R. Paulin, Great Shakespeareans

Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Great Shakespeareans
Volume III
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.
General Series Editors:

Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA
Adrian Poole, Trinity College Cambridge, UK
Editorial Advisory Board:

David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Cordner (University of York,
UK), Michael Dobson (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK), Dominique
Goy-Blanquet (University of Picardy, France), Barbara Hodgdon (University of
Michigan, USA), Andreas Höfele (University of Munich, Germany), Tetsuo Kishi
(Kyoto University, Japan), Russ McDonald (Goldsmith’s College, University of
London, UK), Ruth Morse (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, France), Michael
Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Stephen Orgel (Stanford University,
USA), Carol Rutter (University of Warwick, UK), Ann Thompson (King’s College,
University of London, UK) and Paul Yachnin (McGill University, Canada).
Great Shakespeareans: Set I

Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, Edited by Claude Rawson
Volume II: Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean, Edited by Peter Holland
Volume III: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, Edited by Roger Paulin
Volume IV: Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Edited by Adrian Poole
Great Shakespeareans: Set II

Volume V: Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Edited by Adrian Poole
Volume VI: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry, Edited by Richard Schoch
Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, Edited by Gail Marshall
Volume VIII: James, Melville, Emerson, Berryman, Edited by Peter Rawlings
Volume IX: Bradley, Greg, Folger, Edited by Cary DiPietro
Great Shakespeareans: Set III

Volume X: Marx and Freud, Crystal Bartolovich, Jean Howard and David Hillman
Volume XI: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, Edited by Daniel Albright
Volume XII: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett, Edited by Adrian Poole
Volume XIII: Wilson Knight, Empson, Kott, Edited by Hugh Grady
Great Shakespeareans: Set IV

Volume XIV: Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire, Bonnefoy, Edited by Ruth Morse
Volume XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, Edited by Cary Mazer
Volume XVI: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, Edited by Russell Jackson
Volume XVII: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli Mark Thornton Burnett, Kathy
Howlett, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona Wray
Volume XVIII: Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage, Edited by Peter Holland
Voltaire, Goethe,
Schlegel, Coleridge
Volume III
Edited by
Roger Paulin
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
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© Roger Paulin and contributors, 2010
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Contents
Series Preface vii

Peter Holland and Adrian Poole
Notes on Contributors ix
Note on References to Shakespeare xi
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
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Series Preface
What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This

series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influ-
ence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare,
both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on
cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we con-
tinually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each cul-
ture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals
whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of
its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures
in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is, therefore, not
restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and com-
mentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact
is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and
Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson), but our list delib-
erately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats,
Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers
(Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impos-
sible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been pro-
found, like Marx and Freud.
Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to
exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have
found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclu-
sion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped
by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous
regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this proj-
ect. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our
choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the
lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed
to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopae-
dic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor
viii Series Preface
is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiat-

ing and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and
arbitrariness.
Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of
Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the under-
standing, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as pro-
viding a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography
and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might
be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case, and, at
times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasp-
ing a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window
through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition
like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden
has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of
the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced
Dryden’s own practice.
To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have
taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes
do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopaedia
would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and
Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans
per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors
have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more
engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and
a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who
already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean
and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected
a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our apprecia-
tion of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our
readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures,
and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across
the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has
meant.
Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

Notes on Contributors
Stephen Fennell lectures at the University of Cambridge. He researches

on eighteenth-century German literature and philosophy, and on the con-
tact between German and Asian literatures and philological traditions. He
has published on Hölderlin, Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, and lectured
widely on comparative literature.
Reginald Foakes, Emeritus Professor at UCLA, edited Coleridge’s Lectures
1808–1819 On Literature for the Bollingen Foundation edition of Coleridge’s
Collected Works (2 vols, Princeton University Press, 1987), and then a selec-
tion of Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare (Athlone Press, 1989). He has
also published a number of essays on related topics such as Coleridge’s
concept of dramatic illusion, most recently in the Coleridge Bulletin, New
Series, 29 (Summer, 2007).
Roger Paulin is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University
of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of Ludwig
Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), The
Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914: Native Literature
and Foreign Genius (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003) and has edited the volume
Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007).
Christine Roger teaches at the Université de Picardie, Jules Verne, at
Amiens, and works on the literary and cultural relationships between
Germany, France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. Her publications include Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des
Lumières au Romantisme, sous la direction de C. Roger (Paris: CNRS edi-
tions, 2007), and La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850:
propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère, avec une préface de Roger
Paulin (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008).
Michèle Willems is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the
University of Rouen. Her publications, both in French and English, are
centred on the representation of Shakespeare’s drama through the ages,
x Notes on Contributors
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
All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed.

G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
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Introduction
Roger Paulin
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
progress: without it, Voltaire would never have come to Shakespeare in

the first place and would never have devoted so much time and energy to
this exotic genius whose touches of brilliance made him an object wor-
thy of study. And it says much that the most influential homme de lettres
in eighteenth-century Europe took this line. That is why he must feature
prominently in a volume on eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception, as
Michèle Willems’s essay tells his story.
Of course progress means different things to different people. Voltaire,
with Dryden and Pope and Johnson, believes in a notion of linear chrono-
logical progress, ‘the gradual discovery of one age improving on another’
(Johnson), ‘from a rude origin and obscure beginnings to a perfection
in a later age’ (Thomas Warton). ‘L’art était dans son enfance du temps
d’Eschyle, comme à Londres du temps de Shakespeare.’ This position is
predicated on the belief that discretion in matters of taste and literary style
is already ours. But it is of interest to trace the historical progress from our
rude forebears to our present perfection. We can see that they had sparks
of genius, despite being occluded by general darkness and barbarity.
This is essentially Voltaire’s position, and almost everything that is
known about Shakespeare on continental Europe before about 1750 can
be ultimately traced back to Voltaire’s influence and enjoys a consensus
based on him. Why then has Voltaire had such a bad press? It was his
insistence that Shakespeare was a figure for study, not for emulation or
imitation. There were questions of national pride here. Voltaire saw no
inconsistency between an admiration of Shakespeare and a belief that his
own century had reached a pinnacle in taste. But those who wished to
equate Shakespeare with French achievement were simply being unpa-
triotic. Voltaire’s opposition to translations or adaptations, the stridently
anti-English tone of his later utterances on Shakespeare, have obscured his
real merits as a mediator of Shakespeare to be measured only with figures
like Dryden or Pope.
Not surprisingly, there is an anti-French reaction to this across the chan-
nel, much talk about Voltaire’s ‘petty cavils’ or the ‘Misrepresentations of
Mons. de Voltaire’. The Germans also form part of this wave of anti-Vol-
taire sentiment. Indeed, after having been first introduced to Shakespeare
largely through French mediation, they turn abruptly away from such for-
eign tutelage. There is a leap of the imagination from the cautious advo-
cacy of things Shakespearean in the 1760s to the theophanies of the early
1770s. It will now not do to rein in Shakespeare, to adjust him to moral or
aesthetic systems. He becomes a supernal life-giving force that is part of
nature and of universal history, of its time but transcending it. This is the
Introduction 3
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
or dream, or wholeness, for instance), that reflect the fluid movements of

the various national Romantic movements, so that even famous formula-
tions like ‘willing suspension of belief’ or ‘we chuse to be deceived’ may
find an echo in German criticism. Schlegel’s lectures, if anything, enable
Coleridge to find his own voice and his own emphasis. He already knew,
like Schlegel, that translating a foreign text unlocks the inner structures
of the work of art.
Coleridge proceeds from general principles of the work of art that enable
him to describe and to analyse, to show the interplay of the general and the
particular. When coming to Shakespeare, he is not presumptive or morally
censorious, as Samuel Johnson often had been, but like Johnson and unlike
Schlegel he undertakes close textual analysis while never losing sight of
the whole, the age in which Shakespeare lived, his development as a poet,
his conscious artistry, his judgement and purpose. Coleridge’s ‘practical
criticism’ is of necessity text based; his commentaries on character never
disregard the subtleties of poetic expression, the artistry of language that
contributes to the unfolding of character.
Would Voltaire have sympathized with any of this? He might have nodded
agreement that Shakespeare was something both special and unique, even
if he could not see Shakespeare, in Coleridge’s words, as ‘true romantic
poetry’. He would even have echoed Coleridge’s flourish that Shakespeare
was ‘the dramatic poet of England’, while resting secure in his own neo-
classical positions. The account of Shakespeare’s reception in this volume
will not bridge any such ideological gaps or irreconcilabilities of taste, but
it will give equal validity to the responses of four representative figures in
the history of Shakespeare’s reception in the long eighteenth century, and
thereby seek to do them justice in historical and critical terms.
Chapter 1
Voltaire
Michèle Willems
Although in the history of European culture Voltaire appears as one of

the leading figures of the Enlightenment, when it comes to the reception
of Shakespeare he is mostly remembered as leading the army of French
anti-Shakespeareans. Indeed, his name has so often been associated, par-
ticularly in English-speaking countries, with iconoclastic resistance to the
Bard, that defining him as a ‘Great Shakespearean’ may appear as a para-
dox, if not as a provocation.
It has been common critical practice to explore the reception of
Shakespeare in France (‘Finicky France’, as could recently be heard at a Paris
conference on the subject) as a site of genetic incomprehension, reflect-
ing the incompatibility between the great English dramatist and ‘l’esprit
français’,1 as epitomized by Voltaire. Instead of deciding that the alleged
incapacity of the French to appreciate Shakespeare’s drama is, like so many
other national defects, ‘la faute à Voltaire’,2 it is perhaps more profitable to
approach his criticism of the dramatist from a different angle, in relation to
the century which his life roughly spans (he was born in 1694 and died in
1778). Straddling the excesses of a declining monarchy and the chaos of a
social revolution, the ‘Siècle des Lumières’ is in effect, culturally and ideo-
logically, the seat of tensions between stability and movement, which some
would perceive as order and disorder. Voltaire often mirrors these contra-
rieties, nostalgia for the age of Louis XIV coupled with admiration for the
progressiveness of England being but one example of his own inner strains.
In the light of the paradoxes and contradictions which are the trademark
of his age and of his life, it may thus be instructive to revisit Voltaire’s con-
tribution to the reception of Shakespeare in France, and in Europe. Both
as a discoverer and a deprecator of Shakespeare, Voltaire is, from the start,
in two minds about the plays which he imports into France. Successively in
the vanguard and in the rearguard of the promotion of the English dra-
matist on the Continent, he can also be found in both places at once, often
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.
Voltaire’s Shakespearean Criticism:

A Chronological Approach
1729–60: The Lettres Philosophiques and the Discours sur la tragédie:
Shakespeare discovered through Hamlet and Julius Caesar
Voltaire was probably right in priding himself on being the French dis-
coverer of the dramatist. In fact, at a time when France was the arbiter of
literary taste in Europe and its language the main vector of culture, he can
also be said to have sown the first seeds of interest in Shakespeare on the
Continent. Before him, knowledge of the dramatist was extremely limited,
his name hardly ever mentioned, his works scarcely referred to. The 1632
Folio figured in Louis XIV’s library, and a copy of the plays was registered
in 1661 in Fouquet’s. Both may have been read or leafed through; but in
spite of the close connection of the Sun King’s ill-fated Chancellor with
the artistic world of his time, the only comment that has come down to us
is that by the King’s librarian, Nicolas Clément, discovered in the 1675–84
Catalogue.
Ce poète anglais a l’imagination assez belle. Il pense naturellement, il

s’exprime avec finesse, mais ces belles qualités sont obscurcies par les
ordures qu’il mêle dans ses comédies. [This English poet has a rather
fine imagination. His thoughts are natural, his expression is subtle, but
these fine qualities are marred by the rubbish with which they are mixed
in his plays.]4
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
anglaise’, 5 which is often quoted as having first introduced Shakespeare

in France, was in fact more widely publicized since, after being published
in The Hague in 1717, it was reproduced in the Mercure de France, but not
before January 1728. This text is exclusively concerned with Hamlet, relat-
ing its plot in French for the first time, and – not for the last time – with
derogatory mentions of its ghost and gravediggers.
By 1728 Voltaire had been in London for almost two years, gaining first-
hand knowledge of ‘the author of Hamlet’, as he was soon going to make
him known on the Continent. His discovery of Shakespeare on the occa-
sion of three years of political exile in England was one side-effect of the
militancy that brought him into early conflict with authority. In 1717–18,
he had spent eleven months in the Bastille after writing an epigram in
Latin against the Regent.6 He was soon to return there after a quarrel with
the Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman who refused to fight a duel with a rotu-
rier and had him cudgelled instead. Born François-Marie Arouet, and the
son of a lawyer, Monsieur de Voltaire, as he was soon known in the Parisian
salons, was indeed low-born; although he had inherited his father’s hand-
some fortune, he had to face the nobleman’s scorn for ‘not even having a
name’, to which he is said to have replied: ‘My name is only just beginning,
yours is coming to an end’ (‘Mon nom, je le commence, et vous finissez le
vôtre’). This stroke of prophetic insolence earned him another ticket to
the Bastille. He was freed in May 1726, on condition of leaving immedi-
ately for England where he was welcomed in London by Lord Bolingbroke,
thanks to letters of recommendation from Horace Walpole, then English
Ambassador in Paris, with whom he continued to correspond throughout
his life.
These three years of exile, from May 1726 to February 1729, nourished
his progressive ideas on equality and freedom of speech. He confirmed,
developed and refined his philosophy through contact with a new civili-
sation and a number of enlightened minds: he met Berkeley, Swift, Gay,
Pope, and Young with whom he had spent some time in France in 1727. It
was possibly through the latter that he discovered Shakespeare. But it was
through the theatre and the live performance of his plays that he was really
introduced to the dramatist. He patronized the Drury Lane theatre (often
as the guest of Colley Cibber) where Chetwood, the prompter, would give
him a copy of the play: ‘He told me that he never at the play could follow
without a book any actors except Booth and Mrs Oldfield,’ Richard Neville
writes, on 4 July 1772.7 According to Odell, he also enjoyed the privilege of
sitting in the orchestra pit, the better to hear the actors’ words.8 After eigh-
teen months, his comprehension of the language had improved so much
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
expound on the religious tolerance nurtured in England by the multiplic-

ity of sects, and the following ten emphasize the superiority of English
philosophers,11 in Letters 18 to 22 he regrets the irregularity and absence
of taste of English poets in spite of their genius and imagination, and in
Letter 18 he praises Addison’s Cato (the English equivalent of a French clas-
sical tragedy) above Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Voltaire may have been attracted
by new ideas in politics, but he obviously baulked at novelty in the theatre.
The opening lines of this famous Letter 18, entitled ‘On Tragedy’, describe
the English dramatist as the Corneille of England and the near contem-
porary of Lope de Vega. Essentially, its very first paragraph articulates the
tension between genius and taste which informs Voltaire’s appreciation of
Shakespeare until his death.
Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius; he was natural and sublime,

but had not so much as a single Spark of good Taste, or knew one rule of
the Drama. . . . The great Merit of this Dramatic Poet has been the Ruin of
the English stage. There are such beautiful, such noble, such dreadful
Scenes in this Writer’s monstrous Farces, to which the name of Tragedy is
given, that they have always been exhibited with great success . . . (VS 44)
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
restriction which conditioned the French reception of Shakespeare from

the start.
At first Voltaire used Hamlet and Julius Caesar to assess Shakespeare. As
examples of the ‘dreadful Scenes in this Writer’s monstrous Farces’, he
quotes the gravediggers, ‘drinking, singing Ballads, and making humorous
Reflexions’ on skulls, and ‘the Jokes of the Roman Shoemakers and Coblers,
who are introduc’d in the same Scene with Brutus and Cassius’. But since he
also wants to call attention to ‘some of the beauties of great Genius’s’ (sic),
he provides his own version of ‘part of the celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet’,
an adaptation in rhyming alexandrines beginning with ‘Demeure; il faut
choisir, et passer à l’instant / De la vie à la mort, et de l’être au néant’ (VS
44–8). In his exhaustive study of Shakespeare and Voltaire, Thomas Lounsbury
translates this back into ‘Pause, it is incumbent to choose and pass in an
instant / From life to death, or from existence to nothingness’, defining
the imitation as ‘a half-pennyworth of Shakespeare to an intolerable deal
of Voltaire’.13 Yet one should not underestimate the significance of this first
example of French appropriation of Shakespeare’s text and of the domes-
tication of blank verse into the diction of classical tragedy. Voltaire was the
first French critic to translate and isolate as one of Shakespeare’s ‘beauties’
a soliloquy which was soon to become iconic, perhaps because it was imme-
diately transposed into the literary idiom familiar to the readers of the
time. In the following years, other critics contributed to the promotion of
this gem: in 1733 the Abbé Prévost (the translator of Richardson and author
of Manon Lescaut) gave a literal prose rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy in his
diary, then in 1747 the Abbé Le Blanc enthused about the ‘greatest beauty’
of the prince’s monologue.14 This may explain why, in 1761, in an anony-
mous pamphlet entitled Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un
écrivain anglais, Voltaire deemed it necessary to assert his seniority, remind-
ing his readers that he had been the first, thirty years earlier, to mention
Shakespeare’s name and to acquaint the French public with his beauties
(‘M. de Voltaire est le premier qui les ait fait connaître’). To prove this point
(which was to become an obsession), he reproduced his previous ‘imitation’
of ‘To be . . . ’ and added his own literal translation.
In the following years, Voltaire expressed his interest in Shakespeare
through references to Julius Caesar more than to Hamlet. In 1730, Brutus,
a play which he had started writing in England, was performed at the
Comédie-Française. This tragedy has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, since its hero is Junius Brutus, a Roman consul who had to
judge his own sons accused of high treason against the recently created
Republic, an apt situation for a Cornelian conflict between love and duty.
Voltaire 11
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
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)
Then, as if to exonerate himself from using Shakespeare as a source, he

immediately launches into a violent attack on the play, drawing a list of
its gross irregularities, and marvelling at their coexisting with such sub-
lime features as the ghost. This is one of Voltaire’s most famous diatribes,
culminating in an exclamation often considered as summarizing his criti-
cism of the dramatist: ‘this play seems to be born of the imagination of a
drunken savage [On croirait que cet ouvrage est le fruit de l’imagination
d’un sauvage ivre].’ Voltaire was never to live down this comparison, which
is generally taken out of context, but it is true that he now often assumes
the tone of the pamphleteer, more preoccupied with effect than with accu-
racy: the prince, he writes, kills the father of his mistress, pretending to kill
a rat; while Hamlet and the gravediggers exchange coarse banter, an actor
Voltaire 13
is conquering Poland; Hamlet, his mother and step-father drink together

on the stage. . . . The brief synopsis verging on caricature seems designed to
shock the reader out of the idea that a Shakespeare play could be worthy
of imitation.
1760–78: Open war: Voltaire and the translators of Shakespeare

As it becomes obvious that other critics hold the dramatist in high esteem,
the tone of Voltaire’s criticism gradually changes for the worse. The year
1760 marks the beginning of what appears to be a war with Shakespeare,
but it is also a war with the other discoverers of the dramatist, with those
who dare to promote his plays. A letter written to his friend the Marquise
du Deffand at the end of 1760 marks the turning-point and clarifies his
motivations:
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
appeared as a duty, and after 1760, Voltaire embarked on an avowedly

‘patriotic’ campaign against Shakespeare’s drama.
The tone of his critiques is now different: Shakespeare now tends to be
referred to as ‘Gilles’ (a traditional clown in popular fairs), a means of
stressing his vulgarity. He often resorts to irony in order to underline irreg-
ularities that were bound to shock a reader bred on the classical theatre.
Thus, Voltaire’s complaint to Mme du Deffand continues with a sarcastic
summary of the wooing-scene in Richard III, in which Anne is described
as mourning her own husband rather than her husband’s father. But the
campaign against Shakespeare becomes public with the Appel à toutes les
nations de l’Europe des jugements d’un écrivain anglais, a pamphlet published
anonymously in 1761. In reply to the two articles in the Journal encyclo-
pédique, Voltaire calls upon all European readers to settle the difference
between ‘the tragedy of London and the tragedy of Paris’ (VS 63–80). As
supporting evidence, he includes a summary of Hamlet and another one of
Otway’s The Orphan. His seemingly objective synopsis of Hamlet reads like a
parody, its prosaic paraphrase and bland narration slyly reducing the play
to a senseless disconnected story. This is told in every detail, accumulation
highlighting the complication of a plot which appears to lack focus since
all the incidents are narrated with the same ironical distance and in the
same flippant tone. His final explanation that Shakespeare was content
to turn into dialogue the story of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet, which
Saxo Grammaticus had narrated before him, confirms his bias which is to
elevate, by implicit contrast, the economy of classical tragedies; so this, he
concludes, is the masterpiece which is now preferred to Corneille’s Cinna.
And he attributes the success of such tragedies in London to their socially
mixed audiences and also to a few scattered beauties like the ‘To be’ mono-
logue. And yet his reason for providing a literal rendering of the original
to be compared with his own imitation is that he wants to emphasize its
obscurities.
More precise reference to the text is a remarkable feature of the new
approach to Shakespeare criticism inaugurated by the Appel. Voltaire is
no longer content with allusions or brief summaries. His mostly accurate
synopsis of Hamlet alternates narration and quotation, the characters com-
ing to the fore to tell the story in their own words. But this often takes the
form of biased paraphrase, as when Hamlet exclaims, before killing ‘le
bonhomme Polonius’ as he is familiarly called: ‘Ah! ma mère, il y a un gros
rat derrière la tapisserie’ [Oh! Mother, there’s a big rat behind the arras].
This, and the translations proper, are often given out of context and are
carefully selected to stress the vulgarity and lack of taste of the dramatist.
Voltaire 15
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
volumes. A variety of plays were thus made available to a variety of French

readers. What La Place was offering was neither translation, nor adapta-
tion (he made it clear that his texts were not meant to be performed), but
shortened versions of the plays which alternated translation or paraphrase
with synopsis, the latter being reserved for ‘everything which is not con-
nected with the plot’, as he explains in the Discours.18 Some passages were
translated into prose, others in alexandrines with a sometimes Cornelian
flavour. As Pierre Brumoy had done before with his prose versions of Greek
tragedies, La Place seeks to acclimatize Shakespeare’s plays, not only to a
different language, but also to a different cultural environment.
Such attempts at making Shakespeare acceptable were anathema to
Voltaire, especially as the dramatic model he represented was beginning
to cast a shade over the classical model. In his present mood, he was bound
to be annoyed at La Place’s expressed desire to spare Shakespeare ‘“our
compatriots’” criticism for passages they might consider as weak, ridicu-
lous or improper’ (Discours 1: cxii); the omission of monstrous scenes or
vulgar passages deprived him of important evidence in his prosecution
of Shakespeare. This explains why, in the last part of the Appel, he under-
took to fi ll in some of the gaps left in Othello by ‘le traducteur’ (meaning
La Place). He thus selected for precise translation the coarsest language
spoken by Iago to taunt Brabantio and Othello, as well as the latter’s
abuse of Desdemona as he strangles her. Reversing the process of posi-
tive selection initiated by La Place, Voltaire set about putting together an
anthology of indecorous passages designed to prove Shakespeare’s unre-
fined taste.
La Place’s dissemination of the text had a major side-effect: the produc-
tion of ‘imitations’ of Shakespeare by Ducis. Jean-François Ducis was a
great admirer of the dramatist but, unlike Voltaire and many of his con-
temporaries, he could not read English. So, as he wrote in the Foreword
to his 1769 Hamlet, he turned to the only existing ‘translation’ of the play
which, at the time, was the version published by La Place. Until 1793 he
went on to produce adaptations of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, King
John, and Othello which all enjoyed great and lasting success with audiences
and readers alike: the only Hamlet performed at the Comédie-Française
for the next 82 years was the adaptation by Ducis, and its 1770 edition
alone was reprinted seven times. This must have enraged Voltaire, since
Shakespeare’s plays, however adulterated, were now made available not
only to readers but also to spectators. And yet, while he repeatedly took
the translators to task in his criticism, he never mentioned Ducis’s name. If
this was deliberate snubbing, it is ironic to remember that it was aimed at
Voltaire 17
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:
Ce misérable . . . veut nous faire regarder Shakespear comme le seul

modèle de la véritable tragédie . . . ; il l’appelle, le dieu du théâtre . . . Il ne
daigne pas même nommer Corneille et Racine. [The wretch . . . wants us
to consider Shakespeare as the only model for tragedy . . . ; he calls him
the god of the theatre . . . and does not deign to name Corneille and
Racine]. (VS 174)
He appeals to his friend’s patriotism: ‘Souffrirez-vous l’affront qu’il fait

à la France?’ [Will you endure his affront to France?], and he presses his
point by remarking that ‘this monster’ (Le Tourneur, not Shakespeare)
has supporters in France, particularly, as he adds in a subsequent letter, the
youth of Paris, a city where English trestles and whorehouses are now more
popular than the theatre of Racine and the noble scenes of Corneille.
The same month, he writes to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, then Secretary of
the Academy, to ask him to read in his name a letter addressed to this noble
body of critics. He wishes to put his case in front of the French arbiters of
literary taste, although, being exiled in Ferney, he cannot come to Paris.
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:
Le grand point . . . est d’inspirer à la nation le dégoût et l’horreur qu’elle

doit avoir pour Gilles-le-Tourneur, préconiseur de Gilles-Shakespeare . . . et
de conserver un peu de notre honneur, s’il nous en reste. [The main
thing . . . is to inspire the nation with the disgust and horror it should
have for Gilles Le Tourneur, the advocate of Gilles Shakespeare . . . and to
save some remnant of our honour]. (VS 182)
On 15 August he writes to Jean François de La Harpe, the editor of the

conservative journal, Le Mercure de France, and a member of the Academy,
in order to enlist his support in the patriotic battle to defend Corneille
and Racine (as well as Sophocles and Euripides, supposedly as approved
sources) against Gilles Shakespeare and Pierrot Le Tourneur (VS 184). The
vocabulary of war is everywhere present: Voltaire writes of ‘his war against
England [ma guerre contre l’Angleterre]’ and of his campaign and order
of battle; he calls d’Alembert ‘mon général’,19 and the two men refer to Le
Tourneur and to some unnamed men of letters as ‘deserters’.20 The 1763
Paris treaty still rankles, and ensuring the victory of Racine and Corneille
over Shakespeare has become a point of national honour.
With this in view, Voltaire sets about translating literally the indecent
passages which Le Tourneur has omitted or glossed over. He thus pur-
sues the strategy already tried against La Place, of discrediting both
Shakespeare for his irregular plots and improper language, and his
translators for trying to make him regular and proper. In order to kill
the dramatist and his translator with one stone, he refers to his own
‘faithful’ translation of Julius Caesar which, he says, does not attempt to
deceive the reader; he also draws on his past translations of indecorous
passages already publicized in the Appel: Iago’s and Othello’s sexual lan-
guage, Cleopatra’s conversation with the peasant and Henry V’s wooing
of Kate had already served, along with Francisco’s mouse, to illustrate
Shakespeare’s want of taste in an article on ‘Art dramatique’.21 In his
discourse to the Academy, Voltaire again uses Hamlet as an example of
Shakespeare’s vulgarity and lack of art, but more briefly this time: a short
Voltaire 19
travesty of a synopsis foregrounds the ghost, the murder of Polonius (due

to his being mistaken for a rat), Ophelia’s madness and, predictably, the
scene with the gravediggers which ‘the translator’ is blamed for main-
taining in the play when even Garrick has done away with it, a paradoxi-
cal reproof considering that the same man is elsewhere censured for his
omissions. Le Tourneur clearly can do no right: he has committed the
unforgivable sin of mentioning neither Corneille or Racine, nor indeed
Voltaire, in his Discours des préfaces. The critic who, on the contrary, is
out to prove the superiority of the French Masters, presently enlarges
his collection of Shakespearean ‘monstrosities’ which now range from
the porter in Macbeth to the servants’ brawl in Romeo and Juliet compared
with the exposition of Racine’s Bajazet, through King Lear contrasted
with Corneille’s Pompey. It is noticeable that his now obsessional concern
with Shakespeare’s vulgarity, manifest in the regular reappearance of
Francisco’s mouse or Iago’s obscenities, remains limited to tragedies.
The comedies are definitely outside his range.
The (in)famous Lettre à l’Académie française was published in 1777. It made
its way into the English papers, and, unsurprisingly, it sealed Voltaire’s
reputation in England as an enemy of Shakespeare. Plays like Zara, Aaron
Hill’s 1736 adaptation of his Zaïre, continued to be popular in London,
but a number of English critics voiced their displeasure. As early as 1747,
Samuel Foote had inveighed against ‘that insolent French Panegyrist’,
accusing him of plagiarism. In 1753 Arthur Murphy, in a letter to Voltaire
entitled ‘Shakespeare Vindicated’, published in The Gray’s Inn’s Journal,
had called attention to his misrepresentations of Hamlet, while in 1765
Horace Walpole had defended the mixing of genres censured in his
Commentary on Corneille, and Dr Johnson, in his Preface, had dismissed
the ‘narrower principles’ of both Rymer and Voltaire, as ‘the petty cavils
of petty minds’.22 But it was Elizabeth Montagu, the celebrated ‘Queen
of the Blue Stockings’ who set up a more specific defence of the national
poet with her 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. Although it had been published in English in 1769
(and translated into German in 1771), Voltaire took it to be a reply to his
Academy discourse, since its French translation, under the title Apologie de
Shakespeart (sic), appeared only in 1777, the anonymous translator (long
believed to be Le Tourneur himself) being probably eager to cash in on
the agitation around Shakespeare. In fact Montagu’s essay must have been
motivated by the 1764 publication of Voltaire’s Commentary on Corneille
in which his translation of Julius Caesar was used as a foil to Cinna, since
her main argument is that his English is insufficient to enable him to

be a fair judge of Shakespeare. Listing a number of ‘miserable mistakes
and galimatheus of this dictionary work’, she translates them back for
the benefit of English readers, hoping that they ‘will deter other beaux
esprits from attempting to hurt works of genius by the masked battery of
an unfair translation’.23 Voltaire’s reply to Elizabeth Montagu was a new
letter to the Academy, printed in 1777 as the dedication to Irène. This was
his last play, a memorable success on the stage and the occasion of the
‘apotheosis’ of its author with the crowning of his bust at the Comédie-
Française, perhaps meant as a parallel to the crowning of Shakespeare
during Garrick’s Jubilee.
The 1777 letter is often considered as the second part of his Academy
discourse. But since it was conceived as a reply to Mrs Montagu’s praise
of Shakespeare at the expense of Corneille, it is mainly concerned with
establishing a contrario the superiority of French classical tragedy. The
criticism of the English dramatist remains implied in the numerous ref-
erences to the precepts of Boileau and the recurrent allusions to the dif-
ficulty of writing rhymed, as opposed to blank, verse (one of Voltaire’s
pet themes). The demonstration however soon turns into a panegyric
of Racine, the master of emotion. The letter concludes with the hope
that future generations will be equal to the great century of Louis XIV
and not degenerate for believing that they are superior [‘ . . . que les siè-
cles à venir égalent le grand siècle de Louis XIV, et qu’ils ne dégénèrent
pas en croyant le surpasser’] (VS 227). Voltaire died the following year.
He had started his literary career as an open-minded pioneer, looking
towards the future; but although as a pamphleteer he fought throughout
to promote progress, social justice and tolerance, 24 as a dramatic critic he
ended his life entrenched in the past.
Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare:

