The works of Ferdinand Jakob Raimund, written for the "Wiener Volkstheater" (Viennese popular theater), were an important contribution to nineteenth-century European drama. Like Shakespeare and Molière, with whom he has been compared, Raimund was both an actor and a playwright. His unpretentious yet inspired plays raised the old Viennese "Possen"--uncultured and often crude comedies in the tradition of the Italian commedia dell'arte--to poetic heights. Raimund's sense of morality and his mild pedagogic inclination imbued the then-popular fairy and magic plays with a new ethical quality. With the poet's belated literary recognition, his ever-popular comedies moved out of the sphere of the Volkstheater and took their proper place in the repertoire of Vienna's venerable Burgtheater.

Raimund was born in Vienna on 1 June 1790. His father and grandfather, both lathe operators, had come from Prague in 1769. Jakob Raimann, his father, soon married Anna Katharina Merz, the daughter of...