Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge: Great Shakespeareans: Volume III

212 Pages·2010·1.51 MB·English

by  Roger Paulin & Adrian Poole & Peter Holland

Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge
Great Shakespeareans
Volume III
Great Shakespeareans
Each volume in the series provides a critical account and analysis of those fi gures
who have had the greatest infl uence on the interpretation, understanding and
cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and around the world.
General Series Editors:
Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA
Adrian Poole, Trinity College Cambridge, UK
Editorial Advisory Board:
David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Cordner (University of York,
UK), Michael Dobson (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK), Dominique
Goy-Blanquet (University of Picardy, France), Barbara Hodgdon (University of
Michigan, USA), Andreas Höfele (University of Munich, Germany), Tetsuo Kishi
(Kyoto University, Japan), Russ McDonald (Goldsmith’s College, University of
London, UK), Ruth Morse (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, France), Michael
Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Stephen Orgel (Stanford University,
USA), Carol Rutter (University of Warwick, UK), Ann Thompson (King’s College,
University of London, UK) and Paul Yachnin (McGill University, Canada).
Great Shakespeareans: Set I
Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, Edited by Claude Rawson
Volume II: Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean, Edited by Peter Holland
Volume III: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, Edited by Roger Paulin
Volume IV: Lamb, Hazlitt, Keats, Edited by Adrian Poole
Great Shakespeareans: Set II
Volume V: Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Edited by Adrian Poole
Volume VI: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry, Edited by Richard Schoch
Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, Edited by Gail Marshall
Volume VIII: James, Melville, Emerson, Berryman, Edited by Peter Rawlings
Volume IX: Bradley, Greg, Folger, Edited by Cary DiPietro
Great Shakespeareans: Set III
Volume X: Marx and Freud, Crystal Bartolovich, Jean Howard and David Hillman
Volume XI: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, Edited by Daniel Albright
Volume XII: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett, Edited by Adrian Poole
Volume XIII: Wilson Knight, Empson, Kott, Edited by Hugh Grady
Great Shakespeareans: Set IV
Volume XIV: Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire, Bonnefoy, Edited by Ruth Morse
Volume XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, Edited by Cary Mazer
Volume XVI: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, Edited by Russell Jackson
Volume XVII: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffi relli Mark Thornton Burnett, Kathy
Howlett, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona Wray
Volume XVIII: Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage, Edited by Peter Holland
Voltaire, Goethe,
Schlegel, Coleridge
Great Shakespeareans
Volume III
Edited by
Roger Paulin
Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in 2010 by the Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
Reprinted by Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare 2013
© Roger Paulin and contributors, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-0-8264-3123-3
ePDF: 978-1-4411-7542-7
ePub: 978-1-4725-3912-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents
Series Preface vii
Peter Holland and Adrian Poole
Notes on Contributors ix
Note on References to Shakespeare xi
Introduction 1
Roger Paulin
Chapter 1 Voltaire 5
Michèle Willems
Chapter 2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe 44
Stephen Fennell
Chapter 3 August Wilhelm Schlegel 92
Christine Roger and Roger Paulin
Chapter 4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 128
Reginald Foakes
Notes 173
Select Bibliography 189
Index 193
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Series Preface
What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This
series is designed to explore those fi gures who have had the greatest infl u-
ence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare,
both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on
cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we con-
tinually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each cul-
ture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals
whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of
its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important fi gures
in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is, therefore, not
restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and com-
mentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact
is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and
Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson), but our list delib-
erately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats,
Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers
(Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impos-
sible without Shakespeare and whose infl uence on our world has been pro-
found, like Marx and Freud.
Deciding who to include has been less diffi cult than deciding who to
exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have
found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclu-
sion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped
by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous
regrets over some outstanding fi gures who ended up just outside this proj-
ect. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may fi nd our
choices too Anglophone, insuffi ciently global. Others may complain of the
lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed
to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopae-
dic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor
viii Series Preface
is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiat-
ing and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and
arbitrariness.
Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of
Shakespeare on their particular fi gure and of their fi gure on the under-
standing, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as pro-
viding a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography
and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might
be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case, and, at
times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasp-
ing a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window
through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition
like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden
has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of
the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays infl uenced
Dryden’s own practice.
To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have
taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes
do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopaedia
would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and
Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans
per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors
have space to present their fi gures more substantially and, we trust, more
engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and
a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who
already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean
and to those trying to fi nd a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected
a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our apprecia-
tion of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our
readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures,
and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across
the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has
meant.
Peter Holland and Adrian Poole
Notes on Contributors
Stephen Fennell lectures at the University of Cambridge. He researches
on eighteenth-century German literature and philosophy, and on the con-
tact between German and Asian literatures and philological traditions. He
has published on Hölderlin, Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, and lectured
widely on comparative literature.
Reginald Foakes, Emeritus Professor at UCLA, edited Coleridge’s Lectures
1808–1819 On Literature for the Bollingen Foundation edition of Coleridge’s
Collected Works (2 vols, Princeton University Press, 1987), and then a selec-
tion of Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare (Athlone Press, 1989). He has
also published a number of essays on related topics such as Coleridge’s
concept of dramatic illusion, most recently in the Coleridge Bulletin, New
Series, 29 (Summer, 2007).
Roger Paulin is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German in the University
of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of Ludwig
Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), The
Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914: Native Literature
and Foreign Genius (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003) and has edited the volume
Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007).
Christine Roger teaches at the Université de Picardie, Jules Verne, at
Amiens, and works on the literary and cultural relationships between
Germany, France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. Her publications include Shakespeare vu d’Allemagne et de France des
Lumières au Romantisme, sous la direction de C. Roger (Paris: CNRS edi-
tions, 2007), and La réception de Shakespeare en Allemagne de 1815 à 1850:
propagation et assimilation de la référence étrangère, avec une préface de Roger
Paulin (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008).
Michèle Willems is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the
University of Rouen. Her publications, both in French and English, are
centred on the representation of Shakespeare’s drama through the ages,