“Shelley reads Schlegel”

Abstract

Shelley read Schlegel’s lectures Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur on his journey to Italy in 1818, and they provided both a spur and a foil to his dramatic thought, and specifically to his ideas on Greek drama. By placing Shelley’s reading of Schlegel at his crossing of the Alps and his time in Milan, we can reconsider his labour in the spring and summer of 1818, a strangely unproductive time for the poet, which only produced a few lyrics, some scenes for the incomplete play Tasso, Mazenghi, and the translation of Euripides’ Cyclops, but which also contained what Kelvin Everest has called a “period of sustained immersion in Greek” that laid the foundation for Prometheus Unbound and the “Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks”.