“Nature, Nature! Nothing so natural as Shakespeare’s people”
The Interpretation of Dreams“Nature, Nature! Nothing so natural as Shakespeare’s people” is an expression linked to Goethe’s 1773 essay “On Shakespeare’s Birthday.” Its force in the book’s notes lies both in its praise of Shakespeare’s natural-seeming characters and in a revealing authorship distinction: a different essay on nature, long attributed to Goethe, was actually written by his acquaintance G. C. Tobler.
The Shakespearean Exclamation
The phrase echoes the young Goethe’s essay “On Shakespeare’s Birthday” (1773), where he cries, “Nature, nature! nothing so natural as Shakespeare’s people.” The doubled invocation gives the line the urgency of an exclamation, while its compact assertion makes Shakespeare’s characters the measure of what seems natural. The expression is therefore not simply a general statement about nature: it specifically celebrates the lifelike quality of Shakespeare’s people.
Attribution and the Essay “On Nature”
The surrounding note distinguishes this Shakespearean phrase from “On Nature,” an essay long attributed to Goethe. That essay was in fact written by G. C. Tobler, a Swiss clergyman acquainted with Goethe. Tobler visited him in Weimar in 1781, discussed natural science and natural theology with him, and published the result of those discussions in the Tiefurt Journal in the winter of 1782–3. The juxtaposition makes the attribution issue concrete: Goethe’s association with ideas about nature does not establish that he wrote every text bearing that association, whereas the Shakespeare phrase is traced to his 1773 essay.
