Philipp Hafner
Hafner, Philipp (Vienna, 1735-64, Vienna), Austrian lawyer turned dramatist, is reckoned to be the founder of the Viennese Lokalposse (see Volksstück). His numerous plays, all written within a few years before his premature death from consumption, are early examples of the Singspiel, and have local settings, dialect speech, and a number of songs, though some of these were inserted in later adaptations. Most of his plays were performed while still in MS. and there is much confusion about dates of writing, performance, and publication, which was mostly posthumous. Megära, die förchterliche Hexe was so successful that Hafner wrote a sequel (Zweiter Teil) in 1765. In the same year as Megära, Die bürgerliche Dame oder Die bezähmten Ausschweifungen eines zügellosen Eheweibes and Etwas zum Lachen im Fasching also played to full houses, and Evakathel und Schnudi followed in 1765 Die reisenden Komödianten and Der Furchtsame date from c.1762 and 1763 respectively.
Hafner substituted good-humoured farce for the obscenities of much earlier extemporized Viennese comedy; his plays, in one guise or another, were still in the Viennese repertoire in the first half of the 19th c.
