to avert it.  To give her the semblance of a tragic guilt he resorted to three unhistorical inventions:  First, an attempt to escape, with resulting complicity in the act of the murderous Catholic fanatic Mortimer; second, a putative love on the part of Mary for Leicester, who would use his great influence to bring about a personal interview between her and Elizabeth; and, finally, the meeting of the two queens, in which Mary’s long pent-up passion would get the better of her discretion and betray her into a mortal insult of her rival.  In reality, however, the meeting of the two queens, while theatrically very effective, is not the true climax of the play.  That comes when Mary conquers her rebellious spirit and accepts her ignominious fate as a divinely appointed expiation for long-past sins.  The play thus becomes a tragedy of moral self-conquest in the presence of an undeserved death.

Next in order came The Maid of Orleans, expressly called by its author a romantic tragedy.  It is a “rescue” of the Maid’s character.  Shakespeare had depicted her as a witch, Voltaire as a vulgar fraud.  Schiller conceives her as a genuine ambassadress of God, or rather of the Holy Virgin.  Not only does he accept at its face value the tradition of her “voices,” her miraculous clairvoyance, her magic influence on the French troops; but he makes her fight in the ranks with men and gives to her a terrible avenging sword, before which no Englishman can stand.  But she, too, had to have her tragic guilt.  So Schiller makes her supernatural power depend—­by the Virgin’s express command—­on her renunciation of the love of man.  A fleeting passion for the English general Lionel, conceived on the battle-field in the fury of combat, fills her with remorse and the sense of treason to her high mission.  For a while she is deprived of her self-confidence, and with it of her supernatural power.  There follow scenes of bitter humiliation, until her expiation is complete.  At last, purified by suffering, she recovers her divine strength, breaks her fetters, brings victory once more to the disheartened French soldiers, and dies in glory on the field of battle.  One sees that it is not at all the real Jeanne d’Arc that Schiller depicts, but a glorified heroine invested with divine power and called to be the savior of her country.  Here, for the first time in German drama, the passion of patriotism plays an important part.

After the completion of The Maid of Orleans Schiller was minded to try his hand on a tragedy “in the strictest Greek form.”  He had been deeply impressed by the art of Sophocles and wished to create something which should produce on the modern mind the effect of a Greek tragedy, with its simple structure, its few characters, and above all its chorus.  But the choice of a subject was not easy, and for several months he occupied himself with other matters.  He made a German version of Gozzi’s Turandot and took notes for a tragedy about Perkin Warbeck.