7.29 Schiller — «Wilhelm Tell» (act 1, scenes 1–2) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the first two scenes of Schiller's drama Wilhelm Tell in its first edition of 1804: a storm on Lake Lucerne, a fugitive, a rescue, and a wife who urges her husband to resist. Recognise the Blankvers , the unrhymed line of five stresses used in German classical drama, and compare it with Goethe's rhymed verse in 7.28 Reading . Read reported speech in Konjunktiv I inside a story told on stage, and the spelling of 1804: Scene, sezt, zulezt, thun, Thal . Know lines of Schiller's that became proverbs: Der brave Mann denkt an sich selbst zuletzt ; Der kluge Mann baut vor . Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the German aloud; all of them come back below. German English Der Sturm, ich meyn’, wird da seyn, eh’ wirs denken. The storm, I think, will be here before we know it. Der Föhn ist los, ihr seht’ wie hoch der See geht The foehn has broken loose, you see how high the lake is running Um Gottes willen, Fährmann, euren Kahn! For God's sake, ferryman, your boat! Ihr rettet mich vom Tode! You will save me from death! Der soll mirs zeugen, ob die Fahrt zu wagen. He can tell me whether the crossing can be risked. Der See kann sich, der Landvogt nicht erbarmen The lake can have mercy, the reeve cannot Prerequisites : 7.28 — you need verse from 7.28 Reading , reported speech from 2.26 Grammar , Swiss German words from 11.3 Background , and the political vocabulary of 5.13 Vocabulary . About this text Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) was, with Goethe, the leading writer of German classicism. Wilhelm Tell was his last completed play, first performed in Weimar on 17 March 1804 and printed the same year by Cotta in Tübingen . Schiller never visited Switzerland; he built the play from old Swiss chronicles and from what Goethe told him about his journeys there. The play tells the founding legend of Switzerland. Around 1300 the three forest cantons around Lake Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, owe allegiance only to the Holy Roman Emperor, das Reich . The house of Habsburg, the rulers of Austria, wants to make them its own subjects, and its reeves, the Vögte , rule with violence. The people of the three cantons meet in secret and swear to defend their old freedoms, and the hunter Wilhelm Tell, who is forced by the reeve Gessler to shoot an apple from his own son's head, finally kills Gessler. The play was celebrated for its call to freedom and has often been read politically, in every direction. The excerpt contains the first and second scenes of the first act, about 3,000 words, from the transcription of the first edition in German Wikisource, unchanged except that the printed page numbers are left out. Each line of verse, each speaker's name and each stage direction stands on its own line. In the first scene, a man from Unterwalden, Konrad Baumgarten, has killed a reeve who tried to assault his wife, and is fleeing across the lake. The first scene contains this violence only in Baumgarten's report; the second, after a short exchange with a visitor from Lucerne, is a conversation between husband and wife. Grammar in the text The Blankvers. Most of the play is in unrhymed lines of five stresses, alternating unstressed and stressed syllables: Der See kann sich, der Landvogt nicht erbarmen . This is the Blankvers , borrowed from English blank verse and Shakespeare, and the standard line of German classical drama. It is much more regular than the Knittelvers of Faust , and it has no rhyme, so the sentences run over the ends of lines: Ich hatte Holz gefällt im Wald, da kommt / Mein Weib gelaufen in der Angst des Todes. The songs at the beginning are different: short rhymed lines, sung to the cattle call of the Alps. 2.40 Grammar teaches you to read both kinds of verse aloud. A story with reported speech. Baumgarten tells what his wife said to him, using Konjunktiv I : „Der Burgvogt lieg’ in meinem Haus, er hab’ Ihr anbefohlen, ihm ein Bad zu rüsten. Drauf hab’ er Ungebührliches von ihr Verlangt, sie sey entsprungen mich zu suchen.“ The forms lieg’ , hab’ and sey are the subjunctive of liegen , haben and sein , as in the press language of 2.26 Grammar . They mark that he is reporting. The spelling of 1804. As in 7.28 Reading , th and y appear where modern German has t and i : thun, Thal, Rath, seyn, frey . Schiller's printer also wrote z where modern German writes tz: sezt , zulezt , spizt ; and Hülfe for Hilfe . Scene is the old spelling of Szene . Words of the Alps. The fishermen and herdsmen use words of the mountains: die Alp , a high pasture; der Senne , the herdsman who makes cheese on it; der Firn , old snow on a summit; der Föhn , the warm, dry wind from the south that can make the lake dangerous. The herdsman says nit for nicht and Lug’ for Schau , a touch of dialect. Lines that became proverbs. Schiller's plays are full of short, quotable statements, called Sentenzen . Several in this excerpt are still used: Der brave Mann denkt an sich selbst zulezt , the good man thinks of himself last ; Der kluge Mann baut vor , the wise man takes precautions ; dem Muthigen hilft Gott , God helps the brave . Reading it a second time, section by section The songs. On the shore of Lake Lucerne a fisher boy sings about a boy lured into the water; a herdsman takes leave of the summer pastures; an Alpine hunter sings of the ice fields. The sky darkens. The coming storm. The fisherman Ruodi, the hunter Werni and the herdsman Kuoni read the signs of the weather. They talk about Kuoni's cattle, which belong to the lord of Attinghausen, and about the intelligence of animals. Baumgarten. A man runs up, out of breath and stained with blood, and begs the fisherman to row him across the lake: the reeve's horsemen are behind him. He has killed the reeve of Rossberg, Wolfenschiessen, who came to his house while he was in the forest and demanded that his wife prepare him a bath. The others approve. But the storm breaks, and Ruodi refuses to cross: he too has a wife and children. Tell.