Baudissin, Wolf Heinrich, Graf Von

Wolf Heinrich, count von Baudissin, in full Wolf Heinrich Friedrich Karl, Count Von Baudissin, (born Jan. 30, 1789, Copenhagen, Den.—died April 4, 1878, Dresden, Ger.), German diplomat and man of letters who with Dorothea Tieck was responsible for many translations of William Shakespeare and thus contributed to the development of German Romanticism.

Baudissin served in the diplomatic corps in Stockholm, Paris, and Vienna and traveled in Italy, France, Greece, and Turkey. In 1827 he settled in Dresden, where he spent the rest of his life. The works he translated include Elizabethan drama (Ben Jonson und seine Schule, 2 vol., 1836; “Ben Jonson and His School”), Molière, Italian plays, and the Middle High German epics Iwein and Wigalois. From 1825 to 1833 he contributed translations of 13 of Shakespeare’s plays to the German edition prepared under the direction of A.W. von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck and continued by Tieck’s daughter Dorothea; among them were Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, and King Lear.