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Romeo and Juliet in European Culture
Edited by Juan F. Cerdá, Dirk Delabastita and Keith Gregor
[Shakespeare in European Culture 1] 2017
► pp. 61–76

Chapter 3
Romeo and Juliet in Germany

From the English actors to Goethe

| University of California, Santa Barbara

Although Romeo and Juliet was one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to find its way onto the German stage, it was invariably in versions that were far from Shakespeare’s original. Published translations aspired to reflect the original more completely but Shakespeare’s supposed lapses in taste, his constant breach of neoclassical form, and his mixing of tragedy and comedy, along with German translators’ failure to understand the basic principles of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, often led to misunderstandings and misapprehensions. Critics and theorists of the Sturm und Drang developed a comprehensive view of Shakespeare as a heroic genius, but it would take well over a century before their vision could be represented on the German stage.

Keywords: translation, adaptation, stage production, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Goethe, Herder, Lenz, Wieland, Christian Felix Weiße, Englische Comödianten
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Englische Comödianten (English actors)
  • The Enlightenment
  • Sturm und Drang
  • Toward Romanticism
  • Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sec.1.04wil
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Keinänen, Nely
2023. Finland, and Shakespeare. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

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