Herder’s Shakespeare is a milestone in the development of literary theory. First published in 1773, as one of five contributions to a pamphlet edited by Herder himself and entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art), it represents a defiant rejection of Enlightenment poetics, neoclassicism, and the dominance of French taste. It pioneers a new historicist, proto-Romantic approach to cultures and their products, one that favors the local over the universal, the authentic over the ersatz, the primitive over the modern. It is a key document in the German reception of Shakespeare. And, perhaps most important of all, as the cornerstone of what has come to be seen as the manifesto of the Sturm und Drang movement, it exerted an unrivaled influence on the German literary renaissance of the 1770s.
The title of Von deutscher Art und Kunst clearly signals Herder’s intention for the various essays to be seen as exploring different aspects of German cultural identity. It is rather less obvious, though, what Shakespeare has to do with any of this. In fact, most of the other pieces in the collection would not seem to be directly concerned with German culture in the narrow sense either, dealing as they do with Gothic architecture or with Ossian, the legendary Scottish bard who was enjoying a voguish prominence at the time thanks to the forgeries of James Macpherson. Only the extract from Justus Möser’s patriotic Osnabrück History appears at all relevant. So what exactly is Herder driving at?
In the late eighteenth century Germany was little more than a vague geographical expression. It consisted of hundreds of autonomous territories, ranging in size from Lilliputian statelets to great powers such as Prussia and Austria, all nominally under the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In this empire-on-paper—which lacked political, religious, and economic cohesion, and was ruled by a self-interested and Francophile elite—a unified national culture had failed to emerge. “We are laboring in Germany as in the days of the confusion of Babel,” Herder once grumbled, “divided by sects of taste, partisans of poetic art, schools of philosophy contesting one another: no capital and no common interest, no great and universal reformer and lawgiving genius.”1 Intellectuals throughout the Germanies, Herder among them, felt acutely the absence of a public sphere and worked actively to create the conditions for a literary revival. For Herder that meant restoring continuities in German history and society; it meant renewing shared traditions that had been neglected, interrupted, extinguished, or buried beneath a superficial and alien civilization. Hence his deliberately capacious understanding of the term deutsch. He takes it to signify not only the modern inhabitants of the German-speaking lands but those of Scandinavia and the British Isles also, thereby opening up the old fault line dividing Latin from Germanic Europe, the earthy, robust Teutons from the decadent, effete Welschen. Moreover, he uses the word in its original sense, as referring specifically to the language and art of the people—unruly, coarse, yet creative—rather than those of the Ruritanian ruling caste: urbane, polite, and sterile. Herder’s pamphlet is accordingly concerned with the ways in which these demotic energies might revitalize a moribund culture from below.
A dose of Shakespeare was just the tonic that German literature needed. Herder was by no means alone in thinking so. Ever since, if not before, Kaspar Wilhelm von Borck’s translation of Julius Caesar in 1741, the first rendering of a complete Shakespeare play into German, the English dramatist had come to represent for German writers a welcome counter-force to the canons of French neoclassicism, a role that he had already fulfilled for Addison and others in Britain. Some saw him as a threat for that very reason. Johann Christoph Gottsched, who in the 1730s and 1740s was the most visible champion of French neoclassical drama as a template for German literature, was content to echo the complaints of Voltaire. In the eighteenth of his Philosophic Letters (1733), Voltaire had asserted with typical hauteur that, for all his forceful and fecund imagination, Shakespeare worked “without the least glimmer of good taste and without the least knowledge of the rules,” and ended up producing “monstrous farces” instead of tragedies. Reviewing Borck’s translation, Gottsched agreed. Borck had in fact squeezed Shakespeare into the corset of classical hexameters and, as was common practice in the eighteenth century, primped, pruned, and powdered the Elizabethan in an effort to make him presentable. But that did not prevent Gottsched from sniffily declaring that even the traditional vulgar spectacles he had spent his career attempting to banish from the German repertory were not so “full of blunders and faults in violation of the rules of the stage and good sense” as was Shakespeare.
