Abstract
Two plays composed by Wieland and Bodmer in the same year, 1758, and now largely forgotten, share an identical theme, Lady Jane Grey; both are indebted to English precursors. If Wieland's play is remembered, it is as the first full-length play in German to employ the blank verse line, and as the subject of Lessing's vigorous charge of plagiarism against it. Bodmer's work, like the rest of his creative output, has sunk into oblivion. Yet both plays have merits as well as interest in respect of the difficult notion of plagiarism, and in their relationship to notions of 'martyr tragedy' and 'she-tragedy' they show drama turning away from the stasis of neo-classicism to the more kinetic Shakespearean style and to the drama of pity. Bodmer's play, for all its weaknesses, has moments of dramatic action which anticipate Schiller.
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