• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK II: Lecture Notes to Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos

Friedrich Schiller: 1759 - 1805   Don Carlos

      Dramatic conflicts usually take the form of the clash of opposing values and forces.  The Christian world-view that underlies medieval and renaissance drama set out this opposition in terms of Good and Evil.  Any advance by the forces of evil was intolerable and had to be reversed and  the realm of the play restored to the condition of Order from which it had swerved. The master plot of Shakespearean tragedy for example is, with variations: (a) the undermining of the conventionally ordered realm by forces of disorder; (b) the convulsion of the kingdom and the suffering of characters loyal to the conventional order; (c) the ultimate defeat of the forces of disorder and the restoration of the realm to its former state. This was the pattern invoked by Edmund Burke in his judgment on the French Revolutiuon.

.

.   Post-revolutionary and Romantic literature replaces this pattern with a radical new one, anticipated by Thomas Paine in his reply to Burke.   The given, conventional order now is seen as defective, inadequate, or unjust; the forces of disorder, even if  violent, bring possibilities of liberty and enlightenment.  That the given order of things is riddled with contradictions and injustices that can be identified and overcome leading to a new order of things, is the basis of dialectic in history, massively explored in Georg Friedrich Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spiirit

      The dialectical nature of Don Carlos takes the form of a series of 'ideological triads' each representing an alliance and a conflict of positive versus negative forces.   These alliances and conflicts serve the central theme of Life against Death, Light against Dark.  Light and light-bringers as forces of liberation constitute major metaphors of Romantic and post-Romantic writers. 

 The major single opposition in Don Carlos, is:

          Forces of Light                                                     Forces of Darkness

          (Idealized Freedom)               vs.                                (Oppressive Order)

          Posa           Queen                                                Domingo/Inquisitor   King

                 Carlos                                                                           Alba

 Other such triads, represent different stages of the dialectical conflict.

                                      (Melodramatic Love-intrigue plots )

         King           Queen                                                               King           Eboli

                 Carlos                                                                                  Carlos

                                  (Enlightened vs. Establishment plotting against the King)

          Posa         Queen                                                               Domingo         Eboli

                  Carlos                                                                                      Alba    

The simultaneous operation of these plots creates a dramatic counterpoint resembling Elizabethan double-plots.

1 .   Schiller adds the dynamics of History to Lessing's drama of Ideological division and conflict in Nathan the Wise

.  

          In contrast to the Christian and the Neoclassical desire for the static, traditional and established order, Romanticism affirms as salutary the restless disquietude of the spirit .   Earlier fear of disorder gives way to viewing established Order as oppressive, creating repressive systems of power to be opposed   The French Revolution's utopian attempt to remake human identity within a remade human society remained a major inspiration even after its failure. One of the consequences is that this dialectical conception of reality continued to shape later dramatic writing long after Schiller.

    At the age of thirteen Friedrich Schiller, against his will and that of his parents, was forced into the harsh military academy run by the despotic Duke of Württenberg.  He remained in this servitude until he escaped, at age 21, to witness the huge success in Stuttgart of his first play The Robbers .(1780)   By escaping from the Duke, Schiller was now a fugitive and could never return home.   Furthermore, he could at any time be kidnapped by the duke's agents and imprisoned.   This is one source of Schiller's lifelong detestation of all tyrannies.  At first his revolt took the form of  'Stürm und Drang' dramas, similar to the youthful Goethe's plays.  (Schiller: The Robbers: Goethe - Götz von Berlichingen)

      In 1787 he begins the serious study of history and philosophy while working on Don Carlos and in Jena studies Immanuel Kant's philosophy.   He writes major works of aesthetic theory: Letters On The Aesthetic Education of Mankind , On Naive and Sentimental Poetry , On the Sublime etc.   In 1789 he becomes a professor of history at Jena.

   In 1794 he moves to Weimar (pop. 3,000) and meets Johann Wolgang von Goethe.   An initial coldness between the two leads later to enthusiastic collaboration.   Under the patronage of the young Duke of Weimar, Karl August, and the Duke's mother, this little duchy becomes a major center of art and learning.   Goethe establishes a 'Weimar style' of theatre and acting of ‘passionate restraint' combining neo-classical and Romantic ideals.  

  Schiller's later works include : Wallenstein, Mary Stuart, Maid of Orleans, Bride of Messina and Wilhelm Tell and Demetrius unfinished at his death in 1805.

.        

