The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Piccolomini, by Frederich Schiller

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Title: The Piccolomini
A Play

Author: Frederich Schiller

Release Date: October 26, 2006 [EBook #6786]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICCOLOMINI ***

Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger

THE PICCOLOMINI

By Frederich Schiller

Translated by S. T. Coleridge.

"Upon the whole there can be no doubt that this trilogy forms, in its
original tongue, one of the most splendid specimens of tragic art the
world has witnessed; and none at all, that the execution of the version
from which we have quoted so largely, places Mr. Coleridge in the very
first rank of poetical translators. He is, perhaps, the solitary example
of a man of very great original genius submitting to all the labors, and
reaping all the honors of this species of literary exertion."--Blackwood,
1823.

PREFACE.

The two dramas,--PICCOLOMINI, or the first part of WALLENSTEIN, and the
DEATH OF WALLENSTEIN, are introduced in the original manuscript by a
prelude in one act, entitled WALLENSTEIN'S CAMP. This is written in
rhyme, and in nine-syllable verse, in the same lilting metre (if that
expression may be permitted), with the second Eclogue of Spenser's
Shepherd's Calendar.

This prelude possesses a sort of broad humor, and is not deficient in
character: but to have translated it into prose, or into any other metre
than that of the original, would have given a false idea both of its
style and purport; to have translated it into the same metre would have
been incompatible with a faithful adherence to the sense of the German
from the comparative poverty of our language in rhymes; and it would have
been unadvisable, from the incongruity of those lax verses with the
present taste of the English public. Schiller's intention seems to have
been merely to have prepared his reader for the tragedies by a lively
picture of laxity of discipline and the mutinous dispositions of
Wallenstein's soldiery. It is not necessary as a preliminary
explanation. For these reasons it has been thought expedie