The Romanticists were not successful in the drama.  Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet.  The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production.  It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which for more than a decade carried all before it.

Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses, finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish antics.  Of his various plays, The Sons of the Valley (1803) and the Cross on the Baltic (1806) deserve mention for their religious and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an explanation, though without adding to their understanding. Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Power (1807) is a pageant play of great interest.  Its recantation, The Power of Weakness, was written after Werner’s conversion.  More important than these is his so-called “fate tragedy,” The 24th of February (1810 per formed in Weimar; published 1815).  This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend.  He therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general atmosphere of fatalism.  The play started a whole series; some of these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer’s The Ancestress, were of great power.  These plays were conditioned by something in the air.  Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background.  Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development.  In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end.  But the weak and vulgar imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the genre, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen’s The Fateful Fork (1826).

E.T.A.  Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person.  Like his fellow-Koenigsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol.  He was a painter, a writer, and a musician.  His ability in the pictorial arts was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the art.  Like all Romanticists, Hoffmann was interested in and tried all phases of life and refused to recognize the boundaries between the various parts