BARS 2024

I’ve been in the United Kingdom for the 2024 conference of the British Association for Romantic Studies in Glasgow.

 

The conference kicked off on Tuesday with a talk by Michelle Levy on women writers and publishing. Though we often think of authors in the 18th and 19th centuries as selling their copyrights outright, Levy noted that this often was not the case. She gave particular attention to the poet Phillis Wheatley, who appears to have received half of the print run of her poems to sell herself for her own profit.

 

Next, I chaired a panel on Faustian Romanticism. Three speakers addressed how the Faust dramas of Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe influenced British Romantic writers. Martin Potter discussed Faustian elements in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while also addressing the E.T.A. Hoffmann short story “The Sandman.” Liz Wan talked about how William Godwin’s novel St. Leon could be read as a Faust story, and Maddy Potter addressed Faustian elements in both John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.

 

Later in the afternoon, I went to a panel on P.B. Shelley, since multiple speakers were scheduled to address Shelley’s play The Cenci, with which I have a particular interest. Anna Mercer compared the play to Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga, which also features a Beatrice who suffers a horrible fate. She mentioned that Mary Shelley even quoted from her husband’s play in her journal long after he had died. Nora Crook later went into detail about the various manuscripts that the Shelleys might have had access to that discussed the story of Beatrice Cenci. She also drew parallels between the play and G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti.

 

The final panel I attended on Tuesday was on remediating the supernatural. Natalie Tal Harries mentioned that Walter Scott collected books on witchcraft and demonology and justified his use of superstition in a note on his poem The Lady of the Lake. Orianne Smith also discussed Scott, focusing on his novel Guy Mannering, a book from which Sarah Siddons often performed readings after her retirement from the stage. The character of Meg Merrilies in the book became a favorite in stage adaptations of the novel. Haya Alwehaib spoke last, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with The Arabian Nights. We then headed over to Glasgow City Chambers for a drinks reception in a beautiful setting.

 

Wednesday there was a plenary roundtable with Elizabeth Edwards, Craig Lamont, and Tim Fulford. My big activity for the day, though was chairing a session on Romanticism’s legacies in fantasy literature. Will Sherwood talked about William Blake’s influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, noting that while most people focus on how Tolkien’s work as a medievalist influenced his fiction, he was greatly influenced by Romantic writers as well. Annise Rogers discussed the Romantic legacy in Ben Aaronovitch’s fantasy series The Rivers of London. Jason Whittaker then spoke on the influence William Blake had on Glasgow’s own Alasdair Gray, who like Blake was both a writer and a visual artists. That evening, the conference banquet was held at Òran Mór, a restaurant in a former church that is graced by murals designed by Gray.

 

My own paper was scheduled for Thursday. I began the day at a panel on the Gothic. Samiha Begum discussed Ann Radcliffe, a writer who appears as a character in my own play The Mysteries of the Castle of the Monk of Falconara. Radcliffe, who was influenced by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, was propelled to fame with her novel The Romance of the Forest and received 500 pounds for her next book, The Mysteries of Udolpho at a time at which the average royalty payment for a novel was only 80 pounds. Interestingly enough, gossip recorded by Anna Seward held that Radcliffe had written Joanna Baillie’s anonymously published Plays on the Passions. I was also interested to hear Jakob Lipski speak on the 1803 historical novel Thaddeus of Warsaw and Laura Eastlake discuss links between vampires and volcanos.

 

In my completely neutral, unbiased, unprejudiced opinion, however, my panel was the best. It began with Bethan Elliott discussing the plays of Baillie (not Radcliffe). She quoted from an 1804 letter Baillie wrote to fellow dramatist William Sotheby. Though Sotheby (who had not had the success on stage that Baillie achieved) urged her to focus on “reading” plays rather than “acting” plays, Baillie held that the qualities that make a play good for acting also make it good for reading. Baillie was not snobbish about how her plays were performed, either, and in 1810 wrote to Walter Scott about being pleased that one of her plays had been performed at a fair. The one play Baillie wrote that she did not think was fit for performance was The Martyr, but that was because of its religious subject matter, not because she didn’t deem it an “actable” piece.

