August Wilhelm von Schlegel

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Hanover, 1767 – Bonn, 1845) was a German scholar whose work spanned literary criticism, translation, poetry and, in the later part of his life, Oriental studies. A central figure of early German Romanticism alongside his brother Friedrich, he is remembered today above all for his translations of Shakespeare and Calderón and for helping to introduce Sanskrit studies to continental Europe.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, he began by studying theology at the University of Göttingen, but soon turned to philology under the influence of Heyne and the poet Bürger, with whom he read Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare. After years as a tutor to the son of an Amsterdam banker, he settled in Jena in 1796 at Schiller's invitation and married Caroline Schelling there. Jena became the meeting point of the Romantic circle, which gathered around Fichte, Novalis and Tieck. With his brother he founded the journal Athenaeum (1798–1800), the organ of the Romantic school, and began a translation of Shakespeare that would become one of the most admired poetic versions in German. His translations of Calderón and other Spanish dramatists helped revive interest in Spanish Baroque theatre in the German-speaking world.

In his criticism he held that a critic should not judge a work by fixed rules but seek to understand its individuality and originality. He set out these views in his Vienna lectures, On Dramatic Art and Literature (1809–1811), which were widely read across Europe. Between 1804 and 1812 he travelled with Madame de Staël, whose book De l'Allemagne owed much to his ideas, and he later served as press secretary to the Swedish crown prince. In 1818 he became a professor at Bonn, where he devoted himself mainly to Oriental studies. He published the Indische Bibliothek, edited the Bhagavad Gita with a Latin translation and the Ramayana, and proposed an early typological classification of languages into agglutinative, isolating, inflectional and incorporating types.

As an original poet Schlegel is not considered major, but as a translator and mediator between cultures he left a lasting mark. His work did much to popularise Elizabethan drama and Spanish Baroque theatre in Germany and opened the way for European Indology.