Essay
A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur
August Wilhelm Schlegel · 1809
Synopsis
A journey through European theatre, from the Greeks to the moderns, which sets ancient art against a romantic art whose masters are Shakespeare and Calderón. French tragedy, then held to be unsurpassable, is challenged in the very name of the Ancients it invokes, and German dramatists are urged to look in their country's history for the material of a national drama.
Context
The lectures were given in Vienna in 1808, before an audience that Madame de Staël attended, then revised and published from 1809 to 1811. They came out of the translations of Shakespeare and Calderón that their author had been carrying out for years. The French translation, made at Madame de Staël's instigation by Albertine Necker de Saussure, appeared in Paris and Geneva in 1814 and provoked lively controversy; the English one, by John Black, followed in 1815, the Italian in 1817. Read by the leading Italian writers, the latter weighed on the birth of Italian romanticism.
Who it is for
Three volumes of lectures, old and out of copyright; the French translation of 1814 can be read online.
Prizes and reception
The text through which the division between classical and romantic became common currency in European criticism.
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