 

My paper was on J.H. Amherst’s play The Death of Christophe King of Hayti. Its depiction of armed women was naturally interesting to the third panelist, Sarah Burdett, who has written extensively on that subject. Her paper was on stage adaptations actresses had written of the poems of Walter Scott. Sarah Smith, who was a favorite of Scott’s, wrote adaptations of both The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake performed at the Crow Street Theatre in Dublin. Eliza Macauley, an actress who had a difficult relationship with the Crow Street Theatre, wrote an adaptation of Scott’s Marmion that took a character who only appears in a single Canto of the poem and made her the center of the adapted drama.

 

On Friday, conference delegates could opt for a trip to New Lanark and the Falls of Clyde, which provided some very dramatic landscapes. All in all, it was a wonderful conference!

Goethe on the Theater

I recently wrote a post about beginning a translation of Nathan the Wise by G.E. Lessing. That's not the only German play I've tried to translate, though, and I've previously blogged about a translation I did of a song from Faust by J.W. Goethe.

At the rate I'm going, it will take me years to translate the whole of Faust, but I wanted to share some of my translation because it relates to Goethe's view of the German stage in his time. In the prelude to the play, Goethe shows a conversation amongst a director, a playwright, and a comic actor.

The director is most concerned with commerce rather than art. He asks the writer and actor what play they should do, not seeming to care much, so long as it pleases a paying audience. In a typical passage towards the beginning he says:

I very much want to please the crowd,

For as they live, they give us our living.

The posters are up, we've cried the play aloud

And everyone waits to see what play we're giving.

They're seated already, with expectant faces,

Wondering, now, what exactly our play is.

I know how to keep the people happy,

Though what this crowd expects no one knows.

Something to keep gramps there from feeling too nappy.

I bet he's seen some awful shows.

What shall we do that's fresh and new

And will have some meaning to it, too?

The writer, who is described as a dramatic poet, is an idealist. He wants nothing to do with the practicalities of the stage. Instead, he imagines a more exclusive drama that has spiritual meaning. He rails at the director, saying:

O do not talk to me about the crowd,

Or in an instant the spirit shall fly away!

For the masses, my head remains unbowed,

For they'd run for strudel soon as hear a play.

No, drive me to where heaven's silence is allowed,

Where only the poet and his friends can stay,

Where love and friendship our hearts unfold

And the Hand of God may our spirits mold!

The actor, who is described as a comedian, is even more cynical than the director. Still, he seems to understand what will make a good play. Bringing the playwright back to earth from his poetic flights of fancy, the actor asks:

Who will entertain the folks right here?

That's what they want, and they should get it.

A brave knave is the thing to fit it.

That's me, always ready to appear.

Who knows how to be pleasant and please,

Needs not be bitter about people's taste;

He wishes to bring in lots of fees,

By moving the masses with great haste.

Be only brave and master a smile,

Give into fantasy, and have a good cheer,

Believe, understand, and feel for a while,

But mark you well, with a laugh and a jeer.

The fact that the actor always does everything "with a laugh and a jeer" associates him with the character of Mephistopheles in the play proper, while the playwright's idealism makes him similar to Faust. Indeed, some productions double those roles in performance.

While I haven't completed the full translation, if you'd like to see more, please contact me. It would be great to see my translation of Faust actually performed!

Translating Lessing

I've previously blogged about Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Nathan the Wise, one of the most famous dramas to come out of the German Enlightenment.

Lessing was a towering figure, not just for his plays, but also for his theoretical writings. His book Laocoon is an important meditation on the nature of art, and he compiled much of his thoughts about the stage in the Hamburg Dramaturgy.

One of the problems with Lessing, though, is that most English-language translations don't do his plays justice. Recently, I acquired a copy of Nathan the Wise, or Nathan der Weise, in German.  As I began reading the original, I tried to see if I could translate the play into English verse.

Lessing's play was written in German blank verse--unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse usually sounds rather natural in English, as English poetry (as exemplified by old ballads) tends to be concerned with the number of emphasized syllables, though not necessarily with the total number of syllables per line. That's why dramatic poets like William Shakespeare often throw in extra syllables or leave out a syllable here or there.

The verse in Nathan the Wise can be more regular in terms of the number of syllables, but Lessing seems less concerned about where the emphasis of a line lands. In translating the beginning of the play, I tried to remain faithful to this. The result is a verse that sounds almost like plain prose, though it still meanders about a bit, as Lessing's language can do.

Below is a selection of my translation. I'm not sure if I'll ever finish translating the play, but if you're thinking of doing a production of Nathan the Wise and are looking for a fresh new translation, let me know! I might decide to speed up my work on the piece...

