Get started

WorkGotthold Ephraim Lessing

Hamburg Dramaturgy

Hired to review a new Hamburg theatre, Lessing turned his twice-weekly sheets into a campaign against the French stage.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing820 passages held

  • German, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Hamburgische Dramaturgie
First published
(aged 38)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

A group of Hamburg merchants founded a theatre at the Gänsemarkt in 1767 and hired Lessing to write about it. He announced the paper on 22 April 1767, the day the stage opened, promising to follow every step taken there by the playwright's art and the actor's. The second half of that promise he soon dropped: Germany, he decided, had actors but no art of acting. What remained became a running argument with French classical drama, carried on play by play through Voltaire's Mérope and Sémiramis and the tragedies of Corneille. The French claimed to follow Aristotle's rules. Lessing answered that no nation had misunderstood those rules more, and declared Aristotle's Poetics as infallible as Euclid's geometry. Tragedy, he argued, works through pity and through the fear for ourselves that pity brings with it, and a king on stage moves us as a human being rather than as a king. The numbers came out twice a week until pirate reprints, issued under the borrowed name of the London publisher Dodsley, forced a pause in August 1767. Lessing caught up at up to four numbers a week, and the last of the 104, dated April 1768, reached print only in the second volume at Easter 1769. By then the theatre had failed. The final number blames the good-hearted idea of giving the Germans a national theatre when they were not yet a nation — not in their constitution, Lessing adds, but in their character. The book's reading of Aristotle helped move the German stage from baroque spectacle toward middle-class drama.

Key concepts

What does Lessing mean by fear in tragedy?

Fear for ourselves, not terror on the hero's behalf. Watching someone like us fall, we see that the same could happen to us, and pity turns into that fear. Lessing insists the two belong together, so that whatever arouses tragic pity must also arouse this fear. That is why the suffering character must resemble the audience rather than stand far above or below it.

Why should a tragic hero be neither wholly good nor wholly bad?

Because both extremes block the feelings tragedy needs. The ruin of a wholly good and innocent person, Aristotle says, produces only horror, and the fall of a villain moves no pity. A hero of mixed character, who errs, lets us pity him and fear for ourselves. Lessing defends this rule against plays that destroy blameless figures for the sake of effect.

What are the unities of place and time, and how did the French misuse them?

Rules that a play should keep to one place and to roughly one day. For the Greeks, Lessing argues, these followed naturally from a single, simple action and a chorus that never left the stage. The French made them rules in their own right and then bent them with tricks to fit crowded plots, keeping the letter of the rule while losing its reason.

How do rules and genius relate in this book?

Lessing denies that they conflict. Critics who cry that genius rises above every rule, he says, forget that nothing in the world can suppress true genius, least of all rules. To claim that rules and criticism stifle genius is to claim that examples and practice stifle it. Rules, on his account, are what the best works teach, not a cage imposed on them.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Aristotle Against the French

Who really follows the rules of ancient tragedy? Lessing argues that the nation proudest of obeying Aristotle understood him least.

French classical drama claimed Aristotle's authority, and Lessing tested the claim play by play, through Voltaire's Mérope and Sémiramis and the tragedies of Corneille. He held the Poetics to be as infallible as Euclid, and for that very reason found the French keeping its letter while missing its point, treating the unities of place and time as ends in themselves. Against the cry that rules crush genius, he answered that nothing in the world can crush genius, and that rules and criticism serve it as examples and practice do.

  • dramatic theory
  • aristotle
  • literary criticism
  • dramatic criticism
  • dramatic structure
  • plot
  • probability
  • translation
  • criticism
  • mimesis
  • aesthetics
  • interpretation

Enter a dialogue

Pity and Fear for Ourselves

What does a tragedy do to the people watching it? Lessing rebuilds Aristotle's answer around one move: the fear we feel is fear for ourselves.

Tragedy, as Lessing now reads Aristotle, arouses pity and fear together, and the fear is not terror at the hero's fate but the fear that something similar could happen to us. That is why the hero must be of the same grain as the audience, neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and why a king on stage moves us as a human being rather than as a king. The ruin of an entirely good and innocent person, Aristotle warns, produces only horror.

  • tragedy
  • pity
  • fear
  • emotion
  • character
  • characterization
  • justice
  • revenge
  • jealousy
  • love
  • dramatic illusion

Enter a dialogue

Actors, Laughter and a National Stage

What can a theatre do for the people who fill it? The paper began by reviewing performances and ended by blaming its audience's unreadiness for its failure.

Lessing set out to judge the actor's art beside the playwright's, praising Hamlet's advice to the players as a golden rule, and soon gave it up: Germany had actors but no art of acting. Comedy, he argued, improves through laughter rather than ridicule, training us to notice the ridiculous rather than curing one particular vice. The last number blames the theatre's collapse on the good-hearted idea of giving the Germans a national theatre when they were not yet a nation, not in their constitution but in their character.

  • theater
  • acting
  • comedy
  • audience
  • satire
  • irony
  • dramatic irony

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
820
distinct concepts
672
by passages held, corpus-wide
#79

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “dramatic structure” and “tragedy”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 78 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
dramatic structuretragedy25
aestheticstragedy24
comedydramatic theory21
aestheticsdramatic theory18
comedyliterary criticism18
literary criticismtheater18
theatertragedy18
dramatic theorytragedy17
aestheticstheater16
dramatic structureliterary criticism15
literary criticismtragedy15
comedydramatic structure13
comedytheater13
comedytragedy13
aestheticsemotion12
emotiontheater12
aestheticsliterary criticism11
emotiontragedy9
dramatic structuretheater8
dramatic theoryemotion8
dramatic theoryliterary criticism8
aestheticscomedy7
aestheticsdramatic structure5
comedyemotion5
dramatic theorytheater4
dramatic structureemotion3
dramatic structuredramatic theory1
emotionliterary criticism1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!

    Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.

     DE
  2. 1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel

    The workshop of Lessing's dramatic theory: here, against Mendelssohn and Nicolai, he first tested the account of pity that he later rebuilt for the Hamburg Dramaturgy.

     DE
  3. 1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie)

    Prepared in Breslau, where Lessing served a Prussian general from 1760 to 1765, this is the one part Lessing published of a larger planned study, and it carries over the poet–philosopher divide of his Pope essay into the arts.

     DE
  4. 1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie) you are here DE
  5. 1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit

    Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.

     DE
  6. 1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik)

    A reply to a single defender of the Easter accounts, written in the winter of 1777–78, just before the quarrel with Goeze crowded out every other exchange.

     DE
  7. 1778 Anti-Goeze

    The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.

     DE
  8. 1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)

    Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.

     DE
  9. 1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)

    Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.

     DE
  10. 1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)

    Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.

     DE
  11. 1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)

    An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.

     DE
  12. 1795 Philosophischer Nachlass

    Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.

     DE
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works