Others were more enthusiastic—or at least less dismissive. That same year, Johann Elias Schlegel defended the bold strokes with which Shakespeare portrayed his characters. Yet Schlegel was unable wholly to free himself from the decorum of his time when criticizing Shakespeare’s bawdy language and—a common reproach in the eighteenth century—the exuberance of his metaphor. Friedrich Nicolai, in his explicitly anti-Gottschedian polemic Letters on the Current State of Belles Lettres in Germany (1755), similarly thought, despite his reservations about Shakespeare’s disorderliness, that the Englishman crafted formidable, many-sided characters who could act as a stimulus for German theater. Some years later, Lessing, Nicolai’s coconspirator against Gottsched’s creaking authority, agreed that Shakespeare would be a better example for his countrymen than Racine or Corneille. In the famous seventeenth of the Letters Concerning Recent Literature (1759), he claimed that the terrible sublimity and melancholy of English drama were more congenial to the German temperament than were the délicatesse and raffinement of the French. More important, Lessing was unconvinced that Shakespeare’s practice existed beyond the critical pale. In fact, the Englishman, in spite of his irregularities, achieved, and with greater success than Corneille, the same tragic purpose at which Sophocles aimed: the arousal of fear and pity. Lessing, then, views Shakespeare not as a rebel but as a supreme poet who ultimately, if unconsciously, is a profoundly Aristotelian dramatist, even though, or precisely because, he ignores the rigid and straitening conventions of French pseudoclassicism. Lastly, Herder’s immediate precursor was Heinrich von Gerstenberg, who, in his Letters on Curiosities of Literature (1768), was the first German commentator to declare Shakespeare sui generis and so exempt his practice from the standards of the classical tradition. Whereas the object of Greek drama was the stirring of passions in the audience, Gerstenberg argued, Shakespeare strove to paint “living pictures of moral Nature.” His works are not tragedies but “character pieces” that disclose, in every nuance and detail, the innermost thoughts and feelings of his heroes. Yet despite his promising and historically oriented starting point, Gerstenberg soon loses himself in inconsistencies and is ultimately unable to escape the pull of the ancients entirely.
But none of these writers, Herder thought, had done justice to Shakespeare’s achievements or quite put their finger on why he was so uniquely significant a phenomenon.
Herder had first become acquainted with Shakespeare in 1764, under the tutelage of his friend, the philosopher Johann Georg Hamann. Over the next few years, he gave himself over to what he called his “frenzy” for the English poet. Not one to keep his enthusiasms to himself, he took every opportunity to share his discovery with others—with his new friend Goethe, most momentously, but also with his fiancée, Caroline Flachsland. Shakespeare was his “hobbyhorse,” he confessed to her late in 1770, introducing the man who, as the correspondence during their courtship attests, would become the third apex in a long-running love triangle: “I have not so much read as studied him, and I underline the word; each of his plays is a complete philosophy of the passion whereof it treats.”2 Like many in Germany, Herder was reliant on Christoph Martin Wieland’s idiosyncratic but nevertheless extremely influential prose translations of twenty-two Shakespearean dramas, published between 1762 and 1766. Though he thought little of Wieland’s efforts, it struck Herder, as it had Lessing and Gerstenberg, that the rude vigor of Shakespeare’s verse was a world away from the mannered artifice of French literature or its anemic German imitations. Already in 1768, in a review of J. J. Dusch’s Letters on the Cultivation of Taste (1767), he described Shakespeare as “a genius with an imagination that always aims at grandeur, that can devise a plan, the very sight of which makes us giddy: a genius who is nothing in the individual embellishments but everything in the great, wild structure of the plot: a genius who, if he shall define the concept of the poet, must cause all didactic rhymesters, all wits to tremble.”3 Like Homer, like the prophets of the Old Testament, like Ossian, Shakespeare possessed an expressive power, a sensuous directness that was typical of what Herder called “popular poetry” (Volkspoesie). If poetry was indeed, as he frequently asserted (borrowing a phrase of Hamann’s), the “mother tongue of mankind,” then these “primitive” figures spoke it with an easy fluency long since lost in the stilted, prosy world of the Enlightenment. Active when their respective national cultures were still unformed, they drew from the subterranean reservoirs of human imagination and feeling. They could, therefore, serve as models to regenerate German letters—if only it were possible to tap the same source of creativity.
