Eighteenth-Century Swiss Peasant Meets Bard: Ulrich Bräker's A Few Words About William Shakespeare's Plays (1780)

Abstract

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’