Ambivalence and Paradox
The contradiction between Voltaire’s early and late reception of the dra-
matist is more apparent than real. The critical arguments remain the same
throughout, but in the second half of the century the balance between
praise and censure becomes more and more tilted towards condemnation
as he realizes that he has, himself, set the Shakespearean fox to mind the
classical geese, and thus endangered the future of the French model of
tragedy which had so far ruled over Europe.
Voltaire 21
Voltaire the classicist

Voltaire’s early reception of Shakespeare is overdetermined by his cen-
tury’s cultural and critical environment: his objections to Shakespeare’s
drama merely reflect contemporary taste in tragedy and the basic incom-
patibility between his dramatic practice and the classical doxia, a set of
rules supposedly inherited from Aristotle. Actually, when Voltaire was a
visitor in London, the aesthetic, cultural and critical contexts were very
similar on both sides of the Channel, as well as in Germany. In England
too Shakespearean drama was then often unfavourably compared with the
classical model of tragedy that had prevailed in London since the reopen-
ing of the theatres after the Restoration. Voltaire and his French peers
reacted no differently from their English counterparts when they hailed
Shakespeare’s sublime beauties but bewailed his monstrosities. In 1730
Voltaire could thus write to Lord Bolingbroke to whom he was dedicating
his Brutus:
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
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:
Il a manqué jusqu’à présent à presque tous les auteurs tragiques de votre

nation cette pureté, cette conduite régulière, ces bienséances de l’action
et du style, cette élégance, et toutes ces finesses de l’art qui ont établi la
réputation du théâtre français depuis le grand Corneille. [What has
been missing among almost all your nation’s tragic writers is the purity,
the observance of the rules, the sense of propriety in action and style, the
elegance and all the refinements of art which have established the repu-
tation of the French theatre since the time of the great Corneille.]25
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.
The primacy of taste

Whereas in England the critical debate revolves around dichotomies like
nature and culture or inspiration and art, in France the second term of the
opposition refers to the taste, elegance or refinement acquired through
education and polite conversation. For Voltaire, as for Boileau before him,
nature is only acceptable as la belle nature, ‘nature artfully veiled [cette
nature qu’il faut voiler avec soin]’, as he writes in 1736, in the second
epistle to Zaïre; any representation of reality must be subject to bienséances
and decorum. Most of the irregularities deplored and later derided in his
Voltaire 23
critiques of Shakespeare’s plays are offences against what he considers to

be proper and acceptable on stage. Letter 18 already contains the gist of
his objections: Othello strangling his wife on the stage, the gravediggers
singing ballads in Hamlet, cobblers joking in the same scene as Brutus and
Cassius in Julius Caesar (VS 44–5), these and similar breaches of propriety
will be jeered at time and again over the years. Violations of the unities,
which one might expect to be censured, are sometimes mocked, but they
are generally waved aside. The nine years, dozen locations and thirty-seven
main events in Richard III are pronounced to be trifles (‘une bagatelle’)
compared to the indecencies of the wooing scene.26 In fact, for Voltaire
and many of his contemporaries, the height of bad taste is the mixing of
genres or styles. It is significant that, in the article on Taste which he con-
tributed to the seventh volume of Diderot’s Encyclopédie in 1757, he should
compare the man of taste to a gourmet who rejects the blending of styles.
This allergy to mixtures explains his recurrent targeting not only of low
characters such as gravediggers, cobblers or porters, whose vulgar jokes
and comical quips debase the sublime of tragedy, but also of low style,
which includes Hamlet’s quibbling, Iago’s sexual remarks, Ophelia’s mad
scenes or even Francisco’s mouse. The demand for linguistic propriety, an
avatar of bienséances, justifies many exclusions and rejections. As the years
go by, Voltaire’s war with Shakespeare appears more and more as a crusade
for Taste which barely conceals certain ideological options concerning the
stage. The competition between Racine and Shakespeare, the two icons
later used by Stendhal to illustrate the differences between classicism and
romanticism,27 is not only a conflict between divergent aesthetics of drama.
In a country with a well-established tradition of Court theatre, the tension
also reveals antithetical politics for the stage.
Court theatre versus the Pont-Neuf

Voltaire’s elitist conception of the theatre is a constant in his life and works.
His preference for Court theatre is apparent both in his dramatic practice
and in his critical writings. His first plays were written for the Court. His
theatrical production is essentially made up of tragedies in rhymed alexan-
drines, and their success throughout the century signals the expectations
of the conservative audience of the Comédie-Française where his own plays
were mostly performed. The notion of a theatre reserved for the happy few
contrasts with the more democratic flavour of his political pamphlets, but
it tallies with the aristocratic pretensions of François-Marie Arouet who
insisted on being called Monsieur de Voltaire in the Parisian salons. He
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.
Shakespeare versus Gilles

His advocacy of the theatre as an aristocratic entertainment became more
visible as interest in Shakespeare, nurtured by the translation of his plays,
developed among his contemporaries. However approximate or bowd-
lerized, the texts disseminated by La Place and Le Tourneur acquainted
French readers with a dramatic tradition completely alien to their own.
From then on, Voltaire’s reactions betray his growing fear that vulgarity
might be allowed to trespass upon the hallowed precincts of aristocratic
theatre. This is perceptible in the way a number of his arguments develop
and how they then recur. For instance, his frequent comparison of the
English theatre with its Spanish counterpart, which is at first purely his-
torical and factual, soon serves to oppose the coarseness of the theatre in
these two uncivilized countries to the refined taste of polished nations like
France and Italy. In 1729, the Lettres Philosophiques merely point to the simi-
larities between Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, who both created the the-
atre in their respective countries. The comparison here serves to explain
the powerful but unruly genius of dramatists writing at a time when art
was still in its infancy, an excuse also commonly offered by English crit-
ics for the plays’ irregularities. The argument, this time supported by an
allusion to the Greek theatre, is taken up in the dedication of Brutus to
Bolingbroke, and again, in a letter to Horace Walpole in which Voltaire
wishes to correct his reputation as Shakespeare’s enemy: ‘I said that his
genius was his own but that his faults were his century’s [J’avais dit que
son génie était à lui et que ses fautes étaient à son siècle.].’35 Like Lope de
Vega, he goes on, Shakespeare is a mixture of grossness and grandeur, of

buffooneries and terror, a deviation for which he is prepared to blame the
custom of having fools at Court. But as his critiques become more geared
to the defence of a model of tragedy ruled by taste, Spain and England
together provide a foil for the delicacy and taste of the French (and Italian)
theatre. In his Observations on Julius Caesar, both countries are blamed for
‘applauding for one hundred years plays which revolt other nations’, and
for sharing ‘strange tastes . . . because they never knew any better’. In 1764
Voltaire is still prepared to stress that Shakespeare and Lope had genius,
while lacking in taste. But in 1770, in a long article on ‘Art dramatique’,
what he emphasizes is the vulgarity common to theatres meant for the
populace and not for the Court.
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)
Again, the violation of the unities is only mentioned as incidental to the

unacceptable mixing of classes and languages. What Voltaire objects to is
not so much the presence of gravediggers or cobblers as their conversing
with a prince or with a senator, and essentially the lowering of style that this
entails. In the same article, he scoffs at Dr Johnson for ‘including clown-
ing and drunkenness among the beauties of tragic theatre’ (Johnson’s
preface had stated that ‘the poet disdains those accidental distinctions of
condition and country . . . ‘). For Voltaire, distinctions of condition are any-
thing but negligible. On the contrary, he returns to them again and again,
churning out the same examples, supported by the same quotations. His
allergies are wide-ranging and mostly caused by Shakespeare’s language.
In an Encyclopedia article entitled ‘Goût’ a translation of Prince Hal’s first
dialogue with Falstaff serves to illustrate the dramatist’s lack of taste (an
heir to the throne should not converse with a mere army general). Henry
V’s unseemly courting of Kate or Richard II’s indecorous mention of toads
and spiders in his address to his kingdom are frequently condemned, and
Voltaire 27
Francisco’s mouse is as recurrent a source of indignation as Iago’s obscen-

ities, perhaps because it can be each time unfavourably compared with
Racine’s elegant reference to Neptune. The discourse to the Academy clar-
ifies the nature of Voltaire’s objections to the mouse:
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)
This is by way of saying that the language spoken in Shakespeare’s plays,

whether obscene, indelicate or merely mundane, is unfit for the aristo-
cratic theatre. Tragedies must be written in the elevated style expected
by the Court and by an exclusive elite. Conversely, and logically, since he
repeats that Shakespeare wrote for the populace, Voltaire explains the suc-
cess of Hamlet by its appeal to the vulgar taste of the groundlings, sailors,
cab-drivers, butchers, who will throng to see cock-fights, bull-baiting and
ghosts.36
Significantly, the critic can conceive of no middle position between
the court theatre and the village fair. In his crusade for taste, he refers
to Shakespeare more and more as a ‘Gilles de la foire’, a market-place
entertainer, a clown intent on amusing the populace, and less and less as a
dramatist of genius. The difference between the two has more to do with
language than with anything else: either this is suitably filtered, preferably
through verse, in order to conform to decorum and taste and to the high
style of tragedy; or else it is debased because it serves to represent everyday
reality, and this is the low style which is acceptable only on the Pont-Neuf.
Hamlet, whose famous soliloquy he applauds (especially when translated,
by himself, into alexandrines), 37 is censured for his ‘too solid flesh’ mono-
logue. This time it is the character, not the dramatist, who is likened to
a village clown: ‘Gilles, dans une foire de province, s’exprimerait avec
plus de décence et de noblesse que le prince Hamlet. [Gilles, in a country
fair, would express himself with more decency and propriety than prince
Hamlet.]’ (VS 87). Voltaire, who here provides an adequate blank verse
translation of this first monologue (which he had merely paraphrased in
the Appel),38 does not reveal what he considers indecent or improper; he
is content to comment ironically that ‘the gist of Hamlet’s speech is in
nature: this is sufficient for the English [Le fond du discours d’Hamlet est
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.
Adjusting Shakespeare to French taste: La Place,

Le Tourneur and Ducis
La Place and Le Tourneur were as aware as Voltaire that Shakespeare’s
choice of words might shock their contemporaries. That was why, unlike
him, they chose to omit, correct, or tone down his worst deviations from
classical rectitude. La Place’s option of cutting out ‘uncalled-for details [des
détails déplacés]’, was one means of making Shakespeare’s plays acceptable
to what he calls in his preface ‘the refined taste of our century [le goût
épuré de notre siècle (Discours 1: xi )].’ His positive selectiveness is remi-
niscent of that of the English adaptors and critics who chose to highlight
what conformed to the classical prescriptions, and to ban or explain away
what did not. In England, from Pope’s 1725 edition, with its asterisks and
daggers, to Dodd’s 1752 anthology of The Beauties of Shakespeare, bardolatry
had gone in leaps and bounds. In France, in the 1770’s, Pierre Le Tourneur
anthologized English criticism in his Discours des préfaces, but avoided upset-
ting his noble subscribers by separating the wheat from the chaff in his
prose translations. He took a number of liberties with the text, refining
the style, skipping over obscenities and quibbles and silently emending
some unmentionable words. In Hamlet, for instance, the rat behind the
arras is transformed into a thief (‘un voleur’), Francisco’s mouse into an
insect (‘pas un insecte n’a remué’); ‘old mole’ is rendered by ‘invisible fan-
tôme’ and ‘something rotten’ by ‘quelque vice caché’ [‘some hidden vice’].
Almost a century later Le Tourneur provides a sitting target for a Victor
Hugo intent on promoting his son’s translation of the Complete Works. In
his celebration of genius entitled William Shakespeare, Hugo is very critical
of the dramatist’s first translator. His main preoccupation, he writes, was to
take the edge off Shakespeare’s writing, to smooth down its contours and
angles, to make him pass, thus making him only just passable [‘(il était)
uniquement occupé d’émousser Shakespeare, de lui ôter les reliefs et les
angles, de le faire passer, donc de le rendre passable’].39
Taking up Hugo’s word play, it may be more accurate to describe La Place
and Le Tourneur, less disparagingly, as des passeurs, cultural mediators
Voltaire 29
striving to make Shakespeare accessible to their contemporaries. Both are

also mediators at second remove, since Jean-François Ducis used them as a
source when writing his ‘imitations’ of Shakespeare, turning to the latter
for some of his last plays. In his drastic rewriting of Hamlet, Ducis certainly
does his best to make Shakespeare’s play pass the classical test. In a letter
to Garrick dated 14 April 1769, he explains that he found the original
so full of ‘wild irregularities [des irrégularités sauvages]’ and ‘dramatic
mainsprings totally unacceptable on the French stage [des ressorts dra-
matiques totalement inacceptables sur notre scène]’ that he had to cre-
ate a new play.40 The result is an orthodox tragedy in which everything
happens in one place, within 24 hours and in the course of a single plot
involving only eight characters. They all speak in rhyming alexandrines
and in the elevated style of tragedy. Ducis also translates action into nar-
ration by flanking his four main characters (Claudius, Gertrude, Hamlet
and Ophelia) with confidants to whom they can relate past events and
reveal future plans; he creates a prince torn between duty and love by mak-
ing Ophelia the daughter of his father’s murderer, a Claudius who is the
queen’s ex-lover and is also plotting to usurp the throne.
The popularity of Ducis’s imitations certainly had much to do with the
impact of actors like Molé, and later of Talma, in the title roles. But their
lasting success also derived from the sprinkling of innovation which sea-
soned their orthodoxy, even though this was sometimes too much for the
French public’s taste. Ducis enlarged, for instance, the part of Gertrude
into that of a guilty but repentant mother and stressed the prince’s filial
piety. This emphasized the family relationships characteristic of bourgeois
domestic drama which then appealed to a new public, rather than the love
interest central to classical tragedy. Replacing the ghost, who was deco-
rously maintained off-stage, by an urn containing the ashes of the dead
father, a dramatically effective metonymy, reconciled stage decorum with
stage effect.41 But the attempt to make the ghost call for revenge, even from
off-stage, could not be repeated after the first night, and even in 1791, in
the midst of the Revolution, the attempt to have Desdemona murdered
on stage caused the ladies in the audience to faint and the gentlemen to
protest. Ducis subsequently imagined a happy ending for his Othello, as he
had earlier for his Roméo & Juliette. The time was not ripe for imitating
Shakespeare too closely.
However tentative and limited, the assimilation of Shakespearean drama
through translation and adaptation was a way of bridging the gap between
opposing dramatic traditions and cultural ideologies. In their different
ways, La Place, Ducis and Le Tourneur acted as intermediaries between
Shakespeare’s drama and classical tragedy. Their resonance abroad testi-

fies to their success. It was through Ducis’s play, for instance, that many
countries in and even outside Europe discovered Hamlet and five of
Shakespeare’s tragedies. Apart from their direct influence at a time when
French was still the language of European culture, most of these plays
were translated, or freely adapted, into Italian, Spanish, Dutch and into
the languages of Latin America. Voltaire could not be aware of this. In any
case, he would probably have considered that these rewritings had little
in common with their originals, to reassure himself that Shakespeare had
not acquired the status of model and had not spelled the final defeat of
French tragedy. In his 1756 Essai sur les mœurs, he explained that the dra-
matist’s lack of taste had prevented his plays from crossing the sea, and in
his first discourse to the Academy, he again argued that none of his plays
had ever been performed outside England.42 He judged that such ‘mon-
strous farces’ were not transferable and he applied himself to prove them
so, widening the gap that others were trying to bridge. At the end of his
life, taste had become his only criterion and while the translators strove to
adjust Shakespeare to French taste, he was busy collecting examples of the
dramatist’s vulgar language in order to advertise his bad taste.
Highlighting Shakespeare’s lack of taste:

Voltaire the polemical translator
For all that has been said, Voltaire is a talented, accurate translator, and
he states some sound principles in the prologue to his 1764 translation
of Julius Caesar. For the first and probably the only time in his criticism
of Shakespeare, he refers to him as a poet, a definition never found in
contemporary criticism. The Sonnets were unknown in France at the time
(they were only published in 1871),43 and critiques of his language never
envisaged that his style could be ‘poetic’. In this case, however, Voltaire
compares the original work to a picture and assigns the translator the task
of giving an exact rendering of all its components, organisation, colour
and of its faults and beauties [‘C’est un tableau dont il faut copier exacte-
ment l’ordonnance, les attitudes, le coloris, les défauts et les qualités, sans
quoi vous donnez votre ouvrage pour le sien’] (VS 94). But the passages he
then chooses to illustrate his method betray his ulterior motives: he imme-
diately produces a very precise translation of Iago’s obscene language in
the opening scene of Othello, offering it for comparison with La Place’s
admittedly toned down version: ‘Je dis, monsieur, que vous êtes trahi, &
que le Maure est actuellement possesseur des charmes de votre fille. [I say,
Voltaire 31
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:
Si de telles idées et de telles expressions sont en effet cette belle nature

qu’il faut adorer dans Shakespeare, son traducteur ne doit pas les
dérober à notre culte. Si ce ne sont que les petites négligences d’un vrai
génie, la fidélité exige qu’on les fasse connaître, ne fût-ce que pour con-
soler la France, en lui montrant qu’ailleurs il y a peut-être aussi des
défauts. [If such ideas and expressions indeed represent the beautiful
nature which we must adore in Shakespeare, his translator must not
withhold them from our admiration. If they are nothing but the minor
blunders of a real genius, a faithful translation should make them
known, if only to comfort France by showing that faults may be found
elsewhere too.] (VS 190)
In his theoretical approach to translation Voltaire is ahead of his time.

Accuracy and respect for the original are principles that Victor Hugo was
later to put forward in the preface to his son’s translation.44 But in the
last decade of his life Voltaire’s practice of the art of close translation is
exclusively applied to the vulgar speeches, indecent language and bawdy
passages which he knows will shock his contemporaries’ taste and which
the other translators had omitted for that very reason. Quoting them out
of context, without any critical reflection on their function or any account
of the character who speaks them, amounts to collecting an anthology of
Shakespeare’s Horrors when the rest of Europe has started concentrating
on his Beauties. His translator’s talents are now used to discredit the very
dramas which they earlier served to promote. A survey of his translations
magnifies the progression from appreciation to denigration in his recep-
tion of Shakespeare. He started by collecting pearls; he ended up sifting
through the dunghill itself.
In the 1730s his belle infidèle in alexandrines, followed by his more lit-
eral prose translation, made Hamlet’s monologue famous. In 1761 his
precise, sometimes elegant prose rendering of the various extracts illus-
trating his synopsis, familiarized readers with the play itself. Then in
1764 the first three acts of Jules César became available, thanks to him,
in a much more faithful version than that offered earlier by La Place,
and well before Le Tourneur’s. Voltaire’s translation alternates prose
(reserved for the commoners), and unrhymed alexandrines, which he

refers to as ‘vers blancs’, his personal equivalent for blank verse. One of
his recurrent arguments to prove the superiority of French tragedy is
that it is written in rhymed verse, and he repeats that blank verse (‘which
is as easily turned out as a letter’) would mean the death of tragedy:
‘si on s’avise de faire des tragédies en vers blancs et de les jouer sur notre
théâtre, la tragédie est perdue’. In the case of this Jules César, it is strik-
ing that a translation in alexandrines (even unrhymed), with its atten-
dant rhythm, its inversions, repetitions and other necessary expedients,
gives Shakespeare’s play the flavour of a classical tragedy. Some notes
attract attention to powerful passages (as in Pope’s edition), but much
more often to the indecorous language which the translator apologizes
for having to translate, reminding the reader that Shakespeare was cater-
ing for the taste of the populace.
In such cases, Voltaire the polemicist already peeps out from behind the
translator. Translating Shakespeare is also a means of settling accounts.
Presenting his own Jules César as ‘the most faithful, indeed the only faith-
ful translation ever published in French of an ancient or foreign poet’45
amounts to running down La Place’s previous work without naming him.
And interrupting the translation after Caesar’s death, thus reducing the
play to the conspiracy against him, actually allows the critic to launch into
a mostly unfavourable comparison with Corneille’s treatment of the same
subject in his Cinna. After this, Voltaire’s resort to translation becomes
purely polemical. The same dialogues between or with low characters, the
same obscene or merely improper speeches are quoted again and again,
and always out of context. They are designed as much to underscore the
other translators’ omissions and glosses as to publicize Shakespeare’s
‘baseness and depravity’,46 which the former are accused of concealing
deliberately. Voltaire makes his objective clear in a letter to La Harpe of
15 August 1776, as he is putting the final touch to his discourse to the
Academy:
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
In the published edition of the discourse, this advertising strategy is again

completed by footnotes of apology to his readers, particularly ladies, a way
of making sure that Shakespeare’s transgression does not pass unnoticed.
Paradoxically, Voltaire is ahead of his time as a translator, but behind his
time in the critical use which he makes of it. In turning the selective pro-
cess of neoclassical criticism into the collecting of faults without beauties,
he is running against the rising tide of bardolatry which is doing exactly
the opposite. Both as translator and critic, he is fighting a losing battle to
maintain the supremacy of French classical tragedy.
Voltaire, the cosmopolitan-turned-nationalist

In the 1770s not only is Shakespeare’s reputation developing in France and
on the Continent, but references to his dramatic practice are used more
and more as a means of shaking off French literary domination and of
shattering norms so far based on a European consensus. Voltaire channels
his dismay at the loss of French authority in Europe into a fierce vindica-
tion of the national dramatic model. No holds are barred as the nation-
alistic undertones of his former critiques are first modulated into the
overtones of his attacks against Le Tourneur ‘the deserter’, before being
transmuted into the chauvinistic worship of Racine’s elegance and the sys-
tematic denunciation of Shakespeare’s vulgarity: ‘You should know that
the French, against whom you inveigh, will accept what is simple, but not
what is low and coarse’, he explains to Kames in patronizing tones.47 In his
‘patriotic’ war, Voltaire does not always steer clear of xenophobia (the line
between foreigner and barbarian is always thin), and his excesses backfire:
his aggressiveness increases German critics’ desire to shake off the imperi-
alism of French classicism and the echoes of his diatribes against the now
venerated national poet ruin his own reputation with English critics.
Once again Voltaire appears enmeshed in contradictions as when, in his
patriotic crusade in defence of French taste, the political anglophile turns
into a literary anglophobe and even makes fun, in various letters and in
his discourse to the Academy, of the anglomania in which he earlier par-
ticipated. And yet his recurrent eulogies of Addison and his neoclassical
Cato continue to coexist with his adverse reactions to English drama. In
his article on ‘Art dramatique’, he praises Cato on a par with the French
tragedies, and he remarks that Shakespeare would have been a perfect
poet, had he lived in Addison’s time [‘Shakespeare eut été un poète parfait
s’il avait vécu au temps d’Addison’] (VS 168). In fact, Shakespeare is not a
barbarian because he is English, but because he was born in a barbarous
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
des nations]’ (VS 76). But as Shakespeare threatened to be considered as a

model, this open-mindedness gave way to rigidity. For the critic of the final
decade, taste was absolute and universal, and genius no longer an excuse
for straying. He proscribed and ostracized, heedless of La Place’s warning
in his Discours: ‘Let us beware of rejecting today what our nephews may
applaud later on [Gardons-nous de condamner sans retour aujourd’hui
ce que nos neveux applaudiront peut-être un jour’]’ (Discours 1: xxi). La
Place’s foresight contrasts with Voltaire’s pronouncement that Shakespeare
can never be performed outside England, and with the feeling developing
on the other side of the Channel that his drama is being measured with
a yardstick now inadequate. But the later Voltaire ignores the critics from
abroad, unlike La Place, whose Discours is largely inspired by Pope, or Le
Tourneur, who provides a survey of Shakespearean criticism in England in
his Discours des préfaces and also uses the latest German criticism. And yet,
even though the pressure of other critics or of another dramatic model
never causes him to question his critical concepts, he is not himself immune
to the fascination with this unorthodox drama which disconcerted even
the most inveterate classicists.
The spectator versus the critic: the dramatist’s dilemma

With Voltaire, irritation and rejection override his attraction as soon as
Shakespeare’s intrusion threatens to become an invasion, but fascina-
tion with his drama persists throughout, as if the enthusiastic spectator
of Julius Caesar had refused to disappear behind the critic. Also, Voltaire
is, and remains, a dramatist, and his early contact with the London stage
has obviously made him aware of the limitations of the theatre of his time,
an awareness which may have increased his sense that Shakespeare repre-
sented a threat. His 1733 Essai sur la poésie épique provides the first instance
of unfavourable comparison between French tragedy and its English
counterpart:
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
about the insipid love-plots and interminable conversations of French trag-

edies to which he opposes the energy and liveliness of English drama.53
The dynamism of Shakespearean drama obviously contrasts with the static
declamations of classical tragedy. Strikingly, Voltaire several times mani-
fests his preference for the former, always in association with his memories
of the murder of Caesar on stage. In his 1730 Discours he confesses his ‘rap-
ture’ at the sight of Brutus, the murderer, haranguing the mob. But even
in the context of his 1764 translation, he can expatiate on the attraction
of such savage and unusual plays, opposing the emotion induced, even by
a murder, to the tedium generated by ‘long confidences of cold love, or
even colder political reasonings [J’avoue qu’en tout j’aimais mieux encore
ce monstrueux spectacle, que de longues confidences d’un froid amour,
ou des raisonnements politiques encore plus froids]’ (VS 155). Voltaire’s
preference for spectacle, however ‘monstrous’, over the narration of off-
stage events is a remarkable confession on the part of a classical dramatist
and critic, all the more remarkable since this preference obviously results
from his experience as a spectator. The short analysis of Julius Caesar,
which follows his translation of the first three acts, revolves around his
habitual censure of the English dramatist’s coarseness and lack of taste.
But this is in several places qualified by his reminiscences of the play in
performance. His past reactions, alternately described as interest, curiosity
or emotion, appear to have been channelled into the traditional beauty-
and-fault approach, as if the spectator’s enthusiasm had been taken over
by the critic’s rationality. But the former surfaces when he writes: ‘Despite
so many ridiculous incongruities, I could feel that the play was taking pos-
session of me [Malgré tant de disparates ridicules, je sentis que la pièce
m’attachait.]’ (VS 155). Even after many years, the spectacle of the murder
comes to the fore whenever he reminisces on Julius Caesar on the stage.
The lasting impressions left by Julius Caesar in performance must have
influenced the dramatist as well as the critic, since in 1731, he admits to
having used the play as a source for his own Mort de César. In this tragedy
Cassius appears on stage carrying a blood-stained dagger, after the murder
has taken place off-stage. This is heard, but not seen, as if the dramatist was
steering a middle course between the tedium of a decorous narration and
the excitement of a scene of horror, a hesitation which signals the tension
between the critic’s allegiance to classical taste and the spectator’s attrac-
tion for sensational novelty. In Sémiramis (1748) Ninias enters ‘covered with
the parricide’s blood [couvert du sang du parricide]’, as indicated in a stage
direction, and he proceeds to tell the spectator, in the correct idiom of clas-
sical diction, that he has just killed Ninus, his father: ‘ j’ai deux fois dans
Voltaire 37
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:
From rack’d Othello’s rage he raised his style

