Christoph Houswitschka (Bamberg)

The Political Reception of German Drama in Great Britain in the Period of the French Revolution

This essay studies the reception of German drama in Great Britain in the decade before and after the French Revolution. The revolutionary change in the world of politics also altered the meaning of German drama in the political discourse of the period. From Henry Mackenzie’s famous talk to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788) – which introduced German theatre and literature to the English-speaking world – to ‘the rage’ about German drama at the turn of the century, the otherness of German drama is considered both attractive and subversive. Excessive emotions, sublime terror, and immoral behaviour as displayed in German drama were identified with republicanism and traditions that were said to be alien to the more cultivated British taste. Reform translators, in contrast, believed that German drama educated the audience.

Of all the literary genres, German drama seems to be the least interesting for a British audience in the eighteenth century. Before 1798 only four German plays were staged. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm was performed at the Haymarket under the titles The Disbanded Officer or The Baroness of Bruchsal and Johann Christian Brandes’ Der Gasthof was presented at Covent Garden thirteen times under the title The German Hotel in 1790. For a long time German language and literature were believed to lack the refinement and civilised elegance of British literary achievements. While Britain had been in a literary exchange with other continental nations for centuries and Italy, France, and also Spain, were respected and admired, the very notion of the German language as an appropriate mode of literary expression appears to have been very alien to many readers and theatre- goers in Great Britain as late as the 1780s. The preface of The Disbanded Officer; or, the Baroness of Bruchsal, the English title of Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767), published in 1786, offers an insight into the issues British readers had with the German language:

Every language has a national music of its own, that pleases the ears of none but those who speak it: the number of consonants in the German, proceeding from the composition of words beginning and ending perhaps with consonants, strike the stranger immediately; but ‘tis a long time before he can discern that these compounds give an energy to the German, unknown to every other language. (Lessing, trans. Johnstone viii)

The translator James Johnstone explains that a “language being thus difficult, the progress of its literature among strangers must be 172 Christoph Houswitschka proportionally slow, especially as so many other nations have got the start of it. It has been slow even in Germany itself” (Lessing, trans. Johnstone viii). Johnstone wants to establish Lessing as an exception, by adopting him for an English audience and stretching the rules of literary translation in a way that would have been quite acceptable among many contemporary readers. The translator admits in his dedication that “this play and Lessing’s are materially different,” but justifies this by suggesting that he does what Lessing “would have done, had he written at the present moment, and for an English audience. His gold is new cast into a more fashionable form, and though it has lost in bulk, I hope it has not lost in weight” (v). Johnstone is well aware of the fact that this attitude towards German literature, what he calls a “moral progress” that was made amongst the British, could be misunderstood as “national pride, since the French, Spanish, and Italian have become generally studied,” but rather blames “the tardiness of its growth, and the difficulty of the language” (vii). German lacks the “utility and amusement” it would need to be studied as a foreign language. For the same reason, the Germans themselves have cultivated “every language but their own”. The King of Prussia, for instance, is a French poet, and was surprised when he had to be convinced that “German literature had, during his reign, and without his knowledge or assistance, made most rapid strides to its maturity” (Lessing, trans. Johnstone vii). This example shows very well how difficult it was to establish an interest in German literature, as late as the end of the eighteenth century in Great Britain. In the 1790s, this situation changed completely. A strong interest in German Gothic literature developed and political events surrounding the French Revolution dramatically altered the relationship between Britain and the continent, for better or worse, depending on one’s own political opinions. With regard to drama, the foundations for this shift in attitude had been prepared by those who brought Lessing to the attention of British audiences, but perhaps even more so by Henry Mackenzie in his “Account of the German Theatre” which he read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 21 April 1788. Mackenzie’s essay belongs to some of the most significant and widely quoted contributions to the reception of German drama in Great Britain in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Like Samuel Richardson before him, Mackenzie had earned a reputation as the arch- sentimentalist of Scottish literature when he published his widely successful The Man of Feeling (1771). Mackenzie became an expert in the field after he had procured two collections of Theatre Allemande, French translations of German plays. Hushahn quite appropriately points out that Mackenzie’s striking emphasis on Schiller’s Die Räuber – he dedicates twelve of the thirty-seven pages to The Robbers and translates whole passages from the play’s French translation