Something about the Change of Mind in the History of Mankind

In the mid-eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Gottsched was the undisputed authority on literary matters within the German-speaking world. The poets he mentions as important in his writings were considered important in the circles that were considered educated.

In 1737, Gottsched listed the English playwrights he considered worthy of mention in a paper. Shakespeare was not among them.

Johann Jacob Bodmer was among the first to rebel against Gottsched's absolute literary domination. He wanted to bring a kind of re-evaluation to literary and artistic judgment. The strict poetic form modeled on antiquity, which Gottsched wanted to see maintained, should count for less. In contrast, the free-flowing imagination, which does not conform to fixed forms, should count for more.

In 1740, Bodmer also started mentioning famous poets, including Sasper, an Englishman, and Saspor, a German. The reader of today is asked to bear in mind that Bodmer, the reformer of German literature who was taking a stand against Gottsched, used Sasper and Saspor to refer to Shakespeare, who was now known.

In 1741, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was published in German, translated by von Bork. Gottsched, who had not previously known the poet, was introduced to him. He said of Julius Caesar that the play “has so much villainy in it that no one can read it without disgust”. Shakespeare was not always so unknown and unappreciated in Germany. At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, he was even popular. But this popularity was not due to the literary figures, but to the theater people. They performed plays on primitive stages, but they were widely performed. If one allows oneself a liberal interpretation of the term, these plays can be called translations or free adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. One then moved on to plays that one adapted oneself. These incorporated what had been learned from Shakespeare in terms of composition, portrayal of human nature, and stage effectiveness. Shakespeare's own poetry, even his name, was forgotten in the process. Shakespeare's spirit hung over the comedy stages like an artistic specter, without anyone mentioning Shakespeare.

The people who represented intellectual life in literature had nothing to do with what was performed on these stages for the entertainment of the audience. It took personalities like Gottsched to expand the realm of what intellectuals wrote about to include the dramatic arts.

But first, this art had to put up with being accused, in a rather elegant tone, of being a kind of intellectual street urchin whose leaps onto the stage look plebeian compared to the serious logical structures in a proper philosophical textbook.

With his translation of Shakespeare, Bork had actually done something that must have seemed strange to Johann Christoph Gottsched, the “professor of philosophy and poetry” in Leipzig. When he looked at this “Julius Caesar,” he felt how its poet had not grown out of the artistic-logical, which he presented from the lectern as the “philosophically required,” but out of intellectual street youth. Only that something arose from this through Shakespeare, which rose to art without “philosophical demand,” was not yet felt by Gottsched. The “philosophical-artistic demand” felt disgust.

Then something strange happened. On February 16, 1759, a certain Lessing published a literary letter that portrayed Gottsched's noble art as an old fad, ripe for the cutting, and the Shakespearean as the one that carries the seeds of future poetry. The world of a certain area was turned upside down.

Lessing created the literary atmosphere in which Goethe and Schiller breathed.

Bork still had to put up with Gottsched giving him a good rap on the knuckles with a pedagogical stick. Wieland, however, was allowed to translate almost all of Shakespeare in 1762-1768 without experiencing such “punishment”. And as a result, Shakespeare experienced a renaissance in the German-speaking world that he has never known anywhere else, not even in his homeland.

He was able to experience it because, with Lessing, a turn was made within German intellectual life towards the original sources of creative humanity. It is to misjudge the situation to ascribe this turn to the “influence” of Shakespeare. Just think how Schiller's Wallenstein and Goethe's Faust emerged from such elemental human sources that it seems completely absurd to attribute this elemental force to an external influence.

What happened with Shakespeare is something completely different. His poems were placed in the illumination of a light in which they had not previously existed. The light did not come from them. But by being placed in this light, they showed something that had not been seen in them before. The turnaround in the attitude of leading German figures towards Shakespeare is a symptom of the tremendous transformation that has taken place in the wake of Lessing in one area of human intellectual development.

One would think that such facts could mean something to those who find it very difficult to imagine that new points of view must be found in the thinking and feeling of humanity at turning points in history.

For such people, it is worth recalling the well-known fact that Lessing, who achieved so much, speaks in his writing “The Education of the Human Race” on the repeated lives of human individuals on the evening of his life. He had evidently experienced much of the riddles of human life in his soul; and at the height of his thinking, he could not come to terms with the idea of a human being having only one life on earth, followed by an eternity for the soul that represents the consequences of that one life. He came to ascribe repeated earthly lives to human beings, and thus allowed them to carry impulses from old epochs of historical development into new, later ones. The interim periods between earthly lives, during which the souls have a purely spiritual existence, then provide the stimulus for the souls to revive what they have experienced earlier in a different form in later times; this is how the progress of the human race is formed. A collaboration between a spiritual world and earthly reality, as conveyed by man, thereby draws near to the soul's eye.

Lessing believes that this view should not be considered foolish because it arose in the earliest times of humanity, when humanity had not yet been diverted from elementary thinking and feeling by all kinds of philosophizing.

One could also think that those who consider Lessing a “pioneer” should not believe that he became foolish when he brought his effective thinking to the level of life in the way he did.