ABSTRACT
August Wilhelm Schlegel himself had of course no small opinion of his talents as a writer of verse: in an unpublished autobiographical fragment that may have been written at the time of the reissue of his poems in 1811, he wrote of himself. The poem under discussion was published late in 1797 in Schiller's own Musen-Almanach fur 1798, the so-called 'Balladenalmanach', and both Goethe and Schiller, but also Korner and Humboldt, found praise for it. Schlegel was gratified, too, that his reading of Romeo and Juliet had contradicted that of the major English critics and their 'conventional explanations'. The poem presupposes knowledge of the circumstances of the tragedy; it does not need to rehearse these except through a statements of general import that refer to the brevity of life, the malignity of fate, the inventiveness of love, the union of body and soul.
