August Wilhelm Schlegel

• 1. Introduction

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  August Wilhelm Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845, just three months before the unveiling of a monument he had personally organized in honour of Ludwig van Beethoven. That small gap tells you something essential about the man. He was always just off-centre from the most celebrated figures of his age, shaping their legacies while building his own in the margins. He translated Shakespeare so brilliantly that the English playwright became, in the words of one later assessment, a national poet of Germany. He studied Sanskrit at a time when almost no professor in Continental Europe had mastered it. He travelled across two continents in the company of Madame de Staël, one of the most formidable intellects of the Napoleonic era. And yet the central question his life raises is this: how does someone who is "unimportant" as an original poet leave such a deep mark on European literary culture? The answer runs through lecture halls in Vienna, a printing office for Sanskrit type, and a Romantic circle that gathered in his Jena home between 1796 and 1801.

• 2. The Jena Circle

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  Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to Schlegel's house in Jena, where the assembled thinkers studied Fichte's Foundations of the Science of Knowledge with unusual intensity. Friedrich Schlegel moved in with his wife Dorothea. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling arrived. So did Ludwig Tieck and Novalis. Between 1796 and 1801, the house functioned as the intellectual headquarters of the German Romantics. Schlegel had arrived in Jena in 1796 following an invitation from Friedrich Schiller, and within two years his critical work there had earned him an extraordinary professorship at the University of Jena. The journal he co-founded with his brother Friedrich, the Athenaeum, ran from 1798 to 1800 and served as the primary organ of the Romantic school. In its pages, the two brothers attacked the popular sentimental novelist August Lafontaine and carried on a public controversy with August von Kotzebue. Their joint essays were collected and published in 1801 under the title Charakteristiken und Kritiken. By then the brothers had already broken with Schiller, in 1797, and were widely regarded as the leaders of a new critical movement. Caroline Schelling, whom Schlegel had married in 1796, assisted him in several literary projects during these years before separating from him in 1801 to become the wife of the philosopher Schelling.

• 3. Shakespeare in German

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  Schlegel began translating William Shakespeare while living in Jena, and what he started there grew into one of the most celebrated acts of literary transfer in European history. The Schlegel-Tieck translation, completed under the supervision of Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Tieck, and Wolf Heinrich Graf von Baudissin, is considered one of the finest poetical translations in German. A 1905 assessment stated it plainly: the rendering is universally considered better than any other translation of Shakespeare into a foreign language. The edition of 1871-72 was later revised using Schlegel's own manuscripts by Michael Bernays. Schlegel's critical views on Shakespeare also reshaped how readers across Europe understood the playwright. His definition of "classic" and "romantic" gained wide recognition, and his arguments about the so-called three unities and about Shakespeare's correctness provoked a strong response in England, eventually making what critics called the Johnsonian attitude toward Shakespeare appear outdated. His essay on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was cited as a model of the new analytical and interpretive criticism. He had initially come to Shakespeare through his friendship with the poet Bürger at the University of Göttingen, where both were engaged in an intense study of Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare.

• 4. Madame de Staël and Vienna

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  Early in 1804, Schlegel made the acquaintance of Madame de Staël in Berlin, and she hired him as a tutor for her children. The relationship lasted more than a decade and took him across much of Europe. He travelled with her to Switzerland, Italy, and France, advising her on literary matters. In 1807 he published an essay in French, Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide, which attacked French classicism from a Romantic position and attracted considerable attention in France. His lectures on dramatic art and literature, delivered at Vienna in 1808 and published as Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur between 1809 and 1811, were translated into most European languages and are described in historical assessments as a permanent contribution to critical literature. In 1810, Swiss authorities ordered him to leave the Swiss Confederation as an enemy of French literature. In 1812 he travelled with De Staël, her husband Albert de Rocca, and her children as far as Kyiv, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg, then on through Finland to Stockholm. Between 1813 and 1814 he acted as press secretary to Swedish Crown Prince Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, through whose influence his family's right to noble rank was revived. He remained one of Madame de Staël's intimates until her death on the 14th of July 1817 in Paris.

• 5. Sanskrit and the East

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  Schlegel was appointed professor of Indology at the University of Bonn in 1818, the same year Madame de Staël died and the same year he briefly married a daughter of Heinrich Paulus, a union dissolved in 1821. At Bonn he founded a dedicated printing office for Sanskrit type, a concrete institutional commitment to a language that almost no Continental European scholar had mastered. From 1823 to 1830 he published the journal Indische Bibliothek. In 1823 he edited the Bhagavad Gita with a Latin translation alongside it, and in 1829 he turned to the Ramayana. His 1832 work Reflections on the Study of the Asiatic Languages extended his thinking about language as historical evidence. Schlegel believed that linguistic data could reveal the origins of peoples and trace patterns of human migration. He studied Persian and Indian epics in that spirit, and published arguments that attested to the architectural, mathematical, and technological achievements of Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Aztecs. In 1837 he wrote the preface to the German translation of James Cowles Prichard's book An Analysis of the Egyptian Mythology, originally published in 1819. Historical assessments note that as an Orientalist he was unable to adapt to the new comparative methods opened up by Franz Bopp, suggesting that his contributions in this field belonged to an earlier scholarly moment.

• 6. The Critic's Method

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  The 1910-1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition offered a precise verdict: as a poetical translator Schlegel had rarely been excelled, and in criticism he enacted the Romantic principle that a critic's first duty is not to judge from a position of superiority but to understand and to characterise a work of art. A later assessment from the 1920 Encyclopedia Americana went further, arguing that his unerring linguistic and historical scholarship and the calm objectivity of his judgment allowed him to carry out, even more successfully than Herder himself, Herder's demand that criticism be grounded in sympathetic penetration into the specific individuality of each work rather than in preconceived standards. His essay on Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea was singled out alongside the Romeo and Juliet essay as a founding model of this analytical approach. As a poet, the verdict was consistent across multiple sources: formal perfection of language was the chief merit of his verse, but the poems suffered from a lack of originality. He prided himself on being, in his own words, "model and master in the art of sonnets" among the Germans. His play Ion, performed in Weimar in January 1802 and supported by Goethe, was nonetheless a failure; one assessment described it as a vain attempt to rival Goethe's Iphigenie. His most successful original writing was satirical: the 1801 parody Ehrenpforte und Triumphbogen für Kotzebue was cited as an example of his work at its liveliest. One assessment also described him plainly as quarrelsome, jealous, and ungenerous in his relations with literary men.

• 7. Late Work and Legacy

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  By 1827, Schlegel was financially independent, travelling at his own expense and cultivating friendships with the educated elite across Europe. That year he published On the Theory and History of the Plastic Arts, and in 1828 two volumes of critical writings under the title Kritische Schriften. His Vienna lectures had by then been read across Europe and as far as Saint Petersburg. In 1835 he became head of the committee organising the Beethoven monument in Bonn, the composer's birthplace. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1836. His translations extended well beyond Shakespeare: he produced admirable versions of five of Calderón's plays in Spanisches Theater, published in two volumes in 1803 and 1809, and a collection of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian lyrics titled Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie in 1804. He also translated Dante and Luís de Camões. His Calderón translation of La banda y flor became the basis for E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht. Schlegel died on the 12th of May 1845 in Bonn, and his Sämtliche Werke, collected in twelve volumes by Eduard Böcking, appeared between 1846 and 1848.