Schiller's first stage-play, from 1781, still seems to be one of the best-known and gets performed fairly regularly (it used to be a classic choice as a school play). Verdi turned it into an opera as I Masnadieri.

It's a five-act tragic melodrama, in prose with a couple of interpolated songs. Franz, jealous of his older brother Karl, manages to drive a wedge between their father and Karl while he's away at university, with the result that Karl isn't able to pay his debts, is forced to flee from justice, and, radicalised by this experience, joins a kind of early Baader-Meinhof anarchist group of runaway students and professional criminals in the Bohemian Forest. The dishonest but ultra-respectable Franz commits more and more horrible crimes to get his hands on his brother's inheritance and his fiancée Amalia, whilst the honourable but outlawed Karl finds himself unwillingly complicit in all kinds of mass-murder, sacrilege, and highway robbery.

It's all quite radical by the standards of the time, but nonetheless fairly predictable up to about the end of Act Four, with a lot of action happening off-stage and being described to us in long speeches, often by messenger-characters introduced especially for that purpose, and with the central characters expressing their emotional states in high-flown language of a kind it's all-too-easy to parody.

But then it starts to get rather less predictable, with Karl, in the space of half-a-dozen pages, inventing a dialogue between Brutus and Caesar, picking up a pistol to do a to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy, and meeting what appears to be his father's ghost, whilst Franz is having the sort of sleepless night that even MacBeth would have nightmares about... (and not long after that, there's a final plot-twist that W S Gilbert later undermined by borrowing it for The Pirates of Penzance). Fun!

Very much a young man's play, full of energy and challenge-everything provocation, but also with more moral complexity to it than you might expect. Amalia is the only female character, and whilst she's made out to be strong-willed and independent, all that she actually gets to do is maintain her rather misguided loyalty to Karl. ( )

Ich gebe Schiller kleine gelbe Sternchen!!! ( )

Ich habe euch einen Engel geschlachtet. ( )

Li principalmente por causa de Os Irmãos Karamazovi. Não só é um livro excelente, mas ainda tornou Os Irmãos Karamazovi mais engraçado. ( )

H1.31.4