Features the play Robbers that presents a passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal; and Wallenstein that explores a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor.

Schiller was profoundly shaken by the failure of the French Revolution and devoted many of his greatest works to debating the true nature of freedom. Here, in scenes alternating between the palace of Westminster and the prison at Fotheringhay, he shows us a captive heroine rising above her suffering to gain in insight and spiritual depth. The deceitful and indecisive Elizabeth, trapped by the cruel demands of Realpolitik, can achieve worldly victory only at a terrible moral cost.

Schiller's early plays are full of violent actions and language, but he later adopted a far more restrained and...

This historical and critical survey of German drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides an introduction to major authors and works from Lessing, through Goethe, Schiller and Weimar Classicism, to Kleist, Grillparzer and Hebbel. F.J. Lamport traces the rise and development in the German-speaking world of the last form of "classical" poetic drama to appear in European literature. This development is seen as reflecting the intellectual and political ferment both within Germany and throughout Europe.