SOURCE: Shutze, Martin. “Gustav Freytag, Theorist of the Drama and Playwright.” The Drama: A Quarterly Review of Dramatic Literature, no. 9 (February 1913): 3-28.

In the following essay, Schutze examines Freytag's plays and his theoretical text, The Technique of the Drama, claiming that Freytag's works were outdated by the end of the nineteenth century.

Less than two generations separate us from the dramatic and dramaturgic activity of Gustav Freytag, which extends from 1841 to 1863, the year of his Technique of the Drama, and yet it is almost impossible even now to bridge the gap. Freytag, an empiricist, like Aristotle in a larger measure, undertook, at the close of an era in the moral and aesthetic history of mankind, to fit a dramatic theory to ideas that had already received their cues for their final exits. There is a peculiar, pathetic significance in the fact that Darwin's Origin of Species appeared in...