In his address Zum Schäkespears Tag (1771) Goethe uses the language of liberation to describe the moment when he recognized the genius of Shakespeare:

Schiller uses a similar image of artificial constriction in his preface to Die Räuber when he defends his refusal to squeeze his play into “die allzuenge Pallisaden des Aristoteles und Batteux” (S-NA, 3: 5). The drama of the Sturm und Drang may be accused of being sprawling and shapeless, but it is clear that Goethe and Schiller and their colleagues delighted in a “freer” form that they felt liberated them from the dominant neoclassical tradition, with its implications of order and propriety and, therefore, artificiality. Goethe was at the heart of a group of young writers who shared the feeling of being frustrated by the irrelevance of an older generation of writers and constrained by the conventions of polite society, which was dominated by the alien culture of the court.