The Hamburg Dramaturgy by G.E. Lessing

A New and Complete Annotated English Translation

Natalya Baldyga, Wendy Arons, Sara Figal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415662451
• eBook ISBN: 9781135099275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

While eighteenth-century playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing made numerous contributions in his lifetime to the theater, the text that best documents his dynamic and shifting views on dramatic theory is also that which continues to resonate with later generations – the Hamburg Dramaturgy ( Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767–69). This collection of 104 short essays represents one of the eighteenth century's most important critical engagements with the theater and its potential to promote humanistic discourse. Lessing's essays are an immensely erudite, deeply engaged, witty, ironic, and occasionally scathing investigation of European theatrical culture, bolstered by deep analysis of Aristotelian dramatic theory and utopian visions of theater as a vehicle for human connection.

This is the first complete English translation of Lessing's text, with extensive annotations that place the work in its historical context. For the first time, English-language readers can trace primary source references and link Lessing's observations on drama, theory, and performance not only to the plays he discusses, but also to dramatic criticism and acting theory. This volume also includes three introductory essays that situate Lessing's work both within his historical time period and in terms of his influence on Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theater and criticism.

The newly translated Hamburg Dramaturgy will speak to dramaturgs, directors, and humanities scholars who see theater not only for entertainment, but also for philosophical and political debate.

1
Missions, Misunderstandings, and Mythologies

The relationship between the Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Hamburg National Theater

Natalya Baldyga

In the spring of 1767, the Hamburg National Theater was preparing to open. The experimental enterprise, meant to promote theatrical reform and the legitimacy of German drama, had procured financial backing, a brand-new performance space, and star talent. What it lacked was cultural capital – specifically, a distinguished literary figure whose presence could lend the new theater an air of respectability. As luck would have it, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) was in need of employment. A popular playwright, highly esteemed (and even feared) as a critic, Lessing nevertheless had failed, due to various contretemps, to secure his dream position as the royal librarian in Berlin. Financially, the celebrated author was in desperate straits. It was at this moment that he received an offer to join the Hamburg National Theater as its “official theater poet.” Although the Hamburg endeavor appealed to him, Lessing, who frequently had significant difficulties meeting deadlines, wisely rejected the offer to serve as the theater’s resident playwright. An alternative was suggested: join the theater as an in-house critic and author a serial publication for the theater’s patrons. Lessing accepted. The Hamburg National Theater had succeeded in adding a celebrity author to its roster. After careful deliberation, Lessing chose to call his new journal the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, intending his essays to be a didactic supplement to the Hamburg theater experiment, in the form of a kritisches Register (a critical register) to the plays performed by the Hamburg company (“Notice” 36).

As originally conceived by Lessing, the Hamburg Dramaturgy was meant to contribute to a growing German interest in dramatic theory, to assess the work of playwrights and actors, and to educate the taste of the public (“Notice” 36–7). In practice, however, the Hamburg Dramaturgy differed considerably in form and function from its original theoretical conception. Lessing’s commentary hardly serves as a critical register to the performances: a significant number of plays are never discussed, and some are barely mentioned, while the discussion of others extends over five, ten, or even seventeen essays. When one reads the Hamburg Dramaturgy, the discrepancy between theory and practice quickly becomes apparent: by the time that Lessing concludes his commentary about the theater’s premiere performance in his seventh essay, the Hamburg National Theater had been open for over a month.¹ By the end of the first year of the Hamburg enterprise, Lessing’s journal had little association with the theater to which it was ostensibly attached. Lessing’s commentary in the Hamburg Dramaturgy ends with the theater’s 52nd evening, which occurred on 28 July 1767, even though the Hamburg National Theater continued performances until early 1769.² In his final installment of essays, issued on Easter 1769, shortly after the theater’s closing performance, Lessing admits that his writings were “not exactly what [he] promised” (“Essays 101–104” 306).

