Monday, September 28, 2015

Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller - Complete Works of Friedrich Schiller (1902)

HathiTrust direct link (volume 1) Poetry - (alternate collection of poetry)
Archive.org direct link (volume 2) Early Dramas I
Archive.org direct link (volume 3) Early Dramas II
Archive.org direct link (volume 4) Historical Dramas I
Archive.org direct link (volume 5) Historical Dramas II
Archive.org direct link (volume 6) Thirty Years War
Archive.org direct link (volume 7) Revolt in Netherlands
Archive.org direct link (volume 8) Essays

Open Library main page

Bonus:  Heinrich Duntzer - Life of Schiller


I'm half tempted to do a whole series of these complete works from various authors - Balzac, Froissart, Goethe, Goldsmith, Carlyle, Thackeray, the Frazer edition of Pausanius, among ones that are scanned.  The authors aren't quite marketable enough to keep full editions in print but are still worth the treatment.  (Though frequently there are ebook complete works - Delphi Classics is the most reliable and best formatted I've encountered.)  Translations from these older collections might sometimes elide sensitive material but have the benefit of being closer to the original author's time and, let's face it, from translators more likely to be competent in verse than many modern ones.

I've only read a few bits of Schiller but stumbled across this and it seemed a good post.  I was mostly finished with the links before discovering that what I thought was volume 1 was in fact not - that only appears to be available on HathiTrust.  Since that's the poetry volume I included an alternative.  I'm not entirely sure how complete this edition really is since the German ones are all nearly double this size.  Likely they have notes and apparatus missing from the English one and probably also include Schiller's translations (he did Macbeth among others) that would be a bit pointless done additionally into English.