Invention of the Romantic Human

Samuel Johnson had scarcely finished his preface to Shakespeare when a new enthusiasm for Shakespeare gripped Germany. Herder led the charge, and Herder inspired Goethe: “Goethe, whose Gtz von Berlichingen (1771) was a history playclearly inspired by Shakespeare, but Goethes Shakespeare was most importantlyenunciated in his novel Wilhelm Meisters apprenticeship (1796).This novel, and its use of Shakespeare, formed a major nucleus for hethoughts of the younger generation in Germany, especially the brothersFriedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose writings in their journal The Athenaeum (17981800) activated the term Romantic , which is nowused for the whole movement leading up to them and extending well intothe nineteenth century. A. W. Schlegel contributed to German culture theverse translation of Shakespeare (seventeen plays from 1797 to 1810) thatmade Shakespeare an accepted masterpiece of German literature” (from Jonathan Arac’s essay in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 5: Romanticism , 273).

Coleridge brought the enthusiasm to England, marking the appropriate section of his outline for the history of English poetry with “Shakespeare!!!” Coleridge inspired the Lambs and William Hazlitt and Carlyle. Keats caught his enthusiasm for Shakespeare from Hazlitt, and Melville from both Hazlitt and Keats.

In France, Victor Hugo suggested that Shakespeare set the agenda for contemporary literature:

“In the manifestoserving to preface his never staged drama Cromwell (1827), Victor Hugoelaborated German metahistorical typologies to define the centrality ofShakespeare and launch a Romantic movement in France. Hugo schematizesthe history of poetry as the interrelation of ode, epic and drama, identifiedwith the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare. Drama, which Shakespeareembodies, combines in one breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terribleand the absurd, tragedy and comedy.’ This comprehensive mixtureis the defining characteristic of the third epoch of poetry, of the literatureof to-day” (275). Pushkin took his cues from Shakespeare, and in Italy Alessandro Manzoni defended the Othello against Voltaire’s criticism.

In short, “duringthe Romantic period the most consequential writers of the various Westernnational cultures found Shakespeare an indispensable means of definingtheir own innovations. Romanticism has been seen as a revival of earlierliterary modes and as a revolution that overturned existing modes andmade literature new. Shakespeares impact demonstrates the close connectionof revival and revolution” (275).

Harold Bloom overstates wildly when he speaks of Shakespeare’s ” Invention of the Human ” Shakespeare contributed in large ways, however, to the invention of that particular sort of human known as “Romantic.”