Hermann Conrad on Caroline’s Participation
in Wilhelm Schlegel’s Translations of Shakespeare [*]
|3| Between 1797 and 1801, A. W. Schlegel published his famous translation of sixteen of Shakespeare’s plays (Richard III appeared much later, in 1810). The assumption until now has been that this translation contained the authentic text from Schlegel’s hand, since it was prepared by him personally. This latter assumption, however, is not quite correct; such preparation, organization, and execution requires that it be the author who definitively determines the text destined for the printer and then also reads and corrects the proofs.
Neither was the case here. Schlegel himself did not read the proofs; nor was it he who finalized the text destined for the printer (with the exception of the three parts of Henry VI and probably also Richard III), but rather his wife Caroline, who made the printer’s copies from Schlegel’s own manuscripts. For the plays just mentioned, however, she could not do so, since in 1801, when Schlegel translated and published the three parts of Henry VI, she separated from Schlegel. Schlegel himself sent these manuscripts to the printer without receiving back a copy, where, as was always the case, they were torn up, rendered useless, and as a result probably merely thrown away. (The manuscript of As You Like It was lost in some unknown fashion.) The remaining Schlegel manuscripts are housed in the Royal Library in Dresden.
Hence one might reasonably expect to encounter in the printed text of 1797–1801 a number of mistakes made by the copyist [Caroline] and typesetter, which, however, would not affect the authenticity — were but everything else in order! But such is not the case. Schlegel’s manuscripts were not only not yet ready for the printer, they were not ready even for the copyist.
Schlegel’s considerable linguistic talent did not labor itself sick trying to establish a single rendering of a passage that was the best possible rendering; instead, his empathetic literary soul effortlessly came up with the most varied versions, indeed, two, three, four, even seven at a time, not all of which, of course, were of equal value. Some he crossed out immediately after writing them down, and it is precisely in this labor of surveying that his intuitively delicate empathy with the great playwright manifests itself along with his rarely faulty poetic sensibility and feeling in formative matters.
Just as frequently, however, he would leave several different versions, all of which apparently pleased him, standing unmarked on the page, i.e., not crossed out, for later assessment before making a final choice. This final selection, however — what utterly odd insouciance amid such an enormous competence for such solid accomplishment! — was made not by Schlegel himself, but by his copyist, his wife Caroline. And the aforementioned article [Conrad’s own in the Deutsche Revue 36 (November 1911)] demonstrates how unfortunate she could be in her choices.
This liberty, which Schlegel irresponsibly gave her, was joined by yet another, one she appropriated for herself and which Schlegel could not possibly have allowed: she undertook improvements everywhere in his manuscripts. Each of the four manuscripts of plays constituting the subject of my present study contains her handwriting, which is always recognizable at first glance.
To wit, it is as different from Schlegel’s handwriting as were their respective personalities. Schlegel’s handwriting is characterized by feminine grace and elegance — “in many respects, he is not really a man,” Goethe remarked to Eckermann (24 April 1827) — his letters are |5| inclined, virtually free of emphasis, quickly drawn across the paper, and elongated, his curves not really rounded, but rather elongated ovals above and below the line, something seen especially in his h, g, and z; the overall impression is that of facile fleetingness without enough time to fix on paper the flood of linguistic images the foreign playwright awakens in his imagination.
His handwriting betrays how lightly he held the finely sharpened quill in his hand. By contrast, Caroline uses a goose quill with a broad point, which she holds tightly and roughly presses onto the paper: her handwriting is steep, powerful, and clear. No friend of aesthetic fuss or flap, she; her inclination is rather to get to the goal by the shortest route. Whereas Schlegel’s word endings seek their connection with what follows by way of a hooklet rather than a hairstroke,
Caroline consistently forms the ends of her words with a firm downstroke without hairstroke — for why should she lift her foot when she has no intention of putting it down again? — and if the final letter is a t, the final hooklet is omitted. The elongated ovals are so narrow that, given the breadth of her quill, they usually turn into a single thick line; her h is especially ugly, which almost always displays a thick mark beneath the line, and whose brevity is utterly disproportionate to the part above the line.
Since Schlegel writes quite fleetingly, his letters all become more or less unclear, lacking any vertical development; hence his r is rarely written out, the e even less often, and for both he generally makes do with a checklet similar to a pointed Latin v or a Latin script-r without the concluding hooklet; he rarely makes a German a, finding the Latin a more convenient. The ovals beneath the line are frequently not rounded all the way up to the line.
Schlegel’s fleeting nonchalance corresponds to Caroline’s pedantic pettiness, which is confirmed so often in her textual emendations as well; she conscientiously articulates the German e except at the ends of words, where the final hairstroke is missing; she paints the German r and a just as she learned as a young girl; her a is particularly striking, consisting of three graphically distinguishable parts: an o, the final basic mark, and a noticeably long, flat bowing connecting them.
The character of her handwriting is that of undeterred firmness and rigid, exaggerated self-consciousness, which comes to equal expression in the |6| presumed superiority of her poetic sensibility as attested in her textual emendations, a characteristic also mockingly discerned in her entire bearing by both Schiller and Goethe. Her handwriting is so fundamentally different from that of Schlegel that merely a couple of strokes of the quill suffice to recognize it; hence it was by her hand that an improvement to one of Schlegel’s own hasty errors was made in the discourse of Antonius (Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 2):
[Eng.:] You all did love him once, not without cause — [German (Schlegel):] Ihr liebt all ihn einst, nicht ohne Grund — [You all did love him once, not without cause —]
[Ed. note: liebt can be read as liebtet (liebt[et]); Caroline now eliminates the abbreviation for metrical reasons but maintains the tense:]
[German (Caroline):] Ihr liebtet all ihn einst, nicht ohne Grund —
Quite apart from the much darker ink, she reveals her presence in her firmly drawn e in the appended ending -et.
Caroline’s deletions can also consistently be identified as such. Schlegel, perpetually in haste, strikes through one or several words with lines often deviating from horizontal, and frequently with more than one line. If he is striking several lines, he usually uses a series of slanting lines from above to below, often also connecting them with a curve. In his haste, he does not notice whether his quill has enough ink, and must thus often commence once more in order to delete a word.
