FOLLOWING THE REPUBLICATION OF HIS WRITINGS on literary aesthetics and drama and dramaturgy in 1887, Johann Elias Schlegel gained an ever more secure and respected place in the history of German poetics as the key figure between Gottsched and Lessing. A respectable and international series of both major and minor studies culminated in 1945 with Elizabeth M. Wilkinson's extensive analysis and historical contextualization of Schlegel's theories which, reprinted in 1973, was the standard work for over forty years and remains an ever relevant achievement. While Wilkinson proceeded rather cautiously on the question of Schlegel's originality, Steven D. Martinson in 1984 spoke openly of his innovativeness apropos the nature and effect of imitation in art, together with the related Ständeklausel in drama, specifically the relationship between pleasure and instruction. It was with respect to precisely these topics that Gerlinde Bretzigheimer two years later challenged Schlegel's originality in a monograph which, according to one reviewer, offered the “deepest and broadest reading of Schlegel's aesthetics to date.” Bretzigheimer would appear to have had the last word on the subject, for silence has prevailed over it ever since. Although her work reveals great learning and her conclusions are generally valid, however, I contend that she failed to give Schlegel his just due, and it is in part the purpose of the present study to show this.

A virtual commonplace in Schlegel scholarship is the assertion of a disjunction between his aesthetic theory and dramatic practice. In view of the importance he attaches to the impact of poetic mimesis on the recipient and the social dimension of drama and theater, however, it would be surprising if his plays did not reflect at least these central concerns, especially when one considers that his theoretical and dramatic writings, unlike, for example, those of Lessing, arose in close temporal proximity to, and often enough in conjunction with, each other and that all were written within the short space of the some dozen productive years granted Schlegel. Inexplicably, several scholars have in fact observed aspects of continuity between these elements of his theory and plays without realizing it, or at least without stating as much. For this reason the contribution of the present considerations lies not in the discovery of an entirely new state of affairs but rather in eliminating a marked inconsistency in Schlegel studies and elaborating on the consequences of its elimination for his work.