Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Great Shakespeareans
Volume III
Great Shakespeareans
Each volume in the series provides a critical account and analysis of those figures
who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and
cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and around the world.
Edited by
Roger Paulin
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
www.bloomsbury.com
Introduction 1
Roger Paulin
Chapter 1 Voltaire 5
Michèle Willems
Chapter 2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe 44
Stephen Fennell
Chapter 3 August Wilhelm Schlegel 92
Christine Roger and Roger Paulin
Chapter 4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 128
Reginald Foakes
Notes 173
Select Bibliography 189
Index 193
This page intentionally left blank
Series Preface
from her early incursion into reception studies with La genèse du mythe
shakespearien, 1660–1780 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979), to
recent research on ‘Hamlet in France’ (www.hamletworks.org) and Ducis’s
adaptations of Shakespeare (Shakespeare Survey 60, 2007), and contribu-
tions, in various Cambridge University Press publications, to the study of
Shakespeare on screen.
Note on References to Shakespeare
Isaiah Berlin once indulged in a fantasy in the style of Walter Savage Landor
that imagined Voltaire meeting Shelley and a dialogue of the deaf ensu-
ing. Some of our four writers did meet (Goethe and Schlegel, for instance).
But what if Voltaire really had met Goethe (quite possible) or Schlegel or
Coleridge? Would there have been any debate possible on the essentials of
Shakespeare? Would national pride have triumphed over a real common
interest? Would Voltaire have been outraged at the, for him, unreflecting
enthusiasm for wild genius, his younger interlocutors uncomprehending
of a failure to see basics? This volume seeks to bring these four figures
together in both historical and cognitive debate, to discover what they had
in common and where national and cultural attitudes to foreign or native
genius divided them.
Of our four writers, Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel and Coleridge, one
(Voltaire) was born in the seventeenth century, the other three outlived
the eighteenth century by over a generation and continued to produce sig-
nificant work on Shakespeare well into the nineteenth. To accommodate
them in one sequent stretch of time we may have to expand our views of
an already long eighteenth century and elongate it into a new chronologi-
cal entity. Shakespeare, of course, is rooted in time, his own specific times,
to which our four writers on different occasions refer. But for some, he is
also heralded as a universal genius with semi-divine powers, transcend-
ing established notions of historical computation. Our four figures and
their contemporaries are acutely aware of this. Voltaire prefers to align
Shakespeare with his ‘Times’ and seeks an explanation for his ‘faults’ with
reference to them. Others, like Goethe and Schlegel, elevate him to a tran-
scendent Christ-like figure with salvific powers.
Are these positions irreconcilable, where Voltaire finds at most flashes
of genius amid general barbarity, while Goethe in 1771, with an insouci-
ance for theological niceties, is calling him ‘Pan’, ‘Prometheus’ and Christ,
Schlegel for good measure declaring him ‘arisen and walking amongst us’?
At face value, yes; in historical terms, no. For all are rooted in notions of
2 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
kind of vocabulary that we find in German utterances after 1770: they are
not critical analyses but revivalist homilies. The young Goethe is part of
this, with all the insouciance and brashness of youth setting aside all the
reservations of the French (and also the English).
This is where we see a different notion of progress coming into play.
Whereas the French, despite occasional bouts of Shakespeare mania,
are never prepared to deny their classical heritage, the Germans feel left
behind. They have doubts as to whether they have come of age as a liter-
ary nation. Here Shakespeare acts as a catalyst; he is a mover and doer; he
sets things alight; he unlocks older poetic traditions and gives young poets
the courage to emulate them. Goethe’s career as a poet and playwright
(set out here by Stephen Fennell) is one of initial dependence on such
a father figure, then of gradual attainment of maturity and ironical dis-
tance. Yet part of Goethe’s active career also coincides with the translation
into German of Shakespeare and his establishment on the German stage
(where he still remains the most-performed dramatist to this day). And
later readers of Goethe’s Faust, whether Coleridge or Hugo or Delacroix,
Manzoni or Leopardi, are imbibing Shakespearean influence through the
texture of Goethe’s drama.
The younger generation of German Romantic writers (see the chap-
ter by Christine Roger and Roger Paulin) shares these positions, but
has retreated from any uncritical enthusiasms. August Wilhelm Schlegel
stresses Shakespeare’s artistry, his intentionality, not merely his unreflec-
tive genius. He also believes that the Germans now have taken over the
initiative in things Shakespearean, that ‘English critics have no idea of
Shakespeare,’ indeed that he is ‘completely ours’. These annexational and
proprietary claims had some substance in so far as they were grounded on a
sense of Shakespeare’s participation in the larger issues of history and time,
and in the continuum of world drama. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art
and Literature, delivered in Vienna in 1808, exercise their influence ‘from
Cadiz to Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg’ (as he himself claims),
because they take in these huge spreads of history, examine each national
tradition and define the substance of the work of art within them.
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also delivering public lectures on
Shakespeare, first encountered Schlegel’s published version late in 1811,
he was seized by the rightly famous 25th Lecture that distinguishes the
‘mechanical’ from the ‘organic’ work of art. (The long and sterile debate
about Coleridge’s so-called plagiarisms should be finally laid to rest by
Reginald Foakes’s chapter in this volume.) Coleridge takes part in debates
on Shakespeare that know no national boundaries (on dramatic illusion
4 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Voltaire
Michèle Willems
serving the dramatist’s reputation even as he most reviles him. His famous
definition of Shakespeare’s drama as pearls in a dunghill epitomizes his
contradictions: rather than the irreverence that it is generally thought to
express, it basically reflects the ambivalence of the classicist’s reception of
Shakespeare. But it also subsumes the multi-layered paradoxes of his per-
sonal attitude to the English intruder. ‘C’est moi qui le premier montrai
aux Français quelques perles que j’avais trouvées dans son énorme fumier’,
he writes to his friend d’Argental:3 even as he pleads guilty to having intro-
duced Shakespeare’s drama into the preserves of the French masters, he
is eager to remind the world that he was the first to call attention to his
beauties.
These mixed feelings, and their formulation, will soon be part of the
stock-in-trade of Shakespearean criticism. The ‘Dissertation sur la poésie
Voltaire 7
that he could read and write it, though not speak it very well. It is clear
from his criticism of Shakespeare that he was most impressed by Julius
Caesar and Hamlet. He also very probably attended performances of Othello
(another play he often mentions), and of Macbeth and King Lear. If we are to
believe George Adams, he also saw Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra,
Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus.9 His subsequent critiques indicate that
he must have read Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV and Henry V at some time,
but there is no evidence that he concentrated on the study of Shakespeare
during his stay in England.
Voltaire was already passionately interested in the theatre and it was
through his plays that he had first made a name for himself in Paris. After
his first success with Œdipe, in 1718, he had subsequently written three
plays to be performed at the Court of Fontainebleau on the occasion of
King Louis XV’s wedding, in 1725. It is one of the paradoxes of his life
that he alternately gained the favour of the Court through his plays and
incurred its censure through his pamphlets and satires. In the same way
he repeatedly found his place in Paris society through the theatre, only to
lose it through his philosophical writings. Posterity has reversed the para-
dox, since his plays are now forgotten while he is remembered for his tales
and pamphlets. When he returned from exile in 1729, Voltaire imported
Shakespeare into France, along with a number of the progressive ideas he
had gathered in England. His own tragedies were immediately acclaimed
in Paris, among them Brutus (1730) and Zaïre (1734), obviously influenced
by Shakespeare. Yet in 1734 the unauthorized publication in Rouen of his
Lettres Philosophiques provoked a new lettre de cachet and he was forced to flee
to Cirey where he retired for ten years in the château of Madame Châtelet,
his first lover and his protectress. Cirey was within easy reach of Lorraine
where he could flee whenever he was pursued by Parisian censure.
Gustave Lanson, in his still authoritative study of Voltaire, describes the
Lettres Philosophiques as ‘the first bomb thrown at the Ancien Régime’.10
Most of these ‘Letters from England’ as they were first called, do indeed
stress the progressiveness of the English political regime in contrast with
the despotism and intolerance of French society. Anticipating the censure
which was rife at the time, Voltaire had first published his essays in English,
in London, under the title Letters concerning the English Nation (a sign, inci-
dentally, that he was more proficient in the English language than has
often been indicated). As is often the case, the prosecution of its author
increased the popularity of the book which ran into five editions in 1734
alone, and into five more between 1734 and 1739. Yet the whole of the pam-
phlet cannot be described as revolutionary: though the first seven letters
Voltaire 9
Over the next fi fty years, the formulations vary, and also the balance
between the beauties and the faults; but the initial ambiguity about the
nature of Shakespeare’s drama remains. Shakespeare’s plays are, from
the start, defined as ‘monstrous farces, to which the name of Tragedy is
given’; the tag tragedy is attached to them in reference to the only dramatic
model with which the early eighteenth century was familiar. Remarkably,
Letter 19, entitled ‘On Comedy’ does not even mention Shakespeare’s
name, though it commends Wycherley (‘an excellent comic writer’)
and Congreve, but finds fault with Shadwell (‘despised by all persons of
taste’). The same letter observes that witty exchanges, allusions and puns
are lost upon foreigners. Could this explain why Voltaire does not appear
to have seen a Shakespeare comedy on the stage while he was in London?
It is true that the tragedies were then more often performed. The Tempest,
however, was then one of the stock plays of the Drury Lane repertoire,
admittedly in the Dryden and Davenant version; but the Macbeth that he
saw was the adaptation by Davenant and the King Lear that by Nahum
Tate.12 Voltaire’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s drama may have been com-
paratively extensive, but it never included comedy, a genre which he
did not himself practice. The plays he, and his contemporaries, refer to
are limited in number and they are always labelled tragedies, a generic
10 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
But the play was published with a dedication to Bolingbroke (himself the
author of a Caesar tragedy), known as the ‘Discours sur la tragédie’, in
which several allusions to Julius Caesar come to support the author’s reflec-
tions on tragedy. Starting from the recurrent idea, apparently shared by
Bolingbroke, that the English theatre has many defects, but ‘some admira-
ble scenes in (its) monstrous plays’, Voltaire concedes that their one great
merit is their sense of action and he then draws on his own experience of
the English stage :
Avec quel plaisir n’ai-je point vu à Londres votre tragédie de Jules César,
qui, depuis cent cinquante années fait les délices de votre nation! Je ne
prétends pas assurément approuver les irrégularités barbares dont elle
est remplie. . . . Mais, au milieu de tant de fautes grossières, avec quel ra-
vissement je voyais Brutus, tenant encore un poignard teint du sang de
César, assembler le peuple romain et lui parler ainsi du haut de la tri-
bune aux harangues. [It was with the greatest of pleasure that I saw in
London your tragedy of Julius Caesar which has been the delight of your
nation for one hundred and fi fty years. I do not claim to approve without
reservation the barbarous irregularities with which it is filled. . . . But, in
the midst of so many boorish defects, how enraptured I was when I saw
Brutus, still holding the dagger tainted with Caesar’s blood, assemble
the Roman people to harangue them thus from the rostrum.] (VS 51)
There follows his own translation of Brutus’s oration and of the reactions
of the citizens (translated as Choeur des Romains), as well as a summary of
the rest of the scene and of Antony’s manipulation of the Romans to rouse
them to revenge. Although he wonders whether a French audience would
suffer the sight of the body of Caesar on the stage, it is clear that, when he
was part of a London audience, his own classical reservations were swept
away by the excitement of the performance, a reaction which he now justi-
fies by quoting Greek precedents.
The lasting impression made on Voltaire by the discovery of live
Shakespeare comes through on other occasions, mostly in connection
with Julius Caesar. Though he must have attended some performances of
Hamlet while he was in London, he never mentions them. His various sum-
maries, analyses and (repetitive) strictures testify to his close knowledge
of the play, a sign that, contrary to the view that he criticized what he
could not understand, he was a competent reader of Shakespeare. But his
relation to Julius Caesar is different. He criticizes and censures the play,
as he does Hamlet and, more incidentally, a few other tragedies for the
12 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
same reasons. But Julius Caesar is the only play which he also imitates and
translates at length: in 1731, he writes La mort de César, a rehash of the
Shakespearean original in alexandrines, in which Brutus is revealed to be
the hero’s natural son (and thus the seat of another nice conflict between
love and duty) and Octavius his adopted son. The subject of the play, as the
title indicates, is the death of Caesar; it concludes with Antony’s determina-
tion to succeed Caesar, after an oration which Voltaire describes, in several
letters,15 as ‘a fairly faithful translation from a dramatist living a hundred
and fi fty years ago [une traduction assez fidèle d’un auteur qui vivait il y
a cent cinquante ans].’ His actual translation of the play will be published
much later, as part of the Commentaire de Corneille appended, in 1764, to
his first edition of his Théâtre de Corneille. As the translation covers only
the first three acts (ending appositely on Cassius’s prophecy that ‘this our
lofty scene’ was to be often re-enacted in ages to come), one may wonder
whether it had not been completed much earlier, at the time when he was
composing his own play on the same subject.
The rest of Voltaire’s Shakespeare criticism is centred almost exclusively
on Hamlet. In 1748, he introduces a ghost in his tragedy Sémiramis and in
the preface to the play, entitled Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et mod-
erne, he quotes Hamlet’s father as a precedent:
Les Anglais . . . voient tous les jours avec plaisir, dans la tragédie d’Hamlet,
l’ombre d’un roi qui paraît sur le théâtre dans une occasion à peu près
semblable à celle où l’on a vu, à Paris, le spectre de Ninus. [The English
see every day with pleasure, in the tragedy of Hamlet, the shade of a king
appearing on an occasion almost similar to that on which we have
recently seen the ghost of Ninus on a Paris stage.] (VS 57)
Je suis fâché contre les Anglais. Non seulement ils m’ont pris Pondichéri
à ce que je crois, mais ils viennent d’imprimer que leur Shakespear est
infiniment supérieur à Corneille. [I have fallen out with the English. Not
only have they deprived me of Pondicherry as far as I know, but now they
have just published that their Shakespear is infinitely superior to
Corneille.] (VS 62)
The cause for this outburst was an article entitled ‘Parallèle entre Corneille
et Shakespeare’. Published anonymously in the Journal encyclopédique on
15 October 1760, it proclaimed its author’s preference for Shakespeare
over Corneille. The historical context was the complicated Seven Years’
War between France and England, in the course of which France’s colo-
nial empire was gradually dismantled and the British Empire constituted.
Pondicherry was one of the five Indian towns eventually returned to France,
the only concession in the disastrous Paris Treaty through which, in 1763,
Louis XV surrendered Canada and Louisiana and renounced all claim to
India. Although Voltaire, like many of his contemporaries, had little inter-
est in the colonies and scoffed at the loss of Canada (‘a few acres of snow’)
to the English, his reference to the loss of Pondicherry in association with
the decline of Corneille’s reputation is significant: England was now per-
ceived as both a literary and military enemy. A fortnight later, the Journal
encyclopédique published a ‘Parallèle entre Otwai (sic) et Racine’,16 a confir-
mation that the supremacy of the French Masters was threatened, and with
it, that of the French model of tragedy which had prevailed throughout
Europe for more than a century. Resistance to the foreign invader now
14 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Apart from the now famous ‘To be or not to be’, the only other monologue
mentioned is that which opens on ‘What a rogue . . . ’ at the end of Act 2.
After a reference to Hecuba, his paraphrase conflates the prince’s vitu-
peration against Claudius with the abuse he piles upon himself; the French
equivalents, which range from ‘une putain’ to ‘une vraie salope’ and to the
rather unexpected ‘torchon de cuisine’ (a kitchen cloth for ‘a very drab’),
are meant to show how unprincely Hamlet’s language is. Voltaire’s censure
is now more and more directed at Shakespeare’s low style. He translates
for the first time Francisco’s reply to Barnardo ‘not a mouse stirring’, leav-
ing the French sentence (‘ je n’ai pas entendu une souris trotter’) to speak
for itself. A few years later he turns to commentary. He is reviewing Lord
Kames’s Elements of Criticism17 in which ‘the Scottish critic’, as he scorn-
fully refers to him, had judged Francisco’s line more natural than Racine’s
description of the silence of the night in the opening scene of his Iphigénie.
Voltaire again leaps into the arena to defend the French dramatist against
the attacks of a foreign critic. The translation of isolated lines, phrases
or even words, chosen to stress the inadequacy of Shakespeare’s dramatic
language, now constitutes his usual weapon. In the review, he wonders at
Desdemona’s falling in love with a negro who speaks of antres, deserts,
Cannibals and Anthropophagi and who has told her that he had almost
drowned her (sic): ‘il avait été sur le point de la noyer’ probably refers,
however remotely, to Othello’s mention of ‘moving accidents by flood and
field’ (1. 3. 135). Such approximations are a sign of polemical dishonesty
rather than of linguistic incompetence. In Voltaire’s war, the end now justi-
fies the means.
The end was to discredit, not so much Shakespeare, as the work of the
translators who were trying to promote his drama. The first Frenchman to
introduce Shakespeare to a public of readers was Pierre-Antoine de La Place,
with his Théâtre anglois. From 1746 to 1749 he published an eight-volume
anthology of English drama ranging from Shakespeare to Congreve and
Addison. Shakespeare was granted the best part of the first four volumes,
prefaced by a Discours sur le théâtre anglois, largely borrowed from Pope.
French readers were thus made acquainted with ten different plays, starting
with Othello ou le More de Venise and Henry VI, roi d’Angleterre. Not all of them
were tragedies: La vie et la mort de Richard III, Hamlet, prince de Danemark and
Macbeth took up volume 2, but Cymbeline was next to Jules César and Antoine
et Cléopâtre in volume 3, and Les Femmes de bonne humeur ou les Commères de
Windsor figured along with Timon ou le Misanthrope in volume 4. In volume 3,
analyses or summaries of the rest of Shakespeare’s historical dramas com-
pleted the sequence provided by Henry VI and Richard III in the first two
16 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
the very man who was to succeed him in his seat at the Academy; he does
briefly allude, in letters to friends, to the success of Hamlet, and later of
Roméo, giving this as a sign of the degeneracy of French taste: ‘shades will
become fashionable [les ombres vont devenir à la mode]’, he writes cryp-
tically, reminding his correspondent that he had paved the way when he
introduced a ghost in his Semiramis.
The feeling that some upstarts were poaching on his Shakespearean
preserves also motivated his campaign against the first actual translator
of the plays, Pierre Le Tourneur, who published his twenty volumes of
Shakespeare’s Works between 1776 and 1782. This was the first authentic
prose rendering of the plays and it was immediately successful. The first
volume was published with a long preface which aimed at satisfying the
readers’ growing curiosity, since it included the life of the dramatist, an
account of Garrick’s 1769 Jubilee, and a long Discours inspired by the pref-
aces to various English editions. It opened with an Épître au Roi, Louis XVI,
the French royal family, and even the King of England being the most pres-
tigious subscribers. This seal of official approval must have nettled Voltaire
(all the more so as his name was nowhere mentioned) because it confirmed
that Shakespeare’s drama was threatening the stronghold of classicism and
challenging more and more the superiority of Corneille and Racine. July
1776 finds Voltaire venting his wrath against Le Tourneur, ‘this impudent
imbecile’, in a letter to his friend d’Argental:
The sequence of letters makes it clear that his quarrel is with Le Tourneur
at least as much as with Shakespeare. On 26 July he asks d’Alembert to
read his memo against ‘our enemy, Monsieur Le Tourneur’ (VS 176); on
13 August, having complied with the Academy’s request that the translator
should remain unnamed, he sends the Secretary the final version of ‘his
declaration of war to England [ma déclaration de guerre à l’Angleterre]’,
with this commentary:
J’ai entendu de votre bouche que vous n’aviez pas une bonne tragédie;
mais en récompense, dans ces pièces si monstrueuses, vous avez des
scènes admirables. [I have heard you say that you have no good tragedy;
but, by way of compensation, you have some admirable scenes in those
monstrous plays.] (VS 53)
His correspondent could not deny the second statement either, since
it echoed the mixed reactions of his own contemporaries, later defined
as ‘beauty-and-faults’ criticism. This was the ambivalent response to
Shakespeare of an age whose normative aesthetics (an avatar of their rational
comprehension of the world) were suddenly confronted with the powerful
plays of a non-conformist. On the one hand, critics were intent on check-
ing Shakespeare’s conformity to their prescribed models (and the French
were not the only ones to judge by the book of rules), hence the censuring
of what they perceived as ‘irregularities’. On the other hand, they admired
some isolated beauties such as fine speeches or moral thoughts, hence their
selective approach to the plays, a constant of Shakespearean criticism on
both sides of the Channel. The only variable was the proportion of praise
allocated by way of compensation. Voltaire’s much-derided remark on the
pearls he had discovered in the Shakespearean dunghill had in fact been
anticipated by quite a few English critics: Dryden, whose Essay of Dramatick
Poesie had described Shakespeare as ‘the Janus of poets’, had seen his 1675
adaptation of Troilus and Cressida as removing ‘the heap of rubbish under
which many excellent thoughts lay wholly bury’d’. Charles Gildon, in his
22 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
1710 Remarks on the Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, had resorted to a similar
metaphor (‘beauties . . . in a heap of rubbish’), which an anonymous com-
mentator on Hamlet had improved upon, in 1735, as ‘gold strangely mixed
with dross’. Voltaire is similarly ambivalent from the start, and he follows
the process of selection and rejection which is the trademark of neoclas-
sical criticism of Shakespeare. In 1729, when he first introduces French
readers to Hamlet, he translates the prince’s monologue as an example of
‘those strong, forcible Passages which atone for all (Shakespeare’s) faults’
(VS 45); in 1748, he describes the ghost of his father as one of the ‘beauties
that shine in the midst of terrible extravagances’ (VS 57). But whereas in
these instances he lists and mocks the gross irregularities he finds in the
play, when he writes to Bolingbroke, his approach is more theoretical, as
befits a discourse on tragedy:
In other words, what English tragic writers lack is taste, le bon goût, which
is a prerequisite in French classical tragedy and is, in his view, exemplified
by Racine better than by Corneille. Any analysis of Voltaire’s criticism of
Shakespeare must take into account the tyranny of taste which had gov-
erned the French theatre since the reign of Louis XIV and which the critic
exerted and enforced to the bitter end.
looked down upon melodramas like Diderot’s Père de famille, which catered
for the taste of the middle class, and heartily despised the popular enter-
tainments of the Pont Neuf, the Paris bridge on which clowns were known
to perform.28 His conception of a theatre audience is ‘one hundred men
of bon goût’ for whom ‘there is no pleasure without bienséance [Il n’y a
point pour eux de plaisir sans bienséance]’ as he writes in the second
Epistle to Zaïre,29 certainly not a mixture of social classes with groundlings
to boot. In 1750, there were more than 150 private playhouses in Paris,
testifying to aristocrats’ attraction to the theatre.30 Voltaire himself set up
playhouses wherever he stayed, generally to stage his own plays. When he
was residing in Switzerland, the ban on the building of playhouses pro-
nounced by Geneva’s puritanical Council was the occasion of one of his
many controversies with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the other great figure of
the eighteenth century. In response to the restriction which caused him to
move from ‘Les Délices’ to Ferney,31 he prompted d’Alembert to write an
Encyclopédie article on Genève, in which he praised the town but regretted
its lack of a playhouse. Rousseau replied with the famous Lettre à d’Alembert
sur les Spectacles (1758), a denunciation of the immorality of the stage which
evokes the worst Puritan attacks against the theatre. From then on, he was
Voltaire’s pet enemy,32 but the contention was not really based on principle.
Voltaire liked to pick a quarrel and he was in any case jealous of Rousseau’s
status in the world of letters. The building of playhouses, in Switzerland
or elsewhere, was not a cause he ever defended. The theatre he set up in
Ferney in one of his out-houses could accommodate up to 200 persons, but
although he would round up the butler or the coachman as attendants,
the performances took place in front of friends and visitors and this was
anything but a public playhouse.33
We learn more of Voltaire’s priorities for the theatre from the bulky study
he published in 1751 on Le Siècle de Louis XIV, a century which he hails as
the heyday of French tragedy. His conviction that the development of the
arts is linked to the harmonious development of a civilisation, which in
turn benefits from the refining and pacifying influence of the arts, again
runs counter to Rousseau’s belief that civilisation brings corruption in its
wake. But he also contends that this high period ended with the death
of the enlightened monarch: ‘Genius is confined to one century, then it
must needs degenerate [Le génie n’a qu’un siècle, après quoi il faut qu’il
dégénère’].’34 His nostalgia for the court of the Sun King is manifest in his
admiration for Racine, whom he ranks above Corneille, judged too irregu-
lar. Throughout his career he remains obsessed with Racine, in whom he
finds the perfect conjunction of genius and taste; his elegance, sobriety
Voltaire 25
and command of verse he tries to imitate in his own plays. Conversely, his
mostly negative appreciation of Molière expresses the rejection of what
he repeatedly calls ‘low comedy’, designed to please the populace. This
he explains in Le Temple du Goût, where he deplores the fact that, after
writing Le Misanthrope, a play for an enlightened public, this ‘wise man’
should have disguised himself as a clown to amuse the multitude with Le
médecin malgré lui. Leaving aside the unacceptable mixing of genres, com-
edy itself should be refined and aim at diverting the higher classes of soci-
ety. Unsurprisingly, it is the same elitism which colours his reception of
Shakespeare whose crudity of language and breaches of propriety he con-
siders calculated to please ‘the dregs of the people’. Whatever his advanced
ideas in other domains, Voltaire was and remained a conservative where
the theatre was concerned, a contradiction which, over the years, turned
the enthusiastic discoverer of Shakespeare into his aggressive deprecator.
Le théâtre anglais . . . fut très animé, mais ce fut dans le goût espagnol; la
bouffonnerie fut jointe à l’horreur. Toute la vie d’un homme fut le sujet
d’une tragédie: les acteurs passaient de Rome, de Venise, en Chypre; la
plus vile canaille paraissait sur le théâtre avec les princes, et ces princes
parlaient souvent comme la canaille. . . . [The English stage . . . was very
lively, but this was in the Spanish taste; fooleries were combined with hor-
ror. A man’s whole life was the subject of a tragedy: the actors moved
from Rome and Venice to Cyprus; the lowest rabble appeared on the
stage alongside princes, and these princes often spoke like the rabble.].
(VS 160)
Un soldat peut s’exprimer ainsi dans un corps de garde, mais non pas sur
le théâtre, devant les premières personnes d’une nation, qui s’expriment
noblement, et devant qui il faut s’exprimer de même. [A soldier may
speak like this in a guardroom, but not on a stage, in front of the elite of
a nation, who use elevated language and before whom one should do the
same.]. (VS 201)
dans la nature: cela suffit aux Anglais].’ The context is a review in which
he sneers at Lord Kames for judging the allusion to a mouse ‘natural’. It
is thus logical to infer that in Voltaire’s view words like ‘garden’, ‘seeds’ or
‘shoes’, not to mention ‘appetite’, should never be pronounced by a prince.
What Lord Kames commends as natural beauty, he censures as offences
against taste.
Sir, that you have been betrayed and that the Moor is now enjoying your
daughter’s favours.]’ Why, he comments, should we conceal any aspect of
this dramatist who is presented as so admirable? Later, in his first discourse
to the Academy, he justifies his close translation of the porter’s definition
of the effects of drink with the same apparent candour:
Le vrai but de mon travail [est] que le public soit bien instruit de tout
l’excès de la turpitude infâme qu’on ose opposer à la majesté de notre
théâtre. Il est clair que l’on ne peut faire connaître cette infamie qu’en
traduisant littéralement les gros mots du délicat Shakespeare. [The pub-
lic should be well informed of all the excess of infamous turpitude that
some dare oppose to the majesty of our own theatre. It is clear that the
only way of revealing this infamy is to translate literally the bad language
of the delicate Shakespeare.] (VS 184)
Voltaire 33
age and could not benefit from the refinement of polite conversation. This
is essentially what Dryden and the English neoclassicists said, but much
earlier. Voltaire is the voice of classicism as much as the voice of France,
though they merge more and more in his diatribes.
