We present first results of an ongoing research project on sentiment annotation of historical plays by German playwright G. E. Lessing (1729-1781). For a subset of speeches from six of his most famous plays, we gathered sentiment annotations by two independent annotators for each play. The annotators were nine students from a Master’s program of German Literature. Overall, we gathered annotations for 1,183 speeches. We report sentiment distributions and agreement metrics and put the results in the context of current research. A preliminary version of the annotated corpus of speeches is publicly available online and can be used for further investigations, evaluations and computational sentiment analysis approaches.