9 - Chaos in Classicism: Die Braut von Messina oder die feindlichen Brüder; Ein Trauerspiel mit Chören

Summary

WITH HIS NEXT PLAY, Die Braut von Messina (subtitled Brothers at War), Schiller was attempting to work within the newly established tradition of the formal style of acting that had been evolving in Weimar under Goethe's directorship. There was a relationship of mutual fructification between Goethe's writing of his Regeln für Schauspieler (Rules for Actors) and productions of the play. It was to be a “classical” play, a first attempt at tragedy in the strict form in the style of the Greeks, as Schiller wrote in a letter to Humboldt of 17 February 1803. One senses that this was conceived as an experiment and involved a different approach to Greek drama from that underlying Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris, which Schiller had adapted for the Weimar stage in May 1803, and which he felt was lacking in sensual power, life, movement, in short, everything that was needed for a dramatic work. In particular, Schiller set about reinventing the chorus, a strategy that he justified in a preface. The classical features of the play are clear to see in every aspect of its language: choice imagery, elevation of tone, archaisms, different types of inversion (subject/object, anastrophic genitives), hyperbaton, and parallelisms. The settings are austere, and there are only a small number of scene changes: a spacious hall with columns leading to a double door and chapel gives way to a garden near the sea, then the interior of a palace, followed by the garden, and lastly the columned hall again.