      The concept of  tragedy reborn from the spirit of history- the effects of the past upon the present - will be taken up momentously by Schiller and will prove central to Ibsen's work. Its basis is that radical, dialectical disorder is necessary to human freedom.   In a radical transformation of the dramatic hero and of dramatic action, Schiller inaugurates the idea that the criminally guilty hero/heroine can force a liberating dialectic of consciousness.  From acknowledged guilt an evolution to a more adequate and authentic condition of consciousness can occur.  Even  murderers like Mary in Mary Stuart and Rebecca West in Rosmersholm can be vehicles of enlightened consciousness.

2.   Dramatist of History and of 'Alienation'

          While Schiller working on Don Carlos, Schiller switched from prose to blank verse, influenced by Lessing's Nathan the Wise. He must have been impressed by the fact Lessing had shown it was possible to create a drama of ideological conflict: for this was precisely where he was going while working on Don Carlos, as his own Letters show.   Lessing in Nathan the Wise cleared the ground for the writers who followed.   Almost as much as Kant, Lessing rendered the modern spirit free from all established authority - in any field.   All of reality still waited to be discovered - this was the faith of Enlightenment inherited, though qualified, by Romanticism.

        In Don Carlos, Schiller's problem was to get out of the drama of Stürm und Drang violence and melodramatic intrigue with which he had started; to get his story to set out the new ideas of freedom and its forces vs. despotism and its forces, that now was emerging.   Following Lessing, Schiller, in Don Carlos links his dramatic action to ideology, adding historical dynamism - dialectic - to Lessing's more static structure.

  At this moment we see the new modern supertext coming into being.

3.Tragic Myth out of the ‘Nightmare of History'.

     Schiller sees historical periods as a moment of dialectical transition, of conflicts between competing ideologies (progress and reaction) that will fight to the death.  He recreates historical characters as archetypes of competing ideologies .   This tracing of the evolution of ideas their coming into being under violent pressure and the discovery of contradictions within given 'alienated' reality) creates the new rhythm of modern dialectical drama.   And it will be linked to the evolution of identity, ('you shall become who you are') that gives to modern dramatic characters a radical instability.   The old drama of Integrity is replaced by the new drama of Authenticity.

   Schiller believed that modern humanity, and especially modern poets, suffered for lacking the myth-filled culture of the Greeks.   Modern life was diminished compared with the classical world.   Its religion was dogma, leaving no freedom for the imagination: and the secular world was made up of despiritualized fact.   The historical process as a meaningless succession of events over which humanity had no control, was that same "nightmare of history" from which James Joyce's Stephen Daedelus wishes to escape in Ulysses and which T. S. Eliot will try to overcome in his poetry and drama.   One the way the spirit could regain control over history was to render it as archetype and myth.   This we will discover is the way out for Schiller, Kleist, Richard Wagner, Ibsen, up to Eliot and Joyce in our day.  Archetypes and myths due not claim to be the factual truths of history but are 'shorthand' forms of identifying forces that are seen to shape history.  The evolution of more adequate ideas of human freedom may not be present in the historical records; but, by the cunning of Reason,it might emerge as the most powerful force of the time.  This idea, at least, lies behind Schillerian historical tragedy as it will do behind Hegel's Reason in History.

.

        Modern humanity's identity was formed from history, from the growth of institutions, e.g. of church and state that controlled our lives, distorting them, making both the world and ourselves profoundly alienated, even in our most intimate feelings and thoughts. The world we are born into is an artificial system of repressive institutions, injustices, errors, blindnesses, - a total deception, an unreality. It is always already a bad work of art.   Throughout history we distorted and disfigured the natural world surrounding us: and distorted and disfigured our human identity, too, within the natural world - the major theme of Ibsen's Realist Cycle. .  

4. Exploring Inner and Outer Landscapes

A common theme of Romanticism is that modern humanity has lost contact with the world of Nature and with our own natural humanity.   (Cf.Schiller's On Naive and Sentimental Poetry).  To compensate or heal,  Romanticism simultaneously explores inner and outer landscapes: hence the prevalence of this theme in the art of the time.   The natural (outer) landscape provides a better analogue of our human identity, our psychological (inner) terrain, than does the civic world of neo-classical and rationalist drama.   Both landscapes contain terrifying, monstrous and criminal dimensions.   This is true, also, of the non-dramatic literature of the period: of Byron's poems and plays, of the 'Gothic' novel and of French melodramas.   Romantic art undergoes a huge expansion in character types and their environments.  The rebel, the outsider, the criminal as hero/heroine is a persistent motif, from Karl Moor, Mary Stuart, through Thomas Stockmann, Rebekka West, Hedda Gabler or John Gabriel Borkman up to the characters of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus and Genet.

