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 "Götz 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.