These intuitions were by no means uncommon in the eighteenth century. Like that of many of his young compatriots, Gerstenberg foremost among them, Herder’s response to Shakespeare owed a great deal to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), which appeared in two separate German translations in 1760. Young’s work did much to popularize in Germany the new artistic concept of genius, which had become fundamental to French and especially British critical discourse during the early and mid-eighteenth century. For Young (and for Shaftesbury) the genius was a second Creator, a Promethean figure who imitated not the ancients or other writers but only nature. Instead of taking his lead from elegant learning, the genius created instinctively, promiscuously, with God-given powers. His activity was not mechanical and deliberate but organic and effortless: “An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made.” Inevitably, Shakespeare was for Young—as he was already for Joseph Addison—the prototype of an original genius who had no call for the rules of neoclassicism (which, “like Crutches, are a needful aid to the lame, tho’ an impediment to the strong”), and it was as such that through Young’s mediation he came to be regarded by the new generation of German bardolaters, who conveniently overlooked, in their eagerness to embrace Shakespeare as a primal force of nature, the rhetorical contrivances and sophistication of the Elizabethan dramatist.
These debates form the invisible backdrop to Herder’s essay. We need to bear them in mind because Herder was a lifelong controversialist. His first major works, On Recent German Literature: Fragments, Critical Forests, On the Origin of Language, Yet Another Philosophy of History, and, toward the end of his life, Kalligone and the Metacritique began as ripostes to other writers and thinkers (the latter two are directed at Kant). Like a barroom bruiser, he was always spoiling for a fight, perpetually in need of an antagonist, a foil to help him articulate his own ideas. That is no less true of the essay at hand. Here, however, he is more reluctant than usual to single anyone out. Although he does explicitly take issue with Gerstenberg, as well as making approving noises about Lessing, his strategy is to mention the proliferation of critical literature only to reject it outright. The dispute between Shakespeare’s champions and detractors is flawed because, irrespective of whether they heap praise or mockery on him, both parties take as their starting point and criteria for judging him the very conventions that Shakespeare quite evidently disregards. Instead, Herder wants to show why Shakespeare could not be bound by neoclassical rules and hence why he can serve as a new, freer model for modern European drama. Herder seeks to account for Shakespeare, to understand him, to enter into emotional dialogue with him, and thereby to “bring him to life for us Germans.”
This is possible, he insists, only through a proper appreciation of the historical and cultural context within which art and genius emerge. Though poetic inspiration is universal, the manner in which it is expressed is not. Examining ancient Greek tragedy (as typified by Sophocles) and the modern northern European drama of Shakespeare, Herder shows that each arose under vastly different environmental conditions and from different antecedents; because each was shaped by different social, political, and material forces, they could not but be different and guided by different rules. They are thus two wholly distinct species of drama that, at least from one point of view, do not admit of comparison. Greek tragedy evolved (it was never static or monolithic) from the preexisting dithyramb and chorus, taking as its subject matter simple mythical events whose scope and expressive potential were increased as actors and scenes were gradually introduced. The classical unities of time, place, and plot, which Aristotle discovered inductively rather than arrived at a priori, were no arbitrary imposition on the creative artist; they were an entirely natural and necessary product of the simplicity of Greek life and customs: the “husk” within which the “fruit”—the individual artistic object—could grow. To attempt to replicate Sophoclean tragedy, or to apply its rules, in the entirely different milieu of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France amounted to a refusal to acknowledge the historical and cultural specificity of Greek drama, and as such was not only absurd but positively harmful. The plays of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire are true neither to their own age nor to that of the Greeks from which they purport to derive their legitimacy; they are but a decorous and flimsy parody, an empty shell lacking the soul, the living spirit, of the original. The identity of form and content has been violated. (The same criticism would hold true for German philhellenism, made fashionable by Winckelmann and eventually culminating in—as Herder later saw it—the travesties of Weimar Classicism.)
Shakespeare, by contrast, reflects his own historical reality. The greater complexity and diversity of social life in early modernity are manifested in the sheer variety of events, localities, and characters in his plays, precisely those features that seemed to men like Gottsched to offend against the proprieties of dramatic art.4 His scenes are not stylized fictions like those of the French: we are confronted with nature in all its concrete and tumultuous immediacy. Because Shakespeare did not, like the Greeks, live in an age characterized by unity, such unity could not arise of itself in his dramas. Hence in order to transform the disparate stuff of his age into a whole, into a single work of art, his approach had to be the opposite of Sophocles’. Where the drama of the ancients became more intricate over time—within self-imposed constraints—Shakespeare, as the exemplary modern poet, creates uniformity out of multiplicity. He cannot very well put the entire world on the stage, so he must compress it into a single, awesome event. But the unity he arrives at is purely ideal, the necessary means by which he is able to bring forth a self-sustaining aesthetic illusion. It has nothing to do with the dictates of neoclassicism, and ultimately depends on the power of the poet to transcend our categories of perception and insist on his own measure of time and space. Even where Shakespeare seems to take too many liberties, with his telescoping of time and abrupt accelerations of action, it turns out that he is being faithful to ordinary human experience. Time and space, as Herder reminds us, are not absolute. The internal clock ticking as the drama unfolds may not be synchronized with the watches we wear as we sit in the playhouse—but Shakespeare is able thereby to convey a deeper psychological truth.
