Schiller

Introduction to Don Carlos by Nicholas Dromgoole

Friedrich Schiller was born in 1759 and died in 1805. Although a late arrival and younger than most, Schiller was a leading spirit in the movement known as Sturm und Drang that was a forerunner, a precursor of what was to grow at the turn of the century into a fully fledged Romantic Movement - Rebellion - Revolution, whatever its various historians have called it. Most of the main themes of Romanticism can be found alive and kicking in Sturm und Drang: the emphasis on the individual and individual freedom, a political idealism, the crucial importance of creative imagination, a subjective Rousseau-esque response to nature, the new attention paid to feeling and sensibility, the use of symbolic imagery, the championing of Shakespearean freedom in dramatic writing, as opposed to the dramatic unities, and scurrying back down the corridors of time to find themes for plays in distant epochs and other cultures.
This involved the first serious attempt at some kind of historical realism in stage settings and costumes. Sturm und Drang took its name from the title of a play by Klinger. Its leading spirit was Goethe from 1771-78 who greatly influenced the younger disciples around him - J H R Lenz, H L Wagner, F Muller and F M Klinger. Schiller's work from 1780 - 1785 was a later flowering from the same stem.

To talk of Germany, even in 1805, is misleading. The Holy Roman Empire consisted of a patchwork quilt of little independent states, kingdoms, dukedoms, fiefdoms, each supporting a Court and local aristocracy, depending as it had since feudal times on a labouring peasant class. Yet the increasing efficiency of the educational system was producing a talented middle class for which there were very few jobs, very little chance of status and position. This created a growing social tension which was only gradually resolved as industrialisation and increasingprosperity in the later nineteenth century absorbed and greatly increased the new middle class. In the 1760's it looked as though there was nowhere for this upstart middle class to go. They depended pathetically on the patronage of the aristocrats, particularly on the local ruler.