The note sounded by the criticisms of Lessing met with a ready response, and the productivity displayed by the nascent dramatic literature of Germany is astonishing, both in the efforts inspired by his teachings and in those which continued to controvert or which aspired to transcend them. On the stage, Harlequin and his surroundings proved by no means easy to suppress, more especially at Vienna, the favourite home of frivolous amusement; but even here a reform was gradually effected, and, under the intelligent rule of the emperor Joseph II., a national stage grew into being. The mantle of Ekhof fell upon the shoulders of his eager younger rival, F. L. Schröder, who was the first to domesticate Shakespeare upon the German stage. In dramatic literature few of Lessing's earlier contemporaries produced any works of permanent value, unless the religious dramas of F. G. Klopstock--a species in which he had been preceded by J. J. Bodmer--and the patriotic _Bardietten_ of the same author be excepted. S. Gessner, J. W. L. Gleim, and G. K. Pfeffel (1736-1809) composed pastoral plays. But a far more potent stimulus prompted the efforts of the younger generation. The translation of Shakespeare, begun in 1762 by C. M. Wieland, whose own plays possess no special significance, and completed in 1775 by Eschenburg, which furnished the text for many of Lessing's criticisms, helps to mark an epoch in German literature. Under the influence of Shakespeare, or of their conceptions of his genius, arose a youthful group of writers who, while worshipping their idol as the representative of nature, displayed but slight anxiety to harmonize their imitations of him with the demands of art. The notorious _Ugolino_ of H. W. von Gerstenberg seemed a premonitory sign that the coming flood might merely rush back to the extravagances and horrors of the old popular stage; and it was with a sense of this danger in prospect that Lessing in his third important drama, the prose tragedy _Emilia Galotti_ (1772), set the example of a work of incomparable nicety in its adaptation of means to end. But successful as it proved, it could not stay the excesses of the _Sturm und Drang_ period which now set in. Lessing's last drama, _Nathan der Weise_ (1779), was not measured to the standard of the contemporary stage; but it was to exercise its influence in the progress of time--not only by causing a reaction in tragedy from prose to blank verse (first essayed in J. W. von Brawe's _Brutus_, 1770), but by ennobling and elevating by its moral and intellectual grandeur the branch of literature to which in form it belongs. The Sturm und Drang.