August Wilhelm Schlegel'Hamlet'-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe by Kaltërina Latifi

Abstract

 Reviews A W S, ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by K L. (Germanistische Texte und Studien, ) Hildesheim and New York: Olms. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Hamlet was not August Wilhelm Schlegel’s favourite Shakespeare play. at honour went to Romeo and Juliet, the play relegated to the last volume in Johnson–Steevens’s and Malone’s Shakespeare editions as well as in Eschenburg’s translation (and in a late volume in Wieland), but now reinstated as the first play in Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke in . A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which followed, assumed the primary position allotted it by Wieland and Eschenburg (and the English editions that they used) and picked up the challenge offered by their versions. ere was still no Hamlet, but Schlegel, having devoted volume  to Julius Caesar and Twelh Night, finally relented in  with the third volume, but in tandem with e Tempest. ere are two points of note here. e translation of Hamlet, a daunting prospect compared with the relatively compact Romeo and Juliet, could be seen not so much as a personal preference but as a reaction to the already massive reception of this play in Germany: with alone in the s Garve’s essay and notably Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the young Tieck’s sheaves of (unpublished) notes and Friedrich Schlegel’s significant mention of it in the so-called ‘Studiumsaufsatz ’. Goethe had already had it performed twice in Weimar in this decade and was to use Schlegel’s translation in , since when it has remained the standard version. ere were negotiations with Iffland, the great actor-manager in Berlin, whose interest in a properly rendered Hamlet would provide a breakthrough in the theatre for the otherwise so literature-oriented Romantics. But more precisely, it was Friedrich Schlegel who put pressure on his brother to complete the translation of this so central text, as part of a wider Romantic programme. August Wilhelm had used his opportunistically named Etwas über William Shakespeare bey Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters of , which has little of memorable value to say about either Wilhelm Meister or the Prince of Denmark, to set out his translation principles, the centrality and appropriateness of verse rendition, and the dignity and worth of translation itself in the dissemination of classical poetic texts. It did not, however, make him a friend of Hamlet, witness his very guarded remarks in his Vienna Lectures, nor indeed did he translate Macbeth, Othello, or Lear. Most—but not all—of these factors inform Kaltërina Latifi’s ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript and give it its raison d’être. ey raise issues of editorial scholarship, some specific to Schlegel’s Shakespeare, some less so. But first of all to the text itself. Since Michael Bernays’s ground-breaking study of , Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare, it has been known that the Dresden royal, later state, library (now SLUB) held the manuscripts of twelve of Schlegel’s Shakespeare translations, indeed all but five, in various stages of completion or redaction, mostly ‘work in progress’, with the sole exception of Romeo and Juliet, written out in a fair copy in Caroline’s hand. ey have been consulted by relatively few scholars, and only individual pages have been reproduced in studies on Shakespeare in Germany and MLR, .,   on Schlegel’s specific role in that process. Only one play, the earlier version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (), has been edited, by the late Frank Jolles in  and—it needs to be said—following principles different from the ones here under discussion. What is the status of the manuscript which is the subject of this edition? It is neither a first dra nor a final copy for the printer. It has what Rudolph Genée in , quoted here with approval, called a ‘Zwischenstellung’, affording us, as it were, a privileged insight into the translator’s desktop (Rudolph Genée, A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (Berlin: Reimer, ), p. ). is also may have involved Caroline, although there is very little sign of it here. What we do have is a diplomatic transcription of the main text of Hamlet in Schlegel’s hand, with the original manuscript reproduced en face. e original...