A special interest attaches to Gutzkow's dramatic attempts from the fact that he and Laube were the first German authors of any position since the days of Kleist to connect themselves with the theatre and to win an honourable place for themselves on the German stage. Gutzkow makes a laboured beginning with sentimental dramas that no longer satisfy the public taste. His _Richard Savage, oder der Sohn einer Mutter_ (1839) is from beginning to end a high-flown extravaganza. A talented English poet, who has grown up in ignorance of his parentage, discovers his mother in a beautiful, brilliant, aristocratic woman of the world, who refuses to acknowledge him or to have anything whatever to do with him. The play is a series of representations of his fruitless attempts to win this mother's cold heart. _Werner, oder Herz und Welt_ (1840), is a pathetic, middle-class drama, turning on a theme on which Gutzkow rang many changes, the struggle in a man's heart between an old attachment and a more recently formed connection. Heinrich Werner has allowed himself to be adopted by people in a position above his own. He has been ennobled under the name of von Jordan, and has deserted a poor but charming young girl in order to marry a lady of position. But in his new, affluent circumstances, he misses his former plain, studious life, and, most of all, Marie Winter, the girl to whom he had been engaged, and whom he cannot forget. He suddenly meets her again as governess in his own house. He is long distracted between his duty to his wife and his attraction to this girl, whom he is determined to love only platonically, but whom he really loves above everything. At last things come to a crisis. The wife asserts her rights, rights that Heinrich refuses to acknowledge. His morality is a higher, a freer than hers. She "shudders at his principles." The knot is finally cut by a _deus ex machinâ_. A young friend of Heinrich's comes to an agreement with Marie that he and she will marry, and so prevent the breaking up of the family. The tragic motive is thus, we observe, deprived of its point.