Shakespeare, Mácha and Czech Romantic Historicism

Summary

This article is an attempt to examine, in Ton Hoenselaars's words, one of the ‘countless traces…of foreign cultural and ideological encounters with [Shakespeare's] histories’, focusing on the capacity of Henry IV, Part 2 ‘to mediate in non-English processes of national formation and preservation’. Despite detailed attention paid to one of these traces, the influence of Henry IV, Part 2 on the dramatic fragments of the leading Czech Romantic Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–36), my objective is more general: to study the potential of Shakespeare's histories to transform historical awareness in the context of the early nineteenth-century European Romantic nationalist movements. Specifically, I am interested in the way Mácha's use of Henry IV, Part 2 in his project of historical dramas facilitated an important change in his understanding of Czech history: a shift from perceiving it as a predetermined ‘providential’ narrative of national emancipation to a more ‘realistic’ ‘concern with history as processes and the inner necessities of historical change’. As the exploration of Mácha's reading and transformation of Henry IV, Part 2 will show, this change of historical awareness challenged not only the simplistic and utopian perception of Czech political identity but also the early nineteenth-century position of Shakespeare as a supreme literary and dramatic authority.

It is no surprise that the productions or translations of the histories did not appear in the period of early Czech appropriation of Shakespeare (1782–1807), when tragedies (Macbeth, King Lear) and comedies (The Merchant of Venice) were mainly seen as educational tools facilitating the spread of literacy. In 1792, the preface to a Czech translation of a German adaptation of King Lear pointed out the meaning of theatre for the education of the people, and amplified Friedrich Schiller's argument in favour of the communal nature of theatre and its role as a seedbed for the people's cultural growth.