He did not have to defend theater against the nobility and the church or against the Italian opera and French drama. Instead, he tried to reconcile them. His Weimar Classicism used antique characters and court behavioral rules and remodeled them to fit his ideal. Characters should be natural, without any societal differentiation, to bring bourgeois and nobility together.

He rejected the idea that drama has to follow a strict formal scheme. Goethe wanted to overcome the shackles of a formal scheme