From The Essential Goethe. Edited by Matthew Bell. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is one of those all-time literary greats readers in the English-speaking world have trouble embracing with the same fervor that, say, Germans embrace Shakespeare. (We can’t even pronounce his name correctly; it’s GER-TA!)

There are a few reasons why this is that take nothing from the author’s merits. The first is that like Alexander Pushkin or Jean Racine, almost no translation of Goethe can do credit to the grace of his actual word sounds. (Although certain superb English translators like James E. Falen and Geoffrey Allan Argent do manage to recreate meter and rhythm with something close to the perfection of their originals.) In translation at least, many of Goethe’s expressions seem commonplace; fairly or unfairly—and in spite of that modern sort of pedantry which valorizes Simplicity for its own sake—I find the language of our Englished Goethes much less stupendous than what’s found in Shakespeare, Webster, or Marlowe, or even a middle-weight contender like Phillip Massinger. Now, perhaps Goethe’s language is Shakespearean in the German; it seems hard to believe that the greatest writer in the language of glockenspiel wouldn’t have fine neologisms bursting from his sides. Perhaps our pedestrian impression of Goethe’s language is borne of his translators lacking that courage that D’Alembert speaks of in his “Essay on Translation”:

This courage consists in risking new expressions to do justice to lively and strong passages in the original. . . When there is room to believe, the author has adopted an expression of genius in his own language, then we may seek for a similar one. But what is an expression of genius? It is not a new word dictated by singularity or idleness, but the necessary and exact re-union of some known terms, to render a new idea with energy.

A “necessary and exact re-union of some known terms” is a good description of Shakespeare’s most inimitable (even today) quality. Certainly one can credit the Bard for realism (there are more exacting ones today), or for “inventing the human,” (the invention has been improved on) or whatever illustrious quality you wish to praise in the Bard, but where Shakespeare has still never been rivaled is in how he unites disparate words so perfectly as to make strange phrases seem normal. Whatever situation Shakespeare deigns to describe, his description almost invariably becomes the perfectest description anyone has ever made of that situation. His mouth opens, out pours gold. One wonders if that is how Goethe sounds in German; Michael Hamburger does not make it seem so in English, which is an entirely unfair criticism, but there it is; to be counted among the elite of English translators, you must be willing to “go there” with the aplomb of Thomas Urquhart.

The second issue is that unlike Shakespeare or Dante, Goethe is copiously documented and self-documented, making him more akin to a modern-day European intellectual as opposed to an otherworldly being from a distant time. As such, by being less mysterious (and more voluminous) in his biography, the tale a la Goethe is just a more complicated and less sexy one to tell to teenagers. (And the general taste for classic literature, let’s be honest, is set in high schools; in Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing, just reviewed here on OBM, about a debonair high school teacher who sleeps with a student, the protagonist has his seniors read Sartre and Camus; Goethe is not even on the radar.) It also doesn’t help that Goethe’s most famous English-language enthusiasts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, have become not a little passé to English-speaking readers, because their writing abounds in Dead White Guy superfluities and Victorian-era grandiosities, placing both perilously close to Alfred-Severely Overrated-Lord Tennyson territory. (I mean, I own a crumbling set of Carlyle, and while his essays can get repetitive, there’s a reason The French Revolution was so admired in its time.)

But the major issue with Goethe that I’m going to discuss as it pertains to the play Egmont is Goethe’s Nobility problem (aka his Suburban White Teacher Lady in an Urban School problem, if you’ll indulge that adventitious metaphor.) But before we get there, let’s talk about Goethe in general, Egmont in particular, and how Shakespeare informed the writing of this play.

Contemporary Reception and Context of Egmont

Egmont: A Tragedy belongs to Goethe’s former period of Sturm und Drang Romanticism (for more on this, see my “Miscellaneous Thoughts” post, but it adds certain wrinkles which already show Goethe moving past (or adding context to) the mindset–already self-critical, mind you–that not three years before he began writing Egmont in 1776, produced The Sorrows of Young Werther–that famous tale of a rejected Romeo who decides to kill himself instead of taking Mercutio’s sensible advice to “examine other beauties” (and he’s damn good at nature-writing, there’s that too.) Whereas Werther caused young lords and ladies throughout the land to don black and (some of them) to kill themselves, Egmont received a more skeptical reception from Goethe’s fiery rival (and German Marlowe) Schiller, who claimed (not without reason) that the story lacked a dramatic edge, that we keep hearing about how great Egmont is (and what a stupid name! Egg-mont–durdurdur!), and it has some made-up, non-historical characters. (It’s called poetic license, bro; take a Schill-pill.) Notably, Goethe began writing Egmont contemporaneously with the outbreak of the American revolution, and the play was finally performed in public in the years leading up to the French revolution–clearly ideas of republicanism and constitutionalism were in the air.

