Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Shakespeare
    Shakespeare
    Shakespeare
    Ebook62 pages1 hour

    Shakespeare

    By Johann Gottfried Herder

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Without Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), we simply would not understand Shakespeare in the way we do. In fact, much literature and art besides Shakespeare would neither look the same nor be the same without the influence of Herder's "Shakespeare" (1773). One of the most important and original works in the history of literary criticism, this passionate essay pioneered a new, historicist approach to cultural artifacts by arguing that they should be judged not by their conformity to a set of conventions imported from another time and place, but by the effectiveness of their response to their own historical and cultural context. Rejecting the authority of a dominant and stifling French neoclassicism that judged eighteenth-century plays by the criteria of Aristotle, Herder's "Shakespeare" signaled a break with the Enlightenment, the approach of Romanticism, and the arrival of a distinctly modern form of aesthetic appreciation.

    With a vivid new translation and a fascinating introduction by Gregory Moore, this edition of Herder's classic will speak to today's readers with undiminished power and persuasiveness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 17, 2011
    ISBN9781400828258
    Shakespeare
    Author

    Johann Gottfried Herder

    Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a theologian, philosopher, ethnographer, and historian of the late Enlightenment, whose writings on music have been widely influential during the two centuries since his death. Philip V. Bohlman is Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he is also Artistic Director of the ensemble-in-residence, The New Budapest Orpheum Society.  

    Read more from Johann Gottfried Herder

    Related to Shakespeare

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Red Poets’ Society

      Feb 11, 2022

      Red Poets’ Society
      13 min read

    • Article

      Jena-gadda-da-vida

      Sep 1, 2022

      For a few years at the turn of the 19th century, Jena, a small university town in the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, was an intellectual Shangri-La. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. Though its population was barely 4,500, Jena was for a while home to many of th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Formal Poetry Is Not a Museum Piece: The Millions Interviews Aaron Poochigian

      Apr 19, 2021

      There was some tension at Columbia over my formalism. I was at one point told not to write that way. Because formal poetry is what lights up my synapses, gets me high, I could not accommodate that suggestion. The post Formal Poetry Is Not a Museum Pi

      11 min read

    • Article

      Decoding Duchamp

      Mar 26, 2019

      No other artist is as closely linked to conceptual art as Marcel Duchamp, who toyed with viewers’ expectations, creating works that puzzled and infuriated, including pieces he termed “readymades,” such as Fountain, a porcelain urinal he boldly submit

      1 min read

    • Article

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?

      May 28, 2019

      What Makes a Poet Difficult?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Visible Man

      Dec 2, 2019

      Visible Man
      4 min read

    • Article

      Enduring Myths

      Oct 29, 2020

      Jeremy Pound delves into the world of classical poetry to explore how Ovid’s Metamorphoses has inspired a wealth of composers over the centuries In 8 AD, the poet Ovid found himself in a bad place. Quite literally. Exiled by Emperor Augustus, he was

      5 min read

    • Article

      To Hell And Back

      Sep 1, 2022

      The first complete English translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy appeared in 1802, and over the past two centuries, new versions have proliferated beyond count, like Beatles covers or Sherlock Holmes movies. A diverting literary parlor game is to imag

      4 min read

    • Article

      What The Thunder Said

      Sep 14, 2022

      ON Margate Sands./I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II

      4 min read

    • Article

      Twin Totems Of Teutonic Angst

      Jun 29, 2023

      Twin Totems Of Teutonic Angst
      8 min read

    • Article

      From The Trojan War To Conflict In Ukraine

      Nov 30, 2023

      THE YEAR 2023 HAS BEENrich in works composed in tempore belli. The most impressive is Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine (William Collins, £26) by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. This is an ambitious and

      6 min read

    • Article

      Man of the World

      Sep 6, 2016

      Shakespeare may never have left England, but he became the most global writer who ever lived.

      4 min read

    • Article

      From Hegel to Hollywood

      Oct 26, 2023

      FROM MY WINDOW SEAT, WHERE THIS essay is being written, my field of vision encompasses the flotsam of a shipwreck — the shipwreck of a self-destructive civilisation. Our sitting room has two lamps salvaged from a Viennese house designed by the Austri

      5 min read

    • Article

      His Life Spoke Volumes

      Mar 4, 2019

      His Life Spoke Volumes
      4 min read

    • Article

      Netherworld

      Feb 29, 2024

      THERE ARE NUMEROUS ESTIMATES about exactly how many paintings were produced during the Dutch golden age. While it may be impossible to reckon even approximately it is not unreasonable to suggest that perhaps between five and ten million pictures were

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Big Idea: Could The Greatest Works Of Literature Be Undiscovered?

