Gottsched Is Best Known as a translator for her work on drama. Of all her publications, critics are most likely to be aware of Die Pietisterey im Fischbein-Rocke, her translation/adaptation of Bougeant’s Femme docteur. They may also have noted that she contributed a number of translations of French plays to her husband’s six-volume compendium Die Deutsche Schaubühne nach den Regeln und Exempeln der Alten (1741–45). But Gottsched has gained a rather dubious reputation for these efforts. Lessing’s famous condemnation of the Gottsched school in the seventeenth Literaturbrief has cast a long shadow. There the Gottscheds are accused of being slavishly attached to the idea of a “französirende[s] Theater” and of cobbling together poor German versions that did not match the originals: “Herr Gottsched … verstand ein wenig Französisch und fing an zu übersetzen; er ermunterte alles, was reimen und Oui Monsieur verstehen konnte, gleichfalls zu übersetzen.” Gottsched is certainly not deemed to have reached the same heights of greatness as, for example, August Wilhelm Schlegel for his Shakespeare.

And yet we ought to return to the early eighteenth century and look more carefully at Gottsched’s drama translations in context. Gottsched seems to have taken a special interest in the theater. When she turned to literary translation, it was more often than not to plays. She translated ten plays in their entirety and sections of two others. She also translated various essays on drama and, when she came to compose her own works, she made a name for herself principally as a playwright.

Gottsched began translating plays in Danzig in the early 1730s. Her earliest effort may have been an excerpt from Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1732) in unrhymed alexandrines; this fragment was never completed and was probably undertaken as an exercise in translating drama. While in Danzig she also put together her first full-length drama translation: a prose version of Addison’s tragedy Cato (1713), which her husband later suggested was primarily “zur Uebung im Englischen.” And it was in Danzig that she began working on Bougeant’s Femme docteur.

Gottsched’s main work on drama came in the following decade, when she completed seven plays for the Deutsche Schaubühne. Volume 1 contained her versions of Molière’s Le misanthrope (1666; Der Menschenfeind) and Charles Rivière Dufresny’s one-act playlet L’esprit de contradiction (1700; Die Widersprecherinn).