Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson Page A

versions of the plays had been common currency since the 1660s, and were particularly prevalent in England (though
Macbeth,
unusually, had been played more or less in Shakespeare’s text from the mid-eighteenth century onwards). But I found it revealing that German critics, so thrilled by the galvanising power of Shakespeare in the comfort of their studies, were so timid about what effect he might have in the theatre. In what became known as Weimar classicism, one could glimpse Voltaire’s shadow lingering in the wings.

    NEAR THE END OF HERDER’S ESSAY on Shakespeare is a telling section. Addressing his young disciple directly, Herder writes that he has one earnest desire, ‘that one day you will raise a monument to [Shakespeare] here in our degenerate country’, concluding, ‘I envy you that dream.’
    Herder’s hope was obvious: that Goethe would himself become a new Shakespeare, a Teutonic one. But as the clock ticked towards the tercentenary date of 23 April 1864, many felt that Germany, for all the effect of the
Sturm und Drang
and the eagerness for staging Shakespeare’s plays, still lacked an enduring ‘monument’. England had a Shakespeare Club, founded in 1824 in Stratford-upon-Avon by enthusiasts who met at a pub called the Falcon Inn. America got in on the act when a group of lawyers in Philadelphia, seeking distraction from statutes and appellate hearings, formed a literary salon in 1852; refounded ten years later as the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia,its all-male membership still meets regularly for cocktails and gentlemanly chit-chat (and clings quaintly to the antiquated spelling of its name).
    Like other nineteenth-century Shakespeare societies, these were amateur affairs – dining and wining clubs with a little light literary appreciation thrown in. With the 1864 anniversary approaching, there were calls for Germany to go further. If Goethe and Herder had been right – that Shakespeare had given birth to a new age in German life and literature – then surely this should be marked. Was it not time for Germany to have a professional society in the name of Shakespeare, made up of the best scholarly minds German-speaking countries could produce?
    Yet another Wilhelm, this time a real one, Wilhelm Oechelhäuser – the same man who later dismissed the Stratford-upon-Avon celebrations as ‘miserable’ and ‘pompous’ – was a key agitator. An industrialist from Dessau who had made a fortune in the gas business, Oechelhäuser had revered Shakespeare since childhood and had been plotting a
Gesellschaft
or society devoted to him since at least 1858. Hearing of English plans to celebrate the tercentenary – though not, one suspects, of their shortcomings – he circulated a memorandum insisting that Germany must not be left behind. After Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach agreed to become the society’s first patron, there was only one place it could be based: right here in Weimar. Placing a Shakespeare society in the spiritual capital of German
Kultur
might not only be convenient, Oechelhäuser realised; it could also be a symbolic act. Bach, Cranach, Luther, Goethe, Schiller … why not Shakespeare? The man was practically a native.
    The statutes decreed that the new society would meet annually, on the ‘Shakespeare-Tag’ of the poet’s birthday. It would encourage philology and scholarship, publishing an academic journal,
Shakespeare Jahrbuch.
It would work towards an official translation of the complete works. Above all, it would, in the fervent jargon of the day,
nostrify
Shakespeare: make him Germany’s own. Another founding member, Franz von Dingelstedt, a successor of Goethe and Schiller as director of the Weimar court theatre, wrote, ‘Behold, today, as the third in the sacred trio, the Briton joins Germany’s Dioscuri. He, too, is ours!’
    It is doubtful many Britons