And now, a true story.........
In the year 1890 or thereabouts, a young man, fifteen years old, found himself alone in the middle of Haarlem in the Netherlands. Having to break off his education, he had recently returned from the Dutch East Indies with his widowed mother. His father had been an officer in the Dutch army but had not left his family very well provided for. Well, it was either that or his mother wasn’t very good at handling money and was generally inept.
The upshot of this was that one day they found themselves penniless and homeless. They needed somewhere to stay and the boy’s mother, thinking they would be able to do it alone, separately, gave the boy just enough to find himself lodgings for the night. He took the money and went into town. However with the general optimism of youth and perhaps even believing in a certain providence, he spent the money, not on a bed for the night, but on a theatre ticket.
That ticket was for a production of Hamlet – in German. The boy knew nothing about Shakespeare’s plays and he certainly didn’t know any German. But he went along anyway. And that evening, something happened that made looking for lodgings a trivial way to spend his time.
He came out of the theatre with a spring in his step and a fire in his heart. In spite of his ignorance of German the linguistic and syntactical barriers had dissolved, leading him to the very root of language. He could somehow understand, through the poetry, the very essence of the play. And as he walked through the lamplit city, he had three burning interlocking intentions - to learn English, to read and get to know Shakespeare thoroughly and to become an author himself.
It’s unclear how he managed to get through that night in Haarlem, where he slept, if at all. But he did manage to fulfil those ambitions sparked by those lines of iambic pentameter uttered in German. He finished his secondary schooling in Amsterdam and went on to study English. This was in the days when not English but French was taught as a matter of course in schools.
He went to Stratford and got a job teaching French. He was involved in everything to do with Shakespeare and later, in the Netherlands and in Italy became one of the great Dutch writers.
His name was Arthur van Schendel. The name probably means little to English speakers, although some of his books were translated in his lifetime, but there is no doubt that if a teenage boy had not had that epiphany on a chilly night in Haarlem and become a devotee of Shakespeare, Netherlandish literature would be much poorer.
The upshot of this was that one day they found themselves penniless and homeless. They needed somewhere to stay and the boy’s mother, thinking they would be able to do it alone, separately, gave the boy just enough to find himself lodgings for the night. He took the money and went into town. However with the general optimism of youth and perhaps even believing in a certain providence, he spent the money, not on a bed for the night, but on a theatre ticket.
That ticket was for a production of Hamlet – in German. The boy knew nothing about Shakespeare’s plays and he certainly didn’t know any German. But he went along anyway. And that evening, something happened that made looking for lodgings a trivial way to spend his time.
He came out of the theatre with a spring in his step and a fire in his heart. In spite of his ignorance of German the linguistic and syntactical barriers had dissolved, leading him to the very root of language. He could somehow understand, through the poetry, the very essence of the play. And as he walked through the lamplit city, he had three burning interlocking intentions - to learn English, to read and get to know Shakespeare thoroughly and to become an author himself.
It’s unclear how he managed to get through that night in Haarlem, where he slept, if at all. But he did manage to fulfil those ambitions sparked by those lines of iambic pentameter uttered in German. He finished his secondary schooling in Amsterdam and went on to study English. This was in the days when not English but French was taught as a matter of course in schools.
He went to Stratford and got a job teaching French. He was involved in everything to do with Shakespeare and later, in the Netherlands and in Italy became one of the great Dutch writers.
His name was Arthur van Schendel. The name probably means little to English speakers, although some of his books were translated in his lifetime, but there is no doubt that if a teenage boy had not had that epiphany on a chilly night in Haarlem and become a devotee of Shakespeare, Netherlandish literature would be much poorer.
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