5.   To Negate the Negation

        An art that recorded only the immediate world we live in, would be an imitation of an unreality.   The true artist does not try to imitate this fake reality but seeks to create 'unalienated' reality: or to show the extent of the alienation.   In Schiller, Ibsen, Shaw, Brecht, Genet there is this duality in their art: to record the repression and to search out both the forces that create alienation and the forces that might overcome it.  Schiller wrote: "Culture is to set man free and help him to be equal to his Concept."   Like Rousseau and Tom Paine, Schiller recognized that we need to be freed from alienated culture; but he insisted that culture, not social revolution, is the best means to do this.   In The Aesthetic Education of Mankind he reproaches the French Revolution for tearing down completely the existing state.   He writes, "The clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is in motion."

        French revolutionaries had looked back to the ideal of republican Rome but German thinkers and poets preferred the example of democratic Athens, and it was at this time that the tremendous discovery of Greece took place, in the arts and in philosophy.   History now becomes of supreme importance because history, studied seriously, could tell us how we became what we are, what were the 'forces' in conflict and collision, that shaped us and our world and how we might overcome their negative influence upon us - to negate the negation..  

6.History and Myth

        Schiller was a professor of history but, as a dramatist, he took great liberties with historical facts. He made tragedy out of history and all his dramas after Don Carlos are historical.   It is via history that one might trace the sources of our modern malaise.   But Schiller found writing historical drama faced him with major problems.  To be true to history meant having to include facts that were 'inert' or devoid of poetic or dramatic value.   Because, in Don Carlos, he did not trouble too much with historical fact, dramatizing instead the 'spirit' of the period, he did not have the tremendous struggle he later underwent with his next major drama, the trilogy Wallenstein.

        He compared his problem with the advantage Sophocles had with Oedipus Tyrannos.   The Greek myth had already turned reality into a poetic form which the poet can freely take up and improvise.   Without a body of such myths, the modern poet has to turn to history, but then finds himself confronted with intractable, factual realities that resist poetic structuring.  This is a problem with historical drama up to the present day:(Cf. Mircea Eliade: Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return.)    Schiller's method had great dangers for lesser dramatists and Richard Wagner pointed these out, observing that modern dramatic poets seemed to think that history existed merely to provide plots for playmakers where history could be seen making its grand decisions in the antechamber of the prince, between breakfast as supper.   This is uncomfortably close to the confrontation of Posa and the King, in which Schiller seems to subscribe to a totally impossible idea of history.  The result, said Wagner was doubly false: false to dramatic art and false to history.

        Richard Wagner turned instead to Germanic myth.  Ibsen was to wrestle with the problem for years.   The advantage of myth is that it is uncontaminated by the accidents,the inessential, arbitary events of alienated history.   This was Aristotle's meaning when he declared poetry to be superior to history, for history could only show what happened, whereas poetry could show what ought to happen: the essential, not the inessential.   Schiller,however, did not believe the challenge of history, the process of alienation at work on the human spirit, could just be evaded. His answer is Don Carlos: to convert history into myth while still maintaining the dynamism or dialectics of history: that is, to see in history actions and characters that could be given 'archetypal' stature.   One need not be true to the 'facts' but to the 'spirit' of the historical truth.   This was the "mythology of Reason" Hegel called for.

        In Wallenstein Schiller was dealing with fairly recent German history, and so found it difficult to impose tragic shape on the subject matter.   But in his other plays , Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, and William Tell (which is a legend set in a historical context) he was much freer to 'reshape' history, to see in historical events larger, archetypal meanings and then to bend the facts to bring out the meanings. Only Schiller' could really get away with this 'idealizing' of history.   His poetic and intellectual imagination was powerful enough to make us willing to sacrifice factual accuracy to arrive at visionary truth.  

