525. The Fault Is Not in Our Stars
( Julius Caesar)
Already in his mid-thirties by the momentous year of 1618, little in
Wallenstein’s life until then suggested that fate had marked him out for
great things. The stars, it seems, thought otherwise, or so astrologers
said, while Wallenstein himself was in their thrall – or so tradition and
many historians have said. Astrology loomed large among the rumours
and legends which accumulated around Wallenstein during his years
as the most powerful man in the Empire, tales which lost nothing in
the telling in the following centuries, and which found their fullest
expression in Schiller’s great drama. In this he portrays Wallenstein
facing the final crisis of his life, closeted with his astrologer and hesi-
tating to make a decision, until eventually he finds encouragement in
his stars:
... Now we
Must act, and quickly, now, before the signs
Of fortune’s favour take their flight again,
For ever-changing is the face of heaven.^1This play had a lasting influence, and just as the historical Richard
III has never escaped the image created by Shakespeare so the real
Wallenstein tends to be eclipsed by the star-gazer depicted by Schiller.
Among twentieth-century biographers, Watson made the point by enti-
tling his book Soldier under Saturn, while Mann stated categorically that
Wallenstein ‘believed in the precision and exact legibility of the noctur-
nal sky’s inordinately fitful writing’, and that he had an ‘absolute faith
in [the astrologer] Kepler’s deductions, similar to that which we attach
to the skilled analysis of an X-ray picture’. Diwald likewise claimed that
‘Wallenstein took Kepler’s horoscope as a reliable prediction’ and ‘laid