Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses, finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish antics. Of his various plays, _The Sons of the Valley_ (1803) and the _Cross on the Baltic_ (1806) deserve mention for their religious and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an explanation, though without adding to their understanding. _Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Power_ (1807) is a pageant play of great interest. Its recantation, _The Power of Weakness_, was written after Werner's conversion. More important than these is his so-called "fate tragedy," _The 24th of February_ (1810 per formed in Weimar; published 1815). This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend. He therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general atmosphere of fatalism. The play started a whole series; some of these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer's _The Ancestress_, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the _genre_, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's _The Fateful Fork_ (1826).