ABSTRACT
To achieve the high art of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the novel-genre itself had to be adapted and legitimised. Nothing so radical was needed in drama, a genre already hallowed by tradition. Yet here too Goethe had problems, because ultimately all considerations of genre were secondary in his work. Self-expression had priority, both in importance — when he called his works ‘fragments of a great confession’ 1 , he implied that the record of his experience, thought and feeling as a whole was more important than the perfecting of single works — and in time. The expressive impulse, that is, came first, seizing on a story and hero, legendary or historical — Prometheus, Caesar, Mahomet, Ganymede, the Wandering Jew, Faust, Egmont — and only as expression advanced did the conditions of the genre Goethe had chanced into begin to be felt. He then had a choice: either to rescue the expressive core, as when he took the poems ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Mahomets Gesang’ from abortive dramas; or resolutely to complete a structure, making good any omissions or damage the expressive impulse had caused, as he did in Egmont. There a historical figure served as a mask to speak through, but the play had to be finished long after this purpose had passed. The first impulse was lyrical, the tidying-up had to meet dramatic requirements, rounding off the action and restoring some of the character’s historical substance. Egmont’s eleventh-hour transformation into a symbol of political freedom is the (equally unsatisfactory) answer to both demands. The play is completed, ‘mehr wie es sein konnte als wie es sein sollte’. 2