First Act

First Scene: A Hall in Nathan's House

NATHAN enters as if arriving from a trip. DAJA comes toward him.

DAJA: Oh, here he is! Nathan! — Thanks be to God,

        That you at last have come back to us now.

NATHAN: Yes, Daja; thanks to God! But why at last?

        Had I a need to come back before now?

        And could I have come back? For Babylon

        Is from Jerusalem, the way that I

        Was forced to take, now left, now right, a good

        Two hundred miles winding out of my way,

        And collecting debts is most certainly

        No business that can be taken lightly,

        Or easily accomplished.

DAJA:        O Nathan!

        How miserable, miserable you would

        Have been if you'd been here. Your house…

NATHAN:                    Is burned.

        So I have seen already. — May God grant

        That I have heard the worst of all it now.

DAJA: All could have easily burnt to the ground.

NATHAN: Then, Daja, we'd have built a new one, and

        One much more comfortable.

DAJA:                 That's true,

        But Recha would have been burnt up with all

        The house!

NATHAN:     Burnt up? Who? My Recha? Not she? —

        That I'd not heard. — I would not then have had

        A need for any house at all. — Burnt up?

        With all? Ah-ha! But she is well! Speak up!

        It's really all burned up! Oh, just speak out!

        Kill me and torture me no longer now. —

        Just truthfully, is she burnt up?

DAJA:           If she

        Had been, would you have heard the news from me?

NATHAN: So why do you torment me, then? — Recha!

Want to hear how the scene ends? Let me know! Contact me, and I can send you more of the translation.

Laocoon

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is known for his Enlightenment-era dramas, including Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Miss Sara Sampson. However, he is also important for his many theoretical works on the theatre.

Lessing's Hamburg Dramaturgy is rightly hailed for the influence of its component essays on the German stage. One essay not included in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, however, is a book-length meditation on painting and poetry called Laocoon, in which Lessing sets forth a rational aesthetics for all art, drama included.

In the preface to Laocoon, Lessing speculates that the first person who compared painting with poetry was an amateur, the second was a philosopher, and the third was a critic. Since Lessing himself was a philosopher, I want to focus on the philosophic point of view in Laocoon. In discussing a hypothetical man analyzing the nature of pleasure (Aristotle is probably intended) Lessing writes: "Beauty, our first idea of which is derived from corporeal objects, has universal laws which admit of wide application."

This is a very Enlightenment concept of aesthetics. We arrive at ideas of beauty through experience. By observing corporeal objects, we come to understand that universal laws are at work. These laws can then be applied broadly to a variety of different works of art, regardless of when and where they were created. Do we agree, though? Is beauty universal? Can we uncover the laws by which it is governed? Do these laws transcend all time and place?

Lessing runs into trouble for us when his essay wanders into the territory of flat-out racism. In chapter 25, he reflects upon the fact that the "Hottentots" in Africa have very different concepts of human beauty than his own Euro-centric ideas. According to Lessing, those people regard "as beautiful and holy what excites our disgust and aversion."

Citing a source called The Connoisseur, Lessing invites the reader to imagine a "pressed gristle of a nose, flaccid breasts descending to the navel, the whole body anointed with a varnish of goat's fat and soot, melted in by the sun, hair dripping with grease, arms and legs entwined with fresh entrails." Is this part of Lessing's argument for universal beauty?

We take it for granted that whether a nose is "pressed" or slender is a matter of taste, and a narrow nose is only culturally constructed as beautiful. While breasts reaching the belly button might not be everyone's kink, who are we to judge? And come on, no one really adorns their body with entrails. That's just one of Lessing's racist fantasies, right?

Except, in a note, Lessing documents this as factual. According to The Connoisseur, an African beauty actually did appear adorned with "the shining entrails of an heifer." Whether this was true or not, Lessing gives us his evidence for believing it. Even if we accept that the contours of noses and the shapes of breasts are subject to personal taste rather than universal laws, can we really accept that it's only a matter of opinion whether entrails are sexy?

Here, however, I think we find a challenge to our own concepts a beauty. If I dig chicks in leather jackets, no one sees that as odd, but isn't leather the tanned skin of an animal? How is wearing the skin of a heifer any different from wearing its entrails? Though Lessing begins by trying to demonstrate universal laws of beauty, he ends up supplying arguments against the existence of those laws.

This brings us back to the famous sculpture known as the Laocoon group that gives its name to the essay. Lessing is struck by the sculpture's beauty, but it also presents suffering and horror. How can we reconcile the sculpture's artistic power with its grotesque and horrifying appearance?

