The German Shakespeare Society from the turn of the century until 1914

Whereas in other respects the 2014 Jubilee Celebration of Shakespeare’s 450th birthday exceeded all expectations, the German Shakespeare Society, founded in Weimar in 1864, has limited itself to a cursory study of its own history, with the result that such accounts as we have of those Jubilees which took place early on in its development are outdated and never go beyond the merely panegyric. The following essay attempts to fill one of the many gaps in our knowledge of the Society’s activities: that between the turn of the twentieth century and the start of the First World War, by drawing on hitherto unpublished, or only partly published, documents relating to this period.