August Wilhelm von Schlegel
born Sept. 8, 1767, Hannover, Hanover
[Germany]
died May 12, 1845, Bonn [Germany]
German scholar and critic, one of the
most influential disseminators of the
ideas of the German Romantic movement,
and the finest German translator of
William Shakespeare. He was also an
Orientalist and a poet.
Schlegel was a son of a Protestant
pastor and a nephew of the author Johann
Elias Schlegel. He attended school in
Hannover and in 1787 began his studies
at the University of Göttingen, where he
studied classical philology and
aesthetics. In 1791 he took a post as a
private tutor in Amsterdam, but he moved
to Jena in 1796 to write for Friedrich
Schiller’s short-lived periodical Die
Horen. Thereafter, Schlegel—with his
brother Friedrich Schlegel—started the
periodical Athenäum (1798–1800), which
became the organ of German Romanticism,
numbering Friedrich Schleiermacher and
Novalis among its contributors.
In 1798 Schlegel became a professor
at the University of Jena, where he
began his long-planned translation of
the works of Shakespeare (1797–1810). He
himself translated 17 plays; the
remaining works were translated by
Ludwig Tieck’s daughter Dorothea and by
Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin under
Tieck’s supervision (1825–33).
Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare
became the standard German translation
of that author and are among the finest
of all German literary translations.
Schlegel’s incomplete translations of
five plays by Calderón de la Barca
(Spanisches Theater, 2 vol., 1803–09)
likewise show his gift for carrying the
spirit of foreign literary works over
into German, as do his selected
translations of Petrarch, Dante,
Giovanni Boccaccio, Miguel de Cervantes,
Torquato Tasso, and Luís de Camões in
Blumensträusse italiänischer,
spanischer, und portugiesischer Poesie
(1804; “Bouquets of Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese Poetry”).
In 1796 Schlegel married the
brilliant Caroline Michaelis, but in
1803 she left him for the philosopher
Friedrich W.J. Schelling. In 1801
Schlegel went to Berlin, where he
lectured on literature and art. In his
lectures, he comprehensively surveyed
the history of European literature and
thought, casting scorn on Greco-Roman
classicism and the Enlightenment and
instead exalting the timeless
spirituality of the Middle Ages. These
lectures were later published as
Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und
Kunst (1884; “Lectures on Fine Art and
Literature”). After his divorce from
Michaelis, Schlegel accompanied Mme de
Staël on travels in Germany, Italy,
France, and Sweden, where he served in
1813–14 as press secretary to the crown
prince Bernadotte. The series of
important lectures Schlegel gave while
in Vienna in 1808, published as Über
dramatische Kunst und Literatur
(1809–11; Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature), attack French Neoclassical
theatre, praise Shakespeare, and exalt
Romantic drama. These lectures were
translated into many languages and
helped spread fundamental Romantic ideas
throughout Europe.
In 1818 Schlegel went to the
University of Bonn, where he remained
the rest of his life as professor of
literature. There he published the
scholarly journal Indische Bibliothek, 3
vol. (1820–30), and set up a Sanskrit
printing press, with which he printed
editions of the Bhagavadgītā (1823) and
Rāmāyana (1829). He founded Sanskrit
studies in Germany.
Critics of Schlegel’s poetry
(Gedichte, 1800; Ion, a tragedy based on
Euripides, 1803; Poetische Werke, 1811)
concede that it shows mastery of form
but that it amounts to only cultivated
verse. As a critic of poetry he has been
described as more empirical and
systematic and less speculative than his
brother Friedrich. Schlegel’s view of
world literature as an organic whole
influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His
collected works were edited by E.
Böcking and published in 12 volumes in
1846–47; his letters were edited by J.
Körner and published in 1930.