Caroline is utterly uninterested in such fidgeting; her deletion lines — almost always merely one; two, after all, constitutes superfluous work — are drawn straight and firm, and usually broad, though the occasionally more finely sharpened quills do introduce distinctions from this rule. She usually deletes several lines with an extremely steep line extending from the upper left down to the lower right, rarely with several such marks.
What always makes it easy to recognize her deletions at first glance is her solid ink, which even today maintains its deep black color. And even when in these instances slight variations appear, under a magnifying glass one almost always finds a noticeably darker coloring than is exhibited by Schlegel’s handwriting and deletions on the same page. Schlegel always wrote with diluted ink, which today is yellowed down from black into dark or bright brown.
The changes and deletions from Caroline’s hand can be found in all five of the manuscripts I examined, but nowhere in such profusion as in the fourth and fifth acts of The Merchant of Venice. One can easily explain why such markings do not appear in such profusion elsewhere: As long as the manuscript |7| of a play was copied and Schlegel was still familiar with its final form, he probably examined it from time to time when deleting an old version or adding a new one; and he would certainly have been extraordinarily perturbed had he seen with what insouciance she had rummaged around with her changes in those two acts; after all, he had leveled an extremely sharp and unfair judgment on Tieck’s changes to the first Schlegel-Tieck translation (1825–33), which were in fact largely improvements (in the second Schlegel-Tieck edition [1838–41], Schlegel insisted that the plays he himself had translated be “de-Tiecked,” thus reestablishing his text of 1797–1801).
These two acts, however, unlike the other plays I examined, were indeed organized for final copying, that is, all versions or variations were deleted except one. This phenomenon might perhaps most easily be explained by Schlegel having been absent for a time, a situation giving Caroline more freedom. She likely copied out the first three acts herself, and now she gave the two final acts to someone else, preparing them for the final copy herself.
If from the fact that Caroline’s handwriting in the other manuscripts appears relatively considerably less frequently than in the first two acts of The Merchant of Venice one were to conclude that her “disimproving” activities there were also more restricted, one would be quite off the mark, for the vast majority of Caroline’s changes to Schlegel’s text appear not in his manuscripts, but in the first published edition itself. But this is quite natural: she was, after all, able to change things in the copy she herself was making, and then in the proofs, neither of which Schlegel ever saw, since if he — incredible as it sounds — did not even read the proofs, all the less would he have been concerned with the copies.
That Schlegel did, however, frequently examine the manuscripts after their preparation we can conclude from the fact that Caroline herself repeatedly marked through the variations she had written into the margins — no doubt usually at Schlegel’s behest — and that Schlegel himself deleted a few with his lighter ink. Allow me to explicate here an extremely interesting example in this regard. |8| In Claudius’ monologue (Hamlet act 3, scene 3), when he is trying to find remorse but cannot, we read:
[Eng.:] O! my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't; A brother's murder! [Germ.:] O meine Tat ist faul, sie stinkt zum Himmel; Sie trägt den ersten, ältesten der Flüche, Mord eines Bruders!
Here Caroline marks through Mord [murder] and the two genitive endings -es and -s [eines Bruders, lit. “of a brother”] and writes above the latter mord, also making an upper-case E from the lower-case e in eines; that is, “Mord eines Bruders” became “Ein Brudermord” [a fratricide], a quite natural and also quite obvious — improvement? Not at all. Such would be a fully dynamic equivalent only if Shakespear had said fratricide; but he intended to emphasize “brother,” and therefore said A brother’s murder (he would probably have said Múrdĕr ŏf ă bróthĕr had such not been too free for his metrical sensibility at the time).
In German, however, such cannot be better rendered and thus must be rendered exactly as Schlegel did. Caroline now marked through, at her husband’s instruction, the word added above the line, mord, with her dark ink, the two curves of her upper-case E above and below the line, and wrote a thick lower-case e through the middle of her upper-case E.
But this made the passage quite unclear for the copyist; Schlegel eliminated the difficulty by putting the sign Ϝ both before the words and in the margin with his lighter ink, and wrote once again beneath them “Mord eines Bruders.” This is a nice demonstratio for the relationship between the two translators: here Schlegel’s delicate poetic sensibility, there Caroline’s rash and imprudent naiveté, which unfortunately asserted itself so frequently in the first edition of the plays and from there was perpetuated in all later editions.
For as far as the four plays are concerned which I examined, namely, Julius Caesar (1797), Twelfth Night; or, What You Will (1797), The Tempest (1798), Hamlet (1798) (the next play is The Merchant of Venice, which I examined earlier.), this first edition contains hundreds of variations utterly unattested in Schlegel’s own manuscripts.
It is striking that Bernays, who, he assures us, compared the manuscripts with the first edition, gives no sign of being aware of this situation. Although he is indeed |9| puzzled that Schlegel so often chooses an inferior version from among several, he does not seek any explanation for what can only be described as incomprehensible behavior for a translator like Schlegel. How, for example, can he assume that when Schlegel changes the utterly inappropriate translation “halsstarr’ger Jude” (“stubborn, intractable, obstinate, willful Jew,” The Merchant of Venice, act 4, scene 1, 123 [there: “harsh Jew”]) into “fühlloser [feelingless, emotionless] Jude” in the margin, that it is Schlegel who then turns around and deletes this more appropriate rendering in its own turn, since the contrast between Caroline’s dark ink and thick lines and Schlegel’s light ink and delicate script virtually leaps off every page. Or when Schlegel quite correctly and appropriately translates (The Tempest, act 2, scene 1, 141):
[Eng.:] It is foul weather in us all, good sir, When you are cloudy. [Germ.:] Es ist schlecht Wetter bei uns allen, Herr, Wenn ihr bewölkt (cloudy) seid.
What would have prompted Schlegel to throw out this metaphor — one by no means singular in Shakespeare — and use the word betrübt [grieved, distressed, sad]? This was one of Caroline’s foolish changes, whose poetic sensibility did not quite comprehend this delightful metaphor and who naturally was unaware of the familiar passage in Hamlet (act 1, scene 2, 66):
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
I adduce this passage to characterize the relationship between the philologist Bernays and Caroline as one that is subjective and objectively inappropriate, a relationship the following discussion will demonstrate. Just as he ignores the changes made in Caroline’s visible handwriting in The Merchant of Venice, all of which made their way into the first edition, as irresponsible distortions, telling himself instead that they are in fact not distortions at all, but changes discussed and agreed on by her and Schlegel, so also is he intent on shifting from Caroline’s shoulders the textual bungling of this “betrübt,” which he cannot seriously attribute to Schlegel, whence he comes upon an explanation that I must characterize as untenable scholarship.
