Schiller's later dramas had gradually conquered the stage, over which his juvenile works had in this time triumphantly passed, but on which his _Don Carlos_ had met with a cold welcome. For a long time, however, its favourites were authors of a very different order, who suited themselves to the demands of a public tolerably indifferent to the literary progress of the drama. After popular tastes had oscillated between the imitators of _Gotz_ and those of _Emilia Galotti_, they entered into a more settled phase, as the establishment of standing theatres at the courts and in the large towns increased the demand for good "acting" plays. Famous actors, such as Schröder and A. W. Iffland, sought by translations or compositions of their own to meet the popular likings, which largely took the direction of that irrepressible favourite of theatrical audiences, the sentimental domestic drama.[288] But the most successful purveyor of such wares was an author who, though not himself an actor, understood the theatre with a professional instinct--August von Kotzebue. His productivity ranged from the domestic drama and comedy of all kinds to attempts to rival Schiller and Shakespeare in verse; and though his popularity (which ultimately proved his doom) brought upon him the bitterest attacks of the romantic school and other literary authorities, his self-conceit is not astonishing, and the time has come for saying that there is some exaggeration in the contempt which has been lavished upon him by posterity.[289] Nor should it be forgotten that German literature had so far failed to furnish the comic stage with any successors to _Minna von Barnhelm_; for Goethe's efforts to dramatize characteristic events or figures of the Revolutionary age[290] must be dismissed as failures, not from a theatrical point of view only. The joint efforts of Goethe and Schiller for the Weimar stage, important in many respects for the history of the German drama, at the same time reveal the want of a national dramatic literature sufficient to supply the needs of a theatre endeavouring to satisfy the demands of art.
Meanwhile the so-called romantic school of German literature was likewise beginning to extend its labours to original dramatic composition. From the universality of sympathies proclaimed by this school, to whose leaders Germany owed its classical translation of Shakespeare,[291] and an introduction to the dramatic literatures of so many ages and nations,[292] a variety of new dramatic impulses might be expected; while much might be hoped for the future of the national drama (especially in its mixed and comic species) from the alliance between poetry and real life which they preached, and which some of them sought personally to exemplify. But in practice universality presented itself as peculiarity or even as eccentricity; and in the end the divorce between poetry and real life was announced as authoritatively as their union had been. Outside this school, the youthful talent of Th. Körner, whose early promise as a dramatist[293] might perhaps have ripened into a fulness enabling him not unworthily to occupy the seat left vacant by his father's friend Schiller, was extinguished by a patriotic death. The efforts of M. von Collin (1779-1824) in the direction of the historical drama remained isolated attempts. But of the leaders of the romantic school, A. W.[294] and F. von Schlegel[295] contented themselves with frigid classicalities; and L. Tieck, in the strange alembic of his _Phantasus_, melted legend and fairy-tale, novel and drama,[296] poetry and satire, into a compound, enjoyable indeed, but hardly so in its entirety, or in many of its parts, to any but the literary mind.