BOOKS.

SHAKESPEARE IN GERMANY.*

THERE is a fascination in tracing the history of those greatest of all works of human thought which have survived in spite of the apparent indifference of their authors to the ordinary precautions for securing their perfection of form and preserving them from neglect, which belongs to the history of no work of art that has been fully appreciated and valued from its first' conception. Only when words have ceased to be words, and become as it were en- dowed with a personal life and strength of their own,—with hands and feet, as Luther said,—has it been possible to sow them broad- cast in this way without any security for their safety, and yet with good confidence that they will look after themselves and assert their own power over human nature. It was so in the case of Homer, it was so in the far higher instance which is furnished us by the Gospel of Christ's words and actions, and in a great measure it has also been so with the works of Shakes- peare. It is the chief interest of this curious and valuable book, —to those at least who are not Shakespeare antiquarians—that it shows us how powerfully his plays must have affected the illi- terate minds of the first companies of English actors to whom they were known. They were imported without the name of their author by strolling English comedians into Germany almost as they fell from his pen, rendered—often of course losing almost all their power, but still retaining their leading ideas, though in a blanched form, and probably retaining also their traditional influence on the memory and manner of the actors—into German, and acted in Germany for at least a century and a half before their author became known there, and the true text of these great creations was restored.

Mr. Cohn has proved in this curious book, first, that English actors, some of them connected with Shakespeare's own theatre (the Globe), and who must have been familiar with his plays, acted on the Continent and at various Courts in Germany, not only during Shakespeare's lifetime, but at least thirty-six years before his death, in other words, when ho was in the pr ime of his youth and power ; and next, that the plays which they acted there were often Shakespeare's own ; and when really of German origin usually recast into Shakespeare's models, and often in- debted to him for whole scenes.

In Heywood's Apology for Actors mention is made of a com- pany of English actors engaged by Frederick II. of Denmark at the recommendation of the Earl of Leicester, and by the King of Denmark further recommended to the Duke of Brunswick and Landgrave of Hesse. As this King of Denmark died in 1588, it follows that the transaction must have happened before that date. Mr. Cohn has discovered at Dresden among the archives of the Saxon Court in 1586 letters and decrees providing for five English comedians by name, with the signatures (in German handwriting) of the five Englishmen, two of these being George Bryan and Thomas Pope, whom Mr. Cohn believes, with appa- rently very good reason, to be the actors of that name who stood in intimate relations with Shakespeare, and one of whom, Pope, was one of the first to act Shakespeare's clowns before an English audience. These actors were not a very intellectual class of beings, and do not seem to have been above harlequinade. The Elector of Saxony writes personally to the King of Denmark on the 15th October, 1586, to thank him for sending him the English " in- strumentalists," as he calls the actors (who appear to have done at Court as much in the way of fiddling and athletic feats as of acting proper) in his " one-horse carriage " all the way to Dresden, and in a subsequent decree, after explaining his wish that the English actors should always be ready at once to amuse him "with their fiddles and instruments," and "to entertain us also with their art in leaping and other graceful things which they have learnt," he promises them 500 thalers a year, "paid * Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seeenteenth:Centuries. An account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands, and of the plays performed by them during the same period. By Albert Cohn. With two plates of fee-similes. London : Miler and Co. 184 quarterly," besides " one coat to each," forty thalers for house-rent, free table at Court, and free conveyance, so long as their engagement lasts. These particular actors seem to have returned in that year or the following to England, but Mr. Cohn traces successive bands of English comedians at this and other little German Courts far into the middle of the seventeenth century, and gives us the most convincing proof of the degree in which the Shakespearian pieces acted in the London theatres had contributed to their stock in trade. Shakespeare, whose name is never found in German literary authors till the year 1682, who as late as 1740 was spoken of by a learned man like Bodmer with dim and doubtful knowledge as " Saspar," was in all probability acted on the German stage as early as 1800, and certainly a little later. For instance, The Merchant of Venice (certainly Shakespeare's) was acted at Halle in 1611. In 1626 at Dresden Romeo and Juliet, Julius Ctesar, Hamlet Prince of Den- mark., and King Lear were all played before the Court by the English actors ; the comedy of the Clowns in _Midsummer Night's Dream was acted in Germany before 1636, and in its perfect form of Pyramus and Thisbe in 1659; Time Taming of the Shrew probably in 1658, certainly in 1672 ; and others, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps (though this is doubtful enough) Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest, seem to have directly influenced the composition of German dramas on the same or allied subjects. Thus had Shakespeare's genius penetrated the German stage and, as Mr. Cohn clearly shows us, in many important respects raised the conceptions of dramatic art in Germany a century before the name of Shakespeare became known there or his true genius appreciated by Lessing and Goethe. Mr. Cohn has accumulated the most ample evidence that English comedians were the real instructors of the Germans in the art of acting? and that they were prized far above the German companies of actors as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. And though he has not been able to preserve for us any of the earliest German versions of Shakespeare's plays,—that of Hamlet being no older than 1781, though then taken front a text of 1710, and that of Romeo and Juliet of uncertain date,—he has given us most of the text of two curious old German plays of Jacob Ayser's written about 1595, containing respectively the most remarkable features in the plots of The Tempest and of Much Ado About Nothing; one acted about the year 1600 containing the plot of The Two Gentle- men of Verona ; a Titus Andronicus of the year 1600 taken from the old play of that name, not from Shakespeare's,—as well as the earliest extant German versions above referred to of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, long extracts from tile German form of The Taming of the Shrew and a play closely following the plot of The Merry Wives of lVindsor.

