Frank Wedekind

Four Major Plays

Wedekind, Frank

• Publisher: Smith and Kraus
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN:
  9781684764099
• Print ISBN:
  9781575252094

Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) is rightly called the prophet of sexuality in modern drama. He himself wandered the world in the company of adventurers, libertines, "perverts," and underground figures, seeking to "know love in all its manifestations." Society's antagonism toward the power of sex is the motivating force in the entire body of his work. And yet Wedekind was a moralist in the strictest sense: sex, he seems to say, is its own enemy. His concept of morality was ambivalent: a child of the Victorian age, he was torn between conventional bourgeois morality and the new morality of sexual freedom. It is difficult to overestimate Wedikind's role in contemporary drama, as a vital force in modern expressionism and as a direct forerunner of the so-called Theater of the Absurd, especially in the work of such seminal writers as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Reacting against the bathos of neo-romanticism and the stolidity of naturalism, he struck deep roots.