So where Sophoclean tragedy, born of myth, remained abstract and universal, Shakespeare’s theater, the roots of which lie in the popular carnival plays of the Renaissance, discloses his turbulent world in all its vibrancy and individuality and disparity. But although Sophocles and Shakespeare may be outwardly dissimilar, they have a spiritual kinship that all geniuses share: they are true not only to nature (as Young argued) but also to the culture from which they emerged (and herein lies Herder’s decisive contribution to the concept of genius). Both are mouthpieces of the collective soul of the nation, expressing its thoughts and sentiments, manners and morals; in each case their art is a development of indigenous species of expression. Though their purpose—the manufacture of theatrical illusion, the convulsion of the heart—is the same, their means are necessarily different.5 Nevertheless, each dramatic form has its own legitimacy, and—this is Herder’s point—so might any other literature that is unfettered and faithful to its national character.
But there is more. In his important treatise Yet Another Philosophy of History—a sardonic reply to the Enlightenment’s complacent ideology of progress, published in 1774—Herder views history as an apparently aimless chain of events whose plan is inscrutable and known only to God. He repeatedly compares history to a mighty drama in which props and players are moved about on a cosmic stage so that the Divine Author’s purpose may be achieved, even if the actors are only dimly aware of the greater scheme of things. Shakespeare, completed a year earlier, is clearly a stepping-stone toward the understanding of historical processes advanced there. But here the analogy is reversed: Shakespeare dramatizes history, but not just in the ordinary sense of writing historical plays. So overwhelmed are we when reading him that we forget this is a mere text subject to the restraints and confines of the theater. (And it is surely important to bear in mind that Herder speaks of the experience of reading Shakespeare, not of witnessing an actual performance: few Shakespeare plays had been staged in Germany at the time of his writing.) Shakespeare’s plays are history itself; or at least the vehicle through which history comes alive. The poet is a creator in miniature, an intermediary between God and the world, whose work is akin to Revelation. So complete is the illusion of his richly imagined universe, with its own dimensions, its own beginning and end, a microcosm into which so many fragments of human experience and passion have been intruded, that we feel we are powerless, a blind tool of his will, just like the characters we see hastening toward their fall. Yet at the same time we sense the identity of Shakespeare’s dramatic procedure and the logic of history: he reproduces its modes of operation in the apparent chaos and confusion we see unfold before us. As in life, we cannot clearly discern the larger design; but Shakespeare nevertheless gives us an inkling of it, enabling us to glimpse “dark little symbols forming the silhouette of a divine theodicy.” And what we glimpse are the lineaments of Spinoza’s God, natura naturans, an unending process of being, destructive yet self-renewing. Shakespeare, then, is not just—perhaps not even primarily—literary criticism: the justification of God is at the heart of Herder’s project.
Shakespeare is typical of Herder’s style: impetuous, exuberant, exclamatory; suggestive but never conclusive. It is a way of writing that is deliberately opposed to the Enlightenment ideals of sobriety, balance, objectivity, and reasonableness. A theorist suspicious of theories, an avowed enemy of abstraction, Herder tried to achieve the same immediacy and spontaneity in his work that characterized the expression of earlier epochs, to overcome what Schiller called the “sentimental” mode of consciousness by assuming—ironically enough—a calculated naïveté, an artful artlessness. If Shakespeare is the new Sophocles, then Herder, by implication, must be the new Aristotle, seeking a kind of criticism commensurate with its subject, one that is itself “Shakespearean” in language and tone. By preferring to “rhapsodize” rather than analyze—for example, in his breathless summaries of Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear—Herder hopes to effect the empathetic understanding that will “bring Shakespeare to life.” As a result, his exegetical interest in Shakespeare is necessarily limited and diverges from that of contemporary and later Romantic commentators. He does not deduce a moral system from the plays as a whole. He is unconcerned with character or form, with the literary or dramatic qualities of the plays. He is indifferent to antiquarian detail or textual subtleties. Characteristic, too, is the way the discussion breaks off just as it seems to get going, when Herder remarks offhandedly that “at this point the heart of my inquiry might begin.” But even this is a device. Actually he has realized his primary objective, namely, to justify Shakespeare on historical grounds. Important though the present task is, Herder feels compelled to underline that it should be seen only as a first step, not as an end in itself. The further problems it raises promise to be even more consequential: for example, the question of the alchemy by which Shakespeare was able to “transform some worthless romance, tale, or fabulous history into such a living whole”—or in other words, the laws governing the agency of artistic genius. As Herder makes clear, an investigation of the relationship between individual poetic creativity and the legacy of tradition would not only have implications for the theory and practice of literature, but would also enrich our knowledge of history and philosophy. He gestures at a potentially vast terrain, one encompassing psychology, anthropology, and ethnology: an undiscovered country that he must perforce leave untrodden for the time being, but had begun to chart elsewhere and bring under the banner of “aesthetics.” Once Herder has opened up this vista, it seems almost comically inadequate to go no further than the fish-in-a-barrel dismissal of Gerstenberg and his attempt to apply Polonius’s system of classification to Shakespeare’s dramas. But Herder does touch on these larger questions in his final remarks.
