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Soldier as Playwright: What Broadway Intellectuals Don't Know About Laclos and Les Liaisons dangereuses
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13407 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
2,558 Words |
| Author
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Richard Grenier
Richard Grenier's latest book is Capturing the Culture. |
With the present assumption that literary people and other aesthetes are by their very nature caring humanitarians and consequently hostile to such an ungentle activity as war, I constantly astonish people by telling them that Cervantes, author of Don Quixote - far from "Dreaming the Impossible Dream" as on Broadway - fought fiercely against the infidel Turk at the giant Battle of Lepanto, that Spain's greatest playwright, Lope de Vega, sailed in the Spanish Armade against England, and that Dante, author of The Divine Comedy, fought for the White Guelphs against the Black Guelphs as an officer of the Florentine cavalry.
Even the reflective Rene Descartes, generally considered the father of modern philosophy - the cogito, ergo sum man - spent much of his early life, not only as soldier, but as a soldier of fortune. The politics of France being quiet at the time, Descartes, aged twenty-one (at about the time of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony), took up a commission in the Dutch army. With the coming of the Thirty Years' War and the shifting of all action to the east, he joined the army of Frederick of Bavaria, then an independent state friendly to France. Although much has been written about Descartes' valor in combat, we do not know if he took part in the monumental siege of Prague. But in 1628, by then thirty-two, he went to battle once again - this time under the colors of his own country. A practicing and in his way devout Catholic, he joined the King's army, which at the close of France's guerres de religion was besieging the last Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle - without which the United States would have had to struggle on without a New Rochelle, New York.
The man who writing Discourse de la Methode, in which
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