Four excerpts from the Hamburgische Dramaturgie by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Abstract

The Hamburgische Dramaturgie was written and published in pieces while Lessing was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre in Hamburg. Though a short-lived affair as an institution, the theatre’s enduring contribution was to inaugurate systematic dramaturgical analysis. The German theatre was just in the process of emancipating itself from its great classical and neoclassical models, and translation became a central concern not just of aesthetics, but of cultural politics. The four excerpts here focus on problems of translation in the theatre.