Luther’s Bible translation famously fixed a modern literary standard for written German. This fact became a matter of deliberate cultural reflection with the generation of Jacob Grimm, whose philological work convinced him that the language had been prone to corruption and in imminent danger of being supplanted by Latinate influences for learned and literary purposes until Luther’s Bible provided a robust, native alternative. This view of Luther’s Bible as not only a theological foundation for the German religious Reformation, but also a lexical foundation for the survival and codification of the German language, merged into a single ethnotypical moral-linguistic appreciation. By safeguarding for the Germans their own, honest language, Luther had kept German communication untainted by the insidious forces of Latinization and papist corruption; conversely, the German language was imbued, thanks to Luther, with a tough honesty that precluded prevarication or vain pretence. This was at the bottom of Fichte’s celebration of Luther as “der deutsche Mann” in his Reden an die Deutsche Nation, and of Arndt’s investment of the “Deutsche Zunge” (whose currency defines the territory of Des Deutschen Vaterland) with the moral qualities of piety and forthrightness. Luther was consequently celebrated throughout the 19th century as the dual icon of German cultural and moral steadfastness: in the Wartburg feast of 1817, and indeed in the symbolical place of the Wartburg in German life following its restoration; in the Worms monument of 1868, as co-hero of the primeval Arminius; and as the inspiration behind Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.

For Grimm and his generation, the threatening Latinization of the late medieval, Humanist period was echoed in the modern predominance of French. It is all the more ironic that this celebration of German linguistic nativism, coming as it did in the anti-French resistance movement of the Romantic decades, coincided with another translation project that was second only to Luther’s Bible in its cultural impact: Schlegel/Tieck’s translation of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare had since the days of Lessing and Herder been invoked consistently as the great alternative inspiration for German theatre as it attempted to escape from the hegemony of French classicism. Goethe had as a young man celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday, and the early history plays of the Weimar years were directly calqued on the example of the English playwright, who had almost single-handedly, without Aristotelian precepts to guide him, created a canonical body of work and ensured his nation’s literary pre-eminence.

To translate Shakespeare’s plays into German was therefore both an act of homage and an act of self-recognition; in the process, it would amount to an act of appropriation. The task was begun by August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1789. Schlegel continued this work throughout the 1790s, and in 1801 17 pieces from the Shakespeare corpus were published, in the translation by him and Ludwig Tieck. The project lapsed then and was, indeed, wholly abandoned by Schlegel, only to be completed in the 1820s through the sole efforts of Tieck. Schlegel had also, in his Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Poesie of 1809, celebrated Shakespeare (alongside Calderón) as a truly national poet – in a new sense of the word: as one who has the nation-at-large as his cultural power base, whose voice speaks for the common cultural concerns of his fellow-nationals, and eschewing foreign or classicist standards. Schlegel abandoned Shakespeare in favour of translating Camões, as well as Calderón and other Spanish playwrights, who similarly enjoyed the advantage of drawing directly on a native medieval tradition without self-alienating neo-Aristotelianism. That Hispanophilia was briefly popular in Germany as a result of Spain’s inspiring resistance to Napoleonic rule; but in the years after 1815 most sympathies reverted to the Protestant north-European Shakespeare. It was in Germany that the first European Shakespeare society was founded (1864); as the later critic Friedrich Gundolf saw it, Shakespeare had become a truly German author because he had engendered modern German literature as much as modern English literature (Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 1911). Gerhart Hauptmann, pained at the rupture of German-English cultural concord in 1914, stated to the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft in 1915 that, while the bard had been born in England and had died in England, he truly lived in Germany.