And snatch’d the brand that lights his tragic pile.
When his remonstrances against Shakespeare became known in England,

critics like Samuel Foote retaliated by taxing him with ‘pilfering’ the very
plays that he so harshly criticized and by inviting readers to compare
his Mahomet with Macbeth.54 As late as 1902 Thomas Lounsbury accused
Voltaire of plagiarizing Hamlet in Sémiramis, a play where the ghost of the
slain king roams the stage in search of retribution.55 Indeed in his pref-
ace to this play Voltaire refers to the ghost as one of ‘the beauties shin-
ing in the midst of the terrible extravagances’ which he has listed, and
he remarks that ‘the shade of Hamlet’s father is one of the most impres-
sive stage-effects [(Il faut avouer que, parmi) les beautés qui étincellent au
milieu de ces terribles extravagances, l’ombre du père d’Hamlet est un des
coups de théâtre les plus frappants.]’ (VS 57). He was not the only critic to
be impressed by ‘the terror and force of the ghost scene’, as the Abbé Le
Blanc wrote in his ‘Critical examination of the tragedy of Hamlet’.56 And
yet, as Ducis later wrote to Garrick, ‘an out-and-out ghost who is given long
speeches [le spectre tout avoué qui parle longtemps]’57 was unacceptable
on the French stage at the time, which explains why in his own Hamlet, he
keeps the character off-stage and replaces it with an urn.
It is a measure of Voltaire’s desire for innovation that he tried to meet
the challenge twice, in Eriphyle (1732) where his ghost had to thread his
way among the young fops then still allowed to sit on the stage, and again,
despite this first flop, in Sémiramis (1748) where his ghost was criticized
for appearing to the whole court. Voltaire was certainly influenced by
Shakespeare, and he does imitate his drama in his own way. In La mort
de César Voltaire introduces a mob which he calls Romains; they speak the
same language as Antony, exclaiming ‘Oh spectacle funeste !’ when the
body of Caesar is brought in. In the second prefatory Epistle to Zaïre, he
acknowledges that he has borrowed his subject from national history in
imitation of the English stage. In effect, situating his plot at the time of
the Crusades allows him to create a conflict between love and religion in
a context of tension between Christian and Islamic culture. It is the moral
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.
The Resonance and Afterlife of Voltaire’s

Shakespeare Criticism
Voltaire never let his fascination with Shakespeare overrule his classical
restrictions, and in his final decade the critic’s censures smothered the
spectator’s initial attraction. Yet although his name is more often associated
Voltaire 39
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,
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
well before France discovered Shakespeare. The debates it launched on the

dramatist’s use of the supernatural never involved the French critics. And
the questioning of the superiority of mimetic reproduction over the power
of imagination which ensued does not appear to have weakened the confi-
dence of the French classicists in their own model of tragedy. Its linguistic
formalism was difficult to eradicate and its authority was less easily contro-
verted in the country which had used it as an instrument for the literary
colonization of Europe than in those who saw in the Shakespearean model
a means of dislodging the colonizer. Voltaire had introduced Shakespeare
into France, but in spite of some personal reactions and innovations that
betray his repressed admiration, his public stance and his ossified classi-
cism largely impeded the necessary renewal of French dramatic forms.
Victor Hugo, the Anti-Voltaire
In France the revolution in the aesthetics of drama occurred well after

the social revolution and its main actor was Victor Hugo. As he claims at
the end of his revolutionary preface to his 1827 Cromwell: ‘there is now a
literary ancien régime as there is a political ancien régime [Il y a aujourd’hui
l’ancien régime littéraire comme l’ancien régime politique.].’61 His name is
indeed associated with the 1830 battle of Hernani and the victory of roman-
tic drama over classical tragedy, but his contribution to the understanding
of Shakespeare is often underestimated. And yet, the new theory of drama
which he puts forward in his preface constantly refers to Shakespeare. And
the combination of the grotesque and the sublime on which it is based vin-
dicates those very features that previously found disfavour:
Shakespeare, c’est le Drame; et le drame qui fond sous un même souffle

le grotesque et le sublime, le terrible et le bouffon, la tragédie et la
comédie. [Shakespeare is Drama, drama which fuses in the same breath
the grotesque and the sublime, terror and foolery, tragedy and
comedy.]62
For Hugo, Shakespeare is not a bogey, but a standard. He quotes as prec-

edents the witches in Macbeth, the gravediggers in Hamlet or the apothecary
in Romeo, at the same time as he derides the restrictions imposed on the
theatre by classical dogma. In his preface he champions his new model of
drama in opposition to the old model of tragedy, in the same way as, in
his William Shakespeare (1864), he vindicates Shakespeare’s singularity as a
genius against the strictures of the classicists. Voltaire is sometimes explic-

itly taken to task, about the pearls in a dunghill and his chauvinistic letter
to d’Argental, for instance, but he is more often implicitly mocked as the
quintessential Classicist, blind to the genius of Shakespeare because of his
obsession with taste:
Ce Shakespeare ne respecte rien . . . il enjambe les convenances, il cul-

bute Aristote . . . il est sans pitié pour les pauvres petits estomacs qui sont
candidats à l’Académie. Cette gastrite qu’on appelle le bon goût, il ne l’a
pas. [This Shakespeare has no respect for anything . . . he disregards pro-
priety, he makes light of Aristotle . . . He has no pity for the poor little
stomachs that are candidates for the Academy. He does not suffer from
the gastritis which they call taste.]63
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
Contrary to the recurrent classical argument that the success of Hamlet

rested on a few isolated beauties, Hugo refuses to see the play as a tragedy
defaced by scenes of comedy. For him, Shakespeare’s drama is an organic
whole to be appreciated in its integrity. His recognition of the distinc-
tive style of a genius who combines ‘Olympus and the fairground trestles
[l’Olympe et le théâtre de la foire]’ is also the result of the linguistic revolu-
tion which he had initiated in his poetry and drama. This is based on his
refusal to distinguish between high and low style, which, in a vindictive
poem, he sums up as deciding to call a pig a pig.65 On the same principles,
François-Victor’s translation, hailed by his father as ‘Shakespeare unmuz-
zled [Shakespeare sans muselière]’66 calls a mouse a mouse and a rat a rat
and reintroduces passages and words expunged by earlier translators.
Although critics and translators in the romantic period cleared away the
main classical obstacles to the reception of Shakespeare, French spectators
were still only treated to domesticated versions of Shakespeare’s ‘tragedies’.
The contradiction between the revolution in critical theory and stage prac-
tice that continued to classicize Shakespeare, was bemoaned by convinced
Romantics like Théophile Gautier, a famous witness and actor of the battle
Voltaire 43
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’.
Si jamais l’on peut représenter Le Songe d’une nuit d’été, La tempête et Le

Conte d’hiver de Shakespeare, assurément ce ne sera que sur ces pauvres
tréteaux vermoulus devant ces spectateurs en haillons. [If Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale can ever be
staged, it will have to be on such poor worm-eaten trestles, in front of
such a tattered audience.]68
It was to be years before a Shakespeare comedy entered the French reper-

toire and roughly another century before Gautier’s wish for both an open
theatrical space and a popular audience came true.69 After the revolution
in stage practice initiated by André Antoine at the turn of the nineteenth
into the twentieth century, and the development of theatre in the prov-
inces in the course of its first decades, Jean-Louis Barrault, presenting his
Hamlet in Edinburgh in 1948, could state that Shakespeare was more often
performed in France than Racine.70 Posterity had vindicated Voltaire as
the discoverer of Shakespeare but disowned him as his detractor.
Chapter 2
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Stephen Fennell
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.
The Young Goethe
As a young patrician son from Frankfurt, Goethe grew up with a love of

the theatre and with his father’s well-stocked library that soon became a
Johann Wolfgang Goethe 45
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
the case precisely due to a certain autobiographical element in virtually all

of Goethe’s works, sometimes in an individual character, often split among
a number of characters including the narrator and most strikingly in the
first person of his lyric poetry. Goethe had by this time also read the full
complement of Wieland’s Shakespeare translations, and apparently some
works (among them As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale) in the original.
Apart from its direct influence on Goethe himself, Wieland’s epoch-
making Shakespeare translation and comments ‘launched a thousand
ships’ in the cultural seas of Germany, and several of these subsequent
works in turn constituted a further layer of influences on Goethe’s vision
and understanding of Shakespeare. The translation would be effectively
completed and revised in 1775–7 by Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–
1820), 5 but at this early point of Goethe’s career it was Eschenburg’s publica-
tion (1771) of a translation of Elizabeth Montagu’s essay of 1769 comparing
Shakespeare with the Greeks and French6 that would prove most instru-
mental in promoting Goethe’s interest in the Englishman, for this transla-
tion prompted a review of the essay by the young clergyman and budding
literary critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803): Herder was a consum-
mate and highly versatile philologist, perhaps the greatest polyglot of his
generation, and soon to become the single greatest influence on Goethe’s
literary development and outlook.
Herder met the young Goethe in Strasbourg in the winter of 1770–1.
Despite the fact that Herder was already familiar with Shakespeare’s
work, and had been eloquent on his genius since 1766, it was primarily
Wieland’s and Mrs Montagu’s work that prompted Herder’s epoch-making
essay Shakespear, soon to be published along with Goethe’s essay On German
Architecture (Von deutscher Baukunst) and others in the collection On German
Character and Art (Von deutscher Art und Kunst) (1773) (HA 12: 7–15). This
collection, and Herder’s essay in particular, both in the style of its writing
and in the thrust of its content, quickly became an evangel of the impet-
uously emotion-driven Sturm und Drang movement, for which the grand
sweep of Herder’s published ideas and perspectives was already a potent
inspiration.
In his Shakespear essay, as always, Herder mounts his argument from first
principles. With the geo-anthropological thinking characteristic of his
organic understanding of history and language, he sets about explaining
the nature and purpose of Greek theatre in the context of its own circum-
stances of origin and development. From this he deftly makes out how,
with its mimic and choric origins and the kinds of elaboration effected by
Aeschylus and Sophocles, its success developed from the specificities of its
own culture’s criteria. Thus, their apparent observance of certain ‘rules’

was in reality ‘no artifice at at all! It was Nature!’7 Herder then turns to
France, giving a more punctiliously reasoned assessment than what he had
read in Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy, but reaching similar conclusions on
the artificiality, misguided imitativeness, cultural unsuitability and unfit-
ness-for-purpose of French tragedy (the reasoning would apply similarly to
comedy as well). Returning once more to the axioms provided by his geo-an-
thropological grasp of cultural history, Herder then turns to Shakespeare’s
handling of time, place and ‘plot’. He goes into the very meaning of these
categories and concludes profoundly and persuasively that they are – above
all, in a medium that aspires to the illusion of Nature – entirely relative and
their realism utterly subservient to the nature of the action. Herder goes
on to explain how suitable, indeed how necessary Shakespeare’s choice and
treatment of time and action are, conjuring up the effect of these elements
of action in relation to King Lear, Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet in a breath-
taking manner and with an irresistible verve that, of his contemporaries,
perhaps only Goethe might have been able to emulate. On the issue of
trueness to nature, Herder rightly refers to the inner and highly personal
importance of seemingly trivial details and moments, and to Shakespeare’s
way of investing each one of these with the emotion dictated by its place in
the organic spectacle of the whole play. Herder puts to rest the argument
on the significance of the unities of time, place and action with a firmness
and conviction – and panache – beyond the means of even Lessing. By dint
of this demonstration and his penetrating vision of cultural diversity and
its consequences, Herder is able to set Shakespeare on the same pinnacle
as Sophocles had attained in his age of the world; the French do not figure
in this schema, and the petty critics of Shakespeare both in England and
Europe are brusquely dismissed.
The underlying aim of the essay, of which Herder makes no secret, is to
plot some basic principles and strategies for the development of German
drama whilst the language of Shakespeare is still accessible:
Happy am I that, though time is running out, I still live at a time

when . . . you, my friend, . . . can still dream the sweet dream worthy of your
powers, that one day you will raise a monument to him here in our degen-
erate country, drawn from our own age of chivalry and written in our
own language. (SWS 5: 231)
The friend he is addressing here is Goethe, whose essay immediately fol-

lowed Herder’s. In the company of the fastidious Herder, Goethe must
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.
Zum Schäkespeares-Tag (1771)

While in the Alsatian capital, Goethe composed a short speech, On
Shakespeare’s Day (Zum Schäkespeares-Tag), first read to a gathering of his
friends upon his return to Frankfurt; the piece was partly inspired by David
Garrick’s public eulogy at the inaugural Stratford Shakespeare Festival of
September 1769. From Goethe’s extraordinary little declamation we may
see clearly the element of the English playwright’s work that so urgently
motivated the young German. The speech – a classic Sturm und Drang effu-
sion written in speciously ex tempore guise, and little longer than a polit-
ical flysheet – was, both in its content and its form, the manifesto for a
new drama, a new literature, based on the realization of a new grasp of
human nature and character. This ‘secret point’ in each human character,
that which animates its individuality, but which even mystical literatures
had struggled to comprehend, was what Shakespeare had miraculously
succeeded in making manifest. As the breathless exultation of the speech
suggests, Shakespeare’s first impact on Goethe was not primarily thought-
provoking but more visceral:
So far I have thought little about Shakespeare; entertaining notions,

or feelings at a pinch, is the utmost I have been able to manage. (HA
12: 224)
Shakespeare ‘spoke’ to Goethe in a praeter-rational way – to Goethe’s

heart, Goethe’s soul, Goethe’s whole being. It is in this last item, ‘Goethe’s
whole being’ that the key to Shakespeare’s effect on Goethe lies:
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
sight by a miraculous hand in that moment. I recognised, I felt, with

utmost vividness, my existence augmented by an infinity. (HA 12: 224–5)
It is specifically Goethe’s own existence (not merely his intellectual horizon

or literary repertoire) that he feels is augmented by this experience, and
it is no exaggeration to say that, in various ways at various times, ranging
from the formulation of lines and expressions, to the overall conception
of certain works, to the development of his overall literary thought, to his
insight into the world and its occupants and even to the vision of his own
destiny as a colossus of world literature, Goethe was indeed Shakespeare’s
‘own, for life’. This is a vital aspect of what Goethe means when he says that
Shakespeare’s works tell us about our own nature:
He competed with Prometheus, formed his human beings feature by feature

in the latter’s image, but on a colossal scale: that is why we fail to recognize
our brothers, and then he brings them all to life with the breath of his spirit,
he speaks from their mouths, and one recognises their affinity. (HA 12: 227)
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:
Afterwards I realise that I am a poor sinner, that Shakespeare prophesies

for nature, and that my figures are soap bubbles inflated by novelistic
fancies. (HA 12: 227)
In dwelling on the matter of nature, the relentless probing of reality and of

our experience of it, rather than the more comfortable, essentially sociological
sympathies common to both French neoclassical and bourgeois tragic drama,
Goethe had put his finger here on the very epicentre of this great rift of taste.
And these words of the young Goethe, barely into his 20s, were no rash or
ephemeral declaration: for all the intervening changes in the fine-print of his
view, this is precisely what Goethe still, in his 71st year, would mean by the line
‘What I am, I owe to you’ of 1820, partly addressed to Shakespeare.
Götz von Berlichingen

Goethe’s first major play, the first version of Götz von Berlichingen, was
drafted in Frankfurt in about six weeks from October to December 1771,
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
personal factors as Shakespeare did in Antony and Cleopatra: the dominant

triad of Götz, his sister Maria and adversary Weislingen neatly reflects that
of Caesar, his sister Octavia and adversary Antony.10 Adelheid the ‘femme
fatale’ shares characteristics with Lady Macbeth; the involvement of gyp-
sies in the first version of Götz was more clearly inspired by Shakespeare’s
‘weird sisters’ and included a supernatural folksong with incantatory ele-
ments; the forest near Jaxthausen is in the later version still said to be full
of ‘gypsies and witches’ (1. 2). The figure of the unknown commoner who
warns Lady Macduff against imminent capture we find also in Götz (5.5,
HA 4: 163), warning the titular hero of the impending backlash of the reb-
els, and refusing to give his name in both cases.
There are numerous further moments of characterization and theme
which Götz von Berlichingen – again most poignantly in its first version –
shares with Hamlet, Julius Caesar and King John, for these plays occupied
Goethe in much the same way as Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra in those
heady months in Strasbourg. Some passages of Hamlet (such as the grave-
diggers’ scene) leave a mark on Götz. The dying Götz asking to be taken out
into the open air at the end of the first version of the play – ‘Carry me here
under this tree, that I may once more draw in a chestful of the air of free-
dom, and die’ – calls to mind the final scene of Shakespeare’s King John.
Goethe’s fi fty-six-scene version of 1773 brought with it a greater inde-
pendence of structure and diction, a greater determination to work the
remaining debts a little harder into his own mould. Nonetheless, the
changes made relatively little difference to the situational correspondences
and the commonalities of overriding cultural politics intrinsic to Götz and
its Shakespearean models, and there remain many utterances such as
‘My voice would be a herald of my weakness’11 (in a cameo appearance by
Brother Martin, the young Luther) still testifying to Shakespearean ver-
bal inspiration, and one or two additional Shakespearean touches, such
as the comet heralding the death of the emperor, much as comets were
summoned to knell the death of Henry V in the opening lines of Henry VI,
Part One.12
Some obvious elements of Götz – its relationship to nationalistic histori-
cal themes and the impetuosity of its subject matter – will readily have
commended themselves to the young exponent of the Sturm und Drang,
but the basic motivation for choosing this constellation in particular was
intensely personal. Seminally in this play, Goethe selected a theme which
also defined his own relationship to his historical surroundings: pro-
methean individual genius versus the triumphal sea of mediocrity. The
underlying paradigm, that of man fundamentally at odds with his times
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.
Contemporary Criticism 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
neatly trimmed ‘Sophoclean’ version of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline meets with

similar disapproval, with Goethe neatly sidestepping the necessity of any
specific reference to Cymbeline: these reviews were written in fairly cava-
lier fashion, with more attention to viewpoint than to scholarship14 (HA 9:
550). It would not be long, however, before Goethe’s jealous guardianship
of the Sturm und Drang spirit would ripen into a more objective stance:
the denunciation of a subjectivity so beguilingly portrayed that many, and
perhaps most, readers would overlook its whole point – The Sorrows of Young
Werther. Once more, the patron saint of this new grasp of reality would be
Shakespeare.
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
make up the almost monomaniacal form and perspective of the novel.

Werther falls in love with an already all-but-affianced local girl, Lotte, with
whom he shares a spontaneity and love for poetry. He sues vigorously and
self-indulgently for her favours, breaks off and departs in frustration due
to her ongoing attachment to his rival, the steady homme d’affaires Albert.
Werther takes up an appointment at court, but he oversteps his social rank
and is soon forced to resign. He returns to his rural love triangle, where
he deteriorates mentally now that he finds Lotte married to Albert. At
Christmastide, after yielding to the urge to embrace and kiss her, he bor-
rows his rival’s pistols and shoots his brains out over the open pages of one
of Lessing’s plays.
In Götz, we saw a character at odds with the trajectory of his age, ‘out of
joint’ as one might say. In Werther, we have an individual whose demands
on human existence are altogether incommensurate with what life in
the real world could offer; he is just more deeply possessed by his own
‘cast of thought’ than the practicalities of the situation will bear – a sig-
nally Hamletic trait. Various features of the plot seem preset to under-
line this nexus: like Hamlet, Werther is lacking a father, and the entire
work is in both cases dominated by the forlorn prosecution of an elu-
sive ‘inheritance matter’; both men are patently talented, but artistically
frustrated and metaphysically haunted individuals with a fatally compro-
mised grasp of reality, bound up in an infeasible love and fated to die
as a result of their own folly or incontinence. As if referring squarely to
Hamlet’s speech, ‘What a piece of work is man . . . in apprehension, how
like a god! . . . and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?,’16 Werther
devotes his last epistolary words to questioning the adequacy of human
fabric: ‘What is Man, the praised demigod! Does he not lack the powers
just there, where he needs them most?’17 It is this which similarly forces
Werther to confront the question of ‘being and not being’ in the letter
of 15 November.
Critically, in both cases, character drives plot rather than the converse.
To borrow an expression from the literature on Goethe’s later works:
both Werther and Hamlet (in Goethe’s – or at least Wilhelm Meister’s –
subsequent interpretation of him) are men put in a situation to which
they are not equal. For Hamlet it is the demands of a dynastic broil of
which he is the centre; howsoever much he would, and despite his resolu-
tion and unremitting enterprise in all other affairs, he does not have the
wherewithal to carry out the one task laid upon him until his own demise
has been sealed: it is the task of appropriating his own identity, that of
the rightful King of Denmark. Werther’s task is a numinously ill-defi ned
‘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.
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
later described it, in his poem Ilmenau of 1783, in terms of a comparison

with the life of Shakespeare’s duke in the Forest of Arden:20
Is it a fugitive prince as once in Arden’s Wood?

A man astray, do I in mazy gorges here
Find bodied forth the spirits of Shakespeare?
And yes, aright this notion doth me lead:
It is their selves, or else some similar breed!21
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
so captivating. No doubt some such realization on Goethe’s part is the rea-

son why these sketches remained – fragments.
Despite making himself indispensable in an increasing number of the
Duchy’s administrative affairs, Goethe did manage to draft a number of
important plays in these years, and some were performed, but he clearly
did not feel that he could put a final hand on their written form while so
heavily occupied with the duchy’s business.
Egmont, Cäsar fragment

The first of these plays was Egmont, written from 1775. It deals, fairly freely,
with one episode in the history of the Netherlands’ domination by Spain,
with the historical record recast somewhat to Egmont’s advantage (he is
younger, more idealistic and more patriotically inclined). Initially an emi-
nent general and supporter of the Spanish hegemony in the Netherlands
after the death of Emperor Charles V), Goethe’s Count Egmont gradually
embraces the cause of local freedoms and religious tolerance, without real-
izing how repugnant this must be to the Spanish regents of the province.
Ignoring the warnings of the local nobility, he is deposed and arrested by
his old adversary the Castilian Duke Alba. Goethe’s play charts the interac-
tion between Egmont’s public life (his relationships with the soldiery, the
populace and the regent Margaretha von Parma) and his private life (his
love for the local townswoman Klärchen, and the psychology revealed in
dialogue with his secretary) up to the time of his execution in Brussels.
In this, Goethe’s second completed ‘grand political’ play (after Götz),
Goethe’s mind naturally turned to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and consid-
erable draft materials for a Julius Cäsar of his own were intimately bound
up with Egmont’s conception and composition. In June 1774, for example,
Goethe wrote to Schönborn: ‘I have contrived some further plans for great
dramas. . . . My Cäsar, which you will get to enjoy at some point, also seems to
be developing’ (HABr 1: 162). The following February, we find Prince Carl
of Saxe-Meiningen reporting that Goethe ‘told me that he was working on
two plays: the death of J. Caesar, a tragedy, and an opera.’24 In precisely
what respects Goethe was seeking to diverge from Shakespeare’s treatment
is not clear, but putting Caesar rather than Brutus at the centre of the piece
will undoubtedly have been part of it: for what it is worth, the extant frag-
ment indicates the young Caesar’s encounter with Sulla some thirty-sex
years before Caesar’s death, and even if Goethe eventually shied away from
such an epic length of plot as this suggests – far beyond the plot-length
of even Götz – he will hardly have followed Shakespeare in pursuing the
action much beyond Caesar’s death. Goethe’s comments on the characters

of Shakespeare’s Caesar and Brutus in Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments for
the Promotion of the Understanding and Love of Mankind (1775–8) show in each
case a mixture of rapt admiration and reservation: Caesar the tyrannical
and (for Goethe) almost inscrutable god of deeds versus Brutus, the rest-
less and resistless, but not entirely natural genius of political action,25 but
the apparently keener insight into Brutus’ mind there leaves us with little
clue as to what improvements Goethe had in mind for his Caesar.
We must assume that Goethe at some point destroyed most of what he
had written on the subject of Caesar, possibly because he thought it in
some regard too callow with the looming prospect of comparison with
Shakespeare in mind, for the Cäsar material will have lacked some of the
saving graces of Götz (such as the naturalism of its parlance, and its impor-
tance as a German national historical manifesto). It has been suggested
that Goethe’s Cäsar draft perished because he had already carved off some
of its finer features for more nationalistic use in Götz, but the relative lon-
gevity of the project indicates rather, as Biedermann26 and later critics have
mooted, that Goethe’s Egmont was the ultimate destination for its nobler
parts: as with the Shakespearean influences ploughed into Götz, Goethe
decided to use his Julius Cäsar material on historical scenarios set closer
to home.
It has been suggested that the reason for longish delay in the publication
of Egmont (it was printed only in 1788 after Goethe’s return from Italy, and
premièred the following year) was Goethe’s vacillation over whether this
was the best use for his ‘Cäsar’ material, but the real reason is likely to have
been purely a question of consistency: during the last stages of work on it
in Rome, Goethe reported having trouble recapturing the mood of his
earlier composition period and fashioning the drafted material to satisfy
his present standards.27
There remains the question of the extent of Shakespeare’s direct influ-
ence on Egmont as we have it. The main focus of comparative comment
has been the crowd scenes, the representation of the minds and character
of various members of the lower orders, and the hero’s relationship to the
mass; the idea that these were indeed the chief excellences of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar was already well entrenched in Goethe’s time. Goethe’s ‘crowd’
figures three times in the course of the play: as the casual holiday gather-
ing of the opening scene, relating some of the contextual circumstances of
the historical setting; then as the credulous audience of a political agita-
tor, and finally as the fearful onlookers unswayed by the pleas of Egmont’s
girlfriend to rebel and rescue him. Schiller’s 1788 review of Egmont,28 as
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:
What a blunt fellow is this grown to be!

