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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Lukas Erne
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Extract

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.’

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2000 , pp. 255 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2000

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References

Notes

1. Lohner, Edgar, ed., Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel: Briefe (München: Winkler, 1972), p. 23Google Scholar. The original, of which I give my own translation, reads: ‘Auf ihre Briefe über Shakespeare bin ich sehr begierig.… Ich hoffe, Sie werden in Ihrer Schrift unter anderem beweisen, Shakespeare sey kein Engländer gewesen. Wie kam er nur unter die frostigen, stupiden Seelen auf dieser brutalen Insel? … die Englischen Kritiker verstehen sich gar nicht auf Shakespeare.’

2. Hauptmann, Gerhart, ‘Deutschland und Shakespeare’, in Die Kunst des Dramas, edited by Machatzke, Martin (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1963), 56Google Scholar. ‘Es gibt kein Volk, auch das englische nicht, das sich ein Anrecht wie das deutsche auf Shakespeare erworben hätte. Shakespeares Gestalten sind ein Teil unserer Welt, Seine Seele ist einsmit unserer geworden: und wenner er in England geboren und begraben ist, so ist Deutschland das Land, wo er wahrhaft lebt’

3. ‘voll Schnitzer und Fehler wider die Regeln der Schaubühne und gesunden Vernunft’. Blinn, Hansjürgen, ed., Shakespeare-Rezeption: Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland 1741–1827, 2 vols. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1982–8), 1. p. 40Google Scholar. See also Robertson, J. G., ‘The Knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century’, MLR, 1 (1906), pp. 312–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. From our modern vantage point, Gottsched, on the losing side in what was a kind of German ‘querelle des ancienset des modernes’, was proved wrong by history. In his own time, however, he was highly esteemed. His tragedy Sterbender Cato (Dying Cato) of 1732, which consists to a considerable degree of translated passages from Addison's Cato, was the most successful play in Germany for several decades.

5. For the early Shakespeare reception in Germany and German-speaking Switzerland, see Gundolf, Friedrich, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Bondi, 1911)Google Scholar, Pascal, Roy, Shakespeare in Germany 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937)Google Scholar and The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), Blinn, , Shakespeare-RezeptionGoogle Scholar, and Bircher, Martin and Straumann, Heinrich, Shakespeare und die deutsche Schweiz bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Eine Bibliographie Raisonnée (Bern München: Francke Verlag, 1971).Google Scholar

6. Writings about Bräker's life include: Bröning, Holger, Uhich Bräker, der Arme Mann aus dem Toggenburg: Leben, Werk und Zeitgeschichte (Königstein: Athenäum, 1985)Google Scholar and Holliger, Christian et al. , Chronik Ulrich Bräker: Auf der Grundlage der Tagebücher 1770–1798 (Bern, Stuttgart: Paul Haupt, 1985).Google Scholar

7. Etwas über William Shakespeares Schauspiele von einem armen, ungelehrten Weltbürger, der das Glück genoß, denselben zu lesen. The original 182-page manuscript is now in the Stadtbibliothek Vadiana in St. Gallen, Switzerland (Ms 919). I quote from Bowman, Derek's translation (London: Oswald Wolff, 1979).Google Scholar

8. Blackall, Eric A. (‘Ulrich Bräker und Eschenburg’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 98 (1962), pp. 93–109)Google Scholar has shown that Bräker also read Eschenburg's critical appendices with care, although he substantially differed from Eschenburg in critical perspective.

9. Quoted from the epistle preceding the text of the first quarto (1609). Compare Richard Dutton's recent argument that, ‘surely the point of the epistle is that it is announcing a reading version of the play, new to a print readership and superior to what had doubtless been performed in a cut text by the King's Men at the Globe’ (‘The Birth of the Author’, in Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), p. 84).

10. Johnson on Shakespeare, edited by Sherbo, Arthur, The Yale Edition of Samuel Johnson, VIII (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 750.Google Scholar

11. Barker, Harley Granville, Prefaces to Shakespeare, First Series (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1927), p. 1.Google Scholar

12. The hypothesis that The Merry Wives is an ‘occasional’ has of course long been elaborated by Leslie Hotson and others and is now generally accepted.

13. Goethe's Collected Works, 12 vols. gen. eds. Lange, Victor, Blackall, Eric, and Hamlin, Cyrus (New York: Suhrkamp, 1983–1989)Google Scholar, vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Gearey, John, tr. by E. and E. H. von Nardhoff (1986), p. 164.Google Scholar

14. ‘Unter tausent Milionen Menschen spillt ieder seine besondere Rolle, gut und bös und mittelmässig und noch tausenderley Zwüschentarten—nach dem Trieb seines Geists. Da tritt ieder so ein Weilchen auf diesem Welttheater auf und spillt seine Rolle, kurz oder lang—nachdems ihn trift. Dan ligt er nider, schnarcht ein. Die andern Comödieanten scharren ihn in die Erde. Dan ists aus–er hörts nicht, was mann von seiner Rolle spricht. Und in ein paar Tagen denkt sich seiner niemand mehr’. Bräker, Ulrich, Die Gerichtsnacht oder Was ihr wollt, edited by Stadler, Alois and Wegelin, Peter, 2 vols. (St. Gallen: Erker, 1987), 2. p. 102.Google Scholar

15. My translation. The original reads: ‘Lauter einzelne im Sturm der Zeiten wehende Blätter aus dem Buch der Begebenheiten, der Vorsehung, der Welt!—einzelne Gepräge der Völker, Stände, Seelen!’, ‘Shakespear’, in Von Deutscher Art und Kunst: Einige fliegende Blätter, edited by Irmscher, H. D. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968), p. 78.Google Scholar

16. Derek Bowman's translation of Bräker's autobiography was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1970. The German text is available in several editions and on the World Wide Web on gutenberg.aol.de/braeker/tocken/tocken.htm.

17. Götzinger, Ernst, ed., ‘Das Shakespeare-Büchlein des Armen Mannes im Toggenburg vom Jahr 1780’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 12 (1877), pp. 100–68.Google Scholar

18. See note 7 above. The one article in English that I am aware of—dealing with the question of how Bräker, as a former goat-boy, responds to the pastoral in Shakespeare—is Brönnimann, Werner, ‘Ulrich Bräker: The Goatherd as a Reader of Shakespearean Pastoral’, Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature, 2 (1993), pp. 313–22.Google Scholar

19. Bräker, Ulrich, Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Bürgi, Andreas (München: Beck Verlag, 1998).Google Scholar

20. Quelque chose sur le théâtre de William Shakespeare par un pauvre et inculte citoyen du monde qui a joui du plaisir de le lire, Théâtre Saint-Gervais, Geneva, 22 April-10 May 1998, directed by Marcel Robert.

21. In analogy to ‘Shakespeare's Globe’, the Lichtensteig theatre was officially named ‘Bräker's Globe’. The production was directed by Nikolaus Windisch-Spoerk and featured one of Switzerland's most popular actors, Walo Lüönd.

22. In the meantime, the Lichtensteig Globe, having fallen into disuse, has been sold by Blocher to the ‘Europapark’ Rust in Southern Germany—the second biggest amusement park in Europe after Euro Disney outside Paris—where, after its reconstruction, it is now serving for dramatic and other entertainments.