During the long period of transition which may be said to have ended with the establishment of the new German empire, the German stage in some measure anticipated the developments which more spacious times were to witness in the German drama. The traditions of the national theatre contemporary with the great epoch of the national literature were kept alive by a succession of eminent actors--such as the nephews of Ludwig Devrient, himself an artist of the greatest originality, whose most conspicuous success, though nature had fitted him for Shakespeare, was achieved in Schiller's earliest play.[313] Among the younger generation of Devrients the most striking personality was that of Emil; his elder brother Karl August, husband of Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, the brilliant star of the operatic stage, and their son Friedrich, were also popular actors; yet another brother, Eduard, is more widely remembered as the historian of the German stage. Partly by reason of the number and variety of its centres of intellectual and artistic life, Germany was long enabled both to cherish the few masterpieces of its own drama, and, with the aid of a language well adapted for translation, to give admittance to the dramatic masterpieces of other nations also, and to Shakespeare in particular, without going far in the search for theatrical novelty or effect. But a change came over the spirit of German theatrical management with the endeavours of H. Laube, from about the middle of the century onwards, at Vienna (and Leipzig), which avowedly placed the demands of the theatre as such above those of literary merit or even of national sentiment. In a less combative spirit, F. Dingelstedt, both at Munich, which under King Maximilian he had made a kindly nurse of German culture, and, after his efforts there had come to an untimely end,[314] at Weimar and at Vienna, raised the theatre to a very high level of artistic achievement. The most memorable event in the annals of his managements was the production on the Weimar stage of the series of Shakespeare's _histories_. At a rather later period, of which the height extended from 1874 to 1890, the company of actors in the service, and under the personal direction, of Duke George of Saxe-Meiningen, created a great effect by their performances both in and outside Germany--not so much by their artistic improvements in scenery and decoration, as by the extraordinary perfection of their _ensemble_. But no dramaturgic achievement in the century could compare in grandeur either of conception or of execution with Richard Wagner's Bayreuth performances, where, for the first time in the history of the modern stage, the artistic instinct ruled supreme in all the conditions of the work and its presentment. Though the _Ring of the Nibelungs_ and its successors belong to opera rather than drama proper, the importance of their production (1876) should be overlooked by no student of the dramatic art.