Includes the plays Don Carlos and Mary Stuart

Major historical upheavals of the Sixteenth Century illuminate Schiller's increasingly troubled reaction to the present in these two plays. The huge epic Don Carlos (1787), a 'play expressing a view of life', marries the ideological battle between Philip II of Spain and his son Don Carlos to a gripping narrative. In Mary Stuart (1800), Schiller, sickened by the excesses of a revolution he had once supported, brings together two monarchs - the English Elizabeth Tudor and the Scottish Mary Stuart, cousins who in reality never met - when Mary, falsely accused of conspiracy, finds herself at Elizabeth's mercy.