SOURCE: “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” in Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for our Time, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1959, pp. 263-83.

In the following essay, which was first delivered as a lecture in 1784, Schiller asserts that theater serves a crucial moral function in society, and sets out in detail its sphere of influence and range of effects on human life, calling it “a school of practical wisdom, a guide through social life, an infallible key to the most secret passages of the soul.”

The stage owes its origin to the irresistible attraction of things new and extraordinary, to man's desire for passionate experience, as Sulzer has observed. Exhausted by the higher efforts of the mind, wearied by the monotonous and frequently depressing duties of his profession, satiated with sensuality, man must have felt an emptiness in his nature that was at odds with his desire for constant...