Shakspeare in a correct light. It is obvious at a glance that they again one-sidedly emphasise that side of Shakspeare which is turned towards the Middle Ages-the romantic, fantastic, and humorous and consequently in them it is carried beyond its proper measure. But upon a closer examination, even as regards this one side, there is manifestly a deep and decided contrast between Shakspeare and the Romanticists. Shakspeare's humour and Shakspeare's fantastic creations are always, as it were, mounted on the foil of a strong manly character, of an energetic will, and of a fresh and vigorous action; they have everywhere, so to say, action in themselves, at least they appear everywhere permeated, incarnated and condensed into firm and pregnant forms owing to Shakspeare's realistic appreciation for active, historical life. What Shakspeare the poet has conceived in the free flight of his imagination, Shakspeare the historian, the politician, the man of the world, has, as it were, put into words, and his very ghosts, witches, and elves, therefore, are always thoroughly dramatic.

In our Romanticists, on the other hand, the fantastic element possesses a lyric character, and, therefore, appears in many ways infected by personal peculiarities, temporary tones of mind, individual inclinations, sympathies and antipathies, or is, at least, more or less arbitrarily constructed, whereby it degenerates into the bizarre. Their wit and humour is clever, but, on the one hand, like volatile ether, too spiritualistic, too shapeless; and on the other hand, owing to its lyrico-subjective foundation, is affected by personal inclinations or definite tendencies of the age, and thus frequently becomes a personal satire. For the same reason, their mystic element borders upon mysticism, upon far-fetched mysteriousness, making all life a mere dark enigma, and enveloping everything in a kind of mist. Their poetic creations, accordingly, are wanting in flesh and blood, they are often but scantilyclothed schemes of general ideas, or vanish in the thin ether of mystic idealism, in the mistiness of indefinite feelings, of strange unaccountable states of mind and half-born thoughts. Even Tieck is not free from these faults. In short, the Romanticists have something of

Shakspeare's spirit, it is true, but they lack its principal element, his formative, organizing power, his lofty ethical pathos, and his profound historical mind; when these three elements are wanting, acuteness of intellect and depth of reflection, mind, wit, and imagination are, in poetry, always thrown away to no purpose. At all events, without them we can have no poetical composition in the highest sense of the word, and in any case no drama. The conciliation, however, which later poets, such as Zach. Werner, Müllner, Grillparzer, Houwald and others, attempted to bring about between the romantic and Schiller's conception of dramatic art, only effaced the peculiarities of both without making one step in advance. For Schiller himself had little of the plastic element in his nature, and still less of the sober, objective, historical spirit; and the above-named poets, very far from appropriating this little of Schiller's mind, adopted only his subjective idealism, his subjective ethical pathos, or (like Müllner) caricatured the ancient idea of Destiny by the mystico-romantic interpretation they gave it. In other words, they made the subjective element only more subjective, and thus separated themselves the more from Shakspeare's ideal of dramatic poetry.

As

Shakspeare seems, accordingly, to have twice reappeared in the poetical literature of Germany in a double form, but was both times conceived in a one-sided manner, and, so to say, cut in two. The two forms do indeed mutually complete one another, but still they cannot be made to unite, so as to make one harmonious whole. regards Germany, Shakspeare as a whole may be said to be still in the grave; for Shakspeare is pre-eminently Shakspeare as an historian, as a poet of history. Not that his tragedies and his comedies are not essentially a part of his nature, and in every feature bear the impress of the peculiarly Shakspearian character; but in his historical plays Shakspeare is pre-eminently himself, inasmuch as his style, the peculiar form which dramatic art has acquired on the English national stage, and which is and will remain the fundamental type of the modern drama, appears there in its most striking individuality and clearness. In fact, his historical plays reveal the spirit of modern poetry

in its characteristic form. For neither ancient nor mediæval art was able to produce the historical drama; it is absolutely a product of modern times. Shakspeare's historical plays, moreover, appear even less affected by the above-mentioned accidental peculiarities, failings, and confusion of taste which accompany every separate age, than his comedies, and even less than his great masterpieces in tragedy. Hence they have, perhaps, the greatest claim to be regarded and used as models for the new formation of our dramatic art. And yet it is just these plays which have hitherto exercised least influence in awakening and developing the drama. Goethe, Schiller, Uhland, Immermann, Grabbe, and all those who shared Goethe's and Schiller's conception of the drama, have indeed frequently handled historical subjects. But they more or less regarded the historical material simply as material into which the poet had but to breathe the breath of poetry, not as a substance which itself already contained poetry. Accordingly, they generally disposed of history in such an arbitrary manner that in the end it no longer was history, and the drama anything but a historical drama.

