Goethe proclaimed to a group of friends in a lecture in celebration of Shakespeare given in Frankfurt in 1771: “Once I had read an entire play, I stood there like a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch.” He was only 22. Shakespeare would help liberate German theatre from the straitjacket of neoclassical French drama on which it was modelled. Shakespeare, Goethe wrote, was “the greatest wanderer”. He eschewed artifice.