Notes: Germany

1 | almost total disarray | For my account of the 1864 festivities I am indebted to the painstakingly detailed retelling by Richard Foulkes in The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864 (London, 1984). I’ve also drawn from James Cox, The Tercentenary: A Retrospect (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin), 1865; Sarah Flower, Great Aunt Sarah’s Diary, ed. Ella F.L. Flower (privately printed, 1964); Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare for the People: Working-Class Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare and the Victorians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). I’ve also used the extremely useful collection of primary sources kept in relevant boxes at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, notably The Times, The Telegraph and The Morning Post (25–27 April 1864 editions).

2 | ‘All parties would consent’ | The Athenaeum, 6 June 1863.

2 | ‘Dramatic readings and representations’ | Subscription letter, issued 26 September 1863, now in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust archives.

2 | The Times wearily announces | The Times, 20 January, 1864.

3 | the American showman P.T. Barnum | The precise details of the 1847 saga are still disputed. While there is no clear evidence that Barnum actually attempted to buy the Birthplace, it was reported at the time that he intended to, which helped spur the campaign to save it for the British nation (a rumour the showman subsequently amplified in his 1855 autobiography). See Paul Edmondson, ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, Shakespeare on the Road, 7 July 2014 [http://shakespeareontheroad.com/happy-birthday-barnum]; and Victoria Joynes, ‘Barnum and the Birthplace’, Finding Shakespeare, 17 July 2015 [http://findingshakespeare.co.uk/barnum-visit-performers-past-present].

3 | ‘commentated, expurgated, purified …’ | H.F., “Shakespeare Commemorated,” Temple Bar, March 1864, 484–89.

3 | ‘profitless swells’ Anonymous handbill, now in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Murphy’s Shakespeare for the People puts the handbill in a broader social context and is well worth consulting.

4 | ‘suggestive of a murder’ | Halliday, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare-Mad’, All the Year Round, 11 (21 May 1864), 345–51.

4 | oak sapling in Shakespeare’s memory | The sapling was lost at some point after 1864, but was replaced by a ‘Shakespeare Tree’ at the 1964 anniversary. With glum irony, no one is now sure which tree this is. See Tom Foot, ‘Sir Jonathan Miller and the Forgotten Story of Shakespeare’s Tree on Primrose Hill’, Camden New Journal, 8 August 2013 [http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/aug/sir-jonathan-miller-and-forgotten-story-shakespeares-tree-primrose-hill].

5 | ‘notwithstanding this 300th anniversary’ | The Times, 25 April 1864.

5 | In France | For accounts of many different national celebrations in 1864 – and other years too – Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769–2014 (Berlin, 2015) offers an excellent survey.

5 | ‘special deputation from Frankfurt’ | The Morning Advertiser, 25 April 1864.

6 | ‘mother’s strand of old Germania’ | The Morning Advertiser, 25 April 1864.

6 | in the German-speaking Sprachraum | For extensive discussion of the phenomenon, see especially Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare and the Founders’, in Christa Jansohn, ed., German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 239–55; and ‘Topoi of the Shakespeare Cult in Germany,’ in Literature and its Cults: An Anthropological Approach, eds Péter Dávidházi and Judit Karafíath, 47–65 (Budapest, 1994).

7 | ‘even the smallest German university towns’ | Cited in Habicht, ‘Founders’, 245.

8 | I wrote the article | Andrew Dickson, ‘Shakespeare: Stratford. London. Gdańsk?’, The Guardian, 4 April 2011 [http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/apr/04/polish-theatre-shakespeare-festival-gdansk].

13 | Letters from the English actors | Much of the archival evidence for the English Comedians and the Gdańsk theatre is presented in Jerzy Limon, Gentlemen of a Company: English Players in Central and Eastern Europe, 1590–1660 (Cambridge, 1985), especially Introduction and chapters 1 and 9. Tanscriptions of many documents are included in the appendix. For broader details, see also Zdeněk Stříbrný, Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000), chapter 1.

13 | ‘good stronge and substancyall’ | Details of Street’s contract are available online at the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project [http://www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk/essays/fortunecontract.html]. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage: 1574–1642, fourth edition (Cambridge, 2009), quotes the contract in full and puts it in context.

15 | ‘a large arena’ | Cited in Limon, Gentlemen, 136.

15 | The historical variety | For the history of the English Comedians, see especially the introduction to Limon, Gentlemen; Alfred Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and Berlin, 1865); and Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage: 1586–1914 (Cambridge, 1990).

16 | Maria Magdalena quotation | Cited in Limon, Gentlemen, 14.

