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For all that, they never went as far as Ducis in France. He compressed Acts 4 and 5 of the original so as to concentrate the action on the domestic tragedy a feature of adaptations of Richard III and Romeo and Juliet in the s. Hamlet, following contemporary taste, remained alive at the end Widmann , In his first published version Hamburg, , there are six acts. Later there are only five, enabled by the suppression of the graveyard scenes. In both versions, the play has a happy end. The version incorporates direct borrowings from the new and vastly superior prose translation by Johann Joachim Eschenburg He went far beyond his original brief and restored the text according to Johnson and Steevens, reinstated sections left out by Wieland, and supplied a critical apparatus based on current English Shakespeare scholarship.
They pushed two actors into prominence: Comparisons were made between Garrick and Brockmann, a high compliment indeed, given that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg had recently published letters from London praising the great English actor as Hamlet , 3: These two great actors become identified with Hamlet productions and interpretations over more than a decade.
The position is, however, more complex. Goethe is, to a degree, reacting to that insight, but with the difference that his novel does not depict a Hamlet-like hero, but one obsessed for a time with the figure of the Prince and desperate to direct a production of Hamlet based on his own reading of the play. Serlo, the stage director in the novel, asks the same question. Wilhelm is so preoccupied with Hamlet that this play comes for him to encapsulate Shakespeare to the exclusion of all else.
There is, of course, no single novel called Wilhelm Meister: It remained unpublished until and thus plays no part in the discussion of Hamlet during the nineteenth century. The relationship between the two versions is complex, except for the Hamlet sections. There, Goethe simply borrowed the discussion of Hamlet from the earlier draft and inserted it almost without change into a different context in the finished novel. The Theatralical Mission is significant for being the first sustained attempt by a German author to analyze a Shakespeare play from various different angles.
The analysis takes the form of pauses for reflexion amidst raffish, Hogarthian adventures involving a troupe of actors whom Wilhelm has joined. Wilhelm finds it hard to distinguish between illusion and reality, between the Hamlet of his imagination and the character of the theater. His reading is also selective: Hamlet is a model of princely virtues which are challenged by the sequence of fateful events to which he is subjected.
This is not a brooding, lugubrious Hamlet; far from it. By the same token, his interpretation of was not tied to the Shakespearean discussions of that decade. The young Romantics were not primarily interested in Hamlet and initially sought other paradigms. Goethe actually excludes elements which interested his contemporaries and many commentators since then Paulin , Rather, there is a concentration on fate and premonition , This insistence on a force that supervenes in human affairs and brings about successions as it wills, is a convenient device for exculpating Hamlet from some aspects of his behavior there is next to no discussion of Ophelia.
It enables Wilhelm to cut a swathe through the complexities of the text and to sanction notable omissions. The noble Hamlet whom he projects is thus a figure with whom he can identify as he seeks for self-fulfillment in role-playing. The performance of Hamlet produces its own problems, both of a theoretical and a practical nature. Wilhelm reflects s thinking on Shakespeare notably Herder in insisting on the play being performed without major cuts.
But Wilhelm has recourse to a device which itself runs against notions of wholeness. He deems the expedition to Norway the main sub-plot, as part of a general heroic background of fleets, appropriate for a seafaring nation. Then there is the actual performance. He prepares a translation based on Wieland, an anachronism in the s.
We do not learn how well Wilhelm copes with this task, except for one crucial excerpt. Nor do we know much about the performance, except for one critical moment. Wilhelm is not told who will be playing the Ghost. The stranger who appears fills Wilhelm with such genuine terror that the audience is ecstatic with applause at his interpretation.
Garrick or Brockmann, by contrast, would achieve the same effect through their sheer acting skills. It is, not surprisingly, rather better than Wieland or Eschenburg, but it contains one serious error. Surely Goethe knew better. There may be another irony here. Wilhelm cannot as yet understand why this mysterious figure has appeared.
The climax of the world of Hamlet is thus the turning-point of the novel. The later symbiotic association of Hamlet with the German nation can be traced in part to Wilhelm Meister. Goethe had, of course, not turned his attention to the things that were to occupy the Romantics and their contemporaries: There seems, on the surface, little to distinguish the notes made by Ludwig Tieck as a student in from the popular philosopher of the late Enlightenment, Christian Garve.
The intensity with which these states of mind are presented means that they may easily overbalance into the irrational. Tieck never goes that far. He has, however, not been nurtured on Wilhelm Meister , but on the dark and melancholic strand of eighteenth-century literature esp. Ophelia, who offends against the 'economy' of the play, actually moves us more than Hamlet, who holds it together structurally.
