This book surveys Lessing's lifelong engagement with the practice and theory of dramatic writing, seeking to understand his Plays in the light of his literary intentions and of the traditions of dramatic writing in (or against) which he wrote. The introduction sets Lessing's dramatic work in the context of his life as a whole; there follows an examination of his work in comedy, the genre in which he served his apprenticeship, but in which, after an interruption of some years, he achieved his first real masterpiece, Minna von Barnhelm. It then returns to trace his interest in 'serious' drama (which for Lessing as for his contemporaries almost without exception meant tragedy) from their beginnings around 1750 and the completion of his first tragedy, Miss Sara Sampson, to the appearance Emilia Galotti in 1772, giving full consideration to his unfinished experiments and to his theoretical writings. It concludes with the writing of Nathan der Weise, a work which belongs to neither of the traditional genres, but transcends their boundaries in the service of higher vision. It springs from quite different intentions from those which produced Lessing's other plays, but is, the author argues, his dramatic masterpiece and the fitting crown to his life's work as a dramatist.