Shakespeare "the first European"
by Jonathon Brown
When veteran Wagner commentator Michael Tanner came to the conclusions in his book on the composer (London, 1996), he confessed that his youthful Wagnerianism had subsided over the years; part of his feeling was that while Wagner always had something of an axe to grind - be it a philosophical, moral or theological axe, an axe all the same - Shakespeare was a free observer of the human condition, frank, open and plain, with no delusions. His unique greatness and his immediacy remain supreme in all the arts. He was born in 1564 and died in 1616, and with few of the details of his life surviving we can concentrate on the work. Many of us feel that only Rembrandt matches this detailed wonder at life - or Picasso - but the primordial place Shakespeare occupies in the literature of almost every language other than his own testifies to his unique standing as humankind's most resonant voice and least distorting mirror.
Yet of course, it is an inventive mirror. Not only did Shakespeare's language contribute to a sort of consolidation of all the disparate elements of other languages that met in London, as if having seeped or fled from cultures to the south or east or north - a consolidation also effected by the Authorised Version of The Bible commissioned by King James - but his inventiveness of plot and character was to feed the arts from then on, be it literature, painting, sculpture, music... Music? Indeed, Beethoven told a pupil to 'read The Tempest!' in order to have an understanding of one of his pieces, Berlioz set Romeo and Juliet as a vast concert piece which gave Wagner many an idea for his Tristan und Isolde; oh, and talking of Wagner, his second opera was based on Measure for Measure and throughout his life he read Shakespeare aloud in the evenings to his family and gathered friends. Meantime in Italy, Verdi ransacked Shakespeare for some of his greatest settings, not least Otello and Falstaff.
Shakespeare himself might also be thought of as the first European, certainly the first from British culture. He had an audience both popular, not necessarily too well educated, as well as from the highest in the land, yet to them all he distributed settings, customs and characters taken from other parts of Europe and their history, notably Italy, as if his spectators were all as well travelled as we like to think we are today. All such perspectives were, for him, one, with his one theme: humankind, be that flawed, tragic, comic, glorious or pitiful. And humankind has returned the compliment, in that there can hardly be a language that has not seen Shakespeare translated, often more than once and frequently by the greatest poets - Alfred de Vigny in France, Karl Kraus in German to take two unlikely and different cases. Vigny translated Othello, for instance, while Kraus, the great Austrian satirist of the first third of the 1900s, used to give public Shakespeare readings and did a fine rendering of the complete Sonnets.
It is a long tradition. Perhaps the first translation was done within Shakespeare's lifetime, for a performance of Romeo and Juliet in German, in 1604, and three years later there was the first instance of what we would now think of as surtitles, when a running translation of Hamlet into Portugese was made by Lucas Fernandez, while the play was performed by Captain Keeling's crew on board of the Red Dragon in Sierra Leone! By 1645 Pierre Antoine de la Place had translated Othello, Henry VI Part III, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and The Merry Wives of Windsor all in French. There followed various translations into Russian, Tuscan, Czech (Macbeth, translated by Karel Hynek Thám in 1786), Romanian, and so on. However, for the first complete translation of the Works of Shakespeare in Basque, we had to wait till 1970.
So, where do you go for a 'real' Shakespeare experience, for a real taste of devotion and fascination and living vibrancy around his work? Well, one old answer to that quest was always New York! - since in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries New York achieved something of the last-stop melting pot that London had been in 1600 and the city always had a strong Shakespeare performing tradition. (After all, the Mayflower set sail in 1620, before the first Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays had been published, and the theory that the East coast American accent is closer to Shakespeare's than any other has some currency - among American scholars!) But now, this side of The Pond, we are catching up. The most obvious focal points for Shakespearean performance in his native land are the Royal Shakespeare Company - operating in Stratford and London, and fresh from a unique year in which they performed every single play - and The Globe Theatre, an evocative reconstruction of Shakespeare's own theatre, close to the site itself (it had burned down in 1613), masterminded by the visionary Sam Wanamaker - a fine American actor conscious of his European roots and Shakespeare's universality. The Globe has inspired many derivatives and, in Europe, Wanamaker's dream has been particularly taken up in Germany, not only in performance practice but in academe: Dr. Vanessa Schormann's Shakespeare's Globe: Repliken, Rekonstruktionen und Bespielbarkeit (C. Winter Verlag, Heidelberg) is so far the only book to document all the Globe Theatres in the world. There are no fewer than three Globe replicas in Germany: Schwabisch Hall, Rust and Neuss, all only operational in summer. The Globe Neuss was founded in 1991 and is famous for its annual International Shakespeare Festival where companies from all over the world come to perform.
The English may of course have taken The Bard rather for granted, after all those lines set to be learned by heart at school, but on continental Europe the passion is untarnished. One of the best sources for information both about performances and conferences is here, a site based at the University of Basel whose acronym 'shine' stands for Shakespeare in Europe. Another useful source is at http://www.bardware.com and for details of festivals across the continent, try here; those already used to their web search-engine unearthing millions of results have to become accustomed to Shakespeare searches offering nearly billions!
I said just then, 'performances and conferences' - and just as the academics are still hard at work, piecing together the eternal legacy of the man, the Shakespeare conference industry thrives hand in glove. Perhaps one of the most important and comprehensive pioneering events was "Four Centuries of Shakespeare in Europe", in November 1999, hosted at Murcia University and attended by scholars from 19 different European countries. Earlier signal events at Antwerp (European Shakespeares, 1990) and Sofia (Shakespeare in the New Europe, 1993) had broken new ground in European collaboration in Shakespeare studies but had done less to focus on performance as well as scholarship and translation; the programme at Murcia sough to redress this. A selection of the papers was published in 2003 by the University of Delaware Press in a volume called 400 Years of Shakespeare in Europe, edited by Ángel-Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars. Theme conferences have also been organised at Basle (Shakespeare in European Culture, 2001), Utrecht (Shakespeare and European Politics, 2003) and Krakow (Shakespeare, History and Memory, 2005).
The original steering group convened again in Murcia in June 2006, with the support of new devotees. The meeting included the organisers from the University of Murcia as well as delegates from Sheffield, Utrecht, Sofia, Namur, and Cracow. In 1998, a decision had been taken to form an association but there was no hurry to clutter life with statutes and protocol; now however an objective has been set, to secure a more official status for the European Shakespeare initiative as well as to implement a pan-European research project. The next decision to be taken on the final shape of the organisation will be at the next European Shakespeare conference on 14-17 November 2007, in Iaşi, Romania; it carries the evocative title "Shakespeare and Europe: Border(s) and Territories".
That title gives us a clue. It is interesting how deep Shakespeare passion runs in the 'newer' Eastern countries of Europe, and so it is with good timing that Oxford University Press has just published "Shakespeare and Eastern Europe" by Zdenek Stríbrny.
[his is the first full account of Shakespeare's impact on the whole of Eastern and East Central Europe up to the present day; this too is a long tradition and the book opens with accounts of the tours of English players on the Continent during Shakespeare's lifetime, tracing routes as far as Gdánsk, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna and Graz. Shakespeare played a major role in the national revivals in Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria. After the Bolshevik revolution and behind the Iron Curtain the plays were appropriated for political purposes but his humanism became an increasingly inspiring voice of dissent from Stalinist totalitarianism.
So, there is a Shakespeare for every nation and every history. If that all seems too daunting, follow the Mayflower - there's always that Shakespeare in New York after all!
© by Jonathon Brown. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.