Nathan der Weise

(Nathan the Wise) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

   Premiered 1783. One of Lessing's most frequently performed plays in the post-World War II period, due largely to its humanitarian subject matter and the sympathetic rendering of its title character. Nathan is a Jew living in Jerusalem during the Crusades, and Lessing's plot has devices similar to those found in Voltaire, especially when Nathan's adoptive daughter Recha falls in love with a young Templar knight. But Nathan the Wise is by no means a neoclassical tragedy; it is rather a "dramatic poem" with debts to Giovanni Boccacio's Decameron. From it Lessing borrowed the parable of the rings, which are metaphors for the three religions tracing their beginnings to Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When Nathan recites the parable to Saladin, sultan of Jerusalem, Saladin realizes that the Templar knight is actually his nephew and thus the brother of Nathan's daughter Recha. The play is static, but it contains some of Lessing's finest verse, written in iambic pentameter. Ernst Deutsch, Albert Bassermann, and Paul Wegener were among the actors returning from exile in the late 1940s and early 1950s who played Nathan to wide public acclaim and critical praise.