Johann Joachim Eschenburg was one of the foremost literary historians and aestheticians of the Age of Goethe. Although many of the issues ardently debated by Eschenburg and his contemporaries are no longer seriously discussed in aesthetics, his influence has been lasting in the elevation of Shakespeare to a prominent position in German dramaturgy. Eschenburg's sympathetic analysis of Shakespeare's appeal as a dramatist, promulgated in the 1780s, continued the critical work begun by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1759 and helped establish a permanent and indispensable place for Shakespeare on the German stage. Aside from his esteemed classical scholarship and his ground-breaking work as a collector of German and world literature, Eschenburg's most notable achievement is the first complete German translation of Shakespeare (1775-1782), a thirteen-volume edition that was influential for years after its publication. The better-known translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel, Dorothea Tieck, and Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin (the "Schlegel-Tieck...