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OF

FREDERICK SCHILLER.

EARLY DRAMAS AND ROMANCES.

THE ROBBERS, FIESCO, LOVE AND INTRIGUE,
DEMETRIUS, THE GHOST-SEER, AND

THE SPORT OF DESTINY.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, CHIEFLY BY

HENRY G. BOHN.

LONDON:

HENRY G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

1849.

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PREFACE

BY THE PUBLISHER.

THE present volume, which forms the fourth of the series, comprises the three earliest of Schiller's dramas, the Robbers, Fiesco, and Love and Intrigue, and his latest, Demetrius, which, unfortunately, is little more than a fragment, the author not having lived to finish it. To these is added the Ghost-Seer, now for the first time given to the English public as Schiller wrote it.

The ROBBERS is more strongly associated with the name and fame of Schiller than any other of his works, and is undoubtedly a very extraordinary production. "A strange, rugged, fiery melodrame, which seemed destined to announce and to animate the revolution of a world." "One sweeping, uncompromising defiance of the sober properties, in which the mature see decorum, and the young dissimulation."*

The germ of much of Schiller's after poetry may be traced in this early performance, and as an example of impassioned and vigorous diction, it is quite unsurpassed. "In perusing this play," says Mr. Carlyle, "we are alternately shocked and inspired; there is a perpetual conflict between our understanding and our feelings. Yet the latter on the whole came off victorious. The Robbers is a tragedy that will long find readers to astonish, and, with all its faults, to move. It stands, in our imagination, like some ancient rugged pile of a barbarous age; irregular, fantastic, useless; but grand in its height and massiveness, and black frowning strength. It will long

* Bulwer.

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remain a singular monument of the early genius and early fortune of its author."

There is no drama in the German language, indeed hardly any piece of writing in the same compass, more difficult to render satisfactorily into English; arising in some measure from the familiar colloquy and thieves' jargon which pervade it, and the author's frequent use of metaphor, antithesis, and provincialisms. This may account for our not yet having had a single translation fairly exhibiting the original, although many have been attempted. The earliest, that attributed to Lord Woodhouselee, and published in 1795, was made from the third, or acting, edition, which Schiller had been obliged to alter and curtail to little more than half its original dimensions, to accommodate stage requirements. Many of the finest passages, most of the soliloquies, and all the lyrics, are omitted; whole scenes are transposed, and the plot in some respects altered. Schiller always deplored these theatrical castrations, remarking, among other things, that Francis, one of the principal characters, was designed as a reasoning villain, "a speculative, metaphysico-refining knave," a plan which, though it might satisfy the thinking reader, could not fail to weary the spectator, who seeks not philosophy but action. But his translator, without the same necessity, went even further, and omitted many important passages, the only objection to which must have been the difficulty of rendering them into English. There are besides such constant misconceptions of the author's meaning in this translation, that accredited as it has hitherto been, very little of it could be used in the present.

Another translation by the Rev. Wm. Render, teacher of the German language at the University of Cambridge, published in 1799, is feeble, garbled, and frequently inaccurate : a mere schoolboy performance. Some of its errors are exposed with considerable acrimony in the publisher's preface to Lord Woodhouselee's fourth edition.

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