Agis, King of Sparta. Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Drama at the Hungarian Author Bessenyei György

Abstract

During the Enlightenment, public themes were approached by means of drama. French, English and German theatres focused on specific topoi of Greek drama, while also searching for new themes to address. Traditional, time-honoured themes were generally maintained for artistic reasons, yet new contents were constantly added, which shifted the linguistic appearance of these literary works away from the classical matrix. Both the German author Johann Christoph Gottsched as well as the Hungarian author György Bessenyei used the figure of Agis, in view of the historical background, but also in literary terms, for their own purposes. The present paper offers a comparison between the tragedy of Gottsched’s “Agis, King of Sparta” and Bessenyei’s “Ágis tragédiája” with the purpose of establishing whether we can regard Bessenyei’s drama as an autonomous work or simply as a translated version of Gottsched’s tragedy.