Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German playwright and dramatic critic, the opponent of the reforms of Gottsched. In 1767 he became official critic to Ackermann's shortlived National Theatre, for which he published the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, advocating a theatre based on Shakespeare rather than on the fashionable French classic style. His own works were more akin to those of Dryden and the novelist Richardson, whose influence shows clearly in his first major play, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), a tragedy. His early plays had been light comedies in verse, but Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an admirable prose comedy, and Emilia Galotti (1772) a second tragedy. Towards the end of his life Lessing engaged in a prolonged struggle against narrow-minded orthodoxy, which finds expression in his final work, Nathan der Weise, a noble plea for religious tolerance, written in blank verse. First produced two years after his death, its merits were not recognized until Goethe revived it at Weimar in 1801. Translated into many languages, it was given its first professional production in English in 1967 at the Mermaid Theatre.