A Theatrical Evaluation of Goethe's Abridged Stage Adaptation of Gotz

Abstract

The appearance in 1773 of Gotz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand won Goethe fame as the German Shakespeare. That appellation may have been intended partly as a rebuke of the still little-known author: Any dramatist writing plays in the eighteenth century in true Shakespearean form-with the frequent changes of place characteristic of the Elizabethan playwright's historical workswas presumably writing closet drama. Gotz von Berlichingen with its fifty-six scenes demanding fifty-one scene-changes' was theatrically impractical.