He was quick mettle when he went to school. (Julius Caesar, 1. 2. 295–6)
In another example from earlier in the same scene, Caesar says to Antony:
Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. (1. 2. 192–5)
In the same vein Goethe’s Vansen says of Duke Alba:
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)
What Goethe was modelling on Shakespeare was a new kind of psycho-

logical realism in the interaction of character, event and speech. To make
these chains of reality and psychology and language evident in their plays
was one of the greatest feats that German playwrights of this generation
needed to master: they did master it, and the marks of their greatest model
are not far to seek in their work.
Yet influence of this magnitude could be threatening as it was inspiring.
In 1825 Goethe would say to Eckermann:
Shakespeare is altogether too rich and powerful. A productive spirit may

read only one play by him each year, if it does not wish to be ruined by
him. I did well to get him off my back through writing Götz and Egmont.
(Eckermann, 25. 12. 25)31
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,
this time in the form of a more objectifying, analytic fictional treatment,

though once again squarely autobiographical in its inspiration: the early
work on what would become the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years.
If we look back over the sporadic letters documenting the genesis of the
work,32 spanning some twenty years, we see that Goethe had not really
‘moved on’ from Shakespeare in any absolute sense; rather, it is clear that
some of the problems concerning Goethe’s own relationship to Shakespeare
and certain Shakespearean characters had intermittently preoccupied him
throughout his first decade in Weimar.
The Wilhelm Meister project was to be the tale of a young man born into
a well-off German middle-class background, who becomes an itinerant
and devotes himself to the theatre as a major part of the attempt to ‘edu-
cate’ or ‘shape’ himself – or ‘find’ himself, as we might say these days.
As Wilhelm’s surname (‘Master’) suggests, this teleological schema is cer-
tainly to be understood as an existential strategy, intended from the out-
set as a more constructive paradigm than that which had characterized
Werther’s existential career. The material treating Wilhelm’s story was
written in two versions: the ‘Ur-Meister’, Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission
(Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung) composed in six books from 1777
to 1785, its title first being mentioned to Goethe’s friend Carl Ludwig von
Knebel (1744–1834) in 1782 (HABr 1: 401), and then, following the inter-
val of Goethe’s Italian journey and its aftermath, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of
Apprenticeship published in eight books in 1795–6. The Theatrical Mission
was written during a period – after the initial drafting of Egmont, but
before the renewed impetus of work on Iphigenie and Tasso – when Goethe
had come to feel that the nature and purpose of his career had become
in various ways problematic.33 Despite the steady trickle of opuscula which
would have satisfied most literati of the day, the number of major liter-
ary landmarks actually completed at Weimar was not at all what Goethe
himself would have wished. In short, Goethe found in Wilhelm Meister’s
Theatrical Mission a way of considering precisely this question: how should
one’s talents be directed in life? In the service of the creation of illusion,
or in some more useful regime of pursuits? For Goethe it was, even in
these latter years, Shakespeare who manifested the best and greatest that
might be achieved by the business of illusioneering, and so it was the con-
frontation with Shakespeare’s finest work that Goethe chose to form the
culmination of the Theatrical Mission. Rather, like the hero of his novel,
Goethe had studied Hamlet closely during a week-long convalescent inter-
ruption to his journey to Carlsbad in June 1785,34 and in that year he had
seen the Bellomo troupe stage Hamlet (as well as King Lear, Macbeth and
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
to Shakespeare, whereupon Wilhelm secludes himself to study the English

playwright’s work obsessively and undisturbed: it is a revelation to him.
The troupe’s appointment at court comes to an end, and despite warn-
ings concerning the danger of bandits, they arm themselves and travel on.
Sure enough, while Wilhelm and the actor Laertes are dressed in period
clothing and rehearsing their swordsmanship for the final scene between
Hamlet and Laertes’ Shakespearean namesake, the troupe is duly attacked
and robbed, with Wilhelm sustaining serious injuries.
As he convalesces, with the strange musical company of Mignon and the
Harper, Wilhelm studies various Shakespeare plays, particularly Hamlet,
intimately identifying himself with its hero. Wilhelm and his compan-
ions later catch up with Melina’s troupe in the city of ‘H’ and meet the
theatre director Serlo (plausibly identified with the Shakespearean actor
and director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816), actor and manager
of the Hamburg theatre through the 1770s, late 1780s and 1790s), and
Serlo’s widowed and mentally unstable sister Aurelia. Aurelia too observes
Wilhelm’s rather tenuous understanding of real people, despite his intui-
tive insight into human nature in the abstract, and admires his grasp of
dramatic art and skill as a dramatic poet. Serlo agrees reluctantly to take
on Melina’s troupe, in various ancillary capacities, if Wilhelm will join him,
and expresses keen interest in staging this Hamlet, but – very much against
Wilhelm’s insistence – only in a judiciously adapted version, especially of
the last two Acts; Wilhelm also stoutly resists Aurelia’s suggestion of replac-
ing Ophelia’s bawdy lines and ditties.
Much of this last surviving book of the Theatrical Mission is taken up
with Aurelia’s mixed reflections on the German theatre public, and with
Wilhelm’s expositions of the interpretation of Hamlet he had worked up
during his convalescence. Whereas Wilhelm’s initial reading of (and identi-
fication with) Hamlet had centred around the Danish prince’s malaise and
frustration, it is now the imagined commonalities in their overall plight
that form the dominant theme of Wilhelm’s exegesis: Wilhelm professes to
have gathered together all the clues as to what Hamlet’s character was like
before the royal fratricide and the encounter with his father’s ghost, though
in the text we have, there is in fact little evidence beyond the merest men-
tion of his studies in Wittenberg, and Ophelia’s description of him as
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,

Th’ expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
Th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down! (Hamlet 3. 1. 151–4)37
Wilhelm seems unconscious of the various evidence in the play for a

certain native darkness, for bitterness and passion, and for the mercuri-
ally capable, resolute and boldly active aspects in Hamlet’s character:
from his supposed gleanings (perhaps more directly actuated by his own
recent martial failure in Hamletic guise than by any failure of Hamlet’s)38
Wilhelm concocts an interpretation of Hamlet as simply a noble, gentle
and idealistic soul, tasteful, relaxed, restrained and unimpassioned, sud-
denly emburdened with the task of a deed beyond his capacities. Partly as a
corollary of this, the pattern of tragedy and Hamlet’s eventual revenge are
attributed to a guiding fate rather than to any calculus of human motives
or flaws: this neatly coincides with the way that Wilhelm sees his own career
thus far. Wilhelm’s assessment has since made its way into the history of
serious critical interpretations of Hamlet, under the plausible assumption
that it was also Goethe’s view at the time. There is room for doubt on this
issue, however, since Goethe has Serlo point out certain misapprehen-
sions in Wilhelm’s interpretation of his own fate thitherto: it has in fact
left Wilhelm in a state quite opposite to Hamlet’s. Significant at all events
in this character- and fate-driven conception of tragedy is Wilhelm’s aban-
donment of the Cornelian primacy of plot: he has understood something
vital about the nature of Shakespearean drama which marks it off from
neoclassical drama.
The question of Wilhelm’s affinity with Hamlet is complicated by the
affinity of Goethe himself with both characters. As one of numerous such
parallels, the patently simplistic interpretation of Hamlet as essentially
weak when confronted with woman’s ‘frailty’, is ominously reminiscent of
Goethe’s description of his own ‘frailty’ in one of his Shakespeare-quoting
letters of 1767 to his Leipzig friend Behrisch.39 In this and other details,
however, it is not just Wilhelm’s Hamlet who is reflecting Goethe, but also
Wilhelm who is doing this recasting of character: there is of course some-
thing of a self-fulfilling prophecy implicit in Wilhelm’s interpretation, for
the distortions required to arrive at it are precisely the result of the kinds
of editing and adaptation that Wieland, Heufeld,40 Schröder, and finally
Schlegel, and Goethe himself variously carried out on this and other
Shakespearean plays staged in Germany during these decades, in order to
appease the (real or supposed) sensibilities and limitations of the audience.
The disappearance of Hamlet’s mercuriality was achieved by the excision
and curtailment of various banter-and-intrigue episodes (even by Wieland)
and by the deletion of ‘thematically peripheral’ episodes like his trip to
England, capture by pirates and disposal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
(these all in the cause of simplifying the action or ‘focusing the plot’);
some of Hamlet’s less endearing aspects were neatly sidestepped by editing

out the darker side of some of the soliloquies, all trace of the sexual impro-
prieties of his prior relationships with Ophelia and so on: some of these
very changes would also feature in Wilhelm’s own eventual adaptation of
the play. The ‘critical’ process here was not so much the construction of an
interpretation to clarify Shakespeare’s play, as the progressive retailoring
of the play itself to meet such an interpretation.
Why Hamlet? The question has often been asked of why Goethe
took such particular interest in Hamlet, chose it as the signal text in the
Theatrical Mission in the first place, and later made even more extensive
use of it in the Apprenticeship Years. In fact, many reasons for doing so will
have colluded in the decision: of Shakespeare’s plays it was certainly the
most popular on both the English and German stages, and it had attracted
the most critical comment. Beyond this, it was uniquely well suited to the
treatment of Bildung, which would become all the more central a theme
in the Apprenticeship Years: personal formation, as a conscious project to
encompass one’s destiny or optimize one’s future, must in some sense be
a planned or contemplated aim, and thus involve self-modelling of some
sort; this self-modelling inevitably takes the form of imagined scenarios in
some kind of developmental sequence and is hence intrinsically dramatic
in nature. Hamlet is the striking case of a man who stages drama precisely
in order to encompass his ‘destiny’, and the relationship to the roles of
(partially autobiographical) drama in both Goethe’s and Wilhelm Meister’s
lives makes Hamlet especially rich pickings for the German aspirant and his
literary alter ego. As the various apostasies and rebellions in his own life
and the ongoing work on Faust would make particularly clear, Goethe was
also – again with partly self-modelling purposes in mind – looking for what
the man of the future, modern man, should be like, as part and parcel of
his developmental vision for the individual. In this regard too, Hamlet’s
predicament and character offered a new and complex model that Goethe
wished to explore; whatever the actual merits of seeing Hamlet as ‘modern
man’, criticism since that time has repeatedly taken up this thesis,41 and
Goethe certainly espoused some features of it.
The manuscript of Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission – and probably, not
far beyond it, the draft itself – breaks off in the sixth book, despite some
evidence that Goethe had planned six further books of even this draft
project.42 As one might expect in view of the strong autobiographical ele-
ment of this unfinished curriculum vitae, its writer suspended its comple-
tion and publication at least partly because he realized that his own nature
and talent were not yet fully formed, and he could thus not yet put the last
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.
No doubt keen to draw the practical consequences of these insights

for Shakespearean theatre, as early as the year after his appointment
as Director General of the Court Theatre in 1791, Goethe staged
Eschenburg’s Hamlet, and – significantly just when drafting the relevant
books of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years in 1795 – Schröder’s second
adapted version of the play. About these performances we know little in
detail beyond what the playbills themselves reveal. Both texts already rep-
resented substantial adaptations to middle-class and aristocratic German
taste and will have been subjected to considerable further cuts and altera-
tions: even from the cast list of the 1795 production we can see that the
last scene was missing, and those scenes involving Valtemand, Cornelius
and Osric. To their credit, however, Goethe’s productions – unlike most of
their German predecessors – at least retained the principle that Hamlet
actually dies at the end!44 By this critical and practical exercise of car-
rying out in real life the Hamlet production that Wilhelm Meister had
been poised to tackle at the breakdown of the Theatrical Mission manu-
script, Goethe will have remedied any deficiencies of engagement that
may have contributed to that impasse, and now nothing could have been
more natural than for him to resume and complete the fictional cor-
relate of his theatrical life. The 1795 Hamlet production provided the
pivotal turn of affairs for Wilhelm’s Apprenticeship Years just as Italy had
been the κμη πραγμάτων for the blank-verse Iphigenie. Goethe’s rela-
tively new and more managerial relationship to Shakespeare inevitably
brought with it quite a new outlook on the roles of Shakespeare and
the theatre in the novel which Goethe had from the outset conceived
as (pseudo-)confessional:45 the breath of new insight had come, and the
changes which Goethe wrought even in the first stages of redrafting were
correspondingly bracing.
There were clearly differences. As far as the conception and economy
of the new version was concerned, Goethe swept with an iron broom:
somewhat to the cost of the autobiographical sequencing in the earlier
parts of the work, the events of the six books we have of the Mission were
compressed into four. There is a more carefully distanced relationship
between the narrator and the events, the various characters are inducted
more hurriedly and pointedly than in the Mission’s epic picaresque pro-
cession, some of them in carefully recalculated form. Wilhelm’s mother,
now the donor of the puppet theatre, is no longer a ‘scarlet woman’ but a
decent and proper matron. This sanitizing of the childhood home signally
deprives Wilhelm of any convincing psychological excuse for his ‘flight’ to
the realm of theatre.
The depiction of Wilhelm’s father also becomes less radiant, as if to

reduce the plausibility of any Hamletic reminiscence of Old Denmark.
There is still the (entirely benign) enstatement of Wilhelm’s brother-in-law
Werner at the helm of the family business, but the ‘philandering mother’
theme is in some sense replaced by another kind of inheritance issue,
though again it is laughably more trivial than Hamlet’s. Perhaps in nettled
memory of the sale, in the autumn of 1793, of his own father’s pictures
and other possessions from the old Goethe house in the Hirschgraben in
Frankfurt,46 Goethe now had Wilhelm’s father sell off the cherished art
collection that had belonged to the grandfather, including one painting of
a sick prince to which Wilhelm had been vaguely attached since boyhood.
The sick prince is a conventional Hamletic cipher, but what Wilhelm feels
he has been dispossessed of here is of course a mere representation of an
inheritance issue (in his actual inheritance, the family business, Wilhelm
takes precious little interest). Goethe may here simply be underlining the
pathology of embracing illusory images of fate, as he would do once again
in the 1809 novel Elective Affinities. The revised Wilhelm we see in the new
Book 1, crucially, is no longer a poetic talent and does not triumph even
momentarily by performing any play of his own creation: there is thus
scarcely any evidence of a grand fate for him to pursue.
In curtailed reformulation, the subsequent early books (2–4) of the
Apprenticeship Years proceed through the tale of loyalties divided between
family business and the allurements of theatre (rather as Goethe’s own life
had been split between administration and art), featuring or retaining a
similar array of Hamletisms, great and small, to what we saw in the Mission.
Among the many direct references and reflections of character and struc-
ture that have been noted, by Roberts, Ermann and others,47 between
Hamlet and Wilhelm Meister, both surrounding the Hamlet performance
itself and elsewhere in the narrative of the Mission and Apprenticeship Years,
are Wilhelm’s grey attire (HA 7: 117) after his sexual betrayal by Mariane
(imitating Hamlet’s black attire in the wake of his mother’s perfidy), the
‘head in the lady’s lap’ episode (HA 7: 224), Wilhelm’s repeated shows of
apparent misogyny, the hero’s persistent irresoluteness, the duplicity of the
roles of chance and fate, the quasi-Ophelian complex of love, abandon-
ment and madness in Serlo’s sister Aurelia and the death of the hero’s
father (this time placed suggestively close to Wilhelm’s performance of
Hamlet himself and the encounter with the ghost). Yet each of these ‘par-
allels’ is set up in a consciously bathetic way in the Apprenticeship Years, as if
to drive home not its similarity but its difference from the theatrical arche-
type: Hamlet’s dressing in black was due to the cruel death of his father the
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
by this, and (also with mystifying rapidity) produces an adaptation alleg-

edly reflecting his ‘pre-fratricide Hamlet’ interpretation and suggestive of
the neoclassical compromises and simplified plot schema already seen in
Goethe’s own Weimar productions and other previous German adapta-
tions of Hamlet.49 The aplomb with which we then see Wilhelm lecturing
and dressaging his actors is undoubtedly also a reflex of Goethe’s own new-
found directorial pedagogy.50 Also reflected, however, in Wilhelm’s script
is Goethe’s scruple about Hamlet’s death: despite Serlo’s populist plea that
the hero survive, Wilhelm still demurs – successfully, for a change.51 This
point is surprising, but highly significant: by simultaneously making what
is almost his first firm decision in life, and thereby preserving that feature
of the play which would mark Hamlet out as an unviable model, Meister is
finally sowing the seeds of his escape from the life of theatre.
The Hamlet performance itself, with Wilhelm in the lead role, is only cur-
sorily described, with the exception of the mysterious intervention by the
unknown character who plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father. No actor was
cast for this role, until an anonymous note was received assuring Wilhelm
that the role would be filled on the night. In the event, the character’s
voice and demeanour remind Wilhelm of his own recently deceased father,
and the ghost leaves Wilhelm a note urging him to flee. The actors’ lodg-
ing house burns down that night, Melina and Serlo remove Wilhelm and
Aurelia from stage duties and the troupe disperses due to various causes:
like Serlo, Wilhelm has realized that acting cannot be his métier, despite
the production’s success, and so his engagement with Shakespeare is over.
Wilhelm leaves the world of theatre, and when he is sent on an errand by
the dying Aurelia, he proceeds to another stage in his ‘formation’ in the
hands of a secret lodge which has carefully watched his fortunes hitherto.
After a chapter-long insert of pietistic meditations which are involved in
the later plot, Wilhelm’s affairs and relationships and ongoing tribulations
with members of the lodge (including a bizarre induction into it) and sev-
eral of the earlier characters take up the remainder of the novel.
So we see that, in line with the promptings of the art connoisseur and
several other figures from both versions of the novel, the encounters with
the life of theatre itself constitute in the Apprenticeship Years no more than
precisely a ‘stage’ in Wilhelm’s evolution. The reasons for this, however,
lay not in any downgrading of the significance of Hamlet, but rather arose
directly from an enhanced understanding of Shakespeare’s text. Goethe
saw that the use of the theatre was for the prince of Denmark merely instru-
mental, and even his use of it as an instrument was a misguided prevarica-
tion; thus, the same Jarno who recommends Shakespeare to Wilhelm (3. 8)
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 and the Weimar Theatre
Goethe’s appointment in 1791 as director of the Weimar court theatre

came not long after Schiller’s professorial appointment in nearby Jena, and
since Schiller spent the early 1790s mainly working on the grand scheme of
his theory of drama, the two ‘Dioscurides’ as they came to be called, soon
conferred regularly regarding the ongoing work of the court theatre as
well. True to the caution later uttered to Eckermann, recommending only
limited exposure to Shakespeare lest one’s creativity be cowed, Goethe
was indeed fairly sparing with the Shakespearean offerings of the Weimar
theatre: the twenty-six years of his directorship saw only ten Shakespeare
productions, nestled among a repertoire of more comfortable fare.52
Nor did the two Olympians spare any effort to make their Shakespeare
‘comfortable’ as well: despite already using prudently adapted texts from
Eschenburg, Schröder and Voss (and later A.W. Schlegel’s) a good deal of
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.
After the death of Schiller in 1805, it must have seemed to Goethe,

and to the German reading and theatre-going public, that a great monu-
ment of classicism had passed away, a man whose work had so profoundly
legitimated the partnership of enlightened autocratic rule and the whole-
some genius and culture of the educated middle class. But some details
in our discussion may have alerted the reader to the partly illusory char-
acter of such an assessment – and again, it is Schiller’s lifelong fascina-
tion with Shakespeare that reveals some of the cracks in that wholesome
synthesis. Schiller had indeed assiduously reread Shakespeare’s works – in
Wieland’s and Eschenburg’s and later in Schlegel’s translations53 – since
his schooldays, and it has not escaped the notice of modern critics that
Schiller’s recurrent preoccupation with his Shakespearean sources almost
invariably centred around the arrestingly cruel aspects of character and
action, the impassioned murders and suicides, the grisly spectres of the
dead, the shocking malice of betrayal and conspiracy, the on-stage stran-
gulation, the upheld severed head:54 these darker, irrational elements were
documentably for Schiller the most fascinating of all the manifestations of
‘Nature’ to be found in the Briton’s work. Nor is this entirely surprising in
view of the content of even Schiller’s lyric output, particularly the ballads,
many of which – The Cranes of Ibycus, The Diver and The Ring of Polycrates are
among the most famous – culminate in or spring from just such an event;
in fact, his early interest in medicine may well have been the reflex of a
somewhat macabre underlying interest rather than any profound sense of
Hippocratic vocation. Nor did it escape Goethe’s notice that his colleague
had ‘a certain eye for cruelty’, and Goethe, who had repeatedly edited and
bowdlerized the bard for the provincial beau monde, knew better than any-
one how fruitful a source Shakespeare will have been for this grimmer side
of Schiller’s repertoire; around the turn of the century, at the zenith of
Schiller’s celebrity, Goethe had also reread Macbeth, King John, Coriolanus
and King Lear.55 Goethe himself, though, was ever the didactic in some
way or other, and never a man to confront his public with an abysm with-
out leaving at least fair indication of the way out – an avoider of tragedy,
as he has been called; so for Goethe these unhealable wounds of human
cruelty in which almost all of Schiller’s plays culminate cannot have been
the most attractive feature of the man’s work. In retrospect, it is tempting
to speculate that it was partly Schiller’s take on the presentation of real-
ity in Shakespeare that decisively conditioned Goethe’s later view of the
Englishman’s work.
The year of Schiller’s death still saw Goethe’s production of Voss’s Othello
translation, and 1809 saw the production of A. W. Schlegel’s blank-verse
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.
Goethe’s Production of Romeo and Juliet 1811–12
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
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)
No doubt partly due to Goethe’s meticulous tailoring of the play to

Weimar audience tastes, the production on the first day of February 1812
was a tolerable success, as were those in March and November of that year;
this version returned periodically to the Weimar stage and occasionally
other major theatres until at least 1816. Apart from its usefulness as a the-
atre script, however, Goethe seems – as his above quoted words indicate – to
have regarded the processing of Romeo and Juliet as a kind of propaedeutic
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:
The admiration of Shakespeare is in Berlin, and indeed throughout

Germany, carried to an extent which is very gratifying to our national
taste. Schlegel has pointed out his beauties with so much discriminating
genius, and has, in his contrasts between him and the other modern
poets, so exalted him, that when the name of Shakespeare is uttered,
I have always been prepared for, and not frequently disappointed of
hearing a quotation from Schlegel.60
It was against this background, then – partly generated and abetted by

himself – that Goethe embarked on the remainder of his literary career
after leaving the management of the Weimar court theatre.
Goethe’s Later Views on Shakespeare
During the years following Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Years, a fully

blown movement of Romanticism had grown up around Goethe’s feet,
partly inspired, as we have seen, by his own works, and partly by those of
Shakespeare. As we might suspect from the source of authority mentioned
in William Jacob’s observations, this movement had quickly come to domi-
nate literary fashion in England as well, where – perhaps incomprehensi-
bly for Goethe at the time – he and Schiller were also regarded as part of
that movement. In Germany, however, through the first decades of the new
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.
Goethe’s Shakespeare und kein Ende! (No End of Shakespeare)

We find Goethe’s reaction to these views of the Romantics scattered
through various references in letters and later remarks to Eckermann, but
most pithily expressed in the essay No End of Shakespeare (HA 12: 287–98);
its first two parts were written in 1813 and published in 1815; the third part
was written in 1816 but only published a decade later.
The first section of the essay aims to persuade the reader that Shakespeare,
whilst a uniquely effective purveyor of the real world and of human nature,
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)
Goethe ‘excuses’ Shakespeare for his supposed shortcomings once more by

means of the partly Herderian argument on Shakespeare’s English paro-
chiality and contempt for authentic portrayal, though these points seem
largely defeated by Goethe’s admissions that England was ‘everywhere’,
‘active in all parts of the world’, and that, rather than details of costume, it
is a fundamental realism of human character that makes for authenticity,
and Shakespeare was a ‘connoisseur’ of this.63 Although Goethe’s view of
Shakespeare as the arch-exponent of inner feelings and natures remains,
then, he clearly no longer shares Tieck’s conviction about Shakespeare’s
merits as a specifically theatrical talent.
In the second section of the essay Goethe lists a number of topical
antitheses of literature: the ancient, naive, heathen, heroic, real and neces-
sary versus the modern, sentimental, Christian, romantic, ideal and free.
Without taking specific issue with the validity of these implied alignments,
he adds a further antithesis: that between obligation and will (Sollen and
Wollen). Goethe – on the whole, perceptively – explains ancient tragedy
as the clash of obligation with infeasibility, and modern tragedy as the
clash of will (or desire) with infeasibility; he then credits Shakespeare with
constituting a synthesis of these two clashes. In view of well-understood
features of the predicaments in major works such as Hamlet, Julius Caesar,
Othello and Macbeth, there is again some plausibility and interest value in
this thesis, though one would have been grateful for some actual illustra-
tion of its workings. Although this schema does flatter Shakespeare with
a unique status in the gamut of Western literature, it does not in itself
militate either for or against Goethe’s ‘closet Shakespeare’ thesis, although
if we were to take the ‘real–ideal’ dichotomy (and its implied alignment
with the ‘obligation–will’ dichotomy) seriously – as one probably should in
Shakespeare’s case – it does leave us with the question of how a playwright

commanding a unique synthesis of the ideal and the real (and whose thrust
is thus not purely imaginary) can be so unsuitable for real-life theatrical
presentation.
The essay’s third section, continuing the argument of the first, is devoted
to a more frontal assault on Shakespeare’s capability as a writer for the the-
atre, though it is at first diplomatically hedged by saying that Shakespeare’s
achievement belongs to the history of poetry, and only then do the gradual
denials of his theatrical acumen trickle in (HA 12: 295–8). Without wast-
ing ink on empirical or analytical exposition, Goethe pursues his argument
in an almost purely speculative manner, though the one specific example
he does give (the untheatricality of Mercutio and the nurse in Romeo and
Juliet) – a trivial instance, but presumably the piece of evidence he found
particularly persuasive – exposes a certain naïvété in his structural under-
standing of these characters and does not bode well for whatever examples
he might have used to substantiate some of his other points.
Why did Goethe do this? Was it his real view, or tactical theorizing?
This Shakespeare ‘lacking in audience effect’ was of course partly just
the Shakespeare that Goethe (like Schröder, no less than Weisse and
Heufeld and Schiller64) had created by their various dumbings-down of
scripts, editing and toning down of characters, and prudish acts of censor-
ship and orderly Frenchifications: Goethe is talking, in a sense, about the
Shakespeare that he felt his own milieu, and perhaps he himself, could
‘handle’, and so arguably the supposed ‘stageability’ limits of the plays,
and the supposed limits to Shakespeare’s stage-writing talent, were simply
the limitations of an audience that was not sufficiently in touch with its own
human nature, its sexuality, its contradictoriness, its irrational elements.
Not that there was any lack of others (such as Gerstenberg, and perhaps
Schiller in his heart of hearts) who saw through this and demanded the real
thing. Despite the contemporary German audience’s relatively unevolved
perceptions (of which Goethe was well aware), it seems highly unlikely that
Goethe himself failed to grasp Shakespeare’s generally superb sense of
theatrical impact. But as a man with his own prestige at heart, Goethe
could not live with real Shakespeare in public, as its performance would
mean showing an artistic vision both against his audience’s comprehen-
sion and sentiment, and, in the longer term, going against his own repu-
tation’s interests both as writer and critic. This non-theatrical image of
Shakespeare was a conscious, or subconscious assimilation to what Goethe,
nudged subtly by Schiller and less clemently by Schlegel, now recognized
as his own shortcoming: an attempt to ‘cut Shakespeare down to (Goethe’s
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)
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years)

Among the most substantial works completed in the last decade or so of
Goethe’s life was the eccentric patchwork sequel to the Apprenticeship Years:
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, published in 1821, and appearing in an
expanded edition in 1829. The novel is known to have been jostled together
from an assortment of Goethe’s miscellaneous stories and other papers,
and the question of whether Goethe, now his 70s, did enough by way of
shaping this material into a conceptually coherent work has divided critics
since the initial publication. Certainly neither Goethe’s own remarks on
the work65 nor what we know about the manner of its composition (HA 8:
581–2, 602–6) would incline one to reprieve the work beyond the status of
a postmodernist experiment, despite the interest in its symbolism and its
value as a testimony to Goethe’s growing preoccupation with the idea of
renunciation. With the action following quite some time after Wilhelm’s
fateful Hamlet performance and abandonment of the theatre (and in con-
sideration of what Goethe may have meant by that), we would not expect
a reprise of Shakespearean interest in the Journeyman Years, but there are
a few features of the novel in which Goethe ‘looks over his shoulder’, so to
speak, at Shakespeare.
Wilhelm’s various reactions to the panoramic spectacle of the universe, in
the scene of the Journeyman Years wherein Makarie takes him to the obser-
vatory, his feeling of nothingness, his inability to ‘see’ it properly, have been
revealingly compared to his reaction to Shakespeare in the Shakespeare’s
Day speech.66 The reason of course is that Shakespeare presented one with
a whole world, a whole universe; Shakespeare, according to that speech,
showed how each person had as their essence a ‘midpoint’ which was also
their real access to the world, much as Wilhelm Meister needed this mid-
point (i.e. he relies precisely on the lesson taught by Shakespeare) in order
to be able to even conceive of himself in the midst of the great cosmos.
Shakespeare himself, however, appears no longer to be the donor of this

sense of midpoint. The sublime figure of veneration in the novel, Makarie,
is herself in various ways portrayed as revolving around a mysterious mid-
point, sometimes designated as the sun, sometimes as some point she is
progressively rising away from in a spiral ascent, but again, there is no
longer any place for Shakespeare in this scheme of things.
In the collection of maxims and reflections ‘From Makarie’s Archive’, with
which the third and final book of the Journeyman Years ends, Shakespeare
is paired with Goethe’s pet abhorrence Calderón: after praising the fly-
ing start that these two have given to the enviably well-educated state of
German theatrical talent, Goethe cautions:
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)
Although much of this material was accumulated in the years 1821–9, we

know that some of it dates back as far as the beginning of the century, and
it is just possible that these last remarks were written in that early phase,
when Goethe may still have been railing at the Romantics’ calderonolatry
and their particular take on Shakespeare. This said, it cannot be argued
that it is out of keeping with the attitudes to Shakespeare and the the-
atre in the remainder of Goethe’s Journeyman Years, ‘carpetbag’ produc-
tion though they may have been. Most likely is that they were jottings from
some period when Goethe, perhaps annoyed at some temporary stagna-
tion of his own, was mentally experimenting with this ‘resentful’ view of
Shakespeare, and the Journeyman Years offered some opportunity to get
them into print at a time when sagacious editing was not among Goethe’s
most urgent priorities. Parallel to some of the work on the second edition
of the Journeyman Years ran, among other things, a project infinitely closer
to his heart and substance.
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
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
by his companion Mephistopheles to subliminal omens of his own guilt

and his sweetheart’s plight, ending in a horrifying spectre of her death
by decapitation. Faust prevails on the reluctant Mephistopheles to race
to her aid; as a traditionally religious girl, however, she refuses to be
rescued supernaturally by Mephistopheles’ power. With Faust’s heavy-
hearted abandonment of her, and a celestial voice declaring her salva-
tion, the fi rst Part ends.
The action of Part 2 begins with him waking from sleep in an idyllic
natural landscape, apparently granted oblivion by tutelary nature spir-
its; we soon find him in the imperial court mixing (with Mephistopheles’
dubious magical assistance) in the financial fortunes of the emperor and
suing for his favour. In return for his services Faust is granted the fee of
a piece of ‘land’ which has to be reclaimed from the sea. As preparation
for the ideal society and culture he wishes to found there, we are treated
to a grand allegory (the Classical Walpurgis Night), a kind of mystical
procession of all the elements of Golden-Age Greek culture; as generative
concepts of the new Man whom he wishes to breed on these elements, we
have a homunculus created before us, and chased through the scenes of the
cultural allegory; as the single, defining principle of beauty and propor-
tion which was the quintessence of that ideal culture and was to be the
keystone of his new society, Faust summons up the shade of Helen of Troy,
purifies her of temporal associations (in a fanciful time-warp conflict with
her husband Menelaus), begets a child – shortlived though the embrace
and its fruit turn out to be – and proceeds to construct the territorial and
economic basis of his new realm. But Faust grows old, and his efforts to
create a humane society are undermined by Mephistopheles: goods are
taken from slave plantations, an old couple whose house is in the way
are killed and the corpses of many who die in the land-reclamation work
are used in the polderwork itelf. When Faust himself dies there is a con-
flict over the fate of his soul, but in the end it is pronounced ‘saved’, as
Gretchen’s was at the end of Part 1.
Faust as a drama represents the realization of Shakespearean synthe-
sis, Shakespearean cross-fertilization of the individual and the political
sphere, in a manner which met another of Goethe’s lifelong missions.
The form which Goethe gave, and surely had to give to the working out
of so vast a network of links and consequences as the exposition of such
an historically pivotal character would require, owed something to the
sprawling form that Goethe had pioneered in Götz von Berlichingen, at
a time when the liberty of adopting this form could only be justified by
reference to the success that Shakespeare had had with it. What strikes us
‘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’:
Pace out, then, in this narrow boarded spell

