Conclusion

Summary

AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS STUDY I emphasized that the provenance of gestures in Schiller's plays was more complex and revealing than is normally assumed. We saw how Schiller's gestures could be traced to a number of different sources: his experience of life and the performing arts at the Karlsschule, his reading, especially of dramatic literature and the Bible, and his medical studies, including his interest in physiology and psychology. These factors combined with an imaginative world in which the impulse to theatrical representation was very strong. For although Schiller wrote literary drama throughout his career with an eye to the durability and efficacy of the printed word, he had a fertile visual imagination that needed the stage for its fullest expression. In his early plays he wrote against the grain of much popular theater, but he wanted to appeal to his audience's appetite for enjoying the strongly physical representation of emotions on stage. He used striking gestures, often repeating them for cumulative effect. None of the specific gestures are distinguished by their originality as such — Schiller uses them as an element of stagecraft in a way that is new and exciting. He creates his own repertoire of gestures that he draws on time and again. Violence and horror and outbursts of emotion abound in the early plays. The effects are often powerful, and there is the patent desire to shock.