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1. The Impact of Shakespeare: Goethe to Melville This chapter was composed for a standard reference work, so it fulfills obligations to facts and coverage, but it also enacts a generic impurity. It generates new thinking by developing an argument and the claims that undergird this book. I argue that literary history operates discontinuously, by what I call ‘‘impact’’ rather than what many have called ‘‘tradition.’’ Literary history ’s discontinuity leaps across, rather than remaining confined within, the borders and barriers of nation or language or genre. Critical response to Shakespeare at the start of the nineteenth century was crucial in producing the modern conception of literature, and hardly had literature come to replace poetry as the key operative term than literature came to mean novels.1  The impact of Shakespeare on romantic literary criticism may be measured in at least three ways. First, by the canon: Starting in the later eighteenth century, a transformation in taste, led and articulated by critical writings, radically changed the value of Shakespeare. In the world of culture and learning, Shakespeare ceased to be a source of pleasure and of interest almost exclusive to England; he became by the 1830s a universal genius known and admired, throughout the West, for his deep insight into the human condition . This newly exemplary pedagogical value made Shakespeare the basis for England’s educational mission in India.2 Shakespeare’s cultural destiny was thus linked to Britain’s rise to world power in the decades from the Seven Years’ War through the Napoleonic struggles. Britain’s wars against France counterpointed and reinforced the challenge Shakespeare offered to the literary values of the French neoclassicism that dominated European thought for more than a century. Second, the place of romantic critics in the canon of Shakespeare studies: German works by August Wilhelm Schlegel and English works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt are landmarks that still serve as points of departure for fresh thinking nearly two 3 4 Politics and the Canon centuries later. Third, Shakespeare was a crucial starting point for important romantic writers as they made innovative contributions in poetry and fiction , as well as in literary criticism and theory: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, John Keats, and Herman Melville provide the major cases for this chapter. In 1850 the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson published Representative Men, choosing Shakespeare to represent ‘‘The Poet.’’ Looking back over the period covered by this chapter, Emerson defined the change: ‘‘Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized.’’ Emerson asserts that only in the nineteenth century could ‘‘the tragedy of Hamlet find such wondering readers,’’ and the reason is because the ‘‘speculative genius’’ of the century is itself ‘‘a sort of living Hamlet.’’ Emerson compares the place Shakespeare had assumed to that which religion was relinquishing: ‘‘[T]here is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which like Christianity, qualifies the period.’’3 In the writings about Shakespeare by those in the first generation to feel his power as a tremendous, surprising discovery (not part of an alreadyknown literary culture), there is indeed a feel of religious conversion. Through Johann Gottfried Herder, the young Goethe came to a new awareness of Shakespeare. Goethe’s first public text on Shakespeare, composed to be read among friends at the celebration of Shakespeare’s name day in 1771, testifies, ‘‘The first page I read of him made me his own for life, and when I had finished the first play I stood as a man born blind to whom a miraculous hand had returned sight in an instant.’’4 Such enthusiasm had not characterized the language of Samuel Johnson, even when Johnson judged Shakespeare unmatched except by Homer in the powers of invention and innovation. Scarcely had Johnson consolidated one point of view in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765, two centuries after Shakespeare’s birth in 1564), than quite a different way of writing about Shakespeare began to emerge in Germany, led by Herder’s ‘‘Shakespeare’’ (1771). Herder at this time exercised an immense effect on Goethe, whose Götz von Berlichingen (1771) was a history play clearly inspired by Shakespeare, but Goethe’s Shakespeare was most importantly enunciated in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796). This novel, and its use of Shakespeare, formed a major nucleus for the thoughts of the younger generation in Germany, especially the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose writings in...

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