Literature Guides
Shakespeare
Shakespeare (William) was the most distinguished dramatic poet the world has had since the decline of Greece.
He was the son of a wealthy woolen merchant at Stratford on the Avon, a market spot in the English. County Warwickshire, probably born on Apr. 23, 1564. His mother was a daughter of Robert of Wellington, and William of her ten children was her eldest son. Having enjoyed a not-so-excellent education, he had to go to his father’s business in his sixteenth year, and on the eighteenth he married Anna Hathaway of Schottery, who was almost eight years older than he was , and to him in 1583 a daughter, Susanna, whom he distinguished by his love and bore the twins of Judith and Samuel in 1584. It is said that he was tempted by youthful arrogance to secretly visit the Jagdrevier of an adjacent nobleman, and to avenge himself for the persecution by a taunt. The nobleman, embittered on this point, wanted William with the full severity of the English. Hunting laws, which the latter (around 1586) could escape only by the escape. He went to London to get in touch with the theater. At first he was said to have clothed the low office of a callboy, as it was called, by calling the acting actors the key words, thereby giving the signal for entering the stage. After a while he entered the stage and began to make dramatic poems. As an actor, he initially made little fortune, because his simple, natural portrayal against the declamatory and spread presentation of the rest, which corresponded to the corrupt taste of the time. His playmakers were also criticized, but excited the applause of the spectators. He found a special patron in the Count of Southampton, to whom his poems “Venus and Adonis” and “Tarquin and Lucretia” are dedicated. The great Queen Elizabeth was said to have given him proofs of her well-being. The King Jakob Stuart himself wrote a letter in recognition of the homage offered by him to the family Banquo in the tragedy “Macbeth.” The house of Stuart was derived from Banquo. In spite of his growing fame, Shakespeare remained in poor circumstances, and these had only improved since 1610, when, in addition to two friends, Henning and Condell, he was given the opportunity, under considerable privileges, of setting up his own theater. The two of them were the ones who arranged the first edition of S.’s dramatic works. As early as 1613 Shakespeare withdrew from the theater. He left London and went to his home town Stratfort, where he and his family moved into a large house, which he had formerly purchased. Here he died on his birthdays in 1616. He was buried at Stratford under the chancery of the main church, and his grave was designated by a gravestone with a simple inscription. After a few years, a larger stone monument was erected in the same church on the north side of the pulpit. The same consists of a statue representing him in living position in sitting position. He has a pillow in front of him and holds a feather in his hand. This statue was originally painted, the eyes were light brown, the beard dark, the mud scarlet, and the mantle black. Later the whole statue was painted ash-gray. Among the poets, lat. These verses stand:
Nestor in judgment, in spirit a Socrates, poet like Maro,
If the earth bury him, if the people lament him, Olymp has him.
On the stones underneath is:
Friend, I pray to Jesus’ doctrine:
This dormancy honor. Hail, you spare this stone
But curse, you disturb this my bones.
It is said that Shakespeare himself wrote this epitaph. In 1741, the monument depicted here was finally put to the great poet at the Westminster Abbey in London. The cost to the same was won by performances at the two great theaters in London. This is a picture-column of marble, which Shakespeare represents in the costume of his time; it is supported by a sideways allegorically ornamented lintel on which a book is laid with an inscription taken from S.’s works. The memorization of Shakespeare was celebrated in a meaningful manner by the famous actor Garrick in Stratford on the birthday of the poet in 1769, and when the main event of the feast was given at the Drurylane Theater the following year, that it had to be repeated 100 times. Person is said to have been well-educated, and by this gentle, clever, and amiable behavior, he should have given an excellent shareholder. His children died without descendant, and his son was escaped in the twelfth year. But his relatives should have lived in 1819. The house, which was called Shakespeare in Stratford, and called Newplace, was a precious remembrance of the deceased, and so also a mulberry tree planted before him, until both were placed in the hands of a rude and uneducated man, a country preacher named Gastrell, who turned the tree down and had the house demolished. The house on the other hand, in which Shakespeare was born, is still shown.