        And we can see the importance of his converting the prose of the early Don Carlos into the 'exalted' rhetorical verse-form of the later versions.   This 'lifted' the action out of historical actuality into ‘idealized' reality.   Schiller turns his historical figures and events into images of the human spirit itself: its impulses and aspirations caught in alienating historical circumstances.   The greatness of Don Carlos for all its Stürm und Drang faults is that Schiller is almost unconsciously finding his way to modern drama as well as snatching good tragedy out of the jaws of great melodrama - more or less as we watch. It is like watching a difficult birth

7.   The Plot and Schiller's Agenda are Identical

        One critic has said that Schiller "discovered the shape of his plots in his characters efforts to give shape to their lives."   If history has no acceptable plot, his characters try to give it one, and it is their struggle to control history and their fates that comprise the action of Schiller's tragic dramas. The attempt to shape history is the project of the revolutionary; we see why revolt is so central to Schiller's dramas  and why the aberrant, even the criminal consciousness, is more adequate than innocence.    Neither Schiller nor Ibsen are interested in innocence.   A criminal consciousness, a Mary Stuart or Rebekka West is the consciousness most likely to embark on the desolate journey of self-discovery.   It is by being at odds with given reality, either idealistically, like Posa, or criminally, like Mary or even ambiguously, like Demetrius, that the spiritual movement that brings given reality into question so that the dialectical process, can get off the ground. This attempt by Schiller's alienated characters to shape history is both the glory and the hubris of the Schiller tragic character.

       Schiller's 'Letters on Don Carlos' are immensely interesting for revealing an artist reflecting upon his own artistic process while evolving a new form and theory of theater adequate to the material he is treating.

  Schiller is a young dramatist whose previous successes had been extravagant and melodramatic. The subject of Don Carlos , the rivalry of the father and son over the same woman the Queen, the further intrigue of the Princess Eboli plot (Eboli, the king's mistress who is in love with Carlos) and the final defeat and death of the son lent itself to melodramatic plotting in the manner of the popular Iffland or Kotzebue or, in England, of Otway's Venice Preserv'd. -and, much later in France, Hugo's Hernani.    Schiller describes what happened to him as a dramatic poet while composing the play:

   a.   He outgrew his hero, Carlos as "new ideas ...rose within me that crowded out the earlier ones.(308)  

b.   He had already published Act 1-111 but he brought "a completely different heart to the fourth and fifth acts".

c.   He became more interested in Posa than in Carlos

d.   Posa comes to embody "the ideas of human rights and freedom of conscience" which were responsible for the revolt in         the Netherlands. (311)

e.   Posa, is “less an anachronism than an idealization of historical tendencies of his time”

f.   These ideals make his friendship with Carlos subordinate to his larger ideological aim to whuich tghe friendship/love           themes are now subordinated. Posa is a universal character (315)   For this reason he can 'use' Carlos for his

       larger purposes.

g. This allows him to be guilty of tragic error: in misjudging both Carlos and the king.   (The hubris of trying to change

     historical destiny).(326)

h.   Yet Schiller defends his hero, or his conception of him, by recalling how he represents ideas that Schiller and his

      friends held about human freedom and progress (331-2)

i.   Phillip and his allies were to represent a. spiritual, b. political and c. domestic despotism (335)   (Circumferences of

     meaning)

     This reveals a unity within the seeming 'surfeit'; of details (336)

j.   Schiller insists that these ideological dimensions are the real motives of action (341)

k. And they result in Posa's tragic failing: a tendency to fanaticism (346)

9.   Schiller as a Major Theorist of Modern Culture and its Future  

Apart from these letters Schiller set about writing some of the most important critical and semi-philosophical works of the Romantic period; works that now are classics:

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind: On Naive and Sentimental Poetry; On the Sublime;   On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy and many other essays.   This shows how self-conscious, how theoretically aware, Schiller was as a dramatist.   He worked out the theory of his practice and, as the Letters on Don Carlos show, the theory often emerged from the practice.

   So, the idea of the 'playwright as thinker', as theoretician of his art and of his function in society (and of the function of theater within society) is established at the very beginning of the modern dramatic movement to continue up to the present.

        Schiller's theorizing and that of Nietzsche, Ibsen, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, etc.later, explores the formal needs and possibilities of the evolving ideological subject matter, the continuing cultural agenda of modernism.   This is a complete break with the Neoclassical ‘one paradigm fits all' formula.    The theorizing is as much about this ideological content as it is about the art form.  The dramatists of this tradition leave the 'mainstream' theater and join the other artists, writers and thinkers as part of a critical, minority at odds with the conventional culture.

   The letters show that Schiller's idea of what makes an adequate historical drama radically changed during the composition as he became aware of the greater implications of his subject matter which he then attempted to make his drama contain.   Schiller struggles to evolve a new dramatic form out of a more conventional form  - a new dialectical drama.  

