August Wilhelm von Schlegel (Schlegel until 1812; ; ; 8 September 176712 May 1845) was a German scholar, critic, Orientalist, Indologist, translator and poet. With his brother Friedrich Schlegel, he was a leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His translations of Shakespeare turned the English dramatist's works into German classics.
Schlegel was also the professor of Sanskrit in Continental Europe and produced a translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
Career
In 1796, soon after his return to Germany, Schlegel settled in Jena, following an invitation from Friedrich Schiller. That year he married Caroline Schelling, the widow of the physician Böhmer. She assisted Schlegel in some of his literary productions, and the publication of her correspondence in 1871 established for her a posthumous reputation as a German letter writer. She separated from Schlegel in 1801 and became the wife of the philosopher Friedrich von Schelling soon after.
thumb|Schlegel c. 1800
In Jena, Schlegel made critical contributions to Schiller's Horen and that author's Musen-Almanach, and wrote around 300 articles for the Jenaer Allgemeine Litteratur-Zeitung. He also did translations from Dante and Shakespeare. This work established his literary reputation and gained for him in 1798 an extraordinary professorship at the University of Jena. His house became the intellectual headquarters of the "romanticists", and was visited at various times between 1796 and 1801 by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose Foundations of the Science of Knowledge was studied intensively, by his brother Friedrich, who moved in with his wife Dorothea Schlegel, by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, by Ludwig Tieck, by Novalis and others.