Not only is he a prey to chronic melancholy and unhappiness: Thus his religious sense makes him obey the Ghost implicitly. Enthusiasm can, however, also be related to eighteenth-century debates on madness. Instead, he displays a distracted state of mind, with ideas moving randomly in his head. Lear, by contrast, moves through an increasing scale of passions.
Hamlet, playing a role that comes naturally to him, is thus able to utter disjunct and uncomfortable statements that a raving madman could in reality not formulate. August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel made public statements on Hamlet that have a significance beyond their actual content. Similarly, Schlegel makes claims for criticism that place it on a higher level than visual reception through the theater, as a creative and imaginative process. The later Tieck, by contrast, is able to reconcile both of these aspects, theater and criticism.
Hamlet is a prime example. Only three years later, in his periodical Athenaeum , , Schlegel was able more readily to affirm modern poetry and see its place in an historical process. As a translator, Schlegel sees himself as coming at a time when the German language and its poetic powers of expression are now adequate to the ultimate challenge of Shakespeare in his original form. It meant producing a text that was artistic, that gave satisfaction to the appreciative and critical reader rather than to the listening audience.
Of course, Schlegel had to operate within the different, and more regular, stress system of German. The translation gains from close study of its sensitive approximations to Shakespeare. It is not a good theater text, but no one in over two hundred years has managed to produce a substantially better one.
It remains the benchmark against which all subsequent translations are measured Voss, Bodenstedt, Gundolf, Flatter, Fried, to name some Hofmann , From the early nineteenth century on, Hamlet becomes one of the great German stage roles, like Faust or Don Carlos. We are left with unresolved doubts, velleities, moral uncertainties. There were also strident voices of dissent. The young dramatist, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, for instance, feeling heavily the presence of Shakespeare in his own dramatic writing, in declared Hamlet a structural failure , 4: Some commentators chronologically closer to Schlegel evinced a greater degree of tragic satisfaction from the play.
Both Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger and Franz Horn, for instance, stress the element of higher necessity that destroys both the avenger and the avenged. Extending Goethe, he reads the ending of the play in an almost Aeschylan fashion: Horn, a Christian apologist who sees much moral virtue in Hamlet, stresses the appropriateness of Fortinbras, a man of few words but decisive actions, to preside over the end of the old order and the onset of the new , 2: It sees itself as presenting corrective positions to recent interpretations, concentrating not just on the central character but on the interreaction of all parts.
Above all, he warns against predictable positions and seeks deliberately to challenge comfortable notions. It is part of his awareness, stated in his essay, that criticism has the function of tapping the creative force of poetry and must constantly be giving birth to new positions, must be truly hermeneutic , 3: Thus, in the same way that Shakespeare takes us to the very limits of the possible, so the critic, too, must not shy away from the seemingly aberrant.
Tieck sets out to deconstruct a Hamlet-centered interpretation of the play. The dominant character is King Claudius, strong and forceful and in command of most situations. He is a mover and doer. Polonius is part of this complex, an experienced courtier and statesman who has ambitions for his daughter and for the heir to the throne. Indeed, Polonius has already acquiesced in the seduction of his daughter by Hamlet.
Tieck devotes several pages to the famous soliloquy 3. He does this, not to stress its centrality, but to show how it fits into the necessary relationship of parts to the whole There is the evidence of other plays for a start, and the very different actions of Brutus, Juliet, or Othello.
It cannot be separated from the monologue which almost precedes it 2. It takes up the points made there, singly and as a whole.
They are to some extent those cited by Furness and, after him, by the neo-Kantian philosopher, Kuno Fischer, who magisterially dismisses a whole century of Hamlet studies and declares the play, in rather old-fashioned terms, a character tragedy , Edinburgh University Press, Chatto and Windus, Der bestrafte Brudermord oder: The climax of the world of Hamlet is thus the turning-point of the novel. Inge and Peter Rippmann. Amleto libretto for Franco Faccio.
Tieck adduces one or two alternative readings from F1 to bolster his argument. Modern readers have been too much influenced by Werther and its imitations. There is nothing here of the sickness unto death expressed by such literature. Rather, Hamlet speaks of afflictions caused by others.
