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 Music and art in England also owe much to Shakespeare's influence. From Thomas Morley [q. v.], Purcell, Matthew Locke, and Arne to William Linley, Sir Henry Bishop, and Sir Arthur Sullivan, every distinguished musician has sought to improve on his predecessor's setting of one or more of Shakespeare's songs, or has composed concerted music in illustration of some of his dramatic themes (cf., Shakspere Music, 1878; Songs in Shakspere … set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc.). In art, John Boydell [q. v.] organised between 1790 and 1800 a scheme for illustrating Shakespeare's work by the greatest living English artists, and some fine pictures were the result. Few great artists of later date, from Sir Daniel Maclise to Sir John Millais, have lacked the ambition to interpret some scene or character of Shakespearean drama.

In America no less enthusiasm for Shakespeare has been manifested. Editors and critics are hardly less numerous there than in England, and some criticism from American pens, like that of James Russell Lowell, has reached the highest literary level. Nowhere, probably, has more labour been devoted to the study of his works than that devoted by Mr. H. H. Furness of Philadelphia to the preparation of his ‘New Variorum’ edition. The Barton collection of Shakespeareana in the Boston Public Library is one of the most valuable extant: the elaborate catalogue (1878–80) contains some 2,500 entries. First of Shakespeare's plays to be represented in America, ‘Richard III’ was performed in New York in March 1750. More recently Edwin Forrest (1806–1872), Junius Brutus Booth, Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, and Miss Ada Rehan have maintained on the American stage the great traditions of Shakespearean acting; while Mr. E. A. Abbey has devoted high artistic gifts to pictorial representation of scenes from the plays.

The bible, alone of all literary compositions, has been translated more frequently or into a greater number of languages than the works of Shakespeare. The progress of his reputation in Germany, France, Italy, and Russia was somewhat slow at the outset. But in Germany the poet has received for nearly a century and a half a recognition scarcely less pronounced than that accorded him in America and in his own country. Three of Shakespeare's plays, now in the Zurich Library, were brought thither by J. R. Hess from England in 1614. As early as 1626 ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ were acted at Dresden, and a version of the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ was played there and elsewhere at the end of the seventeenth century. But such mention of Shakespeare as is found in German literature between 1640 and 1740 only indicates a knowledge on the part of German readers either of Dryden's criticisms or of the accounts of him printed in English encyclopædias (cf., Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682, p. 250). The earliest sign of a direct acquaintance with the plays is a poor translation into German of ‘Julius Cæsar’ by Baron C. W. von Borck, formerly Prussian minister in London, which was published at Berlin in 1741. A worse rendering of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ followed in 1758. Meanwhile J. C. Gottsched (1700–66), an influential man of letters, warmly denounced Shakespeare in a review of Von Borch's effort in ‘Beiträge zur deutschen Sprache’ and elsewhere. Lessing came without delay to Shakespeare's rescue, and set his reputation, in the estimation of the German public, on that exalted pedestal which it has not ceased to occupy. It was in 1759, in a journal entitled ‘Litteraturbriefe,’ that Lessing first claimed for Shakespeare superiority, not only to the French dramatists Racine and Corneille, who hitherto had dominated European taste, but to all ancient or modern poets. Lessing's doctrine, which he developed in his ‘Hamburgische Dramaturgie’ (Hamburg, 1767, 2 vols. 8vo), was at once accepted by the poet Johann Gottfried Herder in the ‘Blätter von deutschen Art und Kunst,’ 1771. Christopher Martin Wieland (1733–1813) in 1762 began a prose translation which Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820) completed (Zurich, 13 vols., 1775–84). Between 1797 and 1833 appeared at intervals the classical German rendering by August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, leaders of the romantic school of German literature, whose creed embodied, as one of its first articles, an unwavering veneration for Shakespeare. Schlegel translated only seventeen plays, and his workmanship excels that of the rest of the translation. Tieck's part in the undertaking was mainly confined to editing translations by various hands. Many other German translations followed—by J. H. Voss and his sons (Leipzig, 1818–1829), by J. W. O. Benda (Leipzig, 1825–6), by A. Böttger (Leipzig, 1836–7) and others. Most of these have been many times reissued, but Schlegel and Tieck's achievement still holds the field. Schlegel's lectures on ‘Shakespeare and the Drama,’ which were delivered at Vienna in 1808, and were translated into English in 1815, are worthy of comparison with those of Coleridge, who acknowledged