compassion. Compassion has become socially accepted by that time due to it passing as a christian posture. Lessing wanted to use compassion to revolt against the behavioral rules in the courts.

Lessing thought that the purpose of comedy is to help the audience perceive the ridiculous and therewith help them to become morally better people. This contrasts comedies played in the courts, as they portrayed the ridiculous not as a human attribute, but as a social one.

Gustav Freytag wrote, that Lessing had a national interpretation

1.Previous
3.Next