We must pass by the original German plays, only noting that they are genuine curiosities of their kind, to say a few words on the two German versions, or rather faint and garbled recollec- tions of Shakespeare,—the Hamlet and the Romeo and Juliet which this volume contains. The German Hamlet must in all probability have branched off from Shakespeare's play before the quarto edition of 1603. As in that edition, the Polonius of our later play is called Corambus, and though in one or two trifling instances this German text is a little nearer to the text of 1623, in the majority of cases where it approaches either text at all (com- paratively few) it is no doubt nearer to the old quarto of 1603. It seems more than likely that it was based upon a cruder form of Shakespeare's play than any now extant, which might, however, well have contained passages omitted in the edition of 1603, and afterwards restored and amplified in the later recasts of this great play. Anyhow the German text omits all the finer elements of the play, ignores literally every syllable of medita- tive poetry, remembers only a few jokes here and there with the slightest approach to fidelity, paints no one but Corambus (Polonius), (whom it exaggerates almost into a court fool), with any approach to Shakespeare's intellectual conception, retains nevertheless the central notion of the play, Hamlet's inability to act out his own resolve, and yet curiously enough prefixes a prologue of considerable poetical merit, and written in a far higher key than any part of the play, of which the idea is the great retribution to fall on the King and Queen's crimes, but in which Hamlet himself is entirely ignored.

Mr. Cohn thinks that this prologue shows clear traces of trans- lation from the English, and be finds in it various analogies to

Shakespearian expressions, especially those used in the witch scenes of Macbeth. Shakespeare was not much given to prologues, and in the short one to Romeo and Juliet purposely makes light of them. But this one is not so much a prologue as an imaginative foreshadowing of the Nemesis which is to follow the great crime. A stronger objection perhaps is that it puts forward this retribu- tion as the true subject of the play, instead of the strain on Ham- let's irresolute will and the moody fever of intellect caused by the demand of the ghost that he should avenge him. No doubt Shakespeare's real subject was the peculiar nature which starts back like a strained bow from decisive action, and which is intellectually intoxicated rather than practically stimulated by the pressure of imaginative motives to action. Hamlet can act only by lying in wait for a favourable side-wind of impulse. If he has his mind wide open he is too much occupied in considering, to have any spare force for resolve. That, no doubt, is Shakespeare's true subject, and though every soliloquy and almost every expressive word of Hamlet's are left out of the German players' version, yet this impress has still been left clearly traced on the play, and was probably still more sharply engraved on its acted form. The expedient of feigning madness in order to gain time, the further expedient of experimenting on the King with an acted murder, the excuse made by Hamlet when that experiment has succeeded for not putting him to death though he has an admirable oppor- tunity, the relief it evidently is to him to get sent away to Eng- land, and the half-accidental character of the final catastrophe, are all clearly marked in this miserable German version, as is also the deep intellectual excitement which chooses to feign madness as the most natural veil for the cynical and reckless humour which rises continually to Hamlet's lips. One of the few cases in which a distinct trace of Hamlet's own words is preserved is where he tells Ophelia to go into a nunnery, reproaching her with the vanity and inconstancy of woman, and, again, where he wishes the King good-bye and insists on calling him "good mother," on the ground that " man and wife are one flesh,"--both cases of reckless irony ; also, every sign of irresolution in action, though none of his musings over it, is carefully preserved. It may be asked, then, is it possible that the following kind of prologue could have expressed what Shakespeare would have said, if he had said anything, of his own play ? We append the translation, by no means worthy of the original, by Miss Georgina Archer :—

Night goes on to explain that she is preparing general ruin as the result of the King's and Queen's act, and solicits the aid of the three Furies in the vengeance to follow.

