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August Wilhelm Iffland |
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Enormously popular as an actor and play-wright in his own time, August Wilhelm Iffland is remembered today for his contribution to the development of the German theater. His full-length plays, one-acts, and dialogues proved to be ephemeral, but they trained German audiences to expect good acting and quality productions. Iffland's melodramas, along with those of August von Kotzebue, Johann Jakob Engel, Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, and Otto Heinrich Reichsfreiherr von Gemmingen-Hornberg, flooded the German stage for years; they outnumbered by far performances of plays by Shakespeare, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller because the audiences demanded light fare. Iffland was among the first to appreciate the merits of Sturm und Drang plays, and his theater welcomed Schiller and Goethe; still, the happy-ending bourgeois play dominated the German stage until serious drama was compared with it and recognized as superior to such trivia. Among the services Iffland rendered the German drama with his large output of inferior plays was to provide this contrast.
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