Of the nine or ten tragedies of the foremost German dramatic poet,
Schiller, three are German, "The Robbers," "Intrigue and Love," and
"Wallenstein."
Goethe's highest dramas, "Iphigenia," "Egmont," "Torquato Tasso," are
all foreign in clothing. "The Natural Daughter" has no local
habitation, no dependence on time or place. "Goetz von Berlichingen,"
written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in
prose, "Faust"--the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling
the greatest poems of all time--"Faust" is not strictly a drama: its
wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic
necessity.
The drama of Spain, like the comedies of Moliere, is an exception to
the rule we deduce from the practice of other dramatists; but it is an
exception which, like that of Moliere, confirms the rule. Unlike the
ancient Greek and the French tragic poets, unlike Schiller,
Shakespeare, Goethe, Alfieri, the Spanish dramatists do not aim at
ideal humanity. The best of them, Calderon, is so intensely Spanish
and Romish, as to be, in comparison with the breadth and universality
of his eminent compeers above named, almost provincial.
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