Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805)

Schiller's third play is another prose tragedy, but this time it's a love-story across the class divide in a contemporary setting on the fringes of the court of an unnamed small German state. This is the play that Verdi adapted as Luisa Miller.

The young nobleman Ferdinand von Walter has fallen in love with sixteen-year-old Luise, daughter of the humble musician Miller. Ferdinand's father, an important minister in the Duke's court, tries to frustrate the affair, first by arranging a marriage show more of convenience between Ferdinand and the Duke's current mistress, the exiled English noblewoman Lady Milford, and then by abusing his judicial powers to put the Miller family under pressure. Needless to say, it all ends badly, with the most famous lemonade scene in literary history...

Schiller is settling some personal scores here: of bourgeois origins himself, he had recently been involved in a love-affair with an aristocratic married woman, and he was also satirising the misrule and abuses of power of his former employer the Duke of Württemberg (in particular the way he financed an extravagant lifestyle by hiring out conscript soldiers to fight against liberty in America). But the play also makes a powerful general statement against the arbitrary power and unaccountability of monarchies and the rigidity of the class system, very much in the spirit of the revolutionary 1780s.

Interesting — particularly when we know that Don Carlos is next — is the way Schiller ignores the usual conventions governing father-son relationships. Präsident von Walter is an amoral, self-interested scoundrel, without a hint of honour or nobility. He's obtained his judicial office by having his predecessor murdered, and he is completely cynical about his son's erotic adventures, and only intervenes when his secretary, Wurm (who's also pursuing the lovely Luise), threatens him with blackmail. Yet he has a son who is the very picture of the noble romantic hero, honourable in every fibre of his being, and — absurdly, in the circumstances — proud of his centuries of noble heritage. Normally, the rules say that a hero like that should have a parent who is honourable but misguided in some way, but Schiller clearly doesn't go in for playing by the book. show less

I learnt to read thanks to a fortnightly magazine called Story Teller that was around in the early 80s – it was one of those publications that came with a cassette taped to the front cover, on which various celebrities of the day could be heard reading out fairytales and children's stories, while you read along in the lavishly-illustrated magazine. Frankly, every child deserves to grow up listening to Brian Blessed bellow out The Elves and the Shoemaker, or Joanna Lumley politely explain show more Gulliver's Travels.

One of my favourite stories – indeed one of my strongest memories of childhood – was William Tell, which drew on the inspired combination of Tom Baker and Gioachino Rossini (together at last). Of course I didn't know who Tom Baker was then, I just knew I loved the way he enunciated ‘Gessler's black heart’ with such relish; and I certainly didn't know who Rossini was – I probably assumed the Overture was just something they'd come up with for the sake of the Story Teller recording – I only knew that the music got me so riled up that, afterwards, I used to charge around the house in some frenzy, trying to liberate the airing cupboard from the Habsburg Austrian yoke.

If you have a spare few minutes, treat yourself here.

So anyway. Though Schiller had a lot to live up to by the time I finally got around to reading him, his play also found fertile ground. And though I am the least nationalistic person imaginable, I have always had a soft spot for tales of national freedom or independence. This one is put together with consummate skill, different scenes and conversations echoing each other very deftly. The poetic flourishes are well translated in my edition by William F Mainland in the 70s.

The herald cries his summons to the lists,
But no sound comes to these sequestered valleys;
I only hear the melancholy note
Of cowbells and the dreary ranz des vaches.

There is an interesting tension in the treatment of the central character, who is often discussed but not often on stage. Perhaps it comes from the fact that Schiller, as a professional historian, knew only too well that Tell probably never really existed; Schiller the historian and Schiller the dramatist have, perhaps, slightly different ideas about how large a role he should play. Much of his dialogue consists of regurgitated proverbs, as though he's merely a personification of general folk wisdom – most of it revolving around the theme of self-sufficiency, which is something of a recurring motif here, for people as well as for countries.

I find national myths like this weirdly moving – not so much the original story as the way it has captured the imaginations of so many generations of people. I'm determined to get down to the open-air staging of the play that's put on every summer outside Altdorf, where these legendary events actually ‘happened’. Until then I'll make do with the words on the page – supplemented, natch, by regular doses of Tom Baker. show less

Like many other medieval folk-heroes, the early-14th-century Swiss freedom-fighter William Tell turns out to have left little or no solid evidence to prove that he ever existed — the earliest written mentions of his name are about a century after his supposed lifetime, while many of the stories told about him have suspiciously close parallels to much older mythological sources. Nonetheless, he has long been an important symbol of Swiss national identity, and he achieved pan-European status show more as an icon of liberty around the time of the French Revolution.

