German Classicism and Tragedy's Comic Play

Abstract

This article examines the new understanding of tragedy established by the philosophers and dramatists of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. It traces the efforts of the three most important philosophers of German classicism: Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to redefine tragedy as a genre of ethical reconciliation. As part of their philosophical project, each of these thinkers separates comic play—and the threat it poses to tragic integrity—from tragedy. Despite their efforts to delineate a clear generic separation, however, the German classicists also provide the theoretical framework for a new, playful mode of tragicomedy, which modern dramatists like Henrik Ibsen and Bertolt Brecht embrace in their theatrical projects.