This is because, even in France, the voice of classicism is beginning to
sound old-fashioned. Shakespeare’s dramatic model, however travestied
or bowdlerized, is slyly undermining confidence in French national trag-
edy. In his frantic defence of the French Masters, Voltaire can count on
the support of the Academy and of a few conservative die-hards like La
Harpe.48 But even his closest friend, Madame du Deffand, to whom he
earlier confided his anxieties on the future of French bon goût, writes to
Horace Walpole in 1768: ‘How I admire your Shakespeare! . . . He almost
makes me think . . . that the rules are obstacles to genius.’49 This creative
god, as Le Tourneur defines him to Voltaire’s horror, is throwing French
critical theory off balance with his attractive irregularities. La Place, for
instance, who picks and chooses and expurgates, unexpectedly maintains
the gravedigger scene in full, ‘because it is famous in England, being so
unusual’ (Discours 2 d: 379n.). Le Tourneur also retains what Voltaire
calls ‘this abominable scene’ (VS 192). While a few of his contemporaries
acknowledge the effectiveness of some deviations from the norm, Voltaire
is more and more committed to an orthodoxy that is fast losing its valid-
ity. The conservative becomes reactionary. In 1776, more than ten years
after Dr Johnson had dismissed Voltaire’s and Rymer’s objections to the
‘mélange des genres’, Voltaire still quotes approvingly from Rymer’s Short
View of Tragedy of 1693.
And yet, contrary to his later dogmatic pronouncements, his earlier cri-
tiques had echoed the most favourable judgements of the English critics of
the 1720s and the dispensations they conceded to geniuses. Thus, in 1727,
in the Essay on Epic Poetry, Voltaire granted Shakespeare ‘the privilege of
the inventive genius who cuts a path for himself where no one has walked
before; he runs without guide, art or rules, he gets lost in his course, but
he leaves far behind him everything which has to do only with reason and
exactness.’50 In Le siècle de Louis XIV, Corneille, another true but irregular
genius, was similarly granted the privilege of committing grievous faults,
because he opened a new way: ‘C’est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout
du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de commettre impunément de grandes
fautes.’51 His early conception of taste was much less absolute. In the 1761
Appel he quoted Hamlet’s monologue, ‘an unpolished diamond full of flaws
[un diamant brut qui a des taches]’ as evidence of ‘the diversity of national
tastes [il n’y a peut-être pas un plus grand exemple de la diversité du goût
Voltaire 35
Chez les Français, la tragédie est pour l’ordinaire une suite de conversa-
tions en 5 actes avec une intrigue amoureuse. En Angleterre, la tragédie
est véritablement une action. [In France, tragedy is usually a sequence of
conversations in five acts, with a love plot. In England, tragedy is a genu-
ine action.]52
This is repeated in the Discours sur la tragédie and again much later, some-
times in connection with Corneille, often in association with complaints
36 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
son sang plongé ce fer vengeur’. Yet in the earlier Zaïre (1736), Orosmane
stabs the heroine on stage, in a scene and with a speech very reminiscent of
Othello. The attraction to Voltaire the dramatist of a predecessor whom he
denigrates as a critic is so obvious that he has often been accused of plagia-
rism. Aaron Hill’s prologue to his adaptation of Zaïre is explicit:
dilemma of the heroine, and not the jealousy of the hero which is at the
root of the tragedy, and it is inaccurate to accuse him of having plagiarized
Othello. His deviations from the classical tradition show his desire to inject
some new blood into a genre that he felt needed rejuvenating. They con-
tradict the critic’s resistance to change and seem paradoxical. His classical
plays were very popular, while his attempts at innovation were not always
crowned with success. His imitations of Shakespeare confirm the fascina-
tion as a spectator which as a critic he seems ashamed to confess. Using the
dramatist as a model was indeed a paradox, considering his frantic defence
of the classical dramatic model.
Yet the fascination surfaces at times in the midst of his criticism, as when
he defines the appeal of Hamlet’s monologue, in spite of all its faults as ‘a
je ne sais quoi which attracts and moves us much more than elegance would
[un je ne sais quoi qui attache, et qui remue beaucoup plus que ne ferait
l’élégance.]’ (VS 76). Finding that the classical codes and their rational
categories are ineffectual in explaining Shakespeare’s impact, he resorts
like English critics before him to the undefined je ne sais quoi, or to irratio-
nal concepts like ‘instinctive genius’. But his most emblematic reaction is
probably to be found as late as 1764, not in a published critique, but in a
private letter to Bernard Joseph Saurin, another dramatist. Moving from
his usual censure of Gilles’s barbarity and ridicule to his also recurrent
judgement that Corneille’s reasonings are icy (‘à la glace’) he concludes
by comparison: ‘People still flock to see his (Gilles’s) plays and enjoy them,
even while they find them absurd [Les raisonnements de Pierre Corneille
sont à la glace en comparaison du Tragique de ce Gilles. On court encor
à ses pièces, et on s’y plait en les trouvant absurdes.]’ (VS 84). The French
On (on court; on s’y plait) could here just as well be translated by we, which
includes I. Enjoyment is here coexistent with absurdity. The paradox of
Shakespeare’s appeal, here explicitly stated, implicitly expresses the per-
plexity of the classical critic. Faced with the inadequacy of his categories,
he takes refuge in oxymoron, as when he pronounces Shakespeare a bar-
barian genius and his plays attractive monsters.
with the demotion of the dramatist than with his promotion, the overall
positive resonance of his Shakespeare criticism has been disproportion-
ate to the number of lines he actually wrote. Conversely, the two Hugos,
who contributed much more profusely to the appreciation and dissemina-
tion of his dramas, are less present in international bibliographies. And yet
Victor the father celebrated the tercentenary with a bulky volume that is
too often dismissed as a preface to his son’s translation. And between 1859
and 1865, François-Victor Hugo published translations of the Complete
Works which serve to this day. Yet he never managed to establish a name of
his own, since posterity, particularly abroad, often confuses him with his
father. So why does Voltaire hold such an important place in the reception
of Shakespeare in France, to the point of being (too) often considered to
epitomize the French reception of Shakespeare? Certainly because he was
a pioneer, possibly because he was and remained a classicist.
When Voltaire first introduced Shakespeare into France through criti-
cism and translation, French was the language of culture, spoken in all the
courts of Europe, and he himself was known and influential throughout
Europe: ‘J’ai un petit malheur, c’est que je n’écris pas une ligne qui ne
coure l’Europe [I have a small problem: I can’t write a line that doesn’t
run through Europe],’ he would say, and he later described himself in his
letters as ‘the innkeeper of Europe’, welcoming a great number of visitors,
French and foreign, in his Ferney residence. Though at the end of his life
he appears as a literary dinosaur, he was for decades considered to be the
oracle of Europe. Thus, his discovery, his critiques and his translations of
Shakespeare resounded throughout the Continent and initiated new cur-
rents and ideas which circulated and interacted in the following decades.
His resistance to Shakespeare had a number of paradoxical effects: in
England, the defence of the native poet against the carping French critic
encouraged bardolatry; in Germany, his aggressive vindication of French
cultural domination boosted the Shakespearean alternative. In fact his criti-
cism might have had less positive impact on the reputation of the dramatist
if his judgements had been less provocative. The ripples and waves created
in literary circles by irate letters, angry pamphlets and replies, aroused
curiosity about the plays. Thus, the quarrel triggered by his reactions to
the publication of Le Tourneur’s Shakespeare traduit de l’anglois brought
Shakespeare to the centre of literary preoccupations and attracted atten-
tion to the translations. The growing interest in Shakespeare of both read-
ers and spectators can often be traced back to Voltaire, sometimes through
unexpected paths. The synopsis of Hamlet that is the backbone of his Appel
should perhaps be considered as another intertext for Ducis’s Hamlet since,
40 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
biased and ironical though it is, it offers a mostly accurate summary of the
play which must have nurtured familiarity with the plot.
Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare also reverberates through the
centuries because it is so emblematic of the neoclassical reception of
Shakespeare. Over its fi fty years of contradictions and excesses, it covers
the gamut of classical reactions to the plays, offering a magnified vision of
the dichotomy between the two dramatic models confronted during the
eighteenth century and setting up the terms of a dialectic of rejection and
attraction which remains unresolved until the next one. More than French
resistance to Shakespeare, Voltaire epitomizes the classicist’s resistance
to a rival model, not so much in its attachment to a set of rules as in its
rejection of the mixing of genres, social classes and styles. While England
deplored the dramatist’s exuberant and overblown style, France, through
Voltaire, essentially censured the intrusion of everyday realism into the
elevated preoccupations of tragedy. This allergy was a lasting obstacle to
the recognition of the dramatist’s specific appeal and distinctive style. It
is impossible to decide whether the spectacle of a Shakespeare comedy
on the stage would have shaken Voltaire’s certainties about decorous lan-
guage and propriety. Both were ingrained in his belief in the purity of
tragedy, and this was not swayed by another sensible remark of La Place’s in
his Discours (1: xxi), that if the label ‘tragedy’ was removed, the irregulari-
ties would disappear [‘ôtez le titre de tragédies et l’irrégularité tombera’].
Eighteenth-century France was in any case never subjected to the influence
of Shakespeare’s comedies since none of them was performed on a French
stage before the twentieth century.
This may explain why, even apart from Voltaire’s hostility, French criti-
cism soon lagged behind that of England and Germany, where literary
concepts evolved under the influence of the Shakespearean model of
drama. In Germany, C. M. Wieland’s first published translation was that
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by C. M. Wieland, and the first theatrical
performance was a version of The Tempest, staged by the same Wieland.58
The Tempest also opened Le Tourneur’s translation, but like the other com-
edies it was only available to the reading public.59 The fairies and Caliban
remained unknown to French spectators, even while the marvellous in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest contributed to shatter the con-
cept of imitation in European literary criticism. Though Addison’s semi-
nal essay on ‘the fairy way of writing’ became known on the Continent
through a translation in the French Spectateur, it seems to have passed
through France unnoticed.60 First published in English in 1712 under the
title ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, it was translated the same year,
Voltaire 41
The ironic allusion to Voltaire is even more obvious and the theoreti-
cal difference apparent when he rehabilitates Gilles as inseparable from
Shakespeare :
J’admire Shakespeare et j’admire Gilles; j’admire le cri insensé ‘un rat !’.
J’admire les calembours de Hamlet. [I admire Shakespeare and I admire
Gilles; I admire the insane cry ‘a rat’. I admire Hamlet’s quibbles.]64
of Hernani. In his theatrical chronicles Gautier deplores the fact that the
conservative Comédie-Française (with its bored audience in yellow gloves,
as he describes it) should prefer Ducis’s Othello to Vigny’s more authentic
version and should only perform Shakespeare ‘in very small doses’. In a
provocative review of a pantomime, metaphorically entitled ‘Shakespeare
aux Funambules’,67 Gautier dreams of Shakespeare’s comedies being
performed in a popular playhouse, in front of a public, ‘in their shirt-
sleeves . . . with caps over their ears’.
Introduction
As we see in the volumes of this series, there are numerous ways in which
one can be a Great Shakespearean: one can be a dedicated actor or pro-
ducer or director of Shakespeare’s plays, one can be a critic or commen-
tator or eulogist of his works or one can be a literary writer: a translator,
an epitomator or else a writer of original work which somehow signally
bears witness to Shakespeare’s influence. It should little surprise us that so
magisterial a figure as Goethe (1749–1832) should be found in not one but
several of the above ‘Great Shakespearean’ roles, and indeed occasionally
in more than one role at a time.
Goethe commented in his later years that neither he nor Shakespeare were
creatures of their own making,1 and his own immense debt to Shakespeare
was at least part of what Goethe meant by these remarks. Thus, when we exam-
ine Goethe’s debt itself, we see that it was a semi-organic outgrowth, partly
Goethe’s own response to the Stratford genius, partly a series of reactions
to and assimilations of existing German and French views of Shakespeare’s
work. Goethe’s reception of Shakespeare is decisively conditioned by these
views in the generations before, during and following his own and by the
form in which Shakespeare’s work was present in Germany in those years.
Goethe was by no means the first German to become fully aware of
Shakespeare and his greatness, nor was it any accident that, from around
the time of Goethe’s birth, the greatest dramatist of the English stage
would gradually come into his own as an icon of the German theatre.
source for the young Goethe’s mental culture: it awoke his love of literature
and contained many of the works from various European traditions, old
and new, whose influence would remain palpable throughout his own life
and œuvre.
We know that his father, Caspar Goethe, promptly acquired the fi rst vol-
ume of Wieland’s translation of Shakespeare in the early 1760s. He appears
to have learnt some English in Frankfurt from a young Englishman who
was fond of chatting with his sister, but more in Leipzig, where he went to
study at the age of 16.
Thus, by the time he went to study in Leipzig in 1765, Goethe had a
reasonable vocabulary for reading contemporary English texts, but soon
he would meet with language of greater age and sophistication. By March
1766 Goethe had begun reading William Dodd’s The Beauties of Shakespeare,
which, in his later autobiography Poetry and Truth, he recalled having
read with great pleasure and excitement.2 Yet it has been pointed out that
Goethe’s early gleanings from Dodd, enthusiastic though they are, all stem
from the early pages of the work, and it has been speculated (no doubt cor-
rectly) that a fully appreciative reading of the remainder of Dodd would
have been beyond Goethe’s English reading capacity at this point.3 He
did, however, write some English verse. Why exactly did Goethe do this
strange thing? Because he felt the need for an analysis of human nature
and relationships and situations of which German written culture and the
current projections of German society offered no adequate comprehen-
sion. Particularly in his amatory affairs Goethe felt things and saw himself
in situations for which German culture provided no apposite expression.
Indeed, one searches in vain for prior German models with quite this kind
of expressive power and immediacy.4 But to find a just expression for these
sentiments was for Goethe not an end in itself, for the situations were acute
in their own way, as amatory debacles will be, and Goethe most certainly
sought some practical profit as well from Shakespeare’s genius: the skill of
formulating and comprehending these features of human interaction satis-
factorily was something Goethe saw as a necessary formative capacity in him-
self, and realigning himself to a situation with the help of Shakespeare’s
figuration and expression of it was part of a gradual Bildung for the fash-
ionable young man.
As a motive for adopting the ‘wisdom of Shakespeare’, nothing could be
more simple or obvious, yet it was this initial presupposition of its appli-
cation to himself that would characterize, and indeed motivate, virtually
all Goethe’s borrowings and adaptations of ideas and formulations from
Shakespeare throughout his long life; this, as we shall see, was to remain
46 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
initially have felt more than a tinge of shame, for he himself had first
become acquainted with Shakespeare through that very anthology of
Dodd’s which Herder in his essay pillories as ‘a new Stobaeus or Florilegium
or cornucopia of Shakespeare’s wisdom’.
During the winter of 1770–1 in Strasbourg, Goethe attended dutifully
to Herder, collected local traditional folksongs for him and received in
return a handsome education in life and letters from the most cosmo-
politan German mind of the age. Among other works – those of Homer,
Möser,8 Hamann – Shakespeare was read extensively and Wieland’s fine
prose translation subjected to careful scrutiny.
The first page of him that I read made me his own, for life; and as I was
finished with the first play, I stood like one born blind who has been given
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 49
It is this authenticity to nature (‘Natur! Natur!’), and above all: our own
nature, which commended Shakespeare’s work as a kind of existential
imperative to Goethe, who thus blushes at his own momentary thought
that he might have executed this or that particular a little differently:
partly in order to elicit from his mentor of the day, Herder, some views on
various features of character, realism and, ultimately, aesthetics. The play
itself is a rambling tale of swashbuckling and intrigue, centred around the
vanishing politics of regional and sub-regional individualism in the Holy
Roman Empire at the dawn of the Reformation period. Its plot evolves
from a conflict between Götz, the aging, dyed-in-the-wool Germanic
knight with a small fiefdom among the imperial maze of German terri-
tories on the one hand, and the Prince Bishop of Bamberg on the other.
Götz’s old friend and alter ego, the corruptible and wheedling imperial offi-
cial Weislingen, is won over by the femme fatale Adelheid von Walldorf to
the Bishop’s cause, and the ensuing political and military machinations
(besides encompassing the demise of Weislingen and Adelheid) result ulti-
mately in Götz’s imprisonment and death. It was an age of change, in which
political and administrative expediency were beginning to ‘rationalize’
the exuberance of individualist privileges within the imperial domains:
the viability of Götz’s tiny sub-realm and the interests of its subjects were
being challenged by the intrigues of pettifogging chancery. It is a parable
of the strife between bureaucracy and individuality, a fight for the soul
of German national identity, and partially a mirror reflection of conflicts
which Goethe’s own era had seen – the inevitable decay of the moribund
empire, and the uprising of stridently individual political talent in the per-
son of Frederick the Great. Goethe’s choice of precisely Götz’s moment in
history will hardly have been accidental in the early 1770s: dissolution and
a new order could not be long in coming. So, was the present day Goethe’s
moralitas on the false direction taken by earlier history? With its strident
theatricality and notorious strength of language, Götz is precisely that: a
work on earlier history, on its author’s own national history, and therein
lies a conspicuous commonality with the ‘Historical Plays’ of Shakespeare,
as Goethe knew them, for this choice of subject matter was a relatively
rare one in German drama, and will certainly have been made with both
Herder’s folk-history premium and the great historical achievements of
Shakespeare squarely in mind.
Goethe’s first draft of Götz was highly redolent not just of Shakespeare’s
formal principles and characterization traits but even of his diction, and
Herder fairly commented that ‘Shakespeare has quite ruined you’ when
he read the manuscript.9 Goethe revised the manuscript in 1773 to dimin-
ish the element of superficial imitation in favour of a more dignified and
reflective use of Shakespeare’s legacy, but the sixty-scene 1771 version
remains enlightening. Most conspicuously, the constellation of charac-
ters in Götz was set to exploit some of the same interplays of political and
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 51
and surroundings, was one for which Shakespeare had provided not one
but a whole range of virtuoso models – hence the range of those plays
drawn upon in the writing of Götz.
That Götz met with a highly variable reception is hardly surprising: for a
start, the gangliness of this epic drama of several hours’ sitting and still
nearly five-dozen scenes is not rivalled even by Shakespeare’s sprawling
forty-two-scene Antony and Cleopatra. Wieland in one of his ‘Letters to a
Young Poet’ cautiously and even-handedly defends the achievements of
both Shakespeare and Götz:
I don’t insist on denying . . . that Götz von Berlichingen has given at least as
much innocent occasion as Shakespeare himself for the mischief that
people of very varied kind have brought about on our stages in the past
ten years. . . . But I deny outright that the author of Götz intended in his
work to produce a workable play for our mostly travelling troupes of
actors, or to supplant from our stages those rule-governed plays whose
least virtue was their regularity. His purpose was surely in the main to
test his powers on a great dramatic painting of an age and its manners . . . I
suppose he felt himself strongly tempted at the time to yield to the call of
his genius, which drew him to a dramatic career; he perhaps merely
wanted to legitimise his standing in the eyes of the nation by this first
effort; . . . The public was amazed at the marvel, was at first dazzled by the
mass and diversity of such completely unaccustomed beauties, but soon
enraptured and overwhelmed by the natural truth and the living spirit
that breathes in so many, so varied persons of all classes, from the
Emperor Maximilian to the groom, and from the groom right down to
the gypsy lad.13
By this applause for the vibrancy of life in Götz’s social diversity, Wieland
(despite the nervousness on this subject evident in his Shakespeare transla-
tion) is implicitly also defending the japes of the lower types in Hamlet and
the notorious crowd scenes of Julius Caesar.
Having himself been lauded as the doyen of that life and verve and
authenticity which the Sturm und Drang so admired, Goethe was at this
time understandably censorious of inauthentic specimens of the genre. A
neat sample of his criticism is the review in which Johann Georg Sulzer’s
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 53
Werther
It has been rightly commented15 that the driving force behind virtually
all of Shakespeare’s great protagonists and their tragedies is not sim-
ply that they are at odds with circumstances or social norms, but that
they are each of a mental cast quite outside the comprehension of those
around them: Othello, Hamlet, Prince Hal, Macbeth, Caesar, Lear,
even Shylock. There is something about this inscrutable mindset which
speaks to us all the more grippingly, as it has spoken to each generation
of Europeans since Shakespeare’s own times. Goethe, however, is partak-
ing of something almost new in kind, though something so subtle and
now so ingrained in modern thinking that we could easily overlook it:
it is simply the perception of these characters’ psychology itself, rather
than some version of a plot structure. For it appears to have been only
since the mid-eighteenth century, and the generation of Goethe’s imme-
diate predecessors, that the psychology of character itself was looked
into with such piercing interest on mainland Europe (a glance back at
earlier French criticism emphatically confirms this), and this is undoubt-
edly among the main reasons why Shakespeare was so misprized in
Europe until this point. The degree of that novelty we can gauge from
the international reaction to Goethe’s reception of Shakespearean char-
acter depth in his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. An instant
sensation among the offerings of the Leipzig Book Fair in the autumn
of 1774, and one soon to be replicated (legally and illegally) elsewhere
in Europe, Werther was intimately bound up with events in and around
Goethe’s own life.
Set in 1771–2, almost contemporaneously with its composition, Werther
is the eighteen-month long saga of a middle-class but evidently well-
connected young man who writes the hypnotically subjective letters which
54 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
‘inheritance matter’ which becomes for him the taking possession of the
objects of his desire, primarily the woman Lotte, but in some sense (as
the early letters make clear) the entire universe, and he fails in the one
as inevitably as in the other. His possession-taking of reality is symbol-
ized in the activity of sketching, apprehending some part of the world on
a possessible piece of drawing paper, but even on the day when he can
say he was ‘never more of an artist than today’, the truth is that he can
produce ‘not a stroke’ (HA 6: 9), the acts of appropriation which would
define who he is are acts of which he is incapable. Hamlet too uses art,
not to catch the whole world but to apprehend his uncle and in that way
take hold at least of his own kingdom. But for Hamlet it is a tool ill-suited
to one who cannot carry out what the outcome of his art dictates. The
kind of cosmic possession-taking envisaged by Werther results, as we can
see from the letter of 10 May, in him simply investing his being in the
entire cosmos, like some god, and dispersing his substance. In fact, this
feeling of possession of nature is itself only a slight refiguration of the
principle of infinite expansion which took Goethe himself by storm, as
we saw, in his first encounter with Shakespeare: Werther’s relationship to
the world is the desire to make it his own, for this is the underlying nature
of the ‘inheritance matter’ that takes him to ‘Wahlheim’ (the domicile
and playground of his will), and he becomes owned by it, much as Goethe
became Shakespeare’s ‘own, for life’ in the Shakespeare’s Day speech (HA
12: 225).
T. S. Eliot has criticized post-Shakespearean writers, and indeed Goethe
in particular, for imposing their own character onto Hamlet’s – a thought
Goethe had surely toyed with in a number of connections, including the
later Clavigo-parable – and making ‘a Werther’ of him.18 Indeed, Goethe
does appear to have tapped into Hamletic features in order to exorcize, in
the person of Werther, the jeopardies he perceived in his own character
and inclinations. Yet we should conversely not overstate the extent to which
Werther is merely a new Hamlet, a distracted globe overchallenged by his
situation: the fine print of their demise is in each case quite distinct, and
the socio-economic pathology at the bottom of Werther’s predicament,
and many features of the predicament itself, are an entirely new reflection
on some of the darker potentialities of the human spirit. If a successor he
is, then Werther is surely a worthy successor, rather than a jejune rehash of
the Dane, and all the more now, with the wind of outrageous international
success in his sails, did Goethe aspire to be a worthy peer of the Dane’s
creator: Werther’s celebrity thus heralded a whole new chapter in Goethe’s
relationship to Shakespeare.
56 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Clavigo
In the months following the composition of Werther, Goethe turned once
more to drama, though this time to romantic tragedy of a fairly conven-
tional sort, both structurally and linguistically. Clavigo (1774) was largely
written, within the space of a week or so (Eckermann, 11. 3. 28) from the
newly published early Mémoires (1773–4) of the mercurial French courtier
Beaumarchais, and despite Goethe’s apparent satisfaction with the piece
as a rule-obeying counterpoint to Götz, and the rather different nuances of
character he introduces, the action of the first four Acts is fairly close to,
and in places almost a translation of Beaumarchais’ description: Goethe
curiously justifies this appropriation of chronicle material by reference
to the way Shakespeare practised it (Eckermann, 10. 4. 29). In the play,
Beaumarchais’ sister Marie is abandoned by the unscrupulous careerist
Clavigo at the court of Madrid; Beaumarchais succeeds in pressuring him
into a recommitment, but the lovesick Marie dies after Clavigo’s friend
convinces him to rescind the relationship once more for ambition’s sake.
The scene in Act 5 where Clavigo steals from his house at night and comes
across the torchlight vigil for his betrothed Marie, and has to ask who
the deceased is, before being run through by Beaumarchais, is obviously
indebted to Hamlet’s encounter with Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral (5. 1)
in Shakespeare’s play.19 Clavigo presents us with a further triangle of iden-
tification involving Goethe, one of his fictional characters, and one of
Shakespeare’s. The implicitly evolving relationship to Shakespeare him-
self, as the fourth party, remained for the moment a project rather than a
direct corollary, a project whose realization would demand forms of con-
frontation that went far beyond the compass of drama itself.
Weimar
Largely on account of the interest inspired by the international acclaim of
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe was invited as a guest to Weimar by the
future Duke Carl August. Soon after his arrival in November 1775 came
the opportunity to seek formal appointment and long-term patronage for
his literary activities. Wieland, whose Shakespeare translations and cosmo-
politan novelistic work had also attracted the attention of the ducal family
of Saxe-Weimar, had preceded Goethe as an appointee, and been made
tutor to Carl August and his brother in 1772.
Goethe, now in his mid-20s, quickly became a boon-companion and men-
tor to the young prince, and shared heartily in his youthful revels, rags and
outrages. It was looking back on this first period at Weimar, which Goethe
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 57
It is clear that in these years – from the mid-1770s through till the mid-
1780s – Goethe perceived his life, in some small part at least, as a re-
enactment of Shakespearean scenarios, and not for the last time.
Falstaff Fragments
Doubtless also stemming from Goethe’s early Weimar years, we have two
fragmentary scenes of a Falstaff drama.22 Of the phases of Falstaff’s career
in Shakespeare’s plays Goethe chooses that of the newly fallen Falstaff of
the end of Henry IV, after Hal’s accession to the throne and the banishing
of his old friend. Goethe’s first fragment sees Bardolph talking to Poins;
they and the still sleeping Falstaff are already in ‘banishment’, languishing
in a London prison. Bardolph and Poins commiserate with each other and
bemoan Falstaff’s plight, though not abandoning hope that another change
of the princely heart will see them recalled. Falstaff – who is referred to as
Silenus – awakens. But it is the second fragment where Goethe begins to
show more substantial originality of conception: the catechism of honour
with which Falstaff holds forth in Shakespeare is replaced by a more earthy
doctrine: that of the rational body (which sensibly demands its food, drink
and sleep) and the irrational soul with its superfluous demands. It seems
that Goethe may have intended to propound a more frankly epicurean phi-
losophy in his Falstaff, as against the genuinely multivalent, partly hypocrit-
ical, partly sincere shades of character in which Shakespeare paints the old
knight. Yet in Poetry and Truth, Goethe would recall originally having been
especially taken with ‘the humoristic features’ (HA 9: 493) of Shakespeare,
and Goethe’s riotous rendition of Henry IV to the court theatre23 (presum-
ably in early 1792) suggests that this edge to his admiration had not dulled
in the meantime: one wonders, therefore, whether the philosophical integ-
rity of such a ‘rationalized’ Falstaff would have meant sacrificing those
junctures of moral vacillation which make Shakespeare’s mercurial rogue
58 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
part of the preparation for his own adaptation and staging of the play, com-
pares Goethe’s crowd scenes with Shakespeare’s as a glowing compliment,29
though of course the suggestion of imitation is also implicitly an accusation
of compromised originality – and this from a man who even a decade later
would not shy from quoting Shakespeare virtually verbatim in his own dra-
matic works! The review marks, as one might expect, a low point in the rela-
tionships between Schiller and Goethe (and by no means the only one), but
Goethe’s writing throughout the 1790s evidently draws important lessons
from it. Goethe, despite the scuffle, remained justly unrepentant of having
given his work this Shakespearean dimension, though one should not over-
look the important differences in the motivation and execution of those
scenes: Goethe’s crowd-member types are highly individualized and histori-
cally very specific, and despite their shortcomings they are presented as the
salt of the earth, the bearers of the traditional culture whose ancient rights
and liberties Goethe’s Egmont committed himself to protect; Shakespeare’s
poorly individualized rabble was presented as craven, avaricious, vacillat-
ing and hardly worthy of the godsend of such a ruler as Caesar. Goethe,
by injecting more detailed individualism into his commoners, had taken
his crowd further towards an acknowledgement of their political worthi-
ness, and certainly a good way away from the faceless choric host in another
of the step-progeny of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Herder’s musical drama
Brutus of 1774 (SWS 28: 52–68). Quite apart from the crowd-scene issues,
however, there are in Egmont clear reminiscences of memorable lines from
Shakespeare’s play. Brutus’ simple yet sublime speech on freedom – for
good reason a firm favourite of Voltaire’s30 – is both mentioned and echoed
in the soliloquy by Egmont’s hopeless amatory rival Fritz Brackenburg at
the end of the first Act, when he dejectedly compares past and present: ‘As
a schoolboy I was quite a different lad! When an exercise was set: “Brutus’
freedom-speech, for practice in oratory”; then Fritz was always first’ (1. 3;
HA 4: 388); Brutus’ own early remark about Casca springs to mind:
In another example from earlier in the same scene, Caesar says to Antony:
Vansen: . . . See, the tall duke gives you the very impression of a cross-
spider, not a fatbellied one, those are less hazardous, but of one of those
longlegged lean-bodied ones, that doesn’t get fat from its eating. (Egmont
4. 1; HA 4: 420)
And there is some truth in the notion that in the 1770s the Shakespearean
content of at least Goethe’s drama was largely restricted to those plays, for
the other plays of the 1770s show little sign of Shakespearean influence. With
the belated completion of Egmont, Shakespeare’s influence on Goethe’s
drama not so much entered, as already found itself in an ongoing lull,
for the other two major plays of Goethe’s first period in Weimar, Torquato
Tasso and Iphigenie auf Tauris, largely dispense with any psychological and
situational inspiration from the English playwright. On the one hand, how-
ever, the slack was (as we shall see) more than taken up by Goethe’s prose
writings, and, on the other hand, it is not quite true to say that Tasso and
Iphigenie entirely turn away from the influence of Shakespeare, in that they
are cast in blank verse.
