Book review: Noble Endeavours, by Miranda Seymour
On Valentine's Day in 1613, King James I's daughter Elizabeth Stuart married Prince Frederick of Germany. Accompanied by her favourite pets, the couple went to Heidelberg, where Frederick built Elizabeth an English suite of rooms.
by Miranda Seymour
Simon & Schuster
3.5 stars
Lara Feigel
On Valentine's Day in 1613, King James I's daughter Elizabeth Stuart married Prince Frederick of Germany. Accompanied by her favourite pets, the couple went to Heidelberg, where Frederick built Elizabeth an English suite of rooms.
For Miranda Seymour, this was the start of 400 years of Anglo-German friendship, conducted alongside the better-known story of war and rivalry. Since then, the English and the Germans have been falling in love, admiring each other's gardens, music and literature, and learning from each other's hospitals and universities.
One generation of Germans after another revered Shakespeare, identifying Hamlet in particular as an intrinsically German figure. "Shakespeare, my friend, if you were among us, I could live only with you," Goethe enthused.
The Nazis were almost as keen on the English bard as the Romantic poets were. Hermann Goering sponsored a Shakespeare season in 1930s Berlin, and even in April 1940, Shakespeare's birthday provoked national celebration. A few months later, the Germans encouraged the staging of Shakespeare plays in a British prisoner of war camp in Bavaria, importing costumes from the Munich opera house.
Seymour sets individual tales of friendship and admiration against a background of war and revolution. Germany's 19th-century history was dominated by the desire for unification. It was a wish Queen Victoria (who spoke German in private with Albert) shared, although she worried about the more aggrandising aims of her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II. Other books have told at least some of this story, but Seymour's is by far the most readable and compulsive account.