August Wilhelm von Schlegel
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, 1767-1845, German poet and
scholar.
Schlegel first major work was the lecture series Vorlesungen
über schöne Kunst und Literatur (1801). He lived in the
chateau of Madame de Staël in Coppet between 1804 and 1818, where he served as
tutor to her children. There he wrote his Lectures on
Dramatic Art and Literature (1808; tr. 1815). His scholarly
interests were various: he translated works by Dante,
Calderón, Cervantes, Petrarch, and Camoens, as well as
seventeen of Shakespeare's plays. He edited the Hindu scripture
the Bhagavad-Gita and the Sanskrit epic poem the
Ramayana. Together with his brother Friedrich,
Schlegel was one of the seminal influences in German Romanticism.
