The Making of a Shakespeare Critic: Partial English Translations of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wilhelm’s reflections in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1794/95) significantly influenced the history of Hamlet criticism. The belief that Goethe used his protagonist to present his own analyses was both reflected in and reinforced by partial English translations of the German novel that appeared in British periodicals and anthologies throughout the long nineteenth century. Due to their usefulness for critical discussions, and for British publishers targeting new audiences, Wilhelm’s disquisitions were repeatedly extracted, adapted and remediated by translators and editors who exploited Goethe’s shifting reputation in nineteenth-century Britain. At their hands, pieces of fictional dialogue were reconfigured into autonomous pieces of critical commentary that served specific agendas in the target culture. Building on recent work on remediation, this article analyses both how parts of the novel underwent changes on the textual, paratextual, material and contextual levels, and why translations made them cross the fluid boundary between fiction and literary criticism.