Then came the influence of Körner, the effect of which was to give great prominence to the character of Posa as a positive champion of the right, and to make him for a while the real hero of the play. There seems at first blush but little resemblance between the fanatical idealist of Schiller's imagination and the sensible Dresden lawyer, but the Körner strain in Posa is unmistakable. In his intercourse with Schiller he was evermore insisting on the importance of doing something for mankind. Enthusiasm, love, friendship, sentiment of any kind, were valuable in his estimation only as sources of inspiration for telling activity. As matters of mere private ecstasy, of froth and foam rising and falling to no effect in the turmoil of the individual soul, they were for him objects of mild derision. And the idea that lay nearest his heart as a student of Kant was the idea of freedom. And so, as Schiller worked upon his play at Dresden, Posa was made the exponent of the new point of view. He became the teacher of the unripe Carlos, even as Körner had been the teacher of the unripe Schiller; the subduer of unmanly emotionalism; the apostle of renunciation; the pointer of the way to great deeds; the prophet of a free humanity to come. In the brilliant light thus thrown upon Posa the other heroes were somewhat obscured. The poet's original love, Don Carlos, and his second love, Don Philip, had to make way for a third passion that was stronger than either of the others.
The four installments of 'Don Carlos' that were printed in the _Thalia_, up to the end of 1786, comprised in all three acts. They carried the action to the point where the king, lonely amid sycophants and deceivers, sighs for a 'man' to counsel him. The great scene between Posa and Philip was yet to come in Act IV. The matter already in print contained more than four thousand verses, and several scenes had only been sketched in prose. At this rate it was evident that the play would reach twice the length of a regular tragedy and would be an impossibility on the stage. Schiller began to see that his impatience of stage restrictions and his subjective interest in certain situations had done him an evil turn. He had been deplorably long-winded. And just then came out a caustic review which showed him that he had committed other sins than those of prolixity.[67] Nevertheless he did not now have recourse to that drastic surgery whereby, in the edition of 1801, he reduced the unwieldy play to more manageable dimensions.[68] Without any radical revision of the part already in print, he completed the last two acts as best he could, with Minerva often unwilling. Posa was made to gain the king's confidence, to become seemingly omnipotent, and in the pride of his imagined strength to enter upon that desperate game of intrigue and double-dealing which involves himself and his cause and his helpless friend, Don Carlos, in final disaster.