Only a German could have hit
on the idea that Germany is Hamlet. The English, for whom the play was
written, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, and that Shakespeare was thinking
of a young man, not of the pomposities of national ambition. But if
these clumsy allegories must be imposed upon great poets, Germany need
not go abroad to seek the likeness of her destiny. Germany is Faust; she
desired science and power and pleasure, and to get them on a short lease
she paid the price of her soul.
For the present, at any rate, the best thing the Germans can do with
Shakespeare is to leave him alone. They have divorced themselves from
their own great poets, to follow vulgar half-witted political prophets.
As for Shakespeare, they have studied him assiduously, with the complete
apparatus of criticism, for a hundred years, and they do not understand
the plainest words of all his teaching.
In England he has always been understood; and it is only fair, to him
and to ourselves, to add that he has never been regarded first and
foremost as a national poet. His humanity is too calm and broad to
suffer the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities.
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