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Chapter 1 - ‘Unser Shakespeare’? The Tercentenary and Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2024

Monika Smialkowska
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Summary

This chapter examines a range of 1916 Shakespearean appropriations from the German sphere of influence (the German Reich and Austria-Hungary). Many of them argued that Germany had thoroughly ‘naturalised’ Shakespeare and thus had as much, or more, right to ‘own’ him as Britain. They also used Shakespeare to criticise Britain's alleged iniquities. However, German responses to the Shakespeare Tercentenary did not present an entirely unified, patriotic front. Some of them, like the April 1916 issue of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, exposed significant blind spots in the propagandistic uses of Shakespeare. Chief among them was the uncomfortable contradiction inherent in the claim that Shakespeare was universal and above the hostilities of the war while, at the same time, constituting a uniquely German property. Moreover, it proved possible to use Shakespeare in radical ways which contradicted the official patriotic line, as evidenced in Karl Kraus’s subversive articles published in his magazine Die Fackel.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shakespeare's Tercentenary
Staging Nations and Performing Identities in 1916
, pp. 22 - 62
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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