Lessing is at his best when he compares the sculpture with the Sophocles play Philoctetes. The hero in that drama cries out in pain, which is horrid, but through art, the horrid can be rendered beautiful. As Lessing points out, Sophocles did not "hesitate to make the theatre ring with the imitation of those tones of rage, pain, and despair."

The fact that we hear that cry in drama, that we can experience the anguished calling out of Philoctetes while Laocoon must be forever silent in marble, could be an argument for drama being the most powerful of all the art forms.

The Decameron

Like a number of people enduring the quarantine of the present plague, I've been working my way through reading The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. I knew that the book's hundred tales had made a profound impact on literature in general, but I hadn't realized how important they were to the theater.

The framing device of The Decameron concerns seven women and three men who flee Florence during the Black Death. Outside of the city, with little else to do, they begin telling stories. Each of them tells a story on the first day, and over the course of ten days, they recite a total of one hundred stories, ten stories for each teller.

A woman named Pampinea gets the storytelling rolling by challenging everyone on the first day to tell a tale about whatever pleases them best. Panfilo tells the first story, about a scoundrel who is thought a saint, and then Neifile tells a tale about the debauchery in the Pope's court in Rome. It is the third tale, told by Filomena, however, that caught my attention, since it relates the same story as Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise.

In Boccaccio's version, the story is set in Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, but the general idea is the same as in Lessing's play. Saladin, the Sultan who ruled the Islamic world during the twelfth century, is looking to borrow money from a wealthy Jewish merchant. Testing him, Saladin asks which religion is truly authentic: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Knowing that there is no safe way to answer with any of these three, the merchant comes up with a parable to tell that gets him out of the predicament.

Lessing's version makes Saladin more sympathetic, and uses the merchant's parable as a general plea for religious tolerance. Still, many of the elements of the play are present in the tale Filomena delivers in The Decameron. This story is not the only one, however, that later provided fodder for drama. On the second day, Filomena challenges everyone to tell a story about someone who after suffering many misfortunes, finds unexpected happiness. Hmm... that sounds like a Shakespearean Romance.

And in fact, Filomena's own tale on the second day provided much of the plot for William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Shakespeare did not necessarily read The Decameron directly, since some details in the play aren't in the original, but do appear in a Dutch version of the story called Frederyke of Jennen. The outline of the plot is still there, though. A man foolishly makes a wager on his wife's chastity, and then a villain hides in a trunk that gets carried into the lady's room. Creeping out at night, he examines the room, takes a ring of hers, and examines an unusual mark on her breast. Proof positive that he vanquished her virtue!

Of course, that's not how the story ends, either in Boccaccio or in Shakespeare. After hearing what sounds like incontrovertible proof of his wife's infidelity, the husband orders a servant to kill her. The servant doesn't have the heart to commit the deed, and instead of murdering her, he gives her a set of male clothes so she can escape unseen and reports the murder to her husband. In the climax of the tale, the lady reveals herself to her husband and exposes the villain. Shakespeare's innovation was to combine the tale with the legend of a British king who appears in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, along with some events from the anonymous Elizabethan play Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune.

Filomena's tale on the third day contains some wonderful humor as she describes a woman getting a friar to unknowingly arrange trysts between herself and her lover. Molière incorporated elements of the tale in his play The School for Husbands. The ninth story of the third day is given by Neifile, and it provides the ultimate source of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well. Again, the Bard appears to have used an intermediary source, probably William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare also seems to have invented the role of the braggart coward Parolles, which is arguably the best role in the play.

On the fourth day, the stories concern those whose love ended unhappily, but these tales did not provide the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. Instead, Filomena's tale became the basis of the poem "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil" by John Keats. The fourth tale of the fifth day also apparently provided material for Lope de Vega's play The Nightingale of Seville, though I haven't read that one.

Other dramatists who have retold tales from The Decameron include Thomas Middleton, Apostolo Zeno, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Perhaps during our present quarantine, Boccaccio will inspire more plays. Now if we could only open the theaters to let them be performed....

Nathan the Wise?

In 1779, the German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published his last play, Nathan the Wise. A towering figure of the German Enlightenment, Lessing meant the piece to be a mighty stroke for religious tolerance. He drew inspiration from the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, expecting him to embrace the work. Unfortunately, Mendelssohn most certainly did not.