10   Snatching Tragedy from the Jaws of Melodrama

Much in Don Carlos is extravagantly melodramatic yet certain scenes ae astonishingly fine – and new in drama.  It may not be Schiller's best play: but it may be his most important. What makes it an important and fascinating document is the co-existence within it of a very good melodrama and ideological tragedy . The melodrama is mainly 'domestic' and involves the father and son rivalry over the Queen.   The tragedy is national and spiritual and involves the extinction in Spain of light and life, the loss of love and freedom for the human community.   Spain enters death and darkness symbolized by the blind Grand Inquisitor. 

          If, as has been said, the Grand Inquisitor is an afterthought, a last minute stroke of genius, this figure nevertheless is the logical development of the process Schiller already has shown us. An instance is the deadly and stifling regulation of life in Act I. where Elizabeth is only "allowed to be a mother" at a certain hour of the day.   This already is a society whose cnventions are inimical to life.    The Grand Inquisitor gains so much dramatic force because he makes only one totally decisive appearance, like Tiresias in the Antigone - a model Schiller probably had in mind.

Two streams emerge from Don Carlos: one leads to major dialectical drama. Kleist, Buechner, Ibsen, Brecht.  The other leads to Victor Hugo's Hernani and the 'cloak and dagger' school of historical drama,.   Hernani is lobotomized Don Carlos . In his subsequent work Schiller develops the dialectical and aesthetic interest and subordinates the melodramatic and lays the foundation for modern dialectical drama .

    The melodramatic things in Don Carlos are easy to point out.   They are all connected with the Carlos, Queen, Philip and Princess Eboli 'nexus' created to carry a smaller play.    This has all the characteristics of good melodrama : of emotions excessive to the idea of reality presented; with the Sturm und Drang acting style ("He runs wildly about the room")   which was appreciated for being violently anti-classical; of forced horror:   "I love my mother!" (Oedipal kicks without Oedipal pricks); of tiresome misunderstandings and withheld essential information in unseen letters which were to become features of the well-made-play   And the situation is made worse because Schiller is so skillful at this melodrama: he always is a brilliant theater man.

      In spite of its faults, the play has drawn the admiration of major critical and creative intellects such as Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Dostoevsky.  Verdi was moved to make a version of it one of his greatest operas.   The play had its premiere(!) in England a few years ago with the director Nicholas Hyntner, and was received by the critics as a newly discovered masterpiece, worthy to stand with Shakespeare and Ibsen.  I have always admired it from my student days, even while wincing at its excesses.   It needs extensive - but careful - cutting, of course.   But its major argument, and its great scenes show an extraordinary new dramatic imagination in European drama: one that would change the nature of the art.

      Right from the beginning, in the first act, one is aware of something very distinguished in Schiller:    The isolation of Carlos, under observation from spies, his sardonic dialogue with Domingo, the fine scene where the Queen is shown stifling under the rigid etiquette of the Spanish court, "permitted to be a mother"; the confrontation between the King and the Queen, where the Marquise of Mondecar is banished from the court;  or the meeting between Carlos, the King and Alba in Act II. are all very distinguished dramatic writing.  The 'drop' from this level to the intrigue plot with Eboli is a discomfiting jolt.  Yet the 'intrigue plot', though mishandled, is a metaphor which also will be used finely.  Intrigue, melodrama, is what a culture dooms itself to because it cannot permit free and open action and speech.   Melodrama is excessive action with insufficient thought.  It is a metaphor for the functioning of the guilty, unfree spirit itself.   

  12. A new language - Supertext -for tragedy.

     Schiller created for a modern drama the possibility of finding dramatic metaphors that can search out, express a dialectic of historical forces in opposition which Restoration and 18th. century drama evaded. This was due to intellectual timidity summarized in the formula that drama should 'please and instruct' - essenially in conventional morality.   This discouraged taking drama into the 'heart of darkness' we find in the last Act of Don Carlos.   The moment at the end of the play when we learn that Posa was doomed from the beginning, that he, Elizabeth and Carlos never had a chance, that the Grand Inquisitor and his agents were always in totalitarian control, is a genuinely terrifying intellectual tragedy.  Schiller locates something in the culture of Western Europe that no-one before had put on the stage.

  13     Don Carlos: the historical situation

.   Spain at the time dramatized by the play was the dominant power of Europe: the main defender of Catholicism and great plunderer of the Americas.    By suppressing the revolt of the Protestant Netherlands which were then part of the Spanish Empire, it was suppressing the “freedom of thought' that Posa pleads for with he King .   It was in this part of the empire that new ideas of freedom and liberty were emerging to transform the world.   Holland gave refuge to many freethinkers, including the great philosopher Spinoza.   Schiller, therefore, sets out the forces of repression and the forces of liberation, and sets them against each other in a set of pairs: in this configuration, the characters of the old melodrama now evolve into the agents of a great philosophical opposition.

