COMPARED WITH HIS great contemporaries Schiller and Kleist, Goethe does not strike one as a born dramatist. That is to say: he does not resolutely seek to define worldly experience in terms of endlessly proliferating moments of conflict. Indeed, many commentators have suggested that his was a primarily lyrical talent, one that found its finest expressivity in eavesdropping on the flux of mood and thought that constitutes the inwardness of the individual self. In this sense, there is something monologic about his voice. Yet the range and variety of his achievement in the dramatic mode is impressive. In a revealing remark of March 1775, he commented that he would perish if he did not write plays. Later he became involved in both the institutional and artistic management of the theatre in Weimar. In the original performance of his Iphigenie auf Tauris he played the part of Orestes, and in 1827, he described Torquato Tasso as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In other words, there can be no doubt that he needed the theatre as an imaginative space in which he could work at the problems that troubled him. And, looking at his dramatic oeuvre as a whole, one can discern certain recurring preoccupations. One is the need to body forth in language and action the dynamic of the human self. His comprehension of that bodying forth is anything but solipsistic; in his dramas he richly and circumstantially depicts the context — historical, political, cultural, personal — within which his protagonist has to live. In that process, Goethe worries at an issue which is, no doubt, at one level a perennial debate within human experience, but which, at another level, is a particularly urgent dilemma raised by modern culture: how to negotiate the clashing imperatives of order, containment, morality on the one hand, and of vitality, energy, freedom on the other. It is admittedly true to say that Goethe's vision is not as uncompromisingly tragic as that of many of his contemporaries, mainly because he saw polarity, the dynamic interaction of opposed principles not as a destructive force, but as the creative heartbeat within human experience. Yet, by definition, that tenet of polarity was also generative of dramatic configurations and confrontations.