S. himself has not procured a whole edition of his poetic works, and therefore it is doubtful whether they really belong to him. In the investigations in this respect, we have in part gone too far again, for we have declared, for many limited concessions, works which have evidently the character of Shakespeare’s spirit. Nor is there any definite knowledge of the order of his poems, for a long time after S.’s death, investigations were made in this respect. The dramatic dramas of the whole of 43 are attributed to the S., which are partly games, some of which are tragedy games, and partly historical plays. Some are in the middle of these different genera. Besides, we still have from him the two narrative poems mentioned above, of which Venus and Adonis was already printed in 1593, and 154 Sonnets. It is probable that “Romeo and Juliet” and “Verlorne Liebesmüh” have been created, at least according to the basic idea of S., before he first came to London.
The great never-surpassing art of Shakespeare is that he knows how to fuse the most profound reality with the most sublime poetry, so that, in reality, the reality of poetry and poetry becomes reality before the ears of the enchanted hearer. He knows all the depths of the human mind, until his deepest hiding-corner, into which the light of consciousness is never to penetrate, and the human beings whom he presents to us in his dramas, are not, as by other dramatists, by individual threads of their existence held and directed, but all the fibers of their existence are held by the poet in his hand; He has seized the point from which the soul, in man himself, dominates this extremity, as far as the darkest conception in his breast, as his own life-principle. The persons of all the other dramatic poets have something marionette-like to the Shakespearean, those alone possess true original life. But what is the triumph of poetry, that totality of personality, comes to Shakespeare everywhere, to a universal expression through language, so that S.’s people possess a transparency, which makes their viewing a true art-genre. One understands them through and through, and yet also sees how they can not comprehend themselves; – the contradictions of their existence, which become their destiny in themselves, are clear to the reader and the listener and dissolve into the most beautiful harmonies in the whole of the dramatic work of art. The preoccupied, uneducated spirit is as much as the most educated of S., though he can not account for the reasons as the latter. Indeed, if the artistically uneducated in S.’s works of art, with the ordinary rules of taste, as objects of his criticism, Shakespeare himself will appear to him as a monster of tastelessness, which overthrows all those rules; such a critic will not understand how Shakespeare is exercising all his power over the spirits to whom he can not escape himself, even if he is so much angry about it. There has also been no lack of such assessors of the p. Their rules of taste are nothing but prejudices, which the mediocre poet observes in order to furnish pain, are the mechanism of the Marionettes, which he uses for a miserable imitation of real life; They enter Shakespeare in the living organism of his characters. Those critics resemble those who want to understand and explain a developing organic creature according to the analogy of a machine made by the mechanic; like these, the object of their criticism will appear to them more and more puzzling, more contradictory, the longer they look at him, the deeper they penetrate into him. The disturbing pleasure of pain, the cutting pain of pleasure at Shakespeare are at once contradictions, which mankind, according to its deepest truth, represent, that the ordinary man, who lives and moves only in accordance with conventional forms, has no great pain from his own And, as blinded as ever, to blind the eye, and to persuade himself that the poet is lying, only so that he himself must not confess his own lies. Often, with a few bold outline, Shakespeare presents the whole developmental history of a mind in which no essential moment has been skipped, no characteristic trait is neglected, but buds, leaves and fruits with a hurry under the breath of poetry and in the fervor of passion Which, in ordinary life, in which the embers of the passions evaporate to the slow-moving heat, reach only in long intervals; then the great poet has been accused of arbitrariness by smaller souls. But even where Shakespeare the freeest creations of the imagination can be played in the middle of the real life represented, they have so naturally realized that it seems as if the poet had deceived God’s creative word by which the freedom of the spirit as the necessity of appearance. Shakespeare was far from the arbitrariness of an uncontrolled talent, which philistine Krittler thought alone to recognize in him, and one discovered with deep study in his works the clearest prudence which dominates the infinite substance of creative imagination with penetrating consciousness, and only for that reason completed Appearance of immediacy, because it occurs with the highest degree of unassailability. By acting as a god in his creation, he appears to be an innocent child, and the most infallible effect follows these games, for even the most uneducated one suspects that the mind is speaking to the spirit. It occurs at S., that his acting can not be spoiled even by the worst actors, still retain their effectiveness in the worst performance; it is the consequence of the already touched perfection of his persons, which are so accomplished that the performing artist does not need to take anything away from them. The bad actor appears in S.’s roles only in his own awkwardness, which does not pass over to the part when these have remained unmotivated, for all that is to be expressed has become language in these roles and penetrates through the ear when not through the eye, moving into the soul of the spectator. The manner of expression itself is taken from life in faith, since it does not rise to the swing of genius into the higher realm of the spirit; it is vulgar, where it has to represent common reality, and only nobles it by the fullness of wit, the convulsions of the spirit subjugated in the world by the vulgarity. It must not be forgotten, however, that the life, which is reflected here in S.’s works, according to his utterances, is a temporary one. The manners and the language of a century which has long since passed and is overrun by the present, meet us at S.. In his poems there is a stiffness of expression, an ingenuity of wit, which our refined, morally cultivated time no longer knows, and which by no means should be imitated by a poet of the present, as is often the case with those who follow a great spirit “How he cleaves his throat and how he spits,” and that he meant to understand it.
