Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz was the author of one of the few lasting theoretical works to emerge from the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period in German literature. His Anmerkungen übers Theater nebst angehängten übersetzten Stück Shakespears (1774) served as a dramaturgy for the short-lived movement. Fully in line with the thinking of Johann Gottfried Herder, the young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Lenz rejected rules for drama composition. Like them, he attacked the French theater as superficial, disparaged the unities of time and place, and asserted that the greatest drama is conceived by emotion rather than reason.

Lenz wrote two volumes of poetry, two novellas, and a number of other theoretical essays; he also translated several plays by Plautus and made a substantial beginning on a novel. Yet his reputation as one of the leading writers of the Sturm und Drang movement and as a seminal drama theorist rests on the dramatic uvre and on Anmerkungen übers Theater nebst angehängten übersetzten Stück Shakespears.

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s contributions to German drama are best understood within the context of the Sturm und Drang movement, a movement mirrored not only in his plays but also in his life. The movement flourished during the 1770’s as both a reaction to and a further development of the European Enlightenment. The latter movement was then well into late middle age, and its insistence on the primacy of reason in human affairs had become progressively more normative. Enlightenment ethics and poetics tended to be detailed and prescriptive. The Sturm und Drang movement countered with an assertion of the supremacy of the creative genius unfettered by sterile rules.

Lenz’s dramas confronted a theater tradition based on French classicism and affirmed by the German Enlightenment with such innovations as the realistic depiction of everyday life, the use of short scenes in sequence, and the critical treatment of burning social issues that involved the ruling aristocracy. The works for which he is famous could not be understood as Aristotelian tragedies or comedies. In fact, modern scholarship often describes Lenz as the father of the German tragicomedy . Terminological nuances aside, Lenz was one of the first to experiment with a dramatic form better suited to the new middle-class audience for theater that had grown to maturity during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. His disavowal of tragedy—because its appeal was supposedly limited to a diminishing, aristocratic portion of the total audience—was one of the first suggestions that the genre itself might be anachronistic.

Lenz’s original contribution to dramatic theory lies in his redefinition of comedy. He asserted the validity of the dramatic treatment of imbalance and tension within society. Only comedy presents such tension through its natural focus on events, whereas tragedy focuses on personalities. In the former genre, human destiny is a product of circumstance; in the latter, it is determined by high social station. By consigning tragedy to a stratum of the population with which most theatergoers had little empathy, Lenz was attempting to legitimate the comedy as the only true form of middle-class drama. In his eyes, the comedy should no longer be a lesson in ethics made palatable by humor; quite simply, it should be a depiction of everyday society. It was a definition that found application in his own plays.

Lenz was not a well-known dramatist during his lifetime. Few of his plays were performed, and acclaim, whether popular or critical, eluded those that were. When a contemporary mentioned his name, the focus of interest was usually his personality, not his work: Lenz...