In more recent times Raupach, Rückert, and a number of younger poets, have again applied themselves to historical drama. But Raupach drowns history in beautiful phrases, lyric effusions, and torrents of rhetorical sentences, and gives the historical fact but the outward garb of poetry, without suspecting how much true poetry lies concealed beneath the outer fact in the historical idea which determines it. Rückert, on the other hand, so to say, unembodies the historical idea: he divests it of its living, concrete form, of the historical individuality which it possesses in the several, actual circumstances and relations, in the accidental incidencies and in the peculiar characters of the supporters of the action and their personal interests, resolves, emotions and passions. He thus represents the great historical personages as mere tools of the historical idea, and the latter itself in its philosophical, unpoetical nakedness; in other words, he exhibits the motionless, dry skeleton, not the living and full form of history. Lastly, a number of younger and

highly gifted dramatists mix the passing tendencies of the age with the historical past, and thus not only disfigure the internal truth, but the external beauty of history, inasmuch as they disturb the living organism in its form, and the inner harmony in its several parts; hence their works give evidence that they are working more in the service of the so-called spirit of the age than in that of poetry and history. It is only the few-among whom Emanuel Geibel stands prominently forward-that have any clear idea of the object of a historical drama.

Whether Shakspeare will a third time arise in German literature, and help us to produce the truly historical drama in the higher sense required by our progressive culture, is not merely a question as regards literature, but a question of ethico-political, national, and historical importance. The vigorous and more realistic spirit which has been awakened in the German nation, and which has recently manifested itself in warlike deeds of the greatest renown, promises well for the future, if it does not-as unfortunately is to be feared-ultimately entirely destroy all the ideal elements, and lead to that common practical realism which makes the object of human life to consist solely in making nature subservient to its wants, in procuring merely the so-called enjoyments of life, and a vain luxury which aims at childish splendour, devoid of form or thought.

At all events, it is well that the study of Shakspeare and the influence of his poetry still continues to exist; this incessantly points towards the goal and maintains the ideal interests in a number of noble aspiring minds. The numerous translations of Shakspeare by J. H. Voss and his sons (1818), J. Meyer (1824), J. W. O. Benda (1825), J. Körner (1836), A. Böttger and H. Döring (1836), A. Fischer, E. Urtlepp, A. Keller and M. Rapp, O. L. Wolff, E. W. Sievers, F. Jenken-which followed Schlegel's, but did not approach his*- are for the most part mere speculations of publishers, who were likewise anxious to profit by the enthusiasm for Shakspeare. But they nevertheless

* Ph. Kaufmann's translation (1830 f.) alone, which however has remained unfinished, may, to some extent, be said to come up to Schlegel's.

prove that the enthusiasm, in spite of the trouble taken to suppress it, is not yet dead, at any rate that there is still a great demand for Shakspeare's works. This is further proved by the many editions of Schlegel and Tieck's translation, as well as by the new undertakings of Friedrich Bodenstedt and Franz Dingelstedt, who, in conjunction with a number of distinguished poets have recently begun to publish two new translations of Shakspeare which are intended to eclipse Schlegel and Tieck's. These two editions, as well as the revisal which is being made of Schlegel and Tieck's translation,* testify to an advance in the treatment of our German Shakspeare in so far as both editions are to be furnished throughout with historical, critical, and explanatory introductions and notes.

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To these translations may be added the following works: Tieck's Alt-englisches Theater' (1811) and his 'Vorschule Shakspeare's' (1823); E. von Bülow's Alt-englische Schaubühne (1831); N. Delius' 'Mythus von W. Shakspeare, eine Kritik der Shakspeare'schen Biographieen' (1851), his Shakspeare-Lexicon' (1852) and his treatise, Ueber das Englische Theaterwesen zu Shakspeare's Zeit' (1853) Fr. Bodenstedt's Zeitgenossen Shakspeare's und ihre Werke in Charakteristiken und Uebersetzungen (4 vols., 1858), etc. These works have been the means of making German readers acquainted with the history of Shakspeare and his times, with the character of the dramatic poets by whom he was surrounded, with the peculiarities of his language, and with the arrangement of the stage in those days, and have also been the means of promoting the understanding of his plays. This was also the object of such works as Quellen des Shakspeare in Novellen, Märchen und Sagen,' by J. Echtermeyer, L. Hentschel and K. Simrock (1831), as well as of the many German versions of the best English works upon the history, the criticisms and the explanation of Shakspeare's plays.

It is, however, more particularly the aesthetic consideration of Shakspeare's plays that continues to engage the interest of the German artistic mind and German inquiry.

* Undertaken by the German Shakspeare Society with the view to free this masterpiece in the art of translation from its few faults and defects.