     King : represses freedom and love........................... ...............vs......Queen lives for love and freedom.

     Alba :  Merciless oppressor of Netherlands.............................vs......Carlos ardent friend of Netherland and freedom.

    Inquisitor Spiritual intellectual darkness (blind....................... vs..... Posa spiritual intellectual enlightenment (visionary).

h.    The characters,  therefore, stand for forces in opposition within the empire. One group conspires to impel the empire to light and freedom and modernity; the other is repressive, defensive, frightened of liberation in the world. Spain, soon after he time of the play, was to go into decline, suicidally trapped in its past.    Edmund Burke, Schiller's contemporary, was to call Spain "a great whale stranded on the beach of Europe".  

14.   The Universal Dimensions of the Dialectic

    Schiller's play is traces the death of one part of the world-spirit and the struggle for the birth of another.   Schiller constructs a drama in which our interest in the conflict of human passions, is towards an interest in the conflict of ideas. The crises in the play, at their best, are crises of perception                                                                                                 

      The plot presents a complicated family tangle of Father-Wife-Son caught in opposing passions.

    The son, Don Carlos, was once betrothed to the Queen, Elizabeth of Valois.   But Phillip, Carlos' father, married

    Elizabeth instead.

    Carlos and Elizabeth remain in love with each other

    Carlos and Phillip have been estranged from each other for years, this estrangement abetted by the

    king's corrupt advisors, Alba and Domingo.

2.    A second complication occurs.   The Princess Eboli is pursued by King Phillip but is in love with Carlos and believes he loves her.   So, once again, father and son are involved with the same woman.   The priest, Domingo, encourages Eboli to allow herself to be seduced by the King.   When Carlos rejects her love, she agrees and plots revenge agasinst her rival, the Queen.

.

3.   All this is the basis for complicated melodrama. It is Victor Hugo ( Hernani) would have developed the play for melodramatic success.  But Schiller makes this story carry historical and ideological dimensions beyond melodrama

He sets forces of life, energy, freedom, love on one side, against forces of repression, darkness, death, on the other.   And, to make this conflict clear, he adds the figure of the Marquis of Posa, who works - on the ideological level - on most of the other characters: Carlos, Elizabeth, the King.   Posa as a kind of human Prometheus bringing Light, is set against him the Grand Inquisitor, agent of spiritual death, spreading Universal Darkness.

     Schiller, we see from the Letters, seems to have been excited by these possibilities in his play after he had written half the intrigue plot. He was, at the time, in his twenties, and what we must say about Don Carlos is that for a writer of his age, Schiller achieves quite astonishing distinction. He gets wonderfully carried away by his themes, creating some of the finest dramatic and rhetorical confrontations in derama. The intrigue plot itself now is seen as what we are doomed to if we live by power and violence of passion, without ethical thought.   This is the world of Princess Eboli and is the world Carlos is trapped in until Posa lifts him out of it.

15.   The Posa Plot creates a new concept of dramatic Time

This Posa drama now involves an evolutionary concept of dramatic time: of Posa trying to birth a new age to out of the repressive past.  As Carlos tries to fathom the dimensions of this project in which he accepts that he and Elizabeth are the sacrificial pawns, his struggle to grasp this, forces the audience, too, to imagine these supra-personal, ideological dimensions of tragic motive. Schiller no longer sees the characters in terms of melodramatic villains and heroes.   King Phillip emerges as the really tragic figure in the play (as he is in Verdi's version).   His life, at the end, has become a living death, under the power of the old, blind, life-denying Grand Inquisitor who compels the king to sacrifice the life of his own son and to lose his wife forever.

    Posa acts ruthlessly and deviously with Carlos, despite the fact that his cause is right.   He betrays his cause by trying to further it,deviously, through the King . Schiller shows us Posa is disastrously led astray, while still showing his vision to be good and great. Carlos is depicted as selfishly concerned too long with his own desires, not with the larger realities Posa tries to get him to take up.

.   With this play, modern drama now has a wholly new direction to take: a dialectic drama of intellectual radicalism: of ideas that challenge the accepted and conventional ideas of society.  We begin with the personal grievance of Carlos (the historically true circumstance that Phillip had married his son's intended bride; and Carlos's deep alienation from his father) but this is the basis,only, of a dramatic action will show this 'alienation' to be rooted in a particular and alterable historical condition; - the Spanish empire's determination to suppress the movement to freedom within its borders: The larger extension of the struggle for freedom within the domestic and social situation is set out by Schiller in metaphors of openness and enclosure,  light and darkness. (The play begins in light and open air and ends in darkness, in a guarded chamber that has become a prison).

