Theoria - DISA

Friedrich Schiller
(SOME ASPECTS OF HIS DRAMATIC WORKS)
In the first number of Theoria there appeared an essay on
Goethe which tried to show the development of German
thought in the eighteenth century as mirrored in Faust. The
present essay deals with Goethe's intimate friend Schiller, the
second classical German poet. In a brief analysis of his plays
Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and Die
Braut von Messina we shall consider some aspects of German
drama in the eighteenth century. Such an analysis should be
of topical interest even to those who have not concerned themselves
with German literature, as the productions of King
Oedipus, The Trojan Women, and Macbeth by the N.U.C. Dramatic
Society in Pietermaritzburg and the N.U.C. Department of
English in Durban provide precisely the background of experience
that we require to understand Schiller's plays. For
Sophocles (to a lesser degree Euripides also) and Shakespeare
are the two poles that determine German drama and dramatic
theory in the eighteenth century.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Germans
were completely under the spell of the French theatre. They
admired the lucidity of the plays of French classicism; they
recognised the usefulness as well as the necessity of the three
unities of place, time, and action ; they approved of the clear
distinction between tragedy and comedy, which excludes all
comic elements from tragedy; and found it right and proper
that the heroes of tragedy should belong to the nobility, and
that comedy should only show the bourgeois. They did not
for a moment doubt that in these rules the French dramatists
remain true to the original aims ,pf the Greeks as defined by
Aristotle, and that French classicism is a living example of Attic
tradition. For this reason the Germans did not even go to the
trouble of reading Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides
in the original. All plays written and produced around
1740 in Germany were either translations 'or imitations of
French dramatical works.
With Shakespeare the Germans became acquainted only in
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