Horn brings forth a happy thought,—then he makes wearisome, sweet-sourish grimaces, and groans and twists and twines himself round on the stool of childbirth; and when finally the clever idea has come to light, he looks at it with emotion and wearied smiles, like a midwife who has got through with her job. It is really both vexatious and amusing that just this weak and pious Franz commented Shakespeare. In a comedy by Grabbe the affair is delightfully reversed, and Shakespeare is represented in hell as writing explanations of Horn's works.[1]
But all the glosses and explanations and laborious laudation of commentators was of less practical use as regarded making Shakespeare known to the public than the inspired love with which talented actors produced his dramas, and thereby made them a subject for popular judgment. Lichtenberg, in his letters from England, gives us important intelligence as to the skill and method by which Shakespeare's characters were given on the London stage in the middle of the last century. I say characters not the works in their fulness, since to this day British actors have only felt or known what is charac-
- ↑ Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung. A comedy in three acts. Dramatic Works of Grabbe, vol. ii. The passage occurs in the second scene of act ii. p. 125.—Note by the German Publisher.
