SCHILLER, FRIEDRICH. - German lyric poet and playwright, b. at Marbach, in Württemberg, on 10 Nov. 1759, d. at Weimar on 9 May 1805. His father served for a long time in the army; his mother, of humble condition, had the education and religion of the heart. Having completed his early studies with great profit, Friedrich was received into the military school of Solitude in 1773, where he studied jurisprudence and later medicine; but neither these studies nor the rigid discipline of this institution suited his temperament and his aspiration. Impatient of every restriction and of every specialized study, he preferred to devote himself to reading the classics and the major modern poets, thus nourishing that vocation to poetry which was not slow to reveal itself as overpowering.
After some lyric and dramatic attempts, at only eighteen years of age, amid the astonishment and admiration of his companions, he wrote his first great tragedy: Die Räuber, full of undisciplined impetuosity and powerfully overflowing lyric fervor, which, amid exaggerations and implausibilities, shows a disordered aspiration to individual freedom above and indeed against every moral law. There followed the historical tragedy Die Verschwörung des Fiesko and the bourgeois tragedy Luise Millerin, later entitled Kabale und Liebe, two dramatic works belonging, like the first, to the Sturm und Drang period, in which the reflection of the literary conditions of the time is evident.
After some years the Don Carlos saw the light, S.'s most tormented work. Conceived at first as a family tragedy - the Infante's unhealthy passion for his stepmother, Queen Elizabeth - it had come to be transformed into an exaltation of political faith, in which the figure of the Marquis of Posa, the representative of the poet's political-humanitarian ideal, stands out gigantically. With the publication of this work a broad parenthesis opens in S.'s dramatic production until 1797. To this period belong, besides many lyrics, a series of theoretical writings, in which the principles of a moral aesthetics are set forth, and historical writings, the latter moreover lacking rigorous method as regards the research and criticism of sources.
The series of dramatic masterpieces begins with the Wallenstein trilogy, in which the poet gives the mature affirmation of his genius, attaining, in conformity with long-meditated artistic canons, a human representation idealized by historical elements. In the two subsequent tragedies: Maria Stuart and Die Jungfrau von Orléans the dramatic action moves even further away from historical reality, while in the second there is no lack of that marvelous and supernatural element which in Greek tragedy is represented by fate. In both the poet is concerned above all with portraying human characters. Die Braut von Messina may be defined as a Schicksalstragödie, but S. does not here go so far as the desolate consequences contained in such dramas, so as not to deny free will. The last tragedy is Wilhelm Tell - the Demetrius remained unfinished - which marked a full victory from its first performance (1804). Tell, an imaginary character, loves only his family, his homeland, his freedom, and represents the defender of natural law; only when this is offended does he rebel and kill the tyrant who denies and tramples upon such law. In this work the two great loves of S. are summed up in a marvelous synthesis: the love of the beauties of nature and that of freedom.
S.'s lyrics too are inspired by an ethical idealism, from those of his youth written in his Sturm und Drang period, in which, even amid the outpourings of an ardent and rebellious temperament, the aspiration to an ideal of a higher humanity is already felt, to the much-celebrated Lied von der Glocke. This had, after the poet's death, an epilogue written by Goethe, in which the latter affirmed that the light which had illumined the spirit of the incomparable lost friend had long since become the faith of thousands of men.
The whole of Schiller's work sums up and expresses in itself the aspiration of the German soul to an ideal of higher life and humanity. The dramas and the lyrics are dominated by an ethical principle, by one and the same moral idea. It would be difficult to deny in the poet instinctive impulses of sympathy for his heroes who transgress the moral law, especially for Maria, guilty of every sin, and even for Karl Moor, driven beyond the limit of every wickedness and perversion; but even in this turbid tragedy there is the foreannouncement of the inspiring idea of the later dramas: the dream of political and human redemption of the Marquis of Posa, the inner conflict of Wallenstein, the shudder of Maria's moral conscience, the yearning for sacrifice and resurrection of Joan: heroes and heroines all closely bound to one and the same ethical reality. Man - according to S., whose thought proceeds in the footsteps of Kant - attains the true conquest of freedom, that is, the full possession of humanity and of the harmony of the spirit, only in the complete revelation of the categorical imperative of his own conscience. But such a conquest necessarily implies struggles and sorrows. All Schillerian heroes struggle and suffer thus for their own freedom and for that of others, because the poet, himself thirsting for freedom, even if he often indulges the impetuosity of their passions, never deprives them of the flame of his faith and of the sense of moral responsibility. In reality, therefore, it is always the elevation of the individual and consequently of humanity that is the goal to which the poet aspires, in which he believes and which kindles his feeling and his imagination. Hence the ideal unity of all his work.
Bibliography11 works
Rodolfo Bottacchiari