Egmont is the first of Goethe’s plays that appears in the new (and quite welcome) one-volume The Essential Goethe, an offering of some less commonly translated works edited by Matthew Bell, a scholar who’s written several books on German literature of this period and an article on Goethe’s Egmont. Bell surely chose some of the shorter pieces in The Essential Goethe not so much for artistic merit (which doesn’t have to be the–ahem!–be all and end all) so much as for the window they provide into Goethe’s varied interests.  “Shakespeare: A Tribute,” (1771) is a First Impressions-style rave by the young Goethe. It is written in Leipsig, during a period when the poet’s associates (namely Lessing and Herder) were introducing him to all sorts of foreign influences, and Goethe wrote it after dipping his toe into Dodd’s Beauties of Shakespeare, followed by the German translation of Wieland. “Shakespeare: A Tribute” is top-full of such bardolatrous enthusing as: “The first page I read made me a slave to Shakespeare for life” (873). But Goethe’s immediate impression on reading Shakespeare (and such impressions are the effluvium raked up when once we trawled a great author’s depths and forgotten most of it) was a sense of the impermanence and futility of human endeavors. It wasn’t so much a young ambitor meeting in Shakespeare a wall he could not climb (although if we subscribe to Harold Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence–and I think there’s something to it–we could dangle that idea out there.) But within Shakespeare’s thematic content itself Goethe caught the wind of fate’s caprice, how the tide of events sweeps away the unsuspecting passenger.

The Capricious Spanish King

The Julius Caesar (or unsuspecting passenger) character in Egmont is Lamoral, Count of Egmont, a 16th-century Flemish noble whose execution by the Spanish Crown (in the person of the cold Catholic zealot and King of Spain, Phillip II, his chief inquisitor in the Netherlands, the Bishop of Arras, and his general and military enforcer, the Duke of Alva) is said to have galvanized the people of the Low Countries to revolt and form (at least the upper half of them) the new Republic of the United Netherlands. The play Egmont gives this backstory in a Julius Caesar-aping man-on-the-street scene in Brussels. Jetter, Buyck, and Soest, three citizens, turn from their merry gambols to talking about King Philip, who has 14 years before (the story is set in 1568) inherited the throne of the Habsburg empire from his father Charles V, a giant of the age who ruled lands “on which the sun never sets,” as John Lathrop Motley describes it in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. These citizens are trying to reconcile themselves to the more culturally distant Philip, but he compares unfavorably to his more strapping, enterprising, and culturally Netherlander father. (And, as it emerges, Philip is a murderous tyrant who, in the portrayal of Motley, killed more of his own citizens intentionally than anyone else in the pre-Hitler, pre-20th century history dealt with by our historian.)

The three commoners then toast Egmont, victor at the battles of St. Quentin and Gravelingen. Ruysum, who was a veteran of the latter battle, points out that it was the Netherlanders generally (and Count Egmont specifically) who gave Philip II his victory over the French in the last war. And yet Philip tried to keep an occupying army in the , which fortunately the locals were able to force him to remove. He’s appointed foreign ecclesiastical officials–bishoprics–who supercede local control and local laws for such cities as Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, and Ghent. Going further down the list of the Spanish king’s list of “abuses and usurpations” (this street conversation is half historical exposition, half Declaration of grievances), he has banned the Netherlanders from singing the psalms, and the merry songs which (as Lathrop points out) were central to their baudy Rhetorical societies and drunken celebrations. (In other words: Philip hates fun. Man was not put on this earth to have fun, but to serve God, which invariably requires making everyone completely miserable. So it was, and so it shall ever be.) Like your modern-day dick boss, Philip wants you to furnish him with money and shut up; and if you want your own religion or your own government, prepare for a bloody execution.

