Theaters of Error: Problems of Performance in German and French Enlightenment Theater

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period’s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century.

Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara...