Literary historiography has worried how to place Kleist on the map of the overlapping spheres of (German) Classicism and Romanticism, and while he might be called a 'classic of modernity' in his own right, he may be best classified as, if anything, untimely. 1 The contemporary reception of his work and persona was conflicted, too, exemplified in Goethe's puzzlement at his play Penthesilea, a pronouncement that has assumed its own canonical place in evaluations of Kleist. 2 His engagement with classicisms of various kinds is obvious: the Marionettentheater essay is on some level a postclassical response to Schiller's essay 'Über Anmut und Würde' (1793) -as much as to Schiller's other essays on aesthetic education and self-consciousness -and hence to Weimar classicism and its relationship with ancient drama more generally.Likewise, some of his dramatic works make classical themes and motives deliberately post-or paraclassical, such as the tragicomic aspects of Der Zerbrochene Krug with regard to Sophocles' Oedipus, or Amphitryon in relation to Euripides and Plautus, or, of course, Penthesilea, with its dramatization of erotic and linguistic violence that culminates in Penthesilea's dismemberment of Achilles. This article, written from the perspective of a scholar who is a Classicist and a Germanist both, suggests a reading of Kleist's 'Über das Marionettentheater' (1810), a text with a stereoscopic vision of gracefulness and self-consciousness, and a relentless externalization of its own mechanisms, as a postclassicist text: that is to say as a text that reflects and interrogates the relationship with classical materials and a