Christian Weise

Weise, Christian (1642–1702), German dramatist, headmaster of a school at Zittau, where he wrote and produced a number of long plays which were purely academic. The chronicle plays and tragedies of his earlier days have little to recommend them, but the later comedies, in which Weise portrays the middle class on stage for the first time in the German theatre, foreshadow to some extent the work of Lessing a century later. His Komödie der bösen Catharina (1702) was based on the same plot as The Taming of the Shrew. He used a simple stage and, although he admitted the Fool in the shape of Pickelhering into his plays, he demanded clear delivery in place of declamation and attempted individual characterization.

Christian Weise , 1642-1708, German didactic poet and dramatist. He wrote more than 60 plays, many of them written for production in schools. Perhaps the best-known are the comedy Bäurischer Macchiavellus [the village Machiavelli] (1679) and the tragedy Masaniello (1688). His plays are marked by realism and the use of natural dialects. He also wrote novels, mostly political satires, e.g., Die drei argsten Erznarren [the three archest fools] (1672).