Entire Creation’s universe,
And at deliberate gait traverse
From heaven, through the world, to hell.70
The ‘Witches Kitchen’ scene where Faust is rejuvenated by a potion does

not serve (as we saw the first version of the gypsies’ scene in Götz serve) as
the juncture of direct prophecy by the witches – indeed, Goethe designs this
scene and its speeches from quite different materials, almost as if to avoid
further echoes of Macbeth – but in its function as Faust’s first glimpse of
Helena, it does in fact serve as the supernatural mission-dispensing scene in

the same way as Macbeth 4. 1 (in the cavern, with the three apparitions) and
Hamlet 1. 4–5 (with his father’s ghost), and likewise by means of a spectre.
The first strophe of a song sung by Mephistopheles (allegedly to warm
Gretchen to her next encounter with Faust) –
What dost before

Thy sweetheart’s door,
Young Katelin? – for
The night is scarcely o’er.
Do not begin!
He’ll let thee in,
As maiden in,
But out as maid no more.71
– is a deliberate adaptation of Schlegel’s translation72 of the popular folk

song which the deranged Ophelia sings to King Claudius:
Tomorrow is Saint Valentine’s day,

All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donn’d his clo’es,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more. (Hamlet, 4. 5. 48–55)
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:
So Mephistopheles sings a song from Shakespeare, and why shouldn’t

he? Why should I take the trouble to invent one of my own, when
Shakespeare’s was just right, and said just what it was supposed to?73
The deliberate effect of these correspondences is primarily to present

Faust’s plight in the same light as Hamlet’s: both men were responsible for
the murder of their sweetheart’s sibling and sole remaining parent, but
were themselves the victims of social scandal and needed to overthrow vari-
ous strictures threatening their existence.
Curiously, Goethe inserted at the end of the Walpurgis Night scene an

interlude (supposedly performed in the open on the Blocksberg near the
witches’ sabbath) called ‘A Walpurgis Night’s Dream, or Oberon’s and
Titania’s Golden Wedding Celebration’. The few opening speeches from
Oberon, Titania, Puck and (from The Tempest) Ariel,74 on the humorous
theme of separation as a form of therapy for marital conflict, bear only
distant or perhaps ironic relationship to Faust’s predicament, and are fol-
lowed by an array of mostly topical-type satirical quatrains. These satires
serve as pure distractions and are thus of a piece with Mephistopheles’
strategy with Faust, and so the Shakespearean wedding theme is used as a
little more than a passing emblem here; the only lasting impression being
that of the helpful, ethereal figure of Ariel, though presumably the part
is only played by some sprite from the witches’ sabbath. Ariel himself (in
much the same character) appears as one of the tutelary nature spirits
rousing Faust from his regenerative oblivion at the very start of Part 2:
again in purely emblematic capacity, unless, as in The Tempest, the natural
setting is meant as a kind of asylum from the hero’s previous debacle. (The
heroes’ names, ‘Prospero’ and ‘Faust’, are also semantically close and may
also be intended to abet such a parallel.)
Conclusion
As a playwright and practising dramatist, and aspirant to the very peaks of

‘world literature’, Goethe would always have to share his trough, for better
or worse, with Shakespeare, his works and reputation. Goethe’s handling of
this fact changes, perhaps predictably, along with his interests in the course
of time: for the young Goethe looking for a ladder to the star to which his
talent justly aspired, there was none better to scale than Shakespeare; for
the established but still mercurial Goethe of the middle and later years,
being himself now a ‘ladder’ for the aspirations of Tieck and many others,
a situation of unenviable competition arose between his own reputation,
his own status as an emulable model, and Shakespeare’s. How uncomfort-
ably Goethe reacted to this contention at times, we have seen, yet at no
time did Goethe entirely lose the pure, simple sense of admiration for
Shakespeare’s work, or the gratification of comprehending something of
the genius of the man who produced it, and this admiration and compre-
hension enriched Goethe’s own genius again and again throughout his
long life. In the form not just of Faust, or of Götz or of Egmont, or even of
Wilhelm Meister’s mission, but, in a deeper sense, in the form of his œuvre
as a whole, Goethe surely succeeded in carrying out the ‘mission’ laid on

him by Herder in 1773:
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:
Einer Einzigen angehören, To belong to one sole woman,

Einen Einzigen verehren, To venerate one sole man,
Wie verfeint es Herz und Sinn! How it refines heart and sense
Lida! Glück der nächsten Nähe, Lida! Joy of most intimate
closeness,
William! Stern der schönsten Höhe, William! Star of most beautiful
height,
Euch verdank’ ich, was ich bin. What I am, I owe to you.
Tag’ und Jahre sind verschwunden, Days and years have disappeared,
Und doch ruht auf jenen Stunden And yet upon those hours lies
Meines Wertes Vollgewinn. The net profit of my worth.
Curiously – though perhaps not surprisingly in this evocative structural

parison with Shakespeare77 – the woman he mentions (‘Lida’) is the half-
British Charlotte von Stein, the muse of Goethe’s mid-20s to mid-30s, and
it would be tempting to think that Goethe is here merely transporting him-
self back in a nostalgic reverie to his early and mid-20s and that it is only
to this era that his thoughts apply, but the later lines emphatically rebut
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:
‘A dramatic talent’, Goethe continued, ‘if it was of any significance, could

not but take notice of Shakespeare, indeed it could not but study him. If
it studied him, however, it could not but realise that Shakespeare had
already exhausted the entirety of human nature, in all directions, and
unto all depths and heights, and that basically there was nothing left for
it, the successor’s talent, to do. And whence should one have garnered
the courage even so much as to take up the pen, once his serious and
acknowledging soul were aware of such unfathomable and unattainable
works of excellence, already done? . . . It is with Shakespeare as with the
mountain ranges of Switzerland. Transplant Montblanc to the great
plain of the Lüneberg Heath, and words will fail you for very astonish-
ment at its magnitude. But visit it in its gigantic homeland, approach it
via its great neighbours: the Jungfrau, the Finsteraarhorn, the Eiger, the
Wetterhorn, the St Gotthard and Monte Rosa, and Montblanc will still
remain a giant, yet it will no longer strike us with such astonishment.
Incidentally, whoever finds it unbelievable,’ Goethe continued, ‘that a
good deal of Shakespeare’s greatness is attributable to his great and vig-
orous era, should ask himself whether he considers such a breathtaking
phenomenon possible in today’s England of 1824, in these bad days of
divisive and criticising journals?’ (Eckermann, 2 January 1824)
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
considering how we should react to that phenomenon. Among Goethe’s

very last words was also his last word on Shakespeare:
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)
This does make the remarks preserved in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman

Years seem a temporary aberration or whimsy, or merely an uncomfortable
nuancing of what we should do (or not do) in response to such superor-
dinate genius. With this in mind, one can interpret Goethe’s deliberate
overlooking of Shakespeare’s specifically theatrical genius in a number
of ways. Ermann attributes Goethe’s statically poetological valuation of
Shakespeare primarily to the indelible nature of his early impressions,78
where the emotional effect on Goethe was the overriding factor, as we saw
in the Shakespeare’s Day oration. Yet I would say that a number of reasons
grew up around this: on the one hand, Goethe genuinely appreciated
Shakespeare’s perceptiveness, and ever more as his own life wore on and
his understanding of life grew, the spell that Shakespeare’s vision of life
had on the receptive mind only increased; on the other hand, however,
Goethe avoided putting himself too seriously in Shakespeare’s shadow and
did so by means of just this focus on the effect that Shakespeare had on the
individual’s mind, for which no actual theatre was necessary.
In our examination of the many aspects of Goethe’s relationship to
Shakespeare, perhaps we should pause to spare just a moment’s thought
for Shakespeare’s debt to Goethe, for we must not imagine that Goethe’s
occupation with Shakespeare was entirely a matter of one-way interest. The
German excitement for and translation of his works – the work of Bodmer,
Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Tieck and Schlegel – was what
largely motivated the French translation by Le Tourneur in 1776–82,
the thirteen-play prose version of Michele Leoni of 1819–22 and Carlo
Rusconi’s full prose version in 1838, and these became some of the main
weapons in a literary debate in France and Italy in the decades follow-
ing Napoleon’s downfall.79 The revolution in German literature which, for
the French and Italians, began with Werther’s popularity and continued
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
August Wilhelm Schlegel

Christine Roger and Roger Paulin1
Section A
The Reception of Shakespeare in

Germany 1682–1785
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
of whether German letters, compared with France and England, were

‘retarded’, and as a corollary sought for new poetic models and forms
which could inspire a German literary renaissance and establish German
as a major language of poetry and discourse. Shakespeare’s texts, how-
ever, presented through titles only or brief excerpts, remained largely
unread until Wieland’s work appeared. The knowledge of his plays
remained cursory.
Shakespeare’s dramas had in fact been present in the German-speaking
lands almost since his own lifetime. 3 Bastardized and truncated versions
of Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Julius
Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and of the best-known among them, Hamlet (as
Der bestrafte Brudermord [Fratricide Revenged]), recognizable only in the
barest outlines of plot, were among the plays that had been brought to
the German-speaking lands and to the rest of the Continent from the
late sixteenth century by the ‘Englische Komödianten’. Bands of stroll-
ing players, touring across the territories largely outside the official
theatrical and literary circuits of the courts, Latin schools and universi-
ties, brought simplified versions of the plays to the Continent, staged
in English using strong body language and spectacular effects to com-
pensate for language barriers. They were later followed by translations,
but at no stage did the English Comedians attribute their plays to any
particular author.
In the German-speaking lands Shakespeare long remained only a name
found in lists of English dramatists (Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson etc.),
compiled by scholars who relied on English sources and their translations
without having read any of the original texts. It is generally assumed that
the polymath Daniel Georg Morhof’s (1639–91) Unterricht von der Teutschen
Sprache (1682) (Primer of the German Language) was the first reference.4 In
the terms of the ‘Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’, the debate that
dominated literary discourse in Europe during the late seventeenth cen-
tury and for much of the eighteenth, Morhof sees Shakespeare (whom he
had not read) as a ‘modern’. Short biographical accounts that were clearly
derivative of English sources, articles in lexica and compendia make up the
sparse references to Shakespeare up to about 1730.5 Even in 1740, a critic
and translator such as Johann Jakob Bodmer in Zurich was not even sure of
Shakespeare’s name (‘Sasper’).6 The English might be able to spell it, but
the Italians (Bodmer’s source) might not.
A crucial increase in Shakespeare’s exposure in Germany resulted not
only from the reception of the supreme ‘modern’, Voltaire,7 but also of
the London cultural journals of the early 1700s, the Tatler, the Spectator,
the Guardian,8 in which Shakespeare’s work was often and sometimes

elaborately discussed and of which French translations were beginning
to appear from 1714 onwards. Indeed it is through French mediation,
Voltaire’s and others’, that Shakespeare was initially to feature in German
critical discourse. The first notable critic to square with Shakespeare in
the public sphere was Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66), who exer-
cised an almost papal authority over aesthetic judgement in Germany, in
his productions of live theatre (from 1730 inwards) and by the publication
of his normative Critical Poetics (Critische Dichtkunst) in 1730. It was his wife
Luise who set about translating the Spectator into German,9 resulting in the
first preserved snippets of genuine Shakespeare translation. Gottsched’s
own neoclassical views, indebted to seventeenth-century French dramatic
theory and practice, led to his disparagement of the irregular composition
of English playwrights, singling out Julius Caesar for particular censure, as
formally chaotic and populated with both noble and base characters. This
was of course drawing on a narrow factual base, Julius Caesar, his source for
all his references to Shakespeare, being the first German translation of a
complete Shakespeare play (1741).10
But this translation, little appreciated and soon forgotten, was an impor-
tant step in Shakespearean reception. For Caspar Wilhelm von Borcke’s
version of Julius Caesar (1741)11 had the honour of being the first transla-
tion (as opposed to an adaptation like Voltaire’s La Mort de César) of a
Shakespeare play into any language. A homogenized version in rhymed
alexandrines, the standard verse form of classical French tragedy, it
brought the first real knowledge of a Shakespearean text to Germany and
is thus an important testimony of the neoclassical tradition in Shakespeare
translation. For Gottsched, it might involve no more than infringement of
the rules of the stage and good sense. But it also elicited the first, tentative
defence of Shakespeare. This came from within the Gottschedian circle
itself, from the young Saxon critic and dramatist Johann Elias Schlegel
(1718–49). An uncle of August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and
like them a poet, playwright and critic, he was for a time a follower of
Gottsched’s. His Vergleichung Shakespears und Andreas Gryphs (Comparison
of Shakespeare and Andreas Gryphius, 1741) (Blinn: 1982, 41–61) echoed
the main problems common to eighteenth-century Shakespearean recep-
tion in England and on the Continent: the question of nature and deco-
rum, reference to the authenticity of the characters and comments on
Shakespeare’s ‘beauties’ and ‘faults’. Of course there was much that the
Schlegel the neoclassic could not sanction. But by seeing in Shakespeare a
master of the characterization of authentic human nature, Schlegel took
an independent critical position of his own. His reference to Shakespeare

as a ‘mind that grows spontaneously’ (Blinn, 1982, 61) in his invention
of characters and the liveliness of his imagination, points forward to
Edward Young’s famous definition of genius as something that ‘grows’ and
is not made.12 With this we have one of the standard topoi of the century’s
Shakespeare reception.
For all this, in the twenty years between Borcke’s Cäsar and Wieland’s
translation work (1762–6) there are only a few scattered records of any
sustained critical interest in Shakespeare. An exception would be Johann
Jakob Bodmer (1698–1783). Coming from an interest in Milton and
Addison and Dante, no less a neoclassic than Gottsched, he nevertheless
lighted on an insight that could further an understanding of Shakespeare.
Objects that are not amenable to rational analysis, such as we find in
Milton and by analogy in Shakespeare, may nevertheless be deemed ‘natu-
ral’; the products of fancy and imagination are part of ‘nature’ if we extend
that term to accommodate them.13 Bodmer also seizes on Dryden’s and
Addison’s phrase ‘fairy way of writing’,14 and through this opens up a part
of Shakespeare’s world that appealed to the century’s weakness for the ori-
ent, the romance, the fairy tale, the frisson imparted by the supernatural
or by popular superstition.15
Shakespeare in the Age of Enlightenment

The translation of Voltaire’s chapters on Shakespeare and English trag-
edy and comedy from the Lettres sur les Anglais in the first number of
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s and Christlob Mylius’s periodical Beyträge zur
Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters (Towards a History and Reception of the
Theatre, 1750),16 including Hamlet’s soliloquy, the mentions of Othello and
Julius Caesar there, can be seen as a reminder of the importance of the
French in mediating Shakespeare to Germany at the beginning of the
1750s. The decade brought to readers of German a deeper knowledge of
Shakespeare’s texts. There was first Johann Daniel Titius’s periodical Neue
Erweiterungen der Erkenntnis und des Vergnügens (1753). With passages lifted
from Rowe’s life of Shakespeare (1709) and Pope’s preface (1725), men-
tion of all of Shakespeare’s plays by title, it gave an account of his life and
works, a sample of texts and a portrait of Hamlet.17 It was followed three
years later in the same journal by scenes selected from Richard III,18 thirty
pages which later formed part of the basis of Lessing’s discussion of that
character.
By any measure, the most spectacular and effective pro-Shakespearean

manifesto is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–81) famous seventeenth
Literaturbrief in Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend (1759) (Blinn, 1982,
70–2). In a single issue of his periodical, Lessing mercilessly rejected
Gottsched’s reforms of the theatre for their having introduced the French
taste and style on stage. He criticized his (as Lessing saw it) unreflected
francophilia, suggesting new canons and alternative models in an attempt
to revivify and redefine German letters, not least the ‘grand, terrible and
melancholic’ of the English (Blinn, 1982, 72 ).
In histories of German literature, the polemical seventeenth Literaturbrief
is often taken to be the origin of Shakespeare enthusiasm in Germany in
that it silenced Gottsched’s voice. Lessing certainly was the most radical
critic in the 1760s, but his views were not utterly new. Many of his state-
ments could already be found in earlier essays by his fellow critics Friedrich
Nicolai (1733–1811) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86). Lessing and
Mendelssohn, in the process of reinterpreting Aristotelian terminology,
are more interested in the psychological effect of Shakespeare on his audi-
ence, arresting characters and strong passions that move the heart, while
Nicolai stresses the reality of his characters. But all three use Shakespeare
mainly to challenge the conventions of neoclassical drama as interpreted
by the French and their domination.
Mendelssohn, in 1758, is also most interested in the naturalness of psy-
chological motivation in Shakespeare’s characters, citing Hamlet and
Othello as examples and devoting a detailed discussion to the yet largely
unknown King Lear in the 123rd Literaturbrief.19 Significantly, except for
King Lear, Lessing, Nicolai and Mendelssohn did not widen the canon of
plays that had already been circulating in Germany since Voltaire’s Lettres
philosophiques, and it remained surprisingly small until the beginning of
the 1760s: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Macbeth and Henry IV. Even after Shakespeare had become a
valuable asset against French neoclassical drama, it would seem that he was
still more of passing reference than widely known or read and that even
among those who praised his greatness deeper insights into his drama
were seldom to be found.
The appearance of the second translation of a Shakespeare play demon-
strated once more the limited interest in Shakespeare as late as the end of
the 1750s: Romeo and Juliet, the first translation to be based on a contempo-
rary acting text, David Garrick’s abridged and re-arranged version of the
tragedy produced at Drury Lane in 1748. The author was the Swiss pastor
Simon Grynäus (1725–99). Romeo und Juliet was published in Basle in 1758,
as one of nine mainly Augustan neoclassical tragedies translated in a col-

lection of plays entitled Neue Probstücke der Englischen Schaubühne (including
plays by Young, Addison, Dryden, Lee, Otway, Congreve and Rowe).20 It
was effectively the first theatrical text in German to use blank verse, and it
started the fashion in the German-speaking lands for Shakespearean adap-
tations and imitations: Christian Felix Weisse’s Richard der Dritte (1758–9)
and Romeo und Julie (1767) are examples.
Grynäus’s Romeo and Juliet was received with indifference. With the
Shakespeare canon at the beginning of the 1760s consisting almost
entirely of the same few plays taken from English and French criticism
of the early decades of the century, the times were hardly propitious for
Christoph Martin Wieland’s laborious undertaking, his effort at translat-
ing the complete plays of Shakespeare. It was the first attempt to do so into
any language, at a time which saw the revival of every single play in the
Shakespeare canon in England. In France, Pierre Antoine de La Place’s
(1707–93) much-acclaimed eight-volume collection of English theatre (Le
Théâtre anglois, 1746–9) had contained but ten plays by Shakespeare, ren-
dered in prose.21
Wieland’s Shakespeare Translation
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
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
essential categories applied to Wieland’s translation in the period after

a prose Shakespeare had become obsolete. The translation was success-
ful, Goethe argues, because it appealed not only to a specifically literary
audience, but was generally accessible to most readers. It was written in
the common language of the people rather than in the more esoteric lan-
guage of poetry.
In his remarks Goethe implicitly denies Wieland’s translation the sta-
tus of ‘Poesie’. Wieland’s accomplishment, in Goethe’s view, is a matter of
‘Gehalt’ (‘substance’) versus mere ‘Inhalt’ (‘content’), where the former has
more status than the latter. In the notes that he wrote for his West-östlicher
Divan (published 1819), Goethe once again uses Wieland as an example of
translation techniques and praises his accomplishment as being represen-
tative of his time, rather than of inherent aesthetic value.27 His success lies
far more in making the new seem familiar and amenable, than in convey-
ing the real essence of its foreignness.
Unlike Goethe from his vantage point in 1813, Wieland’s contemporary
critics, commenting on the translation as it was still in progress, found it prob-
lematic because of its ‘slavish’ adherence to the English original in matters
of style. And indeed Wieland did shape his German diction to a surprising
degree according to the English original.28 A large number of English words
and phrases come into German through his translation, sometimes directly
(‘Clown’, ‘Hobgoblin’, ‘Lullabei’), sometimes by giving a new meaning to an
already existing word or stem (‘entweiben’, ‘luftig’), most often by forming
new words from native words on the model of the English (‘blaßwangig’ for
‘pale-visaged’, ‘Werkeltagswelt’ for ‘working-day world’).
Shakespeare and the Sturm und Drang
The last quarter of the eighteenth century inaugurated a new phase in

Shakespeare reception and accelerated the shift from French to English
models in the arts. The young writers of the so-called Sturm und Drang were
particularly attracted to the drama, and would find its most characteris-
tic expression in prose tragedies. Herder’s comment to Goethe ‘daß Euch
Shakespeare ganz verdorben’ (‘Shakespeare has completely ruined you’),29
referring to Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen) (1771, revised 1773), makes it
clear that both he and Goethe shared the perception that Goethe’s drama
was Shakespearean. Some of its qualities, particularly its many short scenes
and rapid shifts of place and time, could have been taken directly from
the English playwright. But most of the play’s elements are actually those
of Wieland’s Shakespeare, including its essential form as a prose tragedy

and above all its vigorous language. Much of what the young Goethe and
others considered Shakespearean language is mediated through Wieland’s
translation. His renderings of moments of great passion with their atten-
dant irregular syntax and rhythms seem to have made a powerful impres-
sion, or perhaps provided the linguistic tools that the new generation most
sought.
Wieland’s contributions to the language of the Sturm und Drang went
unappreciated. The initially warm reception discernible in Goethe’s
description of his student days in Leipzig quickly cooled to outright hos-
tility among writers of the younger generation. Heinrich Wilhelm von
Gerstenberg (1737–1823) set the tone for their response in his essays on
Shakespeare on the occasion of Wieland’s translation, in the Briefe über
Merkwürdigkeiten der Litteratur (Letters on Curiosities of Literature) (1766–7)
(Blinn: 1982, 75–91). In the 1760s and 1770s, Gerstenberg, Johann Georg
Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder began to speak of translation in
ways that would eventually provide the basis for Romantic translation
theory. What Gerstenberg found so intolerable in Wieland’s translation
was the way that Wieland distanced himself from Shakespeare, above all
in the footnotes (ibid., 76). Gerstenberg is one of the first German crit-
ics to break with the long-standing English and Continental tradition of
simultaneously praising Shakespeare and calling attention to his weak-
nesses. He insists that Shakespeare deserves absolute reverence and dis-
misses the neoclassical categories that question Shakespeare’s judgement.
Gerstenberg recognizes a fundamental ambiguity in Wieland’s unfavour-
able criticism of many of the very features he is translating. His attack
on Wieland, and the ill-will of the other young writers who would adopt
his attitude, is motivated by impatience at Wieland’s censure of certain
Shakespearean qualities in the footnotes. The notes seem out of touch
with the post-Sturm und Drang understanding of Shakespeare. The great
majority of the footnotes are purely explanatory, giving the reader his-
torical background or helps with obscure phrases. Others explain word-
plays that he confesses he is unable to reproduce. But the ones that are
most memorable and that have had the greatest effect are those that
show Wieland’s willingness to tamper with the text, that take issue with
Shakespeare’s taste or explain why certain expressions could not be trans-
lated for reasons of decorum, to suggest that Shakespeare’s text can be
divided into good and bad parts. Shakespeare’s unfortunate need to sat-
isfy the world of his time is a frequent theme in the notes, used to defend
Shakespeare’s honour against strict moral and aesthetic judgements. The
division of Shakespeare into positives and negatives is a characteristic

neoclassical approach to the poet. This would remind readers too much
of Voltaire’s view of Shakespeare and its basis in the Shakespeare criticism
of Dryden and Pope.
Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) essay Shakespear in his collec-
tion Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art, 1773) (Blinn,
1982, 104–19) is one of several at about the same time by writers of the
young generation that rejected neoclassicism and the dominance of French
taste. It comes two years after Goethe’s rhapsodic speech, composed to
be read among friends at the celebration of Shakespeare’s name day, Zum
Schäkespears-Tag (1771) (Blinn, 1982, 98–101), and precedes by a year Jakob
Michael Lenz’s (1751–92) essay on Shakespeare, Anmerkungen übers Theater
(Notes on the Theatre, 1774) (Blinn, 1982, 123–43). All three contributions
seem to represent a new departure in German Shakespeare criticism, a
different awareness of the English playwright, close to a religious conver-
sion. They overturn the carefully balanced view discernable in Wieland’s
notes, replacing it with unequivocal enthusiasm. A stress is now put on the
‘organic unity’ of a work of art, and the power and genius of the artist is an
important object of attention. This represents a perceptible shift away from
the traditional emphasis of the previous neoclassical generation on ques-
tions of taste, judgement, decorum and the moral value of literature.
Herder’s 1773 essay stresses that Shakespeare’s plays are a whole, that
Shakespeare is a ‘dramatic God’, a maker of worlds, but that he cannot be
detached from the English culture which had formed him and which he then
helped to form. It follows that Germany could not acquire a national literature
like that of England or France merely by imitating English or French models:
Germany had to identify and draw on its own resources, on its medieval past,
its popular tales, its folk songs. It means that intellectuals had to renew shared
traditions that had long been forgotten or neglected and had to restore ‘lost’
continuities in German history, culture and society. The Sturm und Drang
view of Shakespeare could be summarized by saying that it did not invent
new categories for understanding Shakespeare, at least not in its theoretical
pronouncements, but that it assigned new evaluations to the categories that
already existed, substituting positives where there had been negatives.
Eschenburg’s Translation
Wieland’s translation was completed by Johann Joachim Eschenburg

(1743–1820). It appeared between 1775 and 1777, with a supplement in
1782.30 A professor at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig, his

major qualification for the task was a translation of Elizabeth Montagu’s
monograph An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769)31 and a
nearly complete blank-verse rendition of King Richard III. He would later
write the first book-length scholarly study of Shakespeare in German,
the compendium Über W. Shakspeare (1787).32 Subsequent criticism of
Eschenburg’s Shakespeare translation has suffered from his association
with a scholarly approach, little appreciated at the time. Indeed his trans-
lation benefited from a new generation of English Shakespeare editions
that had appeared in the few years since Wieland had finished his trans-
lation (Johnson, Capell, Steevens, Jennen). Eschenburg seems to have
used Johnson’s 1765 edition and Johnson and Steeven’s 1773 edition. The
result of Eschenburg’s attempt to reproduce the English text as closely
as possible is visible in the way he adopted the Jacobean English system
of numbering acts and scenes. His knowledge of English Shakespeare
criticism shows up clearly in the footnotes and the critical apparatus,
where he quoted from a large body of critical opinion, sometimes weigh-
ing one commentator’s view against another’s, sometimes suggesting his
own interpretations.
Except for the songs and for Richard III, Eschenburg’s Shakespeare is in
prose. The absence of blank verse has been taken as a sign of Eschenburg’s
stylistic identity with Wieland’s work and his separation from later transla-
tors. Shakespeare’s use of blank verse was nevertheless not a matter of indif-
ference to Eschenburg, and his own use of prose was not self-evident and
unreflective (he had translated the illustrative passages from Shakespeare
in Elizabeth Montagu’s Shakespeare Essay into blank verse in 1771), and he
says in the preface to his first edition of Shakespeare that he had already
translated most of Richard III into blank verse before he received the com-
mission to undertake the publication of the complete works. But prose
was easier to use for such an enormous undertaking and Eschenburg was
more concerned to produce a version that would read like German than
to render slavishly every expression in the original. He did, however, set
a standard for semantic accuracy and thoroughness that would influence
all subsequent German translators of Shakespeare. One cannot place too
high expectations of innovation on a translation that was a revision and a
continuation of Wieland. But he nevertheless stands at the beginning of
a long tradition within the German Shakespeare, not just in broad terms
of accuracy but in individual formulations that no one has managed to
do better. In the twenty years after Eschenburg’s complete edition only
isolated translations and adaptations of individual plays appeared, many
of them conceived for the theatre,33 until Schlegel’s version started coming
out in 1797–1801.
* * *
Section B
August Wilhelm Schlegel and

the Romantic Shakespeare34
It is necessary to relate August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) to this earlier

corpus of Shakespearean reception. His uncle, Johann Elias, is part of it.
Another uncle, Johann Heinrich, was an earlier practitioner in German of
blank verse.35 His father, Johann Adolf, translated Batteux’s normative aes-
thetics from the French. There is in this family tradition something of the
formidable erudition, the sense of order, the concern to expand the lim-
its of existing knowledge and experience, which inform August Wilhelm’s
career as translator, critic and interpreter. Through his father, he was able
to correspond with Eschenburg and Herder, pioneers in the process of
making a verse translation of Shakespeare available to the Germans.36
Schlegel may not seem a natural translator of Shakespeare or an inter-
preter of his work. He disliked the English, once expressing to his friend
Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) the hope that Shakespeare was after all not ‘one
of those frigid, stupid souls on that brutal island’.37 He regarded English as
a hybrid language, lacking the Germanic purity of his own.38 His ideal of
humanity, he later said, would be an amalgam of the best qualities of the
Germans and the French.39 The English and their institutions, he believed,
were motivated by profit and gain, not ideas and ideals.40 English literature
after the Jacobeans was not worth studying.41 The list can be extended. But
there was Shakespeare. When Schlegel in 1796 famously – or infamously –
said that Shakespeare was ‘ganz unser’,42 completely ours, he was making
the first important utterance of proprietary and annexational claims by the
Germans, ones that the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were
only too happy to echo. And later generations of German Shakespeareans
could point to a translation (Schlegel’s) which, while of course not as good
as the original, was a work of art in its own right and part of a national heri-
tage that now included Shakespeare. They could with some justification
claim that they had better philological tools for teasing out the intricacies
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
indeed be defined through the analysis of ‘management’ (Tieck) and

