Stimulated to his task by his sister Cornelia, in the course of six weeks he had completed the play which, on its publication two years later, was to make him the most famous author in Germany.
Goethe's choice of Goetz as a theme on which to try his powers is a revelation of the motives that were now compelling him.

Of the nature of these motives he has himself given somewhat conflicting accounts.
He tells his contemporary correspondents that the play was written to relieve his own bosom of its perilous stuff; to enable him "to forget the sun, moon, and dear stars," and, again, that its primary object was to do justice to the memory of a great man.

Writing in old age, he assigns still another motive as mainly prompting him to the production of the play: it was written, he says, with the express object of improving the German stage, of rescuing it from the pitiful condition into which it had fallen during the first half of the eighteenth century.

What is entirely obvious, however, is that Shakespeare is the beginning and end of the inspiration of the _Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand_, as the play in its original form was entitled.

In its conception and in its details Shakespeare is everywhere suggested, though it may be noted that the comic element with which Shakespeare flavours his tragedies is absent from _Goetz_.
But for Shakespeare the play could not have taken the shape in which we have it.