Many writers through history have relied on unusual rituals to get the job done.

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The most unusual writing rituals of famous authors

The Robbers and Wallenstein

This modern translation of Schiller's work captures the elegance and forceful rhetoric of the original plays

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was one of the greatest playwrights, poets, philosophers and historians writing in German. Penguin also publishes his plays Mary Stuart, The Robbers and Wallenstein. Some of the most productive years of his short life were spent in Jena and Weimar, where his creative friendship with Goethe has taken on a mythic status. His poem 'Ode to Joy' became the basis for the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and is now the European Union's anthem.

Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) was one of the most influential of all playwrights, the author of deeply moving dramas that explored human fears, desires and ideals. Written at the age of twenty-one, The Robbers was his first play. A passionate consideration of liberty, fraternity and deep betrayal, it quickly established his fame throughout Germany and wider Europe. Wallenstein, produced nineteen years later, is regarded as Schiller's masterpiece: a deeply moving exploration of a flawed general's struggle to bring the Thirty Years War to an end against the will of his Emperor. Depicting the deep corruption caused by constant fighting between Protestants and Catholics, it is at once a meditation on the unbounded possible strength of humanity, and a tragic recognition of what can happen when men allow themselves to be weak.

Mary Stuart

This dramatic story recounts Mary, Queen of Scots's remaining days held captive in Fotheringay Castle. In scenes alternating between Mary's prison and Elizabeth's court at Westminster, Schiller's play gradually builds a compelling picture of a tragic heroine rising above her suffering to gain in insight and spiritual depth. In contrast Elizabeth, in turmoil over the correct course of action for her country and trapped by the cruel demands of Realpolitik, can achieve worldly victory only at a terrible moral cost. Culminating in a fictitious meeting of the two women, Mary Stuart is a dramatic meditation on the nature of political power, but also a deeply moving human tragedy that captures the emotional essence of complex events.

Friedrich Schiller

'The artist is certainly the child of his age, but all the worse for him if he is at the same time its pupil, even worse its minion.' 
 
On the Aesthetic Education of Man is one of the most profound works of German philosophy, in which Friedrich Schiller analyses politics, revolution and the history of ideas to define the relationship between beauty and art. Resulting from Schiller's deep disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution and expressed as a series of letters to a patron, On the Aesthetic Education of Man is an impassioned attempt to drag mankind upwards from failure to greatness through placing ideas of aesthetic education at the heart of the human experience: 'Our era has actually taken both wrong turnings, and has fallen prey to coarseness on the one path, lethargy and perversity on the other. Having strayed along both paths, it is beauty that can lead [us] back.' Schiller's arguments are as arresting, challenging and inspiring today as when they were first written - it is above all one of the great political statements from a time of revolutionary change.

Friedrich Schiller

Books by Friedrich Schiller

Articles featuring Friedrich Schiller

The most unusual writing rituals of famous authors

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