SOURCE: "Schiller's Tell and the Cause of Freedom," in German Quarterly, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4, November, 1975, pp. 487-504.

In the following essay, Ryder argues that Wilhelm Tell is about two things: the development of a revolutionary movement and the violent crisis of an individual existing within the same social and historical setting.

No one will deny that Schiller's Tell is a classical document of individual liberty, a vademecum for the enemies of tyranny, "a great event in the process of educating Germans to think politically." Or—in the spirit of the 17th Literaturbrief—almost no one.¹

The play in fact offers in its first two and a half acts a paradigm of the abuse of vested power and a model of individual and collective resistance. Committed or imminent, the injustices of the civil authority range from confiscation of property (the oxen) or its destruction (Ruodi's hut), through deprivation of...