He writes (p. 205): “The change was thus not effected until the second copy” (the first copy being Schlegel’s own manuscript, the second Caroline’s copy for the printer) — “If perhaps not here as well” (as was then often the case?!) “it was the typesetter who intruded in an unauthorized fashion and replaced the less frequent word with the more customary one.”
Well — — that Schlegel’s |10| translation of Shakespeare fell into the hands of a typesetter who forged manuscripts without conscience and, exactly like Caroline, without meager linguistic talent and hence with a corresponding disinclination toward any consideration of the original text, “improved” a poet quite according to blind whim, a poet, moreover, who lay quite beyond his powers of comprehension: well, that is a stroke of bad luck of the sort that has rarely indeed happened in world history. —
But why is Bernays intent on so violently cleansing Caroline from this and so many other transgressions? — He does not deny that Caroline did indeed contribute to the formation of Schlegel’s text. If, however, the various nonsense that even he discovered through his less-than-thorough comparison of manuscripts with the first edition were to be attributed to Caroline, then the incompetence of such an assistant could not but cast a dark shadow on a text that Bernays feels called to elevate to such lofty heights.
If he is acting here under the influence of some auto-suggestion, he is to be criticized for such as a man of scholarship. For this power, which can be so fateful in real life and which so often leads us to judge and act erroneously, should not be permitted to acquire such power in scholarship, where one does indeed have the opportunity to establish what is correct through thorough study — in this case: through a thorough comparison of manuscripts with the first edition.
The following passage is also distorted (The Tempest, act 2, scene 1, 216). Schlegel’s manuscript reads:
[Eng.:] Thou . . . wink'st Whiles thou art waking. [Germ.:] Du blinzest Indessen du doch wachst.
In place of this approximately correct translation (wink: to close the eyes entirely, blinzen: to close the eyes halfway), the edition of 1798 has taumelst [to reel, teeter, sway, tumble]. Bernays remarks (Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare 209): “It was not until the second copy that Schlegel was led astray to adopt this strange change.” That is truly a strong presumption. I can find no explanation for this translation except in Caroline’s child-etymology that associated wink with German wanken [stagger, reel, totter]. And one is expected to attribute such to Schlegel? — An even more striking example involve Nerissa’s [Jessica’s] words (The Merchant of Venice act 5, scene 1, 69):
I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
The reference is to the soft, lilting music with which Portia |11| is received in Belmont on that famous moonlit night. Here Schlegel provides three readings using the word froh [merry in the sense of happy, joyful, cheerful, etc.], one with fröhlich [merry in the sense cheerful, happy, light-hearted, etc.], and Caroline forces between the lines two versions with lustig [merry in the more intense sense of gay, jovial, jolly]. And thus do we read in the edition of 1799 and all the following editions:
Nie macht die liebliche Musik mich lustig.
According to Bernays (Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare 239), “Caroline’s hand intervened and saved the day,” or the “correct” version resulted from deliberation with Schlegel. On this reading, then, soft harmonies would make the soul not calm and happy, but make it want to get up and dance. Bernays, by attributing such a choice to Schlegel — flying quite in the face of common sense and artistic taste — is positioning Schlegel too low. How was it possible that here, where Schlegel himself presented four good choices and the nonsense perpetrated by Caroline’s crude handwriting fairly jumped off the page at him, Bernays’s self-deception did not finally come to an end?
Such is quite regrettable, for Bernays’s own sake, for his adoring assessment of Schlegel’s very good but variously distorted translation, a translation that firmly established itself later, would have been justified had he eliminated from the text the mistakes and in part crude distortions from Caroline’s hand and were himself a philologically competent judge of linguistic achievement. In reality, however, it was a case of exaggeration, for the discussion of precisely this question by real experts during recent years has shown that Schlegel’s translation is also merely human.
On the other hand, just how little the absence of Caroline’s handwriting in Schlegel’s manuscript allows one to conclude that his original text has been spared such emendation can be seen — commensurate with the 280 lines of “disimprovements” in the fourth act of The Merchant of Venice discussed in the appendix — from an example from Julius Caesar. Except for a lengthier passage in the discourse of Antonius (manuscript 33b and the top of 34a), which Schlegel seems to have dictated to Caroline from his initial draft, Caroline’s handwriting appears rarely, her deletions |12| a bit more frequently. In the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius (act 1, scene 2), we find absolutely none of her familiar handwriting; in this scene, she seems to have corrected only the punctuation with her extremely dark, strong marks, in part correctly, and in part pedantically.
And yet the changes exhibited by the printing of 1797 are not inconsiderable, and moreover generally represent, as is usually the case, instances of “disimproving”; and when she had to choose between several different versions suggested by Schlegel, she often choose poorly. In the following tables, the versions deleted or marked out by Schlegel himself are bracketed; those that appear to me to be the best (including by Caroline) are italicized.
[Lengthy tables of specific examples in the German text of the play]
This scene of 157 verses with her 16 changes to Schlegel’s text (i.e., 1 of every 10 verses) does not really provide a correct view of the relationship between Schlegel’s first edition and his manuscript insofar as the interpolations are not otherwise so numerous; in the meantime, act 4, scene 3 (the dispute scene) and in Twelfth Night; or, What You Will 1, 3; 1, 5; 2, 3; 2, 5; and 4, 4 are comparable; Caroline’s intrusions into the text, intrusions that rarely constitute improvements, are most numerous in this play, whereas in Hamlet and The Tempest (the latter a difficult text to translate) she was more reserved, albeit not reserved enough by far. This scene also does not really provide a correct view insofar as the changes otherwise are not as harmless as they are here.
We will find among them slips of both understanding and taste that would no doubt have considerably raised Schlegel’s ire had he known about them. This scene does, however, give a completely correct view of the number of genuine improvements, which are always fewer, and the lack of respect which Caroline, in her naive self-assurance, had for the sensibility of her husband as regards poetic style and language.