‘wholeness’ (Schlegel).
All this is by way of saying that Schlegel is part of a wider German Romantic
reception of Shakespeare that involved all of its major figures and that saw
Shakespeare influence the output of the principle dramatists of its gen-
eration and of that following (Kleist, Zacharias Werner, Grillparzer) and
many minor ones as well. Schlegel’s name stands out for several reasons.
His famous Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, delivered in Vienna in
1808 and published in 1809–11, were translated into the major European
languages and passed on into other cultures notions of Shakespeare (and
of much else), easily accommodated to national Romantic movements, be
they French, Russian, Polish, Spanish or whatever. His two seminal essays
from the 1790s do not form part of this ‘Romantic message to Europe’, as
one critic has defined it,47 for the simple reason that they were not trans-
lated at the time.48 Coleridge’s debt to Schlegel, having read him of course
in the original, is to his critical language in the Lectures rather that to
his analysis of Shakespeare’s plays;49 indeed it is unlikely that he knew the
earlier essays. It is through the Lectures that other nations learned that
Schlegel was also a translator, not the other way round. For the Germans,
however, the translation and the Lectures stand as equal beacons of their
national achievement in matters Shakespearean. Yet they also have the
effect of overshadowing other significant aspects of that achievement,
others’ – often successful – attempts at translation, lectures by others
involving Shakespeare (by Schlegel’s brother Friedrich, for instance, or by
Adam Müller) and a considerable corpus of textual scholarship, most of it
associated with the name of Ludwig Tieck and witness to a knowledge of
Shakespeare that no lesser critic than Coleridge called ‘ASTONISHING’.50
Schlegel’s limited interest in the practical matters of theatrical produc-
tion meant that the adaptation of his translation for the German stage
and its reception there (Goethe’s reworking of his Romeo and Juliet, for
instance) were of little concern to him once his reputation as a critic was
established.
Schlegel’s activity as a Shakespeare critic and translator, while seeming to
fall into neat categories or chronological segments, has no predictable tra-
jectory. The translation of Shakespeare is only one part of his multifarious
activity; there may be a link between his Shakespeare and his later Sanskrit
scholarship, but it is not necessarily one of inner logic. But the translator
did not go about his work in a haphazard fashion. He had already gained
practical experience of translating before he enunciated his general prin-
ciples on translation. His translations went through various drafts, most
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.
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
Schlegel’s beginnings as a translator are rooted both in that movement

and in the reaction against its limitations. These are summed up in the
figure of Gottfried August Bürger (1747–94), Schlegel’s mentor while a
student in Göttingen from 1786 to 1791. Bürger, a major poet in the popu-
lar ballad style of the Sturm und Drang, had in 1783 essayed a version
of Macbeth.57 It is, however, worth remembering that in keeping with the
wider notions then associated with translation, he had also tried his hand
at Petrarch (in the sonnet form of the original), the Iliad (iambic) the late
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).
Schlegel’s Essays for Schiller’s Die Horen (1795–7)
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
some of the first samples of his Shakespeare translation. It is also fair to

say that Schlegel fulfilled in exemplary fashion the aspiration expressed in
the announcement of Die Horen, to break down the partition between the
aesthetic and the learned worlds, bring ‘learning into society’ and ‘taste
into scholarship’ (Horen, 1795, 1: v). Here already were enunciated the prin-
ciples that would make Schlegel’s later Vienna Lectures accessible both to
a wider reading public and to the scholarly community. For Schiller, it was
politic to have this formidably learned and technically brilliant young man
on his side.
While Schlegel in these Horen essays kept his more theoretical remarks
separate from his actual translations, the two elements, as already said,
belong together. It would not be enough to discuss the various kinds of trans-
lation (literal, empathetic etc.), as in the eighteenth century D’Alembert
or Le Tourneur or Woodhouselee had done and Goethe, Schleiermacher
and Humboldt were to do.60 It was necessary to go into the very nature of
language itself.
This Schlegel does in his Letters on Poetry, Metre and Language (Briefe über
Poesie, Silbenmaß und Sprache) that appeared in Die Horen in 1795–6 (Horen,
1795, 11: 77–103; 1796, 1: 54–74, 2: 54–74; SW, 7: 98–154), not in the form of
a learned treatise, but in a series of letters to a lady, thus making accessible
the century’s discourses on language and poetry and their origins. His aim
is to establish that rhythm, dance, metre belong to the innermost forms
of human expression. As poetry has been from the beginnings of human
life an essential means of articulating basic needs, urges and wishes, so
rhythm, expressed in the form of metre, is part of the quintessence of lan-
guage, not a mere incidental. This is the basic insight that will inform his
thinking about translation, even if it does yet not form the thrust of the
1795–6 essay. Like Schlegel’s later, more technical, essays on metrics and
scansion it forms part of a wider discussion of what language can do and
what the translator must be aware of.
In approaching Schlegel’s first essay devoted to Shakespeare, in which
he also sets out the criteria for an adequate translation, we have to bear
two factors in mind. First, translation into German had taken on a new
dimension through the recent hexameter translations of Homer (1781,
1793) by Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), that redoubtable figure who
would later compete with Schlegel’s Shakespeare. It was a proof of what the
German language could achieve, consigning to oblivion the various earlier
renditions, French or English, which believed Homer could be contained
in rhyming couplets (or Bürger’s iambs). Second, Schlegel made absolute
claims for Shakespeare and translation that diminished the contribution
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 Wilhelm Meister Essay62
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
moral judgement, as Samuel Johnson perceived it. A ‘more genuine kind

of criticism’ will have as its ‘most laudable task’
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)
This is aligning criticism with the processes of creation, going as far as to

remove the barriers between the two spheres, making it possible for the
critic to put himself inside his subject and redefining his task in those very
terms.
With this insight underlying all that follows, Schlegel essentially takes
leave of Wilhelm Meister. But not quite. Wilhelm’s dilemma, whether to pro-
duce the uncut text of Hamlet (but in prose) or to bow to convention and
shorten, becomes the lead-over to Schlegel’s real concern: how to pres-
ent the Germans with the integrated work of art that the Shakespearean
drama is, and in their own language. To do this, they will need to read
his plays in a poetic translation. Seeing them on the stage is but an inad-
equate medium; indeed Schlegel here, perhaps covering himself for his
later neglect of the ‘problem plays’ in his translation, says it is no loss if
most of his dramatic oeuvre will never be performed in Germany. With
this Schlegel comes to his short account of Shakespeare in Germany, not
only Wieland and Eschenburg of course (but with faint praise), but also
Lessing and above all Goethe. It is the renewal of their own dramatic litera-
ture, not so much translations, which has enabled the Germans to embrace
Shakespeare with such fervour and empathy, no other foreign nation com-
ing near them in their love and admiration for him. He is ‘COMPLETELY
OURS’! (ibid.: 38) [my caps] His virtues are our virtues, his language
related to ours. And German has the quality of flexibility and adaptability,
which places a poetic translation within our grasp.
So far, so good. But Schlegel still feels the need to counter the argument
that the different styles and registers in Shakespeare need not be rendered
in translation, that prose will still suffice. Perhaps he needed to scotch this
notion once and for all. Perhaps his fellow countrymen needed convincing,
for they might note that Shakespearean mixtures of style were absent from
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
difficulties of penetrating into an alien linguistic experience. Humboldt’s

phrase, ‘Farbe der Fremdheit’ (‘tinge of alienness’),64 means that the for-
eign will always emerge through the translated text. Schlegel’s ‘alles im
Deutschen Thunliche’ suggests that Shakespeare can be translated and
can read like German. Their irreconcilable differences emerge already in
1796 when Humboldt writes to Schlegel about his scenes from Shakespeare
in Die Horen and suggests that he is attempting to solve the insoluble.65
Schlegel perseveres nevertheless.
The Romeo and Juliet Essay
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,
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
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).
Schlegel’s Shakespeare Translation67
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
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
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
expression is of necessity wider. A ‘classic’ of German literary production,

it represents the largest single corpus of dramatic verse in the language.
As such, it both shares the limitations of ‘what the language is capable of’
and is a living proof of how that language can be extended in range and
expression – because an alien text is forcing it to do so. Despite Schlegel’s
reference to ‘doughty forebears’ (SW, 7: 63), German did not immediately
have the lexis to accommodate Shakespeare’s range. Should one create it?
Would the obscurity and difficulty of Shakespeare’s language not be com-
pounded in the foreign medium? He is acutely aware of the limits fixed
on each language: when reviewing Voss’s Homer in 1796 (SW, 10: 150), he
places comprehensibility at the head of his translation priorities. There
was also the question of how much his readership could be expected to
take when confronted with as full a Shakespeare text as the times would
stand. There were the needs of the individual plays: the three extracts in
Die Horen demonstrated that each play had its own ‘tone’. For instance, it is
fair to say that Schlegel’s understanding of Petrarch and of the European
baroque style helped him with puns and quibbles, especially in Romeo and
Juliet, but he avoided Love’s Labour’s Lost. Above all, Schlegel was aware of
the built-in inadequacies of such a translation enterprise and knew that
sacrifices would have to be made. This would involve occasional censor-
ings, adjustments and smoothings, accommodations and compensations.
One critic speaks of him casting ‘over the plays a thin veil, which, transpar-
ent though it is, slightly dims the colours and blunts the contours’.78 But he
does usually succeed in line-for-line translation, and he does respect the
essential integrity of Shakespeare’s metaphorical structure. As a poet him-
self more competent and correct than gifted, the best metricist in an age
given to fixed metres, Schlegel nevertheless makes a good showing with the
songs in Shakespeare and is aware of their musical qualities. Latinisms are,
however, an insuperable problem, as ‘consummation’, ‘contumely’, ‘qui-
etus’ demonstrate, to take the most famous of Shakespeare’s monologues.
Yet if we stay with Hamlet, surely the ultimate test of the Shakespeare
translator, we see Schlegel at his best and also perceive his limitations.
Detractors of Schlegel usually point to his worst insult to the text: ‘Seyn oder
Nichtseyn, das ist hier die Frage’ (‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’).
The German infinitive is, however, monosyllabic, and thus unalterable, and
will produce a regular verse in a way that Shakespeare’s is not. Adding an
extra ‘hier’ that is not in the text balances the line. A prose version like
Wieland’s prose could omit that extra syllable, but not a verse translation.
‘O schmölze doch dieß allzu feste Fleisch’ (‘O that this too too solid flesh
would melt’) is another correct line that cannot capture the heavy repeated
stress of the original, while introducing a heavy accentuation of its own,

which is not Shakespeare’s. In fairness, Schlegel has recognized the problem
and has made the only accommodation available to him. Sometimes the
original has to be recast, as in Claudius’s ‘Words without thoughts never to
heaven go’ (Schlegel: ‘Wort ohne Sinn kann nie zum Himmel dringen’):
plural becomes singular (and ‘Sinn’ standing neatly for ‘Gedanken’); the
stress falls on the final two-syllable verb and extends Shakespeare’s ‘go’. It is
a felicitous turning. Often the unusual word in Shakespeare has to be ren-
dered by a more common one in German, as the ‘bodkin’ becomes ‘Nadel’
or ‘bisson rheum’ ‘Thränengüsse’. Or a recurrent word in Shakespeare pro-
duces potential problems. ‘Conscience’ he can translate in all contexts as
‘Gewissen’, but ‘memory’ and ‘remembrance’, words used in several contexts
by different characters in Hamlet, are rendered in the German by four distinct
remembering words that give a different emphasis from the original. When
Schlegel translates Claudius’s ‘O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven’ with
‘O meine That ist faul, sie stinkt zum Himmel,’ we note that German inflec-
tion forces him to opt for ‘deed’, a monosyllable, while ‘stinkt’ makes the
original even more pungent. ‘What if this cursed hand/Were thicker than
itself with brother’s blood?’ becomes ‘Wie? wäre diese Hand/Auch um und
um in Bruderblut getaucht,’ where he sacrifices the ‘cursed’ but makes the
following line even more graphic by having Claudius dip his hand time and
again in his brother’s gore. For Hamlet’s ‘king of shreds and patches’ we
have ‘Ein geflickter Lumpenkönig’: Schlegel can play on the double sense of
the German (‘Lump’ / scoundrel, ‘Lumpen’ / rag) and add an association
different from Shakespeare’s. Schlegel is often prudish, but he leaves noth-
ing to the imagination when he renders the royal couple’s ‘honeying, and
making love/Over the nasty stye’ as ‘buhlend und sich paarend über dem
garst’gen Nest’. Yet these examples cannot blind us to the fact that there is
nevertheless a homogeneity in Schlegel’s Shakespeare, a levelling of lexis, a
regularity, an easing of obscurities alien to the original. By the same token,
it is fair to say that it is a text that makes Shakespeare more accessible to the
linguistic experience of modern German audiences or readers than is the
case with their Anglo-Saxon counterparts and the original.
The Vienna Lectures on Dramatic Art and

Literature (1808)
If Schlegel is known outside Germany, it is because of these Lectures and
their Europe-wide reception. The German original first appeared between
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
stock-in-trade of eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception – all this would

melt away before the insight that Shakespeare was totally different from
the Greeks and that any attempt to assimilate him to them was illusory. But
it was not merely a question of confronting Greeks and Elizabethans, how-
ever revealing that might be. There were other national traditions of drama
that had got in the way of our appreciation of either. And so, set between
ancient drama and that of the Romantic moderns, Schlegel devotes eight
lectures to the systematic demolition of French classical drama and dem-
onstrates with merciless insistence that it lacks the very ‘organic’ qualities
that are then expounded in the lectures following. Thus, the overall pat-
tern of the Lectures emerges: Greek drama is autochthonous, national
(Athenian), self-sufficient, inimitable, but it, too, is subject to patterns of
rise and fall. Roman, Italian and French drama falls largely into the cat-
egory of imitation. This leaves Shakespeare and Calderón to exemplify the
Romantic drama, something essentially different from the Ancients but
with its own equally valid congruities and sets of categories. What hitherto
only fusty compendia had treated in isolation, Schlegel brings together,
Shakespeare and Calderón, for instance. For these lectures are also impor-
tant for their remarks about the Spanish dramatist. This is what the term
‘vermittelnde Kritik’, ‘mediating criticism’ (SW, 6: 159) stands for. It links,
bridges, juxtaposes what until now had been divided. While Shakespeare
and Calderón are in many ways irreconcilably different, especially in mat-
ters religious, their association with state and nation is instructive for the
ideological structure underlying the Lectures.
For Schlegel is telling his audience that the theatre is essential for the
creation of a nation, central for a national culture and literature. This
would modify the accepted wisdom, following Homer or Vergil, by which
only the epic could express a nation’s spirit and character. English read-
ers of the Romantic generation, for instance, could infer from Schlegel
that it was Shakespeare whom they should be reading and studying, and
not Milton. German readers, while noting that Schlegel’s final lecture is
devoted to Goethe and Schiller, would learn that the spirit of Shakespeare
(not, of course, his imitation) might yet bring about a German drama that
was truly national and patriotic and historical. Coming but a few years
after Schiller’s death and during Goethe’s active lifetime, here was a chal-
lenge to accepted verities.
The historical context is also vital. The lectures are delivered in 1808
to the haute volée of Viennese society, with princes and countesses jostling
for tickets.83 In political terms, the lectures fall between Austerlitz and
Wagram, two humiliations inflicted on the Austrian Empire by Napoleon.
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
the emphasis on European Christian and medieval culture, on Christian

legend and fable and deeds of chivalry. For German hearers of his Berlin
lectures, Schlegel’s praise of the Nibelungenlied as their national epic would
encapsulate both the ideological and the aesthetic side of his remarks. His
aspirations for a German historical drama along Shakespearean lines had
been preformulated in 1806 in a long programmatic letter to his protégé,
the poet Friedrich von La Motte-Fouqué (SW, 8: 142–53). Readers of his
Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d’Euripide (1807) would be famil-
iar with his views on French drame classique. And those who remembered
Die Horen would note that his remarks on Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet had
hardly changed in the interim.
But it was ‘vermittelnde Kritik’ that now brought together Ancient and
Modern, Classical and Romantic, classified them, contrasted them, and
presented each as equally valid representatives of their own age and cul-
ture. This was something that mere ‘philologische Kritik’ (SW, 6: 166)
(a distinction based on the analogy of ‘mechanical’ versus ‘organic’) could
not do. It would involve huge syntheses and sets of opposites, tempting in
their absoluteness: whole versus mixed, finite versus processual, human
nature here and now versus intimations and intuitions of a future state,
plastic versus picturesque. Another famous passage from the 25th Lecture,
while it might not apply in all its details to the realities of Shakespeare, is
seductively formulaic:
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)
Schlegel then characterizes Ancient drama in terms of sculpture, of

ordered and matching groupings; Romantic he sees in terms of painting,
with a reference beyond itself into mysteries not yet formulated.
But how could one apply this to Shakespeare? One would need to supply
this general definition and its elegant modulations with a historical con-
text. This Schlegel does by declaring that only English and Spanish drama
represent the true national and popular tradition of theatre. Turning to
Shakespeare, he identifies his real place in time as an age where poetry,
learning, chivalry, an aristocratic and courtly culture were fused, where
political life was lived to the full but where art, too, found an adequate
outlet. Like Raphael (a common Romantic bracketing), living in a poetic
age, Shakespeare would use to his advantage all the progressive elements
of his time. As a playwright reacting to his times, he knew the rules and
conventions, but followed his own imagination and allowed himself to
be guided solely by it. He had the instinctive sense of rightness that only
genius imparts and in one respect had nothing to learn, but he also knew
that art can be learned through practice and experience.
With this, the stage is set for an account of Shakespeare himself. It is
fair to say that Schlegel’s factual discussion hardly takes us beyond the
conventions established by Augustan criticism: learning, anachronisms,
knowledge of humanity, character, mixtures of styles and verse forms, ver-
sification, chronology. But unlike the Augustans, his tone is approving, not
grudging. Much of Augustan disapproval (like Johnson’s) had of course
been elicited by individual loci: Schlegel hardly discusses the text. In the
discussion of the individual plays, his own preferences emerge.
Thus, the order in which he treats the plays is in itself revealing. He is
aware of the problems of chronology, but chooses to proceed by genres
rather than by ‘periods’. Unlike Friedrich Schlegel or Tieck or Coleridge,
he is not really interested in periodizations, ‘early’, ‘middle’ or ‘late’, involv-
ing speculations as they do. At most, he discusses the so-called suppositious
plays and exercises much greater caution than his friend Ludwig Tieck.
He has no problems with attributing Titus Andronicus to Shakespeare, for
instance, and is able to accommodate it in his general categories of genius
and experience. In dealing first with the Comedies, Schlegel knows that
categorizations are always perilous, that the borders between the comic
and the tragic in Shakespeare are always fluid. Yet the Comedies cohere as
a group in that they have novellas as their basis; they are rooted in domes-
tic or family life but involve romantic love stories; they are based on reality
but soon veer off into the wondrous or the high-flown. Romeo and Juliet and
Othello, although tragedies, also follow this pattern. We see here another
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
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
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
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reginald Foakes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge changed fundamentally the ways in which

Shakespeare came to be understood in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, and his influence has been pervasive. Rejecting eighteenth-century
habits of judging plays by external rules and in terms of beauties or defects,
he sought, by an act of sympathetic imagination, to enter into the spirit
of each play he dealt with, to reveal its inner organizing principle, and to
show how Shakespeare exercised artistry and judgement. Dismayed by the
emphasis on spectacle in the theatres of his age he developed a mode of
criticism on the basis of close analysis of the text and its imagery, and saw
the plays as poetic dramas, in which a single line or a striking image might
be of vital importance in contributing to the effect of the whole. He rede-
fined the critical vocabulary he inherited from the eighteenth century, and
introduced new terms, most notably in his application of what he called
practical criticism and in his interest in psychology. His major writings on
Shakespeare were delivered in the form of lectures, for which no systematic
records remain, and which he never published, but his ideas can be recov-
ered substantially from his own notes together with newspaper reports and
notes taken at the lectures by friends and admirers.
In analyses of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism little attention is given as a
rule to his own connections with the stage, and even a commentator who does
notice their importance relegates his remarks to an appendix (Badawi, 198–
203, but see also Jackson).1 The present essay seeks to show that Coleridge’s
own efforts in writing plays for Drury Lane and his involvement with the
stage prompted his incisive investigation of the nature of scenic and dra-
matic illusion which in turn had a vital influence on the development of his
commentaries on Shakespeare. It is divided into seven sections, as follows:
1. On Coleridge’s dismay at the way Shakespeare’s plays were being staged

at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, and how this led to his important
Samuel Taylor Coleridge 129
redefinition of the concept of dramatic illusion, which is basic to his

analysis of Shakespeare’s works.
2. Coleridge’s criticism in its relation to the major eighteenth-century
critics.
3. On Coleridge’s knowledge of German and the impact in particular of
A. W. Schlegel’s writings.
4. Coleridge’s interest in psychology and his understanding of character.
5. The impact of politics on Coleridge’s criticism, and in particular the
importance of his reaction to Napoleon.
6. An examination of Coleridge’s critical method.
7. Coleridge’s development as a critic of Shakespeare.
The Stage and Dramatic Illusion
Coleridge’s career as a literary critic effectively began when he accepted

an invitation, probably through the agency of his old friend Humphry
Davy, to give a course of lectures at the Royal Institution in 1808. He had
spent two years in Malta, returned in August 1806, ‘shirtless and almost
penniless’ (CL II. 1077), and was looking for a way to earn money. After
the Royal Institution was founded in 1799, other Institutions sprang up
in London, forming educational and cultural centres for middle-class
people, especially non-conformists in religion who were denied entrance
to the universities at Oxford and Cambridge (Manning, 232–7). These
institutions provided libraries and reading rooms, and were intended,
according to a pocket guide to London published in 1820, to promote
‘the general diffusion of science and literature by means of lectures and
experiments’ (LL I. 8 and n.). The fame of Davy ensured that the Royal
remained the most distinguished, and by 1806 three courses of lectures
related to literature were offered there, one on ‘English Literature’ by
the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, an antiquarian and bibliographer; one
on ‘Dramatic Poetry’ by the Rev. William Crowe, known for his descrip-
tive poem ‘Lewesdon Hill’ published in 1787; and one on ‘Belles Lettres’
by the Rev John Hewlett, who published sermons and biblical commen-
taries. Coleridge had been invited by Davy to lecture there in 1806 and
1807, but declined because of ill-health and the persuasion of Wordsworth
and Robert Southey. When Coleridge finally did agree in 1808 to pres-
ent a course on ‘The Principles of Poetry’, beginning with ‘the genius &
writings of Shakespere’, William Crowe reverted to his 1804 topic, ‘Civil
Architecture’.
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
theatres permitted to stage plays. During Coleridge’s youth, however, some

radical changes were taking place. As the population of London grew rap-
idly a number of other theatres were established in order to stage shows,
spectacles, burlettas consisting of recitative and songs with musical accom-
paniment, and other forms of entertainment. The two patent theatres
responded in two ways. In the first place, each was enlarged: Drury Lane
was demolished in 1791 and replaced by a much larger theatre seating
3600, the largest in Europe (Survey of London, 52), while Covent Garden was
refurbished in 1792 with an audience capacity increased from 2170 to more
than 3000. In the second place, these theatres took advantage of new tech-
nology to offer much more in the way of spectacle, scenery and lighting
effects. The result was a radical reconfiguration of the typical Georgian
theatre. Until well on in the eighteenth century the major playhouses
could be described as ‘a form [of theatre] with a deep forestage, flanked by
entrance doors in the proscenium sides, and standing in front of an “inner”
stage which was intended primarily as a scenic area, the acting area being
confined to the forestage’ (Southern, 119). This arrangement can be seen
in the well-known engraving of a riot that took place in Covent Garden the-
atre in 1763 during a performance of the opera Artaxerxes by Thomas Arne,
about a Persian emperor of the 4th century BCE (Figure 4.1). The actors
are shown on the forestage, two of them in exotic costumes. The prosce-
nium arch is marked by incongruous cut-out female figures on either side.
Behind it the wings representing columns and the backdrop at the rear
FIGURE 4.1 Stage and auditorium during the riots of 1763

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
FIGURE 4.2 Auditorium in 1813

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.
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
thought of the theatre in Shakespeare’s age as having a bare stage: ‘The

Theatre itself had no artificial, extraneous inducements – few scenes, little
music, & all that was to excite the sense in a high degree was wanting’
(LL I. 228). Shakespeare, Coleridge argued, appealed to the imagina-
tion, not the senses. The developments in stage technology during this
period led to ever more ambitious attempts to achieve pictorial realism,
not only in the rocks, caves and dungeons of Gothic drama, but also in
the settings for historical plays such as Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry
VIII in 1811–12 at Drury Lane, for which John Philip Kemble employed
the antiquarian scene-painter William Capon to create what seemed at
the time authentic reproductions of early sixteenth-century palaces and
streets. In a mock debate between himself as plaintiff and a ‘spokesman
of the crowd’, Coleridge made the defendant praise the performers on
the stage for their strength and ability to ‘take such prodigious leaps!!’ He
goes on ‘And what is done on the stage is more striking even than what is
acted. I once remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear
a word of the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being
set fire to at the same time, and smelt by the spectators, the naturalness
of the scene is quite astonishing!’ (BL II. 189). Things done on stage, ‘pro-
digious leaps’, naturalistic effects, like the deafening explosion, summed
up for Coleridge what he thought most appealed to the audiences at the
theatres of his age.
In his course of lectures in 1808 he led into his discussion of Shakespeare
in Lecture 3 by considering some sonnets and especially Venus and Adonis.
Most recent commentators on Shakespeare, such as Dr Johnson, had little
or nothing to say about his early poems, and Coleridge was innovatory
in beginning by drawing attention away from the drama and what was
done on the stages at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and emphasizing
instead Shakespeare’s powers of mind and imagination. His fourth lec-
ture was devoted to the topic of stage illusion, which he rightly thought
very important, not least because of ‘practical Errors & false criticisms’
(LL I. 135). Dr Johnson, as Coleridge observed, had famously dismissed
the matter in the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765) by assert-
ing that ‘the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the
first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are
only players’ (SCH 5. 70). But this pronouncement was made before the
enormous changes that radically affected the theatres in the decades after
his Preface appeared in 1765. His reference to ‘spectators’ suggests that
he was thinking in fact of scenic illusion, as later Charles Lamb did in his
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
eighteenth-century critics like Dr Johnson, who thought of Shakespeare

as ‘the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mir-
rour of manners and of life’ (SCH 5. 57). His experience of the theatre
led Coleridge to dismiss this idea of Shakespeare as mirroring or copying
life, and to associate him above all with the imagination. This is why he
argued, according to the report by John Payne Collier of Lecture 3 in the
1811–12 series, as follows:
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)
and conceiving it as an activity of the mind or imagination on the part of

the reader or audience.
Although Coleridge deplored the scenic displays and the stimulation of
the senses at the playhouses, he nonetheless understood the power of the
shifting scenes. He recognized that an adult may retain something of a
child’s sensibility, so that through the strength of what he called ‘inward
illusion’ he might make up imaginatively for the deficiencies of the stage. In
the case of an adult, however, this ‘sort of negative Belief’ (LL I. 135) must
be assisted by the will. The experience of watching or reading a play he
contrasted with the experience of dreaming, when ‘Images and Thoughts
possess a power in and of themselves’ (CL IV. 641):
In sleep we pass at once by a sudden collapse into this suspension of Will

and the Comparative power: whereas in an interesting Play, read or rep-
resented, we are brought to this point, as far as it is requisite or desirable
gradually, by the Art of the Poet and the Actors, and with the consent
and Aidance of our own will. We chuse to be deceived. (LL II. 266)
In this phrase, ‘We chuse to be deceived’, Coleridge added the necessary

qualification that helps to explain how dramatic illusion works in relation
to Shakespeare’s plays, both as they are played on the stage and as read in
the study. Whatever distracts or forces itself on the attention of theatrego-
ers so as to prevent the mind from supporting a ‘willing Illusion’ is a defect.
Implicitly Coleridge still has in mind the superiority of reading over per-
formance in relation to Shakespeare, in whose plays (the remarks quoted
were designed as an introduction to a lecture on The Tempest), the charac-
ters, unity of interest, appropriateness of style, together with the ‘charm
of language and sentiment’ all contribute to and support the dramatic
illusion.
The idea that we may through an act of will voluntarily yield to a tem-
porary illusion while knowing we can snap out of it at any moment was
given its most brilliant formulation in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria
(1817), where Coleridge was writing with specific reference to the plan he
and Wordsworth devised for Lyrical Ballads (1798), but there too he was
thinking of Shakespeare when he wrote of their aim ‘as to transfer from
our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbe-
lief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (BL II. 6). The phrase
‘shadows of imagination’ echoes the words of Theseus in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, commenting on the performance of the actors in the play
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.
Coleridge and Eighteenth-century Criticism
If it was important for Coleridge to establish his theory of dramatic illu-

