  ‘Mourning-play’ (Trauerspiel) is a term used to characterise a type of drama that emerges during the baroque period of art history in the late 16th and early 17th century. The principle examples discussed in Benjamin’s thesis come not from its great exponents, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and William Shakespeare, but the German dramatists Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius, Johann Christian Hallmann, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and August Adolf von Haugwitz. Their plays are characterised by a simplicity of action which is comparable to the classicism of earlier Renaissance theatre, but also contain peculiarly baroque features. These include an exaggerated and violent bombast in their language (including a figurative tendency towards linguistic contraction), an absence of psychological depth in its characters, a preponderance of and dependency upon theatrical props and machinery, and a crude emphasis on violence, suffering and death (cf. Newman 2011; Ferber 2013).