ABSTRACT
The death of Schiller makes a good halting-place, for both drama and the art of the theatre had, reached the highest level yet attained in Germany, a level deemed so high by succeeding generations that the eleven years of close friendship and co-operation between Goethe and Schiller have come to be considered the heart of the classical period of German literature and of the drama in particular. Theorists like Sulzer and the young Schiller accordingly praised the theatre as the best means of raising public standards of morality, and even the drama of the German classics is a philosophical drama concerned with man's chiefest end. The German Romantics were no friends of Schiller and tried to play off Goethe against him. The usual recipe in the earlier period was Schiller with a dash of Romanticism. The dramatists with genuine talent, like Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel, could neither wholly accept the Schiller model nor wholly escape its influence.
