In this paper, the author is concerned with the transition, in and via translation, from a classicist Shakespeare, mainly confined to the playwright of tragedies and the history plays, to a romantic Shakespeare, also compromising the comedies, in German literature. The author shows how the various translations parallel and reflect the specificity and the development of the German condition in social, political and cultural terms. Moreover, he demonstrates how the various translations contributed to the debates pertaining to these developments.