Margaret: The Cautious Duchess

But since Philip can’t stand living among such free-spirited people as the Dutch, he has given rule of the Netherlands to his sister, Margaret of Parma, who is more mild in outlook than her brother. Margaret is a loyal Catholic who disdains the reformers, but unlike her brother she is no bloodthirsty zealot. But Margaret is torn between satisfying the absolutist demands of her brother–all dissent must be stamped out–with the immediate crisis on her hands, which was the Beeldenstorm, or Iconoclastic Fury, in which mobs of Calvinist dissenters went into religious establishments across the Netherlands and destroyed numerous church statues and other art. Margaret is counseled to show moderation in her response to this crisis by an anachronistically placed Machiavelli, who in Goethe’s version of this history serves as Margaret’s advisor and the voice of reason and realpolitik. Margaret also has to deal with not one but two enterprising Dutch nobles: Egmont and William of Orange. The two are of very different miens: Egmont is as transparent, open-hearted, and outspoken as Orange is quiet, calculating, and biding his time. “To be frank,” Margaret tells Machiavelli, “I fear Orange, and I fear for Egmont.” The former “is secretive, seems to accept everything, never contradicts, and with the deepest reverence, with the greatest caution, he does what he pleases.” (We might say of him as of Cassius: “Would he were fatter!”)

Egmont: What, Me Worry?

Egmont, meanwhile, “has never troubled about appearances”–like Julius Caesar, he defies the fates and lives without fear. Goethe introduces him speaking with his secretary, attending to the normal business of his realm, and here is a man with a disposition opposite to that of Philip: Whereas Philip is strict and cruel, Egmont is lenient on those who break the laws of the realm. When presented by his secretary with two problems–a debtor who owes him money, and pensioners demanding money from him–Egmont decides to go easy on his debtor while demanding his pensioners be paid in full–apparently not seeing the irreconcilable contradiction between these two stances. You need to get paid by your debtors in order to pay your creditors, and Goethe is casually showing us that Egmont is an impractical man, born for the battlefield, not to manage affairs of state. He wants to live in total freedom, but he also wants to keep everyone happy; he seems unaware that life requires choices, and that not making a choice is as much a choice as outright choosing.

One of Egmont’s more telling expressions comes after his secretary gives him a letter from his father, remonstrating him for his dissolute ways. “The dear, honest old man!” exclaims Egmont, sounding for all the world like Orlando in As You Like It, when he tells old Adam that “before we have your youthful wages spent / we’ll light upon some settled low content.” In the speech that follows, Egmont makes clear how utterly different his worldview is from Philip’s, describing his youthful pranks:

There was this folly and that, conceived and born within a single moment of merriment. We were responsible for sending off a most noble band, furnished with beggar’s scrips and a self-chosen sobriquet to remind the King of his duty with mock humility.

Egmont, then, is the embodiment and the spiritual defender of harmless fun. He goes on:

Is a carnival charade to be accounted high treason? Are we to be grudged the small colored rags which our youthful exuberance, our excited imagination may wrap around the wretched bareness of our lives? If you take life too seriously, what is it worth? If the mornings do not rouse us to new pleasures, if the evenings leave us without the comfort of hope, is it worth while to dress and undress at all?

He believes in living in and for the moment, not preparing for an uncertain future, or dwelling on the unchangeable past:

Does the sun shine for me today so that I may ponder on what happened yesterday? So that I may fathom and link that which is not to be fathomed or linked–the destiny of a future day? Spare me these considerations, leave them to scholars and courtiers.

He also keeps a mistress (apparently a pure invention of Goethe’s), Clare, who the audience encounters next. Clare adores Egmont and reckons she loves the man behind the grandiose reputation; her love for Egmont is unbounded.

Not so her affection for another gentleman, Brackenburg, who dotes on Clare like a second Werther, despite the fact that she uses him for her own purposes and never reciprocates. When she leaves the room in Act I, Goethe gives Brackenburg a Hamlet-aping soliloquy that starts:

Oh, what a wretch I am! Not even moved by the fate of my country, the growing unrest. My own kind or the Spaniards, it’s all the same to me, who’s in power and who’s in the right. How very different I was when I was a schoolboy! When they set us a piece called “Brutus’s Speech on Liberty, and Exercise in Oratory,” it was always Fritz who came first, and the headmaster said: “If only it were more tidy, not such a jumble of enthusiasms.”

