Which plays between 1650 and 1815 are digitized and freely available? The biggest corpus of German Texts is the Textgrid Corpus. Texts are normalized and therefore usable for stylometry as well as topic modelling and are encoded following the guidelines of TEI P5 thus providing the markup for analyzing certain structural elements. For the above mentioned period Textgrid contains about 200 plays (including adaptations but excluding translations).

The corpus shows a a wide range of genre labels in titles and subtitles.

Allegorisches Drama (1), Bardiet (1), Bürgerliches Trauerspiel (1), Drama (14), Dramatische Skizze (1), Dramatisches Gedicht (6), Dramenfragment (1), Duodrama (1), Familiengemälde (2), Farce (2), Festspiel (2), Knittelversspiel (1), komische Oper (5), Komödie (7), Gelegenheitsstück (1), Lustspiel (45), Maerchen (2), Melodrama (1), mit Musik vermischtes Drama (1), Monodrama (1), musicalisches Dramate (1), Nachspiel (2), Oper (2), Operette (1), Parodie (2), Ritterschauspiel (1), Satire (1), Schäferspiel (3), Schattenspiel (1), Schauspiel (18), wunderliches Schauspiel (1), Schauspiel mit Gesang (1), scherzhaftes Zwischenspiel (1), Scherzspiel (1), Schimpfspiel (1), Singspiel (4), Sittengemälde (1), Tragikomödie (1), Tragödie (4), Trauerspiel (47), Volksmärchen (1), Vorspiel (3)

What catches the eye is that those labels obey very different rules of classification.
They refer to

• the content (“Bardiet”, “Bürgerliches Trauerspiel”, “Familiengemälde”, “Ritterschauspiel”, “Märchen”, “Schäferspiel”),
• to the media used (“Mit Musik vermischtes Drama”, “musicalisches Dramate”, “Schauspiel mit Gesang”, “Oper”, “Operette”, “Schattenspiel”),
• to their length (“Dramatische Skizze” or “Dramenfragment”)
• to the number of characters (“Monodrama”, “Duodrama”)
• to their relationship to another play (“Parodie”)
• to the form (“Knittelverspiel”)
• to their relationship to society (“Satire”)
• to emtions they intend to produce (“Komödie”, “Lustspiel”, “Farce”, “scherzhaftes Zwischenspiel”, “Scherzspiel”, “Schimpfspiel”, “Trauerspiel”, “Melodrama”, “Tragikokmödie”, “Tragödie”).

The remaining labels are quite unspecific, but are used for about 35 plays (mostly “Drama” and “Schauspiel”).

The labels point to genres in that sense that they designate historical terms and series of texts. In Textgrid  there are a lot of genres with only one specimen. I think it is not problematic to summarise the following genres under the genre-term ‚comedy‘ because they all have comical elements and a happy end:

Farce (2), Knittelversspiel (1), komische Oper (5), Komödie (7), Lustspiel (45), Parodie (2), Satire (1), scherzhaftes Zwischenspiel (1), Scherzspiel (1), Schimpfspiel (1)

In addition I decided to add the following plays to this category:

• Der niederländische Bauer (1700) of Christian Weise, which is designated as „wunderliches Schauspiel“ in the original title but is mentioned in all Histories of German Comedy I know, has a good ending and treats the comical motive of the king for one day.
• Three plays which are likely to be comedies judging from title and characterlist: Gottlieb von Stephanie one-act play Der Schauspieldirektor (1786), named „Gelegenheitsstück“ and the two aftermaths Der Witzling (1745) fronm Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched and Die Tugend auf der Schaubühne oder Harlekins Heirat (1763) von Friederike Caroline Neuber.

This results in a total amount of 7 comedies in this corpus for the period from 1650-1815.  In grouping these plays together I moved from a concept of genre as a historical label and a series of texts to a concept of genre as a classification term in literary studies. To tell those two usecases of ‘genre’ apart I will use ‘genre(1)’ and ‘genre(2)’  [1]

[1] Harald Fricke uses the term ‚genre‘ to designate „historisch begrenzte[] literarische[] Institutionen“ und ‚Gattung‘ to designate „rein systematische[] literaturwissenschaftliche[] Ordnungsbegriff[e]“. (Harald Fricke: Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur, München 1981, S. 132). As there is only one term in Englisch, I decided to use genre(1) and genre(2).

Computing the comedies I will need other genres(2) to test if my findings on comedy are really specific for the genre(2) and not for the period as a whole. Taking the following genres(1) together under the label of ‘tragedy’ may provide a good corpus for comparative questions: Bardiet (1), Bürgerliches Trauerspiel (1), Tragödie (4), Trauerspiel (47). This results in a number of 53 tragedies. By tragedy I mean that there is a protagonist which becomes guilty without being guilty and the end of the play with the dead of the protagonist with none of the spectators wishing for it.

A “Bardiet” is a very special German genre(1) as it was termed by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock for a play with patriotic content in high style (‘ein vaterländisches Gedicht’). The only existing representative of this genre(1) is his own play Hermanns Schlacht published from 1769 .

The remaining genre labels in Textgrid are:

Drama (14), Dramatische Skizze (1), Dramatisches Gedicht (6), Familiengemälde (2), Festspiel (2), Maerchen (2), Melodrama (1), mit Musik vermischtes Drama (1), Monodrama (1), musicalisches Dramate (1), Oper (2), Operette (1), Ritterschauspiel (1), Schäferspiel (3), Schattenspiel (1), Schauspiel (18), Schauspiel mit Gesang (1), Singspiel (4), Sittengemälde (1), Tragikomödie (1), Volksmärchen (1), Vorspiel (3)

Do those plays do have enough in common except of a good ending (what is the case for all the plays in my corpus in this third group)? There are some which seem to be more simliar to tragedy although there is no tragic ending. This ist especially the case for operas where we had the convention in 18th century to end even tragic plots with a good ending (see for example: Florian Mehltretter: Die unmögliche Tragödie. Karnevalisierung und Gattungsmischung im venezianischen Opernlibretto des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt u.a. 1994; Ursula Kramer (Hg.): Lieto fine? Musik-theatralische Schlussgestaltung um 1800. Tübingen 2009). Here the protagonist begins in a state of good fortune, falls into bad fortune, and is restored back to good fortune by the plays conclusion. An example ist Christoph Martin Wielands Alceste (1773).There are other plays showing a good ending and having comical passages. Should they be added to the comedies although they are not mentioned in histories of comedy? Examples are: Lucas von Bostels Der hochmuetige, gestuerzte und wieder erhabene Croesus (1711) or Die Zaubrflöte (1791) by Johann Emanuel Schikaneder.

It stands to reason just to test if the plays in the third group are more likely to behave like comedies or like tragedies or like outliers when computing, for example,  word frequency, grammatical structures, topics, density or complexity measures.

Remains the task to read the plays to see if they have a good ending and if they contain comedy…

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