Wilhelm Meister
As the Shakespearean influence on Goethe’s dramatic œuvre gradually
ebbed in Weimar in the course of the late 1770s and early 1780s in favour of
Greco-Roman inspiration, his continued experimentation with narrative
prose would, however, bring a further surge of Shakespearean fascination,
62 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
A Midsummer Night’s Dream) in Weimar: the telos for his new biographical
mission was, for the time being, decided.35
The story of the Theatrical Mission begins with a description of Wilhelm’s
childhood and school years, which are dominated by the blossoming of
his interest in the theatre: like Goethe himself at a tender age, Wilhelm
is given a puppet theatre, comes across and studies avidly a number of
books, practises taking roles and gradually becomes estranged from the
idea of following his father’s profession – that of a trader, in Wilhelm’s
case.36 The outside romantic interests of Wilhelm’s mother make for an
unsettled home life that only serves to encourage Wilhelm’s gravitation
towards the theatre: it becomes his obsession. Wilhelm meets a calculating,
dubiously affianced actress, Mariane, they fall in love, and he decides that
he must eventually leave his family and become a star actor in a national
theatre: disappointment ensues on both fronts. At one point Wilhelm’s
brother-in-law Werner, now in charge of the family business, sends him on
tour as a debt collector, in the course of which he enjoys various theatrical
experiences, embraces the Aristotelian idea of tragedy as a catharsis of
the passions, and meets some performance artists. He is particularly fas-
cinated by the young androgynous girl Mignon who has been bought by a
band of players from a tightrope-walking troupe to save her from the whip-
pings she received from her previous masters. Wilhelm supports the com-
pany financially. One of his own plays, Belshazar, is performed, in which it
becomes clear (as an observer tells Wilhelm) that here is a man who knows
his own heart, but little of the world beyond it. Unexpectedly Wilhelm has
to step in to play the lead role at the first performance, and does so with
great success. But the troupe leaders abscond with Wilhelm’s money, leav-
ing Mignon to his care. Together with a beguiling and promiscuous actress
called Philine, who has managed to seduce Wilhelm, he travels onward
with the pretentious but disillusioned actor Melina and wife, and Mignon,
resolving (with some difficulty) to avoid further sexual entanglements,
including approaches from Melina’s wife. They pick up a melancholic
harper whose music enchants Wilhelm, but notwithstanding his commit-
ment to care for Mignon, Wilhelm realizes that he is in bad company with
these actors. Nonetheless, torn between the many possibilities he is faced
with, he decides to abandon the debt collecting, and they find employ for
some weeks at a count’s palace. After being pressed by the count to stage
a sycophantic scenario for the adulation of a visiting prince, and praise
Racine for the prince’s benefit, Wilhelm is reminded by the courtier and
man of the world Jarno (a figure in some ways reminiscent of Herder) of
the worthlessness of both his theatre and its rewards. Jarno introduces him
64 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
hand on even the early career of his novelistic avatar Wilhelm Meister. It is
common critical wisdom that Goethe, with his constantly evolving views
on theatre’s role in the great scheme of things, had decided that the stage
of drama could not be coextensive with the stage of life, and that Meister’s
further progress in the world of affairs should be made to follow after his
scuffle with Shakespeare. It is, however, also very likely that, for Goethe,
even the Shakespeare who embodied the pivotal moment of that career
would need to be a Shakespeare deeply understood, and not one frivo-
lously superseded, of whom Goethe’s reading public would all too soon see
the better. Having recently seen a number of brave but somewhat rough-
and-ready productions of Shakespeare, and well aware of the scale of the
challenges with which Shakespeare confronted German culture, Goethe’s
confidence in his grasp of those plays may still have been prudently muted
at this point. Further inspiration on that front was not quick in coming, and
Wilhelm Meister was thoughtfully shelved.
Indeed, many developments would intervene between this and Goethe’s
reprise of the material in the 1790s. The most momentous was his Italian
Journey. Although of course it brought Goethe to the real settings (Venice,
Verona, Rome) of a few of Shakespeare’s dramas, and into the more gen-
eral geographic environs of several, the overall project of the journey was
not to re-experience fictional settings by a romantic re-projection onto
reality, but rather to see and do things at first hand: his experience of
nature, the human environment and available works of art in Italy reflects
this in various ways. The dramas that were reworked in Italy (Iphigenie auf
Tauris, Torquato Tasso) certainly illustrate that immediacy, and the audible
ancestors within these plays are predominantly those of classical antiquity
and the Italian (rather than Elizabethan) Renaissance.
The Weimar-Jena scene to which Goethe returned in late 1788 was also
soon to become the haunt of his younger colleague and budding dramatic
theorist Schiller, and from this era, and indeed up till Schiller’s death, we
find various testimonies to the two Olympians’ downplaying of the cen-
trality of acting, and to their devaluing of the role of reality in theatre.43
Theatrical illusion was to be worn on the sleeve rather than totally over-
come in the excellence of performance: the playwright’s manipulation
of reality was to be overt in the theatre, and appreciated and admired
in its own right – though no very coherent theoretical justification for
these ideas was ever mounted by either proponent. The subscript is clear
enough, however: despite the rise of a new generation of brilliant actors,
the playwright’s cerebral poetic vision is king, not some petty visual/audi-
tory experience.
68 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
king, putting Denmark’s future and his dynastic fate in jeopardy, whereas
Wilhelm’s grey attire was merely due to his being cuckolded by a tawdry
actress, the cause of Wilhelm’s misogyny is his own gullibility rather than
any grand Hamletic grudge (indeed his Mariane-grudge is quite weak-
kneed even at its height); Wilhelm’s observed foolishness is neither witty
nor feigned for any great purpose, but simply arises from his being duped
and imperceptive; far from pursuing a fate, Wilhelm merely lets himself be
wafted along in an aimless, often hypocritical fashion; despite being the
most obvious Hamletic ‘plant’, Wilhelm’s colleague Laertes has nothing
whatever in common with his Shakespearean namesake, beyond the fact
of being assigned his character in a performance; the grand and fateful
piratic kidnapping of Hamlet becomes in Wilhelm Meister a case of walk-
ing gormlessly into an armed robbery of which he has been specifically
warned; the wounding of Wilhelm and Laertes by the robbers while they
have been practising fencing for the final Hamlet scene is an almost comical
remix, a pastiche of plot elements from the play (despite being armed to
the hilt, the two were powerless to defend themselves in reality); similarly,
the later elements of suicide and death among the other characters of the
Apprenticeship Years, though interpretable as parallels, were clearly intended
by Goethe to bear little meaningful comparison to their exemplars in
Shakespeare’s play. Like those deliberately chimerical destiny omens which
would litter the pages of the Elective Affinities, all these correspondences are
certainly intended to be taken with a large grain of salt as part of the basic
message of the Apprenticeship Years: a warning against misguided fatalism.
Despite correction on the point by various individuals, Wilhelm persis-
tently interprets the forces of fate as ruling his own life in much the same
way he (equally misguidedly) interprets them as ruling Hamlet’s.
After Wilhelm is told of his father’s death by Werner, and offered joint
proprietorship of the firm, the central parts of the fifth book are now
devoted to Wilhelm’s confrontation with Hamlet in the context of Serlo’s
theatre: a confrontation of criticism, of performance and intimate experi-
ence of the play’s parabolic content. The exposition of Wilhelm’s interpre-
tation remains much what it was in the Mission. Here too, Wilhelm initially
echoes the young Herder (and the younger Goethe) by insisting on a virtu-
ally unadapted text as script.48 With managerial prudence, however, Serlo
also draws on Herder’s views in his ethnological argument to the effect that
the Elizabethan spectators for whom Shakespeare’s plays were written were
more culturally primitive than the theatregoers of the city of H. Wilhelm,
whose independent force of will and aesthetic judgement are here no
more formidable than in the Mission, is persuaded astonishingly quickly
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 71
also urges him to embrace a more worldly employment than the theatre
(3. 11) (HA 7: 179–81, 193). Werner, Mignon, Herr C., the Countess and
finally the ghost figure also tell Wilhelm in various ways to drop the the-
atre: Shakespeare was for learning from, not for emulating! Wilhelm only
gradually comes to understand this in the aftermath of the novel’s great
turning point, the performance of Hamlet.
What then are we to make of Goethe’s own implicit relationships to his
Wilhelm and their Hamlet? What kind of life catharsis could Wilhelm pos-
sibly undergo by performing Hamlet under such delusory auspices? The
later books of the Apprenticeship Years, concerning the Tower Society and
various later figurations of Wilhelm’s character, have been questioned (by
Boyle and many others) regarding their seriousness as an answer to ques-
tions of life trajectory; could it be that the Hamlet episode is an equally
red herring? Goethe’s opinions on Hamlet, and indeed on Shakespeare, as
we shall see, vacillate in various ways for the remainder of his life, and it is
not at all easy to answer these questions of irony raised by Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship Years. Despite the much lamp-oil and acribia expended hith-
erto on the Apprenticeship Years, there seems, to this day, to be no stable
consensus on its bottom line: even on whether or not it is indeed a classic
exposition of Bildung! It is hard to ignore the possibility, then, that the
many imitators and ridiculers of Wilhelm Meister’s progress have under-
estimated the irony of Goethe’s ultimate intentions with Wilhelm Meister,
and that the greatest persifleur of Wilhelm’s delusions is Goethe himself.
Goethe’s and Schiller’s own further effort would go into ensuring inof-
fensive, linear plot and almost unity-observant plays whose heroes and
villains cut a rather more courtworthy and less metaphysically disturbing
figure than the Shakespearean originals. Starting promptly with King John
in 1791, and following with a suitably sanitized remix of Henry IV, Goethe
and Schiller were certainly mindful of the role theatre was expected to
play in a hereditary autocratic ducal court: enlightened culture bolstering
the values of rational good behaviour and shunning any of the perturba-
tion that had so regrettably unhinged the politics and society of neigh-
bouring France in these years. This represented of course, especially for
Schiller, a marked change of heart over his earlier cast of thought, but the
theory of drama on which he was engaged was indeed, for all its venera-
tion of the poet’s importance, a teleological scheme aimed at rationally
educated social stability. From this it becomes obvious how little scope
there was for any deep Shakespearean commitment in their repertoire or
the manner of its delivery: in this mannered neoclassical paradise, actors
were expected to wear their illusionistic credentials on their sleeves, and
the roaring chaos of reality – internal and external – was to be kept primly
pruned (edited out if necessary) and in any case firmly at bay. Little sur-
prise then, that after the initial spate of plays Shakespeare had to wait
another three years for his next run on the Weimar stage (Schröder’s
anaemically bourgeois second rewrite of Hamlet in 1795, and King Lear
in 1796) – and yet another four for the one after that (Macbeth in 1800).
The spirit of all these productions, from what is known of their scripts,
seems profoundly anti-Shakespearean, and one might wonder what it was
that sustained any desire to persist with the bard at all under such cir-
cumstances. Yet the answer is not far to seek: due to Germany’s increased
exposure to actual translations of Shakespeare during the 70s and 80s,
the Voltairean argument had evaporated, Shakespeare’s reputation as
the international pinnacle of the art could no longer be avoided and all
major theatres – Vienna, Hamburg, Leipzig, Mannheim – saw themselves
constrained to host his work in whatever manner they could; the most
unflappably traditionalist audience could not overlook the new depth
and breadth of human character which Shakespeare, even an editorially
ransacked Shakespeare, brought them, and no dramatic poet worth his
salt could now ignore the wealth of resources that the Englishman’s work
offered – and none did. The magnum opus of Goethe’s mature years would
eventually reveal its full debt to Shakespeare, and Schiller’s return to play-
writing in the late nineties already presents us with a seamless continua-
tion of Shakespearean influence.
74 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Hamlet, but during most of the second half of this decade the formalization
of his marriage, various scientific work, lesser items on the Weimar theatre
repertoire, the novel Elective Affinities, the beginnings of an autobiogra-
phy and the steady escalation of conflict with Napoleonic France took up
much of Goethe’s time. Goethe met Napoleon in personal audience: the
first figure of such historic stature that Goethe had encountered and was
quite deeply taken with him. As Goethe must have been aware, this was his
first real encounter with the kind of grand political desire that inhabited
a number of Shakespeare’s historical plays, but the turmoil of these years
did nothing to whet Goethe’s taste for the harsh and lingering chaotic con-
sequences of that desire, and this is reflected nowhere more clearly than in
his next Shakespeare project, a stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
The idea of adapting Romeo and Juliet for the contemporary German stage
had been with Goethe at least since October 1767, when he mentioned
such a plan to his university friend Behrisch after being disappointed with
Christian Felix Weisse’s version of the drama. After sporadic diary-entries
in his later years mentioning discussions of Romeo and Juliet with various
interlocutors, 56 Goethe was finally moved to take on the task of produc-
ing a revised Romeo and Juliet from the fifth of December to Christmas
Day 1811. Goethe produced the version by conflation and adaptation of
(and sometimes detectable improvement on) the Wieland, Eschenburg
and A. W. Schlegel texts, and his intention is most clearly stated in a note
to Friedrich Schlegel: he simply wanted to ‘concentrate’ the play’s action by
removing everything that was extraneous to its central story (WA 4. 2. 327).
This, however, meant the excision of some 46 per cent of Shakespeare’s
lines (including two-thirds of the first Act), extensive remodelling, and
the addition of 488 verses of Goethe’s own to the play as a whole.57 Was it
merely practicality, or the frisson of counterfeit immortality in seeing such
a quantity of one’s own verses performed as ‘Shakespeare’? The character
of Mercutio, who is in Shakespeare a strong and effective worldly coun-
terfoil to Romeo, is dismissed by Goethe as a kind of extraneous clown or
Falstaff-type character, and thus given rather shorter shrift in the adapta-
tion. As in many other Shakespeare versions of the age, audience foibles
were pandered to with a reconciliation of the two families at the end, pre-
sumably in the attempt to ‘harmonize’ the elements of the play, as Goethe
repeatedly phrased it.58 The overall effect of removing many of the scenes
76 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
which reflect on the feud and the romance from various points of view, is to
depersonalize the overarching conflict. The removal of one or two scenes of
high emotion (such as the parents’ reaction at Juliet’s supposed death, in 4.
4) again detracts from the presentation of the objective effect of the news,
the social ‘imbeddedness’ of the action, and reminds one of the objections
of Goethe’s German predecessors to raw, untrammelled emotion on stage.
The admixture of humour, relatively common in Shakespeare but severely
pilloried by the French and (in deference to Voltaire in particular) even
the more sympathetic of Goethe’s predecessors, is now eliminated by the
omission of material such as the end of that same scene (4. 4), a bantering
exchange between Peter and the musicians. These changes and the over-
whelmingly rhymed character of Goethe’s additions bring the tone of parts
of the play into the almost sing-song ‘Voltairean’ orbit: just the kind of
de-Shakespeareanizing treatment that Wilhelm Meister and the younger
Goethe had initially deplored, and – to be less charitable – perhaps even
bearing comparison with the kind of unity-observing simplification to
which Christian Felix Weisse had subjected the play! But this was no symp-
tom of sudden change in Goethe’s thinking on Shakespeare: interestingly,
Goethe once again more or less used Herder’s theory of temporal and
geographical specificity to justify the deletions, saying that what he cut
was just the disharmonious dross that Shakespeare was forced to include
by English taste of those times, 59 and one might well read the result as a
specimen of the very type of treatment that the narrator of Wilhelm Meister’s
Years of Apprenticeship had coyly promised for Hamlet, but the author had not
delivered. Yet there remained even now, as there would always remain, a
seed of the old reverence in Goethe’s mind, the awareness that – howsoever
successfully – he was ephemerally tinkering with the work of an ungrasp-
able genius:
This work was a great study for me, and I have probably never looked
more deeply into Shakespear’s [sic] talent, but he, like all ultimate things,
remains after all unfathomable. (HABr 3: 177)
exercise, though the literary uses to which he subsequently put his under-
standing of Shakespeare might leave one wondering what the scrupulous
pruning was for: the sprawling pyroclastic flows of Faust II would be the
next major receptors for this newfound ‘concision and discipline’.
Before we examine the influence of Shakespeare on Goethe’s later
work and thought, it may be best to pause to consider to what stature
Shakespeare had grown more generally in Germany by this time. As one
would expect, there are various marginal remarks on this question in let-
ters and reviews by the major German Shakespearean intellectuals them-
selves, but a less ‘professionally involved’ view from an outsider might better
serve here as testimony. There are numerous memoirs by Englishman who
visited Germany around these years (for since the turn of the century it
was Goethe and Schiller who had set the bon ton for the English literary
elite), but this brief account from William Jacob, the merchant, scientist
and parliamentarian with no more than a polite interest in letters, may be
taken to speak for the many:
century there was a theoretical debate going on, both in Goethe’s mind
and in public, concerning England’s greatest literary export, namely, the
whole nature of Shakespeare’s genius. Was it truly universal literary genius,
or somehow culturally limited, a provincially British phenomenon? Was
Shakespeare a genius of the theatre itself, or merely of dramatic poetry?
These questions had in various ways already been implicit in the to-and-
fro of earlier German views about Shakespeare’s stageability, cultural
compatibility and rank among the other great European dramatists, but
in the new century these issues took on a more personal significance for
Goethe: he was himself a figure on the world literary stage, and German
Romanticism, which eventually found itself in competition with much of
what Goethe stood for, had a bardology of its own. Since Shakespeare’s
Europe-wide reputation had meanwhile exceeded all precedented bounds,
nothing could have been more predictable than that the Romantics and
the Weimar school should place conflicting claims on him and fight over
his posterity, and so they did.
For Goethe, the most troublesome element of the Romantic claim on
Shakespeare was undoubtedly this same, inexhaustible August Wilhelm
Schlegel. By the turn of the century he had placed the Shakespeare-reading
German public deeply in his debt by producing a classic prosodic transla-
tion of seventeen of the plays, and by its quality set a new benchmark for
the art of translation itself; by an astonishing depth, and breadth, and con-
stant expansion of philological grasp he had also (as Goethe well knew)61
made the world of literary criticism his own. On the other hand, there was
Ludwig Tieck’s minute knowledge of the plays and editions of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries,62 though this mastery of detail went hand in hand
with an apparently arbitrary anti-rational line in regard to Shakespeare’s
status and the dating of his plays. Both critics saw Shakespeare as repre-
senting a synthesis of poetry and nation, a status they were not willing to
accord to Goethe.
achieves this not by the action in his plays but by the extraordinarily com-
municative nature of his characters’ language. A more seasoned present-day
connoisseur of Shakespeare would probably point out that the additional
depth in spoken content certainly further potentiates the action of the
plays, but that this action itself (both acted and reported) is for precisely
that reason all the more eloquent! Goethe’s emphasis on the cerebral ele-
ment of the plays in this essay is in fact the first move in a strategy to rede-
fine Shakespeare as ‘closet drama’:
There is no more sublime and no purer pleasure than to close your eyes
and have one of Shakespeare’s plays recited (not declaimed) to you by a
naturally appropriate voice. (HA 12: 289)
own) size’. His inspiration for this ‘closet Shakespeare’ may even have been
taken from the lips of Hamlet:
I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was,
not above once; for the play, I remember, pleas’d not the million, ‘twas
caviary to the general. but it was – as I receiv’d it, and others whose judg-
ments in such matters cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well
digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning.
(Hamlet, 2. 2. 434–40)
yet in this, one should ponder whether here precisely this impressive for-
eign element, this talent sublimated to the point of untruth, must be harm-
ful to German cultural education. . . . How much falsehood Shakespeare
and particularly Calderon have subjected us to, how these two great lights
of the poetic firmament have become ignes fatui for us, let the writers of
the future note in retrospect. (HA 8: 479)
Faust
The monumental drama Faust is these days undoubtedly the work for which
Goethe is most widely regarded in the world at large, and on its two Parts
he expended vast amounts of thought, time and energy at various periods
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 83
in his long adult life. The question of its Shakespearean credentials may
be thought to pale alongside the long ranks of other earlier authors whose
influence is detectable therein, from Homer through the Greek tragedians
and comedians, through most of the major literary veins of the classical,
mediaeval and modern European world as Goethe knew it. But there are,
as we shall see, a number of cardinal features in the conception of Goethe’s
Faust which mark the metaphysical mutineer out in a clear line of descent
from the Shakespearean heritage.
Goethe’s long-term fascination with Faust bore its first fruit in the Sturm
und Drang years 1772–5 with the so-called Urfaust, a version of the Gretchen
tragedy which would later become Part I of the final work; whether it was
the rarefied sociopolitical climate of Weimar, or some other factor which
suddenly caused him to shelve the work is hard to say. Upon his return from
Italy, during the years 1788–90, Goethe wrote a further Faust ‘Fragment’,
a poetically more refined draft of this material. From 1797 to 1805 he pro-
duced what is now Part I of Faust. Eine Tragödie, of whose twenty-eight scenes
(plus dedicatory poem) about half had been significantly remodelled since
the Urfaust, or added, including the Prologue in Heaven, the Prelude in
the Theatre, most of the first scene in Faust’s Study, the Witch’s Kitchen,
the Walpurgis Night scene and the Walpurgis Night’s Dream. Since 1800,
when Goethe drafted some vital sections from what would eventually be
Act 3 of Part 2, it was clear that the Faust being written in these years was
destined to be only the first part of a play of far greater magnitude and
conceptual scope. The bulk of the work on Part 2 was only taken up again
in 1825, and finished in 1831, the year before Goethe’s death at the age of
eighty-two.
An important innovation in Goethe’s treatment of the Faust legend
and its materials is that, following the early university drama and devil’s-
pact scenes, he combines the scene of rejuvenation-by-witchcraft with a
supernatural premonition of an encounter with absolute beauty: it is a
vision of Helen of Troy, whom Goethe (like Marlowe67 and some of the
other antecedents) conjures up later in Part 2 of the tragedy, in con-
nection with his grand fantasies of political power. In Goethe this pre-
monition is a mysterious kind of mission statement. The remainder of
Part 1 primarily features the expansion of the rejuvenated Faust’s ama-
tory episode into a bourgeois social tragedy, the seduction of the young
local girl Gretchen, her family’s ruination, her pregnancy and (in Faust’s
absence) subsequent infanticide, imprisonment and death sentence.
While on a fantastical junket to a debauched witches’ sabbath gathering
on St Walburga’s Eve (Walpurgis Night), Faust is deliberately exposed
84 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
‘on the mazard’, as soon as we even flick through a copy of Faust, is indeed
its multiplicity of historical time frames, characters and highly disparate
scenes, forty-five in all, many of them very long in dramatic terms. It
is Shakespearean formal liberty taken to a grand extreme, about as far
from the unities of time, place and (according to many critics) action68
as one can get, there is indeed the impression of the ‘planlessness’ of
which Shakespeare had also been accused. In riding roughshod over the
dramaturgical rules of the day in this way, Goethe may well have seen
himself as placing his trust in the same exuberance which had brought
some of Shakespeare’s greatest triumphs. Moreover, there are, in this sig-
nally non-Shakespearean fable of Faust, a number of details which show
that Shakespeare was indeed intermittently on Goethe’s mind during the
composition of the work.
The theatre director whom we see in Goethe’s ‘Prelude in the Theatre’
is a relatively uncommon character to have in a play,69 though Hamlet,
and Peter Quince from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are among the few who
carry out that role. The physical detail of the theatre in Goethe’s Prelude
(‘the posts, the boards have been erected,’ ‘our stall’, ‘the narrow portal of
grace’, ‘the ticket counter’) also recalls the theatre’s physical form referred
to in the prologue of Henry V: ‘this unworthy scaffold’, ‘this cockpit’, ‘this
wooden O’, ‘in little place’, ‘these walls’ (10–19). In thematizing the the-
atre in this way, far beyond the mere use of a narrator or prologue reader,
Goethe was consciously putting his drama in a very specific tradition of
which Shakespeare was the pre-eminent exponent, and the aim of their
gesture here was ultimately the same: where Shakespeare’s chorus implores
the audience to extrapolate to grandeur according to the imaginative prin-
ciple he has reiterated, Goethe’s director is urging his troupe to maximize
the effect and do justice to the magnitude of the material, exceeding even
Shakespeare’s ‘vasty fields of France’:
Goethe even used the name Valentine for Gretchen’s brother, who con-
fronts Faust and Mephistopheles immediately after the song, and remarked
to Eckermann on 18 January 1825:
Conclusion
Happy am I that, though time is running out, I still live at a time when it
is possible for me to understand him; and when you, my friend, who feel
and recognise yourself in reading his dramas, and whom I have embraced
more than once before his sacred image, can still dream the sweet dream
worthy of your powers, that one day you will raise a monument to him
here in our degenerate country, drawn from our age of chivalry and writ-
ten in our own language.75
It was of course far from Goethe’s only achievement, and had that not been
so, there would of course have been no monument to speak of. But how did
Goethe feel that it had succeeded, this raising of a monument?
In May 1825 he said to Eckermann: ‘If I could say for what all I am
indebted to great predecessors and contemporaries, then that would not
leave much.’76 As to who might have been the chief practical contributors,
we may guess from his biography; as to who might have been the most
enduring influences on his work, we could simply begin with those hon-
oured in his own reflective poem of as late as 1820:
this impression. From our perspective of much later literary history – for
a rather greater span of years has now elapsed since Goethe’s death than
stood between Shakespeare’s death and Goethe’s birth – and being pri-
marily engaged, as we are here, to highlight Goethe’s relationships with
and debt to Shakespeare, we might be inclined to suspect ourselves of an
exaggeration of the intensity or importance of these relationships. But this
poem would seem to confirm from the poet’s own lips the spirit and weight
of what we have said here concerning Goethe the Shakespearean. Nor,
on closer inspection, did Goethe’s fundamental veneration of Shakespeare
change significantly: the discussion with Eckermann on 2 January 1824
represents an explanation of how it was possible for at least a German not
to be overawed and inhibited from writing in the wake of such a breathtak-
ing genius:
Again, even in the midst of garnering the second edition for the Journeyman’s
Years, Goethe starts from the assumption of Shakespeare’s stupendous
achievement, and only begins to trammel this impression – once again
using his own version of Herder’s anthropological view – when it comes to
90 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Just let someone try, with human desire and human strength, to produce
something that one could set alongside the creations that bear the
name of Mozart, Raphael or Shakespeare. I well know that these are not
the only ones and that in all areas of art innumerable excellent minds
have been at work who have produced things every bit as good as those
named just now. But if they were as great as those figures, then they
exceeded the common run of human nature to that same extent, and
were just as divinely gifted as them. (Eckermann, 2. 1. 24)
via the uptake of Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays, also largely inspired the
rise of wider European interest in Shakespeare and conditioned the prog-
ress of poetic, dramatic and operatic Romanticism in those countries,80
though in Italy, for example, no actual play of Shakespeare’s would be per-
formed in public until 1842,81 and the full blossom of public enthusiasm
for Shakespeare would follow almost a century behind that in Germany.
The details of these movements after Goethe’s death have been examined
by other scholars, but the transmission and reception patterns of these
middle decades of the nineteenth century show that Goethe and those
around him had a decisive input in the process of Shakespeare’s rise on
mainland Europe through the remainder of that century. In some small
part at least, Goethe did indeed repay his debt to Shakespeare.
