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1 Karl Marx at Tomis 1 Karl Marx at Tomis: The role of Shakespeare in the transformations of Marx’s juvenilia and university writings. Christian Smith University of Warwick One December day in 1836 in Rhineland, Jenny von Westphalen, the eldest daughter of Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, a highly-placed government official, received a letter from her beloved, Karl Marx, a student newly-enrolled at the University of Berlin. The letter contained Marx’s words of love and longing for her and it also contained a set of poems, titled Book of Love, written by Marx for Jenny. When she read them, Jenny cried “tears of joy and sorrow”1 (Heinrich Marx an Karl Marx 28 Dec. 1836. MEGA III.1. 304).2 The concluding sonnet in the book begins with this quatrain: So nimm sie hin, die Lieder alle, Die Liebe Dir zu Füssen legt, Wo frei in vollem Lyraschalle Der Seele Gluth sich hinbewegt (MEGA I 1 519).3 The opening of Marx’s sonnet nearly quotes the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40: Take all my loves, my love; yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more (Sonnets 191). Marx would have read Shakespeare Sonnet 40 in the translation by Dorothea Tieck: Nimm was ich liebe, Liebster, alles hin, Du hast was Du gehabt, und hast nicht mehr; Denn, was ich je geliebt mit treuem Sinn, War, eh Du’s nahmst, Dein, lange schon vorher (Sonette 99). Marx’s sonnet tells his beloved, Jenny, to take all of the songs/poems in his Book of Love, because Love laid them at her feet. Marx misses the work that this line (“Take all my loves”) is doing in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40, where the poet is calling out the fair youth for having had an affair with the poet’s mistress. The multiple loves (“all my loves”) include the love the poet has for his mistress and for the fair youth. Since the fair youth has all of the poet’s heart, he also already has everyone the poet loves. The key line is the second one: “What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” Dorothea Tieck also misses the poet’s reproachful subtext in the question asked in the second line. 1 “Gestern war [Jenny] noch bei uns, und weinte bei Empfang Deiner Gedichte Thränen der Wonne und des Schmerzes.“ (Yesterday, Jenny was at our place and upon beginning to read your poetry, she wept tears of joy and sorrow). Sophie’s postscript to Heinrich Marx’s letter to Karl Marx 28 December, 1836. 2 MEGA is Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe. MECW is Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works. 3 Translated by Alex Miller as: “Take all, take all these songs from me/ That Love at your feet humbly lays,/ Where, in the Lyre’s full melody,/ Soul freely nears in shining rays” (MECW I 517). Miller’s translation is closer to Shakespeare’s English than to what Marx actually wrote or to Tieck’s translation of the Sonnets. 2 She translates it too literally: “Du hast was Du gehabt, und hast nicht mehr”.4 Sonnet 40 is part of a three-sonnet episode—Sonnets 40-42—in which the poet handles his feelings about the affair that the fair youth is conducting with the poet’s mistress. Her identity is subtly alluded to in the fourth line: “All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more”. The more is the Moor, the Dark Lady.5 The third line—“No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call”—refers both to the notion that the fair youth already had all of the poet’s love and to the idea that an affair with a mistress is not true love. Tieck’s translated lines—“Denn, was ich je geliebt mit treuem Sinn”6—lay the emphasis of the appeal on the poet’s loyalty. By shifting the emphasis of the lines, Tieck blunts the sharpness of the poet’s reproach. The young Marx in love has lifted a line from Tieck’s translation, out of context from Shakespeare’s sonnets, for use in his love poetry. This allusion to Sonnet 40 is Marx’s first intertextual engagement with Shakespeare. In his forty year writing career, Marx will quote from or allude to Shakespeare’s plays at least 171 more times across his collected works.7 Marx used lines, imagery, plot and ideas from Shakespeare’s plays to give examples of what he was writing, add a literary feeling to the conditions that he was depicting, provide logic to his rhetoric, and signal moves and turning points in his theory. Many of the quotations and allusions occur at significant points where Marx is using the multiple layers of Shakespeare’s meaning to register the multiple layers