17 | Fynes Moryson quotation | Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, ed. Charles Hughes, 6 vols (London, 1907–36), vol. 4, 304.

18 | A playlist from 1608 | Williams, German Stage, is helpful on the composition and repertoires of these groups; see esp. chap 1.

19 | Were they actually the same plays? | On adaptations, see Williams, German Stage, 28–35.

20 | Der Bestrafte Brudermord | A full translation is printed in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London, 1957-75), vol 7, 128–58, which also discusses the text extensively. Citations are to this edition.

20 | ‘Quickly to work’ | Bullough, 140.

21 | ‘May the gods bestow’ | Bullough, 139.

22 | An old theory about Hamlet | Cohn expands upon the circumstances in Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and Berlin, 1865), xxiii.

23 | ‘You’re welcome, masters’ | Hamlet, 2.2.424–7.

23 | One wholly startling fact | By far the best place to go for the story of Shakespeare’s reception from the 1680s onwards is Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany, 1682–1914: Native Literature and Foreign Genius (Hildesheim, 2003).

24 | Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire | On Voltaire, see Michèle Willems’s excellent essay in Roger Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespeareans: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge (London, 2010).

25 | ‘Hamlet goes mad in the second act’ | For Voltaire’s criticism, see Oswald Le Winter’s valuable compendium Shakespeare in Europe: Selections from Lessing, Voltaire, Goethe, etc. (Harmondsworth, 1970). Key excerpts of letters and criticism in the original French are online courtesy of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project [http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/essays/voltaire.cfm].

25 | Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | See Paulin, Critical Reception, 90–95. F. W. Meisnest’s ‘Lessing and Shakespeare’, PMLA 19 (1904), 234–249, provides a good overview, but argues that Lessing’s influence on Shakespeare reception in Germany is overstated.

26 | a close-printed Penguin anthology | Jonathan Bate’s highly recommendable The Romantics on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1992), which includes nuggets from Herder, Goethe, Tieck and Romantic writers from across Europe, including England. Bate’s fine introduction sets the German Romantics in context; it could be extended with another Bate essay, ‘The Politics of Romantic Shakespearean Criticism: Germany, England, France’, European Romantic Review 1 (1990), 1–26.

26 | ‘When I read him’ | ‘Shakespeare’, excerpted in Bate, 39.

27 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The best brief introduction to Goethe’s relationship with Shakespeare is Stephen Fennell’s essay in Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespearians. I have also drawn details from Lesley Sharpe (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Goethe (Cambridge, 2002); John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography (New York, 2001); and Nicholas Boyle and John Guthrie (eds), Goethe and the English-Speaking World: A Cambridge Symposium for his 250th Anniversary (Columbia, SC, 2001). For more information on the life, the obvious reference is Boyle’s monumental biography Goethe: The Poet and the Age (Oxford, 1991–), though Boyle has still to get beyond 1803.

27 | ‘looms so high, few eyes can reach him’ | ‘Zum Shakespeares Tag’, reprinted in Goethe on Shakespeare, trans. Michael Hofmann and David Constantine (London, 2010), 11–13.

27 | The first page of his I read’ | Goethe on Shakespeare, 15.

27 | John Martin | The painting is viewable online at the National Galleries of Scotland website: [https://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/m/artist/john-martin/object/macbeth-ng-2115].

27 | ‘it shapes, as it develops’ | Quoted in Bate, Romantics, 128.

30 | a podgy-looking cherub | I’m indebted to Christa Jansohn for bringing the frieze on the ‘Stegmann House’ to my attention. Jansohn writes about it perceptively – and includes photographs – in ‘Celebrating and Commemorating Shakespeare in Germany: 1864, 1904, 1964 and 2014’, in Jansohn and Dieter Mehl (eds), Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769–2014 (Berlin, 2015), 147–205.

31 | a performance at the Hamburg National Theatre | The best account, from where I have derived quotations and details, is in Simon Williams, ‘The “Great Guest” Arrives: Early German “Hamlets”, Theatre Journal 38 (1986), 291–308. Williams puts the Schröder performances in a broader context in Shakespeare on the German Stage.

31 | Die Leiden des jungen Werthers | I quote David Constantine’s translation in The Sorrows of Young Werther (Oxford, 2012). Constantine’s introduction is particular good on the early reception of the novel.

32 | Young Werther was Young Hamlet | Mary A. DeGuire demonstrates the sheer range of Goethe’s reading for the novel in ‘Intertextuality in Goethe’s Werther’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011) [https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/24503/DeGuire_Mary.pdf?sequence=1].

33 | ‘When I consider’ | Werther, 10.

