Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist with passionate conviction.  He became an object of worship, an article of faith.  The Shakspere cultus dominated the whole Sturm- und Drangperoide.  The stage domesticated him:  the poets imitated him:  the critics exalted him into the type and representative (Urbild) of Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches of the great Teutonic stock.  The enthusiastic young patriots of the Goettinger Hain,—­who hated everything French and called each other by the names of ancient bards,—­accustomed themselves to the use of Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the dramatist’s birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the police and spent the night in the lockup.  In Goethe’s circle at Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. Wagner, this Shakspere mania was de rigueur.  Lenz, particularly, who translated “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” excelled in whimsical imitations of “such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere’s honor at his father’s house (October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the “Will of all Wills,” and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy.  “The first page of Shakspere’s that I read,” runs a sentence of this oration, “made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant’s miracle.  I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had been expanded a whole infinitude.  Everything was new and strange; my eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8]

Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his “Hamburgische Dramaturgie” (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of the antique.  In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took Shakspere as their model.  But while beginning with imitation, they came in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner.  Thus the first draught of Goethe’s “Goetz von Berlichingen” conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian “history.”  The unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions—­knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail.  But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose “Emilia Galotti” had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give it a more independent form.