Shakespeare's Influence on Karl Marx

The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism

Christian A. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367559304
• eBook ISBN: 9781000519037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume presents a close reading of instances of Shakespearean quotations, allusions, imagery and rhetoric found in Karl Marx's collected works and letters, which provides evidence that Shakespeare's writings exerted a formative influence on Marx and the development of his work. Through a methodology of intertextual and interlingual close-reading, this study provides evidence of the extent to which Shakespeare influenced Marx and to which Marxism has Shakespearean roots. As a child, Marx was home-schooled in Ludwig von Westphalen's little academy, as it were, which was Shakespeare- and literary-focused. The group included von Westphalen's daughter, who later became Marx's wife, Jenny. The influence of Shakespeare in Marx's writings shows up as early as his school essays and love letters. He modelled his early journalism partly on ideas and rhetoric found in Shakespeare's plays. Each turn in the development of Marx's thought—from Romantic to Left Hegelian and then to Communist—is achieved in part through his use of literature, especially Shakespeare. Marx's mature texts on history, politics and economics—including the famous first volume of Das Kapital— are laden with Shakespearean allusions and quotations. Marx's engagement with Shakespeare resulted in the development of a framework of characters and imagery he used to stand for and anchor the different concepts in his political critique. Marx's prose style uses a conceit in which politics are depicted as performative. Later, the Marx family—Marx, Jenny and their children—was central in the late-19th-century revival of Shakespeare on the London stage, and in the growth of academic Shakespeare scholarship. Through providing evidence for a formative role of Shakespeare in the development of Marxism, the present study suggests a formative role for literature in the history of ideas.

1 In Love in Shakespeare

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095767-1

Two days after Christmas in 1836, Jenny von Westphalen walked up the road towards the Porta Nigra—the large grey sandstone gate, blackened with age, that anchors Trier in Roman history. She called at the house of her father’s best friend, Heinrich Marx. There awaited a letter from her beloved, Karl—the eldest Marx boy, who was away at university in Berlin. Nestled among the pages of the letter was a small book of poetry written by Karl for Jenny. When she read the poems, she wept “tears of joy and sorrow.”¹ The first sonnet begins:

So nimm sie hin, die Lieder alle,

Die Liebe Dir zu Füssen legt,

Wo frei in vollem Lyraschalle

Der Seele Gluth sich hinbewegt.

(MEGA I, 1, 519)²

Karl Marx’s sonnet tells Jenny to take all of the poems in his “Book of Love,” because Love laid them at her feet. The opening of Marx’s sonnet nearly quotes the first line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40:

Take all my loves, my love; yea, take them all;

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;

All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.³

One cannot know for sure if Marx had already read Shakespeare’s sonnets when he wrote his Book of Love. If he had, then he might have been imitating the opening line of Dorothea Tieck’s translation of Sonnet 40:⁴

Nimm was ich liebe, Liebster, alles hin,

Du hast was Du gehabt, und hast nicht mehr;

Denn, was ich je geliebt mit treuem Sinn,

War, eh Du’s nahmst, Dein, lange schon vorher.

Karl’s love poems for Jenny triggered her tears from a source overdetermined with meaning and brimming with passionate feeling. They had grown up together as children and had fallen in love as young adults. They married in 1843 and birthed a revolution. Shakespeare was the crucible of their affection, and his plays and poems would serve in the office of a muse in their politics for the rest of their lives. It was their revolutionary project—their opposition to the increasingly powerful capitalist world system—that set their joy in love into tragic circumstances. Karl Marx would become the leading critic of this world system. For that critique, he and Jenny would live through years of censorship, state repression and poverty. They would die in exile, stateless. And yet, it was this very response from the system that pointed to their deepest joy as revolutionaries. In 1849, a year after the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, during the suppression of the 1848–9 European revolutions, Jenny wrote to a friend: “My dear Karl always remains confident and cheerful and sees in all the pressures that weigh on us now only the harbingers of an imminent and even more complete victory of our views.”⁵

Jenny von Westphalen was born into a family of Shakespeareans. Her father, Ludwig von Westpahlen, was the First Justice to the Prussian provincial government in Trier and the Mosel area. He was an Enlightenment-influenced Liberal and consummate reader of Shakespeare. He and his second wife, Caroline, staged Shakespeare readings as social gatherings in their home at Neustraße 83, one of the Roman roads that traversed the centre of Trier.⁶ They lived close to the theatre, which staged plays by Goethe, Schelling, Lessing and Shakespeare. As part of his children’s education at home, Ludwig von Westphalen taught them to read world literature, including Shakespeare, Goethe and Homer.

