But Goethe was about to pay more serious homage to the Master, as he then understood him. On November 28th, he informed Salzmann that he was engaged on a work which was absorbing him to the forgetfulness of Homer, Shakespeare, and everything else. He was dramatising the history of "one of the noblest of Germans," rescuing from oblivion the memory of "an honest man." The "noblest of Germans" was Gottfried von Berlichingen (1482-1562), one of those "knights of the cows," whose predatory propensities were the terror of Germany throughout the Middle Ages, and who appears to have been neither better nor worse than the rest of his class. While still in Strassburg, Goethe had noted Gottfried as an appropriate subject for dramatic treatment, but, as he records in his Autobiography, it was immediately after his return to Frankfort that he first put his hand to the work. Stimulated to his task by his sister Cornelia, in the course of six weeks he had completed the play which, on its publication two years later, was to make him the most famous author in Germany. Goethe's choice of Goetz as a theme on which to try his powers is a revelation of the motives that were now compelling him. Of the nature of these motives he has himself given somewhat conflicting accounts. He tells his contemporary correspondents that the play was written to relieve his own bosom of its perilous stuff; to enable him "to forget the sun, moon, and dear stars," and, again, that its primary object was to do justice to the memory of a great man. Writing in old age, he assigns still another motive as mainly prompting him to the production of the play: it was written, he says, with the express object of improving the German stage, of rescuing it from the pitiful condition into which it had fallen during the first half of the eighteenth century. What is entirely obvious, however, is that Shakespeare is the beginning and end of the inspiration of the _Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand_, as the play in its original form was entitled. In its conception and in its details Shakespeare is everywhere suggested, though it may be noted that the comic element with which Shakespeare flavours his tragedies is absent from _Goetz_. But for Shakespeare the play could not have taken the shape in which we have it. Given the model, however, Goethe had to infuse it with motives which would have a living interest for his own time. One of these motives was the admiration of great men which Goethe shared with the generation to which he belonged. During this Frankfort period he was successively attracted by such contrasted types of heroes as Julius Caesar, Socrates, and Mahomet as appropriate central figures for dramatic representation. "It is a pleasure to behold a great man," one of the characters in _Goetz_ is made to say; and, if Goethe had any determinate aim when he took his theme in hand, it was to present the spectacle of a hero for admiration and inspiration.