It is, of course, impossible to adduce every one of the 340 passages in which Caroline changed and usually ruined Schlegel’s text. On the other hand, my assertions can be demonstrated only by providing a number of examples from each of the four plays for each type of error introduced into Schlegel’s text by Caroline’s lack of skill.
Conrad’s ensuing nine chapters provide and discuss, as one can now anticipate, a wealth of examples of the following errors:
• (1) Errors of language;
• (2) errors of understanding;
• (3) correct translation in the manuscript but incorrect in the first edition;
• (4) acceptable version in the manuscript “disimproved” in the first edition;
• (5) poor selection from among several versions presented by Schlegel;
• (6) numerous incomprehensible smaller changes to the manuscript;
• (7) omissions from the manuscript;
• (8) Schlegel’s own translation errors left uncorrected;
• (9) genuine improvements from Caroline’s hand.
His conclusion to his discussion of Caroline’s “disimprovements,” along with the final section concerning her improvements, are worth presenting if for no other reason than that Conrad otherwise so roundly criticizes her contribution:
|75| Here I have presented only a couple of examples of the kind errors in Schlegel’s translation that any attentive and reflective reader could not fail to notice. But one can as little speak of an exhaustive look at this issue as in the other [previous] chapters. This chapter similarly had to be severely restricted insofar as I already published a book in 1906, Schwierigkeiten der Shakspere-Uebersetzung, in which I discussed approximately three hundred errors in Schlegel’s translation; here Julius Caesar and Hamlet are especially well represented.
In this present book, however, I have adduced only passages that are difficult in a larger sense for readers with only an average knowledge of earlier English, or which Schlegel himself severely misunderstood. Apart from these, however, the correct understanding of which seemed important to me, Schlegel made thousands of errors, many of which he could not really avoid making given his primitive auxiliary aids.
[9] Genuine Improvements from Caroline’s Hand
Having criticized Caroline on so many occasions as an arbitrary participant in determining the final form of Schlegel’s text, let us in conclusion now also say something in praise of her. Among her numerous “disimprovements,” she also introduced genuine improvements in several instances when Schlegel’s own translation left something to be desired.
Thus we read in the manuscript of Julius Caesar (act 1, scene 1, 62):
|76|
[Eng.:] and for this fault Assemble all the poor men of your sort; [Manuscript:] Für dieses Vergehn die Armen eures Gleichen [the poor men like you, the same as you] [ed. 1797:] Für dies Vergehn eure armen Brüder. [your poor brethren]
In act 1, scene 2, 45, Brutus says to Cassius in the manuscript:
[Eng.:] Nor construe any further my neglect [of friends]. [Germ.:] Noch mein Versäumen ihrer [der Freunde] anders deuten.
The original text simply says “my neglect”; the edition of 1797 reads:
Noch mein achtloses Wesen anders deuten. [my inattentive, heedless disposition]
At the conclusion of one of the four main parts of the discourse of Antonius (act 3, scene 2, 141), we read in the manuscript concerning Caesar’s hair:
[Eng.:] Bequeathing it as a rich legacy Unto their issue. [Germ.:] Den Erben als ein köstliches Vermächtnis [To the heir as a precious legacy] Es hinterlassend [leaving it behind].
Which is a flat-sounding conclusion to such a discourse. The edition of 1797 reads;
Und hinterliessen's ihres Leibes Erben [And left it to their body's heirs] Zum köstlichen Vermächtnis [as (approx.: to be) a precious legacy].
In Twelfth-Night; or, What You Will, the manuscript reads in act 1, scene 5, 35:
[Eng.:] Wit, an't be thy will, put me into good fooling! [Germ.:] Hilf mir zu einer guten Narrentheidung [archaic word for: Narrenposse, tomfoolerly, buffoonery]
Caroline struck the word Narrentheidung, which even at that time was already archaic and today is virtually unknown, and wrote above it: Posse [more common word for: burroonery, tomfoolery, clowenery, antics].
In the manuscript, Maria intends to trick Malvolio (act 2, scene 3, 146):
[Eng.:] if I do not gull him into a nayword, and make him a common recreation [Germ.:] dass er zum Sprichworte wird und ihn zur allgemeinen Belustigung mache.
Caroline clarifies this constructionless, hastily written sentence (which moreover proves that Schlegel did not read through his manuscript) by striking ihn [him] and mache [make] and writing dient [serves] above them [recasting the sentence as “dient zur allgemeinen Belustigung,” lit. so that he “serves as a common recreation”].
In the manuscript (act 2, scene 5, 31), Malvolio says that Olivia met him with
[Eng.:] more exalted respect than anyone else that follows her
which Schlegel translated as
[Germ.:] als irgend einem von ihren [deleted: Freyern, wooers] Bewunderern [than any one of her admirers].
Here, too, Caroline went back to the original text and found that Schlegel had misunderstood the passage “than any one else that follows her”; only one admirer appears, namely, Duke Orsino. Hence she quite correctly translated:
[Germ.:] als irgend jemand in ihrem Dienst [than anyone else (construed sg.) in her service]
Schlegel considered two possibilities for translating “your master’s mistress” (act 5, scene 1, 34):
[Eng.] you shall from this time be Your master's mistress. [Germ.:] Seyd eures Herren Herrin [be your master's mistress]
and in the margin:
Seyd Herrin eures Herrn. [be mistress of your master]
Caroline correctly struck the latter.
In The Tempest (act 1, scene 2, 71), Prospero says to Ariel in the manuscript:
[Eng.:] Thou my slave, As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant. [Germ.:] Du, mein Sklav || (So nennst du selbst dich) [thus do you call yourself]
But that is not what he does, nor can the words “as thou report’st thyself” mean that. The brackets refer instead to what follows in the passage, and Caroline makes the correction:
[Eng.:] Thou, my slave, As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant. [Germ.:] Du, mein sklav, (So sagst du selbst aus) warst ihr [der Sycorax] Diener damals [(Thus do you yourself state) wast then her [Sycorax'] servant.
|77| In the manuscript (act 3, scene 1, 53), Miranda swears
[Eng.:] but, by my modesty . . . [Germ.:] bei meiner Zucht [discipline, though also: breeding, rearing]
In the edition of 1798, Caroline has replaced this with
[Germ.:] bei meiner Sittsamkeit [here: demureness]
In the manuscript of Hamlet (act 2, scene 2, 570), Hamlet asks the actor
[Eng.:] can you play the Murder of Gonzago? [Germ.:] Könnt ihr die Ermordung Gonzagos spielen
But then Schlegel strikes the article die [the] and orders the sequence of the following two words by placing the numbers 2 1 over them, that is, to be read “Gonzagos Ermordung” [Gonzago’s murder]. In the 1798 edition, Caroline reinserts the original and only appropriate version.
