The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682-1914: Native Literature and Foreign Genius (review)

The story of Shakespeare in Germany comes with its own veritable creation myth. The seventeenth of Lessing's Letters on the Most Recent Literature (1759–65), in which he discards the model of French classicism as advocated by Johann Christoph Gottsched in favor of Shakespeare, assumes, as Roger Paulin puts it, "a kind of status akin to Luther's ninety-five theses" (87). Paulin refuses simply to accept this or any other myth about Shakespeare in Germany. His monumental survey of the Bard's critical reception in Germany from the beginnings to World War I is a sustained effort at demythologizing, contesting the reductively neat teleology of received opinion, largely of nineteenth-century provenance. What his account holds in store for the patient reader is not a counter-narrative of comparable neatness, but an abundance of detail.

Paulin begins not with Lessing and the usual annus mirabilis 1759 but with the remarkably inconspicuous first German mention of Shakespeare in 1682 as one of several English poets "of whom" the author, Daniel Georg Morhof, admits, "I have read nothing^" (12–13). Morhof, a baroque polymath whom Johnson held in high regard, is the first of a long gallery of figures whom Paulin disinters in order to show the intricate workings of literary transmission. Acknowledged luminaries lose some of their luster, while the lesser lights gain some. Lessing's pronouncements on Shakespeare are "often fulsomely and extravagantly" overrated (63); his clichéd notions of "the English character [are] hardly an advance on Morhof" (89). Of the three major Sturm und Drang essayists on Shakespeare (Herder, Goethe, Lenz), we read that "almost nothing they say had not been formulated somewhere before" (151). And Goethe extolling Shakespeare's "nature" is using "the oldest cliché in the book of Shakespearean criticism" (166).

Gottsched, on the other hand, whose reputation never recovered from Lessing's attack, gets more sympathy than the authorized version of Shakespeare in Germany would allow him. His wife, Luise Gottsched, receives high praise for her translations of The Spectator and The Guardian. Making Addison and Steele available to German readers, Paulin argues, was crucial in paving the way for Shakespeare—never mind the Gottscheds' persistently adversarial criticism of the Bard. It is in the detecting of such ironies that Paulin's preoccupation with historical detail pays off.

Paulin shares his passion for the minutiae of literary transmission with his declared hero among eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820). The reviser of Wieland's prose translations, often maligned as a somewhat pedantic, old-fashioned Gottschedian, Eschenburg is Paulin's "first great German Shakespeare scholar" (37). While Lessing, Wieland, Herder, or Goethe "had been strong on advocacy and slender on facts. . . . there was nothing significant about Shakespeare that Eschenburg had not recorded" (120). When we read, moreover, that Eschenburg "sets things out to give the widest representation of literary traditions," that not just "the high peaks of attainment," but "all, great and small, have their apportioned space" in his work, it is tempting to find in this the lineaments of Paulin's own type of scholarship (116–17).

Paulin by no means slights "the high peaks of attainment." The Classical decade from 1795 to 1805, defined by the literary partnership between Goethe and Schiller, not only saw Shakespeare firmly established in the Weimar pantheon of Weltliteratur, but it also produced the Romantic Shakespeare translation which became a canonical part of German literature. August Wilhelm Schlegel's translation, encompassing seventeen plays and completed under the aegis of Ludwig Tieck by Wolf von Baudissin and Tieck's daughter Dorothea, is given due consideration. Its principles, merits, and shortcomings are discussed, and so is the long line of subsequent translators (including such well-nigh forgotten names as Benda or Ortlepp) who attempted to improve on or supplant it.

Translation rightly plays a major part in Paulin's book—the...