Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson Page B

Shakespeares Tag’.
In October 1771, the very month he had delivered the speech, he had set to work on his first major play,
Götz von Berlichingen.
A rumbustious account in no fewer than fifty-six scenes of the medieval knight and mercenary Gottfried of Berlichingen (famous for having had his hand shot away and replaced by an iron fist), it was a crazily ambitious undertaking. It was also heavily touched by Shakespeare’s history plays, which Goethe had perhaps only just read. When Herder saw the manuscript, he exclaimed, ‘Shakespeare has quite ruined you.’
    Werther,
too, was heavily in Shakespeare’s debt – but here the resemblance was to one play alone, the text that had so captivated Schröder and German audiences:
Hamlet.
    Young Werther was young Hamlet by another name. Over-intelligent, cripplingly sensitive, tragically ill-equipped to face the realities of the world, he drifts through his luckless love affair without ever managing to take hold of it. He, too, lacks a father; contemplating death, he describes the funeral of a female ‘friend’ uncannily like the burial of Ophelia.
    For sure, there were differences: it is hard to imagine even Shakespeare’s Prince botching his death as Werther did, shooting himself above the right eye before haemorrhaging slowly. (Being sliced by an envenomed rapier looks positively wholesome by comparison.) But everywhere there are hints of Goethe’s source: in Werther’sfrenzied soul-searching, his emotional paralysis, his restless drift towards insanity. Early in the book, one of his letters to Wilhelm reads:
    When I consider how narrowly the active and enquiring powers of a human being are confined; when I see that all effective effort has as its end the satisfaction of our needs which themselves have no purpose except to lengthen the duration of our poor existence, and that any contentment on one point or another of our enquiries consists only in a sort of dreaming resignation as we paint the walls within which we sit out our imprisonment … All that, Wilhelm, renders me speechless. I go back into myself and find a whole world.
    The lines read like an extrapolated version of Hamlet’s ‘Denmark’s a prison’ (‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’), bolted on to a speech from later in the same scene, ‘this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory’. A marvelling statement that follows in Shakespeare’s text – ‘What a piece of work is a man’ – returns to haunt Werther’s final letter: ‘Who is this thing, the vaunted demigod, a man?’
    After
Werther
’s publication and his move to Weimar, Goethe lived in a cottage given to him by the ever-munificent Karl August, but six years later he moved to much grander accommodation on Am Frauenplan here in Weimar, the house where – barring a journey to Italy from 1786 to 1788 and a stint observing the Battle of Valmy – he would remain until his death in 1832.
    Dutifully touristic, the morning after I arrived I toured the Goethehaus, aiming my cameraphone at the plank on the threshold painted with the word
‘Salve’
(‘welcome’) and staying right to the end of an alarmingly thorough 3D video presentation about its architecture. Despite its considerable size – more stately home than
Haus,
I thought – the place was harried by school groups and coach parties. At least the thirteen-year-olds sniggering next to the poet’s collection of nude classical statuary were having fun; everyone else, drifting around with audio guides clamped to their skulls, looked as if they were waiting on hold. The smell of lilies and furniture polish hung heavy in the air.
    Writers’ houses have always struck me as the least visitable of visitor attractions, the act of writing so private and undramatic – the creaking of pen across paper, the