Schiller half-jokingly claimed that he had started writing his play in 1803 to put an end to the persistent rumours that he was working on a play about William Tell — in practice the impetus seems to have come mostly from his wife Charlotte, who had a long-standing interest in Swiss culture, and from Goethe. Schiller himself never visited Switzerland, but one of the first things he did when he started work on the play was to order a large-scale map of the Vierwaldstättersee. The stage directions show clear traces of this geographical interest: we are told exactly which mountains should be visible in the background of each scene. For the details of the Tell legend, Schiller mostly followed Aegidius Tschudi's Chronicle, written in the late 16th century. The first performance was in Weimar in March 1804, and the play was published in October of that year.

With his historian's hat on, Schiller introduces a couple of interesting nuances into the story. One aspect of this is a careful attempt to make a distinction between legitimate rebellion against a (local) ruler who oversteps his constitutional authority and wrongful attempts to usurp the divinely appointed authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. Throughout the play, the rebels make it clear that they are only seeking to restore their constitutional rights, and in the penultimate scene Tell turns away the man who has come to him for help after assassinating the Emperor Albrecht. Obviously, that is meant to be relevant to the situation in Germany at the time of writing, and also to the post-1789/post-1776 world more generally. Another nuance is the way he keeps Tell apart from the political leaders of the rebellion: he is a man of action whose personal bravery is an inspiration for others, a decent ordinary man pushed beyond the limits of toleration by an arrogant ruler, but he doesn't make speeches or take part in the Oath on the Rütli, contrary to most Swiss versions of the story.

The play is Schiller's only full-length drama not framed as a tragedy: in the title it is simply "Schauspiel" (a play). Where The bride of Messina only had five named characters, it has about forty. As well as the usual serious debates between political leaders, there are a number of big, set-piece crowd scenes with lots of different things going on at once, much as in Wallenstein's Camp. Especially interesting is the scene (III:iii) where Gessler's men-at-arms, Friesshardt and Leuthold, arrest Tell and are set upon by an angry crowd — Schiller showing us how fragile authority is when it is only based on force — and the gratuitously complex scene in the hollow way in Act IV, when Tell is setting up to assassinate Gessler and all sorts of passers-by (including a complete wedding party) threaten to get in the way.

Of the Schiller plays I've read, this is the one that I can most easily imagine working well on a stage, although it would be an expensive and complex one to produce, and of course it comes with its own historical baggage because of the way it has been adopted as a kind of nationalist ritual by the Swiss. (Hitler also loved it at one point, but is said to have lost interest somewhat when he realised people were identifying him with Gessler...) show less

Written in the winter of 1802-1803 and first performed in Weimar in February 1803, this is a largely experimental work, and one of those cases where the experiment seems to demonstrate quite clearly that the hypothesis it was based on is invalid. The play comes with an essay in which Schiller deprecates the tendency for naturalism in drama and justifies reviving the Greek idea of a Chorus as a way of making drama more abstract and stylised, better able to achieve poetic authenticity because show more it isn't tied to the mechanical (and artificial) business of imitating real life on a stage.

The play is a simple story, stripped to the bare bones of narrative, and with only five speaking parts plus chorus. Unlike Schiller's other late plays, it isn't tied to a historical subject: the choice of Messina for the setting is simply a dodge to allow Schiller to mix ancient Greek and Christian motifs. Like The Robbers, it's about rivalry between brothers. Queen Isabella, who clearly isn't trained in narratology, has sent her infant daughter off to be hidden in a convent, in an attempt to circumvent a prophecy that the girl would be responsible for the deaths of her brothers. Now everyone is grown up, and both the brothers, independently, have fallen desperately in love after a chance meeting with an unknown young girl in a remote convent. We don't need telling how this is going to end!

Schiller doesn't quite stick to his theoretical principle of making the chorus stand outside the narrative and comment on the action: they are treated more like an opera chorus, split into two groups representing the armed followers of the two rival princes, and they do get hands-on with the action from time to time. In fact, in a lot of ways this play resembles the libretto of a Wagner opera. Wagner clearly took a lot of his ideas about the use of the chorus directly from Schiller, but with about 900% more alliteration in the verse.

Interesting, but I don't think the story is a good match to the format. The characters somehow come over more like stylised soap-opera figures than as the modern versions of Oedipus and Jocasta they are meant to be. show less