Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans, a Tragedy in movement

Its deeply embedded heterogeneity makes the "Jungfrau von Orleans" an exemplary case-study for the idea of “mobility”, with which one may engage both artistically and culturally. If there exist “scenes in movement”, meaning plays founded on the dislocation of codes and images that are culturally significant even before they are textually significant, then the Jungfrau is arguably a paradigm of these. Schiller himself was aware of this, not just on account of the dialectics of conservation and innovation which is perceivable on the formal level, nor simply because of its famously imposing stage machinery, which will be discussed later. Rather, the paradigmatic quality of the play is determined by the intrinsic neccessity of its subject matter, half way between history and legend, fantasy and ideology. The macroscopic outcome of this intrinsic textual characteristic is a multi-tiered hybridisation of the codes of drama, epos, and idyll.