While Lessing intended the piece to speak out against religious intolerance, in some ways, it seems to oppose the religious impulse itself. Mendelssohn had risen to fame with his book Phaedo, modeled after Plato's dialogue of the same name. Mendelssohn's book (like Plato's) argued for the immortality of the soul. Such notions of the spiritual realm are absent from Lessing's play, which leads the audience to embrace the physical world rather than religious miracles.

For instance, when Nathan's daughter in the play believes a man who saved her was an angel, he rebukes her. Nathan argues:

               Now to an angel, what great services

               Have ye the power to do? To sing his praise--

               Melt in transporting contemplation o'er him--

               Fast on his holiday--and squander alms--

               What nothingness of use! To me at least

               It seems your neighbor gains much more than he

               By all this pious glow. Not by your fasting

               Is he made fat; not by your squandering, rich;

               Nor by your transports is his glory exalted;

               Nor by your faith, his might. But to a man--

Nathan's point is that we owe our thanks to human beings rather than to the supernatural. We should thank men for our good fortune, not some invisible inhabitant of another world. Moreover, he reprimands his daughter for traditional religious observances, such as fasting and almsgiving. Nathan's ultra-rational view of the world sees even the distribution of alms as "squandering" rather than a religious duty that might make the world a better place. Whether or not he is right, his arguments are not merely against intolerance, but against some of the basic tenants of the three great monotheistic religions.

The play represents all three of those religions. Nathan is Jewish, while his best friend Al-Hafi is Muslim, and the mysterious stranger who saved his daughter is a Christian knight of the Templar order. Far from being a Christian zealot, though, the Templar is suspicious of any religion that sees itself as better than another faith. Nathan is delighted, and says to him:

               We must, we will be friends. Despise my nation--

               We did not choose a nation for ourselves.

               Are we our nations? What's a nation then?

               Were Jews and Christians such, e'er they were men?

               And I have found in thee one more, to whom

               It is enough to be a man.

Interestingly enough, it is the men in the play who primarily exalt reason, while the women are more likely to hold "childish" notions about religion. Nathan's daughter Recha naively believes the Templar to be an angel, and Daya, a Christian woman in Nathan's service, secretly works against her master. Recha parrots back her father's teaching that "our devotion to the God of all / Depends not on our notions about God." One might wonder if the concept of God has any meaning, then, if all notions about God are irrelevant. Daya tries a different tact, however. She tells the Templar a secret: Recha is not Nathan's biological child at all, but adopted, and born a Christian!

This revelation throws the characters into chaos, but Lessing's play revels in the fluidness of religious identity. At one point, a kindly friar exclaims, "Nathan, you are Christian!" to which the protagonist responds, "What makes me to you a Christian / Makes you to me a Jew." This interchangeability of religious names is in keeping with a parable Nathan tells about three brothers who each receive what they believe to be a special ring passed down from their father. When the brothers realize all three have what they believe to be the true ring, each brother is forced to act with the greatest uprightness possible, in hopes of proving his own ring to be the one that has been blessed.

The parable is lovely, but Lessing's play takes its lesson to the point of absurdity. The Templar is in love with Recha, who was raised as Jewish, but revealed by Daya to have been born to a Christian family. That would seem to be convenient, since it allows the two to marry without having a "mixed" marriage. Instead of having them marry, however, Lessing reveals that they are actually brother and sister. Not only that, the Templar turns out to be the nephew of the Muslim sultan, the great Saladin! What are the lovers now? Jewish? Christian? Muslim? Does it even make a difference anymore?

More importantly, how are they supposed to deal with the romantic love they have for one another now that they turn out to be brother and sister? Saladin revels in the strong bond of blood kinship, declaring to the (former?) Templar, "Now, proud boy, thou shalt love me, thou must love me." In the Enlightenment view of the play, love is compulsory. Our duties come not from religious faith, but from the dictates of our birth, and each of us are bound to follow the dictates of birth just as each of the three brothers in the parable is bound to honor his own ring, even if it turns out to be a forgery.

Is it any wonder Mendelssohn reacted so strongly against the play? Lessing claims that the Jews are not a chosen people, and even if they are, it scarcely matters since all religious identities are interchangeable, and we are bound not by choice or faith, but by the accident of birth. A woman raised on the Torah is supposed to just blithely start going to Mass because her parents were Christian, and a Templar sworn to fight Islam is supposed to switch sides as soon as he finds out that the sultan is his uncle.

