Coleridge’s Shakespearean Transformation of Schiller’s Wallenstein Plays

In 1800, Samuel Taylor Coleridge published translations of Friedrich Schiller’s historical dramas The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein. Despite his dislike of the process of translating, Coleridge eventually recognized the importance of his own work. In particular, the translations assisted the intellectual development through which Coleridge came to present Shakespeare as the profoundest English moralist. This chapter shows how Coleridge’s English versions pivoted on the intensification of Shakespearean echoes, especially of Macbeth, in Schiller’s original. The chapter then analyses Coleridge’s marginalia in copies of his translations, in which the translator persistently drew comparisons and contrasts between Schiller and Shakespeare. It emerges that Wallenstein was a significant influence on Coleridge’s subsequent Shakespeare criticism and on his moral philosophy, briefly summed up in the phrase ‘Conscience is God ’.