Sweden and Shakespeare's Protestant Afterlife

This article argues that three Swedish translators of Shakespeare, Olof Bjurbäck (1750–1829), Johan Henrik Thomander (1798–1865) and Carl August Hagberg (1810–1864), understood their tasks in relation to what they saw as fundamental religious, specifically Protestant, precepts. All three were either bishops in the state church or came from a family of clerics (Hagberg). While Bjurbäck's prose translation of Hamlet (1820) owes its religious background to Rousseau and Luther, the later Thomander insisted on faithfulness to the original yet also emphasising the centrality of secular works in Christian instruction, and Hagberg owes a debt to the Protestant notion of going ad fontes. In short, rather than constructing a narrative of secularisation around the three translators, this article concludes that Protestant ideology, while itself changing, remained important to understand their work.