LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 23:6 June 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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A. W. Schlegel on Romanticism in Lectures on Dramatic Art

Dr. S. Sridevi

Abstract

This paper aims at analysing the perspectives of A. W. Schlegel’s famous work Lectures on Dramatic Art. With the advent of science, literary artists and professors began to write the principles of writing and an urgency to work it out in an objective and scientific manner. Schlegel aims at tracing the way poetic styles shifted from classicism to Romanticism during the 19th century. European writing came under the influence of the Greeks and Latin works, later took influences from Christianised writings of various nations in Europe, inspired by Shakespeare’s writings that broke away from the Greek and Latin model and again met with the Sanskrit texts from India. A great transformation took place amalgamating all these varied influences into a new type of writing, later termed as ‘romantic’ in nature.

Keywords: A. W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art, Shakespeare, Romanticism.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) was a German “translator, philosopher, and poet” who is “considered to be one of the founders of the German Romantic Movement” which was conceived by him “as a European movement” and also he was “one of the most prominent disseminators of its philosophical foundational ideas” in Europe, “most notably in Britain” with his “outstanding knowledge of art, history, literature, architecture, anthropology, and foreign languages” that contributed to the “development of comparative literature and modern linguistics;” he launched “the journal Indische Bibliothek” and thus “inaugurated the domain of Sanskrit studies in Germany”. He was a critic and was famous for “his brilliant translations into German of Shakespeare, which are still used today” (Hay).

“Friedrich Schlegel and his circle” hearkened “back to the old use of romauns as a term distinct from “Latin,” for one of the emergent meanings in contrast with “classic,” that is, Greek and Latin literature” and Friedrich Schlegel recognised classicism in contemporary writers and found qualities of romanticism in Shakespeare, Cervantes and in Italian poetry; in his circle, “romantisch” came to be “identified with modern or Christian”; there were occasions when “it was narrowed to a sense connected to Roman as novel and meant novelish or novelic, the novel being a characteristically modern genre” (Ferber 2).

“We owe some of the best Shakespearean criticism ever written to the Romantics. Between 1808 and 1818, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt” brought in “character criticism” into the analysis of Shakespearean plays and thus the Romantics ushered in “practical criticism;” they introduced “close reading of texts” and aimed at understanding “textual structures as organic wholes, centred and unified in a germ that had only to be laid open to give meaning to the entire work of art;” these essays and lectures initiated “modern criticism and the emergence of a new hermeneutics” that “became almost identical with the history of Shakespeare interpretation through Romanticism” (Grundmann 29).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. S. Sridevi
Professor of English and Principal
Chevalier T. Thomas Elizabeth College for Women
University of Madras
Chennai
sridevisaral@gmail.com
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