SOURCE: "Schiller's 'William Tell': A Folkloristic Perspective," in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 83, No. 327, January-March, 1970, pp. 44-52.

In the following essay, the critics suggest that Wilhelm Tell remains part of the oral tradition from which it emerged, arguing that Schiller's intent was for Tell's character to be developed through adversity and for this development to be judged according to the morality of the oral tradition.

In a recent work on Friedrich Schiller, Frederick Ungar laments the dimming glory of a German Golden Age and the inexorable decline in popularity of Friedrich Schiller's greatest dramas, whose messages are as pertinent to our unsettled times as they were to the Napoleonic days which fathered them.¹ Though it is only too obvious that Schiller's voice of rational idealism becomes increasingly muted by the growing clamor of the present, the same cannot be said of the sound of battle among Schiller scholars...