sion in relation to the inadequacies of the treatment of Shakespeare in
the theatres of his day, he felt it was also necessary to distance himself
from the eighteenth-century critics who still had great influence, not least
because the introductions to the editions by Nicholas Rowe (1709, 1714),
Alexander Pope (1725), William Warburton (1747), Lewis Theobald (1733),
Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743–44) and Dr Samuel Johnson (1765) continued
to be treated as seminal and were reprinted in later major editions, such as
the edition by Isaac Reed in 21 volumes, the so-called 1803 Variorum, used
by Coleridge in his second course of lectures in 1811–12. It is not easy now
to realize how influential these editors were as establishers of critical posi-
tions. Critical writings of the period that we now see as innovative, such as
Maurice Morgann’s An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) or
Walter Whiter’s A Specimen of a Commentary on Shakespeare (1794), attracted
little attention when published and were not noticed by Coleridge (or
Hazlitt or Keats). Coleridge could fairly assume that most of his audience
at the Royal Institution in 1808, or at the London Philosophical Society’s
meetings in 1811–12, were comfortable with a neoclassical perspective on
Shakespeare, judging the plays by the unities and rules of drama and call-
ing attention to beauties and defects. It was a mode of criticism that received
its best and most influential formulation in the Preface by Dr Johnson to
his edition of 1765.
Johnson’s account of Shakespeare as a dramatist is haunted by the ideal
of rules established ‘by the ancients’ in Greece and Rome. Shakespeare’s
plays ‘are divided between serious and ludicrous characters’, in a ‘practice
contrary to the rules of criticism’ (SCH 5. 61). He observes that the unities
were either not known or not observed by Shakespeare, but such ‘violations
of the rules’ suit Shakespeare’s genius, and ‘the greatest graces of a play,
are to copy nature and instruct life’ (SCH 5. 71–2). Johnson thus found ways
to excuse Shakespeare’s ignorance or inattention to the rules, his failure
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
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
already in his poems Shakespeare ‘previously to his Drama – gave proof of

a most profound, energetic, & philosophical mind’ (LL I. 82), so claiming a
new and elevated status for him from the beginning of his career.
Coleridge was anxious to counter another assumption that was taken
for granted in much earlier criticism of Shakespeare, namely that he was
a ‘a sort of Lusus Naturae, a delightful monster – wild indeed, without
taste or Judgement . . . In nine places out of ten in which I find his awful
name mentioned, it is with some epithet of wild, irregular, pure child
of nature, &c &c &c –’ (LL I. 79). This comment is from his notes for
Lecture 4 in his first series in 1808, and Coleridge often returned to this
topic in later series. Shakespeare was commonly assumed to be ‘a child of
nature’, composing his plays by instinct or intuition, uneducated, growing
up in Stratford-upon-Avon, where, as David Garrick put it in his Ode upon
Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare (1769), ‘Nature led
him by the hand, / Instructed him in all she knew’ (SCH 5. 345). Even
Johnson, who commented on Shakespeare’s reading, lent authority to this
image of Shakespeare by describing him as writing in a country ‘unen-
lightened by learning’, for a public audience that was ‘gross and dark’,
and comparing Shakespeare’s plays to a wild forest of trees ‘interspersed
sometimes with weeds and brambles’ (SCH 5. 74). Johnson meant to praise
Shakespeare as ‘gratifying the mind with endless diversity’, but at the same
time he confirmed an idea of the dramatist as writing works ‘clouded by
incrustations, debased by impurities’ (SCH 5. 76).
It was of vital concern to Coleridge to reject such accounts of Shakespeare
because he sought to demonstrate the poet’s artistry from the very begin-
ning of his career. Hence he emphasized Shakespeare’s judgement in con-
structing the plays, ‘The judgement with which Shakespear always in his
first scenes prepares, & yet how naturally and & with what a concealment of
art, for the Catastrophe – how he presents the germ of all the after events’
(LL I. 559). Where Johnson saw a kind of jungle, Coleridge likened a play
to a tree, stressing the distinctive form each tree possesses. He may well
have had Johnson’s image in mind when seeking to show in 1811 how all
the parts of a play, in this case The Tempest, contribute to an overall unity,
illustrating his argument by ‘referring to the growth of Trees, which from
the peculiar circumstances of soil air or position differed in shape even
from trees of the same kind but every man was able to decide at first sight
which was an ash or a poplar’ (LL I. 358). In 1818 he claimed, that it ‘has
been and it still remains my Object to prove that at all points from the most
important to the most minute, the Judgement of Shakespear is commensu-
rate with his Genius’ (LL II. 263). Coleridge’s insistence on Shakespeare’s
conscious artistry rejects formulations such as Johnson’s, that Shakespeare’s

‘drama is the mirrour of life’ (SCH 5. 59–60), a mere reflection, and relates
to his conception of art as an imitation not a copy, marked by difference
from nature, not sameness.
These general principles inform Coleridge’s consideration of Shakes-
peare’s poems and plays. He substituted for the image of Shakespeare as
taught by nature in a country emerging from an age of barbarism an idea
of ‘those truly heroic times in body & in soul the days of Elizabeth’ (LL I.
354), an age that could nurture in Shakespeare a profoundly philosophic
mind. Coleridge also rejected the tradition of treating Shakespeare’s plays
in parts rather than as wholes. Johnson was the best of a series of edi-
tors and critics who regarded Shakespeare’s plays in terms of beauties and
faults, parts rather than as wholes, and summed up his view by saying,
‘He has scenes of undoubted and perpetual excellence, but perhaps not
one play, which, if it were now exhibited as the work of a contemporary
writer, would be heard to the conclusion’ (SCH 5. 82). Coleridge changed
the course of criticism by his emphasis on the artistry of each play con-
sidered as a whole. Hence his concern from the beginning with dramatic
illusion and the role of the imagination in enabling us to appreciate the
unity of Shakespeare’s plays, and hence, too, the need he felt to attack
the basic ideas of preceding critics, and his anxiety to establish general
criteria and new definitions of critical terms in commencing his lectures
on Shakespeare’s poems and plays.
Coleridge, Germany and Schlegel
In September 1798, a few days before Lyrical Ballads was published,

Coleridge, with his friend John Chester, a young farmer who aimed to
study agriculture, set off with William and Dorothy Wordsworth to spend
three months in Germany. The Wordsworths soon removed to Goslar to be
on their own, and Coleridge in fact spent ten months partly in Ratzeburg
and partly in Göttingen. He had begun to study German in 1796 (CL I.
209), and he now learned to speak German, studied with German pro-
fessors and read voraciously, with a special enthusiasm for the plays and
dramatic criticism of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and did not set off on his
return journey to England until June 24, 1799. He had attended lectures on
‘Physiology, Anatomy, & Natural History’ (CL I. 518–19), collected materi-
als for a life of Lessing and had in mind writing a major work on metaphys-
ics. He returned to England with an enthusiasm for German philosophy
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
Genius, that gives us the greatest Pleasure, sometimes stands in Need of

our Indulgence. Whenever this happens with regard to Shakespeare, I would
willingly impute it to a Vice of his Times’ (SCH 2. 477). By sharpening his
definition of these terms Coleridge was demonstrating that Shakespeare’s
artistry combined both genius and judgement. In considering Venus and
Adonis in Lecture 3 he began by discussing the first stanza in order to
explain how Shakespeare ‘in six simple lines puts the reader in possession
of the whole argument of the Poem’ (LL I. 66). Here, as frequently later on,
his effort was to show how the beginnings of Shakespeare’s works contain
the germ of the whole, and to demonstrate that by his imagination he was
able to combine ‘many circumstances into one moment of thought’ so as to
produce artistic unity (LL I. 68).
Almost no records remain of the ten or more lectures on Shakespeare’s
plays Coleridge went on to deliver in 1808, but substantial accounts in
notes taken at the lectures by J. Tomalin and John Payne Collier as well as
some of Coleridge’s own preparations and newspaper reports survive of
ten lectures in the similar series on ‘Shakespear and Milton in Illustration
of the Principles of Poetry’ he gave at the London Philosophical Society
in 1811–12. As in 1808, he began by defining what he meant by terms like
poetry and taste before proceeding in Lecture 4 to a close analysis of Venus
and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Critics had neglected the early narrative
poems, which for Coleridge established the basic premise of his criticism,
namely, that Shakespeare was above all a great poet, and his plays invited
attention primarily to their language. The fuller records of 1811 provide
a better explanation of Coleridge’s claim that the poems reveal ‘the great
Instinct which impelled the Poet to the Drama’, so that ‘His Venus and
Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representa-
tion of those Characters by the most consummate Actors. You seem to be
told nothing; but to see & hear every thing’ (LL I. 242). The poems also
exemplified ‘That gift of true Imagination, that capability of reducing a
multitude into unity of effect’ (LL I. 249). In developing further the ideas
sketched in the 1808 lectures, Coleridge impressed Henry Crabb Robinson
and a German friend he took to hear Lecture 4, who was ‘delighted to find
the logic & rhetoric of his Country delivered in a foreign language. There
is no doubt that Coleridge’s mind is much more German than English’ (LL
I. 259).
Coleridge digressed a good deal in these lectures from Shakespeare’s
plays, and by Lecture 9 had discussed in any depth only three plays, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. Part of the problem was,
as one reviewer, James Amphlett, noted, that his aim, to illustrate general
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.
In his early courses Coleridge had rejected the application of external

rules to drama, and the concern of earlier critics with the unities of time,
place and action. He argued in Lecture 3 of the 1811–12 series that the
unities were ‘a mere effect of accident in the Greek drama’ (LL I. 226,
254), and Schlegel, who described Shakespeare’s plays as neither tragedies
nor comedies but romantic dramas (Lecture 25, 110) helped him to push
his ideas further. Coleridge went on in 1812 to contend that if the works
of Sophocles are ‘in the strict sense of the word’ tragedies, and the works
of Aristophanes comedies, then Shakespeare’s plays require a new word;
they are in the ancient sense neither Tragedies nor Comedies, nor both
in one—but a different genus, diverse in kind, not merely different in
Degree—romantic Dramas or dramatic Romances’ (LL I. 466), plays that
appeal to the imagination rather than the senses. A new kind of drama
required a new mode of criticism, and was not to be judged by old criteria.
He did not in fact develop this argument, but chose rather in lecturing to
divide Shakespeare’s plays into four classes, comedies, histories, tragedies
and romances. By 1818 Coleridge could refer casually to The Tempest as a
romance (LL II. 268), and he thus gave currency to a term that has been of
great importance in evaluating Shakespeare’s late plays.
Coleridge gave further courses of lectures on drama and Shakespeare in
London in 1812 and 1813, and in Bristol also in 1813. For these he seems
to have taken the volumes of Schlegel’s lectures into the lecture-room
(LL I. 419–20) and carried on a kind of dialogue with the latter’s ideas,
translating, paraphrasing and criticizing. The great German critic’s work
was virtually unknown in Britain at the time and was not translated until
1815. By the time he gave his series of lectures in Bristol, Coleridge was
compressing most of the general and historical material borrowed from
Schlegel into his opening lecture and commenting in detail on a range
of plays in subsequent lectures. His basic aim in his lectures remained the
same, but he seems to have realized that he did not need to spend so much
time preparing his audience for novelty in his approach. It was enough to
repudiate Dr Johnson’s image of Shakespeare’s plays as irregular, a wild
forest interspersed with weeds and brambles, and emphasize instead the
idea of organic form, acknowledging his debt to ‘a Continental Critic’:
‘The organic form . . . is innate, it shapes as it developes itself from within,
and the fullness of its development is one & the same with the perfection of
its outward Form’ (LL I. 495). His concern to bring home to his audiences
this idea of organic unity reinforced the emphasis he had laid consistently
since his first course in 1808 on ‘the judgment with which Shakespear in
his first scenes prepares, & yet how naturally & with what a concealment of
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.
Psychology and Character Criticism
Coleridge’s concern to demonstrate the organic unity of the plays he

commented on, like his account of dramatic illusion and insistence on
Shakespeare as imitator rather than copyist in the creation of characters,
constituted a new mode of criticism. He also advanced the analysis of char-
acters significantly. He knew the essays by Thomas Whately on the char-
acters of Richard III and Macbeth (published posthumously in 1775), and
William Richardson’s account of Macbeth, Hamlet, Jaques and Imogen
(1774). He may also have read the latter’s two further volumes on Richard
III, Lear, Timon, Falstaff and female characters (1784, 1789). Whately
aimed to show Shakespeare’s judgement in the way these characters are
‘preserved entire and distinct’, though he also finds much ‘bad composi-
tion’ and blemishes in the plays. Richardson provided Coleridge with the
image of Shakespeare as ‘the Proteus of the drama; he changes himself into
every character, and enters easily into every condition of human nature’
(LL I. 69). Coleridge subtly changes the image by insisting that we remain
aware of Shakespeare at the same time as he becomes ‘by power of imagi-

nation’ another, like Proteus, ‘yet still the God felt to be there.’ Indeed,
Coleridge coined the term ‘Shakespearianized’ (not in the OED) in 1804
to suggest ‘The Proteus essence that could assume the very form, but yet
known & felt not to be the Thing by that difference of the Substance which
made every atom of the Form another thing – that likeness not identity’
(CN II. 2274). Likeness, not identity, imitation, not copy. These important
distinctions supported his claim that Shakespeare’s characters were drawn
rather from meditation than observation: ‘whatever forms they assumed,
they were still Shakespeare, or the creatures of his meditation’ (LL I. 289),
not copied as by someone ‘going about the world with his Pocket book, not-
ing down what he has heard & observed’ (LL I. 306).
The late eighteenth-century critics seem, in accordance with neoclassical
theories, to have had two main concerns in their approach to Shakespeare’s
characters: first, that they should be ‘consistent – they should be “preserved,”
“sustained,” or maintained as a coherent whole’ (Vickers SS 12), and second,
that they should ‘fulfil some moral purpose’. Coleridge inherited a vocabu-
lary from his predecessors, but modified or changed terms and meanings
in relation to the idea of imaginative coherence. In his lectures he speaks
as a rule not of consistency, but rather of plays or characters being ‘in keep-
ing’, a term he borrowed from discussions of painting in art, and meaning
the maintenance of harmony in composition, or of a proper relationship
between ‘the representations of nearer and more distant objects in a pic-
ture’ (OED, ‘keeping’, 9a; LL I. 86, 303). As to moral purpose, Coleridge
was aware of Dr Johnson’s complaint that Shakespeare sacrificed ‘virtue
to convenience, and is so much more careful to please than to instruct,
that he seems to write without any moral purpose’ (SCH 5. 65), and he no
doubt knew William Richardson’s claims in response that Shakespeare’s
characters could serve to illustrate the moral principles of human conduct.
Coleridge dealt with this matter by claiming that Shakespeare’s plays might
represent vice, but always within a moral context, hence his superiority to
Beaumont and Fletcher: ‘The grossest passages of Shakespear were purity
to theirs,’ for Shakespeare kept ‘at all times the high road of life; with him
there were no innocent adulteries, he never rendered that amiable which
religion and reason taught us to detest; he never clothed vice in the garb of
virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher’ (LL I. 522, 520).
These two issues came into especial focus in relation to the character of
Hamlet. George Steevens was one of a number of critics who was troubled
by ‘the glaring inconsistencies in the character of the hero’ (Vickers SS 13).
Others, however, explained the oppositions and contradictions in Hamlet
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
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
of ferocity, or a mark of the want of human feeling, to this monster of his

creation’, and William Richardson described her as ‘a character invariably
savage’, who moves ‘without reluctance to the contrivance of the blackest
crimes’ (LL I. 532). Coleridge saw her very differently, as ‘a woman of a
visionary and day-dreaming turn of mind: her eye fi xed on the shadows of
her solitary ambition’, whose constant effort was ‘to bully conscience.’ He
goes on,
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. . . .
Her courage Coleridge saw as an aspect of day-dreaming, the boldness of

words not actions, marked in her promise to chastise her husband with the
valour of her tongue (LL II. 308). In the fragmentary notes and comments
that survive Coleridge opened up a new way of interpreting the characters
in this play.
His accounts of a number of characters in other favourite plays show a
similar probing of motives and psychology. In commenting on Othello he
linked Iago, Richard III and Falstaff as characters who are confident of
their superiority of intellect, and ‘reverse the order of things’ by subordi-
nating feelings and morality to intellect, leading to contempt for whatever
did not display intellectual power (LL I. 575). In Iago Shakespeare came
near to presenting as coexisting in the same individual what is admirable
in the mind with what is most detestable in the heart, ‘without any appar-
ent connection, or any modification of the one by the other’ (LL II. 328).
Courage, intellect and strength of character Coleridge regarded as forms
of power, and he recognized that we cannot help admiring power without
any reference to a moral aim. Hence our complex involvement with Iago’s
‘passionless character, all will in intellect’ as he deludes Roderigo and goes
on to soliloquize about duping Cassio and Othello at the end of Act 1, dis-
playing ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity’ (LL II. 315) – a phrase
that continues to echo in interpretations of this play (Honigmann, 33–5).
Coleridge commented at length in several lectures on Romeo and Juliet.
He wrote especially vividly on the Nurse as possessing ‘all the garrulity
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).
Coleridge, Shakespeare and Politics
Coleridge’s interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays were made during a

period when Napoleon threatened to conquer Europe and when England
seemed in danger from his power. From the end of 1799 Coleridge had
contributed regularly essays for the Morning Post, in which he frequently
updated his assessment of Napoleon, who at first ‘had the splendour of a
hero in romance’ (EOT I. 57) and appeared, with George Washington, to
be a military genius. The latter, however had moral greatness, whereas by
becoming ‘First Consul’ in 1802, Napoleon established a link with ancient
Roman emperors, and, like them, encouraged great public works while
abolishing political freedom and creating a new despotism. As Napoleon’s
conquests grew so Coleridge accused him of sacrificing more human blood
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
one, Lecture 5 of the 1818–19 series, Coleridge had commented on Iago,

describing him as ‘A being next to Devil – only not quite Devil’ (LL II.
315), but did not connect him with Napoleon. He saw Edmund and now
Napoleon as complex tragic figures, not merely evil.
Coleridge liked to distinguish between men of ‘commanding genius’,
or a will to power that expresses itself in action, and those who possess
‘absolute genius’, the poet or philosopher who can ‘rest content between
thought and reality’ (BL I. 30–3). The former ‘come forth as the shaping
spirit of Ruin’ in times of tumult, while the latter, exemplified in Chaucer
and Shakespeare, have a manly cheerfulness (Chaucer) or an ‘evenness
and sweetness of temper’ (Shakespeare). Coleridge’s critique of Napoleon
helped him to formulate his accounts of Macbeth and Edmund, and also
affected his own political views as well as his conception of Shakespeare’s
politics. Like Wordsworth and many others, Coleridge was initially an
ardent supporter of the French Revolution, but with the rise of Napoleon
his views changed, as in his journalism he was concerned with the defence
of his threatened country. Later on William Hazlitt never tired of attacking
Coleridge for what he regarded as his apostasy in his political views and
rejection of his early radicalism, and by 1811, was making insulting com-
ments about his Shakespeare lectures. Hazlitt said then, as reported by John
Payne Collier, that Coleridge was incompetent to lecture on Shakespeare
and ‘was not well read in him’ (LL I. 233), when in fact Coleridge referred
to, cited or commented on all the plays in his lectures and published
writings.
Hazlitt was six years younger than Coleridge, came to maturity after the
French Revolution and could maintain a radicalism of a different kind in
relation to repressive government in England. In his lectures from 1808
onwards Coleridge represented England differently as a bastion of liberty
holding out alone against the threat of Napoleon’s armies. In 1817 Hazlitt
published his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, and the following year, when
Coleridge was lecturing at the London Philosophical Society’s premises,
Hazlitt lectured on Shakespeare at the Surrey Institution, where Coleridge
had given a course in 1812–13. Hazlitt wrote and lectured from a con-
scious political perspective as a radical who argued in his comments on
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus that ‘The language of poetry naturally falls in
with the language of power’, that the principle of poetry is anti-democratic
and ‘puts the individual for the species, the one above the infinite many,
might before right’ (Hazlitt IV. 214–15). It is hardly surprising, then, that
Hazlitt wilfully misunderstood Coleridge’s position when he censured the
latter’s lectures on Shakespeare. Responding to the Tory William Gifford’s
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.
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
these characters as having the ‘dawnings of understanding without reason

or the moral sense’, so that his behaviour is marked ‘by the appearance
of vice’. In Coleridge’s reading of Shakespeare politics and morality are
closely linked: ‘For it is in the primacy of the moral being only that man is
truly human’ (LL II. 270), as he illustrates especially in his incisive account
of this play.
Coleridge’s Critical Method
In his Shakespeare criticism Coleridge used the term ‘method’ both in

relation to education and understanding, and in explaining his own mode
of reasoning. His discussion ‘is confined to Method as employed in the
formation of the understanding and in the constructions of science and
literature’ (Friend I. 449), and he associates method with an educated and
well-disciplined mind, ‘which has become accustomed to contemplate not
things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the rela-
tions of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or
to the state and apprehension of the hearers’ (Friend I. 451). In such a
mind thought connects and imagination combines all things into one. The
words ‘observers’ and ‘hearers’ might relate to the theatre, and Coleridge’s
essay on the principles of method in The Friend (1818) is in fact largely
devoted to demonstrating the supreme excellence of the ‘myriad-minded
Bard’ Shakespeare (Friend I. 453; compare BL II. 19). In the conclusion of
the essay Coleridge praises Shakespeare’s ability to create a huge variety of
characters; in his plays, ‘we find individuality every where, mere portrait
nowhere.’ He then ends by describing what he means by method in the
plays:
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
reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’ (BL II. 15–17). It also

connects Shakespeare with philosophers and scientists, as Coleridge finds
method also in the elements of Euclid and the discourses of Plato. From his
first lectures on Shakespeare Coleridge pointed to the dramatist’s power
and energy of thought, and found in his early poems ‘proof of a most pro-
found, energetic & philosophical mind, without which he might have been
a very delightful Poet, but not the great dramatic Poet’ (LL I. 82). His con-
cept of method in Shakespeare reinforced his elevation of the bard to the
status of an absolute genius.
Coleridge liked to distinguish genius from talent, defining genius ‘as
originality in intellectual construction: the moral accompaniment, and
actuating principle of which consists perhaps, in the carrying on of the
freshness and feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood’ (Friend I.
419). He also stressed what he saw as ‘the creative, and self-sufficing power
of absolute Genius’ in those like Shakespeare who ‘rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium [i.e. a space between
two worlds; Coleridge’s coinage] of which their own living spirit supplies
the substance, and their imagination the ever-varying form’ (BL II. 31–2).
Hence, Coleridge’s insistence that Shakespeare’s characters are drawn from
his imagination, and always ‘the consciousness of the Poet’s Mind must be
diffused over that of the Reader or Spectator’ (LL I. 86). Shakespeare’s
method thus establishes the unity and harmony of his plays, and illustrates
why he was especially drawn, according to Coleridge, to the great tragic
villains.
He said that power is an object of desire and admiration for us all, and
‘without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing its
being’; but power goes with ambition, and ‘the co-existence of great intel-
lectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented without
exciting the strongest interest.’ In such a combination we can ‘contem-
plate the intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence,
than in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the
will of an infinitely superior being’. Hence the ‘sacred charm’ of charac-
ters like Richard III, Iago and Edmund, who are all ‘cast in the mould of
Shakespeare’s gigantic intellect’ (BL II. 216–17).
Shakespeare delighted in portraying characters of pre-eminent intellec-
tual powers, but in whom the ‘moral faculties are wanting,’ at the same time
that he taught the ‘superiority of moral greatness’ (CRD I. 309). If examples
of grossness and offences against decency could be found in Shakespeare’s
plays, they were not ‘aimed at the moral feeling, nor designed to corrupt’.
Coleridge compared Shakespeare’s plays with the drama of his own time,
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
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
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
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.
Coleridge’s Development as a Critic of Shakespeare
Although Coleridge never published his lectures, the records of them,

incomplete or fragmentary as they are, show how his thinking changed
and developed. In the first two courses he was anxious to illustrate the
principles of poetry as a way of establishing his own mode of criticism.
Coleridge was also keen to establish Shakespeare as a political hero, an
absolute genius providing England with a philosophical and moral supe-
riority over Napoleon, the commanding genius who had military and
political domination over Europe. In 1812 Napoleon was forced to retreat
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
on the ‘capability of reducing a multitude into unity of effect’, and strove to

establish an idea of great poetry as combining ‘a more than usual State of
Emotion with more than usual Order’ (compare BL II. 17), and as harmo-
nizing ‘the Natural and the Artificial’. Coleridge needed to work out this
formulation in order to establish grounds for claiming that Shakespeare
was a supreme artist, not just a ‘child of nature.’
The range of plays he went on to discuss in detail was limited, but
included examples of the genres Shakespeare experimented with, comedy,
history, tragedy and romance. In 1811–12 he commented on Love’s Labour’s
Lost, Romeo and Juliet; The Tempest; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, then Richard
III and Falstaff (no records of these two lectures are known); and lastly
Richard II and Hamlet. The chronology of Shakespeare’s plays was far from
being settled, and Malone’s attempt to settle the matter on the basis of
external evidence produced some strange results, such as dating Twelfth
Night in 1614, which Coleridge found unconvincing. He proposed a chro-
nology on the basis of internal evidence (Lecture 4 in the 1811–12 series,
revised in Lecture 3 in the course of 1819; LL I. 239–44, II. 373–5), which
is closer to the order now generally accepted. One of his main concerns
was to claim that Love’s Labour’s Lost was Shakespeare’s earliest play, and
showed that his habits before he left Stratford ‘had been scholastic & those
of a student’ (LL I. 265). The claim was important to Coleridge because
he argued that from the beginning Shakespeare as poet and philosopher
conveyed ‘profound truths in the most lively Images’, and wrote as ‘a man
of reading and learning’, not from mere observation of nature (LL I. 275).
He noticed at the same time the limitations of the apprentice dramatist
in the play’s defects, especially in having only ‘the embryos of characters’
(LL I. 276).
He dealt at length with Romeo and Juliet, dwelling especially on the differ-
ence between Romeo’s idealization of Rosaline as an abstraction and his
love for Juliet as a person. Coleridge’s main concern was to show that while
in this play Shakespeare displayed many of his excellences, the parts were
not combined into a harmonious whole, so that there are speeches in which
the ‘Poet forgets the character & speaks in his own person’ (LL I. 311). In
speaking on the plays Coleridge commented mainly on the early scenes
and the way various characters were introduced. In relation to Richard II
he focused on Richard, Gaunt, Bolingbroke and York at specific points in
the play. In his account of Hamlet he attended mainly to the character of
Hamlet in a brilliant analysis explaining his failure to act not in terms of
cowardice or indecision, but from a sort of imaginative overload producing
an aversion to action.
Always he had in mind Shakespeare’s judgement and the unity of the

whole play. He aimed to show how Shakespeare’s judgement appeared in
the way each scene was ‘still preparing and still recalling like a lively piece of
music’ (LL I. 365). He also sought to demonstrate that Shakespeare was no
common dramatist connecting ideas ‘by association or logical connection’,
but a vital writer, who ‘in a moment transports himself into the very being
of each character’ (LL I. 359). In this way he might convey to his hearers a
sense of the dramatist’s imaginative power, and of the relation of individ-
ual scenes to the whole, and, as he said in comments on The Tempest, there
would be no need to go through the whole play, describe the plot, or point
out all its beauties: ‘were he to repeat them he should pass from the charac-
ter of a lecturer into a mere reciter’ (LL I. 366). Coleridge said in Lecture 4
of this course that he would pursue a ‘psychological, rather than a histori-
cal, mode of reasoning’ (LL I. 253), and this is exemplified in such analyses
as that of a passage in Richard II cited below; but it is most prominent in his
account of Hamlet, a character with whom Coleridge had a special affinity,
as Henry Crabb Robinson noted after attending Lecture 12, commenting
sardonically that it was an elegy on Coleridge himself, as the lecturer ended
with his striking account of Hamlet’s inability to act: ‘No intellect however
grand is valuable if it draw us from action & lead us to think and think till
the time of action is passed by and we can do nothing’ (LL I. 391).
In later courses Coleridge returned to these plays, and also added The
Winter’s Tale and Othello in 1812, and in 1818–19 King Lear, Antony and
Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida. In these late courses of lectures he devel-
oped his innovatory technique of ‘particular and practical Criticism’ deal-
ing with a range of Shakespeare’s plays. The first lecture in the 1818–19
course was advertised as a discussion of The Tempest and Coleridge chose
this play no doubt because ‘It addresses itself entirely to the imaginative
faculty’ and he aimed to show that although dramatic illusion might be
‘assisted by the effect on the senses of the complicated scenery and dec-
orations of modern times, . . . the principal and only genuine excitement
ought to come from within’ (LL II. 268). His close readings of the texts
in this course were thus connected with his theory of dramatic illusion as
he went on to speak with the text in front of him, basing his comments on
brief notes written on the pages interleaved in his copy of the edition of
Shakespeare by Samuel Ayscough (1807). There is no way of knowing how
he developed at length most of his commentaries, for the few brief newspa-
per reports offer little help, but the notes he made are continually interest-
ing and original in their attentiveness to detail and perceptive analysis of
language in relation to character.
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’,
but rather displays a ‘wantonness in feminine shew, feminine friendism,

intensely Woman-like love of those immediately about him – mistaking the
delight of being loved by him for a love for him’ (LL II. 287).
In this comment on Richard as in his the remark on Bolingbroke
Coleridge was driven to invent terms (‘preconcertedness’, ‘friendism’) to
explain what he meant. He devoted two of his late lectures to Hamlet, one
to the first two acts, with an analysis of the character of the hero, then
recommencing ‘the particular Criticism’ (LL II. 301) or detailed commen-
tary on the text. This offers many insights about the way the text prepares
the audience for the development of the play, and again Coleridge felt a
need to introduce new terms, as in his comment on Horatio as represen-
tative of the ignorance of the audience in the first scene, when he asks,
‘has this THING appeared again to-night?’ Coleridge pointed out that
the words ‘thing’ and ‘again’ have a ‘credibilizing effect’ before the Ghost
turns out to be no thing but indeed an ‘intelligent Spirit’ (LL II. 295).
The presence of ‘Flesh and Blood Sympathists’, Coleridge argued, helps to
create a double effect in the appearance of the Ghost: ‘This accrescence
of Objectivity in a Ghost that yet retains all its ghostly attributes & fearful
Subjectivity, is truly wonderful’ (LL II. 299). Here the lecturer introduced
more new terms in ‘Sympathists’ and ‘accrescence’, having coined ‘subjec-
tivity’ previously.
The remaining lectures were devoted mainly to the major tragedies, and
in these too Coleridge introduced coinages of words he found necessary to
explain particular effects. In discussing Macbeth Coleridge saw the Witches
as invoking the imagination in contrast to the opening of Hamlet, which
moves from simple forms of conversation to ‘the language of impassioned
Intellect’ (LL II. 305), and went on, coining another term, to show how
Macbeth’s character is revealed through the ‘unpossessedness of Banquo’s
mind, wholly present to the present Object’ (LL II. 306). While Banquo is
unconcerned by the appearance of the witches and openly curious, Macbeth
reveals his anxious state of mind (‘Good sir, why do you start and seem to
fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ 1. 3. 51). Here Macbeth betrays ‘the
guilt in its Germ anterior to the supposed cause & immediate temptation’
(LL II. 307). Banquo’s mind, Coleridge said, is ‘wholly present to the pres-
ent Object – an unsullied, unscarified Mirror’, ‘unscarified’ being another
new word. Other coinages include ‘presentimental’, or conveying some
feeling relating to future events (as in Duncan’s response to the news of the
death of Cawdor in Macbeth, 1. 4: ‘There’s no art / To find the mind’s con-
struction in the face’). His need to invent a new critical vocabulary relates
to the novelty of Coleridge’s analysis in these lectures, which prompted
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).
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
of Shakespeare, and ignored him while praising Schlegel and criticizing Dr

