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A good discussion from the dramatic and histrionic point of view is contained in Bulthaupt, Dramaturgie des Schauspiels, 5th edition, Oldenburg, 1891. The Studien zu Schillers Dramen, by W. Fielitz, Leipzig, 1876, are excellent, but relate only to 'Wallenstein', 'Maria Stuart' and 'The Maid of Orleans'. Suggestive and eminently readable is Werder, Vorlesungen ueber Wallenstein, Berlin, 1889.
But one learns at length to recognize and value this very incompleteness as characteristic of the man who was growing lifelong, and to whom the selfish thought that any share of truth could be exclusively his was an impossibility. At the end of the ninety-fifth number of the Dramaturgie he says: "I remind my readers here, that these pages are by no means intended to contain a dramatic system.
Lessing's mind was critical rather than creative; he, too, was an enthusiastic student of Aristotle, and read with far truer artistic intelligence than Corneille. The criticism of his Hamburgische Dramaturgie cleared the way for the great creative poets of the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. It was a period of experiment, both in subject-matter and in form.
It is no less fresh in the minds of critics how that modern Jupiter, Lessing, waged a long and bitter battle with the Titans of the French classical drama, and finally crushed them with the thunderbolt of the "Dramaturgie;" nor what acrimony sharpened the discussion between the rival theorists in music, Gluck and Piccini, at Paris.
Consequently, it is soon recognised that they write for the sake of filling up the paper, and this is the case sometimes with the best authors; for example, in parts of Lessing's Dramaturgie, and even in many of Jean Paul's romances. As soon as this is perceived the book should be thrown away, for time is precious.
At the time when he published his Dramaturgie, we Germans had scarcely any but French tragedies upon our stages, and the extravagant predilection for them as classical models had not then been combated. At present the national taste has declared itself so decidedly against them, that we have nothing to fear of an illusion in that quarter.
It was Lessing who in the trenchant prose of his Hamburger Dramaturgie first revolted against the French domination, the strength of which may be judged from the list there given of works performed in the Hamburg theatre from April to July 1767. Of the fifty-two plays there enumerated, fifteen were German, thirty-five French, and two from other languages only one being English.
He wrote "Hints for an Essay on the Drama," a work which has scarcely held its place in the library of the dramatist by the side of the "Paradoxe sur le Comédien" of Diderot, or the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" of Lessing. He wrote an account of the European settlements in America, still interesting as showing the early and intimate connection of his thoughts with the greatest of English colonies.
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