The German theatre was, owing to the Gallomania of the period, merely a bad imitation of the French stage. Gottsched,[4] who greatly contributed toward the reformation of German literature, still retained the stilted Alexandrine and the pseudo-Gallic imitation of the ancient dramatists to which Lessing put an end. Lessing wrote his "Dramaturgy" at Hamburg, recommended Shakespeare and other English authors as models, but more particularly nature. The celebrated Eckhof, the father of the German stage, who at first travelled about with a company of actors and finally settled at Gotha, was the first who followed this innovation. He was succeeded by Schroeder in Hamburg, who was equally industrious as a poet, an actor, and a Freemason. In Berlin, where Fleck had already paved the way, Iffland, who, like Schroeder, was both a poet and an actor, founded a school, which in every respect took nature as a guide, and which raised the German stage to its well-merited celebrity.
At the close of the eighteenth century, men of education were seized with an enthusiasm for art, which showed itself principally in a love for the stage and in visits for the promotion of art to Italy. The poet and the painter, alike dissatisfied with reality, sought to still their secret longings for the beautiful amid the unreal creations of fancy and the records of classical antiquity.
Fashion, that masker of nature, that creator of deformity, had, in truth, arrived at an unparalleled pitch of ugliness. The German costume, although sometimes extravagantly curious during the Middle Ages, had nevertheless always retained a certain degree of picturesque beauty, nor was it until the reign of Louis XIV. of France that dress assumed an unnatural, inconvenient, and monstrous form. Enormous allonge perukes and ruffles, the fontange (high headdress), hoops, and high heels, rendered the human race a caricature of itself. In the eighteenth century, powdered wigs of extraordinary shape, hairbags and queues, frocks and frills, came into fashion for the men; powdered headdresses an ell in height, diminutive waists, and patches for the women. The deformity, unhealthiness, and absurdity of this mode of attire were vainly pointed out by Salzmann, in a piece entitled, "Charles von Carlsberg, or Human Misery."