Love and Intrigue

Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe)
Title page to the first edition, 1784.
Date premiered	13 April 1784
Place premiered	Schauspiel Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main
Original language	German
Genre	Bourgeois tragedy

Intrigue and Love, sometimes Love and Intrigue, Love and Politics or Luise Miller (German: Kabale und Liebe, literally "Cabal and Love") is a five-act play written by the German dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). It was his third play. It shows how cabals and their intrigue destroy the love between Ferdinand von Walter, a nobleman's son, and Luise Miller, daughter of a middle-class musician.

Ferdinand is an army major and son of President von Walter, a high-ranking noble in a German duke's court, while Luise Miller is the daughter of a middle-class musician. The couple fall in love with each other, but both their fathers tell them to end their affair. The president instead wants to expand his own influence by marrying off his son Ferdinand to Lady Milford, the duke's mistress. However, Ferdinand rebels against his father's plan and tries to persuade Luise to elope with him. The president and his secretary Wurm (Ferdinand's rival) concoct an insidious plot, arresting Luise's parents for no reason. Luise declares, in a love letter to the Hofmarschall von Kalb, that only by death can she obtain her parents' release. Luise is also forced to swear an oath to God to state she wrote this letter (actually forced on her) of her own free will. This letter is leaked to Ferdinand and deliberately evokes jealousy and vengeful despair in him.

Luise tries to get release from her oath by suicide, dying before Ferdinand and restoring their love's innocence, but her father puts a stop to this by putting massive moral and religious pressure on the couple. This means she has only silence and the lie required by the oath to counter the charges against her. Luise is released from her secrecy by death, revealing the intrigue to Ferdinand and forgiving him, and Ferdinand reaches out his hand to his father at the moment of his death, which the President interprets as his son's forgiveness.

In a subplot, Lady Milford is shown in a position between the middle and upper classes, in love with Ferdinand. She is confronted with Luise's pure and simple love for Ferdinand. Despite Lady Milford's love for him, they are intent on marriage and withdrawing from the world of the court.

In 1784 Schiller published his theoretical work The Theatre considered as a Moral Institution, whose central idea was to present tragedy as a means of theodicy, with theatre's mission being to show the world God had created the restoration of divine justice onstage. This righteousness is visible in Intrigue and Love, since ultimately, its final court of appeal is not secular justice but God himself. Schiller saw education as another function of theatre, to bring the audience to catharsis to complete their education and so make the theatre a "moral institution". He saw its most important function, however, as to mediate between freedom and necessity, showing an idealised version of the individual's struggle with and victory over social, moral and religious constraints onstage.