Friedrich August Leo (December 6, 1820 - June 30, 1898) was born in Warsaw and, after the early death of his father, was brought up in Berlin. He learned and practised the bookseller’s trade until, at the age of 26, he began studying at the Faculty of Philosophy of Leipzig University, from which he eventually obtained his doctorate. During that period he depended financially on what he could earn as a teacher, writer and translator (mainly of Danish texts). In 1854, however, his marriage to Elisabeth Friedländer, daughter of a wealthy banker and a distant relative of Heinrich Heine, gave him the support that permitted him to devote himself entirely to freelance writing and scholarship and to make his home a center of social life reminiscent of 18th-century intellectual salons. He never held a university post, though for a brief period (1873-1875) he did lecture on Shakespeare at Herrig’s academy of modern languages. The title “Professor” which came to be attached to his name is an honorific one, conferred upon him by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar in recognition of his services to the Shakespeare Gesellschaft. Several distinguished professors of the University of Berlin, however, were among his friends - and among the writers of the letters - as were artists, musicians, men of the theatre such as Adolph L'Arronge (the director of the Deutsches Theater) and the actors Max Grube and Carl Grunert, politicians, high-ranking librarians, etc. After being afflicted by the death first of his only daughter (married to Joachim Graf von Pfeil und Klein-Ellguth) in 1891 and then, in 1893, of his wife, he withdrew from most of his public activities, though his commitment to Shakespeare lasted his whole life long. “Poor man,” confided H.H. Furness to his sister, who had visited Leo in Berlin in early 1898, only a few months before he died, “his life has been, I fear, a good deal of a tragedy. His only daughter and child married a German brute, a sprig of nobility, who drove her to an early grave, and her poor mother died within two years, of a broken heart” (The Letters of Howard Horace Furness [Boston, 1922], II.9). Those who knew him closely were impressed by his fascinating personality, his wide knowledge, his brilliant wit and his warm-hearted altruism. One of the main preoccupations of his last years was the use of his considerable fortune for beneficent purposes.

F.A. Leo’s own writings, many of which are repeatedly referred to in the letters of this collection - if only in acknowledgement of the receipt of presentation copies or offprints - include poems, a volume of which was published in 1870 and republished in 1872 and 1886, occasional verse, plays (his comedy Ein Hochverräter, published under the pseudonym August Olfer in 1875, had a moderate stage success), prose fiction for children, etc., besides the Shakespeareana listed more fully below. Suffice it here to note that he produced an English edition of Coriolanus (1864), which unhappily incorporates Collier’s “early manuscript corrections” which Leo had previously defended against Nikolaus Delius; a German stage adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra (1870), which was accepted for performance by the court theatres of Berlin and Weimar (cf. letters from Botho von Hülsen, Jan. 6, 1870 and Grand Duke Karl Alexander, Nov. 15, 1869); and a new translation of Macbeth for Hermann Ulrici’s German edition of the complete plays (1871). He edited the sections of North’s Plutarch relevant to Shakespeare’s Roman plays (1878). He compiled, and distributed privately, an Index to Sidney Walker’s A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare. His collected essays on textual cruxes were published in English as Shakespeare Notes (1885). Some twenty-five Shakespearean articles, as well as numerous notes, reviews, reports and obituaries were printed in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch, to which he contributed from its very first volume (1865) and which he edited from 1880 to 1898, striving (as many of the letters attest) to give it a greater breadth of interest and thematic scope than had been achieved by the previous editor, Karl Elze.

The Shakespeare Jahrbuch was of course published as the official organ of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft, which was founded in Weimar in 1864 with the aim of promoting knowledge of Shakespeare in Germany. It was conceived not as an organization of academic specialists but as a public forum for everyone concerned with and interested in Shakespeare and his works - academics of various disciplines, theatre practitioners, translators, journalists, schoolteachers, politicians, as well as the cultured “general public.” Characteristically, the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft was officially inaugurated by a member of the ruling aristocracy, the Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, while its effective founder was an industrialist (Wilhelm Oechelhäuser), its first president a professor of philosophy (Hermann Ulrici) and one of the vice-presidents a theatre director (Franz Dingelstedt). The Shakespeare Gesellschaft has essentially retained its identity as an open public institution to the present day, even though no one now would describe it as a kind of national temple for the cult of the Bard and his appropriation in Germany, as some of those responsible for its inception were inclined to do. Indeed Leo himself, who was a founding member and sat on the presidium to the end of his life, seems to have been more reluctant than others to let the growing German nationalism of the time affect the image of Shakespeare. Perhaps his Jewish background had something to do with this. During his editorship of the Jahrbuch the jingoistic stance to be found in the earliest volumes subsided noticeably.