Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3822/The Saving of Stratford
[It has been decided, we gather, to go on playing Shakspeare in Berlin, because Shakspeare is so closely connected with the German race.]
This was so good of you, so like your grace,
Ye on whose brows the brand of Rheims is graven,
To spare the poet of our common race
And find forgiveness for the Bard of Avon;
And all the little lore he feebly guessed,
Phantasy, rhetoric, and trope and sermon,
To clasp politely to your mailéd breast,
Refine, transmute and render wholly German.
Seeing in Henry V. a Prussian King,
Tracing in Hamlet a more moody Kaiser,
You put new might into the master's wing.
He seems more wonderful to us, and wiser;
Not as he dimly sang in ages gone
He warbles to us now, but wild with culture,
Exchanging for the mere parochial Swan
The full-mouthed war notes of the Potsdam Vulture.
So shall he live, and live eternally
(In humble homage to the War Lord's mitten)
"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
Heligoland, of course, and not Great Britain:
A thousand carven saints are lain in dust
In lands the Prussian Junker sets his boot on,
But Wilhelm Shakspeare and his honoured bust
Shall save themselves by being partly Teuton.
And when the hooves of those imperial swine
Leap, as of course they will, the ocean's borders,
And England's trampled down from Thames to Tyne,
And Wells is burnt, and Winchester, by orders,
It may be tears shall start into the eyes
Of helméd colonels in our Midland valleys,
And they shall spare the tomb where Shakspeare lies;
He was a German (Deutschland über alles).
Almost I seem to see the Uhlans stand,
Paying their pious sixpences to enter
That little homestead of the Fatherland
That housed the dramatist in Stratford's centre;
A trifle flushed, maybe, with English beer,
But mutely reverent and not talking chattily,
They write beneath their names: "A friend lives here;
Not to be ransacked. Signed, The Modern Attilae."
A glorious scene. The voice of Krupp is dumb;
Not pining now for Frankfort or for Münich,
The sub-lieutenant slides with quivering thumb
A picture-posteard underneath his tunic.
Till then, if any dawn of doubt creeps in
Ilow best to judge the Bard and praise him rightly,
Let me implore the actors of Berlin
To play Macbeth to crowded houses nightly.