ABSTRACT
In the Enlightenment both the editions and the translations of Shakespeare reflect a profound aversion to the irrational and the obscure, to magniloquence and ambiguity, to the lack of logic and of sense. From the 1760s, the French tradition of the so-called belles infidelles was gradually replaced by an effort to renew the German language and literature through the translation of culturally and stylistically alien works of literature. The Macbeth translation was accomplished within one-and-a-half months, from the beginning of January to the middle of February 1833, and was included that same year in the ninth volume of the Schlegel-Tieck Shakespeare. The so-called Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare’s plays, entitled Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke and issued in Berlin between 1796 and 1810, reached a considerable level of formal, stylistic, and semantic proximity to the source text.
