Fate and Guilt in Schiller's Die Braut von Messina

Extract

The “dramatic guilt” or the “tragic fate” differs, it is well known, from fate and guilt in the common sense of the terms. Fate is the equivalent of blind destiny, or of the whimsical decree or the general envy or malice of the gods towards men. This Fate foredooms the victim to some crime which brings a punishment in its train, or to a wholly undeserved calamity, which the Greeks were fond of representing as foretold but unavoidable. The ill-will of the gods had perhaps been incurred by an ancestor of the victim, but was wreaked upon the remote descendant to the third and fourth generation. In this curse of the gods we may see a poetical conception of an hereditary evil. Or on the other hand, in heredity we may see a modern and very real equivalent of the Greek decree of the gods, the “moira.”