Love and Intrigue

Schiller’s play Kabale und Liebe, usually translated into English as Love and Intrigue, represents the disastrous consequences that follow when social constraint, youthful passion, and ruthless scheming collide in a narrow setting. Written between 1782 and 1784, the play bears the marks of life at the court of the despotic Duke of Württemberg, from which Schiller had just fled, and of a fraught liaison he entered shortly after his flight. It tells the tale of a love affair that crosses the boundaries of class, between a fiery and rebellious young nobleman and the beautiful and dutiful daughter of a musician. Their affair becomes entangled in the competing purposes of malign and not-so-malign figures present at an obscure and sordid princely court somewhere in Germany. It all leads to a climactic murder–suicide.

Love and Intrigue, the third of Schiller’s canonical plays (after The Robbers and Fiesco’s Conspiracy at Genoa), belongs to the genre of domestic tragedy, with a small cast and an action indoors. It takes place as the highly conventional world of the late eighteenth century stands poised to erupt, and these tensions pervade its setting and emerge in its action. This lively play brims with comedy and tragedy expressed in a colorful, highly colloquial, sometimes scandalous prose well captured in Flora Kimmich’s skilled and informed translation. An authoritative essay by Roger Paulin introduces the reader to the play.

As with all books in the Open Book Classics series, this translation is supported by an introduction and notes that situate an old text in its period and help both the student and the general reader read it with ease and with pleasure.

Love and Intrigue
Friedrich Schiller. Translated by Flora Kimmich. Introduction by Roger Paulin | May 2019

130 | 7 colour illustrations | 6.14" x 9.21" (234 x 156 mm)

Open Book Classics Series, vol. 11 | ISSN: 2054-216X (Print); 2054-2178 (Online)
ISBN Paperback: 9781783747382
ISBN Hardback: 9781783747399
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783747405
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783747412
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783747429
ISBN Digital (XML): 9781783747436
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0175
Subject codes: BIC: DSG (Literary studies: plays and playwrights), AN (Theatre studies); BISAC: LIT004170 (Literary criticism: German), LIT013000 (Literary criticism: Drama)

Flora Kimmich translates from French and German. Her translation of Gustav Droysen’s classic History of Alexander the Great—the first into English—was published in 2012 by the American Philosophical Society. We have published three other plays by Schiller in translations by Flora Kimmich: Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa, Wallenstein and Don Carlos. Flora is also the translator of Jules Michelet's On History.

Roger Paulin is Schröder Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. His major interest is literary history from 1700-1900. His chief monograph publications have been on Ludwig Tieck (1985), on the German Novelle (1985), and on the reception of Shakespeare in Germany (2003). He has published numerous articles on Goethe, Kleist, Romanticism, and on German poetry from Klopstock to Rilke. In 2002 he was awarded a Humboldt Prize and in 2011 the Bundesverdienstkreuz. With OBP he has published The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry and wrote the Introduction for Wallenstein: A Dramatic Poem.

Translation and Notes to the text Flora Kimmich © 2019
Introduction Roger Paulin © 2019