This historical and critical survey of the great tradition of German drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provides an introduction to the major authors and works from Lessing, through Goethe, Schiller, and Weimar classicism, to Kleist, Grillparzer, and Hebbel. The development of German classical drama is seen as reflecting the intellectual and political ferment of its age: the great flowering of German philosophical thought, the rising aspirations of Germans to national unity, and the waves of revolution and counter-revolution which mark the European history of the period.