Writing to his brother Karl from Wolfenbiittel on 11 August
1778, Lessing noted:

I still don't know what the upshot of my business (with Jo-
hann Melchior Goeze) will be. But I would very much like
to be prepared for every possible one. You well know that
one can't be better off than when one has money, as much as
needed. And so this past night I had a foolish notion. One
time many years ago I sketched out a play, whose content
has a sort of analogy with my current controversies, one that
I never dreamed of at the time. If you and Moses ( Mendels-
sohn) think it's good, I'll have the thing printed by
subscription.

The "thing" was Nathan the Wise. Lessing preferred casual talk,
offhandedness, a practically deprecating approach, when he spoke
about his own work. "More the product of polemics than of
genius," he would later say; a writer really can't talk about nascent
material more offhandedly. Lessing chose to make the leap from
the pulpit to the theater not out of enthusiasm, seized by rabies
poetica, but for more down-to-earth reasons. First of all, he
wanted to get around the censorship that, had he continued the
battle against Goeze in theological pamphlets, would have fin-
ished him off (and not only in Brunswick). Second, he wanted at
the same time not to drop his polemic, but to give it the character

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