Under the influence of this reading he now finally broke with classicism and became one of the leaders of the new Sturm and Drang movement.
With Gotz von Berlichingen, Shakespeare's art first triumphed on the German stage, and the literary movement known as Sturm and Drang was inaugurated.
While Gotz inaugurated the manlier side of the Sturm and Drang literature, Werther was responsible for its sentimental excesses.
A lighter vein is to be observed in various dramatic satires written at this time, such as Cotter, Helden and Wieland (1774), Hanswursts Hochzeit, Fastnachtsspiel vorn Pater Brey, Satyros, and in the Singspiele, Erwin and Elmire (1775) and Claudine von Villa Bella (1776); while in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger (1772- 1773), Goethe drove home the principles of the new movement of Sturm and Drang in terse and pointed criticism.
Goethe's hero changed with the author's riper experience and with his new conceptions of man's place and duties in the world, but the Gretchen tragedy was taken over into the finished poem, practically unaltered, from the earliest Faust of the Sturm and Drang.
