August Wilhelm Schlegel

August Wilhelm Schlegel: The Man Who Gave Germany Shakespeare

He translated seventeen plays of a foreign playwright so completely into the rhythms of his own language that German readers for two centuries have half-believed Shakespeare was born speaking German. August Wilhelm Schlegel never wrote the play, poem, or system that made him famous in his own right — he made everyone else's work legible, and in doing so reshaped how an entire continent thought about art.

A Pastor's Son at Göttingen

Born September 8, 1767, in Hannover into a Protestant pastor's family — his uncle Johann Elias Schlegel was already a noted author, and his younger brother Friedrich would become his lifelong intellectual partner and rival — Schlegel was educated locally before entering the University of Göttingen in 1787 to study classical philology and aesthetics. The training gave him what would become his signature: an ability to move fluently between languages and literary traditions, reading Greek, Latin, English, Italian, and later Sanskrit with equal comfort. After Göttingen he spent several years as a private tutor in Amsterdam, an unglamorous interlude before his real career began.

Jena and the Athenäum

In 1796 Schlegel relocated to Jena, then the intellectual capital of Germany, where Friedrich Schiller invited him to contribute to the periodical *Die Horen*. Two years later, with his brother Friedrich, he co-founded the journal *Athenäum* (1798–1800), which Britannica calls "the organ of German Romanticism." The Schlegel brothers used its pages to define, in real time, what a Romantic sensibility could be — impatient with Enlightenment rationalism, hungry for medieval spirituality, and committed to the idea that criticism itself could be a creative act. That same period brought his marriage in 1796 to Caroline Michaelis, a brilliant and independent woman who ran in the same Jena Romantic circle; she divorced him in 1803 to marry the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, a personal blow that did not stop Schlegel's public career from accelerating.

Translating a Continent

Between 1797 and 1810, Schlegel translated seventeen of Shakespeare's plays into German — a task completed by collaborators under Ludwig Tieck's direction only by 1833. Britannica calls the result simply "the finest German translation of William Shakespeare" ever produced, and it remains the standard German text of the plays to this day. But Schlegel did not stop at Shakespeare: he rendered Calderón, Dante, Petrarch, and Cervantes into German as well, effectively building a bridge across which the whole of southern and western European literature could reach German readers who had no other access to it. His Berlin lectures of 1801 surveyed European literary history and, in Britannica's phrase, cast "scorn on Greco-Roman classicism and the Enlightenment" in favor of a Romantic counter-narrative. His Vienna lectures of 1808–1809, promoting Shakespeare and Romantic drama, were translated and read across Europe, shaping how English critics — Coleridge among them — thought about their own national playwright.

A Theory of Art Against Imitation

Schlegel's critical writing was not merely descriptive; according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, his central philosophical move was to reject the old idea that art is imitation of nature and argue instead that art emerges from creative force and should embody eternal truths reached through what he called an "almost unconscious choice of the highest degree of excellence." He drew a sharp line between *style*, a transcendent artistic choice, and mere *mannerism*, a limited personal tic — a distinction that gave later critics a vocabulary for judging greatness rather than just cataloguing technique. He also read the difference between ancient and modern art through the historical rupture of Christianity, framing Romantic art as an expression of *Sehnsucht*, a longing for a lost unity that classical art, in its self-contained harmony, had never needed to feel. On language itself he went further still, arguing that language is essentially poetry — that ordinary speech already contains the same creative capacity that a poet merely exercises more consciously, an idea the Stanford Encyclopedia notes anticipates Ferdinand de Saussure's later distinction between *langue* and *parole*.

Sanskrit, Bonn, and a Second Career

After years traveling as a companion to Madame de Staël and a stint as press secretary to the Swedish Crown Prince Bernadotte in 1813–14, Schlegel took a professorship at the newly founded University of Bonn in 1818. There he effectively founded academic Sanskrit studies in Germany, establishing a Sanskrit printing press and founding the journal *Indische Bibliothek*, through which he published editions of the *Bhagavad Gita* and the *Ramayana* — the first time these texts had been made available in German scholarly editions at this level of rigor. It was, in miniature, the same act he had performed for Shakespeare: taking a body of foreign genius and making it permanently available to a new audience.

Why August Is Called a Genius

Calling Schlegel a genius requires care, because his own century already argued about it. Heinrich Heine's savage 1835 attack on him — portraying Schlegel as a derivative popularizer coasting on other people's brilliance rather than an originator of his own — did lasting damage to his reputation, and it contains real truth: Schlegel wrote no *Faust*, no *Phenomenology of Spirit*, no enduring poem of his own that ranks with the writers he translated. What he had instead was a rarer and harder-to-name faculty: an ear so exact and a critical mind so systematic that he could absorb an entire foreign sensibility — Shakespeare's, Calderón's, the Sanskrit epics' — and reproduce it in German without flattening it. Walter Benjamin, writing decades later, called Schlegel's refusal of speculative excess in favor of close engagement with actual artworks "surprisingly modern," and his influence on Coleridge, Schelling, and Hegel testifies to genuine intellectual substance rather than mere facility. The honest verdict is that Schlegel's genius was one of synthesis and transmission rather than invention — a critical and linguistic intelligence of the first rank, even if it produced no first-rank original creation. That his first full-scale biography appeared only in 2016 suggests scholarship is still catching up to what that kind of genius is worth.

Legacy

Schlegel died in Bonn on May 12, 1845, at seventy-seven. His Shakespeare translations are still performed on German stages essentially unaltered, a rare longevity for any translation, and his Sanskrit editions helped found an entire academic discipline. Two centuries on, the case for his genius rests less on any single work than on the sheer number of doors he opened for other people's masterpieces to walk through.

Achievements

• Affiliated with University of Bonn and University of Jena
• Educated at University of Göttingen
• Worked as linguist, translator and Sanskrit scholar