Chapter 3
Section A
Introduction
When Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) published his translation
of Shakespeare’s plays (Zurich 1762–6)2 he gave his informed readers
one of their fi rst opportunities to discover in depth a dramatist whom
they had previously known mainly through indirect translations of
English sources. French second-hand translations of English texts, far
from being a mere curiosity in eighteenth-century Europe, were the rule
rather than the exception. By the time the fi rst volume of Wieland’s
translation was published, containing Alexander Pope’s Preface to his
edition (1725), A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear, there had been
references to Shakespeare in German critical discussions for more than
three-quarters of a century. Despite several mentions of Shakespeare,
there is no convincing evidence that any writer or scholar, not even the
major literary critics Johann Christoph Gottsched, the Leipzig professor
and man of letters, or his Zurich counterparts Johann Jakob Bodmer and
Johann Jakob Breitinger, had actually read a play by him before Caspar
Wilhelm von Borcke’s version of Julius Caesar appeared in 1741. From
the early 1740s on, his name passed more frequently into the stream of
critical discourse. During the 1740s and 1750s, he figured repeatedly in
the debates that were taking stock of the national cultural and literary
achievement, past and present. The discussions confronted the question
August Wilhelm Schlegel 93
Viewed from the perspective of later in the eighteenth century and beyond,
it is easy to see Wieland’s translation as merely one element in the inexo-
rable surge of German and Continental interest in Shakespeare. But con-
sidering the literary situation of his day, it is evident that Wieland was the
one who made Shakespeare accessible to a wider circle of German read-
ers. Before 1762, Shakespeare was known, but only superficially. Nearly
all German critics from Gottsched to Lessing had made use of him as an
abstract idea, as a counterforce to the canons of French neoclassicism.
Johann Elias Schlegel’s review of Borcke’s Cäsar in 1741 remained more
than twenty years later the only detailed analysis of a Shakespeare play in
German. Thus, Wieland deserves credit not only for offering the German
public a more convenient way of reading the English poet but also the very
first detailed account of his plays.
It is instructive to view Wieland’s Shakespeare translation from the per-
spective of the period immediately preceding it, as well as to consider the
way our understanding of Wieland’s achievement has been shaped through
the readings of the generations following him. Later critical reactions saw
little more than historical interest in Wieland’s translation and failed to
98 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
appreciate its aesthetic qualities. With this went a condescension that the
texts themselves did not justify.22
The most striking and disconcerting characteristic of Wieland’s
Shakespeare is that the plays were rendered in prose. Wieland used this
medium to represent all of Shakespeare’s multiple formal features, prose,
blank verse and rhyme. Only A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the first play he
translated, is in blank verse, but with very little of the rhyme so character-
istic of that play. Wieland had been among the pioneers in introducing
blank verse into the German drama (Lady Johanna Gray, 1758) and was
thus clearly aware of Shakespeare’s formal qualities and their beauties. His
decision to work in the medium of prose in twenty-one of the twenty-two
plays that he translated was not forced on him, nor did he lack a facil-
ity with verse. It implies instead a feeling that the essential elements of
Shakespeare’s plays could be reproduced in prose.
There was as yet but scant notion of a fully integrated text, and Wieland
set a new standard of fidelity. Given the proportions and the difficulties
of Wieland’s task and his other simultaneous literary projects,23 it is little
wonder Wieland sometimes felt as if he were performing the labours of
Hercules.24 The only French translations of Shakespeare at the time, by
Pierre Antoine de La Place, had used frequent summaries to fill in the
plot between scenes translated in full, a widespread practice at the time.
One of the most widely available versions of Shakespeare in England and
in Germany was William Dodd’s (1729–77) collection of highlights, The
Beauties of Shakespear (1752). Another model was an ‘analytic’ version, simi-
lar to Père Brumoy’s celebrated Théâtre des Grecs (1730). But Wieland chose
none of these. Whatever his merits as a translator – and opinions here
remain divided – Wieland did tackle plays that even the great Schlegel
never attempted, like Othello or King Lear or a problematic comedy like
Measure for Measure. His verse translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
puts the ‘fairy way of writing’ in the forefront and counters La Place’s and
Lessing’s emphases on the terrible and monstrous in Shakespeare. True,
he was not assisted by using Warburton’s faulty edition, but that was in
itself a sign of the times.25
Goethe in 1813, some fi fty years later, describing the initial reception of
Wieland’s Shakespeare,26 claims that Wieland’s use of prose rather than
verse was effective in resolving intricate problems inherent in the very pro-
cess of translation and that it enabled him to reach a learned readership.
He implies that prose provided readers with a general understanding of
the text and a common idiom. Goethe is praising Wieland here, but he
uses much the same language as Wieland’s detractors and employs the
August Wilhelm Schlegel 99
Eschenburg’s Translation
of them conceived for the theatre,33 until Schlegel’s version started coming
out in 1797–1801.
* * *
Section B
of the Shakespearean text than the English. They had the oldest and most
active society devoted to Shakespeare (1864, and still going strong).43
This was a process that had set in before Schlegel stepped into promi-
nence as a Shakespearean. Whereas Wieland and Eschenburg were def-
erential towards English Shakespeare editors and commentators and (in
the case of Eschenburg) produced a kind of digest of their insights, the
younger generation that included Herder showed growing impatience and
exasperation with Augustan Shakespeare criticism. It might be better than
the French, but it was too hedged around with qualifications, too circum-
spect, too unwilling to face the full blast of the Shakespearean text. Almost
nothing of it was translated into German after William Richardson’s study
of Shakespeare’s characters. Instead, it would be necessary, as Herder did,
to relate Shakespeare to the largest of human issues, to historical processes
on the widest of scales, the natural rise and fall occasioned by ‘forces’ in
mankind’s development, to creative urges. The young Goethe’s develop-
ment as a Shakespearean is informed by such thinking. Where they discuss
character, they relate it to the whole structure of a play, Herder seeing the
action of King Lear defined by ‘two old fathers’, not one (Blinn, 1982, 112),
Goethe in the first draft of Wilhelm Meister referring his hero to Hamlet’s
subjection to the powers of dynasty and succession.44 There is much that
is Herderian in Schlegel’s critical language, not least the vocabulary of
organic growth and processual development that so struck Coleridge when
first reading him.
The Romantic generation, to which Schlegel belonged together with
his brother Friedrich and Ludwig Tieck, nevertheless had two parallel
thrusts. It saw Shakespeare’s wholeness, the vast extent of his oeuvre
(including the poetry), his place in wider historical and political devel-
opments, the phases of his development. But it was also concerned to
define, through the closest of analysis, what constituted the work of art
of which Shakespeare was the supreme practitioner and craftsman. The
young Romantics might despise Johnson or Steevens (while using their
editions), but they knew their Malone and the arguments there for read-
ings and datings. This is Ludwig Tieck’s forte, Schlegel’s less. Where
Tieck became more and more enmeshed in the minutiae of Shakespeare
scholarship,45 declaring – as infamously as Schlegel’s pronouncement –
that ‘no Englishman in print had ever understood him,’46 Schlegel never
lost sight of the artistry that the text contained and its challenges for
the translator. Nevertheless, Tieck’s essay on The Tempest of 1796 and
Schlegel’s on Romeo and Juliet of 1797 are an early high point in Romantic
Shakespeare appreciation, aware that the indefinables of artistry may
August Wilhelm Schlegel 105
of them hidden from the general reader, before reaching published form.
But once in the public domain, they were subject to the scrutiny of others
and altered or ‘improved’ contrary to his wishes, indeed it is fair to say
that he later effectively dropped Shakespeare and concentrated on other,
perhaps more congenial, areas.
Yet it is imperative that we see the critic and translator as one entity, the
one activity as inseparable from the other. Older scholarship on German
Romanticism and on Schlegel specifically tended to diminish his trans-
lation achievement by associating it with other writers, perceived to be
greater than he, and by seeing Schlegel merely as an accessory to their
greatness. Thus, Friedrich Gundolf’s once influential study, Shakespeare und
der deutsche Geist (1911), was able to accommodate Schlegel in its account
of the German-Shakespearean symbiosis by stating him to be the logical
fulfilment of all that Goethe stood for.51 Critics in the nineteenth century,
but by no means only then, disparaged Schlegel the translator by deem-
ing him to be merely the ‘imitator’, the ‘empathizer’, the ‘receiver’, the
‘vessel’, as opposed to creative and original genius such as Goethe’s or
Schiller’s.52 There is here a wish to play down the fact that Shakespeare, by
1864 (or whatever other convenient date), had effectively become the third
German ‘classic’ alongside Goethe and Schiller, that foreign genius had
had almost as great a role in the forging of a German national literature
as native-grown products. There is an unwillingness here to acknowledge
that the long eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth in
Germany had seen translation, apart from its undeniable virtues as a vehi-
cle for the dissemination of wisdom and beauty, as a means towards stimu-
lating a poetic revival such as Spain or England had had in their respective
Golden Ages. It is also fair to say that nearly all of the significant figures
in German letters during that period had been travellers in those realms
of gold. Indeed Goethe and Schiller themselves, in the 1790s decade that
also saw the first volumes of Schlegel’s Shakespeare and his two critical
essays, were aware of how foreign models, Greek, Roman, Italian, English,
could enrich their own endeavours, and of how definitions of literature
and its categories (Schiller’s ‘naïve’ and ‘sentimental,’ for instance) were
informed by reference beyond the narrow confines of one’s own tradi-
tions, and how strivings towards an indigenous national achievement must
always be measured against the great foreign exemplars.53 Goethe’s notion
of ‘Weltliteratur’, formulated in 1827, was already in effect acknowledged
around 1790 (Wieland had actually used the word privately more than a
generation before Goethe), 54 and it is there, spoken or tacit, in all that
Schlegel writes about literature and poetry, occidental or oriental.
August Wilhelm Schlegel 107
Georg Forster, prefacing his own translation of Sir William Jones’s ver-
sion of Kalidasa’s Shakuntalâ (1791), averred that the Germans’ role was
to take the fragments of alien cultures and interpret them for others.55
That might be taking the analogy too far, for such a view could be read
as overlooking one of the conditions of alien reception: the need for an
adequate style. For the debate about translation in the eighteenth century
had been accompanied by another discussion: was German poetic expres-
sion capable of the task of rendering the great models of foreign literature?
If one looked at translations earlier in the century, Bodmer’s of Milton or
even Wieland’s of Shakespeare, one saw that prose, the medium of mere
comprehension, was the norm in Germany (and in France). What is more,
German poets (Johann Elias Schlegel among them) were finding it diffi-
cult to abandon the neoclassical alexandrine for the blank verse in which
English drama, Shakespearean or even still Augustan, was largely cast.
Christian Felix Weisse, with his adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and
Richard III in the 1765s and 60s, was one who had made the transition.
Wieland, a virtuosic versifier when the mood caught him, had done a
very commendable verse rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while
Eschenburg, in his turn, had produced a splendid blank-verse King Richard
III. German poets did not find blank verse easy at first, and it is not until
the 1780s, with Lessing’s Nathan, Goethe’s Iphigenie and Schiller’s Don
Carlos, that we see this verse form being used creatively. But it is a very
large step indeed from those verse dramas to a kind of style that would
be adequate for Shakespeare, not to speak of their content. Stage adapta-
tions of Shakespeare in the Sturm und Drang period had been in prose.
For one thing, they were often based on Wieland; for another, they saw
Shakespeare generally in terms of the rapid and fulsome speech and quick
scene-change that prose best expresses.
Schlegel’s Beginnings56
Latin Pervigilium Veneris and the Song of Songs. His Macbeth bore much of
the stamp of the Sturm und Drang: it was in prose, it was shortened (and
censored: no Porter, for instance), and Bürger the folk balladeer had with
some gusto translated the witches into racy verse not unlike his own. This
would certainly not pass muster under Schlegel’s later stringent criteria
for the translator. Bürger, early aware of the young Schlegel’s talents (he
had worked on the Vergil edition of the great Göttingen classicist Heyne
but was also competent in English, French and Italian), took him in hand,
gave him an outlet for his first poetic efforts and guided him towards the
adequate style in Shakespeare translation that he himself had not found.
The ‘young eagle’ (Bürger on Schlegel) and his mentor worked together
on a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that would both outdo Wieland
and also establish a critical basis for the future.58 It is hardly a collabora-
tion; the young translator might learn a thing or two about versification
from Bürger the sonneteer, but Bürger by and large gave the young man
his head, or, more accurately, the young star pupil disregarded his teacher
and set out patterns for the future: verse-by-verse rendition (where possi-
ble), elegance and concision of expression, poetry rendered by poetry. This
version never saw the light of day in its time and was only to serve as the
basis for the one published in 1797, which with Romeo and Juliet signalled
his debut as a translator. But Schlegel, ever one to have more than one
string to his bow, had also been encouraged by Bürger to translate Dante
(part of the Purgatorio that appeared in 1791). There, the self-confident
young poet-translator had laid down principles that were also to hold for
Shakespeare: ‘as accurately as possible’, observing the constraints of the
original terza rima and its peculiarities, a ‘poetical translation’ that repro-
duces the ‘character of the original’ (SW, 3: 227–30).
Yet Bürger would not suffice for an ambitious young man eager to make
his mark in the world of criticism and letters. It is an irony that the man
who was to give Schlegel the first really important outlet for his publica-
tions was Friedrich Schiller, the same who in a review of his works in 1791
had savaged Bürger’s reputation as a person and poet. But in 1794, when
announcing his new periodical Die Horen (The Hours), Schiller was all con-
ciliation, calling for men (and even women) of good will to contribute.59
His short-lived periodical, famous for its contributions by Goethe and by
Schiller himself, is also notable for containing three essays by Schlegel and
August Wilhelm Schlegel 109
made by Wieland and Eschenburg, both of whom were very much alive
and one of whom (Eschenburg) was soon to reissue his prose translation
(1798–1806).61 Behind the necessary deference to them, there was a clear
challenge. Thus, Schlegel, using the protection and prestige that Die Horen
afforded in its association with Goethe and Schiller, was informing the
wider reading public that there might be something in the offing. The
snippets from The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar that Schiller
was only to glad to take for his periodical, would substantiate expectations,
Schlegel using Die Horen for his own strategic purposes, as indeed Goethe
and Schiller were using it for theirs.
The title of the essay of 1796 (Horen, 1796, 4: 57–112; SW, 7: 24–70)
Something on William Shakespeare on the Occasion of Wilhelm Meister (Etwas
über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters) puts Goethe’s
novel centre stage and thus invokes the great man in the ultimate
processes of revelation. For on the second page of the essay, Schlegel
states that, with the appearance of this novel (1795–6) and its asso-
ciation with Hamlet, Shakespeare has ‘risen from the dead and walks
among the living’ (SW, 7: 24–5). This Shakespearean apotheosis, theo-
phany, would not surprise anyone familiar with the junketings of 1769
or with Goethe’s and Lenz’s subsequent invocation of a Christ-like
Shakespeare. Except that Goethe’s little essay of 1771 was still securely
locked in his bottom drawer, not to emerge during his lifetime. If that
were not enough, Schlegel on the fi rst page claims that the Hamlet
sections of Wilhelm Meister ‘cannot be regarded as a mere episode’
(ibid., 24). This would raise in the reader expectations of an analysis of
Goethe’s novel, but these hopes are not sustained. There is no aware-
ness of the deep structure of paternity and inheritance that enables us
today to relate the Hamlet sections to the main themes of the novel,
nor would we expect these to be apparent in 1796. Rather it is perhaps
little more than a rhetorical flourish, a gambit, to make us aware that
Hamlet is a ‘Gedankenschauspiel’ (ibid., 31), a reflective play or a play
about thoughts, where no solutions are offered, but where contradic-
tory moral problems will be centred on one character, the unravelling
of which will occupy the reader or spectator.
Schlegel is here addressing a special kind of reader who will respond to
a particular kind of criticism. The task of criticism is not merely to exercise
August Wilhelm Schlegel 111
to grasp the overall meaning that creative genius places in its works,
often preserves in the very core of their arrangement, purely, completely,
sharply and definitely, to give it meaning and thereby raise observers
who are less independent but nevertheless receptive, to the right level for
seeing things correctly. But only rarely has it achieved this. Why? Because
contemplating the characteristics of others closely and directly as if it
were a part of one’s own consciousness, is intimately related to the divine
capacity for creation itself. (ibid., 25–6)
modern dramatic production: Lessing’s Emilia Galotti was all in prose but
his Nathan der Weise all in blank verse, Schiller’s Die Räuber and Don Carlos
similarly divided, or Goethe’s Egmont and Iphigenie, with only his recent
Faust. Ein Fragment, if quite different from Shakespeare, demonstrating the
commingling of the two media. Instead, he chooses an example from quite
outside, Shakuntulâ, so recently translated by Sir William Jones. In the much
earlier culture out of which this play arose, gradations in social status and
office were defined by variations in language. But Shakespeare is much
more complex: he apportions language according to situation, not merely
to status, often to the same character. It is his innate sense of rightness,
of what is appropriate, which guides him, which causes his characters to
speak in verse or in prose accordingly, that explains his ‘Mannigfaltigkeit’
(ibid., 44), his endless variety (a term that will recur in his discussion of
Romantic drama in 1808).
This brings Schlegel to the more technical questions of translation (he
later subtitles this concluding section ‘Über den dramatischen Dialog’).
We have not only to come to terms with the multiformity of Shakespeare’s
prose and verse, but with rhythmic irregularities within the verse itself, with
rhymed verse, with unrhymed, with songs. To do this justice, the translator
will be involved in the hardest of contests with his own language. On the
other hand, he will have at his disposal ‘everything of which the German
language is capable’ (‘alles in Deutschen Thunliche’, ibid., 62) and total
freedom in marshalling it. Schlegel’s phrase is a statement of faith in his
native language, its richness and its malleability. It expresses both chal-
lenge and accommodation, the search for aptness, but the courage to be
free rather than stiff and literal. For example: German blank verse, with its
regular stress, must adapt to Shakespeare’s freedoms; it must above all avoid
monotony. Or: the unmanageable is better left out; compensations must be
made for the sake of comprehensibility (play on words, for instance, should
never be rendered literally). Where appropriate, German should unlock its
resources to confer an archaic dignity. These are the translation principles
on which Schlegel is not prepared to negotiate. They are uncompromis-
ing on basics and remind us that the going may be tough. They may place
accuracy and poetic expression on the same footing, but they also allow
for flexibility where the differences between the languages are irreconcil-
able. Above all, they confer on the translator a status above all drudgery
and hackwork and make him, as Schlegel was proudly to say in 1826, a
‘herald of genius’, ‘a messenger from nation to nation’.63 Schlegel differs
from contemporaries like Schleiermacher or Wilhelm von Humboldt, who
stress the closed systems of each language and the ultimately insuperable
August Wilhelm Schlegel 113
In the 1796 volume of Die Horen Schlegel had published anonymously twelve
pages of a ‘new metrical translation’ of Romeo and Juliet (Horen, 1796, 3:
92–104) and twenty-one from The Tempest (ibid., 6: 61–82), and it is to these
that Humboldt is referring in his letter. He selects the scenes from Romeo
and Juliet (2. 1: Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio; 2. 1: Romeo and Juliet, the
first balcony scene; 2. 2: Friar Laurence and Romeo) to demonstrate differ-
ent registers and his the translator’s mastery of them. Readers of the third
scene would note, for instance, that Schlegel was rendering Laurence’s
and Romeo’s rhymed verse into German alexandrines that had little of
the repetitiveness once associated with this metre (still in Johann Elias
Schlegel). They would remark that wit, tenderness and reflection occur in
quick succession and require differing reactions from the reader or specta-
tor, and might wonder how these differing styles could be reconciled and
integrated. Schlegel would answer these questions in the 1797 issue of Die
Horen, in Über Shakespeares Romeo und Julia (Horen, 1797, 6: 18–41; SW, 7:
71–97), indeed by then his own full version of the play had appeared sepa-
rately. Schlegel is using his critical essay to mediate between the needs of
the text and its comprehension; he is seeking to make the work of art acces-
sible through the analysis of its organism.
Ludwig Tieck had attempted something similar in 1796 with the essay
Über Shakespears Behandlung des Wunderbaren (How Shakespeare Employs the
Wondrous) (Blinn: 1988, 69–90) that accompanied his prose translation of
The Tempest. The German Romantics are moving away from the established
patterns of English Shakespearean criticism, with its emphasis still on char-
acter, especially individual character, to explore general questions of artis-
tic form and its wholeness. They are also reacting against the uncritical,
sometimes dithyrambic outpourings of their own native Sturm und Drang
reception of Shakespeare, in order to stress Shakespeare’s conscious artistry,
114 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
his ‘intentionality’ (a word that Schlegel uses in his Vienna Lectures) (SW,
6: 185). Thus, Tieck seeks to demonstrate, to analyse, how Shakespeare
makes deliberate use of the devices of magic and the numinous to create
his own set of congruities, to bring about a world into which he leads us
and elicits our surrender to it. These young Romantics may be privately
aware of what they owe to older critics (Tieck to Elizabeth Montagu, for
instance), but in public they are at pains to stress their differences from
those obtuse ‘Englishmen in print’. Thus, Schlegel in his Romeo and Juliet
essay excoriates Samuel Johnson: he sedulously overlooks Johnson’s point
about ‘the airy sprightliness of juvenile elegance’ (Vickers, 5: 155) which is
not far from his own formulations and plays down the sombre undertones
that Johnson had detected (and also Tieck and Coleridge were to). Where
Johnson gives individual insights through his commentary, Schlegel seeks
‘inner unity’ (SW, 7: 76), striving to look beyond the surface and the inci-
dentals and to fathom the deep structures, the spiritual or intellectual
(German ‘geistig’, ibid.) way of seeing that all art involves. This is what that
‘more genuine kind of criticism’ can achieve and this is why it is related to
the very creative processes themselves.
Amid all the contradictions and paradoxes of Shakespeare’s text, his
exuberance and inventiveness, the limiting and containing forces as
well, the critic seeks the ‘inner unity’. Schlegel in the German uses here
‘ergründen’ (ibid.), a word with mystical associations of sounding out
God’s unknowability. This process can, however, involve close and techni-
cal analysis, establishing how Shakespeare unites formal devices with their
emotional expression. And this will be the ‘hinge’, as he says, ‘on which
everything turns’ (ibid., 77). Through it we can reconcile and solve the
antitheses inherent in the play, its tendernesses and its frenzies; we can
comprehend that these sets of antitheses are the very structural principle
that holds everything together.
Schlegel is insistent that Romeo and Juliet, despite the boldness of their
speech, its often mannered ‘artificiality’, speak from out of the inner truth
of their hearts, they express what for them is ‘nature’ and ‘purity’ (ibid.,
80–1). The very intensity of their love absolves them from everyday con-
cerns of life; their existence ‘creates itself’ (‘selbstschaffend’, ibid., 83). It
lifts them above social and linguistic norms, so that the language that they
speak does not belong to common nature; it transcends it and enters a
realm of its own significance. What for others may be mere ‘conceit’ or
invention is the expression of their very selves.
Juliet’s character Schlegel sums up in terms of love and virtue, without
the conflicts of duty and inclination that a modern heroine like Schiller’s
August Wilhelm Schlegel 115
must contend with. Romeo is full of noble feeling that takes him neverthe-
less through the whole gamut of the passions and their every gradation.
Mercutio, not Romeo represents the violent extremes of mood, the play’s
jagged edges, the forces that impel the play towards its tragic denouement.
The overall antithetical structure, which Schlegel sees as the basis of the
play, extends to both major and minor characters.
This reading, concentrating as it does on the lyrical, gentle, magic
moments of the play and investing them with a higher reality of their own,
permits Schlegel to see in Romeo and Juliet a tragedy – which cannot of course
be denied – but a tragedy softened and mitigated by the reconciliation of
the families, by the ‘tragic decorum’ (ibid., 90) of the ending, where the
tender love of the tragic pair may be said to live beyond their last moments.
The play is a ‘wonder of harmony’, almost a Petrarchan antithesis, resolved
of ‘sweet and painful, pure and fiery, tender and passionate’ (ibid., 97).
Schlegel’s is a ‘close reading’, examining the language, the constellations
of character, the shades of feeling that make up the work of art. Unlike
Coleridge,66 he is less interested in the processes that bring this about, or
its place in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, its status as an early work, for instance.
He is not interested in Romeo’s development, but posits him as a character
who is suddenly ‘there’, in the full flight of love; Coleridge examines the
stages of Romeo’s love. Coleridge relates the play to wider moral issues;
for Schlegel, it creates its own moral universe in its own terms. Schlegel’s
discussion of the play in his Vienna Lectures differs very little from his
analysis of 1797; indeed the ‘colours of the dawning’ that he sees radiating
from it there are made more vivid by contrasting it with the ‘Rembrandt
tones’ of Othello (SW, 6: 244).
By the time Schlegel’s essay on Romeo and Juliet appeared, the first volume
of his own translations of Shakespeare had come out, with this play head-
ing the series.68 The critic is seemingly asking his readers to verify for them-
selves the insights of the essay by examining the text in a version that sought
to do justice to the styles and devices that he has analysed. Schlegel is writ-
ing for that ideal reader who needs no visual or aural promptings, just the
text. His reader gets nothing else, no preface, no apparatus, no variants,
no datings; he or she is not even told the original editions that form its
base (they are in fact the Malone edition of 1786–90 and the Bell edition
of Johnson and Steevens published in 1788).69 Schlegel is here following his
116 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
predecessor Wieland, except that the older translator had supplied a foot-
note commentary, often uncomplimentary, on passages that eluded him or
were considered unseemly. Eschenburg’s translation, by contrast, contained
a scholarly apparatus, as Tieck’s was to do. Schlegel’s title, Shakspeare’s dra-
matische Werke, had echoes of both Wieland and Eschenburg, but he was
making no concessions to the needs or requirements of producer or actor.
Here was the full text, take it or leave it. (Goethe would need to cut a
third of Schlegel’s Romeo and Juliet and rewrite much before he considered
it suitable for the Weimar stage.)70 The only exception is a version of his
Hamlet translation adapted for the great actor-producer August Wilhelm
Iffland.71 Dramatische Werke would also mean that the poetry was excluded,
and indeed Schlegel’s interest in it is marginal.
Schlegel did not undertake his translation single-handed, but kept
this fact quiet. There is ample evidence of the guiding hand of his wife
Caroline, who, like other woman Shakespeareans in Germany, Luise
Gottsched or Dorothea Tieck, is usually written out of the account. Indeed
the end of their relationship is effectively the end of the translation enter-
prise. It is not clear whether Schlegel ever hoped to translate the whole
of Shakespeare’s plays; of the seventeen titles he did complete, sixteen
appeared between 1797 and 1801. Other projects and enterprises crowded
in to push the Shakespeare translation aside, with only a straggler King
Richard III later, in 1810. The Vienna Lectures delivered in 1808 encom-
pass Shakespeare’s whole oeuvre, but not in the detail that the translator
demands. His priorities, inasmuch as we may extrapolate them from what
he did translate, suggest that he intended to give no more than a sample
of Shakespeare’s range. Or, seen differently, they reflect many, but not all,
of the eighteenth century’s existing preferences. Romeo and Juliet had been
in the forefront of German Shakespeare reception since the 1760s; the two
fairy plays, A Midsummer Nights’ Dream and The Tempest, had been Wieland’s
favourites and were now Ludwig Tieck’s; Hamlet needed no introduction;
Julius Caesar had been reviewed by his uncle Johann Elias as far back as
1741; The Merchant of Venice was much loved by theatre-goers, not always for
laudable reasons;72 As You Like It and Twelfth Night were generally accessible;
King Henry IV and King Richard III were well established on the German
stage. Why not add the remaining Histories, all of which Schlegel trans-
lated (except King Henry VIII)?
But where were Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, also now part of the stan-
dard dramatic repertoire? Why the concentration on the history plays
and not on Coriolanus or Much Ado About Nothing, also part of the theat-
rical canon? It was clear from the start that Schlegel, for all that he set
August Wilhelm Schlegel 117
standards of translation never before attained, was not going to deliver the
full Shakespeare and that others would need to be involved. Wieland and
Eschenburg, for all their limitations and reservations, had not baulked at
the dark and offensive in Shakespeare. Schlegel, as the Vienna Lectures
later make clear, did not warm to all aspects of Shakespeare and shrank
instinctively from the most unpleasant and disturbing. It explains why
Goethe in 1800 commissioned Schiller to do a version of Macbeth for the
Weimar stage.73 It might not conform to Schlegel’s stringent criteria (and
Schlegel criticizes it in his Vienna Lectures, SW, 6: 253), but the contest
of Schiller with Shakespeare is exciting. The first complete German verse
translation of Shakespeare was in fact that by Johann Heinrich Voss and
sons (1818–29),74 followed by several others.75 What remained of Schlegel’s
Shakespeare was taken over by Ludwig Tieck; using Wolf von Baudissin
and Dorothea Tieck as (anonymous) translators, he brought out the so-
called ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ in 1825–33.76 While completing the series, it also
‘corrected’ and ‘improved’ Schlegel’s existing text and caused him much
heartache. He, in turn, began to undo the ‘improvements’, but soon gave
up the effort. None of the many versions of the ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ published
subsequently and still in print today as the standard German Shakespeare,
actually contains Schlegel’s full original text. It is that text alone that
deserves to be associated with his name.
