One of the most prolific writers of the Age of Goethe, August von Kotzebue was the author of short stories, novels, travelogues, historical studies, autobiographical works, essays, and poetry; he also edited newspapers and journals and translated French plays into German. It is, however, for his great facility and voluminous productivity as a dramatist that he is best known. Kotzebue, who once boasted that he could write a comedy in three days, estimated the total number of his dramatic works to be 211; recent scholarship places the figure at 230. While his comedies and melodramas won him acclaim, his few efforts in historical drama and in tragedy were justifiably ignored by the literary establishment. Kotzebue conceded in the foreword to his Der Graf von Burgund: Ein Schauspiel in fünf Akten (1798; translated as The Count of Burgundy: A Play, in Four Acts, 1798) that he was not a writer of...