SOURCE: “Introduction,” in Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. vii-xxvi.

In the following essay, Sharpe presents a critical overview of the historical dramas Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, and maintains that the hope evident in Don Carlos disappears in the later play and is replaced by a bleaker vision of human integrity in the world of action.

At first sight Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, with Wallenstein Friedrich Schiller's greatest historical dramas, are striking in their similarity. Both are blank-verse plays, set against the background of religious strife in sixteenth-century Europe. Both explore the private emotions of the great and powerful as they confront the insoluble dilemmas of the political world. Both also display the hallmarks of Schiller's style and technique—swift-moving action, great set-piece encounters, impassioned rhetorical speeches, strongly contrasting characters, an unabashed theatricality. In both plays the historical setting is used not as...