Where Hamlet asks Ophelia, “Are you honest” (act 3, scene 1, 124), the manuscript has the obviously inappropriate [Germ.] rechtschaffen (upright). Caroline struck it and wrote in the margin tugendhaft (honest in the sense of virtuous). (In my own edition of Hamlet [see below], I preferred to use ehrbar [honorable], since it better expresses the specific virtue of which Hamlet is thinking.)
In act 4, scene 5, 206, of the manuscript, the king says:
[Eng.:] If by direct or by collateral hand They find us touch'd, we will our kingdom give [Germ.:] Wenn sie uns grade oder mittelbar Dabei betroffen finden. [if they find us there straight(away) . . .
Caroline struck the impossible word grade and wrote zunächst [first of all, at first, initially]:
[Germ.:] Wenn sie zunächst uns . . .
In act 5, scene 2, 207, of the manuscript, the courtier asks Hamlet at the behest of the king:
[Eng.:] he sends to know if your pleasure hold to play with Laertes, or that you will take longer time. [Germ.:] ob eure Lust, mit Laertes zu fechten, fortdauert oder ob ihr längere Zeit dazu verlangt [or whether you will take/need/demand longer time, "longer time" being an anglicism]
In place of this incorrect manner of expression [i.e., the anglicism], we read in 1798 [from Caroline’s hand]:
[Germ.:] oder ob ihr längeren Aufschubdazu verlangt [or whether you take/need/demand longer postponement/delay for it]
The number of improvements, especially of more modest ones, might reach approximately thirty; on the whole, they are negligible compared to the mass of textual distortions. In the first edition of these four plays, I have counted 331 ruined passages that in Schlegel’s manuscripts still attested an acceptable, good, or even excellent translation. Any conscientious editor would have incorporated Schlegel’s versions into his text, and where several were available, would have determined the best and most appropriate on the basis of philological expertise and poetic sensibility, both of which were indispensable for such work.
As we have seen, Caroline possessed the latter characteristic only in quite modest proportions, and so little of the first that only in a few passages (mentioned above) did she trust herself even to look at the English original; there can be no talk of any more comprehensive improvement of Schlegel’s own translation mistakes, |78| something one might indeed have expected given the high-handedness with which she took such liberties in correcting Schlegel’s delicate work.
She in fact exhibits nothing of that particular subtle sensibility for linguistic form and rendering that in fact is bestowed much more freely on women than on us; in that sense, she was more a man than a woman, and it was her husband who possessed to an extraordinary degree precisely that which she lacked, namely, the subtle feminine sensibility and sympathetic capacity.
Dame Lucifer, as the much-reviled Schiller referred to her, brought to this edition solely a romantic notion of her own self and the facile conviction, one so often associated with such a notion, that the arbitrary sense of preference deriving from the boundless depths of her genius — the arbitrary sense of her preferences — would always make the correct and exemplary choice. And this text of the first edition, a text so ruthlessly distorted by such an editor as she, has hitherto been viewed as authentic because, apart from Bernays, no one was acquainted with the original text.
What remains is to determine the precise, quantifiable relationship between this scholar, Schlegel’s manuscripts, and the first edition, an edition brought to production allegedly by Schlegel but in reality largely by Caroline, a relationship, moreover, that in a larger sense emerges unequivocally from the numerous examples adduced here. [Ed. not: In the following discussion, I omit Conrad’s footnotes with passage cites.] In the preface to the first edition of (1871) [of Bernays’s edition of Wilhelm’s translation] — the oft-cited book [Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare] appeared a year later, as it were as an explication for his mode of textual recovery — we read (p. viii; cited according to the second edition 1891): “Here only a single guideline was imposed: the preservation, the unaltered preservation of the text [these and following italics from Conrad], as determined by the first edition. The editor was not authorized to effect any changes excepting when it was possible to correct Schlegel by Schlegel himself.” Bernays then emphasizes that he was able
to undertake a careful comparison of these manuscripts with the transmitted text; the present edition is the first to profit from the results of such an examination, and as such it claims independent value over against all previous editions of Schlegel’s translation.
In the preface to the new printing (1891), he writes (p. xv): “The principles according to which [the text] was treated and determined at that time (1871) |79| were affirmed by all who are in a position to pass such judgment.” — Unfortunately, “all those in a position to pass such judgment” were not in a position to examine the extent to which these principles were put into practice. — And: “The translation was examined anew with constant reference to the original text. During this new examination, Schlegel’s manuscripts provided the desired assistance.”
Even Bernays’s fundamental principle for determining the text as described in the preface arouses considerable reservations. If the text of that first edition (1797–1801) was indeed in as ruined a condition as has been demonstrated here with almost 150 examples, then the preservation of such a text should not possibly have been the editor’s primary task, but rather the reestablishment of the massively interpolated original text according to Schlegel’s manuscripts. Such a principle could be presented only by someone who had not recognized the distorted condition of the text of that first edition; and only someone who had only superficially compared this text with the manuscripts could still have such lack of knowledge.
Bernays cannot escape this reproach through his repeated presupposition that the deviations from the manuscripts found their way into the copied or printed text through an agreement between Schlegel and Caroline — viz. while Caroline was copying out Schlegel’s manuscripts for the printer or during the proof stage. For only someone who has only superficially compared the editio princeps with the original text can state such a presupposition.
It is simply inconceivable that Schlegel could have accepted all the meaningless, incorrect, and tasteless versions of the first printing adduced here that took the place of meaningful, correct, and tasteful versions of his manuscripts; for it is inconceivable that one of the most subtle translators in the German language alongside Luther could simultaneously be an extremely mediocre translator.
According to the material presented in this present study — only a good third of the overall material — Bernays accepted 69 inadequate |80| versions from Caroline’s hand — moreover without closer inspection; it is unbelievable that in all these cases he was aware of Schlegel’s better version and checked it against the original and then, Schlegel and Shakespeare notwithstanding, chose Caroline’s inferior version. In the vast majority of these instances, he obviously was not acquainted with the manuscript version and obviously did not compare Shakespeare’s original text.
