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 'Ritterstück'. 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 the Werther-mania of the previous decade spread over Germany. The newspapers told of conspiring schoolboys whose heads had been turned toward a career of crime. A well-born youth who had essayed the rôle of Robin Hood near Strassburg and was hanged there in October, 1783, confessed suspiciously that he had been brought to his fate by the reading of bad books. The sedate authorities of Leipzig forbade the further performance of the play in their city because they had observed a sudden increase of burglary and petit larceny. An edition of 1782, which the publisher, possibly without Schiller's knowledge, had adorned with a rampant lion and the motto _In Tirannos_, probably added to the vogue of the piece as a revolutionary document. A French translation appeared in 1785 and drew the attention of the turbulent Gauls to that 'Monsieur Gille', who was in time to receive the diploma of a French citizen. The first English translation dates from 1792.