33 | ‘Denmark’s a prison … What a piece of work is a man’ | Hamlet, 2.2.245, 307.

34 | T.S. Eliot’s pursed-lip view | T.S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (1919), in Selected Essays (London, 1999). Online text at Bartleby: [‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (1919), in Selected Essays (London, 1999)]

35 | trouble with it from the off | Stephen Fennell tells the tangled story of Wilhelm Meister’s genesis and development extremely neatly in Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespearians, 61–72.

35 | Goethe quotation | Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, book 3, chap. 11, trans. Thomas Carlyle, 2 vols (London, 1894). A reliable full text is available online at Bartleby: [http://www.bartleby.com/314/].

36 | Goethe quotation | Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, book 4, chap. 13.

36 | Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller | On Schiller and his influences, the best sources are Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambrige, 1991), and Paul E. Kerry (ed.), Friedrich Schiller: Playwright, Poet, Philosopher, Historian (Bern, 2007). Thomas Carlyle’s biography (1825) is still well worth consulting, as are the relevant sections in Paulin, Critical Reception.

37 | ‘Who would be my surety?’ | In Schiller, The Robbers and Wallenstein, trans. F.J. Lamport (London, 1979), 130 [act 4, scene 5].

38 | ‘When I first became acquainted with Shakespeare’ | Trans. Helen Watanabe, helpfully reprinted in Stephen Prickett, European Romanticism: A Reader (London, 2010), 121. A slightly soggier translation of the essay is available online, courtesy of the Schiller Institute [http://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/Schiller_essays/naive_sentimental-1.html].

39 | notably bashful when it came to staging him | Williams, German Stage (chap. 5), is excellent on Goethe and Schiller at the Weimar court theatre, particularly on their combined anxieties about staging unexpurgated Shakespeare.

40 | ‘envy you that dream’ | Quoted in Bate, Romantics, 48.

41 | The statutes decreed | Werner Habicht has done peerless work on the early years of the DSG, and I am grateful to him for making time to speak to me in Munich. As well as our conversation, details and quotations are drawn from three of his essays: ‘Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Making of a Myth’, in Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Symposium, ed. Modris Eksteins and Hildegard Hammerschmidt (Tübingen, 1983), 141–57; ‘Topoi of the Shakespeare Cult in Germany’, in Literature and its Cults: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Péter Dávidházi and Judit Karafíath (Budapest, 1994), 47–65; and ‘Shakespeare and the Founders’, in Christa Jansohn (ed.), German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty- First Century (Newark, DE, 2006), 238–254. I have also drawn details from Wolfgang Stroedel, ‘90th Anniversary Celebration of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’, Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954), 317–22.

43 | ‘We want to de-Anglicise’ | Quotations drawn from 1865 and 1867 editions of the Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. I’m indebted to Emily Oliver for helping me check and confirm these.

44 | Das Testament | Das Testament William Shakespeare’s (Weimar, 1889).

45 | inserted their statue in 1904 | On the monument and its evolution, see Jansohn, ‘Celebrating and Commemorating’, 162–75.

49 | ‘Wilhelm had already for some time’ | Apprenticeship, book 5, chapter 5.

50 | two different Jahrbuchs | On the postwar history of the DSG, see Christa Jansohn, ‘The German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft During the Cold War’ and Dieter Mehl, ‘The German Shakespeare-Gesellschaft and “Die Wende”’, both in German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty- First Century.

52 | an agreed translation | Paulin, Critical Reception, is voluminous on differing translations (and their shortcomings). See especially 297–370, which covers competing nineteenth-century versions in some detail.

53 | systematic verse translation | See Kenneth E. Larson, ‘The Origins of the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare in the 1820s’, The German Quarterly 60 (1987), 19–37. Bate, Romantics, also prints useful selections of criticism by Schlegel and Tieck; and Christine Roger and Roger Paulin’s essay on Schlegel in Great Shakespearians (chap. 11), provides more background for the translation.

55 | ‘I have probably never looked more deeply’ | Trans. taken from Fennell’s essay in Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespearians, 518 [original in Hamburger Ausgabe Briefe von und an Goethe, vol. 3, 177].

56 | ‘Not for our physical eyes’ | Goethe on Shakespeare, 21–2.

56 | ‘How much falsehood’ | Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, trans. taken from Fennell’s essay in Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespearians, 524 [original in Hamburger Ausgabe, vol. 8, 479].

57 | ‘Just let someone try’ | Translation taken from Fennell’s essay in Paulin (ed.), Great Shakespearians, 532.