The same applies to the 44 instances when he accepted Caroline’s inferior choice from among several manuscript versions; that, too, happened largely without any knowledge of Schlegel’s own manuscripts and Shakespeare’s original text. Moreover, in several instances in his book he was unfortunate enough to recognize the manuscript version as the better one, and yet in the second edition of his translation nonetheless to maintain Caroline’s inferior version from the first edition. These 113 inauthentic or incorrect versions stand over against 28 improvements to Schlegel’s first edition according to Schlegel’s manuscripts.
Such is the relationship regarding the material presented here. In the preface to his book (Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare, 2), Bernays states that he intends to present “a modest selection of [his] improvements” according to Schlegel’s manuscripts. Except for the examples given in his book, however, I have found in his text of these four plays only about twenty improvements |81| deriving from Schlegel’s manuscripts.
I myself have found 331 passages in these four plays that could be improved according to Schlegel’s original text, but only just at 50 passages in Bernays’s second edition that genuinely have been improved. Given the over 10,000 lines overall, that is indeed a meager gain. And given Bernays’s so sporadic use of Schlegel’s manuscripts, he in any event has no right to boast that “as such” his own edition can claim “independent value.” He does seem to have done a more thorough study with respect to Midsummer-Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, which fill the larger half of his book.
In what follows, these four plays along with The Merchant of Venice will be mentioned most often; the other plays, with whose debit and credit I am not acquainted, only occasionally. With respect to the five plays mentioned — concerning The Merchant of Venice see the article in the Deutsche Revue [reprinted as an appendix to Conrad’s study] — he seems to have taken only random samples; there can simply be no talk of any conscientious word-for-word comparison of the first edition with Schlegel’s manuscripts of the sort on which this present study is based.
Conrad’s article from the Deutsche Revue 36 (November 1911) is then reprinted in a slightly abridged version as an appendix to the present study. Some of his remarks are of interest with respect to the overall situation involving Schlegel’s translations and Caroline’s contribution:
Caroline’s Textual Distortions in the fourth and fifth Acts
of The Merchant of Venice
|82| Wilhelm Schlegel is such an extraordinary translator that it is not only interesting, but also quite instructive for the purpose of producing a text as complete as possible to become acquainted with the genesis of his work, specifically in the manuscripts housed in the Dresden Royal Library, whose still unfinished texts contain a wealth of versions alongside that which was sent to the printer.
Unfortunately, only twelve of the plays translated by Schlegel are extant as manuscripts: Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Twelfth-Night; or, What You Will; The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, The Life and Death of King John, The Tragedy of King Richard II, parts one and two of King Henry IV, and The Life of King Henry V. The other five have been lost: nothing is known of the fate of the lost comedy As You Like It.
According to Schlegel’s own words, no copies of the three part of Henry VI exist; the hastily and fleetingly produced initial drafts were |83| sent directly to the printer; such was probably also the case with Richard III. By contrast, two manuscripts of Romeo and Juliet exist, one of which is a copy by Caroline Schlegel; the same applies to A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, which is extant as an initial draft and as a first copy by Schlegel himself. The remaining are all Schlegel’s initial copies of drafts with numerous corrections, improvements, and parallel versions, among the latter of which only some were crossed out, i.e., immediately discarded, the others being translation possibilities among the best of which Schlegel still had to choose before sending the text to the printer.
The assumption has been that Schlegel’s wife Caroline prepared the copies of her husband’s manuscripts destined for the printer, considering that a copy of Romeo and Juliet exists in her handwriting and because she probably also — according to an unequivocal passage in one of her letters (see Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare 22) [7 September 1797; letter no. 185 in present edition] — prepared a copy of Twelfth-Night; or, What You Will. Although one does not know for sure whether she did the same thing with the other plays, one can be almost certain insofar as her handwriting appears in every one of Schlegel’s manuscripts up to their separation (1801) and because her interpolations all appear in the first edition (1797–1801).
The assumption is wholly untenable that in every single case Schlegel told her which of the yet undeleted versions of the same passage he wanted to go to the printer; in that case, given his extreme lack of time, which even made it impossible for him to read the proofs of such an epochal work himself (Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare 5fn2), he would have acted in a much more practical fashion had he himself marked out or otherwise eliminated all the versions in his manuscript except the best one.
The fourth and fifth acts of The Merchant of Venice resolve this question, a question that is so important with respect to the authenticity of the text that went to the printer under Schlegel’s name. Here — though it remains unclear why here alone and not in the first through third acts as well — every textual version except for one has been marked out, so that this part genuinely has already been prepared for the second copy, that is, the copy to be sent to the printer. The markings, however, were not made with Schlegel’s own delicate, light hand, nor with his lighter |84| ink, but with Caroline’s coarser hand and with ink that even today is still deep black. And the first printing of 1799 contains all the versions she selected.
Unfortunately, however, she allowed herself even greater liberties. Often none of Schlegel’s versions or suggestions satisfied her; in that case, she struck through them all and wrote her own version above them. Such, too, appears in the familiar, so-called Schlegelian text, as if it genuinely came from Schlegel himself. But since her own poetic and stylistic gifts lay far beneath those of her spouse, the overwhelming majority of her versions in fact constitute “disimprovements.”
In the manuscript of Romeo and Juliet, Schlegel himself writes in the margin next to a passage: “C[aroline] is rigidly intent on understanding this differently” (Bernays, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare 240). This is the passage in which Friar Laurence appears at Juliet’s coffin and Juliet addresses him in Schlegel’s version (act 5, scene 3):
[Eng.:] O, comfortable friar! where is my lord? [Germ.:] O güt'ger Vater! wo ist mein Gemahl?
Caroline’s version stands in today’s text: “O Trostesbringer!” [O bringer of consolation, comfort]. She was familiar with the meaning of comfortable as “tröstlich” [comforting, consoling]; she did not know its meaning, one frequent at the time but now considered archaic, as “helpful, amiable, affable, kind”; one cannot, of course, really hold such lack of acquaintance against her. Neither was Schlegel familiar with it, but he did sense that there could be no talk of consolation in this situation, and that Caroline’s translation is wholly impossible; thus did he intuitively translate correctly and beautifully just as he did.