Schlegel’s published text had its faults and errors; had Schlegel had the
time and leisure, he might have done his own corrections. The versions of
some of the plays evolved over time, not in a momentary burst of energy.
We can trace, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream over two drafts and a
printed version; there are manuscript drafts for most of the other plays, which
diverge from the published text, and for Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and
The Tempest we have the extracts in Die Horen which differ from the Dramatische
Werke. But his interests turned elsewhere. As it is, we are able to trace the
development of his own translation skills and their growth in sophistication.
More importantly, we have versions of seventeen plays that, for better or for
worse, must be regarded as definitive and which have influenced all subse-
quent translators. But we should not forget that Schlegel’s translation is also
part of the continuum of the German Shakespeare. Without so much as an
acknowledgement, he used to his advantage both Wieland and Eschenburg.77
Often he was unable to improve on his predecessors, at most putting their
felicitous prose formulations into verse. And Eschenburg’s blank-verse King
Richard III could stand on an equal footing with Schlegel’s.
Schlegel’s translation cannot avoid being caught in the time frame of
its conception. It is linguistically not dissimilar to Schiller, but its range of
118 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
1809 and 1811 (in which version Coleridge read them),79 then came the
French translation by Albertine Necker de Saussure (1813), the cousin of
Madame de Staël, which so influenced Stendhal and Victor Hugo,80 fol-
lowed by the English version by John Black (1815) (a pirated edition soon
appeared in the United States).81 Schlegel could later claim that these
lectures had spread his name and influence from ‘Cadiz to Edinburgh,
Stockholm and St Petersburg’,82 and it was no exaggeration. It would be
what one expected from a ‘citizen of the world’ (SW, 5: IX), as he describes
himself in the preface. There are several reasons for this world-wide effect.
For some readers, the Lectures would be the first accessible account of
what the German Romantics had been saying about literature for at least
ten years, but in much more esoteric contexts and for an initiated and
conditioned readership. Very little of that material had been translated:
in France and England one was still coming to terms with Goethe and
Schiller, let alone with the younger generation. Madame de Staël’s famous
De l’Allemagne, when it finally appeared in 1813, had more to say about
the Weimar Classics than about Schlegel’s contemporaries. Coleridge,
who, unlike most other readers, was actually familiar with the language
of German idealism, seizes on the famous passage in the 25th Lecture
because it sums up so neatly what Herder or Goethe or Schelling had been
saying about the distinction between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘organic’.
This insight enables him to cast new light on Shakespeare, whereas the
actual Shakespeare sections in Schlegel lack much of Coleridge’s energy
and vibrancy and boldness of formulation.
Some of Schlegel’s readers would of course receive their first general
comprehensive introduction to Shakespeare through these lectures. They
were not directed at experts – far from it – but contained nothing to
affront a specialist. But those already familiar with Shakespeare, those who
knew their Johnson and Steevens and Malone and Chalmers, for instance,
would learn little of a factual nature that they had not already assimilated.
German readers of Eschenburg’s Ueber W. Shakspeare would similarly not
have their field of knowledge much extended.
But the context is crucial. Placing Shakespeare in a continuum of world
drama, in the way that it is done here, was something radically new. The
framework might remind one of Herder’s great sweep from Sophocles to
Shakespeare, but his approach had not been systematic, carrying his read-
ers along in a tide of homiletic declamation. And his had been a voice cry-
ing in the European wilderness. Schlegel could build on the basic scheme.
The excuses made for Shakespeare’s inadequate classical learning, his
rudeness and rusticity, his failure to observe the rules and bienséances – the
August Wilhelm Schlegel 121
The lament in the preface of 1809 over the disunity of the German-
speaking peoples, linked only by language, the spirit and the intellect,
the mentions of despotism, political catastrophe and usurpation in the
section on Shakespeare’s Histories, could only be read as references to
the ‘Zeitgeist’ and to the ultimate Usurper himself. That Schlegel was
able to give these lectures in Vienna in the first place, he owed in no
small measure to Madame de Staël, whom he had been accompanying
since 1803, and she was well known as an opponent of Napoleon. The
times in which the lectures were delivered and published, 1808–11, were,
therefore, ones of turmoil but also of hope for a German nation not yet in
being. Other German contemporaries, too, were seeking in the same year
1808 through lectures and speeches to express similar hopes, political
and cultural, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam Müller. Müller even went
as far as to see a pattern in Shakespeare’s Histories that might be a guide
for the times: political upheaval and civil war followed by the establish-
ment of a Henrician order.84 Schlegel is much less specific, but he notes
that Shakespeare is the product of an age of national upsurge, of stir-
ring times, Calderón similarly. By analogy, he hopes for a coincidence
of German nation-building and national drama. Given that these aspira-
tions were to be deceived by the post-1815 restorations and reactions in
the German lands, readers of the lectures after that date would be aware
of the irony of those remarks. The irony would be even greater when one
reflected that Prince Metternich, the author of this repression, had actu-
ally attended Schlegel’s lectures.
All this might suggest a spontaneous reaction to the times, the involve-
ment of Shakespeare not just in an aesthetic context, as in Die Horen, but in
the political arena and its cultural extension. But in fact the lectures also
repeat and reformulate much that Schlegel had already said. The critical
lexis that expressed notions of organic growth, analogies from plant life, the
biological processes of seed and ripening, of self-creation, which introduce
the whole series and are present in the famous 25th Lecture, are already a
part of Schlegel’s vocabulary and would be familiar to readers of Herder
and of Goethe. His insistence on a mythology for the modern drama,
Shakespeare’s or Calderón’s, was part of a general Romantic insistence that
myth and poetry sustain each other; it was the message that Schlegel had
already propounded in an earlier set of lectures, given to a very different
audience in Berlin in 1801–3, but largely unpublished. There, it had been
his aim to reverse the Enlightenment’s notion of progress, the view that
earlier historical periods were only of interest as primeval articulations of
what a later age had brought to eloquent perfection. Instead, he had placed
August Wilhelm Schlegel 123
Ancient art and poetry strives for the strict severance of the disparate,
the Romantic takes pleasure in indissoluble mixtures: all opposites,
nature and art, poetry and prose, the grave and the gay, memory and
intuition, the intellectual and the sensuous, the earthly and the divine,
life and death, it stirs and dissolves into one solution. As the oldest law-
givers proclaimed their teachings and precepts in modulated harmonies,
as Orpheus, the fabled tamer of the still wild human race, is praised in
fable: in the same way the whole of ancient poetry and art is a rhythmic
set of prescriptions, the harmonious proclamation of the eternal pre-
cepts of a world, finely ordered, that reflects the eternal archetypes of
things. The Romantic, by contrast, is the expression of the mysteries of a
chaos that is struggling to bring forth ever new and wondrous births,
that is hidden under the order of nature, in its very womb: the life-giving
spirit of primal life hovers here anew over the waters. The one is simpler,
clearer and more akin to nature in the self-sufficient perfection of its
single works; the other, despite its fragmentary appearance, is closer to
the secret of the universe. (SW, 6: 161)
124 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
aspect of Schlegel’s ‘vermittelnde Kritik’, this time linking the Italian prose
novella and Shakespeare’s drama as exemplars of a ‘Romantic poetry’ that
knows no national or generic boundaries.
As said, Schlegel’s account of the Comedies (Lecture 28) is conventional
and by and large limited to plot. In fairness, many of his hearers or readers
would not have been familiar with the plays that lay outside of the theatri-
cal canon. Two sections stand out for what they do or do not say: Measure for
Measure (he does not mention that it is also set in Vienna, however fabled)
is for Schlegel a ‘triumph of grace over punitive justice’ (ibid., 223), a far
cry from Coleridge (he is in fact closer to Hazlitt). His discussion of The
Merchant of Venice seeks on the one hand to free the play from the anti-
Semitic crudities to which Viennese audiences would be conditioned, but
it fails to discern any genuine humanity in Shylock (here Hazlitt would dif-
fer). When treating the ‘fairy plays’ (Lecture 29), Schlegel has a clear pref-
erence for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where everything comes about as if
inspired by the merest breath, the lightest shade or hue, the most delicate
touch. Yet Schlegel rehearses the eighteenth-century insight of ‘waking
dream’ first formulated by Kames and expressive of those states where con-
sciousness and surrender to imagination are held in balance. Like Tieck,
he sees the persuasive artistry of The Tempest, but differs from him (and
Coleridge and Hazlitt) in his negative and dismissive view of Caliban.
The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline receive relatively more attention than
Schlegel’s contemporaries accord them: they contain a tragic potential, if
one that Shakespeare finally averts, and they oscillate between the domes-
tic and affairs of state. They provide a bridge to the section dealing with
his favourite Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. He has little to add to his
remarks of 1797, and still unrepentantly finds in it harmony and unity, a
‘sigh’ (ibid., 243), where others see frenzied passion. He quite clearly prefers
it to Othello, a play he contrasts to its disadvantage (and one which he did
not translate). Hamlet of course receives a long section. It is now divorced
from its former associations with Wilhelm Meister; his view of Hamlet’s char-
acter has changed since 1796, but does not of course distinguish between
Goethe’s interpretation of Hamlet and Wilhelm’s or allude to the ironic
distance between creator and hero. It is subsumed solely under ‘Gedanken-
Trauerspiel’ (ibid., 247) (‘reflective tragedy’, compare Coleridge’s ‘ratioci-
native’). What Wilhelm Meister failed to see (or what his creator withheld
from him) were the prince’s weaknesses, his spite, his cruelty, his enjoy-
ment of others’ sufferings, and these Schlegel now brings to the fore.
If space is any indicator, Schlegel now seems to prefer Macbeth (Lecture
30) to Hamlet. If he disagrees with Goethe over the one, he has even less
126 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
time for Schiller over the other. Macbeth may remind us of elements of
Greek tragic fate, but Shakespeare is not bound by its conventions. It is,
therefore, wrong to try to assimilate the play to Greek tragedy, as Schiller’s
stage adaptation had done (the witches as Eumenides), thus excluding the
‘numinous shadow side of nature’ (ibid., 254) and the horror it engen-
ders. Schlegel is willing to admit some admiration for Macbeth’s nobility
of character, even in its perversion; where Hamlet does nothing, Macbeth
at least acts, and Schlegel clearly is attracted to a tragedy that contains
something of Nordic heroism, something that appeals to an admirer of the
Nibelungenlied. King Lear, by contrast, elicits only pity, engendered by the
deepest human misery, madness. Where for Macbeth words like ‘terror’ or
‘abhorrence’ were adequate, Lear calls for ‘Entsetzen’ (‘horror’, ibid., 261).
And this superlative terror is all the more dreadful in that our moral sense
revolts at seeing it not merely once, but twice. (Again, Herder had already
seen the effect of this double plot.) One feels that Schlegel seizes on the
parallel of Cordelia with Antigone to restore some sense of moral order to
an action otherwise devoid of it.
The Roman plays, which follow in Schlegel’s account, offer some relief.
Yet Schlegel the classical scholar is clearly not happy with historical dramas
that presuppose so much background knowledge (Antony and Cleopatra)
or that present characters unhistorically (his uncle Johann Elias, too, had
had trouble with Shakespeare’s Caesar) or that reach their climax too
early. Schlegel is more at home in the simpler moral world of Timon or in
the medieval Troy that he sees as the basis of Troilus and Cressida.
Perhaps Schlegel’s noble and distinguished hearers grew restive in their
chairs as they sat through by far the longest section of the lectures on
Shakespeare, that devoted to the Histories (Lecture 31). But in a sense this
was the climax, the peroration. Not only did he know these texts inside
out from translating them. They represented for him two things that were
a prerequisite for a national literature. They were a kind of heroic epic in
dramatic form. Here Schlegel was echoing ideas current at the time, or
soon to be current, on the multi-authored ‘songs’ of Homer (Friedrich
August Wolf) or the heroic lays that must have predated Roman histori-
ography (Barthold Heinrich Niebuhr). This was the English epic cycle, if
one wished (by implication, one could forget Milton). The Histories were
also a direct reaction to their own times, a mirror of princes, a source of
political wisdom, and Schlegel’s use of the words ‘usurpation’, ‘tyranny’
(ibid., 273) and ‘despotism’ (277) leaves his audience in no doubt as to
their specific and timely relevance. The analogy of Henry VIII’s settlement
might suggest to some minds the Emperor Francis who had emerged from
August Wilhelm Schlegel 127
the loss of the Holy Roman Empire to rule over Austria. It is noticeable
that while Schlegel devotes due space to Falstaff, his real hero is Henry V,
his anti-hero Richard III, chivalric virtue versus the incarnation of evil.
When Schlegel at the end of the whole series (Lecture 37) asks rhetorically
which Romantic dramatic genre is most suited to the times in which his
hearers live, he opts without hesitation for the historical drama. Where
once Shakespeare used Angevins and Plantagenets to record the patterns
of national history and its ascendance, the German dramatic writer should
now turn to Arminius, to the Hohenstaufen, and not least to the house of
Habsburg under whose aegis Schlegel’s lectures were taking place.
It was not to be Schlegel’s most positive legacy, if indeed it was he who
was responsible for the rash of historical dramas that nineteenth-century
Germany was to see, and the first half of the twentieth. It could, however,
be said that Schlegel is here giving articulation to aspirations that were
already present, had seen a fulfilment, a climax even, in the dramas of
Schiller’s maturity, and were able to draw on these potent sources, now
enriched by the supernal influence of Shakespeare himself.
Chapter 4
Unfortunately only fragmentary notes survive for the first four lectures,
and no notes that can certainly be connected with eight more that were also
devoted to Shakespeare, so that it is not easy to appreciate how extraordinary
Coleridge’s scheme for lectures on the principles of poetry was. He may have
exaggerated in claiming later that his views ‘appeared at that time startling
Paradoxes’ (CL IV. 839), but his plan was for lectures of a more incisive and
original kind than his audience may have expected, since he aimed to rebut
critical concepts derived conventionally from eighteenth-century writers.
His first was on taste and the idea of beauty. In the second he sought to ‘clear
the ground for a just estimate of Shakespeare’ (LL I. 56) by giving a potted
history of the development of drama since the time of the ancient Greeks.
The third lecture led from a definition of poetry via the fancy and imagina-
tion to a detailed appreciation of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. The fourth
extended Coleridge’s comments on Shakespeare as a poet in a discussion of
some of his sonnets. His aim was to establish the idea of Shakespeare as a
‘great dramatic Poet’ (LL I. 82). He then seems to have gone on to the topic
of dramatic illusion before launching into the commentary on Shakespeare’s
plays that occupied the following eight lectures.
In order to understand Coleridge’s method it is important to see it in
relation to his passion for the stage, both as theatre-goer and as would-be
dramatist, which began early and continued long (PW I. 1. clxviii–clxx).
He had collaborated with Robert Southey in 1794 in writing The Fall
of Robespierre, a short blank-verse tragedy in three acts, written for publi-
cation, not with the stage in mind. In 1797, prompted by a request from
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the principal proprietor of the Drury Lane
theatre, Coleridge completed Osorio, a tragedy in the conventional mode
of five acts in blank verse, intended for production there. Sheridan appar-
ently retained the manuscript but did not put the play on. It was revised as
Remorse, and eventually staged at Drury Lane in 1813 after Sheridan was
no longer in control. There it ran successfully for twenty performances
(PW III. 2. 1038–43). Coleridge went on to write Zapolya, ‘A Christmas
Tale’, published 1817 as ‘in humble imitation of the Winter’s Tale of Shakespear’
(PW III. 2.1338). This romance, as altered by T. C. Dibdin, was staged at
the Surrey Theatre in 1818. Coleridge translated Friedrich Schiller’s Die
Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod, possibly Goethe’s Faust (see Crick, 83–4),
and produced many plans for other works for the stage. Although his one
great success was with a tragedy, his ‘later dramatic projects were almost all
comedies, farces, entertainments, musical dramas, or pantomimes’, proj-
ects for works of a popular kind that might make money (PW I. 1. clxix).
At this time two theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, retained the
royal patent awarded by Charles II that licensed them as the only London
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 131
have nothing to do with the play, and simply provide a neutral neoclassical
interior that suggests a room in a large modern house. Candelabra hang
over the forestage to produce a constant light.
This kind of stage was well served by the comedies of manners popular
in the eighteenth century. The best seats were in the tiers of boxes at the
sides of the forestage, and actors might address to them the many asides
that often feature in such plays as Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777).
During the later part of the century radical changes were introduced in
lighting and in scenery. Chandeliers over the stage were discarded, and
by the late 1770s the stage at Drury Lane was lit by lights on vertical metal
strips, with shields that could be drawn round to suggest shade. Gauzes,
transparencies and pivoting lights made possible ever more sophisticated
changes and effects of lighting (Hogan, lxv–lxvii). At the same time the
forestage retreated as stage action was moved behind the proscenium
arch, where flat wings in fi xed grooves were replaced by movable scenery
using ground-rows in separate pieces supported by braces. The side boxes
were removed, and actors played to the audience in front of the stage
(Figure 4.2). The theatres, partly driven by a need to compete with the
shows at the popular stages, sought to create ever more naturalistic scenes.
On February 17, 1776 a reporter in the Morning Chronicle praised Philip de
Loutherbourg, a painter and inventor brought over from Paris to London
by David Garrick in 1771, as ‘the first artist who showed our theatre direc-
tors that by a just disposition of light and shade the eye of the spectator
might be so effectively deceived in a playhouse as to take the produce of art
for real nature’ (Rosenfeld, 92).
Theatre managers and dramatists were seeking to maximize scenic
illusion and to the extent that they succeeded they transformed a the-
atre of the ear into a theatre of the eye. In the huge patent theatres of
the 1790s acoustics were poor, and many in the audience had difficulty
in hearing spoken dialogue. Plays became more dependent on spec-
tacle, with dancing and singing between the acts (Hogan, lxxxviii). An
increasing emphasis on realistic antiquarian detail was to be seen in
the staging of plays on historical topics, like those by Shakespeare. For
melodramas and Gothic plays, given an impetus by the great success
of Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Castle Spectre at Drury Lane in 1797,
elaborate landscapes and interiors were devised. Lewis’s play, set in a
medieval world of castles and dungeons, was ‘classically Gothic: in a
wild inhospitable setting a hidden event of past years exerts a fateful
influence on the present, so allowing an evil force to hold sway over
unprotected innocence’ (Donohue, 98–9); in other words, there is a
noble hero, and a heroine threatened by an evil villain, whose character
is complicated by remorse for what he has done. Sheridan, once noted
for his comedies, had his greatest triumph later on with his historical
melodrama Pizarro (1799), about the invasion by Spain of Peru when
ruled by the Incas, which had elaborate scenery for the audience to
enjoy. Scenes included pavilions and tents, trees on a rocky eminence,
‘A wild retreat among stupendous rocks’, a dungeon in a rock, a thick
forest, ‘a dreadful storm’ with thunder and lightning, a ‘romantic recess
among the rocks’ and, as a climax in Act 5, Scene 2, ‘an outpost of
the Spanish camp, wild and rocky background. Torrent falling down a
precipice, with bridge formed by a tree’. The Inca hero, Rolla, fleeing
the Spanish soldiers, escapes under fi re across the tree with a babe in
his arms, and tears the tree away from the bank opposite. Dialogue was
hardly necessary here.
The success of this play, which Coleridge, writing in December 1800, scorn-
fully regarded as ‘a Pantomime’ (CL 1. 653), made him think that no serious
tragedy would succeed ‘in the present size of the Theatres’. He nevertheless
retained his ambition to write a tragedy, with Shakespeare as his model.
134 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Pizarro was based on a play by the German writer August von Kotzebue,
whose impact on theatre in London was identified as mania by one anony-
mous critic (Sheridan, Works II. 636), who commented on the ‘noise, faint-
ings, the startings and ravings’, as well as a ‘strong abhorrence of common
sense’ in its victims. This author also complained that it ‘extinguished the
light of morality’, so that ‘what had been formerly considered as crimes were
metamorphosed into virtues, and religion and decency were thrown aside
like old garments.’ This critique might have been written by Coleridge, who
poured out his scorn for Kotzebue’s ‘pantomimic tragedies and weeping
comedies’ (BL II. 185), associating them with Beaumont and Fletcher, in
contrast to Shakespeare, who ‘never clothed vice in the garb of virtue’ (LL
I. 520). He reserved his fullest attack on such plays for his extended criti-
cism of Charles Maturin’s play Bertram, or The Castle of St. Aldobrand, staged
to acclaim at Drury Lane in 1816. He was scornful of its absurdities of plot,
disgusted by its lack of moral principles, as in its apparent sympathy for
adultery, and mocked its stage effects, describing the heroine Imogine as
she ‘wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the
back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out con-
tinually, for whose presence there is at least this reason, that they afford
something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury-Lane audience who
have small chance of hearing a word’ (BL II. 232).
At the same time, Coleridge recognized that he would have to adapt to
the conventions of the age if he was to get a tragedy of his own put on at
Drury Lane. His play Remorse, staged in 1813, was, like Pizarro and Bertram
set in the remote past, the age of Philip II of Spain, and a remote place, and
it makes use of typical settings, a Spanish seashore, a ‘wild and mountain-
ous country’, the inside of a cottage, a courtyard before a castle, a hall of
armoury with an altar, the interior of a chapel, a dark cavern with moon-
light and a dungeon. The action includes sorcery, a flash of fire and the
appearance of a picture as if by magic. In its moral concern with guilt and
remorse it differs from the works Coleridge attacked, but it conforms to
the melodramatic style of the period, and Coleridge had great respect for
the professionals who worked in the theatre, commenting as early as 1800
‘That actors and managers are often wrong, is true; but still their Trade is
their Trade, & the presumption is in favor of their being right’ (CL I. 636;
compare PW III. 2.1038). Right, that is to say, in relation to the practical
exigencies of the cavernous theatres of the age.
Coleridge’s familiarity with the ways of these theatres showed him that
he could not expect to see Shakespeare’s plays properly acted in them. He
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 135
essay on ‘Imperfect Dramatic Illusion’, the title when first published in the
London Magazine in 1825, later in the Last Essays of Elia (1833) called ‘Stage
Illusion’, which begins confusingly by stating as if it were an obvious truth,
‘A play is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion
produced.’ Lamb also does not distinguish between these various kinds of
illusion. The wider theoretical context of Coleridge’s thinking about illu-
sion and its connection with poetic faith has been examined by Frederick
Burwick, and my concern is more limited. Coleridge needed to investigate
the nature of dramatic illusion in order to explain why the theatres he
knew, with their devotion to scenic illusion, failed to stage Shakespeare’s
plays adequately, and also in order to establish the special distinction of
Shakespeare.
His draft notes begin by considering the relation between stage scenery
and painting as a fine art and establish a crucial distinction between a
copy and an imitation. The aim of the stage was, he argued, that of ‘imi-
tating Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality.
Thus Claude imitates a Landscape at Sunset, but only as a Picture; while a
Forest-scene is not presented to the Audience as a Picture, but as a Forest’
(LL I. 133). When we look at a work of art, ‘it is a condition of all genuine
delight’ that we should not be deceived, whereas a scenic representation on
the stage has as its very purpose ‘to produce as much Illusion as its nature
permits’, even if ‘in the full sense of the word we are no more deceived by
the one than the other’ (LL I. 133–4). Coleridge observed that small chil-
dren may be deceived by stage scenery, but he did not assume, as did the
reviewer of Philip de Loutherbourg’s show The Wonders of Derbyshire that
the spectator could be ‘so effectually deceived in a playhouse as to take
the produce of art for real nature’. The aim of stage effects was to repre-
sent rocks or woods or buildings as accurately as possible in the effort to
deceive spectators by an illusion of reality that depended on how closely
the originals were copied. By contrast, a painting of a scene by a great artist
gives us pleasure as an imitation, as a picture, through our awareness of the
difference between it and nature – in other words, by our consciousness of
its artistry.
This principle Coleridge extended to drama in his 1808 lectures on
Shakespeare, and in every subsequent course: ‘The end of Dramatic
Poetry is not to present a copy, but an imitation of real life. Copy is imper-
fect if the resemblance be not, in every circumstance, exact; but an imita-
tion essentially implies some difference’ (LL I. 83, II. 277). For Coleridge
this crucial distinction enabled him to explain the role of the imagina-
tion in understanding Shakespeare’s plays, and to reject the claims of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 137
It was natural that Shakespear should avail himself of all that imagina-
tion afforded. If he had lived in the present day & had seen one of his
plays represented he would the first moment have felt the shifting of the
scenes – Now, there is so much to please the senses in the performance &
so much to offend them in the play, that he would have constructed them
on a different model – ‘We are grateful’, said Coleridge, ‘that he did
not – since there can be no comparative pleasure between having a great
man in our closet & on the stage. All may be delighted that Shakespear
did not anticipate, & write his plays with any conception of that strong
excitement of the senses, that inward endeavour to make everything
appear reality which is deemed excellent as to the effort of the present
day. (LL I. 228–9)
Shakespeare spoke not to the sense, as was now done, but to the mind, and
in modern plays, in ‘the glare of the scenes, with every wished-for object
industriously realized, the mind becomes bewildered in surrounding
attractions; whereas Shakespear, in place of ranting, music and outward
action, addresses us in words that enchain the mind, and carry on the
attention from scene to scene’ (LL I. 564).
Coleridge’s preference for Shakespeare in the ‘closet’ (LL I. 229), as
read rather than as staged, is thus directly related to his own involvement
with the stage, and the development in London of a theatre of the eye, of
sensation and scenery. This preference led him to further refinements in
his theory of dramatic illusion. The idea of scenic illusion, a deception of
the eye, was inadequate to explain the workings of the imagination. For
Coleridge all ‘Stage Presentations, are to produce a sort of temporary Half-
Faith, which the spectator encourages in himself & supports by a voluntary
contribution on his own part because he knows that it is at all times in his
power to see the thing as it really is’ (LL I. 134). A crucial development in
his conception of dramatic illusion lay in shifting the location of illusion
from the stage (the illusion of a realistic location, or the illusion of the
actor as being in a different world or historical period from the spectator)
138 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
with the play, ‘The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no
worse, if imagination amend them’ (5.1.211–12). The willed suspension of
disbelief freed the imagination to work, and it was only through the imagi-
nation, Coleridge claimed, not in the conditions of theatrical performance
at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, that Shakespeare’s plays could be fully
appreciated.
to be ‘a correct and regular writer’ like Joseph Addison. The work of such
a writer he compares to a garden, but Shakespeare’s compositions are like
a forest, ‘gratifying the mind with endless diversity’ (SCH 5. 76). However,
Johnson’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare and strong appreciation of his plays
are usually qualified by the critical methods he inherited. He assumes that
Shakespeare grew up at a time when the stage was ‘in a state of the utmost
rudeness’ (SCH 5. 78). He feels bound to consider the plays in relation to
rules of drama and of criticism, and he follows the common practice of
commenting on beauties and blemishes: ‘Shakespeare with his excellen-
cies has likewise faults, and faults sufficient to obscure and overwhelm any
other merit’ (SCH 5. 65). Major faults include carelessness about morality
and in pursuing a plot, neglecting the latter parts of his plays, and a style
that is ‘ungrammatical, perplexed and obscure’ (SCH 5. 83).
Johnson was not bound by the rules, and said, ‘there is always an appeal
open from criticism to nature’ (SCH 5. 61), but he could serve for Coleridge
as exemplifying a mode of criticism that generally applied external cri-
teria to Shakespeare’s plays. Others besides Johnson were beginning to
stress truth to nature as more important than subservience to rules in the
representation of characters, and Coleridge probably knew the Elements of
Criticism (1762) by Henry Home, Lord Kames, Thomas Whately’s Remarks
on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare (written by 1770, not published until
1785), which in fact deals only with Richard III and Macbeth, and also
William Richardson’s A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of
Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters (1774; second series 1784; additional
essay on Falstaff, 1789; collected essays 1812). Whately insisted that ‘the
distinction and preservation of character’ in Shakespeare’s plays was the
topic most worthy of critical attention. Richardson offered a corrective to
Johnson, who put at the top of the list of faults he found in Shakespeare
his propensity for sacrificing ‘virtue to convenience’ so that he seemed
‘to write without any moral purpose’ (SCH 5. 65); Richardson by contrast
treated Shakespeare’s characters as illustrating moral principles of con-
duct. In his lectures Coleridge pays little attention to individual predeces-
sors other than Pope and Johnson, who served to typify most of what he
was rejecting in eighteenth-century criticism.
