Unlike the other dramas of Schiller’s last period, William Tell has no plot in the technical dramatic sense.  There is no snare of circumstances laid which forces a hero, after vain attempts to elude or unloose it, to tear his way out at the cost of more or less innocent lives.  We see the representatives of three small, freedom-loving democracies pushed beyond endurance by the outrages of tyranny, pledging mutual support in resisting these encroachments upon their liberties, and carrying out a successful resistance, aided by the wholly fortuitous assassination of the tyrannical emperor.  We see, as a single instance of these oppressions, the arrogant caprice of the bailiff Gessler in demanding homage to the Austrian hat, his jealousy of the freeman Tell expressed in imposing as a penalty for neglected obeisance the shooting of an apple from his little son’s head, the successful meeting of this test, and in turn Tell’s vengeance through the exercise of this same prowess in shooting Gessler as he rides home through the Hohle Gasse.  Mingled with these elements we see the patriotic support of the common people by a native noblewoman, Bertha von Brunneck, and her successful effort to win to this cause, through his love for her, the young Baron von Rudenz, whose uncle Attinghausen, always loyal to his people, hears in dying the news of his nephew’s conversion, while with his last breath he prophesies the triumph of liberty.  These three threads are woven into a single pattern through the element of the common cause.  This is the unity of the action, which many critics have found wanting in the play.  Moreover these three plans of action cooeperate, if not by deliberate foresight, yet by coincidence of time and purpose, and in some measure by common personages.

The theme of William Tell had been used as early as the sixteenth century in one of the early popular pageants with which the modern German drama begins.  These pageants occupied the whole of several days in presentation and employed, including all supernumeraries, as high as three hundred people.  Schiller knew the old Tell Play and imbibed something of its spirit.  He uses masses of populace in William Tell as in no other of his plays except the Camp of the Wallenstein trilogy.  It may be that the influence of the old popular play together with the nature of his material led him to dispense here with the unity of action, the plot, and the expression of tragic guilt, which may be found in all his other later plays.

Along with keen appreciation, such as A.W.  Schlegel’s comment:  “Imbued with the poetry of history, with a treatment true to nature and genuine, and, considering the poet’s unfamiliarity with the country, astonishingly correct in local color,” William Tell met from the first much adverse criticism.  This applied first of all to the looseness of connection already cited between the various elements of the action, and further, to the supposed superfluousness