Ludwig’s father was Philipp von Westphalen, a soldier who had worked in the General Staff to the Duke of Brunswick during the Seven Years War. In 1764, Philipp was ennobled for his successful military work, acquiring the von prefix to his surname. Ludwig’s mother was Jeanie Wishart, a Scottish woman who was related to the commander of the British forces. Ludwig grew up speaking both German and English; he could access Shakespeare’s plays in their English original and in German translation.⁷ He taught his children English as well.

Ludwig von Westphalen’s formative years occurred during a period that was also formative for the German states. He was born in 1770 in Bornum am Elm, a town in the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, which was a subdivision of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneberg, one of many German statelets that existed in the 18th century. In 1714, the Duke of Brunswick, Georg I, became George I, the King of Great Britain, and the German state was tied to the British state for the next 123 years—through Georges I–IV and William IV—until Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837 and was disallowed the throne of Hannover by Salic law. The connection between the German and British states was the historical and structural condition upon which rested the von Westphalen’s knowledge of English and their intimacy with Shakespeare’s plays.

When Westphalen was 19 years old, the French Revolution detonated and tore asunder the fabric of European society. As a student at the Collegium Carolinum in Göttingen, he developed views favourable to the principles of the revolution. These views would have been controversial, maybe even subversive, in the staunchly counter-revolutionary court of Brunswick. Westphalen may have felt torn between his political views and the conservative court setting in which he was to build his career. However, his views of the French Revolution were most certainly complicated by French aggression against the German states and their citizens. In April 1813, Westphalen was arrested by the French occupation troops in Salzwedel and held in Gifhorn Castle (Krosigk 9). While there are no records of what Westphalen felt at the time, it may be instructive to look at the writings of another court official who found himself in a similar situation—chief advisor to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, the poet J. W. von Goethe.

In 1792 the Duke of Brunswick led the German states in a counter-revolutionary invasion of France. The German princes feared that the example of the French Revolution would ignite a similar opposition to their feudal absolutism. In his Brunswick Manifesto, the duke threatened to destroy Paris and kill all the revolutionaries if they harmed Louis XVI in any way.⁸ One of the commanders of Prussian army was Goethe’s patron, Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. He bid Goethe to accompany the army to function as observer and propagandist. On 20 September 1792, Goethe observed first-hand the newly mustered French Revolutionary army confronting the powerful combined German-Prussian forces at Valmy.⁹ The French set upon the Germans with a fierce artillery attack from their rear flank and won the battle. The Germans were forced to withdraw; many of them died of disease on the way home.

Similar to other great court poets, who are hired by princes partly to lend legitimacy to their reign—Chaucer for Richard II, Shakespeare for James I—Goethe used his literary deftness to write lines that showcased the greatness of his prince, yet he executed his prose in a manner that critiqued the official line through literary inversions. This rendered the critique subliminal to all but the most culturally literate. In his autobiographical prose text Campagne in Frankreich, written almost 30 years after the battle, Goethe describes the scene of defeat.¹⁰ The French artillery bombardment caused a state of mass confusion among the German troops. Goethe writes that the air and land around them seethed in a heat that could be felt inside oneself as if one had a fever.¹¹ A group of German soldiers stood enclosing a circle. Some were silent; some spoke in reflection and judgement. Finally, one called out to Goethe, asking him what he was thinking, because it was usual for him to “cheer up and refresh” the troops with “pithy slogans.” Goethe, who had had “absolute trust in the army and in the Duke of Brunswick,” now said,

Von hier und heute geht eine neue Epoche der Weltgeschichte aus, und ihr könnt sagen, ihr seid dabeigewesen.

(51)

From here and today starts a new epoch in world history, and you can say that you were present.

