Major developments in Schiller scholarship over the last ten or fifteen years make this a particularly advantageous moment to offer the first extended general study of his work to be published in English for over forty years. My aim is to survey his development as a dramatist, poet and thinker, providing detailed discussions of his major works (including his essays on aesthetics), written in the light of up-to-date research and presented in such a way as to be accessible to the informed general reader as well as to the specialist in German studies.

Schiller criticism of the last two decades has laid increasing emphasis on the importance of the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment, particularly as it was transmitted through his education at the Karlsschule, his use of historical drama to explore political themes, especially as they presented themselves in contemporary political events, and his engagement through poetry and aesthetics with the French Revolution and its aftermath. Schiller was writing at a time of cultural and political crisis. His early dramas, Die Räuber, Fiesco and Kabale und Liebe, present the rootlessness of a generation that has inherited the Enlightenment's intellectual liberation from the constraints of tradition but cannot realize its vision of a better world. Karl Moor, Fiesco and Ferdinand von Walter wish to appropriate a new freedom to seek fulfilment and to impose their vision, be it benevolent or destructive, on the world. Don Carlos shows a move towards more public concerns and away from exploration of the tensions within the individual in its treatment of the crushing of the beginnings of a new order by the old.