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SCHILLER'S I MARIA STUART G. W. Field In 1959, his bicentenary year, Schiller attracted most attention outside Germany through his play Maria Stuart, which recently, according to Benno von Wiese, "in Paris was a greater success than any play by a living German dramatist could have been." In New York, Tyrone Guthrie produced a new prose version' which was featured in the 1959 Vancouver Festival and has since been touring the continent. In two major respects the Guthrie adaptation diverges from the original intention. First, the two queens are humanized--even sentimentalized: for instance, in Elizabeth's affectionate dependence on Leicester and in Mary's fear of facing the scaffold. Secondly, the historical element is emphasized, suggesting that the producer saw this work in the tradition of Shakespeare's historical plays. Both these emphases tend to obscure the deeper philosophical meaning. Ouly in a superficial sense is Maria Stuart an historical play, for Schiller used historical material freely to clothe his ideas. Familiarity with Elizabethan history may even be an obstacle to appreciation. As Tonnelat said of Schiller's Maid of Orleans: "A Frenchman will always have some difficulty in enjoying Schiller's drama, if he does not begin by admitting that the heroine has received the name Joan of Arc ouly by accident and that we have to do in fact with a purely imaginary being."2 Although Elizabeth and Maria are not "purely imaginary beings" to the same degree as Schiller's Joan, the more glaring deviations from historical fact-the youthfulness of both queens,3 the meeting between them, Elizabeth's character-may irk us, whereas a German audience can readily accept Schiller's history-the more so since he held the Chair of History at Jena. But Schiller is quite frank about the role of history for him as poet and philosopher: Poetic truth does not consist in the fact that something really happened, but in the fact that it could happen, that is to say in the inner possibility of the thing. ... The circumstance, that these personages really lived and that these events really ensued, can to be sure often increase our pleasure. but Vol. XXIX, No. 3, April, 1960 SCHILLER'S Maria Stuart 327 with a foreign admixture which is more apt to be disadvantageous to the poetic impression.4 Schiller's philosophical ideas underlie his portrayal of character and plot and motivate his conscious deviations from history. By analysing his thinking as revealed in this drama, I am not suggesting that the thought alone can justify the play's existence. As a work of art and not a didactic treatise, the ideological content is legitimate only as long as the ideas are merely implicit and not explicit. In this respect Maria Stuart may be considered the most homogeneous of Schiller's classical or verse plays. Here history, character, and plot merge with basic philosophic concepts to form a more harmonious whole than is the case in the other later dramas. Such flaws as it has arise chiefly from an excess of zeal in Schiller for the ideas he embodied in the work and this also justifies our analytical and philosopbical approach. We have here another variation on the Schillerian theme of man's struggle to attain moral freedom despite the blows of fate in the guise of physical causality, that is, we have another version of the confiict between Pfiicht (duty) and Neigung (inclination), for to Schiller (and to Kant) Pfiicht represents the requirement of the moral law in the realm of freedom while Neigung represents determination by natural forces. The "personality" (die Person) of Mary is violated by physical force--ber captivity and impending execution. Her initial reaction to this impingement of external forces is to try to meet force with force. For such a realistic recourse her resources are hopelessly inadequate, and as long as she pursues it she becomes ever more hopelessly bound up in the chain of physical causality. Thus her hopes pinned upon Mortimer , the interview with Elizabeth, and her physical attraction of Leicester -all these in tum serve only to enmesh Maria more deeply in the chain of events leading inexorably to her physical death. The...

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