Brackenburg is both paralyzed in love and paralyzed in addressing his country’s desultory condition. He is a “jumble of enthusiasms”  like the rest of the Netherlanders, but it is not yet clear what all this energy is tending to; in that they are like the American colonies, where war broke out just as Goethe started writing Egmont. Brackenburg represents, as we will see, the condition of many Dutch at this particular moment, and he represents the sort of indifference, the sort of go-alongism, that makes Egmont mistrustful of the masses who so admire him.

If Egmont and Julius Caesar are parallel characters, their weaknesses differ in interesting ways. Caesar, famously, believed he was invincible, ignoring the advice of those nearest to take heed of the old krone’s warning to “beware the Ides of March”; for Caesar, to live in fear is not to live (” cowards die many times before their death”).  For Egmont, this sentiment is altered because it is not so much cowardice that he fears will make him a living dead person so much as the inability to live a life free from constraint; Caesar idealizes courage, while Egmont idealizes relaxation, indifference, and privacy; this is part of why even though he is regarded as a hero of the people, privately he finds the people unreliable, untrustworthy, and judgmental. He is at least as burdened by the admiring crowd as by anything faraway Philip ever did to him, as he makes clear to Clare in this speech distinguishing his public and private selves:

CLARE. Tell me. I don’t understand. Are you Egmont? Count Egmont, the great Egmont who raises such an ado, whom the newspapers write about, whom the provinces adore?

EGMONT. That Egmont is an ill-tempered, stiff, cold Egmont, who has to keep up appearances, now make this face, now that; who is tormented, misunderstood, entangled, while other people think he is gay or carefree; loved by a people that does not know it’s own mind, honoured and carried aloft by a mob for which there is no help; surrounded by friends on whom he must not rely . . . Oh, let me say no more about him!

One wonders if this mistrust of the masses somewhat mirrors Goethe’s own early contempt for the masses, which he freely cops to in his late-written autobiography. Did Goethe, in the moral panic following the release of Young Werther, feel himself to be a misunderstood public figure like Egmont? It may seem a frivolous question but what can be said with more confidence is that both Goethe and Egmont have what we may term a Nobility problem; they have mixed with the masses, they are sympathetic to the masses, but they are not of the masses, and that mental distance is critical.

Goethe outlook on “the crowd” is in some ways more humanizing than Shakespeare’s. Matthew Bell discusses the many parallel passages between Egmont and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in an essay whose title, “This Was a Man!” has the fortunate effect of pointing to the most obvious shortcoming of both plays from the perspective of a modern: the fact that both plays are about Great Men, and more importantly, Nobility, i.e. rich dudes born into positions of relative power, who through some modicum of skill made the best of what their daddies gave them. (In this, they are comparable to Donald Trump.) They are strong, righteous, bold, but also–and more essentially than all of that nice stuff–pre-destined to shape events by virtue of their “blood” and their paragraphs of exceptional Ancestry.com material. (We are the descendants of Hercules! and so they kept harping, for more than three millenia, until Ted Kennedy died and mercifully put an end to this dynastic shlock.) But what are the demos in Shakespeare? They are “you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” They’re morons who kill the wrong Cinna and harbor indiscriminate rage against all lawyers,  and their opinions matter not, except as such a cynical fellow as Antony can direct them.

Goethe’s depiction of the rabble in Egmont is an advance on Shakespeare’s, but (unfortunately aping the phraseology of Donald Rumsfeld) we might say that Goethe suffers from a pre-Levée en Masse mentality. He admits in his autobiography that in the earlier part of his career he harbored a certain contempt for the common man, which might seem surprising for a lad who roamed through the streets of Frankfort-von-Maine, mixing freely with the town grocers and tradesmen and their kids.

In any case, the character I found most sympathetic in this story was Clare. When the Duke of Alva arrives and arrests Egmont, Clare essentially tries to play Antony to Egmont’s Caesar, trying to rally the masses with heroic, valiant rhetoric that should–per the example of Antony–move them to tears and then to rise up and free Egmont.

When rumour announced him, when the news spread: “Egmont is coming! He is coming back through from Ghent!” the inhabitants of those streets through which he must pass thought themselves lucky. . . . etc.

(She as much as tells them that when the poor hath cried, Egmont hath wept, and so on.) But Clare’s heroic rhetoric doesn’t work, because the speaker is a woman, and Mark Antony-level inspirational speaker or not, they aren’t going to risk their necks to follow a woman.