LESSING, Gotthold Ephraim. Nathan der Weise. Ein dramatisches Gedicht, in fünf Aufzügen.

With a Manuscript Poem by Lessing’s Friend

LESSING, Gotthold Ephraim. Nathan der Weise. Ein dramatisches Gedicht, in fünf Aufzügen. S.l.: s.n. [May] 1779.

[bound with:]
[PFRANGER, Johann Georg.] Der Mönch vom Libanon. Ein Nachtrag zu Nathan der Weise. Dessau: printed at the expense of the publisher [Heinrich Heybruch] for the Allgemeine Buchhandlung der Gelehrten. 1782.

8vo. Near-contemporary half sheep with pastepaper sides, contrasting yellow and green morocco lettering-pieces to spine, edges stained red, marbled endpapers; Nathan der Weise: pp. [4], 276; Der Mönch: pp. 296; sporadic light spotting, some dampstaining to a few pp., A8 and first few ff. of text subtly reinforced at inner margin; nonetheless very good; early ownership inscription ‘Hartwig’ to front free endpaper verso, near-contemporary German purchase note to title of Nathan der Weise, near-contemporary authorial attribution to title of Der Mönch, manuscript verse to front flyleaf (see below), nineteenth-century ink stamp ‘M. Weller’ to title and p. 7 of Nathan der Weise, 1950s Slough ‘Railways of the World’ trading card loosely inserted.

The true first edition, printed in May 1779 for subscribers, in the second state, of Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) promoting religious tolerance and friendship amongst Jews, Christians, and Muslims, set in Jerusalem during the Third Crusade. This copy is bound with Pfranger’s sequel, printed in the hometown of Moses Mendelssohn, Lessing’s friend and the inspiration for the character of Nathan.

In 1778, whilst working as head librarian in Wolfenbüttel, Lessing was banned from publishing theological prose due to the intensity of his theological dispute with Johann Melchior Goeze, chief pastor of Hamburg. He consequently decided to see if he could ‘preach undisturbed’ from his ‘old pulpit, the stage’, as he wrote to his brother in August 1778 – having published no plays since Emilia Galotti in 1772 – in the hope of playing a ‘vexatious prank on the theologians’ with his masterful Enlightenment treatment of religious tolerance. The first edition was printed anonymously for some 1,200 subscribers, followed by a trade edition printed in the same year by Christian Friedrich Voss in Berlin.

The present edition features several distinguishing features: the quote from Gellius on the title opens ‘Jntroite’ rather than ‘Introite’, there is no full stop after ‘wiederkommt’ on p. 1, p. 123 is mispaginated 233, and p. 95 bears the line ‘reichre Mann’ instead of ‘reicher Mann’, corrected in later editions. ‘There are copies of this edition that show various corrections, even though they were pulled from the same setting of type’ (Muncker, trans.). This is Muncker’s variant B, in which the line ‘Der reicher Jude’ appears instead of ‘Der reichre Jude’.

This copy has been bound with the first edition of Der Mönch vom Libanon, a sequel conceived by the clergyman and friend of Schiller, Johann Georg Pfranger (1745–1790) who felt that Lessing had ‘undermined the honour of the Christian religion’ (Deutsche Biographie, trans.). Heinrich Heybruch printed this edition at Dessau – hometown of prominent Jewish Haskalah philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, close friend of Lessing and the model for the sage Jewish protagonist of Nathan der Weise – on behalf of the Allgemeine Buchhandlung der Gelehrten (General Bookshop for Scholars), established in Dessau during the Enlightenment to promote self-published works. In 1805, Heybruch published a heavily revised edition of Mendelssohn’s Be’ur, the first Jewish translation of the Torah into German (rendered in Hebrew letters).

Provenance: Inscribed to the front flyleaf and signed ‘Gleim’ is the manuscript poem ‘An unsere großen Künstler’ in praise of Lessing and of Nathan der Weise:

Grabt ihn in Kupfer, schneidet ihn in Stein,
Gießt ihn in Erz! Er soll Exempel seyn
Den Weisesten, die seine Werke lesen;
Der Nathan, den er malt, der ist er selbst gewesen.

Lessing sent fifteen copies of the subscribers’ edition to his friend, the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (1719–1803), as well as a specially bound author’s copy. For three weeks, Gleim wrote to Lessing in July 1779, ‘Nathan der Weise was my only companion. I have studied it; I have read it aloud. Oh, how I would love to prove that you could not have created anything better in a book of twenty-four sheets. Everything is excellent: plot, verse, expression’ (trans.).

Gleim’s poem would seemingly not be published until 1783, where it appeared in Issue 112 of the Berliner Zeitung and was reproduced in Winkopp’s Bibliothek für Denker und Männer von Geschmak in the same year. The Frankfurt antiquarian bookselling firm Joseph Baer & Co. recorded a copy of the second edition featuring the same poem, in Gleim’s hand, to the front flyleaf (cat. 517, c. 1905, no. 3338). Could ours be one of the fifteen subscriber’s copies sent by Lessing to Gleim?

Nathan der Weise: VD18 11831499; Goedeke IV/1, Lessing 171; Muncker 22, pp. 458–459 (variant B); Wilpert/Guhring, Lessing 72. Der Mönch vom Libanon: VD18 11867019; Goedeke IV/1, Lessing 171m.

SKU: 2126432