SOURCE: "Sentimental and Fantastic Comedy: Lessing and Raimund," in Masters of Dramatic Comedy and Their Social Themes, Harvard University Press, 1939, pp. 275-313.

In the following excerpt, Perry compares Raimund's fairy-world comedies and observes that his last play, Der Verschwender, "is probably his artistic masterpiece. "

The libretto of Mozart's The Magic Flute, which Tieck had complimented in The Booted Cat, is one of the best-known survivals of the light drama which flourished for many years beside the Danube. With its clownish Hanswurst and its rough horseplay, its supernatural machinery and its incidental music, this kind of comedy achieved relative permanence as well as immediate popularity. Though it had been attacked during the classical period as vulgar and tawdry, it continued to exist, with or without music, but always with Hanswurst or some similar buffoon to give it humor and vivacity. In the nineteenth century this minor genre of comic...