The monograph provides a model for a new history of comedy linking canonical with non-canonical works, the north and the south of the German speaking area and accounts for the predominance of translations, adaptations and music theatre. It analyses influential and successful comedies from 17th, 18th and early 19th century, which were performed and published in German in both Hamburg and Vienna in different versions. In four series of works and their versions, the positioning of comedies in theatre programs, book series and theatre literature is reconstructed along their writing and authoring strategies, institutional, cultural and mental-historical conditions.
Agents like publishers, other authors and theatre managers, institutions such as theatres, literary academies and and their prizes as well as other textual formations like poetics, reviews or cultural policy treatises are considered to reconstruct the position of texts and performances. The majority of them are translations and adaptations. The Italian and French originals as well as the context of literary production in their respective countries of origin are analysed, as well as the adaptation to the 'target literature'.