SOURCE: “The Silence of Wilhelm Tell,” in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 76, No. 4, Summer 1983, pp. 857-68.

In the following essay, Lamport argues that Tell, a simple and humble man, undergoes a profound change after his confrontation with and triumph over Gessler: he moves out of his simple world and gains historical significance, and he finds a new eloquence as result of the important moral decision he makes in silence.

Schiller's Wilhelm Tell seems at first sight a fairly simple play. The action is, of course, a complex one, with four separate strands (the conspiracy of Stauffacher and his associates; the love of Rudenz for Berta; the assassination of the Emperor by Duke John; and Tell's ordeal and the killing of Gessler), but these all converge in a single point, all are gathered together to assert a single, simple meaning—the defence by the Swiss of their traditional liberties...