delit1-4, Exercise 1: Lessing

Model answer (check the details):

As critic: Lessing wrote Laokoon (1766), which argued about the different limits of poetry and painting (poetry works in time, painting in space), and the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, theatre criticism that argued against copying French classical drama and for Shakespeare and a theatre of German subjects and middle-class feeling.

As playwright: Emilia Galotti (1772), a middle-class tragedy set at a prince's court, and Nathan der Weise (1779), a play of religious tolerance with the parable of the three rings.

Contribution: he helped to give German literature a critical vocabulary and a serious theatre of its own, and he made tolerance a subject of drama. Choose either work to illustrate; both are in English translation.