For example, speaking of Lessing's Preface to the "Contributions to the
History and Reform of the Theatre," he tells us that "his eye was
directed chiefly to the English theatre and Shakespeare." Lessing at that
time (1749) was only twenty, and knew little more than the names of any
foreign dramatists except the French. In this very Preface his English
list skips from Shakespeare to Dryden, and in the Spanish he omits
Calderon, Tirso de Molina, and Alarcon. Accordingly, we suspect that the
date is wrongly assigned to Lessing's translation of _Toda la Vida es
Sueno_. His mind was hardly yet ready to feel the strange charm of this
most imaginative of Calderon's dramas.
Even where Herr Stahr undertakes to give us light on the _sources_ of
Lessing, it is something of the dimmest. He attributes "Miss Sara
Sampson" to the influence of the "Merchant of London," as Mr. Evans
translates it literally from the German, meaning our old friend, "George
Barnwell." But we are strongly inclined to suspect from internal evidence
that Moore's more recent "Gamester" gave the prevailing impulse. And if
Herr Stahr must needs tell us anything of the Tragedy of Middle-Class
Life, he ought to have known that on the English stage it preceded Lillo
by more than a century,--witness the "Yorkshire Tragedy,"--and that
something very like it was even much older in France.
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