Yet it was Lessing’s shift in focus from practical staging matters to dramatic theory that most likely ensured the position of the Hamburg Dramaturgy as a seminal text of the European – and specifically, German – theater, as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship prioritized dramatic theory over discussions of acting and performance and later twentieth-century scholars turned to the text for evidence of incipient German nationalist discourse. Today, in library catalogs, one finds the work listed under the subject headings “Drama – Technique,” “Aristotle – Poetics,” and, occasionally, “Drama – History and criticism.” Such headings elide the scope and complexity of Lessing’s project. So too do the brief synopses in theater history textbooks, which describe the Hamburg Dramaturgy as a treatise in which Lessing challenged French neoclassical interpretations of Aristotle and professed his admiration for Shakespeare. Although both of these statements are true, they nevertheless provide an erroneous understanding of the form and function of Lessing’s journal by presenting it as a cohesive and premeditated literary endeavor, when it was in actuality rather disjunctive and improvisational in nature. Additionally, the origins of Lessing’s journal have been significantly mythologized, which has colored how the Hamburg Dramaturgy has been viewed. As is often the case, the full story is rather messier than the sanitized hagiographies that prevail in textbooks. Both in Lessing’s time and in ours, people’s expectations regarding the Hamburg Dramaturgy seldom align with the realities of its production, and its contents are often less – and sometimes more – than originally promised. These disparities make greater sense when one considers Lessing’s journal in relation to his larger interest in cultural reform and the founding and brief life of the Hamburg National Theater.

Lessing followed a circuitous path to his role as one of Germany’s most influential literary critics. Born in Saxony in 1729, Lessing was the son of a Lutheran pastor-scholar. Scholarships allowed him to attend the University of Leipzig, propelling him into an eighteenth-century German mecca of culture, literature, and learning (and gateway to European Enlightenment thinking). Although enrolled as a theological student, Lessing frequented lectures on literature, philology, classical studies, and philosophy. These years also marked Lessing’s first serious engagement with the theater, an interest that developed early and persisted despite the active disapproval of his parents, actors being considered social outcasts by reputable citizens. Lessing fraternized with actors in Leipzig and attended the theater often, translating plays as a means of gaining admission to performances. Later, as Lessing’s fortunes as a journalist, critic, translator, traveling companion, and independent writer waxed and waned, he would shuttle between Leipzig and Berlin, with time in Wittenberg, Breslau, Amsterdam, and other cities as well. Before his move to Hamburg to join its new National Theater, Lessing had obtained a master’s degree in philosophy, scraped together a living from all manners of clerical work, published an acclaimed six-volume collection of his plays, poetry, criticism, and theological and philosophical works, and founded several journals, including the Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters [Contributions to the History and Development of the Theater] (1750), the first German periodical to focus on drama and theatrical performance.³

Much of Lessing’s prolific output was related to the theater. His second periodical, the Theatralische Bibliothek [Theatrical Library] (1754–58), was meant, much like the Beyträge, to provide a scholarly discussion of drama and theater history accessible to the general public. Lessing’s thinking about theater and performance was further developed by his conversations (in person and in letters) with his wide range of talented and illustrious friends and acquaintances, and in particular with the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) and the bookseller and entrepreneur Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811). Together, the three friends published the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend or Litteraturbriefe [Letters Concerning the Most Recent Literature or Letters on Literature] (1759–65) and maintained a running epistolary dialogue that addressed contemporary aesthetic and philosophical debates (including dramatic and theatrical matters) for over a quarter of a century. Moreover, in addition to his vast and influential critical writings, Lessing was also a celebrated playwright who added to the growing body of original German-language plays aimed at a domestic audience. Before moving to Hamburg, Lessing had already written two of his masterworks, the domestic tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and his controversial political comedy Minna von Barnhelm (1767), in addition to other minor plays.

If Lessing was attracted by the mission statement of the Hamburg National Theater, which emphasized the reform of the German theater and the development of its literature, he was, as yet, unaware of the mixed and sometimes conflicting aims of those involved in the establishment of the new theater.⁴ The impetus for the Hamburg enterprise is often ascribed to a “group of art-loving citizens,” a narrative founded more on the promotional hyperbole surrounding the new theater’s inauguration than on fact.⁵ Although Hamburg, by the 1760s, had at one time or another housed the most important German acting companies of the early to mid-eighteenth century, not all of Hamburg’s populace was pleased that their city served as a locus for theatrical entertainment. Theater in the German lands had not yet gained the status of a respectable pastime. In order to understand the experimental nature of the Hamburg National Theater and the situation in which Lessing found himself, one needs to know something of the turbulent history of the eighteenth-century German theater.

At the time of the Hamburg National Theater’s founding, German troupes were largely relegated to town halls and temporary stages or performing booths (Spielbude) that were torn down after performances. Large opera houses built in the seventeenth century in Germany had up-to-date neoclassical scenery and stage machinery but were used for Italian opera and occasionally for visiting French acting companies; German troupes did not have access to them. Appropriately known as Wanderbühnen (traveling players), German actors remained permanently on tour, leading a vagabond existence in conditions that ranged from difficult to appalling. The main fare of the early eighteenth-century German companies was improvisational comedy featuring the boisterous “German harlequin” Hanswurst (Jack Sausage), Italian opera libretti, and the Haupt- und Staatsaktionen (chief and state plays), sensational tragedies adapted from English, French, and Spanish plays. Although these mixed entertainments were well attended, the boisterous non-literary repertoire of the Wanderbühnen, their itinerant status, the nature of their performance spaces, and the widely held preconception of actors (and especially actresses) as people of loose morals all contributed to the impression held by the educated middle-classes and lower gentry that theater was a suspect pastime, perhaps appropriate for the lower classes but not for respectable citizens.

The Hamburg National Theater can be seen as the direct descendant of earlier efforts to reform the German theater, which began in earnest in the first third of the eighteenth century with the partnership between professor and critic Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) and actress-manager Friederike Karoline Neuber (1697– 1760) in Leipzig.⁶ The performance of original German-language works was rare at this time, and there were few available for companies to perform. In his search for a new German literature, Gottsched looked to the strict rules and order of French neoclassicism as his model for German playwriting. Beginning in 1727, Gottsched and Neuber worked to establish a new theatrical repertoire, which included not only French tragedies by Corneille and Racine but also plays by German authors such as Johann Elias Schlegel (1719–49), Johann Christian Krüger (1722–50), and even a young Lessing, then a student at the university.⁷ Gottsched and Neuber combined their respective talents – scholarship and performance – in the attempt to convert the public to their views. The Gottsched-Neuber repertoire was initially successful in Leipzig, but interest palled and their partnership began to disintegrate; it eventually came to a final and acrimonious end in 1741 when Neuber lampooned Gottsched onstage. Both the Neuber-Gottsched dramatic repertoire and its attendant acting style (the “Leipzig style”) were passed down by the leading actor-managers who had begun as members of Neuber’s troupe. Their companies, as well as Neuber’s, brought the experiments in theater reform begun in Leipzig to the theater-going public in Hamburg.⁸ The company of Johann Friedrich Schönemann (1704–82) supplemented Neuber’s French neoclassical repertoire with pastorals, Haupt- und Staatsaktionen, and bourgeois dramas such as Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755), performing this adapted repertoire in Hamburg throughout the 1740s and early 1750s. Schönemann’s repertoire was in turn inherited by Konrad Ernst Ackermann (1712–71), a performer in Schönemann’s troupe who established his own company in Hamburg in 1764. It was Ackerman’s company that would be coopted by theater critic and theatrical reformer Johann Friedrich Löwen (1727–71) in order to form the Hamburg National Theater.⁹

Ackermann not only presented English, Italian, and German works alongside the standard French neoclassical plays but also provided the public with highly popular ballets and pantomimes. In 1765, Ackermann constructed a new theater in Hamburg which, although small (and deemed a fire hazard by the city authorities), was preferable to the space he had previously leased, and hired Löwen, an erstwhile academic and theater critic, as a literary advisor. The appointment did not prove congenial. Ackermann came to resent Löwen’s criticism of his management of the theater and replaced him. In 1766, Löwen secured backing for a new Hamburg theatrical endeavor, which was intended to replace Ackermann’s company. In actuality, Löwen leased the theater building from Ackermann, merely changing its name, while retaining most of the in-house company, including Ackermann himself. Having secured a theater, Löwen now set his sights on obtaining a company playwright, with a view toward promoting German-language plays.

At the time of the founding of the Hamburg National Theater, some playwrights were writing in the German language, but there was no established school of German playwriting. In 1755, when Lessing wrote his first major play, the immensely popular domestic tragedy Miss Sara Sampson, most German playwrights were still focusing their efforts on translating or adapting classical or foreign works. J. C. Gottsched’s six-volume Die Deutsche Schaubühne [The German Stage] (1741–45), for example, contained primarily translations of French ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of contributors
• A note on the original author
• 1 Missions, misunderstandings, and mythologies: the relationship between the Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Hamburg National Theater
• 2 “We have actors, but no art of acting”: performance theory and theatrical emotion in the Hamburg Dramaturgy
• 3 The legacy of the Hamburg Dramaturgy
• 4 Note on the translation
• Volume I
• Volume II
• Paralipomena
• Notes to essays 1–104
• Notes to the Paralipomena
• Works cited
• Subject index
• Name index
• Title index