When Shakespeare was first translated into Swedish on a more systematic scale in the nineteenth century, the translations were in various ways influenced by Protestant ethics and ideals. While two of the earliest translators of Shakespeare, Olof Bjurbäck (1750-1829) and Johan Henrik Thomander (1798-1865) were Protestant bishops, and the most important of them, Carl August Hagberg (1810-64) was the son of one, research has paid little attention to the importance of the Christian and Protestant contexts to the theory and practice of these translators. For example, Bjurbäck’s early translation of Hamlet (1820) was equipped with a preface in which the translator laments the sorry state of mind among his readers: the majority of them, he says, do not possess the ‘simplicity’, ‘honesty’ and ‘infantile innocence’ required to understand Shakespeare. As this paper argues, these calls for virtue should be read from the normative standards of Protestant ethics. Methologically, to Bjurbäck such ideals could only be achieved at the cost of sanitizing the play, including its sexual morals. Critics have noted in passing that Bjurbäck’s translation sets ‘Ophelia’s death as well as Hamlet’s struggles within an explicitly Christian context’ (Lindskog Whitely), but I consider this tendency in Bjurbäck’s translation more specifically in the context of Protestant values suggested by his preface, and also by his specific choices of words in the translation itself, as well as by the passages he excised from the original.

A seemingly very different approach to the translator’s task is found in Hagberg’s complete translation of Shakespeare’s plays (1847-51), long considered to be the standard Swedish version. Hagberg insists on philological correctness and faithfulness to the original: ‘it has been the translator’s aiming point to not only render the spirit and meaning of the original text, but to imitate its peculiarities in style and turns of phrase, while of course conscientiously retaining the character and temperament of the Swedish language’. However, for all its methodological differences to Bjurbäck’s judicious censoring of the Bard, Hagberg’s preference for a direct, plain style and his ambition to stay as close as possible to the English text can in themselves be contextualised in terms of the Reformation catchphrase to go ad fontes, and of the stylistic ideals behind the Protestant translation of sacred texts. In other words, the paper concludes, despite the very different practical outcomes of Bjurbäck’s and Hagberg’s translation projects they both have in common an indebtedness to central Protestant standards and ideals.