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Schiller's Don Carlos, written ten years before his great Wallenstein trilogy, testifies to the young playwright's growing power. First performed in 1787, it stands at the culmination of Schiller's formative development as a dramatist and is the first play written in his characteristic iambic pentameter. Don Carlos plunges the audience into the dangerous political and personal struggles that rupture the court of the Spanish King Philip II in 1658. The autocratic king's son Don Carlos is caught between his political ideals, fostered by his friendship with the charismatic Marquis Posa, and his doomed love for his stepmother Elisabeth of Valois. These twin passions set him against his father, the brooding and tormented Philip, and the terrible power of the Catholic Church, represented in the play by the indelible figure of the Grand Inquisitor. Schiller described Don Carlos as ́a family portrait in a princely house. ́ It interweaves political machinations with powerful personal relationships to create a complex and resonant tragedy. The conflict between absolutism and liberty appealed not only to audiences but also to other artists and gave rise to several operas, not least to Verdi's great Don Carlos of 1867. The play, which the playwright never finished to his satisfaction, lives on nonetheless among his best-loved works and is translated here with flair and skill by Flora Kimmich. Like her translations of Schiller's Wallenstein and his Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa, this is a lively and accessible rendering of a classic text. As with all books in the Open Book Classics series, it is supported by an introduction and notes that will inform and enlighten both the student and the general reader.… (more)
User reviews
Both times, I read the performing edition by James Kirkup, found in Eric Bentley's compendium The Classic Theatre: Five German Plays. I remembered thinking the translation a little hokey, and upon rereading I wanted to go through it with a red pen. The vocabulary is simply not consistent with the sixteenth-century setting, including words like "lots" when "many" or "much" would be more appropriate. And I don't know whether to blame the Mr. Kirkup or Schiller himself for this, but all attempts at exposition come off as very awkward. The scene with Carlos and Eboli is laughable, for even as he's trying to convince her that he does not love her, he makes asides about how beautiful she is. I really did not care for either of these characters—the King, Queen, Marquis of Posa, and especially the blind old Grand Inquisitor are much more interesting. It has a good twist at the end too. But overall I dislike the plot, which is a sort of Spanish version of Tristan and Isolde.
I hope that at some point I can reread the author's Mary Stuart with more positive results.
In January 1568, Philip II arrested his 23 year old son, Carlos, confining him to his palace rooms under guard. Six months later, Carlos was dead. The perfect set-up for a dark romantic scandal, but in the boring real world the Infante's short life seems to have been merely sad, unpleasant
Whether it was due to an excess of inbred Hapsburg DNA, brain damage resulting from a difficult birth, teenage malaria and/or a head injury from a fall in 1562, Carlos displayed increasingly violent and unpredictable behaviour as he grew up. It is probably reasonable to assume that he was seriously mentally ill and his confinement was a medical necessity, his death probably from natural causes. Modern historians generally see no need to suspect any dirty work by the king in this case.
Schiller
However, there were plenty of people who scented a propaganda opportunity here. A pamphlet circulated by William of Orange seems to have been the starting point for the legend that Carlos was murdered because he was in love with his young stepmother, Elisabeth of Valois, and involved with her in a conspiracy to seize power in Flanders in support of the Protestant rebels there. That was taken up in a novel by the Abbé de Saint-Réal in the 1670s, which in turn gave Schiller the outline for his first big verse tragedy, written between 1783 and 1787 and first performed in Hamburg.
Besides Carlos, Philip and Elisabeth, Schiller gives big parts to the Princess of Eboli, one of the Queen's ladies, and to the Marquis of Posa, a childhood friend of Carlos who is a passionate supporter of the cause of the Flemish rebels. There's also quite an important sub-plot involving the Duke of Alba and the king's confessor, Domingo, and lots of other minor parts for Spanish grandees and ladies (including, twenty years too early, the Duke of Medina Sidonia coming on to report the defeat of the Armada...!). But the best walk-on part is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who comes on about five minutes before the end of Act Five and completely steals the show.
The plot is ridiculously tangled, with everyone changing sides (or appearing to) at least twice in the course of the play, and there are about a dozen different compromising documents that have to fall into the wrong hands at significant moments. But there are lots of fine speeches as characters debate love versus duty, liberty versus order and stability, and so on.
The passion between Carlos and Elisabeth is oddly abstract — she never really commits herself, whilst he is obsessed with her without apparently ever having had the chance to talk to her. Both the Princess and Posa are obviously in love with Carlos in a very real, physical way (we're meant to read Posa's declarations of love as just the flowery language of homosocial bonding, but of course we know better...): Carlos seems to respond to both of them warmly while they are in the room, then forgets them at once and goes back to ranting about his passion for the Queen. Schiller plants the idea that he's looking for a mother-substitute (one of his first lines in Act I reminds us that his "first action on coming into the world was matricide"), but given that he's the same age as Elisabeth, it's hard to imagine how he could really see her as a mother.