The Robbers and Wallenstein

The Robber - the supreme tragedy of liberty and fraternity - was Schiller's first play, written in 1780 when he was twenty-one. Nineteen years later he produced his masterpiece, the trilogy Wallenstein, in which he attempted to combine the best of Sophacles, Shakepeare and French Classical drama.

Naturally enough, they are very different works, worlds apart in most of their external features. Yet both bear their author's characteristic stamp in their grand rhetoric and powerful dramatic situations, in their blend of idealism and realism and, above all, in their central theme. For both are concenred with freedom: with man's attempt to spread his wings and fly, to be the arbiter of his own destiny, even to change the world in accordance with his own designs.