ABSTRACT
The new comedy spread quickly, first to Denmark, a country which so far had little modern literature, and which relied largely on foreign companies for its drama. While Denmark was broadening the territory of Western literature, which was to spread in the course of the century to Sweden also, a revival of Italian drama, again attributable in part to Moliere's example, seemed about to bring that country back as a leader in the dramatic field. For Romanticism, Classicism, and the drama of psychological conflict–all the great movements that were to absorb the energies of the nineteenth century–had been experienced and partly explored by that universal genius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, before he died, at the age of eighty-two, 1832. Goethe meanwhile had been playing the petty official and master of entertainments at the court of Weimar, on intimate terms with the Duke, and sentimentally attached to Frau von Stein, who presided as his sacred Muse over his very small production.
