ly to the play
performed. After a while, however, even this did not suffice; bad
management, stage cabals, private jealousy, and clerical intrigues, had
undermined the slender popularity of the theatre. Before the end of its
first year, the house saw itself forced to close its doors, thanks to
creditors and to the rival and superior attractions of a company of
French comedians. It is true the German troupe returned in the spring
to make a final effort, but this also proved a failure; the debts were
only increased, and the throng of creditors who besieged the box-office
was so great that the public could not have entered if it had tried. In
November (1768) the theatre finally closed its doors.

_Transeat cum caeteris erroribus_, was Lessing's comment on the event.
He was the poorer by another hope, and not only poorer in spirit but in
fact. The promised salary had not been paid, the sale of his rich
library would not suffice for his debts and needs, and he had moreover
hampered himself with a printing-press that only helped yet more to
cripple his means. His position was a sorry one. Literary work was once
more his only resource. It happened that he had from the first been in
arrears with his journal, first advisedly, then from a tendency to
procrastination that befell him whenever the first white heat of
interest had been expended. He now determined to continue it, employing
it as a vehicle for his own opinions under the cover of criticisms of
the national theatre, which he still hoped against hope might not be
utterly defunct.

The 'Dramaturgy' is the permanent result of this shipwrecked
undertaking, itself a fragment--for after a while Lessing wearied of
it, and piratical reprints robbed him of the slender profit--but a
fragment like the 'Laokoon,' full of suggestive truths and flashes of
elucidation. As an entire work it is not as homogeneous in design as
the 'Laokoon'; no connected or definite thread of reasoning pervades
it, its perusal requires more independent thought from the reader, who
must form his own conclusions, they are not worked out before him as in
the 'Laokoon.' But in its ultimate results it is no less valuable, and
has been no less effective. It freed the German stage from bondage to
French pseudo-classicisms by its scornful exposure of the perversions
practised by the Gallic authors under the cloak of Aristotelian laws.
Lessing showed the divergence between real and absolute, and fanciful
and per