The Dramaturgy of Demise: On Goethe’s Der Groß-Cophta

Goethe’s first drama written in the wake of the French Revolution, Der Groß-Cophta, has garnered little favor from audiences and scholars since its first publication. This essay argues that Goethe’s comedy inverts fundamental dramaturgical conventions of tragedy, revealing a social and political world in collapse. It shows that patterns of literary figuration first articulated in Der Groß-Cophta extend across several of Goethe’s literary engagements with revolutionary tumult. Confidence men and narratives of lost innocence emerge as crucial elements in Goethe’s diagnosis of the disintegration of ethical life responsible for the demise of the ancien régime.