There is no purchase, there is nothing that relates to the real experience of life, no wisdom based on a knowledge of reality. All is darkness and death. These have undermined his sense of life itself. One might almost think the play had been written by a German. Nobody went quite as far as to suggest German authorship. Yet the strand of identification of Germany with Hamlet runs right through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
It is a conservative hope, anticipating the political restoration and reaction that the chancellor Metternich was to initiate in the German lands in The most famous utterance comes from quite a different political quarter: A liberal patriot and also a Shakespeare translator , Freiligrath was caught up in the repression of Young Germans like himself by the Metternich system. It was to lead to his exile until Of course the poem presupposes other things that go beyond politics.
It is not a vision of a liberal Germany: It forms the envoi to his section on the play , 3: Gervinus was writing as a failed liberal parliamentarian after the collapse of the revolution and the end of hopes for a united Germany.
Hamlet is symptomatic of an introspection that has undermined the national fiber. The Germans have retreated into ideas, not into deeds. They did nothing for Poland in ; when they did act, in , like Hamlet, they showed their less attractive side. The rabid chauvinist Julius Langbehn uses a similar analogy in , Liberal intellectuals like Meyer in , and Julius Bab looked forward to its demise. It is important to distinguish Hegel from Hegelians. These are in a dialectical relationship. He does this purely by chance and thus forfeits any claim to moral rightness.
He becomes, not a judge, but a mere executor of higher justice. Unlike Orestes, an old parallel taken up by both Gans, , 2: Gans postulates a tragic satisfaction at the end: Fortinbras, not Hamlet, fulfils the demands of world history , Hegel does not see the play or its hero in these terms. He is not interested in Shakespeare in any mechanical way, but primarily as the main representative of dramatic art in the post-ancient world. Hegel cannot abandon the view that Greek antiquity was the highest age of aesthetic achievement, fulfilling the ideals of harmony and balance in polity, religious observance, and art.
But the succeeding age, while intrinsically inferior and manifesting disintegration and lack of fulfillment, nevertheless can produce a Shakespeare, to whom Hegel, despite himself, accords the highest accolade. Shakespeare, of course, cannot display a world where the protagonists are at one with their religious system and accept its constraints like Electra or Orestes. His is a world of characters, striving for sense and fulfillment, with only themselves and their inner resources to pit against those around them. They may display a one-sided, ruthless determination, like Macbeth, or they may have deeper qualities in themselves, like Hamlet.
Despite this, his failure to act delivers him up to random forces which bring about the fate of the whole as well as visiting on him individually the nemesis of his own introspection. Unlike Electra, caught between two intrinsically correct moral principles, Hamlet, the modern character, faces an unclear set of circumstances, chance and doubt. Modern tragedy, Hamlet tells us, lies not so much in deeds as in the greatness, breadth and depth displayed by character.
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There is a tendency in post-Hegelian readings to superimpose a central thesis or principle upon the analysis of character. Gervinus, whose favorite Shakespearean characters are Percy and Prince Henry, sees similar virtues in Hamlet. He represents all the high qualities of statecraft and honor, but not their fulfillment in deed , 3: Hamlet has laudable intentions: Instead, he is forced into compromise and mere retaliation.
Friedrich Schiller's Macbeth performed at Weimar. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Johann Wilhelm Otto Benda: Wolf Graf von Baudissin: Timon von Athen und Die beiden Veroneser. Oliveira Silva's text for a performance in Brazil by Joao Caetano in Petz, Karl Simrock, E. Thein, Ausgabe in einem Bande. Francesco Maria Piave, Macbeth for Verdi. Jacop van Lennep, Romeo en Julia , Otello Stan islaus Kozmian, Makbet. Husaren-Regiment, 5 Hefte, Bonn Amleto libretto for Franco Faccio. Nikolai Gerbel and Nikolaj Nekrasov: Seeger, Karl Simrock und H. William Shakespeare's dramatische Werke , hrsg.
Edvard Lembcke 18 bnd. Steingrimur Thorsteinsson Lear konungur. Giulio Carcani - 9 , ultimately increased to a complete edition Italian. The Merchant of Venice: Jan Kasprowicz Krol Lir. Friedrich Theodor Vischer Macbeth. Hviezdoslav , Hamlet Slovak. Vincenzo Errante, verse translations of: Braga, Grave, Rego, Ramos. Grandi Libri Garzanti, ed.
Otello; Tempesta, Romeo e Giulietta. Universale Economica Feltrinelli ed. Michel Grivelet et Montsarrat, Giles. Julius Caesar Dresden, Pierre Antoine de La Place: Alfred de Vigny, Othello. Michal Bosy, Hamlet , Slovak.