Johnson at length in his preface. Hazlitt’s commentaries provide impor-
tant accounts of plays such as Cymbeline which Coleridge hardly touched on,
and his readings of some other plays offer a fresh perspective in the light of
Hazlitt’s radical political bias, notably in his account of Henry V as an ‘ami-
able monster’ and of Coriolanus as a celebration of ‘the insolence of power’
(Hazlitt IV. 215, 286). Hazlitt may be innovatory in reappraising these plays in
relation to the politics of his own age, but in his general critical methods he
seems old-fashioned in relation to Coleridge. He goes through all the plays
one by one, is judgemental, includes long quotations to illustrate beauties,
is much concerned with the ruling passion in leading characters and shows
no interest in what was central for Coleridge, the organic growth of the plays
from the opening scenes. It is significant that the works Coleridge used to
demonstrate Shakespeare’s poetic genius from the beginnings of his career,
his early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, are dismissed by
Hazlitt as ‘a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as
cold’ (Hazlitt IV. 358). He also had little time for Love’s Labour’s Lost, observ-
ing, ‘If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this’
(Hazlitt IV. 332). This was the play with which Coleridge began his commen-
tary on plays in 1811, thinking of it as the earliest of Shakespeare’s dramas,
but as already displaying the dramatist’s genius as in ‘The wonderful activity
of Thoughts throughout the whole first Scene’ (LL I. 265). Hazlitt was more
systematic, conveyed an enthusiasm which fired Keats, but he relied on quot-
ing long passages and tended to move towards generalities.
Coleridge differed from him in his critical practice also in scorning the
theatrical conditions of the age, the prominence given to stars like Kemble
and Mrs Siddons, while other parts were ‘usurped by fellows who owed
their very elevation to dexterity in snuffing candles’ (LL I. 254), and the
emphasis on spectacle. Dramatic illusion, as Coleridge defined it, could
work for the reader as well as the viewer, and he increasingly focused on
the language of the plays as shaping character and imaginative coherence,
so that he came to think that the best criticism should be concerned with
particulars. In his notes for his lecture on Macbeth in 1819 he remarked on
the ‘easily satisfied mind’ of Banquo in interrogating the Weird Sisters,
compared with Macbeth’s eagerness to find out more, and quoted from
their dialogue (omitting one phrase):
B. The Earth hath bubbles – Whither are they vanished?

M. Into the air – and what seemed corporal melted
As Breath into the wind – WOULD THEY HAD STAY’D.
Is it too minute to notice the appropriateness of the Simile ‘As Breath’

in a cold climate? (LL II. 307)
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
Shakespeareans. Theodore Besterman, for instance, the editor of the prestigious

Oxford edition of Voltaire’s Works, describes the book as ‘insensitive and intem-
perate’ (VS 11, n. 1).
14
See Abbe J. B. Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations, 2 vols (London:
J. Brindley, 1747), 2: 77.
15
See For example, a letter to P. R. Le Cornier de Cideville, dated 3 November 1735
(VS 55).
16
Both articles were presented as translated from the English and are believed to
have been written by the Abbé Prévost.
17.
This was published in La gazette littéraire on 4 April 1764 (VS 85–9)
18.
P. A. de La Place, Le Théâtre anglois, 8 vols (Discours sur le théâtre anglois, 1, i–cxi;
London: n. p., 1746–9), 1: cxi. Hereafter cited as Discours.
19.
See in particular the beginning of his letter of 3 September 1776, in which he
plans the printing of his discourse to the Academy (VS 211).
20.
‘Il faut faire voir à ces tristes et insolens Anglois, que nos gens de lettres savent
mieux se battre contre eux que nos soldats et nos généraux. Malheureusement il
y a parmi ces gens de lettres bien des déserteurs et des faux frères’ [we must show
these wretched and insolent English that our Men of Letters can fight against
them better than our soldiers and generals. Unfortunately, there are many desert-
ers and traitors among these men of letters], d’Alembert replies to Voltaire whom
he calls his general (VS 180 n.).
21.
This was published in 1770 in the second volume of his Questions sur
l’encyclopédie.
22
Samuel Foote, The Roman and English Comedy Consider’d and Compar’d; Arthur
Murphy, Essays on Shakespeare (1753–4). Horace Walpole, Second Preface to The
Castle of Otranto (1765). All quoted in Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical
Heritage, 6 vols (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–81), succes-
sively, 3: 222 and 4: 90–4 and 548–9. For Dr Johnson’s Preface, see W. K. Wimsatt
(ed.), Dr Johnson on Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 61.
23
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 (London, 1769), 214 and 218. ‘I do not pretend, as Mr Voltaire does, to
make the reader a judge of the stile of Corneille by my translation’, she adds
(220).
24
As in his 1763 treatise on tolerance (Traité sur la Tolérance) or through his combat
in favour of a number of victims of religious fanaticism.
25
‘Discours sur la tragédie’ in Voltaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols
(Paris: Garnier, 1877–85), 1: 311–25.
26
Lettre à la Marquise du Deffand (VS 62).
27
Stendhal’s Racine et Shakespeare II, published in 1825, is a politico-literary pam-
phlet which uses Shakespeare as a positive ‘romantic’ pole opposed to an
‘academic’ theatre hampered by its use of alexandrines and its strict observance
of the unities.
28
Reference to the Pont-Neuf was derogatory from the seventeenth century, as indi-
cated by this line in Boileau’s Art poétique: ‘Et laissons le burlesque aux plaisants
du Pont-Neuf [Let us leave farce to the entertainers of the Pont-Neuf.].’
29
‘L’honnête homme éclairé’ is another definition of the acceptable spectator.
Notes 175
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
conceal nothing: ‘traduire réellement . . . c’est ne rien éluder, ne rien omettre, ne

rien amortir, ne rien cacher’ (456).
45
‘La traduction que l’on donne ici de ce César, est la plus fidèle, & même la seule fidèle
qu’on ait jamais faite en notre langue d’un poète ancien, ou étranger’ (VS 95).
46
The words are used in a letter to D’Alembert (VS 180), as well as in a letter to La
Harpe (VS 180), both written in August 1776.
47
‘Sachez que les Français, contre lesquels vous vous déchaînez, admettent le sim-
ple, et non le bas et le grossier’ (VS 168).
48
His lectures, later published in his 18-volume Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne
et moderne (1797) put forward a reactionary defence of an aristocratic theatre.
49
Quoted in P. Van Tieghem, Le préromantisme, 3: La découverte de Shakespeare sur le
continent (Paris: Sfelt, 1947), 3: 194.
50
This was published in English; the French Essai sur la poésie épique (1733) is already
less advanced in its views.
51
Le siècle, 738. Voltaire repeats the same idea in his Commentaire sur Corneille, pub-
lished in 1764.
52
Voltaire considered at the time that taste could vary from country to country,
since this first chapter was entitled ‘Des différents goûts des peuples’.
53
‘[L]’amour est insipide dans presque toutes ses pièces [Love is insipid in almost
all his plays],’ he writes in the article on ‘Goût’ which was first published in 1771,
in volume vi of the Questions sur l’encyclopédie (VS 169), but he goes on to say that
Corneille is still infinitely superior to Shakespeare in matters of taste.
54
Foote, Roman and English Comedy, see n. 22.
55
Conversely, F. C. Green controverts this accusation in his first Appendix, A Critical
Study of French and English Ideas in the Eighteenth Century (London: Dent, 1935),
467–70.
56
Le Blanc, Letters, 2: 77. Letter 59 (2: 75–89) censures both the gravediggers and
Ophelia’s scenes of madness.
57
Lettres de Ducis, 7–8.
58
Wieland published his translation of twenty-four plays between 1762 and 1766.
The Tempest was performed in 1761. See Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of
Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914 (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Georg Olms
Verlag, 2003), 113–15, and Christine Roger’s contribution to the chapter on
Schlegel in this volume.
59
La Place had included Cymbeline and Les Femmes de bonne humeur ou les Commères de
Windsor in his anthology.
60
Addison’s article was published in The Spectator 46. The journal, which was very
influential in England between 1711 and 1714, was translated into French and
published irregularly at Amsterdam from 1714 as Le Spectateur ou le Socrate moderne,
7 vols (Amsterdam: Wetstein & Smith). J. G. Robertson explains that, partly
because it was often abbreviated, it was not an effective vehicle for spreading
knowledge of Shakespeare. See ‘The knowledge of Shakespeare on the Continent
at the beginning of the eighteenth century’, MLR 1 (1905): 316.
61
Victor Hugo, Cromwell (1827; reprinted Paris: Nelson, 1949), 68.
62
Ibid., 28.
63
Hugo, Shakespeare, 226, 228.
64
Ibid., 297.
Notes 177
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
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
Meisters Lehrjahre’, Goethe Jahrbuch 96 (1979): 101–10, and R. Ellis Dye,

‘Wilhelm Meister and Hamlet, identity and difference’, in Goethe Yearbook:
Publications of the Goethe Society of North America 6 (1992): 67–85, contribute to
the comparison.
48
‘[T]hat “Hamlet” was to be staged in full and unmutilated’ (Apprenticeship Years 5.
4, HA 7: 293).
49
50
HA 7: 273; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 155.
51
Apprenticeship Years 5. 4; HA 7: 298.
52
In contrast, current statistics reveal that Shakespeare is far and away the most
frequently staged playwright in twenty-first-century German theatre.
53
Karl S. Guthke, ‘Schiller, Shakespeare und das Theater der Grausamkeit’, in
Roger Paulin (ed.), Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007),
181–94 (183); Schiller’s familiarity with the text of the English originals was lim-
ited to a handful of passages: his knowledge of English was far poorer than
Goethe’s.
54
Guthke, ‘Schiller, Shakespeare und das Theater der Grausamkeit’, 181–94.
55
Boyle, Goethe, 2: 648.
56
A. W. Schlegel in June 1797 (WA 3. 2. 73ff.), the Weimar librarian Riemer (1774–
1835) in 1806 (WA 3. 3. 121), and others in March 1811 (WA 3. 4. 188); see
57
Calculated by G. R. Hauschild (1907), cit. Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 277. See also
Heinrich Huesmann, Shakespeare-Inszenierungen unter Goethe in Weimar,
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-historische Klasse,
258. 2 (Graz, Vienna, Cologne: Böhlau, 1968), 157–9.
58
Thus, for example, in the letter to Caroline von Wolzogen of 28 June 1812 (WA
4. 22. 246).
59
Thus in the letter of 28 June 1812 (WA 4. 22. 246) to Wolzogen, and in the letter
of 13 February 1813 to C. F. von Reinhard (HABr 3: 177).
60
William Jacob, A View of the Agriculture, Manufactures, Statistics, and State of Society of
Germany, and Parts of Holland and France, Taken During a Journey through those coun-
tries in 1819 (London: John Murray, 1820), 220.
61
A. W. Schlegel is among the ‘knowledgeable men’ to whom Goethe refers in his
deprecation of the English theatre (No End of Shakespeare, HA 12: 298).
62
For the ‘ASTONISHING’ depth and accuracy of this knowledge, and Tieck’s first-
hand intimacy with the vast swathe of other central and western European
literature, we have Coleridge’s spellbound testimony of 1817: Collected Letters of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–71), 4:
744.
63
HA 12: 290; ‘but they are indeed human individuals, fundamentally so, and on
such characters a Roman toga may also fit.’
64
Even A. W. Schlegel, as late as 1808 acquiesced in the excision of certain moments
of humour that were incompatible with contemporary audience sensibilities.
Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Lecture 28. August Wilhelm
Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann,
1846–7), 6: 186–90; Ermann, Shakespeare-Bild, 322.
Notes 181
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
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
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:
Badawi: M. M. Badawi, Coleridge Critic of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1973)
Black: John Black, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and literature, by Augustus
William Schlegel, trans. by John Black; revised by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison
(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846)
Burwick: Frederick Burwick, Illusion and the Drama. Critical Theory of the Enlightenment
and Romantic Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Pres, 1991)
BL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson
Bate, 2 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV,
7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1983)
CL: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1956–71)
CN: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Vols. 1–3
(The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series L. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1957–61; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1973)
C on Sh: Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the lectures of 1811–12, ed. Reginald
Foakes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971)
CRB: Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed.
Edith J. Morley, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938)
CRD: Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry
Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler, 3rd edition, 2 vols (London and New York:
Macmillan, 1872)
Crick: Joyce Crick, review of ‘Faustus from the German of Goethe translated by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’, ed. Frederick Burwick and James C. McKusick, Coleridge Bulletin,
New Series 32 (Winter 2008): 70–84
Donohue: Joseph W. Donohue Jr., Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford: Blackwell,
1975)
EOT: Essays on His Own Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed. David V.
Erdman, 3 vols (The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series
LXXV, 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978)
Notes 187
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
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Index
Adams, George 8 Macbeth 107–8,

Addison, Joseph 15, 33, 40–1, 95, 97, 140 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 108
Cato 9, 33
Aeschylus 2, 46 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 82, 121,
Amphlett, James 145 122, 146
Antoine, André 43 Capell, Edmund 102
Aristotle 42, 63, 96 Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar 56
Arminius 127 Carl of Saxe-Meiningen, Prince 58
Arne, Thomas Chalmers, Alexander 120
Artaxerxes 131 Charles II, King 131
Artaxerxes, King 131 Charles V, Emperor 58
Ayscough, Samuel 166 Châtelet, Émilie du 8
Chaucer, Geoffrey 155
Bacon, Francis 141 Chester, John 143
Barrault, Jean-Louis 43 Chetwood, William 7
Baudissin, Wolf von 117 Cibber, Colley 7
Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron Clarkson, Mrs 161
de 56 Claude, (Claude Lorrain) 136
Beaumont, Francis 93, 134, 149, 157, Clément, Nicholas 6
160 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 3–4,
Behrisch, Ernst Wolfgang 65, 75 104, 105, 114–15, 120, 124, 125,
Bell, John 115 128–72
Berkeley, George 7 Biographia Literaria 138, 157, 163, 170
Berlin, Sir Isaiah 1 Fall of Robespierre, The 130
Bestrafte Brudermord, Der 93 Lectures on Literature 1808–1819
Black, John 120 129–30, 134–8, 140–53, 155,
Blair, Hugh 164 157–8, 160–72
Bodmer, Johann Jakob 90, 92, 93, Lyrical Ballads 138, 143
95, 107 Osorio 130
Boileau, Nicolas 20, 22 Remorse 130, 134
Bolingbroke, Henry, Lord 7, 11, 21, Zapolya 130
22, 25 Collier, John Payne 137, 145, 155, 161
Booth, Barton 7 Congreve, William 9, 15, 97
Borcke, Caspar Wilhelm von Corneille, Pierre 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18,
Julius Cäsar 92, 94, 95, 97 19, 20, 22, 24, 35, 38, 65
Breitinger, Johann Jakob 92 Cinna 14, 19, 32
Brumoy, Pierre 16, 98 Pompée 19
Bürger, Gottfried August 107–8, 109 Crowe, Rev. William 129
194 Index
D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 17–18, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 122, 144

24, 109 Fletcher, John 93, 134, 149, 160
D’Argental, Charles Augustin Feriol, Henry VIII 135
Comte 6, 17, 42 Spanish Curate, The 157
Dante Alighieri 95, 108 Foakes, Reginald 3
Davenant, Sir William Foote, Samuel 19, 37
Macbeth 9 Forster, Georg 107
Davenant, Sir William, and John Francis I, Emperor 127
Dryden
Tempest, The 9 Garrick, David 17, 19, 20, 29, 37, 132,
Davies, Sir John 141 142, 153
Davy, Humphry 129, 144 Romeo and Juliet 96
Deffand, Marie-Anne, Marquise Gautier, Théophile 42–3
du 13, 14, 34 Gay, John 7
Delacroix, Eugène 3 Genghis Khan 154
Dibdin, Rev. Thomas Frognall 129 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm
Dibdin, T. C. von 80, 100
Zapolya 130 Gifford, William 155–6
Diderot, Denis 23 Gildon, Charles 21–2
Père de famille Le 24 Gillman, James 170
Dodd, William 28, 45, 48, 98 Goethe, Caspar 45
Dryden, John 2, 34, 97, 101 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1, 3, 44–91,
Essay of Dramatick Poesie 21 98–9, 106, 108, 109, 110, 117, 120,
Troilus and Cressida 21 121, 122
Ducis, Jean-François 16, 29–30, Clavigo 55–6
37 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and
Hamlet 16, 17, 29, 37, 39 Truth) 45, 57
King John 16 Egmont 58–61, 62, 87, 112
Macbeth 16 ‘Falstaff’ 57–8
Othello 16, 29, 43 Faust 3, 66, 77, 82–7, 112, 130
Roméo et Juliette 16, 17 29 Götz von Berlichingen 49–52, 54, 56,
Dürer, Albert 169 58–9, 61, 84, 85, 87, 99
Ilmenau 57
Eckermann, Johann Peter 61, 72, 86, Leiden des jungen Werthers, Die (The
88, 89 Sorrows of Young Werther)
Eliot, T.S. 55 53–6, 90
Elizabeth I, Queen 164 Iphigenie auf Tauris 61, 62, 67, 68,
Eschenburg 46, 72, 74, 75, 101–2, 103, 107, 112
104, 110, 111, 116, 117 Julius Cäsar 58–9
Hamlet 68 Romeo and Juliet 75–7, 105, 116
Richard III 102, 107, 117 Shakespeare und kein Ende! 78–80
Ueber W. Shakspeare 102, 120 Torquato Tasso 61, 62, 67
Euclid 159 Von deutscher Art und Kunst 46
Euripides 123 Von deutscher Baukunst 46
Wahlverwandtschaften, Die (Elective
Farmer, Richard 141 Affinities) 69, 70, 75
Fennell, Stephen 3 West-östlicher Divan 99
Index 195
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre 62, 66, 68, John, King 156

69–72, 76, 77, 81, 87, 104. Johnson, Dr Samuel 2, 4, 19, 26, 34,
110–11, 125 102, 104, 110. 114, 115, 120,
Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische 124, 135, 137, 139–43, 142–3, 146,
Sendung 62–8, 69, 70 147, 148, 149, 150, 156, 169,
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 81–2, 171, 172
89, 90 Jones, Sir William 107, 112
Zum Schäkespeares-Tag 48–9, 55, Jonson, Ben 93
81, 101
Gottsched, Johann Christoph 92, 94, Kalidasa 107
95, 96, 97 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 15, 28, 33,
Gottsched, Luise 94, 116 125, 140
Grillparzer, Franz 105 Kant, Immanuel 144, 148
Grynäus, Simon Keats, John 139
Romeo and Juliet 96–7 Kemble, John Philip 135, 171
Gundolf, Friedrich 106 Kleist, Heinrich von 105
Kotzebue, August von 134, 160
Hamann, Johann Georg 48, 100 Krusve, Bernard 146
Hanmer, Sir Thomas 139
Harbage, Alfred 172 La Harpe, Jean François de 18,
Hazlitt, William 125, 139, 155–6, 163, 32, 34
169, 170–1 La Motte-Fouqué, Friedrich von 123
Henry VIII, King 126, 156 La Place, Pierre Antoine de 15–16, 18,
Herder, Johann Gottfried 46–8, 50, 25, 28, 29, 34, 35, 40, 97, 98
63, 70, 76, 79, 88, 89, 90, 99, 100, Antoine et Cléopâtre 15
103, 104, 120, 122, 126, 144, 148 Cymbeline 15
Brutus 60 Discours sur le théâtre anglois 15,
Shakespear 46–7, 101 Femmes de bonne humeur, Les 15
Heufeld, Franz 65, 80 Hamlet 15, 34
Hewlett, Rev. John 129 Henry VI 15
Heyne, Christian Gottlob 108 Jules César 15, 31–2
Hill, Aaron Macbeth 15
Zara 19, 37 Othello 15, 16, 30–1
Homer 48, 83, 107, 109, 118, 121, 126 Richard III 15
Hooker, Richard 141 Timon 15
Hugo, François-Victor 39, 42 Lamb, Charles 135–6, 169
Hugo, Victor 3, 28, 31, 39, 41, Landor, Walter Savage 1
41–2, 120 Lanson, Gustave 8
Cromwell 41 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 59
Hernani 41, 43 Le Blanc, Abbé 10, 37
William Shakespeare 41–2 Le Tourneur, Pierre 17, 18–19, 25, 28,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 109, 112–13 29, 33, 34, 35, 39, 90, 109
Hamlet 28, 34
Iffland, August Wilhelm 116 Julius Caesar 31
Lenz, Jakob Michael 101, 110
Jacob, William 77 Leoni, Michele 90
Jennen, Charles 102 Leopardi, Giacomo 3
196 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
Shakespeare, William (Cont’d) Voltaire, (François-Marie Arouet) 1,

Titus Andronicus 93, 124 2, 4, 5–15, 17–43, 60, 73, 76, 93,
Troilus and Cressida 8, 126, 153, 163, 94, 101
166, 169 Art dramatique 26, 33
Twelfth Night 116 Appel à toutes les nations de
Venus and Adonis 130, 135, 145, l’Europe 10, 14, 34, 39
162–3, 164, 171 Brutus 8, 10–11, 21, 25
Winter’s Tale, The 43, 46, 125, 130, Commentary on Corneille 19
162, 166 Discours sur la tragédie 6, 11,
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 1 35, 36
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 130 Dissertation sur la tragédie ancienne et
Pizarro 133–4 moderne 12–13
School for Scandal, The 131 Ériphyle 37
Siddons, Sarah 171 Essai sur la poésie épique 34, 35
Sidney, Sir Philip 141 Essais sur les moeurs 30
Sophocles 46, 53, 120 Irène 20
Southey, Robert 129, 130 Jules César 26, 30, 31–2, 36
Spenser, Edmund 141 Lettres sur les anglais, (Letters
Staël, Germaine de 120, 122 concerning the English Nation) 8, 95
Steevens, George 102, 104, 115, 120, Lettre à l’Académie française 19
148, 149, 151–2 Lettres Philosophiques 6, 8, 25, 96
Stein, Charlotte von 88 Mahomet 37
Stendhal, (Marie-Henri Beyle) Mort de César, La 12, 18, 36, 37, 94
23, 120 Oedipe 8
Stobaeus 48 Sémiramis 12, 17, 36–7
Sulzer, Johann Georg Siècle de Louis XIV, Le 24, 34
Cymbeline 52–3 Temple du Goût, Le
Swift, Jonathan 7 Zaïre 8, 19, 22, 24, 37
Voss, Johann Heinrich 72, 109,
Talma, François-Joseph 29 117, 118
Tamburlaine 154 Othello 74
Tate, Nahum
King Lear 9 Walpole, Horace 7, 19, 25, 34
Theobald, Lewis 139, 144–5 Warburton, William 139
Tieck, Dorothea 116, 117 Warton, Thomas 2
Tieck, Ludwig 78, 79, 87, 90, 103, Washington, George 153
104, 105, 113, 114, 116, 117, Weisse, Christian Felix 76, 80
124, 125 Romeo und Julie 75, 97, 107
Über Shakespears Behandlung des Richard der Dritte 97, 107
Wunderbaren (How Shakespeare Werner, Zacharias 105
Employs the Wondrous) 113 Whately, Thomas 140, 148, 150, 151
Titius, Johann Daniel 95 Whiter, Walter 139
Tomalin, J. 145 Wieland, Christoph, Martin 40, 45, 46,
52, 56, 65, 74, 75, 90, 92, 97–100,
Vega, Lope de 9, 25–6 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111,
Vergil 121 116, 117
Vigny, Alfred de 43 Hamlet 118
Index 199
Julius Caesar 92 Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser

King Lear 98 Tytler, Lord 109
Lady Johanna Gray 98 Wordsworth, Dorothy 143
Measure for Measure 98 Wordsworth, William 129, 143,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 40, 92, 155, 157
98, 107, 108 Lyrical Ballads 138, 143
Othello 98 Wycherley, William 9
Willems, Michèle 2
Wolf, Friedrich August 126 Young, Edward 7, 95, 97

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Series Preface vii

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This

is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiat-

Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

Stephen Fennell lectures at the University of Cambridge. He researches

All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed.

progress: without it, Voltaire would never have come to Shakespeare in

or dream, or wholeness, for instance), that reflect the fluid movements of

Although in the history of European culture Voltaire appears as one of

Voltaire’s Shakespearean Criticism:

Ce poète anglais a l’imagination assez belle. Il pense naturellement, il

anglaise’, 5 which is often quoted as having first introduced Shakespeare

expound on the religious tolerance nurtured in England by the multiplic-

Shakespear boasted a strong, fruitful Genius; he was natural and sublime,

restriction which conditioned the French reception of Shakespeare from

Then, as if to exonerate himself from using Shakespeare as a source, he

is conquering Poland; Hamlet, his mother and step-father drink together

1760–78: Open war: Voltaire and the translators of Shakespeare

appeared as a duty, and after 1760, Voltaire embarked on an avowedly

volumes. A variety of plays were thus made available to a variety of French

Ce misérable . . . veut nous faire regarder Shakespear comme le seul

He appeals to his friend’s patriotism: ‘Souffrirez-vous l’affront qu’il fait

Le grand point . . . est d’inspirer à la nation le dégoût et l’horreur qu’elle

On 15 August he writes to Jean François de La Harpe, the editor of the

travesty of a synopsis foregrounds the ghost, the murder of Polonius (due

her main argument is that his English is insufficient to enable him to

Voltaire’s Criticism of Shakespeare:

Voltaire the classicist

Il a manqué jusqu’à présent à presque tous les auteurs tragiques de votre

The primacy of taste

critiques of Shakespeare’s plays are offences against what he considers to

Court theatre versus the Pont-Neuf

Shakespeare versus Gilles

Vega, he goes on, Shakespeare is a mixture of grossness and grandeur, of

Again, the violation of the unities is only mentioned as incidental to the

Francisco’s mouse is as recurrent a source of indignation as Iago’s obscen-

This is by way of saying that the language spoken in Shakespeare’s plays,

Adjusting Shakespeare to French taste: La Place,

striving to make Shakespeare accessible to their contemporaries. Both are

Shakespeare’s drama and classical tragedy. Their resonance abroad testi-

Highlighting Shakespeare’s lack of taste:

Si de telles idées et de telles expressions sont en effet cette belle nature

In his theoretical approach to translation Voltaire is ahead of his time.

(reserved for the commoners), and unrhymed alexandrines, which he

In the published edition of the discourse, this advertising strategy is again

Voltaire, the cosmopolitan-turned-nationalist

des nations]’ (VS 76). But as Shakespeare threatened to be considered as a

The spectator versus the critic: the dramatist’s dilemma