Conrad presents ten examples to illustrate his case, then continues:
|89| These ten “disimprovements” in not even three hundred verses (though I count fifteen) probably suffice. But the same occurs throughout the entirety of the two acts: all the versions of a passage that do not satisfy her, Caroline strikes through, leaving but one, albeit one which, as we have seen, is frequently inferior; often none of Schlegel’s own versions satisfies her, in which case she enters her own, which in a few instances genuinely do constitute an improvement, in others not entirely a debasement of the text, but in the majority of instances a “disimprovement” of Schlegel’s text. |90| If we are to have a text from Schlegel, it must also be the pure text from Schlegel, without changes from someone else’s hand.
There can be no question that Caroline’s work here was done independently; it would be naive to assume that Schlegel sat next to her and pronounced his yes and amen to every deletion and every recasting of any given passage; such would have been a waste of time that this man, who did not even take the time to read proofs, would hardly have allowed himself. Instead, he either left this work up to Caroline’s poetic and stylistic sensibility and judgment, thereby demonstrating excessive trust that was also not entirely free of a considerable dose of insouciant carelessness, or Caroline herself made these changes without his knowledge. The latter seems most probable.
Now, one might object that even if Schlegel did give his wife a free hand in revising his text, he did afterward read through her deletions and corrections. Such is doubtless Bernay’s unspoken assumption, for otherwise he could not support Caroline’s inferior versions with a conviction that is in its own turn comprehensible only if one assumes that the auto-suggestion of his enthusiasm for Schlegel momentarily crippled his otherwise so evident poetic taste.
Whoever places Schlegel as a translator as high as he indeed must be placed, cannot, to the extent his judgment remains firm and unbiased — such a person simply cannot assume that in so many instance Schlegel’s subtle sensibility really did choose from among the different versions precisely the most coarse, inaccurate, poetically worthless one. I have saved for last a passage that irretrievably slays, once and for all, the assumption that Caroline’s corrections came about with Schlegel’s subsequent concurrence.
|91| Jessica responds to the soft music with which Portia is received at home on her wedding night (The Merchant of Venice, act 5, scene 1):
[Eng.:] I am never merry when I hear sweet music.
Schlegel’s text reads today:
[Germ.:] Nie macht die liebliche Musik mich lustig.
(Thus in the editions of Schlegel of 1799, and in that of Schlegel and Tieck 1841; in the edition of 1826, Tieck used “fröhlich,” a change later withdrawn.) This word [lustig, see discussion above] is a slap in the face for anyone with even a modicum of poetic sensibility; and I still remember quite vividly the stupefied incomprehension I felt when reading the revision of this passage for the first time years ago, being utterly unable to comprehend how precisely Schlegel, of all people, could have played such a coarse trick on this simple and pregnant verse. To be lustig means to laugh, shout, yodel, rejoice, dance, jump for joy: and a delicate, elegiac piece of music is supposed to have such an effect!? “Sweet” music with its soft harmonies sooner calms the soul, filling it with gentle, amiable feelings and making it thereby “froh.” It is with this word that I myself replaced the truly stupid word “lustig“:
[Germ.:] Nie stimmt die lieblich Musik mich froh.
When reading Schlegel’s manuscript [viz. rather than the published play], I apologized to Schlegel’s manes: he himself had not been responsible for this outrageous tastelessness after all, and the suspicion that he had been was itself an insult to him. He suggested no fewer than four versions for this verse, one with fröhlich (this word designates a more superficial feeling) and three with froh:
[Germ.:] Nie hör' ich fröhlich liebliche Musik. [Never do I merrily hear sweet music.] [Germ.:] Nie bin ich froh, spielt liebliche Musik. [Never am I happy/merry when sweet music plays.] [Germ.:] Nie bin ich froh, wenn ich Musik vernehme. [Never am I happy/merry when I perceive music.] [Germ.:] Nie bin ich froh bei lieblicher Musik. [Never am I merry/happy amid sweet music.]
(A beautiful version.) Thereafter we find two versions from Caroline:
[Germ.] Nie war bei lieblicher Musik ich lustig. [Never was I jovial/jolly amid sweet music.] [Germ.:] Nie macht die liebliche Musik mich lustig. [Never does sweet music make me jovial/jolly.]
An external circumstance also demonstrates that Schlegel never saw Caroline’s textual emendations at all. Throughout the entire fourth and fifth acts, we never once see, |93| beneath a coarsely deleted but beautiful version, the reinsertion points that occur frequently enough beneath the versions which he himself has previously marked through or deleted, nor any corrections to the other handwriting with the thick basic lines. And such would doubtless be in evidence had Schlegel read through Caroline’s botchwork.
Since, then, the first edition is not an authentic edition, then all editions based on that first one alone, rather than on Schlegel’s manuscripts, are worthless. For it is only his manuscripts, not the edition of 1799, that contain Schlegel’s authentic text; and as soon as in that first edition of the plays that appeared between 1797 and 1801 a version or reading appears that is not confirmed by Schlegel’s own manuscripts, one can assume that that reading was interpolated not by Schlegel, but by Caroline. For the plays for which no manuscript from Schlegel himself exists, we have absolutely no way to determine the degree of their authenticity, since we cannot determine which textual mutilations made their way to the printer through the more or less impious copyist, or through the more or less neglectful proofer.
Perhaps precisely these plays (excepting As You Like It, which was translated earlier) — plays in which Caroline’s false self-estimation either possibly or reliably could no longer cause any damage (for Henry VI appeared in 1801, the year her marriage to Schlegel fell apart, and Richard III in 1810, a year after her death) — perhaps precisely these plays contain a more authentic text.
But we cannot know. The most authentic text is apparently found in the three plays that he revised for the second Schlegel-Tieck edition, whose proofs he admittedly also never saw, namely, King John, Richard II, and the first part of Henry IV. Given the advanced age at which Schlegel undertook this revision, it is doubtful whether the changes in these plays all represent improvements over against the first edition. In King John in any case, which I have compared, the improvements do just manage to predominate.
