SOURCE: "Weimar: The Later Dramas: Wilhelm Tell," in Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 293-309.

In the following excerpt, Sharpe describes Schiller's attempt to balance the concepts of idealism, pessimism, and tragedy in Wilhelm Tell.

Schiller described his last finished play, Wilhelm Tell, as something of a 'Seitenschritt' ('diversion').⁶² This comment, in a letter to Wilhelm von Humboldt, probably arose from a certain embarrassment at the play's popular success, and from an awareness that he had taken a theme with immediate topical relevance and developed it in a manner that had great theatrical appeal. Wilhelm Tell combined the popularity of the family drama and the Volksstück and took up one of the most popular themes of the decade following the French Revolution, for Tell dramas abounded in the 1790s. Spectacle was also provided. Even more than Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Die Braut...