Goethe's early plays bear witness to his urgent desire to enliven German theater--an ambition that followed him to the National Theater in Weimar, where he was named director in the early 1790s. This volume contains eight of these plays, written between 1771 and 1787. Not only do they demonstrate Goethe's unprecedented versatility in experimenting with new forms of dramatic expression, but they also give insight into his development from to classicism. These works include prose plays ( and ), tragedies and comedies (, , and ), and dramatic verse forms (, and ).