Demetrius: A Play
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who have read Schiller's major plays and want to understand his late work
- Students interested in historical drama and succession themes
- Readers studying unfinished literary works and the aesthetics of the fragment
- Enthusiasts who want free access to public-domain English dramatic texts
Not a good fit for
- General readers expecting a complete plot and a clear ending
- Specialist researchers needing detailed historical verification and annotation
- Readers completely unfamiliar with Russian history who are unwilling to supplement background materials
Reading tips
- Look up the basic historical facts of the False Dmitry episode before reading the play.
- Read the unfinished portion as a fragment, focusing on character portrayal rather than ending.
- Compare with Schiller's other historical plays to observe changes in his late work.
- After reading, note the contradictions in Demetrius's motives for discussion.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
FAQ
Why is this play unfinished?
Can I read this play without knowing Russian history?
Does this electronic edition include a German-facing text?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) is a major writer in German literary history, often mentioned alongside Goethe. The collection here contains 60 of his works, covering drama, narrative poetry, and writings on aesthetics, with his plays being especially influential. His representative works include The Robbers, Intrigue and Love, Wallenstein's Death, Mary Stuart, Wilhelm Tell, and The Maid of Orleans. Set mostly against historical and political backgrounds, his plays explore freedom, justice, power, and moral conflict, featuring vivid characters and a language full of passion and tension that combines Enlightenment ideals with the beauty of classical form. Public information is limited, so biographical details are not elaborated here; nevertheless, these works show him as both a representative of Germany's Sturm und Drang movement and a key founder of German classicism, exerting a lasting influence on later European drama and intellectual culture.