      May 30, 2022

      When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more tha

      4 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      May 11, 2023

      Michael Wood On…
      3 min read

    • Article

      All The World’s A Stage

      Apr 6, 2023

      All The World’s A Stage
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Shakespeare

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Shakespeare - Johann Gottfried Herder

      Shakespeare

      JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER

      Shakespeare

      Translated, edited, and with an introduction

      by Gregory Moore

      Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

      Herder’s essay, Shakespeare, appears in Selected

      Writings on Aesthetics by Johann Gottfried Herder,

      translated and edited by Gregory Moore

      (Princeton University Press, 2006)

      Published by Princeton University Press,

      41 William Street,

      Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

      3 Market Place, Woodstock,

      Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      All Rights Reserved

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1744–1803.

      Shakespeare / Johann Gottfried Herder ; translated, edited,

      and with an introduction by Gregory Moore.

      p.    cm.

      "First published in 1773, as one of five contributions to a

      pamphlet edited by Herder himself and entitled Von deutscher

      Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art)" — T.p. verso.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN: 978-0-691-13535-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

      1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation.

      I. Moore, Gregory, 1972– II. Title.

      PR2978.H45           2008

      822.3′3—dc22          2007025547

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      This book has been composed in Bembo

      and Centaur Display

      Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

      Contents

      Introduction GREGORY MOORE

      Shakespeare

      JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER

      Editor’s Notes

      Index

      Introduction

      Herder’s Shakespeare is a milestone in the development of literary theory. First published in 1773, as one of five contributions to a pamphlet edited by Herder himself and entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Character and Art), it represents a defiant rejection of Enlightenment poetics, neoclassicism, and the dominance of French taste. It pioneers a new historicist, proto-Romantic approach to cultures and their products, one that favors the local over the universal, the authentic over the ersatz, the primitive over the modern. It is a key document in the German reception of Shakespeare. And, perhaps most important of all, as the cornerstone of what has come to be seen as the manifesto of the Sturm und Drang movement, it exerted an unrivaled influence on the German literary renaissance of the 1770s.

      The title of Von deutscher Art und Kunst clearly signals Herder’s intention for the various essays to be seen as exploring different aspects of German cultural identity. It is rather less obvious, though, what Shakespeare has to do with any of this. In fact, most of the other pieces in the collection would not seem to be directly concerned with German culture in the narrow sense either, dealing as they do with Gothic architecture or with Ossian, the legendary Scottish bard who was enjoying a voguish prominence at the time thanks to the forgeries of James Macpherson. Only the extract from Justus Möser’s patriotic Osnabrück History appears at all relevant. So what exactly is Herder driving at?

      In the late eighteenth century Germany was little more than a vague geographical expression. It consisted of hundreds of autonomous territories, ranging in size from Lilliputian statelets to great powers such as Prussia and Austria, all nominally under the jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. In this empire-on-paper—which lacked political, religious, and economic cohesion, and was ruled by a self-interested and Francophile elite—a unified national culture had failed to emerge. We are laboring in Germany as in the days of the confusion of Babel, Herder once grumbled, divided by sects of taste, partisans of poetic art, schools of philosophy contesting one another: no capital and no common interest, no great and universal reformer and lawgiving genius.¹ Intellectuals throughout the Germanies, Herder among them, felt acutely the absence of a public sphere and worked actively to create the conditions for a literary revival. For Herder that meant restoring continuities in German history and society; it meant renewing shared traditions that had been neglected, interrupted, extinguished, or buried beneath a superficial and alien civilization. Hence his deliberately capacious understanding of the term deutsch. He takes it to signify not only the modern inhabitants of the German-speaking lands but those of Scandinavia and the British Isles also, thereby opening up the old fault line dividing Latin from Germanic Europe, the earthy, robust Teutons from the decadent, effete Welschen. Moreover, he uses the word in its original sense, as referring specifically to the language and art of the people—unruly, coarse, yet creative—rather than those of the Ruritanian ruling caste: urbane, polite, and sterile. Herder’s pamphlet is accordingly concerned with the ways in which these demotic energies might revitalize a moribund culture from below.

      A dose of Shakespeare was just the tonic that German literature needed. Herder was by no means alone in thinking so.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1