Herder’s criticism not only strives to be sensitive to the historical circumstances of a work’s origin but is also acutely aware of its own rootedness in a particular place and time: he can rhapsodize about Shakespeare precisely because Shakespeare speaks to that moment. But not for long. The essay’s coda sees an abrupt shift from major to minor, from rapture to lament, with Herder complaining that his will be the last generation truly able to understand Shakespeare. Already the Elizabethan age is becoming increasingly remote, the work itself destined to lose its vitality and become an incomprehensible object of wonder, as strange and exotic as the ruins of ancient Greece or Egypt. Even the “great creator of history” cannot in the end escape the inevitability of historical change. His world is no longer ours.
But surely this is an exaggeration? After all, The Iliad is a product of its age, in its concerns and characters and form; yet it is still read, and appreciated, thousands of years after its composition. In fact, Homer is an excellent example of what Herder is here gesturing toward. Long neglected in favor of the more “classical” and “tasteful” Virgil, Homer had been rediscovered in the eighteenth century and lived on in the translation of Pope, for example, whose achievement Herder admired and desired to see emulated in Germany. Ossian, too, had been resurrected, though in more problematical fashion by James Macpherson. Truly great poetry does indeed transcend its historicity. But it can do so only if it is constantly reinterpreted, reinvented, reinvigorated. Even Shakespeare will slip into oblivion unless writers actively engage with the past, but in such a way that the result is always provisional, temporary, surpassable, never absolute. Just as Shakespeare built on what went before him, so we must build on Shakespeare: he is now part of that long, continuous tradition that we must adapt and shape for our own ends. The important thing is not to imitate Shakespeare directly, but to follow his example: to be true to one’s historical and cultural identity. Hence Herder’s own translations of various scenes from the Shakespearean canon, in which he attempts to capture the essential otherness of the archaic and densely allusive English, pushing at the limits of what is possible in German prosody. Hence, too, his concluding apostrophe to Goethe, the friend whom he claims to have embraced before Shakespeare’s “sacred image.” Goethe’s first major success, the Shakespeare-inspired drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773), put Herder’s ideas into action and heralded a new literature based on native traditions and forms. But that is not all. Goethe takes as his subject history itself: the iron-handed Götz is a late-medieval knight struggling vainly against his own obsolescence, caught as he is on the cusp of transition from heroic individualism to the legal framework of modern civil society. Moreover, by setting his play in Germany’s own “age of chivalry,” as Herder demands, Goethe enacts the very essence of poetic practice: revisiting the past. Götz von Berlichingen, then, like Shakespeare, is not just an end but also a beginning.
1 “Fragments: First Collection,” in Johann Gottfried Herder: Selected Early Works, 1764–1767, ed. Ernest A. Menze and Karl Menges (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 95.
2 Herder, Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Dobbek and Günter Arnold (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1977–2004), 1:277, 270–71.
3 Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–1913), 4:284.
4 Samuel Johnson in 1765, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, which was translated and used by Wieland also, similarly argues that the mingling of tragedy and comedy, the interplay of moods, and the utter range of characters constituted the quintessence of Shakespeare’s genius; but Herder is the first to explain why that is the case.
5 Whilst Herder claims that Sophoclean and Shakespearean drama are more or less entirely different phenomena, this is true only of their form: the essence or purpose of drama would appear to have remained unchanged over time.