Germany and Shakespeare.

Evening Star, Issue 17701, 30 June 1921, Page 4

Germany and Shakespeare.

The Germans are an amazing people. Presumably they have

given up some of the old delusions which

misled them before the war, but it is wonderful how others have been retained. In an address given at Weimar on the recent anniversary of the birth and death of Shakespeare Herr Max Forster, professor of the English language and literature at Leipzig, had the boldness to repeat the claim that Shakespeare really belongs to Germany much more than to the British race. The first argument urged in support of this amusing claim was, of course, the familiar one that Shakespearean plays are acted more often in Germany than in England, but that evidence does not go very far. In 1920, it was stated, “the gigantic number of 1,622 performances was attained ” by Shakespeare’s plays in Germany, while “ in England Shakespeare is scarcely played a few hundred times a year.” But then Germany has many more theatres, as well as a much larger population, than Great Britain. A large proportion of the German places of entertainment, also, are subsidised and municipal theatres, which play naturally what is prescribed by authority, so that the selection of dramas which they offer, to a people singularly obedient to direction, may give small indication of the public’s taste. Professor Forster thinks it is an advantage to the German to he able to hear Shakespeare in a' modern translation, which presents no difficulties of vocabulary, but he makes too much of that difference when ho says j that the greatest of all playwrights can only be read by his fellow-countrymen “ in the very antiquated and therefore hard-to-fce-understood language of the sixteenth ccnturv. . . . Even the most

highly educated Englishman can Only understand his Shakespeare with the help of a dictionary and a commentary'.” If the egregious professor could see Shakespeare performed before an English audience, or even an audince of those, like Dunedin’s playgoers, who have loss frequent opportunity generally of hearing him, he would have no doubt of their ability to understand him well enough. Tho extent to which countless expressions of Shakespeare have become part of the everyday speech of Englishmen, and are quoted by all classes with no sense of incongruity or strangeness, contradicts his opinion of their obscurity. It would be a real test of Teutonic appreciation if we wore told how far the sayings of the translated version have become household words in Germany, and no one but a German will ever believe that the best translation of Shakespeare could be anything but a pallid simulacrum and dilution of his unmatched felicities of language.

But the other arguments which the professor uses to support his claim for a special German proprietorship of Shakespeare are still more surprising. He belongs to them, it is gravely declared, because he is more like them. Tne whole character of the English people, according to Professor Forster, has entirely changed .since Shakespeare’s time. “The political and .religious troubles of the seventeenth century have changed the Englishman from the cheerful, merry, frankly epicurean man of the Renaissance age to the serious, reserved Puritan of the present, intent on business alone, while we have preserved to ourselves to a greater extent the freshness of life and accessibility of the Renaissance. The first thing to be said to that profession is that the German contention was precisely the opposite before and during the war. The Gormans were then the serious, hard-working people who were bound to conquer the world, and the English were despised for their frivolity. The Teutons cannot have it both ways to suit their theories. It is urged also by the Leipzig professor that “Shakespearean freedom and, independence of thought .appeal to us more strongly than to the Englishman this despite the notorious penchant of the German people for following en masse any lead that is given them by authority. It is easy to believe that such a people flock to Shakespeare’s plays tecause they are told that they should do so. Their own actions make it impossible to credit that, as a nation, they have any real understanding of his character, his universality as opposed to their narrow nationalism, his dislike of extreme;., his large charity, which has nothing in common with their sentimentality, and his humor. Most of the tragedies of Shakespeare, it has been said, are the tragedies of men betrayed by strong obsessions —of ambition, of suspicion, and other passions. So the Gorman nation was betrayed when it imagined that, as a chosen people of God, it had nothing to do but crush all peoples under it. No nation has ever been so given to believing strong delusions. If the Germans have studied Shakespeare more than other nations Karo done, they have studied him to little purpose.