We do not, however, think such a prologue in fact inconsistent with the conception of Shakespeare. His characters were so great chiefly because they grew up in his mind as secondary to the action. We doubt if he ever once invented an action for the sake of the character, if all his greatest conceptions—even Hamlet himself—were not the result of working out the fullest imagina- tive expression of a great action. No instrument better than Hamlet's great, imaginative, irresolute, and dilatory mind for protracting the anguish and yet multiplying a thousand-fold

" DIE NICHT von oben.

"Ich bin die dunkle Nacht, die alles sehlaf end macht, Ich bin des Morpheus Weib, der Laster Zeitvertreib, Ich bin der Diebe Schutz, und der Verliebten Trntz, Ich bin die dunkle Nacht, und hab in meiner Macht, Die Boaheit auszniiben, die Mens- chen za betriiben, Mein Mantel docket zu der Huron Selland' and Ruh', Eh' Phobia nosh wird prangen, will ich ern Spiel anfangen ; Ihr Kinder meiner Brost, ihr Mich- ter meiner Lust, Ear Furien, auf, auf, hervor und last each sehen, Kommt, horet fleifsig zu, was kur- zens soli geschehen.

" ALECTO.

" Was sagt die dunkle Nacht, die Konigin der Stine,

Was giebt sin Neues an, was ist ihr Lust und Wine?

" MAGMA.

"Aus AeheroashnstrerHeh1ckomm ich Magera her Von dir, du Unglucksfrau, zn horen dein Begehr.

" THISIPHONE.

"Und ich Thisiphone, was hast du vor, sag an, Da schwarze Hecate, ob ich dir die- nen kan ?"

"Man; from above.

" I am the sable Night, all feel in sleep my mighty

Of Morpheus I'm the wife, in vicious pleasures rife ; I'm guardian of the thief, I bring to love relief, I am the sable Night, who have it in my might All wickedness to do, and cause mankind to rue.

Concealed my veil shall keep the harlot's shame and sleep. Ere Phoebus lights the sky, I have a game to try.

Ye children of my breast, daughters of lust confessed Ye furies, up, arise, come forth and show your face, Come listen all to me what shortly shall take place.

" Azscro.

" What saith the sable Night, the Queen of sleep and rest ?

What is her wish and will, what thoughts do move her breast ?

" MEPLERI.

" From Acheron's dark pit, Megmra I, appear, From thee, ill-omened hag, thy wishes now to hear.

" TrasonomE.

"And I, Thisiphone, say on what is thy plan, Hecate, thou dark one, say, I'll serve thee if I can."

the mischief of the crime and its Nemesis could have been con- ceived. His mind is the shell which deals out far more destruc- tion because it lies still so long before bursting ; and the spec- tacle of the evil wrought by his incidental murders of Polonius, of flosencranz and Guildeustern, and virtually of Ophelia, before the King, Queen, and Laertes, as well as Hamlet himself, fall vic- tims at the end, greatly enhances the awfulness of the retribu- tion. We do not think it impossible that this curious prologue is the rendering of something really written by Shakespeare.

But at all events it is quite clear that the leading ideas of Shakespeare had fastened themselves so strongly on the minds of those who acted him, that they were retained long after the poetry and language of Shakespeare had been wholly lost. It is the same in the German Romeo and Juliet. The Nurse indeed is too purely English to be intelligible to a German mind, and she is a mere name. But the conception of Juliet's forward, passion- ate love remains, after all the beauty of it is gone. It is a curious sight to see these dry skeletons of Shakespeare's ideas wrapped up in a German dress, destitute of all the attractions of his style and poetry, still retaining for a hundred years at least their hold on the German stage, and marking the track of his genius , —as all footsteps are marked,—by sharply-defined vacancies.