Book: Shakespeare

Overview
Johann Gottfried von Herder's "Shakespeare" (1773) is a passionate plea for recognizing William Shakespeare as the exemplar of natural genius and a decisive force in the renewal of modern European literature. Herder rejects received neoclassical rules and the French critical tradition that prized formality and artificial symmetry, arguing instead that Shakespeare's art grows organically from life, language, and national character. The essay reads both as close aesthetic praise and as a broader manifesto for a new literary sensibility rooted in antiquity's living spirit rather than in imposed abstractions.

Core arguments
Herder presents Shakespeare not as a flawless craftsman bound to a set of prescriptive rules, but as an overflowing creative spirit whose apparent irregularities reveal a deeper, truer order. Plot unity, strict dramatic unities, and polished rhetorical surfaces are secondary to the portrayal of complex human beings, morally vivid situations, and the truthful dramatization of feeling. Character supplants plot for Herder: Shakespeare's figures are alive because they embody whole human types, shifting moods, and inner contradictions, and because the language responds flexibly to the needs of inner life rather than to external formal demands.

Language, folk culture, and the poetic imagination
Herder celebrates Shakespeare's language as animated by the speech of common people as well as by inventive lyricism. He sees Shakespeare's power in the poet's capacity to assimilate folk idioms, proverbs, and everyday expression into a rich dramatic diction that expresses communal life and individual conscience. This fusion of the vernacular with poetic invention makes Shakespeare a model for national literature: a writer who expresses the spirit of his people while elevating it to universal human significance. Herder's emphasis on language as cultural, historically situated, and organically developing anticipates his later ideas about national character and the formative role of the Volk.

Relation to modernity and European literary development
Herder situates Shakespeare at the center of a European turn away from artificial classical imitation toward literature that responds to contemporary life and modern sensibility. He attributes to Shakespeare a formative role in freeing European drama from narrow rules, thereby enabling the birth of a literature that could register historical change, individual subjectivity, and the mingling of comic and tragic elements. For Herder, Shakespeare's importance is both descriptive and prescriptive: he is the most complete demonstration that a literature true to human nature and grounded in national speech can achieve universal significance.

Influence on German letters and aesthetic thought
Herder's appraisal helped shape the German reception of Shakespeare and exerted strong influence on the Sturm und Drang movement and on later German Romanticism. By valorizing the national voice and the creative genius over imported templates, Herder offered writers and critics a framework for cultivating indigenous cultural expression. His historicist bent, insisting on understanding works within their cultural and linguistic contexts, also helped steer criticism away from abstract, ahistorical judgments toward a more sympathetic, contextual approach.

Legacy
The essay "Shakespeare" endures as a formative statement about the nature of literary genius, the cultural rootedness of art, and the modern turn toward individual and national expression. Herder's insistence that literature must grow from life itself, that the particular can reveal the universal, and that language and character are foundational to aesthetic truth contributed to a revaluation of Shakespeare across Europe and to a broader rethinking of how literature relates to history, society, and the human soul.