        The play's action relies overmuch on awkwardly set-up misunderstandings,and failures of communication at crucial moments where one sensible word would clear the matter up .Even these incidents,however are used with some distinction: Posa's secretive plotting is a form of tragic hamartia - the betrayal of his honesty and openness and that causes his death and the imminent deaths of Carlos and the Queen.   Historically, both died young and near the same time.

   Schiller outgrew these devices and Mary Stuart is more or less free of them but they remained the stock-in-trade of later melodrama - on the stage and in the movies.  The characters, especially Carlos, fling themselves about too vehemently ( the Sturm und Drang style popular with the public) but the passionate emotions of the play seem true and convincing, and finely linked to the 'higher' drama.

Tragedy vs. melodrama

   Melodrama is violence of action or expression with insufficient intellectual justification.    It displaces the audience's interest from thought to suspense for its own sake. In  tragedy, suspense comes from the perception of the meaning of an action, the adequacy of the idea of life it is revealing through the actions.  

        In the best melodrama the action makes visible to the audience a drama of Good and Evil where Providence, though delaying, ultimately makes Good triumph and Evil punished and destroyed. It uses stereotypical characters and actions and 'astonishing' events, cataclysms, etc. As a form, melodrama is firmly conventional, an assurance to the public that Providence is in control.

High and Low Intrigue Plots in Don Carlos

1.   Schiller, however,   is searching round for the terms of a new kind of modern, ideological drama.

2.   His problem is to make sure that our excitement in the theater is through the idea being revealed.

3.   He used the 'sensuous' devices of the theater to lead the audience's interest to the ideological level.

4.   But he is such a virtuoso constructor of intrigue plots, that the audience might be happy to stay on this level, unleavened

      by thought.   This is a danger he 'corrects' in Wallenstein and Mary Stuart where he makes sure we are aware of the

      aesthetic control over his dramas. He remained an unabashed virtuoso of theatrical effects.

5.   Schiller constructs a number of intrigue plots, high and low, and mixes them:

     a.   'Lowest' level:   The two love triangles.  

     b.   The melodramatic plotters: Phillip-Carlos-Domingo-Alba-Eboli: -poisoning king's mind against his son

    c.   Posa's audacious ( historically impossible) plot:

          (i)   Intriguing with Spain's enemies: Britain, Suleiman (Instanbul) and the Netherlands.   Some of these did unite

                historically, but one man hardly could have worked this to serve cause of freedom.

          (ii)   To arrange, with Queen, Carlos' escape to Netherlands to lead the armies of liberation.   This seems to have

                some historical foundation: The historical Carlos did want to escape to Netherlands.

2  The   Inquisitor's plot, revealed only in Act V. that he has been in control of everything from the beginning.   The totalitarian horror where the clever plotter Posa, has been totally out-plotted.

3.   Now, all this plotting and counter-plotting means that for much of the time the play reaches its tragic level of argument with some difficulty.  In Acts IV & V .   we are as bewildered as anyone in the play as to what Posa is up to, and so cannot attend to the argument.  Posa's (and Schiller's) devious plotting,and not his cause, seems to defeat Posa.

   Drama needs to create a better agreement between dramatic plotting and argument (and Schiller, later, will do it)

5.   The great things in Don Carlos are very great.

    For so young a man, some of the dramatic confrontations are on a superb scale or are conducted with tremendous finesse.  Act IV. Sc. vii, between Phillip and Elizabeth, is sensitive to both characters but it is followed by the melodrama of IV v. with its 'mistaken conclusions by Lerma; and by the frantic melodrama of Carlos and Princess Eboli (IV. vi.)ending with Posa arresting Carlos and threatening Eboli with a dagger.   A few words of explanation and more accurate reporting by Lerma (who overhears only enough to crucially misunderstand) would have spared all this action.

Also superb is scene xxii.  Here, the center of the scene is the King, also offstage while his courtiers anxiously wait. We see only the anxious reactions of those waiting to find out his reaction to Posa's betrayal. It ends with the astonishing news "The king was weeping".  The whole of Act V. is on the highest level, in which the Love-trio, Elizabeth-Posa-Carlos affirm their values, transcending selfishness.

