52 Milton D. Baumgartner 



ing to Nicolai the iambic pentameters in blank verse were at times 

 so jolting, so devoid of harmony, so full of dialect [so schweitzer- 

 isch], that prose would have been far preferable. Then while 

 here and there a passage was well done, others were insipid, 

 tedious, abounding in inartistic and unusual expressions. 



The first play in the third volume was Oedipus^ ein Trauerspiel 

 in fiinf Aufzilgen, aus dem Englischen des Herrn John Dry den 

 und Nathaniel Lee. There seems to have been a revival of Oedi- 

 pus about the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe, and that 

 accounts for the translation of the Play by Dry den and Lee.^^ In 

 a review of one of these plays in the Bibliothek der schonen Wis- 

 senschaften, the criticism that Dryden made of Sophocles' Play on 

 the same theme is referred to by the reviewer. ^'^ 



D. All for Love 



Dryden's best play, All for Love, received the greatest recog- 

 nition in Germany. It was one of the first English plays read 

 by Bodmer^^ in 1723. Citations from it were not uncommon. ^^ 

 It was translated and used as a source for a German play after 

 Shakspere's play on the same theme had been translated by 

 Wieland and Eschenburg. The first translation was made by 

 Schmid in 1769^° under the title Kleopatra. Schmid was not a 

 master of English and many glaring errors crept into the trans- 

 lation. He learned to know the Play through Prevost's French 

 translation which appeared in Paris in 1735.^^ While he regarded 



26 Voltaire's play gave the first impulse in this revival. In 1748 his 

 Oedipus vi^as translated at Braunschw^eig, and in 1749 at Vienna. See 

 Gottsched's Nothiger Vorrath ziir Geschichte der Deutschen Dramatischen 

 Dichtkiinst, pp. 328, 333, etc., Leipzig, 1757. 



27 VII, Stiick 2, p. 326. 1762. The review is of the Drei neuen Trauer- 

 spiele, ndmlich Johanna Grey, Tokenburg und Odip, Zurich, 1761. 



28 See Bodmer Denkschrift, p. 322. 



29 See note to p. 167 of Bodmer's 1742 translation of Paradise Lost, and 

 Aesthetik in einer Nuss, p. 384. 



30 Christian Heinrich Schmid, Englisches Theater, bey Dodsley und 

 comp., Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1769. All for Love is in the second volume, 

 page I ff. 



81 See Schmid's Theorie der Poesie, p. 471, and British Museum Cata- 

 logue under Dryden. 



340 



