How did Friedrich Schiller use blank verse in Don Carlos?

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Friedrich Schiller Friedrich Schiller, painting by Anton Graff, c. 1785.

Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787) represents a significant evolution in his career, as it was his first major drama written in iambic pentameter.1

While blank verse had been utilized by earlier German playwrights, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Nathan der Weise, it was Schiller’s Don Carlos—alongside Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris—that firmly established the form as the standard medium for German poetic drama. In Don Carlos, Schiller introduced the characteristically resonant tone of his blank verse, which he employed to elevate the play's complex political and domestic conflicts.1