Free Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson

discovered there was Shakespeare.
    It was a fateful encounter. On the one hand, Voltaire was wonderstruck by what he saw on stage, so at odds with rule-bound French drama; on the other, he was appalled. Despite admiring Shakespeare’s ‘sublime strokes’, the Frenchman seems otherwise to have regarded the English playwright with outright horror. More than once, he called Shakespeare ‘savage’, and lambasted him for ignoring the ‘unities’ of classical tragedy then de rigueur in France – principles, derived from Aristotle’s
Poetics,
which demand that a piece of drama should take place in a single span of action, in a single place, over a single day.
    Samuel Johnson’s famous appraisal, that Shakespeare’s plays exhibited ‘the real state of sublunary nature … in which, at the same time, the reveller is hastening to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend’, was for neoclassicists such as Voltaire a demonstration of everything that was wrong with him: tragedy and comedy and everything else clotted together in one undigested, morally questionable lump. In a dissertation on tragedy, Voltaire had particularly stern words for
Hamlet,
a ‘rude and barbarous piece’:
    Hamlet goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes mad in the third; the prince slays the father of his mistress, pretending to kill a rat, and the heroine throws herself into the river. They dig her grave on the stage; the gravediggers jest in a way worthy of them, with skulls in their hands; Hamlet answers their odious grossnesses by extravagances no less disgusting. Meanwhile one of the characters conquers Poland.
    â€˜One might suppose such a work,’ Voltaire added testily, ‘to be the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage.’ With a précis like that, it is hard to disagree.
    Voltaire spent the next few years penning a series of epic imitations that gave Shakespeare’s rough edges a deep French polish and made him acceptable to the European Enlightenment.
Zaïre
(1732, a version of
Hamlet
),
Le Mort de César
(1743) and
Sémiramis
(1748, based on
Othello
) were composed in alexandrines, the taut, inelastic twelve-syllable verse form favoured by Racine and Corneille, and noteworthy for the decorous sobriety of their action.
    In Britain, fed by the old enmity with France, the position taken by Voltaire and fellow neoclassicists was caricatured as the last word in Continental foppery. But the German intelligentsia took careful note. Voltaire’s criticisms were reproduced almost point for point by the aesthetician Johann Christoph Gottsched, who in the 1720s began to call for a revival of German literature along elegant French lines.
    Accordingly, when a German version of a whole play by Shakespeare finally appeared – this time with Shakespeare’s name attached – it was in zealously politened and over-restored form. In 1741, the Prussian diplomat Caspar Wilhelm von Borck published a translation of
Julius Caesar,
perhaps the coolest and most classical Shakespearian tragedy of all, making sure to do so – once again – in alexandrines.
    Yet, though unfelt by Voltaire, Gottsched or Borck, an earthquake was on its way. The first tremors arrived in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, twenty-nine years younger than Gottsched and from a different intellectual world. In one of a series of essays on literature written in 1759, Lessing insisted that Germany should abandon any notion of imitating France; instead it must look both inwards and northwards, towards its own
Volksdrama,
and to England, whose ‘grand, terrible and melancholic’ emotions were akin to those of the Germanic soul. Later in the decade, in an influential collection of writings on modern theatre, 1767–69’s
Hamburgische Dramaturgie
(‘Hamburg Dramaturgy’), Lessing went further. Inspired by an adaptation of
Richard III
he had seen, he used