Johann Gottfried Herder: Dramatische Werke

Johann Gottfried Herder as a playwright: this critical edition opens up a new field of research. For the first time, it encompasses Herder’s entire dramatic work, including drafts, fragments and unpublished texts, some of which are purely dramatic in nature, whilst others bear witness to Herder’s experiments with the genres of dramatic poetry and musical theatre. The two volumes present all the facsimiles and their transcriptions, tracing Herder’s creative process. His unfinished thinking is at the focus and is of interdisciplinary interest. The first volume contains a comprehensive introduction to Herder as a reader, spectator, playwright, historian and theorist of theatre. It covers all the works from his youth up to the end of his stay in Bückeburg, a period in which he sought to position himself both in relation to Greco-Roman classical literature and within the context of the contemporary German and French repertoire, and in which, in the tradition of ›Sturm und Drang‹ and influenced by Shakespeare, he was driven by the wish to contribute to the definition of a German theatre.