Abstract

As in Plato's parable of the cave, the problem of Enlightenment lies not in the ascent from darkness, but in returning to the cave to do the work of philosophy. For the early German Enlightenment, the example appeared to be the best instrument of instruction and understanding. It offered tangibility to a common public while remaining subordinate to the rule it illustrated. Exemplarity operated particularly forcefully as a technique on the stages of the 18th century and as a methodological problem in the dramatic theories of Gottsched, Schlegel, Lessing and Lenz. The mimetic impulse sent out from the stage via these examples had to be technically contained, because each bad example in circulation had to remain inimitable. The problems raised by the intersection of the comprehensibility of the bad example and its imperative inimitability form the subject of this study. While this dissertation owes much to sociological, philosophical or rhetorical accounts of the 18th century, it primarily demonstrates the broad applicability of commercial figures in legitimating or impeaching a series of theatrical techniques. When 18th-century dramatists make the exemplary character or play into a sample or commodity, they participate in a powerful system of representation which regularly shares the stage with an immense potential for misrepresentation. This study describes this contradiction as a history. Thus, the exemplary comedy of the early 18th-century does not remain a pre-historic vestige of German literature, but instead proves its parentage of the "genius," the figure who would later stand at the watershed of legality and transgression