The prologue to Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy is set in the camp before Pilsen in Bohemia, among Croats, dragoons, sharpshooters, a sutler-woman and a raw recruit. In rhymed scenes the soldiers drink, dice and argue about their pay and their general, while a Capuchin friar thunders a comic sermon at them. The great commander never appears, yet his shadow covers every line.
A vivid, self-contained picture of a seventeenth-century army, and a lively way into Schiller’s greatest historical drama. Download the free EPUB.