Reading Shakespeare in 18th Century English Literary Criticism: The German Case

Moving from the recenbt debates within Shakespearean studies, reception studies and Kulturtransfer, I intend to explore the way in which Shakespeare’s plays were read by some emergent English literary critics and presented to a public of specialists that from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards was not only merely English but certainly international and in particular German. I will focus on some examples from those English essays that were translated into German or reviewed by German critics, since it is mainly from these sources that the image of Shakespeare was re-elaborated for the German public and appropriated by the German critics to respond to specific ideological and aesthetic values.