Werner Habicht

Werner Habicht (29 January 1930 – 5 November 2022) was a German scholar of English literature and culture and an internationally acclaimed authority in the field of Shakespeare studies in particular. During his academic career, he held Chairs in English Studies at the Universities of Heidelberg (1966–70), Bonn (1970–78), and Würzburg (1978–95).

Education Born in 1930 in Schweinfurt, Habicht studied English and Romance Studies at LMU Munich, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, and the universities of Paris and Bristol. After completion of the teacher-training ‘Staatsexamen’ in 1954, he was awarded his doctorate at the LMU in 1957, and – following a period as a Research Associate at both the LMU and the Free University of Berlin – achieved Habilitation in Munich in 1965. as well as being a corresponding (elected) member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur) in Mainz, In 1986 he organized the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association in West Berlin.

Habicht was recognized as one of his generation's leading lights in German Shakespeare Studies, as well as being a literary scholar of international renown. Alongside around 120 articles and chapters, Habicht authored seminal book-length studies on – among other subjects – the use of gesture in Medieval English poetry (1959), English dramatic form before Shakespeare (1968), Shakespeare's place in the German literary and cultural imagination (1994), and English literature and its contexts at the close of the 16th century (1995). On the occasion of Shakespeare's 450th birthday in 2014, he collaborated with fellow members of the Mainz Academy on the Shakespeare Album: a photographic album presenting 109 portraits and autograph signatures of personalities central to the propagation of German interest in Shakespeare over the centuries.

Among his philological contributions, he edited a large collection of letters of F. A. Leo (1820–1898) at the Folger Shakespeare Library, many of which related to the early history of the German Shakespeare Society, as well as a selection of German-language documents relating primarily to Shakespeare at the Folger Library.

Major publications

Die Gebärde in englischen Dichtungen des Mittelalters, Bayerischer Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1959). Studien zur Dramenform vor Shakespeare (Heidelberg: Winter, 1968). Ed., English and American Studies in German (EASG): Summaries of Theses and Monographs. A Supplement to Anglia (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968–1983) [annual]. Ed. with Ernst Leisi, Rudolph Stamm et al., English-deutsche Studienausgabe der Dramen Shakespeares (Tübingen, Stauffenburg, 1976–1997). Ed. with Ina Schabert, Sympathielenkung in den Dramen Shakespeares: Studien zur publikumsbezogenen Dramaturgie (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1978). Ed., Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (Bochum: Ferdinand Kamp, 1981–1992) [annual]. Ed. with D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle, Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988). Ed., “Leo, Friedrich August. Letters mostly to him from various people”, M.S. (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992). See here. Ed. with G. Klotz, Shakespeare Jahrbuch (West) (Bochum: Ferdinand Kamp, 1981–1992) [annual]. Shakespeare and the German Imagination, International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper No. 5 (Hertford: Stephen Austin & Sons, 1994). Texte und Kontexte der englischen Literatur im Jahr 1595, Bayerischer Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995). Ed. with Dieter Lange, Der Literatur Brockhaus, 8 vols (Berlin: Cornelsen, 2nd rev. pbk. ed. 1995). “Shakespeare and the Berlin Wall”, in: Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, ed. Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 157–176. Ed. with Christa Jansohn, Shakespeare Album, in cooperation with the Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Theatersammlung der Universität Köln, and the Shakespeare Library, University of Birmingham (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 2014). See here. Ed. with Christa Jansohn, Dieter Mehl, and Philip Redl, Shakespeare unter den Deutschen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2015).