 August Wilhelm Schlegel was son of Johanna Christiane Erdmuthe Schlegel (née Hübsh) and Johann Adolf Schlegel, who was a Lutheran clergyman and poet. He was born in September of 1767, in Hanover. He initiated his studies at the University of Göttingen in 1786, first in theology and later in classical philology and aesthetics. It is also in Göttingen that he first met Wilhelm von Humboldt and Caroline Michaelis (Caroline Böhmer after 1784), an intellectual and scholar who encouraged him and also participated in his Shakespeare translations.  His youngest brother, Friedrich Schlegel, joined him in 1790. During this period, he was influenced by some of his lecturers, such as Heyne, Bürger, and Eschenburg, and the works of authors such as Johann Gottfried Herder (cf. Ewton 1972 and Hölter 2010: 16–18). August Schlegel finished his studies in 1791 and moved to Amsterdam where he worked until 1795 as a private teacher of Willem Ferdinand Mogge Muilman. In 1796 he moved to Jena to work as a literary critic. His brother Friedrich also followed him to Jena, and they both joined important artists and philosophers such as Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Dorothea Schlözer, and F.W.J. Schelling, thus forming the ‘heart’ of the so called Jena Romantik. In this same year, he married the widow Caroline Böhmer, whose role in A.W. Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare as well as other writings attributed solely to him (such as the dialogue Die Gemälde, first published in the Athenaeum in 1799) was much more important than has been acknowledged. In fact, as Ernst Behler claims, Caroline “had a decisive influence upon the formulation of early Romantic theory” (Behler 1993: 40).