The depth of feeling between the friends as well as the lovers, is itself a highly Romantic value, especially in Germany, where ‘Heart' was considered more important than the ‘Head' .   'Heart' meant Nature uncorrupted naturalness and innocence, what an alienated society such as Philip's Spain, had totally lost contact with, sinking into a form of perverse death-parody of the Posa-Carlos-Elizabeth trio   Schiller invents a potent myth of history: a tragedy of the historical consciousness and of historical 'heroism'.  

Plotting, movement, in Don Carlos.  

One of the indications of something quite new in drama is found in two very prominent aspects of Don Carlos

a   The evolution of stage.directions in modern drama comes partly from the loss of rhetorical force in stage dialogue Schiller's stage directions also represent the authority of the dramatist over the performance.   He, and not the acting company, is in control.   He has a message to deliver and is concerned that it be accurately rendered.   This suggests the text might be something strange to the actor and audience something that needs careful presentation because it is breaking with convention.   The actor and the audience need guiding in this new dramatic method. In non-dialectical drama, because given reality was relatively unproblematic, (we might not have fathomed the world we live in but we believe we all lived in the same ideological world) the conventional positives and negatives of that world could be expressed, with various degrees of force, subtlety, beauty, originality, insight, through established theatrical rhetoric.

           But, with Romantic and dialectical drama the characters come from such odd and new emotional/intellectual directions and confront a reality seen by the poet as being not at all what it seems, not even yet known but still to be explored, (identity and reality as projects to be attained) that we need help in following the characters reactions to events.    Schiller wans to make clear at the outset that, for example, Posa is a ‘positive' force in the dialectic. In the older drama he would be seen as a horrendous traitor.

b.   Plotting:   Dialectical plotting creates conflicts that forces serious opposition, confrontation of ideas, values, into the open.   So the thrust of dialectical drama is not rhetorical affirmation but questioning ideological interchange.   Schiller's poetry has an 'earnest' rhetorical quality of bringing out into the open principles that must battle their opposites "We must have freedom of thought".   Instead of 'exploring' the condition they find themselves in (Shakespeare) Schiller's character "proclaim" conditions and values they want to see come into being, - making given reality inimical, a ‘false consciousness' to be negated.

           The true mode for this form of dialogue is the probing, analytical and self-analytical prose of realism: of half-formed sentences, urgent questions, pauses, silences, as the spirit keeps reflecting upon, hovering over, the new forms of consciousness, (inward) and new forms of reality (outward), that emerge from the mutual dialectic process of self-discovering characters discovering their evolving world.

  Humanity, in e.g. Ghosts, is an enigmatic biological-cultural project thrust into a yet to be comprehended cosmos.   The stagedirections that often notate movements of mind that cannot explicity be affirmed.  

Creating the Modern Supertext

         The conversion of historical events into a new mythology, where beneath the events, meaningful and significant conflicts could be seen, meant the denied values could be detected and proclaimed.   In Don Carlos, and Mary Stuart, Schiller, felt free to convert historical fact into an archetypal mythology, to see archetypal meanings in historical facts, and then to bend the facts to bring out the meanings.   All historical dramas, from Aeschylus' The Persians and Shakespeare's History Plays, have been very free with the facts.    Schiller openly adapts history to his ideological agenda.  He could get away with this 'idealizing' of history because his poetic and intellectual imagination was powerful enough to make the procedure acceptable. We are willing to sacrifice factual accuracy to arrive at metaphoric truth.  

             If history has no acceptable plot, his characters, like Posa, try to give it one, and it is their struggle to control history and their failure to do so that comprise the action of Schiller's tragic dramas.   The dramatist's own struggle to force meaning onto history is the same as his protagonists    The attempt to both theoretically understand and then to shape history accordingly is, of course, the project of the revolutionary; of a Lenin, or Mao, Castro or Che Guevara.   (Or, in a negative version, a Hitler or Pol Pot!). Opposing the given order of things is central to Schiller's dramas.  

           The aberrant consciousness, even the criminal, offending conciousness, is more adequate than innocence.    Neither Schiller nor Ibsen are interested in innocence.   A criminal or alienated consciousness, a Mary Stuart or Rebekka West, is the consciousness most likely to embark on the desolate journey of self-discovery.   And this will be the subject of much of the most significant modern literature, through Ibsen and Dostoevsky, - both admirers of Schiller – and Kafka, Sartre, Camus and others in modern literature.  Schiller begot a long tradition of distrurbing transgressors up to the outcasts of Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet..