Free Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson Page B

way into the company of a young group of intellectuals led by Herder, and spent the long summer evenings of 1771 debating with them everything that mattered: philosophy, politics, literature, life.
    Back home in Frankfurt that October, still reeling from his experiences, Goethe summoned a gathering of friends for a celebration. He had prepared a short speech. His subject wasn’t Strasbourg or its cathedral, or even the brief entanglement with Friederike; it was a writer and a poet, a man he called a ‘prodigy’ and ‘the greatest wanderer’, someone who ‘looms so high, few eyes can reach him, and it is difficult to credit anyone could even take in the entirety of him, let alone surpass him’. That writer was Shakespeare. The day Goethe chose for his address was 14 October, the poet’s name day.
    Goethe’s ‘
Zum Shakespeares Tag’
(‘On Shakespeare Day’) has become one of the founding texts of German Bardolatry. Even in translation, it is obvious why. Where Herder called Shakespeare ‘godlike’, Goethe carried the simile to its conclusion:
    The first page of his I read put me in his debt for a lifetime, and once I had read an entire play, I stood there like a blind man, given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch. I sensed my own existencemultiplied in a prism – everything was new to me, unfamiliar, and the unwonted light hurt my eyes.
    The simile could barely be more intense: Shakespeare is Christ, Goethe a halting Saul on the road to Damascus.
    After taking a few potshots at neoclassical theatre (‘all French tragedies are parodies of themselves’), Goethe warmed to his theme, the boundlessness of Shakespeare’s vision:
    Shakespeare’s theatre is a beautiful curiosity cabinet in which the world’s history is drawn past our eyes on invisible threads of time. His plots are not plots after the common fashion, but his plays all turn on the hidden point (yet to be seen or defined in any philosophy) where the distinctiveness of Self, the alleged freedom of Will, encounters the necessary path of the whole.
    â€˜I call out: Nature! Nature!’ he went on. ‘Where is there anything so natural as Shakespeare’s people?’
    Though Goethe had probably read snippets of Shakespeare as a child, Herder’s passion filled him with new depths of awe. While the older man’s essay wouldn’t be published until 1773, Goethe read an early version of it, and to me the two pieces seemed like facing pages of the same book. They deployed the same arguments, rhyming phrases: Shakespeare as all-powerful creator, chronicler of humanity and history, man of destiny,
Weltseele,
‘world soul’.
    It is probable that neither Herder nor Goethe had yet seen Shakespeare performed, and the poet as they imagined him was certainly beyond the constraints of any mere theatre. Their analogues were Romantic philosophy and visual art, not drama; their pictorial equivalent the quixotic pen-and-watercolour extemporisations on Shakespeare done by William Blake, or the semi-imaginary scenes from the plays painted by the German-born Henry Fuseli, done in rushes of ectoplasmic impasto, white on black.
    On the cover of my Penguin anthology was a painting by the Northumbrian artist John Martin,
Macbeth, Banquo and the Three Witches,
a version of which is now in the National Gallery of Scotland. It is a tumultuous scene: a churning vortex of blood-clotted cloud and rock surrounded on all sides by beetling peaks. Just visible in the centre of the picture, buffeted and helpless, are Banquo and Macbeth, and infront of them the Witches, cannoned from the sky by a lightning bolt. This, surely, was what Herder’s disciples had been imagining on those torrid nights in Strasbourg.
    There was an irony here, however: Blake and Fuseli’s work wouldn’t be done for decades, and Martin’s painting would not be complete in its final form until