Cross-Cultural Inventions in Drama on the Basis of the Novel in Prose, or World Literature before World Literature: The Case of Fortunatus

Abstract

In 1767 German author and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing launched his beautifully written polemics against French drama: he called it frightful, vain, all too rational and idealist, focused on rules and norms only. Lessing wished to ban this kind of drama from the German stage, which was still in its infancy (Lessing, of course, called it “barbarian”): indeed, during its brief period of existence, the Hamburg national theater, Lessing’s theater of reference at which he himself was employed as a critic, played 70 French, 40 German, 5 Italian, and 4 English dramas, plus a Dutch text.1 Though Lessing (like Moses Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai) himself aimed to direct German theater toward the English – according to him, in retrospect Shakespeare beat Voltaire – German literature and theater history thereafter stressed the influence of French drama up to the 1760s and credited the discovery of Shakespeare on the German stage to Lessing and his contemporaries.2 Lessing’s polemic led to an unintended effect: the forgetting of the relevance of English theater and drama in the early modern German context.3 It goes without saying that ascriptions like these suffer from the dominance of “the national” in histories of theater and literature as well as from – so to