positions, has been translated more
frequently or into a greater number of languages than the works of
Shakespeare. The progress of his reputation in Germany, France, Italy,
and Russia was somewhat slow at the outset. But in Germany the poet has
received for nearly a century and a half a recognition scarcely less
pronounced than that accorded him in America and in his own country.
Three of Shakespeare's plays, now in the Zurich Library, were brought
thither by J. R. Hess from England in 1614. As early as 1626 'Hamlet,'
'King Lear,' and 'Romeo and Juliet' were acted at Dresden, and a version
of the 'Taming of The Shrew' was played there and elsewhere at the end of
the seventeenth century. But such mention of Shakespeare as is found in
German literature between 1640 and 1740 only indicates a knowledge on the
part of German readers either of Dryden's criticisms or of the accounts
of him printed in English encyclopaedias. {342} The earliest sign of a
direct acquaintance with the plays is a poor translation of 'Julius
Caesar' into German by Baron C. W. von Borck, formerly Prussian minister
in London, which was published at Berlin in 1741. A worse rendering of
'Romeo and Juliet' followed in 1758. Meanwhile J. C. Gottsched
(1700-66), an influential man of letters, warmly denounced Shakespeare in
a review of Von Borck's effort in 'Beitrage zur deutschen Sprache' and
elsewhere. Lessing came without delay to Shakespeare's rescue, and set
his reputation, in the estimation of the German public, on that exalted
pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal
entitled 'Litteraturbriefe,' that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare
superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who
hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern
poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his 'Hamburgische
Dramaturgie' (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the
poet Johann Gottfried Herder in the 'Blatter von deutschen Art and
Kunst,' 1771. Christopher Martin Wieland (1733-1813) in 1762 began a
prose translation which Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743-1820) completed
(Zurich, 13 vols., 1775-84). Between 1797 and 1833 there appeared at
intervals the classical German rendering by August Wilhelm von Schlegel
and Ludwig Tieck, leaders of the romantic school of German literature,
whose creed embodied, as one of its first articles, an unwavering
veneration for Shak