of his method—historical and dialectical materialism. Yet, in 1836, Marx had not yet become the Marx of Marxism. He was, in his first year at the University of Berlin, a young Romantic. His engagement with world literature and aesthetic theory would serve as the grounds for his transformation first into a Young Hegelian and then into a dialectical materialist. The Schoolboy In August 1835, during his last year of attendance at the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Marx wrote an essay titled, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession”8 (MEGA I.1 454; MECW I 3). It seems to be a standard schoolboy essay in which the writer is reflecting back to his teachers some of the values he may have learned from them. The headmaster of the gymnasium was Hugo Wyttenbach, an adept of Kantian philosophy. He took part in forming the Casino Club, a gathering of Liberals in Trier that included Marx’s father, Heinrich Marx, and the Baron von Westphalen among its members.9 Wyttenbach was, at one point, placed under police surveillance for sedition (McLellan, Karl Marx 9). In the essay, Marx writes that one should not choose a profession that “glitters” and “arouses ambition”. One will soon tire of that. One should also not choose a profession because it will make one famous. Instead, one should choose the profession that allows one to work on becoming perfect and to help serve the welfare of humankind (MEGA I.1. 454-57; MECW 1 3-9). Wyttenbach qualified the essay as “fairly good” and praised Marx for his ideas, but critiqued his 4 You have what you had, and have not more. 5 If the fair youth is the Earl of Southampton, this Sonnet can give some support to Jonathan Bate’s vote for the identity of the Dark Lady. He picks John Florio’s wife, who lived in Southampton’s house (Genius 56). Shakespeare may have also been a resident at that house in 1593-4, while the plague kept the theatres shut in London. This places the poet, the fair youth and the Dark Lady all under the same roof. 6 Because, what I ever loved with loyal sense/meaning. 7 I have listed all of these intertextual instances in my doctoral thesis: Shakespeare’s Influence on Marx, Freud and the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (2013). 8 Betrachtung eines Jünglings bei der Wahl eines Berufes 9 Marx was born in Trier, Rhineland on 5 May, 1818. 3 “exaggerated desire for rare and imaginative expression” (McLellan, Karl Marx 14). One of these exaggerations may have been Marx’s use of the word “glitter”, which he may have recently read in Timon of Athens. He writes: Das Große glänzt, der Glanz erregt Ehrgeitz und der Ehrgeitz kann leicht die Begeisterung, was wir dafür gehalten, hervorgerufen haben;... Und nicht zu dem Stande sind wir berufen, in welchem wir am meisten zu glänzen vermögen; (MEGA I.1 455)10 Marx was introduced to Shakespeare’s plays by Ludwig von Westpahlen, Jenny’s father. Marx was a frequent visitor to the von Westphalen house and considered the baron to be like a father to him (McLellan, Karl Marx 16). Von Westphalen would take Marx on long walks around the hills near Trier and recite Shakespeare to him (McLellan Karl Marx 15). They read from the Schlegel-Tieck translation, which had recently been published in 1833 (Larson, 1987). In Dorothea Tieck’s translation of Timon of Athens, she uses the word “glänzender” (glittering) for the word brilliant in one of Timon’s rants against gold/wealth (Timon von Athens 4.3.410). Shakespeare has Timon call gold “glittering” in the scene where he is digging for roots and finds gold instead: Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods, I am no idle votarist – Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make Black white, foul fair, wrong right, Base noble, old young, coward valiant (4.3.26-29). Tieck translates glittering in this passage as “flimmernd”—flickering (Timon von Athens 4.2.27). Marx may have even heard the line in English, because von Westphalen spoke and read English. This description of gold/wealth made an impression on Marx’s consciousness; Marx used it to describe the problems with money in Capital Vol 1, and in all five of his preparatory economic writings that led up to Capital (Smith, Shakespeare’s Influence). In the section on money in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx writes: “Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions” (229-230). A footnote is inserted here that leads the reader to an extended quotation from Timon of Athens.
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