Prince Friedrich of Homburg is the indisputable dramatic masterpiece of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), a leading figure, along with Goethe and Schiller, among early German Romantics. Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G. Peters. A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to “civilized” behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the field.…

Heinrich von Kleist, along with his older contemporaries Goethe and Schiller, was one of the great innovative forces in the early Romantic movement. By the time of his death in 1811 at the age of thirty-four — he made a suicide pact with a woman he barely knew — his modest output of seven complete plays and eight Novellen, or chronicle narratives, together with such critical essays as “About the Marionette Theater,” had profoundly transformed German drama and, indeed, the very scope of European literature.…