A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Neuber, Caroline
NEUBER, CAROLINE,
Was born in the year 1692, the daugher of a German lawyer, Weissenborn. Her father was very strict with her, and in her fifteenth year she ran away with a student, a Mr. Neuber, whom she afterwards married. They soon after organized a strolling troop of actors, with which they performed at first in Weissenfels.
Madame Neuber felt her calling to become the regenerator of the German stage; she placed herself at the head of her troop, made laws for it, and introduced better morals among its members In 1726, she obtained a royal privilege to perform in Dresden and Leipzic; she erected her stage in the latter place, and performed the old-fashioned tragedies of the German stage, such as "King Octavins," "Courtship," "Fate and Death," "The Golden Apple," "Nero," etc After the death of King Augustus, 1733, Madame Neuber went to Hamburg. In 1737, she returned to Leipzic, and assnmed the reform of the stage, in conjunction with the celebrated author Gottsched.
The German harlequin was, after a long struggle, banished from the stage, and the victory celebrated by a piece called "The Victory of Reason." Her fame spread all over the continent. In 1740, she was invited by Duke Biron, the favourite of Anne of Austria, to come to Courland, and from thence to Petersburg. On her return to Leipzic, she quarrelled with her benefactor, Grottsched, and constant and bitter recrimination was the result; she even went so far as to burlesque the person of the professor on the stage. From that time, fortune forsook her; she was compelled to disband her troop, and died in great poverty, near Dresden, in 1760.