A love-story is interwoven with the presentation of Goetz’s activity; and from the point of view of art this is perhaps the best part of the drama. Weislingen, a young and brilliant statesman at the corrupt court of the Bishop of Bamberg, is taken prisoner by Goetz. He falls in love with the knight’s sister, Maria, and his love is returned. When, however, he goes back to the Bishop’s court, pledged to support no undertaking against Goetz or his friends, he is overcome by the wiles of Adelheid, a subtle, cruel, and fascinating woman, who understands thoroughly the essential weakness of his character. She professes to love him, and becomes his wife, and in the end he is poisoned by his servant, who acts as her agent. Weislingen and Adelheid are genuinely dramatic figures, and the character of Maria, simple, affectionate, and loyal, is not less finely conceived. It was Frederika Brion he was thinking of when he depicted Weislingen’s love for, and desertion of, Maria. When the play was published, he sent a copy to Salzmann, with a request that it should be forwarded to Sesenheim. “Poor Frederika,” he wrote, “will be to some extent consoled when the unfaithful one is poisoned.” The play was printed by Merck, who had started a printing establishment of his own; and in the summer of 1773 it was published. The enthusiasm it awakened far surpassed Goethe’s anticipations. Hitherto the unities of the French classic drama had been rigidly respected in the drama of Germany. Lessing had fought hard to show that they are not essential to a great work of art, but in his own plays he had not cared to violate them. The author of “Goetz” had wholly ignored them, daring to think rather of the vitality of his characters than of the conditions of a well-rounded scheme. To some critics of the older generation the play seemed almost grotesquely extravagant, but the younger men hailed it as a glorious symptom of the uprising of a new and adventurous spirit of liberty. A man of genius, putting aside conventions and artificialities, had gone straight to reality for inspiration, and had uttered a word that delivered them, as they thought, from the necessity of submitting not only to the unities, but to any kind of artistic law. A school of writers was formed, all of whom looked to Goethe as their chief. Prominent among them was Klinger, a native of Frankfort, the title of one of whose plays, “Sturm und Drang,” was afterwards accepted as the name of the period in which it was produced. Lenz, whom Goethe had known at Strasburg, and who, after Goethe’s departure, had tried to win the affections of Frederika Brion, was another member of the group. These young writers had plenty of ambition and vigour, but they mistook eccentricity for originality, sentimentalism for passion, noisy declamation for poetry, and not a shred of interest now attaches to their productions, except as documents which throw light on a curious phase of literary history.