It is a peculiar statement for Goethe to make to the German soldiers. Their defeat at Valmy allowed the French Revolution to progress and to birth the modern political world that promised equality, liberty and the right to private property. It foretold the death of European feudalism and a challenge to absolutism—both features of German dukedoms, including the one for which Goethe worked. However, Goethe was no reactionary. He preferred gradualist social change but, nevertheless, saw the historical necessity of the Revolution. The poet may have found himself in a contradiction of consciousness, and, to register that contradiction, he turned, possibly unconsciously, to his formative literary influence: Shakespeare. Goethe’s statement to the German soldiers contains a deep allusion to a scene in Henry V.

In Shakespeare’s depiction of the Battle at Agincourt, Henry delivers a speech to motivate the English troops. His primary rhetorical scheme is to brand the English combative effort under the name Crispin’s day—“These wounds I had on Crispin’s day” (4.3.48)¹²—and to establish the legitimacy of each soldier as a loyal patriot based upon having been present at the battle. Goethe’s scene rhymes, as it were, with Shakespeare’s scene, but it is an inversion of its precedent. Henry’s motivating speech is delivered to the underdogs who emerged victorious; Goethe’s is delivered to the superior forces who were defeated. The inversion spins inside the poet’s own consciousness; he trusted the German forces would win, but recognised the historical importance of their defeat. Shakespeare’s Henry V also works through inversions. The play’s apparent English patriotism is troubled throughout by problems such as the prince’s deadly intentions against Falstaff,¹³ the threatened massacre at Harfleur, the execution of Bardolph and the killing of the French prisoners. Henry’s military victory is inverted in the fifth act by his failure to win the heart and mind of the French princess, and his subsequent use of force to consummate the kiss. Inversions—rhetorical, generic, literary—are a hallmark of Shakespeare’s drama, and they will influence both Goethe’s writing and Marx’s work. Were Shakespeare’s inversions part of what attracted Ludwig von Westphalen to his plays?

This question can serve as a means to access what Ludwig von Westphalen might have been experiencing during this extraordinary period of European history, which corresponded to his development as a young man. He was 13 years old when his monarch, George III, lost the American War of Independence. The storming of the Bastille occurred four days after von Westphalen’s 19th birthday, and the Battle of Valmy occurred when he was 22 years old. In 1794, two years after Brunswick’s defeat at Valmy, Westphalen was chosen to serve in the duke’s government. His liberal political tendencies would have stood in contradiction to his employer’s position. Consequently, he would have had to keep his politics veiled. Contemporary reports indicate that, while at university, Westphalen preferred reading literature to his jurisprudence studies. Might Shakespeare’s plays have offered the young civil servant a means for working through the contradictions between his politics and his career? Goethe was Westphalen’s favourite German poet.¹⁴ Might the influence of Shakespeare on Goethe have served Westphalen in a specifically German context at this juncture of European history? Might the Shakespearean inversions have served as an Adornian negative dialectic, avant la lettre, in the development of Westphalen’s critical consciousness?

Jenny von Westphalen was born in Salzwedel on 14 February 1814 to Ludwig and his second wife, Caroline. In 1816, after the Prussians recovered the German states from Napoleon, they made the newly established Rhineland into a client state, and needed civil servants to administer its regions. Westphalen was appointed First Justice to the occupying Prussian government in Trier. At 46 years old, Westphalen moved his new family to Trier and became the highest-paid official in the town.

Westphalen joined the Casino-Gesellschaft (Casino Society), which met in a building in Trier’s central Kornmarkt. The Society was formed for Trier’s professional- and upper-middle-class to host lectures, theatre and balls,¹⁵ but the society was also a meeting place for Enlightenment-minded liberals like Westphalen.¹⁶ It was here that Westphalen met Heinrich Marx, Karl’s father, and Hugo Wyttenbach, Karl’s history teacher and headmaster of the gymnasium he would attend. All three ended up under police surveillance for alleged pro-French sentiments. A police spy report pertaining to a Janua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 In Love in Shakespeare
• 2 “But Where Then? That Is the Question”
• 3 Standing the World on Its Feet; The Rheinische Zeitung Articles
• 4 “The Point Is to Change It”
• 5 “That Smooth-Faced Gentleman, Tickling Commodity”1
• 6 “Such Men Are Dangerous:” Politics, History and Revolution1
• Bibliography
• Index