We present first results of the project “Emotions in Drama” in which we explore the annotation of emotions and the application of computational emotion analysis, predominantly deep learning-based methods, in the context of historical German plays of the time around 1800. We performed a pilot annotation study with five plays generating over 6,500 annotations for up to 13 sub-emotions structured in a hierarchical scheme. This emotion scheme includes common types like joy, anger or hate but also concepts that are specifically important for German literary criticism of this period like friendship, compassion or Schadenfreude. We evaluate the performance of various methods of emotion-based text sequence classification including lexicon-based methods, traditional machine learning, fastText as static word embedding, various transformer models based on BERT- or ELECTRA-architectures and pretrained with contemporary language, transformer-based methods pretrained or finetuned for historical and/or poetic language as well as the finetuning of BERT models via our own corpora and plays. We do achieve state-of-the-art results with hierarchical levels with two or three classes, i. e. the classification of valence (positive/negative). The best models are the transformer-based models gbert-large and gelectra-large by deepset pretrained on large corpora of contemporary German, which achieve accuracy values of up to 83%. Lexicon-based methods, traditional machine learning as well as static word embeddings are consistently outperformed by transformer-based models. Models trained on historical texts show small and inconsistent improvements. The performance becomes significantly smaller for settings with multiple sub-emotions like 6 or 13 due to the general challenge and class imbalances in which the models achieve 57% and 47% respectively. We discuss how we intend to continue our annotations and how to improve the prediction results via various optimization techniques in future work.