What is most disturbing about the play's ending, though, is its sublimation of the sexual and romantic energy between the lovers into the familial love of a sibling relationship. Lessing glosses over this, having the two perfectly satisfied with how things turn out, and not at all troubled by their incestuous longings. The sexual element of the play is effectively neutered.

Lessing could have ended the play differently, but he chose to make the lovers brother and sister. Why? The neutering of their relationship, which is so bound up with their religious zeal (after all, she first thought he was an angel) in effect becomes a neutering of religion itself. Now we see why the "rational" men in the play eschew religious faith while the "irrational" women are likely to mistake men for angels. Lessing's goal is to make reason manly, while religion appears as a girlish pursuit unbecoming of a true man. He even gives the one male character associated with the irrational nature of religion--the Patriarch of Jerusalem--feminine characteristics, having him strut around in his stately garments even when he is just out visiting the sick.

The play offers an asexual and aromantic rationality as the "cure" for religion's extremism. In removing all that was irrational from religion, however, Lessing also eliminates what gave it power. The eroticism that bound together the Templar and Recha disappears, and with it, much of the irrational, faith-based passion that makes religion attractive to many people. Lessing intended the play as a plea for religious tolerance, but one can't help wondering: Did Lessing understand religion at all?

Clearing Up the German Stage

In Germany, the Enlightenment was known as the "Aufklärung" which translates roughly to the "clearing up of things." Since the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Germany had been left as a mess, politically, economically, and intellectually. Enlightenment thinkers in Germany tended to steer clear of political problems, and they usually came from the rising middle class, which was helping to restore the finances of the region in the wake of decades of war. Their primary goal was to liberate people from superstition and worn-out ideas. They particularly took aim at prejudices among German-speaking people to favor fashions from France or England rather than something that had been produced locally, be it a cloak, a hat, or a new play.

The German Aufklärung also sought to clear up the mess that had been made of the country's theatre, and perhaps no one person was more dedicated to reorganizing the theatre than the actress and theatre manager Caroline Neuber. Born Friederike Caroline Weissenborn, she was well educated by an intelligent but tyrannical father who seems to have quite literally beaten her unfortunate mother to death. At twenty, she ran off with a young clerk, Johann Neuber, and married him. The couple joined a troupe of traveling actors, and then five years later moved to another company. In 1727, they founded their own troupe and were granted a special patent by the local government to perform at the annual Easter Fair in Leipzig.

Performing extensively rehearsed productions, the Neubers' company attracted the attention of a university professor in Leipzig, Johann Christoph Gottsched. Like Neuber, Gottsched wanted to elevate German drama, and the two worked together, with Neuber staging innovative new productions and Gottsched writing critical defenses of her actions. Most controversial was Neuber's holding a symbolic banishing of the traditional German clown, Hanswurst, an act Gottsched justified as necessary to bring about a new seriousness in drama. Unfortunately, Gottsched felt he needed to be deferred to in stage matters as well as literary ones, and Neuber would have none of that. The two fell out in 1741 over an argument in which even Gottsched's own wife had sided with Neuber.

Realizing the value of having an educated critic on her side, Neuber looked about for a replacement for Gottsched, and came upon a talented student at the University of Leipzig named Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. She induced him to translate French plays for her, and then in 1748 she produced his first original play, The Young Scholar. Lessing began reviewing theatre productions, and eventually co-founded a new journal dedicated exclusively to the drama. Though it lasted only four issues, it established his reputation. Lessing continued to write plays, and in 1755 penned Miss Sara Sampson, a bourgeois tragedy influenced by George Lillo's The London Merchant but surpassing it in many ways.

While Miss Sara Sampson introduced bourgeois tragedy to the German stage, Lessing's 1767 play Minna von Barnhelm set new standards in romantic comedy. The same year he wrote that play, Lessing began work on a series of essays for the Hamburg National Theater. Though the theatre closed two years later, Lessing's essays, collected together in the book Hamburg Dramaturgy, had a lasting effect on dramatic theory and criticism. In 1772 Lessing wrote Emilia Galotti, a tragedy on classical themes but with a contemporary setting, and seven years later he shocked religious sensibilities with his historical comedy about the Crusades, Nathan the Wise. Though Lessing intended the play as a plea for religious tolerance, people of many faiths condemned it for its argument that all religions are essentially interchangeable.

Lessing is generally credited with helping to pave the way for German Romanticism, but that's another story.