ABSTRACT
Gottsched is probably best known to posterity through Lessing’s hostile criticism and Goethe’s description in Dichtung und Walnbeit of his visit to the old man when he himself was a student in Leipzig. Gottsched then was a populariser and organiser, not a thinker or poet. Gottsched held in fact the ‘imitation’ theory in its crudest form. Gottsched’s dramatic theory is clearly only of interest now for the light it throws on his time and on his own mind. Gottsched’s reform efforts had begun soon after his arrival in Leipzig early in 1724. Friederica Carolina Neuber, at the time when Gottsched, supported by the ‘German Society’ of Leipzig, made his first approaches to the newly formed Neuber troupe, was a woman of thirty, with ten years’ experience of acting behind her and a considerable reputation both in serious and comic parts. The only German tragedy acted was Gottsched’s Sterbender Cato to turn to ridicule Gottsched’s ideas about historical costume.
