finished
February 18, 1804, in the author's forty-fifth year and something over
a year before his death. After this he completed only a pageant, _The
Homage of the Arts_, although he was occupied with many plans for
other plays, including _Demetrius_, founded on the career of the
Russian pretender of this name, of which he left the first act.
_William Tell_ is the last of Schiller's five great dramas, a series
beginning with _Wallenstein_, written within nine years, constituting,
along with his ballads and many other poems, the work of what is
called his "third period." This period was preceded by Schiller's
chief prose works and the historical and philosophical studies
preparatory thereto, together with considerable reading of Greek and
English classics, notably Homer and Shakespeare. The influence of his
historical and critical studies and of this reading is evident in the
dramas: _Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, The Maid of Orleans, The Bride of
Messina, William Tell_. But of these, _William Tell_ stands apart in
several ways.

For all of them Schiller made careful preliminary studies, but for
none in such detail as for _Tell_. He had not only a remote historical
material to deal with, but also a land and customs which he had never
seen and which nevertheless he wished to present with great fidelity.
His chief source was the Swiss chronicler Tschudi, of the sixteenth
century, from whom he took not only the main features of his action,
but many touches of scenery and much actual phraseology. In addition
he studied the Swiss historian Johannes von Mueller, maps and natural
histories of Switzerland, and received also some oral notes from
Goethe, to whom, in fact, he owed the original suggestion of
dramatizing the story of William Tell.

Unlike the other dramas of Schiller's last period, _William Tell_ has
no plot in the technical dramatic sense. There is no snare of
circumstances laid which forces a hero, after vain attempts to elude
or unloose it, to tear his way out at the cost of more or less
innocent lives. We see the representatives of three small,
freedom-loving democracies pushed beyond endurance by the outrages of
tyranny, pledging mutual support in resisting these encroachments upon
their liberties, and carrying out a successful resistance, aided by
the wholly fortuitous assassination of the tyrannical emperor. We see,
as a single instance of these oppressions, the arrogant caprice of the
bailiff Gessler in dema