A Paradox of Self-Image: William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II in Hitler’s Germany

This thesis investigates the connection between the cultural authorities of the Third Reich and the works of William Shakespeare. Nazi cultural authorities utilized theater as a milieu of representation wherein the Third Reich showcased its underlying ideological principles. However, Shakespeare's works, because of his humanist concern for the problems of the individual, create numerous difficulties that arise with any effort to align his works as a whole with a single set of ideological principles. The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's most famously Jewish play, appears on the surface to present the Nazi cultural authorities with a prime opportunity to showcase anti-Semitic values; however, the play presents numerous interpretative difficulties that make a purely anti-Semitic interpretation difficult to stage. Among those difficulties are the hints of sympathy for Shylock and Jessica's marriage to the Christian Lorenzo, an act of miscegenation illegal in the Third Reich.

King Richard II is an English history play that presents problems of identity and power for Nazi Cultural Authorities. To a regime that struggled to align Shakespeare with the German-born classical writers, Goethe and Schiller, a drama that dealt with English history served as a reminder of Shakespeare's essential foreignness. Finally, this play depicts a subject overthrowing his monarch and suffering no punishment for the act. The figure of King Richard, an indecisive and ineffective leader, falls because he lacks either the cunning or the brute force needed to suppress Henry Bolingbroke. Thus, the Third Reich's cultural authorities could not simply accept a play that featured both a weal leader and a rebellious subject who succeeds in toppling his king. These plays serve as representative examples of Shakespeare's lack of suitability as regards aligning his works with Nazi principles. I conclude that the Third Reich's cultural guardians, by refusing to ban Shakespeare from their literary canon, created an insoluble paradox that plagued Nazi Germany until the end of the Third Reich.