Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Sturm und Drang Passions and Eighteenth-Century Psychology
- Herder and the Sturm und Drang
- Ossian, Herder, and the Idea of Folk Song
- “Shakespeare has quite spoilt you”: The Drama of the Sturm und Drang
- The Theater Practice of the Sturm und Drang
- “Die schönsten Träume von Freiheit werden ja im Kerker geträumt”: The Rhetoric of Freedom in the Sturm und Drang
- Young Goethe's Political Fantasies
- “Wilde Wünsche”: The Discourse of Love in the Sturm und Drang
- Discursive Dissociations: Women Playwrights as Observers of the Sturm und Drang
- Schiller and the End of the Sturm und Drang
- The Sturm und Drang in Music
- The Sturm und Drang and the Periodization of the Eighteenth Century
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
“Shakespeare has quite spoilt you”: The Drama of the Sturm und Drang
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Sturm und Drang Passions and Eighteenth-Century Psychology
- Herder and the Sturm und Drang
- Ossian, Herder, and the Idea of Folk Song
- “Shakespeare has quite spoilt you”: The Drama of the Sturm und Drang
- The Theater Practice of the Sturm und Drang
- “Die schönsten Träume von Freiheit werden ja im Kerker geträumt”: The Rhetoric of Freedom in the Sturm und Drang
- Young Goethe's Political Fantasies
- “Wilde Wünsche”: The Discourse of Love in the Sturm und Drang
- Discursive Dissociations: Women Playwrights as Observers of the Sturm und Drang
- Schiller and the End of the Sturm und Drang
- The Sturm und Drang in Music
- The Sturm und Drang and the Periodization of the Eighteenth Century
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
The meeting of Goethe and Herder in Strasbourg in 1770 was probably the most momentous encounter in the history of German literature, outranking even that of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar twenty-odd years later. By that time Goethe's and Schiller's literary paths were already converging in a new form of neoclassicism. But in 1770 Herder transformed the imagination of the twenty-one-year-old Goethe, released it from the frivolities of the rococo or the artificial constraints of an earlier, outmoded neoclassicism of French origin, and revealed to Goethe new and powerful sources of inspiration: the national heritage of German culture, embodied in history, folklore, folk song, and ballad, and the free, unfettered, original, but also profoundly “national” dramatic genius of Shakespeare. Herder's own panegyric on Shakespeare appeared in its final version in his collection Von deutscher Art und Kunst in 1773; Goethe's address Zum Schäkespears Tag (For Shakespeare's Nameday) had already been delivered to a circle of like-minded enthusiasts on Goethe's return to his native Frankfurt in the autumn of 1771. Inspired by Shakespeare, Goethe declares, he hesitated not a moment in renouncing the “regular” theater and casting off the “fetters” of the supposedly Aristotelian unities of action, time, and place. Shakespeare's theater is
ein schöner Raritäten Kasten, in dem die Geschichte der Welt vor unsern Augen an dem unsichtbaren Faden der Zeit vorbeiwallt. Seine Plane, sind nach dem gemeinen Styl zu reden, keine Plane, aber seine Stücke, drehen sich alle um den geheimen Punkt, (den noch kein Philosoph gesehen und bestimmt hat) in dem das Eigentümliche unsres Ichs, die prätendierte Freiheit unsres Wollens, mit dem notwendigen Gang des Ganzen zusammenstößt.
(G-MA, 1.2: 413)- Type
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- Literature of the Sturm und Drang , pp. 117 - 140Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2002