Schiller and Euripides: The Translations of 1788 and Schiller's Later Plays

Abstract

The article explores some of the connections between the translations of Euripides’Iphigenia in Aulis and The Phoenician Women, which Schiller made in 1788–9, and his own later ‘classical’ plays. Schiller chose not directly to imitate the metrical forms of Greek tragedy, but the forms he used – blank verse for the dialogue, rhymed free verse for the choral odes – reappear fifteen years later in Die Braut von Messina, though with significant differences which reflect the intervening developments in Schiller's conception of poetic drama. And the (self-)sacrifice of Euripides’ Iphigenia, as Schiller interpreted it, offered a remarkably ‘pure’ instance of that ‘sublimity’ which he came to see as the very essence of tragedy, and which is embodied in several of his later tragic protagonists: most clearly in the case of Maria Stuart (whose tragedy is appropriately cast in what Schiller himself described as ‘Euripidean’ form), more questionably in that of Don Cesar in Die Braut von Messina. The latter play thus appears in both respects less ‘classical’ than it would seem at first sight: rather, as Schiller said of Goethe's Iphigenie, ‘erstaunlich modern und ungriechisch’. It represents, however, the final stage in a development which begins with the Euripides translations, and from which Schiller subsequently began to retreat.