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Written in 1802-03, The Natural Daughter and The Bride of Messina show Goethe and Schiller writing in a neo-classical manner far removed from the Sturm und Drang style of their early works. The plays reflect their authors' reaction to the troubled post-Revolutionary years of their composition - a counter-Revolutionary one, both in an aesthetic and at least implicitly political sense. Their eponymous heroines embody hopes of restored familial harmony and political order, yet in both plays those hopes are tragically frustrated. Goethe's Eugenia, natural daughter of the Duke, is abducted and threatened with exile by a political conspiracy, and must renounce her aristocratic aspirations. Reduced to bourgeois anonymity, she hopes nevertheless one day to re-emerge and serve King and country, but the ending of the play is at best ambiguous. Schiller's Beatrice is loved by both Manuel and Cesar, brothers whose mutual hatred has plunged Messina into civil strife. Deception, misunderstanding, and a terrible secret weave a fatal web, whose unravelling leaves both brothers dead and Messina rulerless to face an uncertain future.F. J. Lamport's bold new verse translation captures the highly refined, deliberately artificial style of these two unusual plays which, though less well known than some of their authors' other works, represent a remarkable poetic achievement.

The beginning of the eighteenth century opened Spain to an influx of people, books and ideas and gave the country its own brief age of Enlightenment. At this time of momentous change, the three authors represented in this volume contributed to the Europe-wide debate over the nature of women and their position in society. Benito Jerónimo Feijoo was an admired scholar and a prolific author. One of his most controversial essays was Defence of Women, which argued that women were men's intellectual equals. This sparked a pamphlet war that continued for twenty-five years.Josefa Amar y Borbón was a writer and translator who submitted her own spirited argument, the Defence of the Talents of Women, to a debate on whether women should be admitted to the new Economic Societies. She also demanded in her Discourse on the Education of Women that women should be given the opportunity to study and learn.At the very end of the century, Inés Joyes y Blake published an Apology for Women, arguing that women should develop self-respect, support each other and refuse to be manipulated by insincere lovers and domineering husbands. All three writers wrote with verve and imagination about one of the most important social questions of their day

In May 1760 the Comédie-Française performed a play by Charles Palissot de Montenoy entitled Les Philosophes (The Philosophes), an attack on the group of writers known by that name. In the audience was Michel-Jean Sedaine, who, although not a member of the group himself, was sufficiently shocked by this attack on serious authors and thinkers to decide that he should write a reply to Palissot's work. At least in part because the use of the controversial subject of duelling on which the plot is centred caused problems with the censors, Le Philosophe sans le savoir did not reach the stage until 1765, but, when it was at last performed, it proved to be a great success. Although Sedaine usually wrote libretti for operas-comiques, for his new play he chose a genre pioneered by Diderot, one of the writers attacked in Les Philosophes, the drame. Sedaine's play has been generally recognized as the masterpiece of this short-lived genre. As well as looking at the play itself, the introduction to this translation examines its place in the literary controversy sparked by Palissot's play, and the origins and development of the drame.