5 - Weimar and Jena 1787–1792

Summary

Don Carlos appeared in print in June 1787. A number of theatres expressed interest in staging it and Schiller, anticipating the problems of staging the verse version, prepared a prose version himself. The actor-manager Schröder was keen to attract the poet to Hamburg, offering him an honorarium for the play and stressing how different were the circumstances there from those in Mannheim. Though Schiller was much restored in spirits by the experience of friendship with Körner and his circle, he was still subject to fits of melancholy combined with the growing realization that he must at some point try to establish an independent existence. He announced his intention to arrive in Hamburg in the autumn. On his way lay Weimar. A stay there would open up opportunities to establish contact with its leading personalities, not only Goethe but Herder, Wieland, Bode, Bertuch, Reinhold, Voigt and the numerous visitors that Weimar's fame drew to it.

POETRY AND JOURNALISM

Goethe was still in Italy when Schiller arrived on 21 July, and several other leading lights, including the Duke, Karl August, were temporarily absent. His letters to Körner make a fascinating account of the Weimar of that time, but he was in general unimpressed by the aloofness of the people and provinciality of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, he quickly established contact with Wieland, who, in spite of reservations about the indelicacy of the younger writer's early work, showed himself eager to secure his services for his journal, the Teutscher Merku.