From the 1740s on, Johann Christoph Gottsched’s (1700–1766) personal star began to wane. He came under increasing critical attack, both for the narrow rationalism of his views and for his allegedly dictatorial pretensions as sole arbiter of German literary taste; and his partnership with the actress and theater troupe leader Friederike Neuber came to an end when her troupe departed for St. Petersburg in 1740. But Gottsched’s achievement and his significance in the history of German drama should not be underrated. Even Lessing, in his blistering attack on Gottsched in the famous seventeenth Literaturbrief (Literary Letter) of 1759, sums up the state of the German theater before Gottsched’s reform in terms that closely echo Gottsched’s own words in the preface to Der sterbende Cato (The Death of Cato, 1732). Gottsched had in considerable measure succeeded in generating acceptance for serious, “regular” drama among a public of increasingly “bourgeois” tastes and values; his association with Frau Neuber can be seen as the first step towards the creation of a German National Theater, that distant goal for which, as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister was to observe, so many at that time could be heard to sigh. Gottsched’s Deutsche Schaubühne (German Stage) of 1740–45 was intended to provide the nucleus of a repertory for such a theater. However, for all the assiduity and, within their limits, the talent of Gottsched and especially of his wife, Luise Victorie Gottsched, as adaptors and translators, and the promise of a number of younger dramatists who built on the foundations Gottsched had laid, something more truly original was needed before their hopes for a national German dramatic revival could be realized. This only appeared with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) and the revolution initiated by his Miß Sara Sampson (1755), the first German tragedy with a contemporary bourgeois setting.

Schlegel and Gellert: Heroic Tragedy and Sentimental Comedy

Johann Elias Schlegel (1719–49) was and is still rightly regarded as the most promising of the generation of dramatists growing up under Gottsched’s shadow. In his short life Johann Elias completed five tragedies and drafted sketches for two more; he also produced several comedies and a small but significant body of essays which have earned him the title of “a German pioneer in aesthetics.”