Gadzooks! Shakespeare is on all thinking minds at the moment because of the 400th anniversary of his death and he was also on German-speaking and English-speaking minds 100 years ago this week. He was the subject of a tug-of-love.
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Sydney's Globe and Sunday Times War Pictorial reported "OUR SHAKESPEARE."
"As Germans seem to have annexed Shakespeare, and speak of him as 'our beloved Shakespeare," the news that Stratford-on-Avon has been darkened on account of Zeppelins is considered of sufficient importance for conspicuous display.
"The Germans' government-controlled Lokal-Anzeiger is much perturbed that the town council thinks it necessary to safeguard the community's historic shrines against German sky-piracy.
"It says: 'Shakespeare's self-composed epitaph calls down-damnation on anybody who disturbs the repose of his bones. If the town fathers of Stratford-on-Avon really believed in the effectiveness of their immortal fellow-citizen's curse, they should wish a visit from our airships, in order that.it might be realised. Instead they seem to think that the nation [Germany] which understands and appreciates Shakespeare better than his own has no more ardent wish than to destroy the house of his birth and his tomb, to which no people has sent such pious pilgrims as the Germans.'"
Lokal-Anzeiger lectured that you can tell how Shakespeare is more appreciated by the Germans than the English by the way in which there are always more of his plays, "culture's holiest works", running in Berlin than in London. This showed, the German newspaper scoffed, the "colossal lack of education" among the English.
