Bourgeois tragedy

Years later came two plays by Denis Diderot: Le fils naturel was first staged in 1757 and Le père de famille in the following year; while these plays were not strictly tragedies, they treat bourgeois lives in a serious manner atypical of contemporary comedy and provided models for more genuinely tragic works.

While ordinary people had always been the subject of comedies, classical and neo-classical theorists asserted that tragic heroes should always be men of noble rank.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics, including the influential German Martin Opitz, perpetuated the theory that only members of the higher classes were capable of suffering harm serious enough to deserve dramatic reenactment.

Usually, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Miss Sara Sampson, which was first produced in 1755, is said to be the earliest Bürgerliches Trauerspiel in Germany.

Other important examples of German Bürgerliche Trauerspiele are Die Soldaten by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1776) and Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784).