One of the first writers to combat, on the continent of Europe, Voltaire’s depreciation of Shakespeare was Lessing. But his eulogy was dated 1759. A year earlier (1758) Moses Mendelssohn, in his essay on the Sublime, had anticipated Lessing’s judgment. But his influence did not lead the new-Hebrew school to translate Shakespeare. It was not till near the middle of the nineteenth century that we find Hebrew translations even of such famous soliloquies as Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” In 1842 Fabius Mieses and in 1856 N. P. Krassensohn rendered the passage. Both, however, were dependent on Mendelssohn, translating his German rendering. Others, at the same period, turned a few passages, including one of Richard II’s monologues, from German versions into Hebrew. “To-day we exact our revenge from the English! They took our Bible and made it their own. We, in return, have captured their Shakespeare. Is it not a sweet revenge?” With these words Smolenskin opened his introduction to Salkinson’s Hebrew translation of _Othello_. It is not easy to explain how it happened that we had to wait till 1874 for the first Hebrew adaptation of a Shakespearean drama. In fact, with the exception of Salkinson’s _Romeo and Juliet_ (1878), S. L. Gordon’s _King Lear_ (1899), and Isaac Barb’s _Macbeth_ (1883), I know of no Hebrew version of plays by the author of _Hamlet_, which latter drama so far as I have observed, has not even been printed in Yiddish. (Dr. Halper, however, informs me that _Hamlet_ was translated into Hebrew by H. J. Bornstein, and that his version appeared in the pages of Ha-Zefirah somewhere about 1900). _Julius Cæsar_ appeared in Yiddish in 1886. _King Lear_ has also been printed in the same language, and the _Merchant of Venice_ received the same honor, at the hand of Basil Dahl, in New York, in 1899. I use the words “_printed_ in Yiddish” advisedly, because there are extant in manuscript acting versions of other plays used by Yiddish companies. Of course, select passages from Shakespeare have often been rendered into Hebrew, as, for instance, in that curious publication _Young’s Israelitish Gleaner and Biblical Repository_, Edinburgh, 1855 (pp. 24, 16). The lack of Hebrew translations may be explained by two considerations. The _Merchant of Venice_, despite its sympathetic treatment of some aspects of Shylock’s character, dealt so deadly a blow at the Jews, that there could be no enthusiasm with regard to the other works. But more operative was another fact. The available Hebraists for the most part were ignorant of English. The _Macbeth_ mentioned above was translated not from the original, but from Schiller’s German.