In spite of Johnson’s scepticism about the rules, he provided Coleridge
with evidence that he remained in thrall to them. So Coleridge could ‘throw
down the glove with a full challenge’ when lecturing on the opening scenes
of Othello in 1819 (LL II. 316). He said, ‘Dr Johnson has remarked that
little or nothing is wanting to render the Othello a regular Tragedy but
to have opened the play with the arrival of Othello in Cyprus, and to have
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 141
thrown the preceding Act into the form of narration’ (see SCH 5. 166),
and Coleridge proceeded to attack the notion of regularity as exempli-
fied in the application of external rules such as the three unities. For him
rules were ‘means to ends’ and ‘the End must be determined and under-
stood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be.’ Coleridge
began his first course of lectures on Shakespeare by redefining the critical
vocabulary then current, terms such as taste and beauty, and promising to
consider others, such as wit, fancy, imagination and sublimity in later lec-
tures (LL I. 30). He aimed for an elucidation of critical principles based on
a recognition of the essential qualities and determining characteristics of a
poem or play. Rejecting a prescriptive and generalizing mode of criticism,
he moved from the establishment of terms and principles to a descriptive
and analytical practice attentive to both the details and the overall unity of
each work. The fragmentary remains of his notes for the lectures of 1808
show that his effort from the beginning was to derive principles of judge-
ment in criticism from the work under consideration, not from rules.
The mainstream of eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism had been
anti-historical in its concern to generalize and apply those ‘rules of criti-
cism’ referred to by Johnson. There had been a continuing debate about the
extent of Shakespeare’s learning, which culminated in Richard Farmer’s
Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), in which he dismissed the claim
of various scholars who had found echoes of ancient Greek or Latin writers
in the plays, and showed that these were ‘either borrowed from contem-
porary translations or illustrated by contemporary usage’ (Nichol Smith,
xxvi). Farmer concluded that Shakespeare’s ‘Studies were most demon-
stratively confined to Nature and his own Language.’ Farmer seems to have
meant to praise Shakespeare, but his conclusions, which Coleridge knew,
helped to confirm the idea of the dramatist as a child of nature; as Johnson
put it, ‘The English Nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling
to emerge from barbarity’ (SCH 5. 74), and ‘the greater part of his excel-
lence was the product of his own genius.’ Although Johnson acknowledged
the emergence of humanist learning in the period, he said it was confined
to scholars or people of high rank. Coleridge based his criticism on an
understanding of the age of Elizabeth as intellectually favourable to the
‘full development of Shakespeare’ (LL I. 287–8), as an age that produced a
‘great activity of mind’ and ‘a galaxy of great men’, such as Francis Bacon,
Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser. In his lectures Coleridge cited or
referred also to others such as Richard Hooker, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir
John Davies, so reclaiming for Shakespeare a context of cultivation and
knowledge. In his first course of lectures in 1808 he sought to establish that
142 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
and thought as represented notably in the works of Kant and Schiller, two
parts of whose massive trilogy Wallenstein he translated (CN 1. 451–4). He
continued to extend his reading in German criticism and philosophy in
later years. In BL, chapter 9, he writes of his obligations to the thinking
of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W. J. Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
and he also knew works by Johann Gottfried Herder and Jean Paul Richter.
During the series of lectures Coleridge gave on Shakespeare in 1811–12
he also encountered and devoured the Shakespeare criticism of August
Wilhelm Schlegel.
In the mainstream of eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism in Britain
there is no reference to German thought. Coleridge’s study of German crit-
icism and philosophy helped to provide a new framework and theoretical
basis for his courses of lectures. The courses on literature or belles-lettres
presented at the Royal Institution before 1808 appear to have been devoted
to historical surveys or genial compliment, so that Coleridge’s proposal for
a course on ‘the Principles of Poetry’ which would contain ‘the whole result
of many years’ continued reflection on the subjects of Taste, Imagination,
Fancy, Passion, the sources of our pleasures in the fine Arts . . . & the con-
nection of such pleasures with moral excellence’ (LL I. 12) was wildly ambi-
tious and radically innovatory. He was intending to reconsider the terms
used in the accepted vocabulary of criticism in relation to literature and
the fine arts, and to establish a basis for making a new range of distinctions
and discriminations.
Coleridge’s 1808 course was postponed when Davy fell ill, interrupted
later when Coleridge himself became sick, and was terminated early
because of illness. The surviving fragmentary notes all relate to the first
four lectures on the history of drama, Shakespeare’s poems and dramatic
illusion. Coleridge began by discussing the meaning of ‘taste’ in an effort
to distinguish its use in relation to the arts from its more common senses.
He then related taste to an idea of beauty defined as ‘a pleasurable sense
of the Many (by Many I do not mean comparative multitude, but only as
a generic word opposed to absolute unity – ) reduced to unity by the cor-
respondence of all the component parts to each other & the reference of
all to one central Point’ (LL I. 35). He thus brought together pleasure and
judgement, for, as he argued, the purpose of the arts is to ‘gratify the Taste’
by uniting ‘a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves with the perception
of external arrangement’ (LL I. 37). Taste in eighteenth-century criticism
had been commonly linked to judgement, while genius had been related
to pleasure; hence, Shakespeare might be acclaimed as a genius, and at the
same time accused of lacking judgement. As Lewis Theobald put it, ‘The
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 145
principles, ‘beats him out of that which is simple into that which is complex;
from individualities to generalities’ (LL I. 321). It seems likely, too, that
Coleridge had not worked out in advance the development of his ideas. His
account of Romeo and Juliet in Lecture 7, which focuses mainly on the char-
acters in the play, differs greatly from A. W. Schlegel’s essay, published in Die
Horen in 1797 and reprinted in Charakteristiken und Kritiken (1801), in which
he claimed that the play had an ‘inner unity’ (‘innere Einheit’), the result
of ‘choosing and ordering’ (‘Wählen und Anordnen’) (Horen, 23–4), or
Schlegel’s Lectures which declared it perfect, where ‘nothing could be taken
away, nothing added, without mutilating and disfiguring the perfect work’
(‘nichts hinwegnehmen, nichts hinzufügen, nichts anders ordnen könne,
ohne das vollendete Werk zu verstümmeln und zu entstellen’: Schlegel II,
ii, 54; Black II. 127; LL II. 279). Coleridge, by contrast, described the play
as an early work in which the parts were ‘less happily combined’ and not
united in harmony, a work composed before Shakespeare’s judgement and
taste were developed (LL I. 303). But then, shortly before he gave Lecture
9, which was on The Tempest, Coleridge said he was presented by a German
named Bernard Krusve with a copy of Schlegel’s Über dramatische Kunst und
Litteratur (Heidelberg, 3 vols, 1809, 1811). Nothing more is known about
the donor, whose name Coleridge might have misspelt, but he could be the
German friend taken by Henry Crabb Robinson to hear Lecture 4.
Schlegel’s thirty-seven lectures dealt with European drama from the
beginnings in ancient Greece to current developments in Spain and
Germany. Seven of his lectures focus on Shakespeare, and he goes through
all the plays devoting a page or two to each, with more space given to the
tragedies. Coleridge was especially impressed by Schlegel’s introductory
lecture on Spanish and English drama (Lecture 25), in which he defended
the abandonment of the rules by Calderón and Shakespeare by his brilliant
formulation of the concept of organic unity as innate and growing from
within. Coleridge developed the contrast by relating mechanic form to a
copy, and organic form to ‘the growth of Trees’ (LL I. 358), and Schlegel’s
formulation helped him to realize that the best way to establish the idea of
organic unity in Shakespeare’s plays was to illustrate the growth of the play
from, as it were, a seed planted in the opening scenes, or in the first intro-
duction of a character. Coleridge went on to focus on specific plays in the
remaining lectures on Shakespeare in this course, though records of what
he said survive only for Lecture 12, which was on Richard II and Hamlet.
Reading Schlegel helped Coleridge to formulate his general ideas, but it
is notable that he went on in this series to devote a lecture to a detailed
critique of Dr Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 147
art, for the Catastrophe—how he presents the germ of all the after events’
(citing notes for a lecture on Richard II, given in 1813, LL I. 559).
Coleridge’s method thus changed in his later series of lectures on
Shakespeare, which were much more focused on individual plays and char-
acters. The basic ideas that he began to formulate in his first course in
1808 were firmed up and sharpened by his reading and use of Schlegel’s
lectures. He offered what at the time was a new approach to Shakespeare
for his London and Bristol audiences. He made Dr Johnson rather unfairly
into an exemplar of what was wrong with earlier criticism, but was citing
the figure most likely to be familiar to his audiences. In 1808 he used
the latest in English scholarship, the Variorum edition by Isaac Reed in
21 volumes (1803), which included the prefaces written by all the major
eighteenth-century editors from Rowe to Steevens, and which also con-
tained Edmond Malone’s historical account of the English stage and his
first serious attempt to establish a chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. From
the beginning he was also influenced in his general mode of thinking by
the German scholars he had studied under in Göttingen, and his reading
there in authors such as Lessing, Herder, Kant and Schiller. The acquisi-
tion of a copy of Schlegel’s lectures on drama helped him to refine his
critical method and led him to focus especially on the opening scenes in
his later commentaries on Shakespeare’s plays.
by arguing that they were not evidence of poor dramaturgy but rather the
expression of a mind divided within itself. The best formulation of this
idea was by a Scottish critic, Thomas Robertson, whose work Coleridge
does not appear to have known, and who argued that in Hamlet’s char-
acter opposite qualities lead to a kind of paralysis in ‘the fluctuation of
his mind between contriving and executing’ (Vickers SS 14). By offering
a psychological explanation Robertson anticipates in some measure the
account of Hamlet proposed by Coleridge, who, however, offers a differ-
ent and more nuanced perception of Hamlet’s inaction as resulting from
‘that aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world within
themselves’ (LL I. 386), those for whom the world of the imagination is
more vivid than reality. He described Hamlet as a consistent character,
who keeps ‘still determining to execute and still postponing the execution’
until he must ‘in the infirmity of his nature at last hopelessly place himself
in the power and at the mercy of his enemies’ (LL I. 390).
The moral issue in the play Coleridge dealt with in his comments on
Dr Johnson’s note on Hamlet’s speech as he contemplates killing Claudius
at prayer and wishes rather to do so when he is ‘about some act / That has
no relish of salvation in’t’ (3.3.91–2). This speech was for many early critics
savage and inhuman, and, as Dr Johnson said in a note on it, ‘too horrible
to be read or uttered’. Some then countered by arguing that Hamlet did
not mean what he said but was inventing an excuse to delay his revenge.
So to claim was to offer a psychological solution to a moral problem – how
could the morally upright Hamlet behave in this way? Coleridge’s method
was, as he said, psychological, and he never claims moral rectitude for
Hamlet, but insists rather that though possessing ‘all that is amiable and
excellent in nature’ (LL I. 390) he has a fatal weakness in his inability to
act. So allowing Claudius to ‘escape at such a moment was only part of the
same irresoluteness of character. Hamlet seizes hold of a pretext for not
acting, when he might have acted so effectually’ (LL I. 389). For Coleridge,
then, Hamlet’s behaviour here is in keeping with his character, another
mark of his weakness rather than a moral issue.
Among the chief writers on Shakespeare’s characters, Whately had not
commented on Hamlet at all, Richardson had sought to defend Hamlet in
moral terms and Schlegel saw him as malicious and possessing a ‘natural
inclination for crooked ways’ (Black, 405; Schlegel II. ii. 149: ‘er hat einen
natürlichen Hang dazu, krumme Wege zu gehen’). Coleridge found in
Hamlet an admirable figure, brave and perceptive, seeing through ‘the very
souls of all who surround him’ (LL I. 386), aware of his moral duty and not
indecisive: ‘he knew well what he ought to do & over & over again he made
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 151
up his mind to do it’ (LL I. 387), but he could not bring himself to act: ‘he
is a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human &
divine but the great purpose of life is defeated by continually resolving to
do, yet doing nothing but resolve’ (LL I. 390). So Hamlet ‘delays action,
till action is of no use: and he becomes the victim of circumstances and
accident’ (LL I. 544). Hamlet’s vivid imagination made for him an inner
world that was so rich that it led to an aversion to action, a ‘retiring from all
reality’ (LL I. 388). Hamlet was a special case in relation to these questions
of morality and psychology, and clearly fascinated Coleridge. Late in his
life Coleridge saw in Hamlet something of his own failings, and famously
commented, ‘I have a smack of Hamlet myself’ (Table-Talk, 1827, II. 61).
Character criticism in the period was mainly concerned with Shakespeare’s
major tragic characters and Falstaff, and Coleridge followed suit, offer-
ing fresh and subtle commentaries on Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. For
Coleridge, the special excellence of Shakespeare’s characters lay in what
he identified as his method. In all of them ‘we find individuality every
where, mere portrait no where’, and we ‘may define the excellence of their
method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetra-
tion of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works
of decided genius and true science’ (Friend, I. 457).
What this meant in practice can be seen in his insights into characters
such as Macbeth. Whately describes Macbeth as ‘a man not destitute of the
feelings of humanity’, who is induced by the weird sisters and his wife to
act ‘contrary to his disposition’ and commit murder. Coleridge’s account
is much more probing and subtle, giving more importance to Macbeth’s
response to the Witches as showing how he is ‘rendered temptible by previ-
ous dalliance of the fancy with ambitious thoughts’ and so is made to ‘start
and seem to fear’, as Banquo notes, on hearing them speak. Coleridge con-
trasts Banquo’s openness and ‘talkative curiosity’ with Macbeth’s silence
and sees Macbeth as becoming a tempter to himself, as he ‘mistranslates
the recoilings – and ominous whispers of Conscience into prudential and
selfish Reasonings’ (LL I. 529). So Coleridge’s emphasis was on the ‘inge-
nuity with which a man evades the promptings of conscience before the
commission of a crime’, compared with his total helplessness after it has
been committed (LL I. 531). It is as if Whately describes the characters
from outside, while Coleridge sees them from the inside.
Coleridge’s comments on Lady Macbeth are equally incisive. It had been
a commonplace of eighteenth-century criticism to depict her as a mon-
ster; so George Steevens, in a note reprinted in the 1803 edition Coleridge
knew, said that Shakespeare ‘never omits any opportunity of adding a trait
152 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
A passage where she alludes to ‘plucking her nipple from the boneless
gums of her infant’, though usually thought to prove a merciless and
unwomanly nature, proves the direct opposite: she brings it as the most
solemn inforcement to Macbeth of the solemnity of his promise, to
undertake the plot against Duncan: had she so sworn, she would have
done that, which was most horrible to her feelings, rather than break the
oath: and as the most horrible act which it was possible for imagination
to conceive. . . .
of old age and all its fondness which was one of the great consolations
of humanity’ (LL I. 308). He also elaborated a definition of love in order
to distinguish between Romeo’s passion for Rosaline which showed ‘in
truth he was in love only with his own idea’ and his genuine love for Juliet.
Hence, Romeo can refer to Rosaline in terms of ‘the devout religion’ of
his eye, and yet ‘instantly becomes a heretic’ when he sees Juliet ‘and com-
mences the fullness of attachment which forms the subject of the tragedy’
(LL I. 334). It had been common theatrical practice, as in David Garrick’s
performances, to cut the references to Rosaline altogether, and Coleridge
understood her importance in Shakespeare’s conception.
The surviving records of Coleridge’s commentaries on Shakespeare con-
tain many perceptive assessments of characters in other plays. So, for exam-
ple, he notes how Richard II ‘scatters himself into a multitude of images,
and in the conclusion endeavours to shelter himself from that which is
around him by a cloud of his own thoughts’, while Bolingbroke returns
from exile under the pretence of claiming his dukedom, ‘at last letting out
his design to the full extent of which he was himself unconscious in the
first stages’ (LL I. 382, 383). Ariel in The Tempest ‘is neither born of Heaven
nor of earth but between both’, and while Shakespeare ‘gives him all the
advantages all the faculties of reason he divests him of all moral charac-
ter’ (LL I. 363–4). In Troilus and Cressida Coleridge contrasts the vehement
passion of Cressida with the affection of Troilus, an affection that is pas-
sionate, ‘but still having a depth of calmer element, in a will stronger than
Desire, more entire than Choice, and which gives permanence to its own
act by converting it into Faith and Duty’ (LL II. 376).
than tyrants such as Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan (EOT II. 368). By
1809 he was depicting the French emperor (titled thus in 1804) as an off-
spring of Satan and ‘enemy of the human Race’ (Friend II. 162; EOT II. 76).
If Coleridge’s denunciations of Napoleon sank at times into abuse, he was
keeping up the spirits of his readers in a period of alarm. At the same time
he recognized in the French emperor a figure without parallel in recent
European history, an awesome commanding genius who was imposing his
will on most of the continent.
In looking for a yardstick by which to measure Napoleon, to provide
a comparison for a career that was at once magnificent and horrendous,
Coleridge turned naturally to literature, relating the emperor’s playing out
of roles in military or Roman costume on his political stage to fictional
stages on which characters like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost enacted their
roles. In an early lecture in 1808 he found an analogy for Napoleon in
Macbeth, describing the latter as, like Napoleon, a ‘Commanding Genius’,
in whose temperament hope is the ‘Master Element’, but meeting with ‘an
active & combining Intellect, and an Imagination of just that degree of
vividness which disquiets & impels the Soul to try to realize its Images’ (LL
I. 137). This is a lesser creative power than that of the poet or artist whose
images compose a world satisfying in itself. The commanding genius as
military leader has to impose himself on his world, and when successful
the hope that impelled him may turn to fear: ‘the General who must often
feel even tho’ he may hide it from his own consciousness, how great a share
Chance had in his Successes, may very naturally become irresolute in a
new scene, where all depends on his own act & Election.’ Coleridge’s use of
the words ‘General’ and ‘scene’ merge Macbeth into Napoleon, who at this
time was seen by him as a kind of tragic hero.
Much later, looking back in 1819, Coleridge found a way of accounting
for Napoleon in his analysis of the complex character of Edmund in King
Lear. He observed that Shakespeare does not show Edmund’s wickedness
as originating in mere ‘fiendishness of nature’, or allow it to pass ‘into
utter monstrosity’, by providing circumstances, such as his being a bastard
and cut off from domestic influences by being sent away from home for his
education, which affected the way his character was formed. His ‘Courage,
Intellect and strength of Character were the most impressive forms of
Power,’ and it was inevitable that we should admire power without any ref-
erence to a moral purpose, ‘whether it be displayed in the conquests of a
Napoleon or Tamurlaine, or in the foam and thunder of a Cataract’ (LL
II. 328). The image of the cataract links these figures and Edmund with
forces of nature, and it is notable that in the lecture that preceded this
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 155
review of his book in the Quarterly Review in 1818, Hazlitt asked, ‘Do you
then really admire those plague spots of history, and scourges of human
nature, Richard III, Richard II., King John, and Henry VIII.? Do you
with Mr. Coleridge, in his late Lectures, contend that not to fall down in
prostration of soul before the abstract majesty of kings as it is seen in the
diminished perspective of centuries, argues an inherent littleness of soul?’
(Hazlitt IX. 35). Coleridge said nothing of the kind.
In assessing Napoleon Coleridge had recognized the way power, ‘without
reference to any moral end’, compels admiration (LL II. 328), but did not
identify this power with the language of poetry. His Shakespeare criticism
was affected by the political situation, and in 1811 and 1813 he spoke on
Richard II, a favourite play, both for its characterization of the leading roles
and for its blending of epic and tragic. He saw Richard as having ‘immediate
courage’ (LL I. 381) when faced with murderers, and powers of mind, but
as ‘weak and womanish’, and ‘altogether unfit for a King’. Richard’s rapid
transitions, from love to resentment and hatred, contradicted Dr Johnson’s
perception of him as pious. The ambitious Bolingbroke, he thought, grad-
ually acknowledges his design to claim the throne, and his pretended
humility is contradicted by a sense of his self-importance. Coleridge began,
however, by reading and emphasizing Gaunt’s famous speech beginning
‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle’ (2. 1. 40–66) as collecting
‘Every motive, every cause producing patriotism’ (LL I. 378), and as point-
ing to the moral superiority of England over the enemy, Napoleon and his
powers. In stressing Gaunt’s speech for its patriotism, Coleridge abstracted
it for political purposes from a play which did not portray model kings,
but which supported the idea of a monarchy, of ‘royal kings, / Fear’d by
their breed, and famous by their birth’. For Hazlitt, by contrast, writing
in 1817, by which time Napoleon was ailing in exile on the island of Saint
Helena, Gaunt’s speech merely fed ‘the pampered egotism of our country-
men’ (Hazlitt IV. 275), though he quotes it all the same.
In more general terms, Coleridge rehabilitated the Elizabethan age from
Dr Johnson’s idea of it ‘struggling to emerge from barbarity’, and repre-
sented the period as one showing an amazing development of intellectual
power, an age of great men even if they applied their powers to prudential
ends. Even greater was the republican age that followed, as Coleridge con-
trasted the ‘fullness of grand principle’ that informed the seventeenth-
century Puritan revolution in England with the barbarity and ‘want of all
principle’ in the French Revolution. Coleridge’s version of Shakespeare
and his age was closely connected with a perceived need for patriotism and
a growing national pride in response to the French domination of Europe.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 157
England was also perceived as the home of liberty in contrast to the tyr-
anny of Napoleon, and in reworking Lecture 4 of the 1811–12 series for
Biographia Literaria Coleridge ended Chapter 15 with praise of Shakespeare
and Milton, citing from a sonnet by Wordsworth:
O what great men hast thou not produced, England! My country! Truly indeed –
Must we be free or die, who speak the tongue
Which SHAKESPEARE spake . . . (BL II. 28)
Shakespeare thus became a spokesman for English liberty, and was pre-
eminent in his use of the English language, which was superior to other
languages in its range of meanings and multiplicity, constituting ‘the uncon-
scious wisdom of the whole nation’ (LL I. 292). Napoleon was given his due
by Coleridge, but in assessing him as a hero-villain in relation to Macbeth,
Edmund and Milton’s Satan, Coleridge effectively subordinated him to
Shakespeare. These analogies enabled Coleridge to preserve a sense both
of the grandeur of the French emperor and of the evil consequences of his
lust for empire. At the same time they also implicitly supported the idea of
the superiority of the absolute poetic genius of Shakespeare over the mili-
tary commanding genius of Napoleon, and of England over France. In this
larger sense Coleridge’s elevation of Shakespeare in his critical accounts
of the plays has political implications. If Shakespeare upholds freedom, at
the same time ‘he is always the philosopher and the moralist with a pro-
found veneration for all the established institutions of society,’ and ‘never
promulgates any party tenets’ (LL II. 272).
These remarks he made in a lecture on The Tempest in which, as on a num-
ber of occasions, he distinguished between Shakespeare’s way of ‘keeping
to the high road of feelings’ and the politicized treatment of characters
by Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger. In Beaumont and Fletcher he
saw prejudice in their royalism, exemplified in Fletcher’s ‘vulgar mockery’
(LL I. 317) of priests, no doubt thinking of plays like The Spanish Curate; in
Massinger he detected ‘rank republicanism’ (LL II. 272). Shakespeare, by
contrast, ‘made no copies from the bad parts of human nature’ (LL I. 317),
and never introduced ‘a professional character, as such, otherwise than as
respectable’, but treated priests and monks so as to win ‘love and respect’
for them. Commenting on Alonso and Sebastian in The Tempest Coleridge
observed that in Shakespeare’s plays only bad men show scorn for others,
‘as a mode of getting rid of their uneasy feelings of inferiority to the good,
and also, by making the good ridiculous, of rendering the transition of
others to wickedness easy’ (LL II. 271–2). He distinguished Caliban from
158 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Speaking of their effect, i.e. his works themselves, we may define the
excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that
union and interpenetration of the universal and the particular, which
must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science. For
Method implies a progressive transition and it is the meaning of the word
in the original language. (Friend I. 457)
Coleridge’s concept of method here may be linked on the one hand to his
insistence that Shakespeare’s characters are never copies of individuals,
but imitations from nature, and on the other, to his theory of the imagi-
nation as enabling the poet to diffuse a ‘spirit of unity’ in ‘the balance or
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 159
having in mind especially the popular plays translated from the works of
Kotzebue, which, like the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, exemplified for
Coleridge ‘the refinements of modern immorality’: in them ‘vice and vir-
tue are confounded; and through the delicacies of language and senti-
ment, we are tempted to connect innocence with adultery; humanity with
murder; and to consider wickedness as entitled, not to detestation, but to
sympathy and pity’ (LL I. 514).
Coleridge’s discussion of what he called the principles of method in
Shakespeare systematizes ideas expressed in his early lectures in 1808, in
which he stressed the connections between just taste and morality, sought
to show that the dramatist has a most profound and philosophic mind (LL
I. 82) and praised especially the dramatist’s power of imagination in ‘com-
bining many circumstances into one moment of thought to produce that
ultimate end of human Thought and human Feeling, Unity’ (LL I. 68).
In these lectures he rejected the eighteenth-century concern with rules
and external criteria in relation to drama, and offered what amounted
to an organic concept of Shakespeare’s art and judgement, even if he did
not find a neat formula for his ideas until he read Schlegel’s lectures on
dramatic art and literature late in 1811, which in many ways echoed his
own thinking, but better articulated, and supplied him with the terms
‘organic’ and ‘mechanic’ with which to distinguish between the special
excellence of Shakespeare’s plays and the kind of regularity demanded by
rules of drama (LL I. 358). Method in Shakespeare is not to be confused
with Coleridge’s own critical method, which changed and developed over
the years. Coleridge had given political lectures in Bristol in 1795, and in
his Unitarian phase had delivered sermons, but lecturing on literature was
a novel experience for him and his audience in 1808.
As he conceived his course, it was to be much more ambitious than the
typical belletristic fare offered in previous years at the Royal Institution,
and he was setting out to challenge the main line of Shakespeare criti-
cism through the eighteenth century and redefine its vocabulary. Hence
he felt a need to present the result of many years of continued reflection
on ‘the source of our pleasures in the fine Arts in the antithetical balance-
loving nature of man, & the connection of such pleasures with moral excel-
lence’ (LL I. 12). The course was to explain the ‘Principles of Poetry’ and
in defining his terms in his first lecture he apologized for the tedium his
hearers might feel as he spoke on Taste and ‘the definition of the Fine
Arts’ (LL I. 30). He was not well, and in letters commented that he could
only read Lecture 2 through, scarcely taking ‘his eyes off the paper’ (CL
II. 59). There were further apologies as sickness caused the cancellation of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 161
lectures between the second on February 5th and the third on March 30th,
and it may be that illness and opium left him unable to prepare fully for
some lectures. This lack of preparation seems to have been a mixed bless-
ing in fact, for it enabled him to discover that he might be able to dazzle
an audience by eloquence. One attender at a literary lecture in this series
recalled that he apologized for the absence of notes, but that he was so
fluent she thought he had left his notes at home on purpose (LL I. 149).
I think it very probable too that Coleridge realized that his ‘main Object’
in the course, which was to define terms, establish principles and demon-
strate, as he said in Lecture 4, ‘the reciprocal connections of Just Taste
with pure Morality’ (LL I. 78), made rather hard going for his audience,
and in the opening lecture he remarked, ‘I feel the heaviness of my subject
considered as a public Lecture’ (LL I. 30).
Little is known about the content of the rest of the lectures Coleridge
devoted to Shakespeare in this course, except for Lecture 15. Following one
on Milton, Coleridge returned to the topic of the supremacy of Shakespeare
as a poet and dramatist and spoke about several plays. An account of this lec-
ture appears in a letter written by Henry Crabb Robinson to Mrs Clarkson
on 15 May 1808, and is notable for his comment: ‘Coleridge’s digressions
are not the worst part of his lectures, or rather he is always digressing’ (LL
I. 118). By this time it seems that his lectures were successful, as Coleridge
said to John Payne Collier, when they came ‘warm from the heart’ (C on Sh
44). The course was successful enough to encourage him to hire a hall and
offer a public course of a similar kind in 1811–12. Coleridge again began by
defining terms, and in relation to this spoke on the causes of false criticism.
