Erckenbrecht, Ulrich. Shakespeare Sechsundsechzig. Variationen uber ein Sonett. Gottingen: Muriverlag, 1996.199 pp. DM 10.00 paperback. This little book is a highlight in the fascinating (hi)story of German translations of Shakespeare. It collects the astonishing number of 88 different German translations of Shakespeare's sonnet No. 66 (Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.) A long and rather loosely organized introduction deals with general problems of Shakespeare scholarship and provides information on the German reception of Sonnet 66, which has frequently been considered a political poem and which gained relevance in various periods of German history, notably in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, but also in the Federal Republic. The commentary section contains an analysis of the sonnet's form, remarks on the status of the text, an exposition of the volume's editorial principles, a line-by-line commentary on the poem's translations, followed by bibliographical material and expressions of thanks to persons and institutions that helped in the making of the book. It is obvious that an enormous amount of detective work went into the production of this book, for which the assistance of experts in the field of German Shakespeare translation were enlisted, for instance Raimund Borgmeier, Christa Jansohn, and Hannes Stein. He was lucky to be able to use a comprehensive and meticulous bibliography of German translations of Shakespeare's sonnets by Annette Leithner-Brauns in the context of a project directed by Werner Habicht (published a year before Erckenbrecht's book inArchiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen and Literaturen, 285 [1995): 285-316). The author/editor notes that no other work of world literature has been translated as often into German as Shakespeare's sonnets and that none of these 154 sonnets found as many translations as No. 66. The editor did his own part to make the number of translations in his book particularly staggering, for he smuggled (71) nine translations and variations of his own into the collection under ornithological pseudonyms. There are also three translations (Ulrich Sonnemann, Ulrich Horstmann, Achim Amme) commissioned expressly for this volume. But if we subtract these texts and the editor's own versions or variations, which are, incidentally, fine efforts, there still remain an impressive number of texts in this anthology. The editor does not believe in the possibility of an ideal or authoritative translation (69-70) and thus places all translations accessible to him side by side without according any one of them primacy. He believes that all the translations contribute in their entirety to exhausting and expressing the wealth of meaning contained in the original English text. For the most part he excludes free adaptations or rewrites let alone fantasies derived from Shakespeare's text. …