Johann Christoph Gottsched, the prominent reformer of early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s — the satirical Saxon comedy, the sentimental comedy, and the revitalized pastoral play — were involved in the construction of a new sentimental discourse promoting the concept of marriage based on love, mutual compatibility, and free partner choice, while devaluing traditional socioeconomic considerations as a foundation for marriage. Comedies by well-known contemporary dramatists such as J. C. Gottsched, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, Johann Elias Schlegel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Theodor Johann Quistorp nonetheless display moments in which alternative gender roles and sexual behaviors call the primacy of marriage into question. One finds depictions of women asserting their independence and refusing to be integrated into marriage, episodes of cross-dressing that foreground the culturally constructed aspects of gender roles, instances of male same-sex desire masked by hypochondria, and allusions to female same-sex desire.

This book examines the marital discourse and the alternative modes of resistance in densely contextualized close readings of these authors' plays. It uncovers the ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy's stance on marriage, highlighting comedy's resistance to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. It excavates the connections between the texts and contemporary norms regarding gender roles and sexual behavior, for scholars have generally neglected these aspects of the plays. Moreover, this study examines how these comedies self-reflexively perform their own reception, using plays-within-plays to reflect upon early Enlightenment comedy, poetics, and pedagogical aesthetics, thereby commenting on the efficacy of theater as a means of promoting norms relating to gender roles and sexual behavior.