This lecture was reviewed in several newspapers, and the comments in the
Sun are especially interesting, as showing that after beginning by reading
from notes, Coleridge addressed his audience directly. The reporter found
his ‘occasional digressions’ were ‘exceedingly beautiful’, and, referring
also to the 1808 course, recommended ‘Mr. C. to speak as much, and to read
as little as possible’ (LL I. 196).
The relatively full records of the 1811–12 course show that Coleridge could,
in a lecture advertised as dealing with Romeo and Juliet talk ‘very amusingly
without speaking at all on the subject’, as Henry Crabb Robinson reported
(CRB I. 53; LL I. xlviii). Friends like Robinson, looking for more systematic
arguments, might be irritated or disappointed, but they were familiar with
his conversation, and there was not enough difference between this, which
Robinson said ‘was a sort of lecturing & soliloquizing’ (LL I. xlvii), and the
colloquial style of his public speaking. Coleridge was too pleased with his
ability to improvise, and sometimes claimed that ‘with the exception of
162 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
the general Plan & leading Thoughts’ his lectures were ‘strictly extempore,
the words of the moment’ (CL III. 471–2). This may well have been true of
some of the lectures in the 1811–12 course, when his commentary on Romeo
and Juliet stretched to three lectures and he was forced to squeeze Richard
III and Falstaff into one lecture, and Richard II and Hamlet into another to
complete his promised coverage of Shakespeare. In fact he seems to have
prepared carefully for most of his lectures, and the series that ended in
January 1812 was successful enough to encourage him to offer two more
courses each of six lectures in London in the spring of 1812, one on drama
generally, the second on Shakespeare. The first of these courses was much
indebted to Schlegel’s account of drama, and the second was abandoned
in June for lack of support.
Coleridge then accepted an invitation to present twelve lectures on ‘the
Belles Lettres’ at the Surrey Institution beginning in November 1812. His
syllabus, like those for the 1808 and 1811–12 series, begins from a grand
plan to consider the principles of poetry and the origin of the fine arts in
general, with a promise of four lectures on Shakespeare late in the course.
He appears in fact to have devoted the last five lectures of the course to
Shakespeare, which ended to great applause. In all the series thus far
Coleridge had begun from general principles, and in the lectures he gave
after December 1811 had made much use of his copy of Schlegel.
Then in 1813 at short notice he set up a course of eight lectures in Bristol,
six on Shakespeare and two on education, in an effort to raise money for his
friends John and Mary Morgan. For this series he abandoned his attempt
to deal with general principles, and, building on old lectures notes, began
to focus more closely on the text and characters of the plays he dealt with.
He took relevant volumes of the edition of Shakespeare by Joseph Rann
(6 vols, 1786–94) and his copy of Schlegel with him into the lecture room,
as his notes show (LL I. 540–2). Quoting from these, and commenting on
and quarrelling with Schlegel, helped him to develop readings of favourite
plays, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Othello, Richard III and Richard II,
mainly in relation to the major characters.
The last lectures Coleridge gave on Shakespeare in 1818–19 show a
remarkable innovation in his method, seen from time to time in earlier
courses, which owes nothing to Schlegel. Towards the end of a course on
European literature in May 1818 Coleridge drafted an announcement for
a proposed course of six lectures ‘of particular and practical Criticism,
taking some one play of Shakespear’s, scene by scene, as the subject of
each Lecture’ (LL II. 34). He had given currency in 1817 to a concept of
‘practical criticism’ in his commentary on Venus and Adonis in Chapter 15
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 163
of his Biographia Literaria, which was developed from a lecture of 1808. This
concept, applied to determine qualities in a poem ‘which may be deemed
specific symptoms of poetic power’ (BL II. 19) was in turn taken over by I.
A. Richards in 1929 as the title of a book that came to constitute a kind of
manifesto for the ‘New Criticism’, the practice of close reading that became
so influential in succeeding decades. Coleridge’s note for the first lecture
show he was consciously intending to comment on Shakespeare’s works ‘in
a somewhat different and I would fain believe more instructive form’ than
hitherto (LL II. 263).
In his first lecture he began with a brief introduction on drama as imita-
tion not copy and on dramatic illusion, then launched into a discussion
of The Tempest as a play of the imagination, having no allegiance to time
or place. He went on in the six lectures of the 1818 course and in the first
three lectures of the course he gave in 1819 on Shakespeare and Milton
to focus in detail on the texts of the plays as he considered the major
tragedies, including for the first time King Lear, and ending with Troilus
and Cressida. He promised to devote each lecture to one play, considered
‘scene by scene, for the purpose of illustrating the conduct of the plot,
and the peculiar force, beauty and propriety, of the language, in the par-
ticular passages’ (LL II. 254). For these lectures he had a copy of Samuel
Ayscough’s edition of Shakespeare (1807) interleaved with blank sheets on
which he could make notes, and took it into the lecture room, so that he
spoke directly from the text of the play in front of him. This concentra-
tion on minutiae was a notable departure from the practice of lecturers
like Schlegel and Hazlitt of going through the plays one by one describing
the plot and pointing out beauties and faults. Coleridge’s notes for his late
courses mostly relate to the close reading and exposition of the play text,
especially the early scenes.
from Moscow, in 1813 he was defeated in Spain and much of Europe was
freed from French rule and in 1815, after escaping from exile in Elba,
he was finally defeated at Waterloo. In his 1811–12 lectures Coleridge was
anxious to promote a patriotic belief in the English as ‘one of the gyant
nations of the world’ since the heroic times of Queen Elizabeth, with a
moral superiority embodied in Shakespeare, ‘the greatest man that ever
lived,’ a superiority that still enables them to ‘struggle with the other, the
evil genius of the Planet’ (LL I. 354–5), that is, Napoleon. In 1814, by con-
trast, Coleridge could conclude a lecture on Milton with an analysis of the
late French emperor, who now, after his abdication, had dwindled into
‘Napoleon Bonaparte, the cowardly Corsican Usurper, Rebel and Assassin’
(LL II. 13).
From his earliest lectures Coleridge sought to rebut the common
eighteenth-century conception of Shakespeare as summed up by Hugh
Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric (1783): ‘Great he may be justly called, as
the extent and force of his natural genius, both for Tragedy and Comedy,
is altogether unrivalled. But, at the same time, it is genius shooting wild,
deficient in just taste, and altogether unassisted by knowledge or art’ (II.
523). Coleridge insisted on Shakespeare’s consummate artistry, and began
with a general lecture on taste, redefining it in relation to art as having as
its purpose ‘to combine & unite a sense of immediate pleasure in ourselves
with the perception of external arrangement’ (LL I. 37). Already he was
linking just taste with judgement and artistry, and he went on to show how
Shakespeare displays these qualities in his earliest poems, Venus and Adonis
and The Rape of Lucrece, works generally neglected by earlier critics. In the
fragmentary notes for these lectures he sought to show in Shakespeare’s
poems an ‘endless activity of Thought’ energized by fancy, or the ‘aggre-
gative Power’ (LL I. 66–7), and Imagination, or ‘the power by which one
image or feeling is made to modify many others, & by a sort of fusion to
force many into one’ (LL I. 81). His aim was to demonstrate that Shakespeare
proved himself as a great poet before he began to write plays.
When he went on to speak of Shakespeare as a dramatist, Coleridge divided
the characteristics of drama into ‘Language, Passion, and Character’ (LL I.
85), giving primacy to language, and insisting that the consciousness of the
poet’s mind must be ‘diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator’ (LL I.
86), allowing for different styles within one work, as long as all are ‘always in
keeping’ or in harmony. In his first two courses of lectures on Shakespeare
his initial effort was to arrive at a definition of poetry, culminating in a
‘Final Definition’ of a poem and poetry (LL I. 245) in their highest sense, a
definition reworked in Biographia Literaria, chapter 14. He insisted above all
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 165
From his early series Coleridge moved easily between the general and the
particular, sometimes zooming in on a line, and image, or a detail of the
action, with a penetrating comment on the play of meaning in the dialogue.
So for example Lecture 12 in the 1811–12 series he cites Bolingbroke’s (or
Bullingbrook’s) lines on arriving at Berkeley Castle to learn that Richard II
is within its walls. He calls on Northumberland to deliver a message:
Noble lord,
Go to the rude ribs of that ancient castle;
Through brazen trumpet send the breath of parley
Into his ruin’d ears, and thus deliver:
Henry Bullingbrook
[On both his knees] doth kiss King Richard’s hand,
And sends allegiance and true faith of heart
To his most royal person; . . . (3.3.31–8)
Coleridge noticed the slippage between the castle and Richard in ‘his
ruin’d ears’, the pronoun ‘his’ showing that ‘altho Bolingbroke was only
speaking of the castle his thoughts dwelt on Richard the King’ (LL I. 384).
In spite of his protestations he knows and means to exploit Richard’s ruin.
The point is missed in many modern editions: the Riverside, second edi-
tion (1997) glosses ‘its ruin’d ears’ as ‘its (the castle’s) ruined loopholes’,
and in the Norton Shakespeare (1997), the phrase is explained as ‘its
battered loopholes’. The modern editors miss the psychological subtlety
Coleridge noticed. He also drew attention to the suggestion of self-impor-
tance in ‘Bullingbrook’ stretching his name into the equivalent of a blank
verse line.
It was, however, only in his late lectures that he fully realized what was
new and exciting about his critical approach, and he probed more deeply
in relation to Richard II, observing, for instance, how the rhymes that end
Bolingbroke’s accusations against Mowbray in the opening scene show he
has planned his part in advance, and ‘well express the preconcertedness of
Bolingbroke’s Scheme, so beautifully contrasted with the vehemence and
sincere irritation of Mowbray’ (LL II. 284) in the opening scene. In this way
he showed how attention to rhymes provides an insight into the characters
of these challengers. Coleridge went on to consider other uses of rhyme in
the play, and to demonstrate how their mode of speech reveals aspects of
the characters of Richard and Gaunt especially. He also brilliantly observes
how the Queen’s foreboding about being parted from her ‘sweet Richard’
in 2.2 illustrates the character of Richard, who is no ‘vulgar Debauchee’,
168 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
one sympathetic reviewer in the Courier to write: ‘He appears to us, to have
studied our great Bard with an intensity of the reasoning faculties, and at
the same time with a fervor and sensibility of poetical feeling which rarely
unite in the same person. He has opened to himself an entirely new path’
(LL II. 334).
The commentary on Othello is especially notable for the analysis of Iago’s
character, as revealed in his exchanges with Roderigo in the early scenes,
showing ‘the coolness of a preconceiving Experimenter’ (LL II. 313), and at
the same time revealing ‘the dread of contempt’ in someone who has his
‘keenest pleasure’ in contempt of others. As noted earlier, Coleridge also
vigorously defended the unity of the play against Dr Johnson, who wished
the play had begun with Act 2 in Cyprus. In King Lear Edmund especially
intrigued Coleridge, as possessing admirable qualities, courage, intellect
and strength of character, and at the same time a viciousness that can be
explained, if not justified, through the voice of his father, Gloucester. His
insensitive comments bring out the shame of Edmund’s bastardy and his
being sent away for his education. Lear himself Coleridge saw as embody-
ing old age: ‘Old age, like Infancy, is itself a character – in Lear the natu-
ral imperfections increased by life-long habits of being promptly obeyed’:
so his faults become the ‘means and aggravations of his Sufferings & his
Daughters’ ingratitude’ and increase our pity for him (LL II. 330, 332–3).
Coleridge wound up his lectures on Shakespeare with another commentary
on Romeo and Juliet, and a final lecture speculating on the chronology of the
plays, but ending with a discussion of Troilus and Cressida. A reviewer in the
New Times newspaper quoted what the lecturer said about Thersites, expand-
ing Coleridge’s own note, which refers to the way the heroes of paganism
in the play are translated into ‘Knights of Christian Chivalry’, but does not,
as the reviewer reports, describe the characters as ‘all Gothic faces, and in
Gothic drapery, each intensely filling the space it occupies’ (LL II. 379).
This description helps to explain why Coleridge saw the play as a ‘grand
History-piece in the robust style of Albert Dürer’ (LL II. 378). This newspa-
per report gives some idea of the way Coleridge elaborated and developed
his notes when lecturing. In his lectures he commented in detail on about a
dozen of Shakespeare’s plays and did not attempt a systematic overall view.
This was not, as Hazlitt insultingly said in conversation at a gathering at
Charles Lamb’s house in 1811, because Coleridge had not read the works
and knew no more than the excerpts printed in Elegant Extracts – indeed,
Coleridge chose to dwell on a selection of favourites in his lectures in order
to demonstrate Shakespeare’s artistry in the way the early scenes, as he said,
contain the ‘germ of all the after events’ (LL I. 559).
170 Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
The records of Coleridge’s lectures are frequently sketchy and never bet-
ter than incomplete. He published only two formal essays on Shakespeare,
the essay on method in The Friend, the periodical he edited in 1809–10, the
other on Shakespeare’s poetry, worked up from lecture notes for Biographia
Literaria, Chapter 15. In his other works there are many scattered comments
on Shakespeare, especially in his letters, notebooks and in the records of
his Table-Talk. However, most of his innovative and original Shakespeare
criticism has to be recovered from notes and the reports of people who
attended the lectures. This explains some of its limitations, such as the lack
of a sustained argument. He has little to say on the comedies, and his sense
of Ophelia as lacking what he called outjuttings (LL II. 351), as having no
edge to her character, or being free from faults, was related to his percep-
tion of other heroines such as Miranda, Imogen and Queen Katherine in
Henry VIII as possessing ‘the exquisite harmony of all the parts of the moral
being constituting one living total of head and heart’ (LL II. 270).However,
his comments on the nurse in Romeo and Juliet and on Lady Macbeth show a
much deeper understanding of female characters. He enlisted Shakespeare
as a patriot gentleman in opposition to Napoleon, and came to envisage
him as a ‘philosophical aristocrat, who treated the mob with “affectionate
superiority,”’ and had ‘a profound veneration for the established institu-
tions of society’ (LL II. 272–3). At times he relied on Schlegel too casually
for a snap judgement, as when, in a lecture hurriedly put on at short notice
in 1813, he said he could not remember a single pun in Macbeth, echoing
a remark by Schlegel in his Lecture 27 that he found no example of word-
play in this text (LL I. 572; DKL II. 134). In his 1811–12 lecture Coleridge
had vigorously defended Shakespeare’s use of puns (LL I. 293). In spite
of such limitations and the fragmentary nature of his criticism Coleridge
summed up his original insights in a memorable way, so that his formu-
lations remain a challenge or stimulus to later critics. He was especially
attentive to the subtleties of Shakespeare’s poetic language, and to the way
the plays grow from the opening scenes into a unified whole.
Perhaps it is as well that none of his lectures is recoverable in its totality,
for they were not designed for publication, but developed for the occasion,
and involved the personality of the speaker in direct engagement with his
subject. Some deplored his spontaneity (LL II. 338), but his doctor, James
Gillman, commented that ‘In his lectures he was brilliant, fluent and rapid;
his words seemed to flow as from a person repeating with grace and energy
some delightful poem’ (LL II. 250). After Coleridge the most important
Shakespeare criticism of the Romantic period was that of William Hazlitt, who
was decidedly hostile to Coleridge when he published in 1817 his Characters
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 171
Coleridge acutely observes here how breath in a cold climate like that of
Scotland may become visible as vapour, so that the image is suggestive of
the location. Much earlier, in a notebook entry while reading Sir Walter
Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and thinking of the Edinburgh Review in 1810 he
had jotted down, ‘I must not forget in speaking of the certain Hubbub, I am
to undergo for hypercriticism, to point out how little instructive any criti-
cism can be which does not enter into minutiae’ (CN III. 3971). All through
the records of his lectures there are marvellous examples of incisive close
readings of Shakespeare’s texts, but it was only in his late lectures that he
learned to build his arguments for the power and unity of the plays from
the minutiae of practical criticism. In spite of the incomplete and often
scattered nature of Coleridge’s own notes and the reports of his lectures,
there still remains enough to establish him as a seminal critic, indeed one
of the most influential of all Shakespeare’s interpreters. As Alfred Harbage
put it, ‘When we read Johnson, we think what a wonderful man Johnson
is. When we read Schlegel, we think what a wonderful summary this is.
When we read Coleridge we think what a wonderful artist is Shakespeare.
Coleridge’s is the criticism with immediacy, the power to evoke the works
criticized; when he speaks Shakespeare is there’ (Harbage 25–6).
Notes
Chapter 1
1
See, for instance, John Pemble’s recent book where the French failure to
understand Shakespeare is also blamed on ‘the stubborn endurance of
Catholicism in France’ (Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France
(London: Hambledon and London, 2005), 20.
2
This common expression, which mocks the reactionary view that Les Lumières are
to be blamed for the ills that befell the following ages, originates from the song
which Gavroche, the quintessential Paris brat, sings on the barricades in Victor
Hugo’s Les Misérables.
3
This letter is dated 19 July 1776; similar reminders are frequent, for example, in
the 1761 Appel, or in a letter to Horace Walpole dated 15 July 1768. References to
Voltaire are to Theodore Besterman’s edition (1967) Voltaire on Shakespeare
(Geneva: Droz, 1967), here, successively, 175, 73 and 158. Hereafter cited as VS.
4
Quoted by F. Baldensperger in ‘Esquisse d’une histoire de Shakespeare en
France’, Etudes d’histoire littéraire: second series (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 157. The
translations of the French quotations are my own. Note that in the seventeenth
century, comédie can refer to any play. Mme de Sévigné calls Racine’s Bajazet (1672)
‘une comédie’.
5
This text, now generally attributed to Justus Van Effen, was published in the
Journal littéraire (1717), ix, 1: 157–216.
6
In 1716 already, his Ecrits satiriques had banished him to the provinces.
7
See Sir Gavin de Beer and André-Michel Rousseau (eds), Voltaire’s British Visitors
(Geneva: Droz, 1967), 157. Hereafter referred to as British Visitors.
8
G. C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols (London: Constable,
1920), 1: 282.
9
P. G. Adams, ‘How much of Shakespeare did Voltaire know?’ Shakespeare Association
Bulletin 16 (1941), 126.
10
G. Lanson, Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1920), 52.
11
Bacon is hailed as the father of experimental philosophy (Letter 12), Locke as its
promoter (Letter 13), and Newton is considered superior to Descartes (14 to
17).
12
Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 1, 259–60, and J. Genest, Some Account of
the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols (Bath: Carrington,
1832), 3: 185–246.
13
T. R. Lounsbury, Shakespeare and Voltaire (London: David Nutt, 1902), 66.
Lounsbury’s very informative but often adverse study has sometimes been con-
sidered as responsible for Voltaire’s discredit among English-speaking
174 Notes
30
Their private taste did not always correspond to the critics’ prescriptions and
performances of libertine scenes graced many a society dinner.
31
After Mme Châtelet’s death, Voltaire lived mainly at ‘Les Délices’, in Switzerland,
from 1755 to 1760, and then in Ferney, on French territory, almost until his death
in 1778.
32
From then on, Voltaire did not spare him, making fun of L’Émile, Rousseau’s
treatise on education, and turning to ridicule the return to nature which it advo-
cates: ‘One feels like walking on all fours when one reads your book. [Il prend
envie de marcher à quatre pattes, quand on lit votre ouvrage]’, he wrote to
Rousseau on 30 August 1755 (Correspondance, ed. Th. Besterman, 13 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977–92), 4: Letter 4183.
33
On play-acting at Ferney, see the testimony of John Conyers in a letter dated
August 1765 (British Visitors, 114–15).
34
Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV (Paris, 1752; reprinted Librairie générale française,
2005), 747.
35
This letter, dated 15 July 1768, is a reply to the preface of The Castle of Otranto (VS
158; see n. 22).
36
‘Les porteurs de chaises, les matelots, les fiacres, les courtauds de boutique, les
bouchers, les clercs même, aiment beaucoup ces spectacles; donnez-leur des
combats de coqs, ou de taureaux. . . . des gibets, des sortilèges, des revenants, ils y
courent en foule.’ Lettre à l’Académie française (VS 201).
37
He refers to his translation as being imitated in French with the precautions
demanded by a nation excessively punctilious on the subject of bienséances
[(ce monologue) . . . qu’on a imité en français avec les ménagements qu’exige
une nation scrupuleuse à l’excès sur les bienséances.] ‘Art dramatique’ (VS
167).
38
His translation of ‘ . . . that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-
slaughter’ by ‘Oh! Si l’Etre éternel n’avait pas du canon / Contre le suicide!’, is
one of his rare errors of comprehension; he may also have missed the gravedig-
ger’s pun on Adam ‘carrying arms’, since he translates it by ‘les armes’, without
an explanatory footnote.
39
Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), 454.
40
Lettres de J. F. Ducis, par M. Paul Albert (Paris: G. Jousset, 1879), 7–8.
41
A scanned image of the fifth reprint of the Gogué edition (Paris: Ruault, 1789)
can be consulted on www. hamletworks.org. For a more detailed analysis of
Ducis’s play, see my article, ‘The mouse and the urn: re-visions of Shakespeare
from Voltaire to Ducis’, Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007): 214–22.
42
‘Pourquoi aucune pièce de Shakespeare n’a-t-elle pu passer la mer? C’est que le
bon est recherché de toutes les nations.’ (VS 61) ; ‘On n’a jamais représenté, sur
aucun théâtre étranger, aucune des pièces de Shakespeare.’ (VS 206)
43
In 1821, François Guizot published a revised edition of Le Tourneur’s transla-
tions which included the Poems. The Sonnets were only included in the 1871
re-edition.
44
In the ‘Préface pour la nouvelle traduction de Shakespeare,’ which concludes his
William Shakespeare (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1864), Hugo insists, with his usual rhetoric,
that the true translator should evade nothing, omit nothing, blunt nothing,
176 Notes
65
Hugo claims that he topped the old dictionary with the legendary red cap worn
by revolutionaries (‘Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire: / Je nommai
le cochon par son nom; pourquoi pas ?’). The poem, entitled ‘Réponse à un acte
d’accusation’ [In Answer to An Indictment], was published in Les Contemplations
in 1856.
66
Hugo, Shakespeare, 223.
67
This title refers to the Théâtre des Funambules, originally reserved for tight-rope
walkers, which was later popularized by Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné’s 1945
film, Les Enfants du Paradis.
68
This was published in 1842 in La revue de Paris; quoted in Anne Ubersfeld,
Théophile Gautier (Paris: Stock, 1992), 225.
69
See Théophile Gautier, Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans
(Paris, 1859), 285 and 263.
70
Published in ‘Shakespeare et les Français’ (1959), Nouvelles réflexions sur le théâtre
(Paris, 1959), 116–28.
Chapter 2
1
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed.
H. H. Houben (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1913), 30 March 1824. Hereafter cited as
Eckermann, with date of letter.
2
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke (‘Hamburger Ausgabe’), ed. Erich
Trunz, 14 vols (Munich: Beck, 1981), 9: 492–3. Hereafter cited as HA.
3
Kurt Ermann, Goethes Shakespeare-Bild, Studien zur deutschen Literatur 76
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983), 7.
4
The closest comparison might be with Johann Christian Günther (1695–1723), a
short-lived Catullan ingénu two generations prior to Goethe: largely overlooked
these days, but certainly read and admired by Goethe and fondly remembered in
Poetry and Truth (2. 7; HA 9: 264–5).
5
William Shakespear’s Schauspiele, 13 vols (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Füessli, 1775–82).
6
[Elizabeth, Montagu] Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear Compared with
the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some remarks upon the Misrepresentations of
Mons. de Voltaire.
7
Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1877–1913), 5: 211. Hereafter cited as SWS.
8
Justus Möser (1720–94): statesman, lawyer, historian and commentator on poli-
tics and literature.
9
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe (‘Hamburger Ausgabe’), ed. K. R. Mandelkow
(Munich 1988), 1: 133. Hereafter cited as HABr.
10
This and many of the following comparisons have been noted by Jakob Minor
and August Sauer, ‘Die zwei ältesten Bearbeitingen des Götz von Berlichingen’ in
Studien zur Goethe-Philologie (Vienna: Konegen, 1880), 237–92.
11
We hear in All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘my heart / Durst make too bold a herald of
my tongue’ (5. 3. 45–6); in Much Ado About Nothing, ‘Silence is the perfectest
heralt of joy’ (2. 1. 306); the king’s colour comes ‘Like heralds ’twixt two dreadful
battles set’ in King John (4. 2. 78).
178 Notes
12
‘Comets, importing change of times and states, / Brandish your crystal tresses in
the sky’ (1. 1. 2–3).
13
‘Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. Dritter Brief’, in Der Teutsche Merkur (March
1784): 239 ff.; trans. Timothy J. Chamberlain, in H. B. Nisbet (ed.), Eighteenth
Century German Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237.
14
Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 271.
15
Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Individualism. An Original Study: Essays on
Shakespeare and Goethe, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, Jaspers,
Heidegger, and Toynbee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40–3.
16
Hamlet, 2. 2. 303–8.
17
Letter of 6 December, 1772; Benjamin Bennett, ‘Goethe’s Werther: double per-
spective and the game of life’, German Quarterly 53 (1980): 64–78 (70).
18
T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and
Criticism (London: Methuen, 1921), 95. Eliot similarly accuses Coleridge of mak-
ing ‘a Coleridge’ of Hamlet.
19
Goethe himself refers it to an English ballad, probably the ‘Lucy and Colin’ writ-
ten by Addison’s friend Tickell, the original of the ballad which Herder included
as ‘Röschen und Kolin’ among his Volkslieder collection (SWS 25: 180–2), though
in fact it does not parallel much of Goethe’s content in Act 5.
20
Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age; vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1992), 284.
21
Ist es ein flüchtiger Fürst wie im Ardenner-Wald?/Soll ich Verirrter hier in den
verschlungnen Gründen/Die Geister Shakespeares gar verkörpert finden?/Ja,
der Gedanke führt mich eben recht:/Sie sind es selbst, wo nicht ein gleich
Geschlecht! (Ilmenau, am 3. September 1783, 52–6; HA 1: 108)
22
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der
Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen (‘Weimarer Ausgabe’), (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–
1919), 1. 53. 94–6. Hereafter cited as WA.
23
This is recorded in the memoirs of the pastrycook-become-court-actor Eduard
Franz Genast (cited by Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 217); Genast was a gravedigger
in Goethe’s first two productions of Hamlet.
24
Goethes Gespräche. Gesamtausgabe, ed. Flodoard Freiherr von Biedermann, 5 vols
(Leipzig: Biedermann, 1909), 1: 53.
25
Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 59–62.
26
Flodoard von Biedermann, Goethe-Forschungen (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten &
Loening, 1879), 173; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 55.
27
11 August 1787, to Duke Carl August (HABr 2: 63).
28
Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen and Gerhard
Fricke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1943 ), 22: 199–209. Hereafter cited as Schiller.
29
T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 52–3.
30
See preface to Voltaire’s Brutus (1730); influence is also detectable in Cassius’s
speech in Act II of La Mort de César (1735).
31
Daniel Jacoby, ‘Zu Goethes Egmont. 1: Egmont und Shakespeares Julius Cäsar’,
Goethe-Jahrbuch 12 (1891): 247–52 (252).
32
The earliest actual mention of the novel is in a diary entry of 16 February 1777
(WA 3. 1. 34), though a reference, in a letter of 1773 (HABr 1: 152), to ‘slow’
work on a novel may well also refer to Wilhelm Meister material.
Notes 179
33
Although his utterances at the time were more circumspect, Goethe’s later
remarks, such as his acquiescence (in the 3 May 1827 conversation with
Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 497–8) in Ampère’s view of this part of his
career, confirm this assessment.
34
Boyle, Goethe, 1: 386.
35
Marvin Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1978), 49; Boyle, Goethe, 1: 400.
36
Caspar Goethe, though not a trader himself, had been a jurist and honorary
imperial counsellor living comfortably on the proceeds of his father’s wine-
trading business.
37
Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 118.
38
The general tendency of the interpretation to ‘goetheanize, meisterize, werther-
ize, egmontize’, Hamlet is neatly diagnosed by Gustav Landauer in Shakespeare.
Dargestellt in Vorträgen. ed. Martin Buber, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten &
Loening, 1923), 1: 208–14.
39
11 October 1767, HABr 1: 62; as Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild notes (119), Goethe’s
remark there is an explicit epanorthosis on Hamlet 1. 2. 146.
40
Heufeld’s prim, draconian and – even compared with its already truncated
Wieland original – extensively mutilated Hamlet was first staged in Vienna in
1773, and was widely used in the years thereafter. Detailed assessment in Simon
Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, vol. 1: 1596–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70–2.
41
The earliest of these seems to be Goethe himself, implicitly referring to Hamlet
in No End of Shakespeare: ‘a desire which exceeds the powers of the individual, is
modern’ (HA 12: 294).