With respect to Hermann Conrad’s own edition of Shakespeare, see Richard Jonas, “Ausgaben von Dichtwerken; Erläuterungsschriften,” Jahresberichte über das höhere Schulwesen, ed. Conrad Rethwisch, 21 (1906) (Berlin 1907), 39:
One particularly noteworthy enterprise is the edition W. Shakespeares dramatische Werke, translated by A. W. Schlegel and L. Tieck, revised by Hermann Conrad, 5 volumes (Stuttgart, Leipzig 1905). People have tenaciously clung to the notion that the Shakespeare translation of Schlegel and Tieck was to a certain extent unsurpassable, a view also supported by Bernays, even though he himself corrected and improved Schlegel in several passages. Schlegel himself, by the way, translated only 17 plays, the rest being rendered not even by Tieck, but under his guidance by his daughter Dorothea and by Baudissin.
The quality of the latters’ translations — something connoisseurs have long known — fell far short of those of Schlegel. People gradually also became convinced that the Schlegel-Tieck translation itself was in need of a not inconsiderable number of corrections, and Hermann Conrad, as one competent reviewer has put it, “a solid connoisseur of the English language and literature and himself positioned among the very best Shakespeare scholars today,” has undertaken a revision of the Schlegel-Tieck translation whose results are now accessible in this tastefully produced edition.
The aforementioned reviewer has declared that Conrad was completely successful in “presenting to the educated German reader the works of the great Briton in a form that, notwithstanding the power of the poetic expression, accords as far as possible with the demands we make on language today, and has done so in a form faithfully rendering the original text not only in the larger sense, but also in specifics, and which does not disrupt one’s enjoyment through linguistic peculiarities or harshness.” It is quite true that the original Shakespeare translation exhibits a whole panoply of such peculiarities and harshness.
In such cases, Conrad has improved the text and removed much that could not but seem offensive. He himself has explicated the principles that guided him in this undertaking in the very readable essay “Eine neue Revision der Schlegelschen Shakespeare-Übersetzung,” Preussische Jahrbücher 111 (1903) no. 1, 67–97. There he illuminates a large number of passages needing improvement and the manner in which he indeed improved them.
See also Rudolf Genée, A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare: ein Beitrag zur Würdigung der Schlegelschen Übersetzungen (Berlin 1903). Genée deals at length with the working manuscripts (i.e., not the final copies from which the translations were printed) of Wilhelm Schlegel’s translations in the Dresden State Library. This detailed study of Schlegel’s countless changes and exhaustive attempts to find the right word or poetic rendering enables Genée to establish the principles guiding Schlegel’s translations. He was also, however, able to discern much of Caroline’s hand in the translations, especially of Romeo and Juliet (here 23, 28–29):
|23| Only the second working copy of Romeo and Juliet comes from the hand of Caroline Schlegel, the writer’s wife; all the others were written by Schlegel himself. . . .
|28| As already noted, we have Romeo and Juliet not only in a manuscript written by Schlegel himself, but also as a copy by Caroline Schlegel, who during this period yet took and extremely active part in the Shakespeare translation, something one can also ascertain from several smaller changes she entered in her spouse’s manuscript. Even though some of these changes can indeed be acknowledged as improvements, her own final copy of this tragedy suggests she was also the source of some of the inadvertent copying errors and omissions that found their way into the published edition.
|29| Toward the end of the first scene in act 1, one of Romeo’s lengthier passages, in this instance about love, is rendered as follows in Schlegel’s manuscript:
[Eng.:] Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears [Germ.:] Gequält, ein Meer von Thränen angeschwellt —
In Caroline’s copy one reads “sighs” [Seufzer] instead of “tears” [Tränen], though the published version reads as did Schlegel’s initial manuscript. — In the second scene, toward the end of Capulet’s lengthier discourse, one reads:
[Eng., stage directions:] [To Servant, giving him a paper.] [Germ.:] Du, Bursch, nimm dies Papier mit Namen —
Schlegel’s manuscript reads “full of names [voll Namen], and in Caroline’s copy, Schlegel himself changed “with” [mit], which she was fond of using, back to “full” [voll].
In the fourth scene of act 2, in Mercutio’s discourse we read:
[Eng.:] More than prince of cats, I can tell you etc. . . . a duellist, a duelist . . . [Germ.] Kein papierner Held, das kann ich dir sagen. . . . Ein Raufer! Ein Raufer!
The manuscript has “Ein Fechter! Ein Fechter!” [fencer, here in the sense of swordsman] instead of “Ein Raufer! Ein Raufer! [here: a rowdy or tough]. In any event, Schlegel did not make the change for publication until later, one also according with the sense of the English: A duellist! So also in the first scene of act 3, when after Romeo’s evasive answer Mercutio intervenes, the initial reading was:
[Eng.:] O calm, dishonourable, vile submission! Alla stoccata [at the thrust] carries it away [Germ.:] O zahme, schimpfliche, verhasste Demuth! Die Klinge wetzt es aus mit Hieb und Stich [The blade runs off (grinds it out) with stroke and thrust] —
Schlegel changed the second line for publication into:
Die Kunst des Raufers trägt den Sieg davon [The art of the rowdy will carry the victory].
In the second scene of act 3, in Juliet’s discourse, “O serpent heart etc.,” the first manuscript reads
[Eng.:] Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st; A damned saint, an honourable villain! [Germ.:] Das rechte Gegentheil dess, was mit Recht Du scheinest: ein verdammter Heiliger! Ein ehrenwerther [lit. "worthy of honor, honor-able"] Schurke!
Although Caroline’s copy used the term ehrenvoller [lit.: “full of honor”], the correct reading was reinserted for publication.
Notes
[*] Hermann Conrad, “Karolinens Textentstellungen im vierten und fünften Akt des Kaufmanns von Venedig (Caroline’s textual distortions in acts 4 and 5 of The Merchant of Venice),” originally published (with a slightly different title) in Deutsche Revue 36 (November 1911), reprinted (slightly altered) in the appendix of Conrad’s Unechtheiten in der ersten Ausgabe der Schlegelschen Shakspere-Übersetzung (1797–1801): nachgewiesen aus seinen Manuskripten (Inauthenticities in the first edition of the Schlegel translation of Shakespeare, demonstrated on the basis of his manuscripts) (Berlin 1912) (reprinted material from Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht [1912] issues 4–6, and Deutsche Revue 36 [Nov. 1911]).
Pagination from: Unechtheiten in der ersten Ausgabe der Schlegelschen Shakspere-Übersetzung (1797–1801). Back.
Translation © 2012 Doug Stott