58 | ‘marvellous free adaptation’ | A brief but colourful account of various eighteenth-century adaptations of The Tempest – including Mozart’s abortive one – is included in Catherine Alexander’s review of The Magic Flute performed at English National Opera, Blogging Shakespeare [http://bloggingshakespeare.com/reviewing-shakespeare/magic-flute-english-national-opera-netherlands-opera-london-coliseum-2013]. The Grove entry for Mozart by Cliff Eisen and others is good on the composer’s frantic final months.

59 | the Gesellschaft’s website | Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur, ‘The History of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’ [http://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/en/society/about/history.html].

60 | ‘It will be well for England’ | Henry Arthur Jones, Shakespeare and Germany: Written During the Battle of Verdun (London, 1916), 3–4.

61 | ‘O God of battles’ | Henry V, 4.1.286–9.

62 | ‘the formal surrender of William Shakespeare to Germany’ | Quoted in Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998), 4. See also Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare Celebrations in Time of War’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001), 441–55.

63 | even more eager to conform | Many details are drawn from Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur, ‘“The Country that Gave Birth to You a Second Time”: An Essay about the Political History of the German Shakespeare Society 1918–45’, in Jahnson (ed.), German Shakespeare Studies, 255–71. The best introduction to theatrical culture in this period is Glen W. Gadberry (ed.), Theatre in the Third Reich, the Prewar Years: Essays on Theatre in Nazi Germany (Westport, CT, 1995).

62 | ‘Some of you might be somewhat shocked’ | Günther’s essay, ‘Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen aus lebens-kundlicher Sicht’, is printed in Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 73 (1937), 85–108. Cited and translated in Rodney Symington, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare: Cultural Politics in the Third Reich (Lewiston, NY, 2005), chap. 5, which is worth reading in full for what Symington pointedly terms ‘the sins of the scholars’.

63 | ‘My entire life’ | Quoted in Ledebur, ‘Political History’, 265–7.

73 | Kultur and Kulturpolitik | For more on Nazi cultural policy, consult the broad contextual histories offered in Symington, Nazi Appropriation and John London, Theatre Under the Nazis (Manchester, 2000).

73 | Joseph Goebbels, a genuinely cultured man | As well as conversations with Longerich, I have drawn details and quotations from his superlative Goebbels: A Biography (London, 2015).

74 | historian Timothy Ryback | Ryback’s fascinating research is detailed in Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life(London, 2009).

75 | ‘more relevant and modern’ | Quoted in Longerich, 215.

76 | ‘Politics had become’ | Quoted in Gerwin Strobl, The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–45 (Cambridge, 2007), 49. Statistics and information on Nazi theatre are drawn from this account, as well as those by London and Symington.

76 | Even when ‘enemy dramatists’ | See Werner Habicht, “German Shakespeare, the Third Reich, and the War”, in Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh (eds), Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity (Toronto, 2012), 22–34.

77 | ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ | The Merchant of Venice, 3.1.53–8.

77 | Many producers balked | See Andrew G. Bonnell, Shylock in Germany: Antisemitism and the German Theatre from the Enlightenment to the Nazis (London, 2008); and Zeno Ackerman, ‘Shakespearean Negotiations in the Perpetrator Society: German Productions of The Merchant of Venice During the Second World War’, in Makaryk and McHugh, Shakespeare and the Second World War, 35–62.

77 | a lavish film of The Merchant of Venice | See Bonnell, 167.

79 | ‘Operation HK’ | This little-known and entirely fascinating story is related by Simon Barker in ‘Shakespeare, Stratford, and the Second World War’, in Makaryk and McHugh, Shakespeare and the Second World War, 199–217.

81 | ‘Full fathom five’ | The Tempest, 1.2.399–408.

84 | Die Hamletmaschine | On Müller and other German incarnations of Hamlet, see especially Manfred Pfister’s ‘Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West’, in Shakespeare in the New Europe, ed. Michael Hattaway et al. (Sheffield, 1994) 76–91. Barbara Korte and Christina Spittel, ‘Shakespeare under Different Flags: The Bard in German Classrooms from Hitler to Honecker’, Journal of Contemporary History 44 (2009), 267–86, provides some broader GDR context.

85 | Nervous about how to direct | Many of these details are drawn from conversation with Alexander Weigel, amplified by David Barnett’s on-the-ground account in ‘Resisting the Revolution: Heiner Müller’s Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, March 1990’, Theatre Research International 31 (2006), 188–200.

86 | ‘I’m not Hamlet’ | Die Hamletmaschine, trans. Carl Weber, repr. in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (London, 2000), 208–15, 212–13.

87 | ‘Why, look you now’ | Hamlet, 3.2.351–4.