42
It was mentioned in a letter of December 1785 to Charlotte von Stein (WA 4. 7.
138).
43
‘Frauenrollen auf dem Römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt’ refers to the
‘pleasure of seeing not the thing itself but its imitation, being entertained not by
nature but by art’, and Goethe implements this in ‘Rules for Actors’, especially in
the last paragraph where he reminds the actor ‘that it is supposed to be an imita-
tive spectacle and not an unadorned reality’. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen
seines Schaffens, ‘Münchner Ausgabe’, ed. Karl Richter et al. (Munich: Hanser,
1985–98), 3. 2. 175 and 6. 2. 703–45. Schiller similarly rails against the artless
imitation of nature (Schiller 29: 56–9, 179). Simon Williams rightly draws atten-
tion to the political principle behind these views (German Stage, 1: 90–2).
44
Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre, 72.
45
In a letter to Herder of May 1794, Goethe admitted to revising the novel not in
order to make a good job of it, but rather to ‘get it, as a pseudo-confession, off my
chest’ (HABr 2: 176).
46
Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age; vol. 2: Revolution and Renunciation (Oxford;
Clarendon, 2000), 235.
47
David Roberts, The Indirections of Desire: Hamlet in Goethe’s ‘Wilhelm Meister’
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1980), 33, 60, 111–12, 120–7; Roger Paulin, ‘Shakespeare
1564–1616’ in Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte et al., 4 vols in 5 (Weimar,
Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996–8), 4. 2: 985; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 118 ff.; even the
more cautious Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Die Funktion des Hamlet-Motivs in Wilhelm
180 Notes
65
These are assembled at HA 8: 572–8; the Tag- und Jahreshefte for 1807 refer to the
Wanderjahre as ‘little stories strung together by a romantic thread’, which are
meant to form ‘a marvellously attractive whole’.
66
Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 209–11.
67
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Act V, Scene 1.
68
Stuart Atkins, Goethe’s Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1958), 6, 58, 276; Ronald Gray, Goethe: A Critical Introduction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 165–71.
69
A ‘theatre master’ (i.e. scenery builder) appears at the beginning of the Walpurgis
Night’s Dream (4223–6), and Mephistopheles himself acts as ‘prompt’ in the
mumchance at the emperor’s court at the beginning of Part 2 (4955).
70
Faust 239–42; compare Henry V, Prologue 12.
71
Faust, 3682–9 (‘Was machst du mir / Vor Liebchens Tür,/ Kathrinchen, hier /
Bei frühem Tagesblicke? Laß, laß es sein! / Er läßt dich ein, / Als Mädchen ein, /
Als Mädchen nicht zurücke.’)
72
Schlegel substituted ‘Sankt Kathrin’ for Shakespeare’s ‘Saint Charity’ in the fol-
lowing strophe.
73
Eckermann, 18 January 1825.
74
Faust, 4231–50.
75
‘Shakespeare’, trans. Joyce Crick, modified by Barry Nisbet, in Eighteenth Century
German Criticism, ed. by Timothy J. Chamberlain (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 161.
76
‘Wenn ich sagen könnte, was ich alles großen Vorgängern und Mitlebenden
schuldig geworden bin, so bliebe nicht viel übrig’. (Eckermann, 12 May 1825)
77
L. A. Willoughby noted this rationale for Goethe’s choice here in ‘Goethe looks
at the English’, MLR 50. 4 (Oct. 1955): 464–84 (476).
78
Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 327.
79
Piero Weiss, ‘Verdi and the Fusion of Genres’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society 5. 1 (Spring 1982): 138–156 (139).
80
Lacy Collison-Morley, Shakespeare in Italy (Stratford-upon-Avon, UK: Shakespeare
Head Press, 1916), 98–150; Paul van Tieghem, Le Préromantisme: Études d’histoire
littéraire européenne, III: La Découverte de Shakespeare sur le continent (Paris: Sfelt,
1947).
81
Weiss, ‘Verdi and the Fusion of Genres’, 141.
Chapter 3
1
Christine Roger is the author of the first section of this chapter, ‘The Reception
of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1785’ (pp. 92–103), and Roger Paulin of the
second, ‘August Wilhelm Schlegel and the Romantic Shakespeare’ (pp.
103–127).
2
[Christoph Martin Wieland], Shakespear Theatralische Werke. Aus dem Englischen
übersezt von Herrn Wieland [ . . . ], 8 vols (Zurich: Orell Gessner, 1762–6).
3
On this see Albert Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries: an Account of English Actors in Germany and the Netherlands and of the Plays
182 Notes
Presented by Them During the Same Period (London: Asher, 1865), esp. 263–303;
Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German stage. Vol. 1: 1586–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 27–45.
4
Daniel Georg Morhof, Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie [1682], ed.
Henning Boetius, Ars Poetica. Texte 1 (Bad Homburg v.d.H: Gehlen, 1969), 110,
121, 129.
5
J. G. Robertson, ‘The knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent at the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century’, MLR 1 (1906): 312–21.
6
Gustav Becker, ‘Johann Jakob Bodmers “Sasper” ’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch 73 (1937):
139–41.
7
See the essay by Michèle Willems in this volume.
8
See Fritz Rau, Zur Verbreitung und Nachahmung des ‘Tatler’ und ‘Spectateur’,
Anglistische Forschungen 145 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1980).
9
Der Zuschauer. Aus dem Engeländischen übersetzet [trans. Luise Gottsched] (Leipzig:
Breitkopf, 1739). See Hilary Brown, ‘“Als käm sie von der Thems und von der
Seyne her”: Luise Gottsched als Übersetzerin’, in Brunhilde Wehinger and Hilary
Brown (eds), Übersetzungskultur im 18. Jahrhundert: Übersetzerinnen in Deutschland,
Frankreich und der Schweiz (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2008), 37–52.
10
Texts in Hansjürgen Blinn (ed.), Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare
in Deutschland. vol. 1: Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788 ; vol. 2: Ausgewählte Texte
von 1793 bis 1827 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982, 1988), 1: 40–1, 62–3. Subsequent
references in text as Blinn: 1982, 1988.
11
Versuch einer gebundenen Uebersetzung von dem Tode des Julius Cäsar, trans. Caspar
Wilhelm von Borcke (Berlin: Haude, 1741).
12
[Edward Young], Conjectures on Original Composition (London: Millar and Dodsley,
1759), 12.
13
See Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914. Native
Literature and Foreign Genius, Anglistische und Amerikanistische Texte und Studien
11 (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 2003), 49–53.
14
In the Spectator essay ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, Tuesday, July 1 1712.
15
See Roger Bauer, ‘“The fairy way of writing”. Von Shakespeare zu Wieland und
Tieck’, in Roger Bauer et al. (eds.), Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen
Aufklärung und Romantik, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A:
Kongressberichte 22 (Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris: Peter Lang,
1988), 143–61.
16
[Christlob Mylius], ‘Des Herrn Voltaire Gedanken über Trauer- und Lustspiele
der Engländer, aus seinen Briefen über die Engländer, übersetzt’, Beyträge zur
Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters. Erstes Stück (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1750), 96–136.
17
Neue Erweiterungen der Erkenntis und des Vergnügens, 9 vols (Frankfurt, Leipzig:
Lankisch, 1753–9), 4. Stück (1753), 275–97.
18
Ibid. 39. Stück (1756).
19
See Paulin, The Critical Reception, 90–2.
20
[Simon Grynäus], Neue Probstücke der englischen Schaubühne, aus der Ursprache über-
setzet von einem Liebhaber des guten Geschmacks (Basel: Schorndorff, 1758). See Balz
Engler, ‘Was bedeutet es, Shakespeare zu übersetzen? Die erste deutsche Fassung
von Romeo and Juliet’, in Roger Paulin (ed.), Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, Das
achtzehnte Jahrhundet. Supplementa 13 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 39–47.
Notes 183
21
[Pierre Antoine de La Place], Le Théâtre anglois, 8 vols (London [Paris]: n.p.
1746–9).
22
See Sabine Kob, Wielands Shakespeare-Übersetzung. Ihre Entstehung und ihre Rezeption
im Sturm und Drang, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe XIV, 365 (Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 2000); Dieter Martin, ‘Le Shakespeare de Wieland entre lecteur
et spectateur’, in Christine Roger (ed.), Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des
lumières au romantisme, Revue Germanique Internationale 5 (2007) (Paris: CNRS
Éditions, 2007), 109–20.
23
Manfred Fuhrmann, ‘Wielands Übersetzungsmaximen,’ in Christoph Martin
Wieland, Werke, ed. Gonthier-Louis Fink et al., 12 vols (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986–), 9: 1089–95.
24
Christoph Martin Wieland, Briefwechsel, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Berlin, 20 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1963–), 3: 375.
25
The Works of Shakespear in eight volumes [ . . . ], being restored from the blunders of the first
editors, and the interpolations of the two last [ . . . ] by Mr Pope and Mr Warburton, 8 vols
(London: Knapton, 1747).
26
In Dichtung und Wahrheit, part 3, book 11. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Werke.
Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, 14 vols (Hamburg: Wegner, 1960), 9: 493–6.
27
Goethe, Hamburger Ausgabe, 2: 255–6.
28
See Kyösti Itkonen, Die Shakespeare-Übersetzung Wielands (1762–1766). Ein Beitrag
zur Erforschung englisch-deutscher Lehnbeziehungen, Studia Philologica Jyväskyläensia
7 (Jyväskyla: Jyväskylän Yliopisto, 1971).
29
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefe. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow,
4 vols (Hamburg: Wegner, 1962–5), 1: 133.
30
William Shakespear’s Schauspiele. Neue Ausgabe. Von Joh. Joach. Eschenburg, 13 vols
(Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuessli, 1775–7, 1782).
31
[Elizabeth Montagu], Versuch über Shakespears Genie und Schriften [ . . . ] Aus dem
Englischen übersetzt und mit einem doppelten Anhange begleitet von Johann Joachim
Eschenburg (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1771).
32
Johann Joachim Eschenburg, Ueber W. Shakspeare (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Fuessli,
1787).
33
See Renate Häublein, Die Entdeckung Shakespeares auf der deutschen Bühne des 18.
Jahrhunderts. Adaption und Wirkung der Vermittlung auf dem Theater, Theatron 46
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005).
34
On the Romantic movement and Shakespeare, see Paulin, Critical Reception,
253–96.
35
Jakob Thomson’s Sophonisba ein Trauerspiel aus dem Englischen übersetzt und mit
Anmerkungen erläutert [ . . . ] von Johann Heinrich Schlegeln (Leipzig: Hahn, 1758).
36
Letters in Michael Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1872), 254–60.
37
Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel. Briefe, ed. Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler,
1972), 23.
38
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie (1803), ed. Frank Jolles
and Edith Höltenschmidt, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, 3 (Paderborn,
Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 2006), 350–1.
39
Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis, ed. Josef Körner, 3 vols.
(Brno, Vienna, Leipzig: Rohrer, 1936–7, Zurich: Francke, 1958), 2: 381–2.
184 Notes
40
Schlegel, Vorlesungen, 221.
41
This is the burden of the 34th Lecture in his Vienna series.
42
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig:
Weidmann, 1846–7), 7: 38. All subsequent references to Schlegel’s works from
this edition in text as ‘SW’, volume and page number.
43
The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft.
44
See the contribution to this volume by Stephen Fennell.
45
See Michael Hiltscher, Shakespeares Text in Deutschland. Textkritik und Kanonfrage
von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Münsteraner
Monographien zur englischen Literatur 12 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Berne,
New York, Paris, Vienna: Peter Lang, 1993), esp. 57–178.
46
Ludwig Tieck, Kritische Schriften, 4 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848–52), 1: 159.
47
Josef Körner, Die Botschaft der deutschen Romantik an Europa, Schriften zur deutschen
Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft 9 (Augsburg: Filser, 1929) gives an account of
the dissemination of the Lectures.
48
Schlegel’s essay on Romeo and Juliet was, for instance, not translated into English
until 1820. Julius Hare, ‘A. W. Schlegel on Shakspeare’s Romeo and Juliet; with
remarks upon the character of German criticism’, Olliers Literary Miscellany 1
(1820): 1–39.
49
See the contribution by Reginald Foakes to this volume.
50
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1956–71), 4: 744.
51
Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Bondi, 1911),
350–5.
52
Examples are Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des
deutschen Geistes [1871] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972),
15 and Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik. Vol. 1: Blütezeit der Romantik (Leipzig: Haessel,
1911), 3–25.
53
See Hans-Joachim Simm, ‘Einleitung: Literarischer Kanon und literarische
Klassik’ in Literarische Klassik, suhrkamp taschenbuch 2084 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1988), 7–41.
54
Hans-J. Weitz, ‘“Weltliteratur” zuerst bei Wieland’, arcadia 22 (1987): 206–8.
55
Georg Forster, Werke. Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. Deutsche Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1958–85), 7: 285.
56
For this account see Bernays, Entstehungsgeschichte, 29–95; Frank Jolles, A. W.
Schlegels Sommernachtstraum in der ersten Fassung vom Jahre 1789, Palaestra 244
(Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1967), 31–55; Peter Gebhard, A. W. Schlegels
Shakespeare-Übersetzung. Untersuchungen zu seinem Übersetzungsverfahren am Beispiel des
Hamlet, Palaestra 257 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1970), 14–31.
57
Macbeth. Ein Trauerspiel in fünf Aufzügen nach Shakespear [ . . . ] von G.A. Bürger
(Göttingen: Dieterich, 1783).
58
For the text see Jolles, Sommernachtstraum.
59
Die Horen. Eine Monatsschrift herausgegeben von Schiller [1795–7], 6 vols (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959), 1: iv, v, ix. Subsequent references in
text as Horen, year, volume and page number.
60
See generally Rolf Kloepfer, Die Theorie der literarischen Übersetzung. Romanisch-
deutscher Sprachbereich, Freiburger Schriften zur romanischen Philologie (Munich:
Fink, 1967).
Notes 185
61
William Shakspeare’s Schauspiele. Von Johann Joachim Eschenburg. Neue ganz umgearbei-
tete Ausgabe, 12 vols (Zurich: Orell, Gessner, Füssli, 1798–1806).
62
See Gebhard, Shakespeare-Übersetzung, 239–54.
63
August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Über die Bagavad-Gita’, in Hans Joachim Störig (ed.),
Das Problem des Übersetzens, Wege der Forschung 8 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1969), 98.
64
Störig, Probleme des Übersetzens, 83.
65
Anton Klette, Verzeichniss der von A.W. von Schlegel nachgelassenen Briefsammlung
(Bonn: n.p.), vi.
66
See Gerhard A. Schultz, Literaturkritik als Form der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Eine
Untersuchung am Beispiel der literaturkritischen Versuche von Samuel Taylor Coleridge
und August Wilhelm Schlegel über das Shakespeare-Drama Romeo und Julia, Analysen
und Dokumente 14 (Frankfurt am Main, Bonn, New York: Peter Lang, 1984).
67
On Schlegel’s translations see Bernays, Entstehung; Margaret E. Atkinson, August
Wilhelm Schlegel as a Translator of Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958); Gebhard,
Shakespeare-Übersetztung; Jürgen Wertheimer, ‘ “So macht Gewissen Feige aus uns
allen”. Stufen und Vorstufen der Shakespeare-Übersetzung A.W. Schlegels’, in Bauer
(1988), 201–25; Paulin, Critical Reception, 297–370.
68
Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, übersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel, 9 vols (Berlin:
Unger, 1797–1801, 1810).
69
The Plays of William Shakespeare. Accurately printed from the text of Mr Malone’s edition,
7 vols (London: Rivington, 1786–90); The dramatick writings of Will. Shakspere, with
the notes of all the various commentators [ . . . ]. Ed. Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens,
20 vols (London: Bell, 1788).
70
Heinrich Huesmann, Shakespeare-Inszenierungen unter Goethe in Weimar,
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse,
Sitzungsberichte 258, 2 (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1968), 148–86. See also
the chapter by Stephen Fennell in this volume.
71
Shakspeare’s Hamlet. Übersetzt von Aug .Wilh. Schlegel (Berlin: Unger).
72
Häublein, Entdeckung, 279–304.
73
Macbeth ein Trauerspiel von Shakespear. Zur Vorstellung auf dem Hoftheater zu Weimar
eingerichtet von Schiller (Tübingen: Cotta, 1801).
74
Shakespeare’s Schauspiele von Johann Heinrich Voß und dessen Söhnen Heinrich Voß und
Abraham Voß, 9 vols (1–3 Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1818–19; 4–9 Stuttgart: Metzler,
1822–9).
75
These are listed in Christine Roger, La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815
à 1850. Propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère, Theatrica 24 (Bern, Berlin,
Brussels, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 363–407.
76
Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke. Uebersetzt von August Wilhelm von Schlegel, ergänzt und
erläutert von Ludwig Tieck, 9 vols (Berlin: Reimer, 1825–33). See Kenneth Larson,
‘The origins of the “Schlegel-Tieck” Shakespeare in the 1820s’, Germanic Quarterly
60 (1987), 19–37.
77
See Marion Candler Lazenby, The Influence of Wieland and Eschenburg on Schlegel’s
Shakespeare Translation (Baltimore: n. p., 1942).
78
Atkinson, Schlegel as Translator, 50.
79
The first edition reads Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur. Vorlesungen von August
Wilh. Schlegel, 2 parts: I and II, i (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809; II, ii 1811).
All references to the Lectures follow the revised edition in SW.
186 Notes
80
Körner, Botschaft, 59–69.
81
Ibid., 69–70.
82
Georg Hirzel,’Ungedruckte Briefe an Georg Andreas Reimer’, Deutsche Revue 18,
vol. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1893), 98–114, 238–53 (249).
83
Those attending are listed in Krisenjahre, 3: 302–6.
84
Johannes von Schlebrügge, ‘Adam Müllers Shakespeare: Ein Verbündeter im
romantischen Kampf gegen Napoleon’, in Bauer: 1988, 226–39.
Chapter 4
1
All references are given in the text, using the following abbreviations:
Friend: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke, 2 vols (The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 4. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969)
Harbage: Alfred Harbage, Introduction to Coleridge on Shakespeare: A selection of the
essays and lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the poems and plays of Shakespeare, ed.
Terence Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969)
Hazlitt: William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M.
Dent & Co., 1930–4)
Hogan: Charles Beecher Hogan, The London Stage 1776–1800. A Critical Introduction
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968)
Honigmann: Introduction in Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare
(London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997)
Horen: August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Ueber Shakespeare’s Romeo und Julia’, Die Horen
eine Monatsschrift herausgegeben von Schiller, Jahrgang 1797, 6. Stück, 18–48
Jackson: J. R. de J. Jackson, ‘Coleridge on Dramatic Illusion and Spectacle in the
Performance of Shakespeare’s Plays’, Modern Philology LXII (August, 1964):
13–21
LL: Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. Reginald Foakes, 2 vols (The Collected Works
of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 5). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)
Malone: Edmond Malone, An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed
to Shakspere Were Written (London, 1778)
Manning: Peter J. Manning, ‘Manufacturing the Romantic Image’, in Romantic
Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840, ed. James Chandler and
Kevin Gilmartin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 227–45
Nichol Smith: D. Nichol Smith (ed.), Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 2nd
edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)
Norton Shakespeare: The Norton Shakespeare, general editor Stephen Greenblatt
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)
PW: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV, 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2001)
Richards: I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and
Trubner, 1929)
Riverside: The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997)
Rosenfeld: Sybil Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scenic Design in Britain (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1973), reworked as Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
SCH: Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers, 6 vols (London and Boston:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81)
Schlegel: Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur. Vorlesungen von August Wilh. Schlegel.
2 parts in 3 vols (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809–11)
Sheridan: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Dramatic Works, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)
Southern: Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery (London: Faber and Faber, 1952)
188 Notes
Survey of London: The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent
Garden. The Survey of London, general editor F. H. W. Sheppard, Vol. XXXV
(London: Athlone Press, University of London, 1970)
TT: Table Talk, recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge and John Taylor Coleridge,
ed. Carl Woodring (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen
Series LXXV, 14. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press and London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990)
Vickers SS: Brian Vickers, ‘The Emergence of Character Criticism, 1774–1800’,
Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 11–21
Select Bibliography
Atkins, Stuart. Goethe’s Faust. A Literary Analysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958.
Atkinson, Margaret E. August Wilhelm Schlegel as a Translator of Shakespeare. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1958.
Badawi, M. M. Coleridge: Critic of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1973.
Barrault, Jean-Louis. ‘Shakespeare et les Français’. In Nouvelles réflexions sur le
théâtre. Paris: Flammarion, 1959.
Bauer, Roger et al. (eds) Das Shakespeare-Bild in Europa zwischen Aufklärung und
Romantik, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Reihe A: Kongressberichte 22.
Berne, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris: Lang, 1988.
Besterman, Theodore (ed.) Voltaire on Shakespeare. Geneva: Droz, 1967.
Black, John. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and literature, by Augustus William
Schlegel. Translated by John Black; revised by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison.
London: Bohn, 1846.
Blinn, Hansjürgen (ed.) Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in
Deutschland. vol. 1: Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788; vol. 2: Ausgewählte Texte
von 1793 bis 1827. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982, 1988.
Carlson, Marvin. Goethe and the Weimar Theatre. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell
University Press, 1979.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Edited by James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. Collected Works, Bollingen Series LXXV, 7. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
—. Collected Letters. Edited by E. L. Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1956–71.
—. Collected Notebooks. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. Vols 1–3. Collected Works,
Bollingen Series L. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957–61; Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1973.
—. Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the lectures of 1811–12. Edited by R. A. Foakes.
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—. Essays on his own Times in The Morning Post and The Courier. Edited by David
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—. The Friend. Edited by Barbara Rooke. 2 vols. Collected Works, Bollingen Series
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—. Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature. Edited by R. A. Foakes. 2 vols. Collected Works,
Bollingen Series LXXV, 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
190 Select Bibliography
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Wieland, Christoph Martin. Shakespear Theatralische Werke. Aus dem Englischen über-
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Williams, D. Voltaire, ‘Literary Critic’. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
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Williams, Simon. Shakespeare on the German stage. Vol. 1: 1586–1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Index
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 47, 54, 90, Odell, George Clinton Densmore 7
95–6, 97, 98, 111, 143, 148 Oldfield, Anne 7
Emilia Galotti 112 Otway, Thomas 13, 97
Hamburgische Dramaturgie 47 Orphan, The 14
Nathan der Weise 107, 112
Lewis, Matthew Gregory Paulin, Roger 3
Castle Spectre, The 132–3 Petrarch 107
Louis XIV, King 6, 20, 22 Plato 159
Louis XV, King 8, 13 Pope, Alexander 2, 7, 28, 32, 35, 92,
Lounsbury, Thomas 10, 37 95, 101, 139, 140
Loutherbourg, Philip de 132, Prévost, Abbé
Wonders of Derbyshire, The 136 Manon Lescaut 10
Malone, Edmond 104, 115, 120, 148, 165 Racine, Jean 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24,
Manzoni, Alessandro 3 27, 33, 43, 123
Massinger, Philip 157 Bajazet 19
Maturin, Charles Iphigénie 15
Bertram 134 Raleigh, Sir Walter 141
Mendelssohn, Moses 96 Raphael 90, 124
Metternich, Klemens Wenzel, Reed, Isaac 139, 148
Prince 122 Rembrandt van Rijn 115
Milton, John 95, 107, 121, 126, 145, Richard II, King 156
154, 157, 163, 164 Richard III, King 156
Molé, (actor) 29 Richards, I. A. 163
Molière, (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 25 Richardson, Samuel 10
Médecin malgré lui, Le 25 Richardson, William 104, 140, 148,
Misanthrope, Le 25, 149, 152
Montagu, Elizabeth 19–20, 46, Richter, Jean Paul 144
102, 114 Robertson, Thomas 150
Morgan, John 162 Robinson, Henry Crabb 145, 146,
Morgan, Mary 162 161, 166
Morgann, Maurice Roger, Christine 3
Essay on the Dramatic Character of Rohan, Chevalier de 7
Falstaff, An 139 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24
Morhof, Daniel Georg 93 Lettre à d’Alembert 24
Möser, Justus 48 Rowe, Nicholas 95, 97, 139, 148
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 90 Rusconi, Carlo 90
Müller, Adam 105, 122 Rymer, Thomas 19, 34
Murphy, Arthur 19
Mylius, Christlob 95 Saurin, Bernard Joseph 38
Saussure, Albertine Necker de 120
Napoleon I, Emperor 75, 90, 121, 129, Saxo Grammaticus 14
153, 154–7, 163–4, 170 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm
Neville, Richard 7 Joseph 120, 144
Nicolai, Friedrich 96 Schiller, Friedrich 59–60, 72–4, 77, 80,
Nibelungenlied, Das 123, 126 90, 91, 106, 108, 109, 110, 117, 120,
Niebuhr, Barthold Heinrich 126 121, 126, 148
Index 197
Don Carlos 107, 112 93, 95, 96, 104, 110–11, 116, 118–
Macbeth 117 19, 123, 125, 126, 146, 148, 149–51,
Räuber, Die 112 162, 165, 166, 168, 170
Wallenstein 130, 144 Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (including
Schlegel, August Wilhelm 1, 3, 4, 65, Falstaff) 8, 26, 53, 57, 73, 75, 96,
72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 90, 94, 116, 127, 148, 151, 152, 162, 165
103–27, 129, 144, 146, 150, 162, Henry V 8, 18, 26, 85, 127, 171
163, 170, 172 Henry VI Parts 1–3 15, 51
Hamlet 118–19 Henry VIII 116, 135, 170
Letters on Poetry, Metre and Julius Caesar 8, 10, 11–12, 15, 18, 23,
Language 109 26, 31, 35, 36, 51, 52, 53, 58–61, 79,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 108 93, 94, 95, 96, 110, 116, 117
Romeo and Juliet 108, 113 King John 16, 51, 73, 74
Something on William Shakespeare on King Lear 8, 19, 47, 53, 62, 73, 74, 92,
the Occasion of Wilhelm Meister 96, 104, 116, 126, 148, 151, 154–5,
110–113 157, 159, 163, 166
Tempest, The 113 Love’s Labour’s Lost 118, 145, 165, 171
Über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, Macbeth 8, 15, 16, 19, 31, 37, 41, 47,
(Lectures on Dramatic Art and 51, 53, 62, 73, 74, 79, 86, 96, 116,
Literature) 3, 105, 146–8 125–6, 140, 151–2, 154, 155, 157,
Über Shakespeares Romeo und 162,168–9, 170, 171–2
Julia 113–15 Measure for Measure 98, 125
Schlegel, Caroline 116 Merchant of Venice, The 53, 116, 125
Schlegel, Friedrich 75, 94, 104, Merry Wives of Windsor, The 15
105, 124 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 43, 62,
Schlegel, Hamlet 74–5 85, 87, 92, 96, 98, 107, 108, 116,
Schlegel, Johann Adolf 103 117, 125, 138–9, 165
Schlegel, Johann Elias 94–5, 97, 103, Much Ado about Nothin 93, 116
113, 116, 126 Othello 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 26, 29,
Schlegel, Johann Heinrich 103 30–1, 37, 38, 47, 53, 74, 79, 95, 96,
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 109, 112 98, 115, 116, 124, 125, 140–1, 151,
Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 64, 65, 68, 152, 155, 159, 162, 166, 169
72, 80 Rape of Lucrece, The 145, 164, 171
Hamlet 73 Richard II 8, 26, 146, 148, 153, 156,
Scott, Sir Walter 172 162, 165, 166, 167–8
Shadwell, Thomas 9 Richard III 8, 14, 15, 23, 95, 107, 116,
Shakespeare, William 127, 140, 148, 152, 159, 162, 165
Antony and Cleopatra 8, 15, 18, 51, 52, Romeo and Juliet 8, 16, 17, 41, 75–7,
126, 166 80, 93, 96, 107, 110, 113–15, 116,
As You Like It 46, 57, 116, 148 117, 118, 123, 124, 125, 145–6,
Coriolanus 8, 74, 116, 155, 171 152–3, 161–2, 165, 169, 170
Cymbeline 15, 53, 125, 148, 170, 171 Sonnets 30
Hamlet 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14–15, Taming of the Shrew, The 93
16–17, 18–19, 22, 23, 26–7, 28, 29, Tempest, The 9, 40, 43, 87, 96, 110, 113,
30, 31, 34–5, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 47, 116, 117, 125, 138, 142, 145, 146,
51, 52, 53, 54–5, 56, 62, 64–6, 68, 147, 153, 157–8, 163, 165, 166, 170
69–72, 73, 74–5, 76, 79, 81, 85, 86, Timon of Athens 15, 126, 148
198 Index