SOURCE: "Raimund's Contribution to Viennese Popular Comedy," in The German Quarterly, Vol. XLII, No. 3, May, 1969, pp. 352-67.

In the following essay, Prohaska surveys Raimund's plays, noting that his greatest contribution to popular drama was the creation of convincing comic characters.

When Ferdinand Raimund the actor was engaged to play major comic roles at the Leopoldstadt theatre in 1817, he joined one of the most successful groups of popular entertainers who have ever trodden the European stage. Night after night, year after year, they played to a full house in this little suburban theater. Tireless local playwrights constantly replenished the vast repertoire of dialect comedies with which they delighted the Viennese community. Actors, playwrights, and audiences all contributed to a comic tradition which had sprung from the fairground buffoonery of Stranitzky's Hanswurst in the early years of the eighteenth century.

At the heart of the development which took place within...