A comet in the dark
The Robbers and Wallenstein by Friedrich Schiller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve been wanting to write a review of The Robbers for months but unfortunately this wild and unruly play is packaged up in this Penguin edition with Schiller’s late masterpiece about Wallenstein and the Thirty Years War, which I haven’t read and probably won’t read until next year.
One thing is certain. I am bound by more rules in my reading than young Schiller was in his writing.
It is easy to adopt a superior attitude to The Robbers. The characters are like the feral scrawls of a cave dweller who is haunted by recurring nightmares. Their actions make no sense. The killings are rampant and random. The violence is completely unjustified. And yet without it all the rhetoric would be hollow.
So the work seems immature. Even Schiller himself didn’t know what to make of it. All these ideas just exploded out of him and he tried his best to give them shape. It appears he changed his mind a few times and probably never quite succeeded in getting down on paper exactly what it was he wanted to say.
But I loved the play’s boldness. And I loved Schiller’s description of it as ‘a novel in dramatic form.’
It is completely appropriate to me that the plays of Schiller, of Shakespeare, Sheridan, Racine, Corneille and even the plays of Moliere, whose comic genius, we are told, was apparent in his performances as much as in his verse, should all exist now as books to be read. I can best appreciate these plays by reading them so it is very consoling to know that Schiller had no expectation of ever seeing The Robbers on stage.
And I really enjoyed reading The Robbers. The translation by F.J. Lamport is first rate. It is so good I forgot I was reading a translation. The language rolls along like a smoke billowing out of a furnace. At times it echoes Shakespeare. It burns up Corneille and Racine who are like fragile cinders in its wake.
Schiller’s ambition is vaulting. Technically, he is not quite there yet but there is no doubting where he is going. He is like a fireball lighting up the end of the eighteen century and blazing a trail for generations of geniuses who will draw inspiration and sustenance from his vision.
His plays make excellent operas and there is an excellent rendering of The Robbers by Verdi in gorgeous lyrical music that tames the chaotic energy of its source. But you can’t make The Robbers beautiful. It is ugly and damnable.
And youthful and immature though it is, it has the immaturity of budding genius. It has the glimmer of greatness.
Schiller is not just a writer who was great in his time. He towers above all our contemporaries and The Robbers is an astonishing piece of writing, like a comet in the dark. I loved it.
