How August Wilhelm Schlegel turned Shakespeare into a German national icon
In short: August Wilhelm Schlegel was the intellectual engine of German Romanticism. A polymath who translated Shakespeare into German classics, he redefined literary criticism by arguing that art should be understood on its own terms rather than judged against rigid, preconceived standards. His influence spanned from Sanskrit studies to European dramatic theory.
Born in 1767 in Hanover, August Wilhelm Schlegel emerged as a central figure in the Jena Romantic movement alongside his brother, Friedrich. His approach to criticism marked a departure from Enlightenment rationalism and Classicist aesthetic rules. Instead of applying external standards to judge a work, Schlegel insisted that a critic’s primary duty was to sympathetically penetrate the specific individuality of a poetic production. This methodology, which he refined in his influential Vienna lectures on dramatic art and literature between 1808 and 1811, helped dismantle the prevailing Johnsonian attitude toward Shakespeare, making it appear obsolete.
Schlegel’s translation work was transformative. His renderings of Shakespeare, begun in Jena and later completed with the help of Ludwig Tieck and others, are widely considered the finest poetical translations of the dramatist in any foreign language. By naturalizing these works, he effectively turned Shakespeare into a German national poet. Beyond English literature, he introduced German readers to the works of Calderón, Dante, and Petrarch, and his 1804 collection of southern lyrics helped integrate Romanic metrical forms into German verse.
Later in his life, Schlegel pivoted toward Orientalism, becoming the first professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe at the University of Bonn in 1818. He founded a specialized printing office for Sanskrit and published editions of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana. Driven by a belief that linguistic evidence could map human migration, he studied the epics of Persia and India, viewing these cultures as contributors to human progress. Despite his scholarly achievements and his role as an intimate advisor to Madame de Staël, he was often described as a quarrelsome and jealous figure in his personal relations with other literary men.
Schlegel’s philosophical legacy rests on his rejection of naturalism in art. He argued that a work of art should not merely reflect the real world but create its own, possessing internal coherence and organic completeness. When he died in 1845, he left behind a vast body of critical and translated work that fundamentally altered the European understanding of dramatic poetry and the history of literature.
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