Zacharias Werner

Amy Emm (The Citadel)
Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error

Zacharias Werner is German Romanticism’s most significant dramatist after Kleist. His disappearance from the canon has left our understanding of 19th-century drama incomplete, as his plays filled the gap between formulaic popular theater and the classical plays of Goethe and Schiller. Influenced among others by Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Kant, Tieck, A.W. Schlegel and Schleiermacher, Werner integrates epic, lyric and operatic forms and treats historical and mythological subjects and settings from various European cultures. His literary oeuvre of eight plays, several volumes of poetry, essays, and sermons has always had to compete with his notorious biography. The rhapsodic artist was thrice married, thrice divorced, and frequented literary salons and brothels alike. Goethe described…

1406 words

Citation: Emm, Amy. "Zacharias Werner". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 June 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5935, accessed 19 March 2024.]

5935 Zacharias Werner 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.