Many years ago the superstition crept into Germany that Shakespeare must be given literally word for word, even if actors and audience were murdered in the process. The attempts, occasioned by an excellent and exact translation, were nowhere successful, of which fact the painstaking and repeated endeavors of the stage at Weimar are the best witness. If we wish to see a Shakespearean play, we must take up again Schroeder’s version; but the notion that in the staging of Shakespeare not an iota may be omitted, senseless as it is, one hears constantly repeated. If the defenders of this opinion maintain the upper hand, in a few years Shakespeare will be quite driven from the stage, which for that matter would be no great misfortune; for then the reader, whether he be solitary or sociable, will be able to get so much the purer pleasure out of him. They have, however, with the idea of making an attempt along the lines of which we have spoken in detail above, revised _Romeo and Juliet_ for the theatre at Weimar. The principles according to which this was done we shall develop before long, and it will perhaps become apparent why this version, whose staging is by no means difficult, although it must be handled artistically and carefully, did not take on the German stage. Attempts of a similar kind are going on, and perhaps something is preparing for the future, for frequent endeavors do not always show immediate effects. FOOTNOTES: [8] “Goethe, in a thoughtful essay, _Shakespeare und kein Ende_, written many years later than his famous criticism of Hamlet in _Wilhelm Meister_, says that the distinction between the two [ancient and modern drama] is the difference between _sollen_ and _wollen_, that is, between _must_ and _would_. He means that in the Greek drama the catastrophe is foreordained by an inexorable Destiny, while the element of free will, and consequently choice, is the very axis of the modern. The definition is conveniently portable, but it has its limitations. Goethe’s attention was too exclusively fixed on the fate tragedies of the Greeks, and upon Shakespeare among the moderns. In the Spanish drama, for example, custom, loyalty, honor, and religion are as imperative and as inevitable as doom. In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the crisis lies in the character of the protagonist.”--James Russell Lowell, _Shakespeare Once More_. FIRST EDITION OF _HAMLET_ (1827) _The First Edition of the Tragedy of Hamlet_, by William Shakespeare, London, 1603. Reprinted by Fleischer, Leipzig, 1825.