Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien was published by Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig in 1787. Schiller worked on it for five years — longer than any other play — and the result shows the complexity of its gestation: it began as a domestic tragedy (Carlos loves his stepmother Elisabeth) and evolved into a political drama (the Marquis of Posa attempts to use his friendship with Philip II to achieve liberty for the Netherlands).
The play is set at the court of Philip II of Spain in the 1560s. Don Carlos, the heir, loves Elisabeth of Valois — who was originally betrothed to him but married his father instead for reasons of state. Carlos’s friend, the Marquis of Posa, is a political idealist — a believer in human freedom, religious tolerance, and the Enlightenment values that Philip’s absolutism suppresses. Posa sees in Carlos (sympathetic, impulsive, in love with a woman the court wishes to control) a potential ally for his grand project: the liberation of the Netherlands from Spanish tyranny.
Posa’s strategy is Schiller’s real subject: he attempts to work within the system, to befriend the tyrant, to achieve progressive ends through personal influence rather than revolution. The strategy fails catastrophically: Philip is too intelligent to be manipulated, the court’s surveillance apparatus is too efficient to be evaded, and Posa — for all his idealism — discovers that operating within a despotic system requires compromises that eventually corrupt the ideals he claims to serve.
The play ends in defeat: Posa dies, Carlos is betrayed to the Inquisition, and Philip — Schiller’s most fully realized antagonist, a man who is simultaneously a loving father and a political monster — delivers his son to institutional destruction. The political lesson is bleak: personal virtue cannot reform structural evil; friendship with power corrupts the friend.
Verdi’s opera Don Carlo (1867) — one of the great nineteenth-century operas — draws directly on Schiller’s play.
Collecting Don Carlos
First edition (Georg Joachim Göschen, Leipzig, 1787): In German.
Market values:
- First edition (1787): $2,000–$8,000
- Early English translations: $100–$500
- Nineteenth-century editions: $30–$100
- Modern critical editions: $10–$25
Schiller’s most intellectually ambitious play and the source of one of the great Romantic operas. First editions are rare and primarily of institutional interest.