August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761-1819)

Kotzebue wrote about 215 plays including Menschenhass und Reue (Misanthropy and Repentance--pirated in 1798 as The Stranger by both Benjamin Thompson for Drury Lane and William Dunlap for his American Company at thePark Theatre), and Die Spanier in Peru (The Spaniard in Peru, pirated by Richard Brinsley Sheridan as Pizarro.) There was a "Kotzebue craze" from about 1790 to about 1825. He was a master of sentimentalism and startling effects which by their nature tend to age badly. Still, in his day, he provided very popular vehicles for the best actors of the day. His great popularity is seen as the driving force behind the emphasis on sensationalism that came to dominate melodrama.

Born in Weimar, Kotzebue began writing plays at an early age. He spent a great deal of his life in St. Petersburg where he was a civil servant from 1781 through 1795. He spent the next several years in Vienna working in the theatre, but on his return to St. Petersburg, he was arrested and sent to Siberia. After his release, he served as the director of the Court Theatre in St. Petersburg. When his patron Paul I died, he returned to Weimar. After Napoleon's defeat, he became the Russian Consul-General in Königsberg. Perhaps owing to his vocal oppostion to the Youth Movement at German universities, he was stabbed to death by a fanatic student, Karl Ludwig Sand.

The Stranger was the precursor of a great many plays which focus on the agonizing consequences of unfaithfulness and subsequent repentance in marriage (See East Lynne, or Miss Multon, eg.) The central figure is a wife who has run off from her children with her lover only to return and find that her children have forgotten her. Unable to make herself known, her suffering appealed to audiences (in various incarnations) for more than a century.