Wallenstein's Camp: A Play

In 1634, during the Thirty Years' War, the soldiers of the imperial army are camped outside the city of Pilsen in Bohemia. In this one-act play there is no plot and no hero, only the camp itself: sergeants and recruits, Croatian and Irish troops, a trumpeter, a cheating peasant, a woman selling provisions and a Capuchin friar who preaches a comic sermon against the soldiers' sins. Through their talk the audience feels the power of their absent general, Wallenstein, whom they follow with blind loyalty, and hears the rumours that the emperor plans to break up his army.

Friedrich Schiller wrote the play in 1798 as the prelude to his great Wallenstein trilogy, which continues in The Piccolomini and The Death of Wallenstein, and it was first performed at Weimar under Goethe's direction. It ends with a rousing cavalry song. Schiller's first play, written in his youth, is The Robbers.