Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature

by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, John Black

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Genres: Romanticism, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Philosophy

452 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1808

About the author

German scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel wrote influential criticism, translated several Shakespearean works, composed poetry, and also edited a literary magazine with Friedrich Schlegel, his brother.

This foremost leader of Romanticism made the English dramatist into classic.

A Lutheran pastor fathered him. People in Hanover and Göttingen educated him. At the University of Göttingen, he received a thorough philological training under Heyne, and an ardent study of Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca engaged him with his admired friend Bürger. From 1791 to 1795, Schlegel tutored in a family of a Dutch banker at Amsterdam.

Quickly after return to Germany, Schlegel, following an invitation of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, in 1796 settled in Jena. In that year, he married Karoline Böhmer, the widow of the physician. She assisted her husband in some of his productions, and the publication of her correspondence in 1871 established for her a posthumous reputation as a German letter writer. She separated from Schlegel in 1801 and quickly afterward served as the wife of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling.

In Jena, Schlegel made contributions to Horen of Schiller, to Musenalmanach , and to the Jenaer Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung. He also from Dante. He thus established his reputation and gained an extraordinary professorship in 1798 at the University of Jena. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg, and other persons visited his house, the intellectual headquarters of the “romanticists,” at various times between 1796 to 1801.

Schlegel founded Athenaeum (1798–1800), the organ of the Romantics and dissected disapprovingly the immensely popular sentimental novelist August Lafontaine. He also published a volume of poems and carried on a rather bitter controversy with Kotzebue. At this time, people ably remarked on the vigor and freshness of ideas, and they commanded respect as the leaders of the new Romanticism. They apparently titled a volume of their joint essays in 1801 Charakteristiken und Kritiken .

In 1802, Schlegel went to Berlin and delivered lectures on art. In the following year, he published Ion , a tragedy, which in Euripidean style gave rise to a suggestive discussion on the principles of drama. In two volumes of Spanisches Theater in 1803 and 1809, he presented admirably five plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In another volume, Blumensträusse italienischer, spanischer und portugiesischer Poesie (1804), he gave Spanish, Portuguese and Italian lyrics; included Luiz Vaz de Camões.

He began in Jena, and Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin and Dorothea Tieck ultimately completed under the superintendence of Ludwig Tieck, her father. He thus rendered the best indeed in any language. He related to Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In 1826, A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired Mendelssohn at the age of 17 years to write his concert overture.

After divorcing Karoline Schlegel, his wife, in 1804, he traveled in France, Germany, Italy, and other countries with Madame baroness de Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Staël-Holstein as tutor to her sons and adviser. She owed many of the ideas, embodied in De l'Allemagne . In 1807, he in Comparaison entre la Phèdre de Racine et celle d'Euripide attracted much attention in France and attacked French classicism from the standpoint of the Romantics.