Only a few of S.’s masterpieces can be mentioned here by name. When, in Romeo and Juliet, he lets the sacred flame of love blaze as it overpowers the night of the grave and death, triumphs triumphantly through all the horrors of revenge, horror, despair, and after all the earth has been devoured by it, and finally defeat their hatred, and thus give the peace of the earth by hovering to heaven; In Othello, on the other hand, he represents to us the love imprisoned in the deception and deception of earthly life, which is subdued by the power of reality, undermined and consumed inwardly, instead of being happy, tormented, as by a deed which does not seem to belong to love, but to the most savage hatred. Shakespeare has done the most difficult thing in “Hamlet,” the representation of the mediation of thought to act in its difficulty for man, who by an artificial form have borne the immediacy of his existence. The spirit returns to itself, instead of going out of itself, and this disturbance of the mind becomes a real madness in the immediate man (in the case of innocent Ophelia), and in the self-conscious (in Hamlet), a falsehood. To himself, not only to the others, Hamlet lays this madness, and reaps the bitter fruit of this lie, by finally turning himself into a deed, which is like a curse upon his soul. All the Powers of Darkness have sneered at Shakespeare in the Macbeth, as they become alive in the breast of man, and for himself gain the false appearance of a reality in which he works on nothing but on self-destruction. In the most powerful power of the creative spirit, Shakespeare appears in the Cymbeline; a world of its own, which does not belong to any time, and yet all the time, is here before our eyes. In the same way, he also proceeds in his playing games, in which he allows all the fantastic caricatures of the spiritual to be played in common reality, and that that which is in truth is also a caricature of the spiritual. We only recall here the “Sommernachtstraum,” in which our astonished glances represent three different worlds, the meanest of the everyday world, smelling the craft of craftsmanship, and the fantastic world of elves amalgamate so wonderfully that the seemingly highest becomes the lowest, and vice versa. A true national work consists of the ten playful plays drawn from the history of English, which are closely connected to the whole. One does not know what to admire more, the historical fidelity and sharpness of the character-drawing, or the art with which the historical figures are transfigured into poetic, so that it is their own soul, which excites itself in every word the depth of the mind from the poet.
England has made a great contribution to his greatest poet by the most magnificent and still repetitive editions, but the German culture first penetrated into the depths of the Shakespearean spirit, so that, as a matter of fact, the English had learned only from the Germans what they actually did Shakespeare. Since Lessing, as far as Goethe and Tieck, the appreciation and appreciation of Shakespeare has been growing, as German literature itself has strengthened itself into art, and it is at which German poetry has grown to its present height. Lessing, Goethe, Schlegel, and Tieck must be mentioned above all as the one to whom we have to thank the deeper knowledge of Shakespeare Wieland and Eschenburg gave the first German translation, later the translations of IH Voss (9 volumes, Lpz. And Stuttgart 1818-29), Benda (18 volumes, Lpz. 1825-26), Jul. Körner Kaufmann (Berl since 1839) and several others; the most admirable and truly classical translation is that of A. W. von Schlegel (improved and completed by Tieck, 9 vols., Berl., 1829-35, appearing in a new edition). Tieck, Falk, Count Baudissin & A. have translated individual pieces.
