form, was published by Schwan under the name of a 'Trauerspiel' by
Friedrich Schiller.

The changes made in the new version do not reflect the free play of
Schiller's dramatic instinct so much as his deferential attitude towards
Dalberg. Thus we know that the most important of them all, the shifting
of the action back into the age of expiring feudalism, was made
reluctantly. Schiller felt, and had reason to feel, that the modernity
of his drama was its very life-blood;[32] for the squeamish Dalberg,
however, the robbers in the age of Frederick the Great were a painful
anachronism. So they were put back three centuries and costumed in the
style of the 'Ritterstueck'. Other less dubious changes were also made.
Thus the long soliloquies of Franz and the ribald garrulities of
Spiegelberg were reduced to more tolerable proportions. Robber Schwarz
and Pastor Moser were omitted, and the bastard Hermann was vitalized
into a person of some account by means of his counter-plot against
Franz. The un-lyrical songs by which Schiller had set great store were
dropped, and the catastrophe was so changed as to bring the two brothers
finally face to face. The life of Schweizer was spared and Franz,
instead of being torn limb from limb, was derisively pardoned by his
great-souled brother and then, amid mocking laughter, thrust into the
selfsame dungeon in which he had confined his father. Much against
Schiller's will Amalia was made to kill herself with a dagger snatched
from one of the outlaws, instead of receiving her death at the hands of
her lover.

The prodigious success of 'The Robbers' upon the Mannheim stage, and
upon other stages where it was soon produced in more or less garbled
form, made the work famous. Famous and at the same time notorious. New
editions, most of them pirated, began to appear, and a mania similar to