How did Gotthold Ephraim Lessing praise Denis Diderot’s drama?

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German dramatist and critic Gotthold Lessing — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Gotthold Lessing, detail of an oil painting by Georg May, 1768; in the Gleimhaus, Halberstadt, Germany.

In his influential series of essays titled Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing praised Denis Diderot for the realism found in his descriptions of middle-class life.1

While Lessing generally argued against the courtly, mannered tragedy modeled on French writers like Pierre Corneille and Voltaire, he held Diderot’s approach to bourgeois drama in high regard for its faithfulness to nature and reality. Diderot’s own theories on drama, which emphasized the importance of serious bourgeois subjects and the social milieu of characters, were a significant influence on Lessing’s own development as a dramatist and critic.12