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 of the Parricide episode in the Fifth Act, to the alleged unnaturalness of Tell's long speeches and to the ignoble nature of his assault upon Gessler from ambush. The last was given the poet in the legend of Tell, which in general he took over with pious reverence as authentic history. The Parricide episode was introduced, partly because it was actually there in history and helped to complete the victory of the peasants' cause, partly in order to give a better color to Tell's own act, as being less prompted by selfish considerations. The criticism of Tell's speeches, whether his pithy, epigrammatic sentences in Act I, Scenes 1 and 3, and elsewhere, or his long monologue in Act IV, Scene 3, applies to the whole constitution of the conventional stage with just as much validity against Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_ and _Hamlet_ as against _William Tell_. True, it is not plausible that Tell recited 100 lines of beautiful poetry while lying in wait for Gessler; neither is it likely that Prince Hamlet talked to himself in pentameters.