You've Goethe See This!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (roughly pronounced "GER teh") lived in rather sparse times for playwrights (1749-1832). Centuries after Shakespeare and Moliere, and decades before Ibsen, Shaw, Wilde, or Chekhov, it was an era of extensive music and art, but little drama.

In France, two men noted primarily as novelists, Alexandar Dumas and Victor Hugo, wrote some plays. In Germany, Goethe's fellow Weimar resident Friedrich Schiller wrote magnificent poetry and a few historical dramas (Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, Wallenstein's Death, and William Tell).

The other notable playwrights from that age were Irishmen living in England. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals, The Critic, and The School for Scandal) and Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer) wrote some of the funniest plays ever, still produced regularly today.

By contrast, Goethe wrote perhaps the deepest and most significant drama of the human spirit, Faust, based on a medieval legend of a man who sells his soul to the devil.

I don't know who originated the phrase, "Write what you know," but Goethe certainly proposed to "Write what you believe." In Faust he provides some of the best writing advice when he proclaims:

Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain; unless this feeling pours forth from your soul with native, pleasing vigour to control the hearts of all your hearers, it will be in vain. Pray keep on sitting! Pray collect and glue, from others' feasts brew some ragout; with tiny heaps of ashes play your game and blow the sparks into a wretched flame! Children and apes will marvel at you ever, if you've a palate that can stand the part; but heart to heart you'll not draw men, no, never, unless your message issue from your heart.

 Translated by George Madison Priest

Or put another way:

Unless you feel it, you will never achieve it. If it doesn't flow from your soul with natural easy power, your listeners will not believe it. You can sit down and paste phrases together by the hour, cook up a little stew from others' feasts; you can blow up miserable flames from your heap of ashes that will amaze children and monkeys - if such little triumphs please your taste - but you'll never move others, heart to heart, unless your speech comes from your own heart.

 Translated by C. F. MacIntyre

While Faust may be Goethe's most famous play (others include Goetz von Berlichingen and Egmont, which featured music by Beethoven), it was only one of many works that went far beyond playwriting. He was also known as a poet, critic, novelist, scientist, administrator, and one of the great thinkers of all time. Goethe's impact on theatre continues to be discovered and debated.

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