ABSTRACT
George Eliot loved Schiller's poetry, and in Bulwer Lytton's famous 1844 translation Bulwer comments on Schiller's very particular approach to his subject. While Eliot was on her second journey with Lewes to Germany and writing Adam Bede, she went to the opera and saw Rossini's adaptation of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell which inspired her to write the confrontation scene between Adam and Arthur Donnithorne in the wood. While many of Schiller's plays dramatize the moral conflicts of high-born or extraordinary figures, Wilhelm Tell focuses on the heroism of the common man. In Adam Bede, the problem of murder, innocence and intention are displaced from Tell's counterpart, Adam, onto the figure of Hetty Sorrel and viewed rather differently. While Tell celebrates the ability of the individual to overcome evil without being tainted by it, Adam Bede fails to celebrate the continuity and 'partial salvation' that was Eliot's aim.
