Free Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson Page A

Shakespeare to attack everything that was wrong with French drama, Voltaire included: too moralising, too stoical, too prissy, too reluctant to examine the dark things inside all of us.
    Intoxicated by the philosophy of Lessing’s contemporaries Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann, who urged the primacy of experience and emotion, the young generation growing up in the 1760s and 1770s yearned for something more untamed and Promethean – more
German.
In 1776, the young playwright Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger wrote a play initially called
Der Wirrwarr
(‘Confusion’), aboutthe gripping events of the American Revolution, unfolding before his eyes. Following the recommendation of a friend, Maximilian came up with an alternative title, tighter and more dramatic:
Sturm und Drang,
‘storm and stress’. The movement at last had a name.
    On the Deutsche Bahn express train heading towards Weimar, 500 miles south-west of Gdańsk, it wasn’t just the countryside that was flying past rapidly. I had graduated to the German Romantics. Even in the form of a close-printed Penguin anthology, they were a white-knuckle ride.
    My first calling point was Johann Gottfried Herder, thinker and critic, whose explorations into the philosophy of language and history made him one of the most influential figures of the
Sturm und Drang.
Herder’s essay ‘Shakespeare’, published in 1773, places the playwright centre stage, as if in rebuke to the century and a half in which Herder’s countrymen had not even bothered to find out his name:
    If there is any man to conjure up in our minds that tremendous image of one ‘seated high on the craggy hilltop, storm, tempest, and the roaring sea at his feet, but with the radiance of the heavens above his head’, that man is Shakespeare.
    In his talk of craggy hilltops and roaring seas Herder was paraphrasing the English poet Mark Akenside, but this could equally have been Shakespeare as painted by the younger Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich – solitary, unequalled, gazing into untold and possibly undreamed-of distances.
    Renouncing the ‘masses who explain him, apologise for him, condemn him’, Herder declared that his task was to ‘make [Shakespeare] alive for us in Germany’. This he proceeded to do by claiming him as a ‘northern dramatist’, an ‘interpreter of Nature’, who drew from the landscape all around him. Ideas about Shakespeare as a child of nature had been circulating in England at least since Milton, warbling native woodnotes wild and the rest; but Herder contrived to give the image a bracing new Alpine tang. He made the humdrum act of opening a book sound like a world-shattering event: ‘When I read him, it seems to me as if theatre, actors, scenery, all vanish! Singleleaves from the book of events, providence, the world, blowing in the storm of history.’
    It wasn’t hard to work out which ‘masses’ Herder was turning against, nor which theatre he was trying to obliterate: that of France. Herder had only scorn for neoclassicism, laughingly condemning the ‘frivolous Frenchman who arrives in time for Shakespeare’s fifth act, expecting it will provide him with the quintessence of the play’s touching sentiment’. No – one did not so much watch or read Shakespeare as become consumed by him.
    If Herder’s feelings were fervent, they were nothing compared to the emotions coursing through his young disciples. A few years earlier, in 1770, a shiftless twenty-one-year-old law student called Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had met Herder in Strasbourg. Goethe was meant to be pursuing his studies, but instead spent much of his time mooning over the soaring Gothic architecture of Strasbourg cathedral and the spectacular landscape of the Alsace (not to mention a pastor’s daughter called Friederike Brion, perhaps his first serious romantic relationship). Goethe found his