The Burial of Danish Comedy - and its birth

One more Holberg post, if just to get at the mystery of why and how his 18th century Danish comedies exist.

The rough story, which I am pulling from the Argetsinger and Rossel selection of Holberg’s plays, is as follows.  A French entrepreneur opened a comic theater in Copenhagen, population 100,000 or so, that performed French and German plays.  He quickly found that however sophisticated the Copenhagen audience, he desperately needed Danish-language plays to keep the theater alive.  He commissioned quick translations, of Molière, for example, and cast about for original plays in Danish.

Enter Ludvig Holberg, a 38 year old professor of Roman literature who had just had a bit of success with a long verse satire blending Juvenal and Don Quixote, which I would guess is close to  unreasonable now, but have I ever been wrong about that sort of thing.  This does not, to me, sound like much of a qualification to write comedies for the stage, but it turned out that Holberg had a genius for the form.  He knocked out roughly five comedies a year for five years until a series of catastrophes, including a terrible 1728 fire that destroyed much of Copenhagen, shut down the theater for good.

Holberg stole like a genius: plots, characters, jokes.  I see Molière and Italian comedies as the main sources of the ones I have read, as if I know so much about early modern theater to know about Holberg’s sources.  But in a play like The Christmas Party (1724) or Pernille’s Brief Experience as a Lady (1727), the characters can be directly matched to their commedia dell’arte predecessors – this one is Harlequin, this one Pantalone, and so on.

What is new is the old story and characters in a not just a new setting but a thickly described one, so that in The Christmas Party the usual plot about a wife and her lover fooling the husband is given a background of Epiphany candles, rice puddings, Christmas games and gifts, and a little boy costumed as a ram.  Holberg is putting in his plays some of the strengths of the modern novel, which in some sense has not been invented yet, or perhaps was just invented by Daniel Defoe a few years earlier.  I am contrasting Holberg with his contemporary Marivaux, who was moving Italian comedies in the opposite direction, reducing them to a state of light, elegant, but almost abstract perfection.

Fires aside, Holberg’s theater was ultimately done in by money.  Even his brilliance was not enough.  The book I have used ends with a six page play, The Burial of Danish Comedy (1727).  The skit begins with an actor calculating his debts:

HENRICH:  “Chicken soup, for six pennies, boiled beef with horseradish for seven pennies, sauerkraut with pork for five pennies, buckwheat porridge boiled in milk for three pennies, three rolls and six mugs of beer,”  That’s true.  I ate well that day.  There’s no other advantage to these days of fasting.  (Sc. 1)

Henrich and the other actors learn some bad news.  “The interminably sick is the assuredly dead”  (Sc. 3) – Comedy has died, leaving nothing but debts to the actors.  What will they do, how can they find other employment? 

MADEMOISELLE HIORT:  We’ve offended everyone: officers, doctors, lawyers, pewterers, marquises, barons, barbers!

HENRICH:  That’s certainly true.  I haven’t dared to get a shave since we played that comedy about Master Gert.  (Sc. 4, “Master Gert” not translated, unfortunately)

The actors form a procession ahead of the corpse of Comedy, who is in a wheelbarrow.  They march around the stage three times before lowering the wheelbarrow through the trap door.  We live in a crueler age now, so if I were staging this I would ump the corpse in, headfirst.  “HENRICH jumps into the grave, full of sorrow, as though he will never survive the Comedy.”  This was actually performed, on February 25, 1727.

The company eventually  reformed again, but it was back to Roman literature and metaphysics for Holberg.  He had founded Danish literature.

You should be ashamed for ruining the whole story like this! - Ludvig Holberg's meta-comedy

How about some 18th century Danish satire!  Followed by some meta-theater.  Readers would be fleeing Wuthering Expectations, if they had not already done so, years ago.  Satire is, to so many readers, death.  I do not know why.  I have guesses, all unflattering, so I will keep them to myself.

In Erasmus Montanus, or Rasmus Berg (1723), the target is book learnin’.  The subtitular character goes to Copenhagen to the university and returns transformed into the title character, spouting Latin and syllogisms, completely ruined by his education.  Since I was only 70% ruined by mine, I laughed and laughed.

JACOB:  Then what should I call Brother?

MONTANUS:  You shall address me as “Monsieur Montanus.”  That is my name in Copenhagen.

JACOB:  If I can only remember that.  Was it Monsewer Dromedarius?  (II.2.)

There are circumstances in life when one should not go for the cheap laugh, but writing a comedy is not one of them.

Just as I am ready to see the disputatious Erasmus Montanus punished for his idiocy, the play swivels.  The villagers do not just condemn his pretensions and uselessness, but his real knowledge – is the earth round, does it go around the sun, and so on.  Montanus is threatened with heresy, expulsion, and finally with the military draft.  Things are taking an ugly turn.  But this is a comedy, so everything turns out all right.  Crushed by the community, Rasmus Berg renounces everything, true or false, good or bad, allowing him to marry his girl and save his hide.  Curtain.

Wait a minute, what happened here?  Holberg’s satire still has some sting.

Ulysses von Ithacia; or A German Comedy (1723) satirizes the conventions of theater.  It is in some sense built around Homer, but in a ludicrous mishmash of Classical, Biblical, and Nordic names and themes.    The central character, Chilian, talks to the audience and recognizes that he is on stage, so he gets to handle every gag involving false beards, props, and the passage of time.

CHILIAN:  I hope m’Lord won’t mind if I ask him how old he was when he left home?

ULYSSES:  I was in my flowering years, not more than forty.

CHILIAN:  Let’s see, forty years at first, then ten years in the siege makes fifty, and twenty years on the trip home make seventy.  The good Dido must be a great lover of antiquities.  She could have her pick from among so many young men, but she’s so cool toward them and falls in love with an ancient, bearded man.

ULYSSES:  Listen, Chilian, I will not listen to such reasoning, thou must have added incorrectly.  (IV.1.)

When Ulysses’ men are turned into swine by Circe, Chilian “cures” them by beating the actors, who are on all fours.

THE SWINE:  [They stand up and become men again.]  As sure as we’re honorable men, you’ll pay for this beating, my good Monsieur Wegner.  You should be ashamed for ruining the whole story like this!  (IV.5.)

He is a blend of Groucho and Chico.  I was surprised by how much of the humor seemed almost Yiddish.

CHILIAN:  Are your streets fairly clean?

TROJAN:  They’re spotless in July, but the rest of the year we can hardly go out for fear of drowning in the mud, but that’s only eleven months of the year, they go quickly.  (II.2.)

Thus it was somehow not a surprise when the play ends with two Jewish moneylenders shutting down the production, stripping the costume right off of Ulysses in lieu of cash.

I will not promise that many people will find these plays as funny as I did, but still, three hundred years later, why should they be funny at all?

Jeppe of the Hill - 18th century Danish topsy-turvy land

What I am trying to do is avoid writing about Henrik Ibsen, so let’s look at one of his greatest influences, the 18th century Dano-Norwegian playwright Ludvig Holberg.  “In the nineteenth century, Holberg’s comedies influenced Henrik Ibsen, who wrote that they were the only thing he never tired of reading.”  So says one of Holberg’s translators  (p. xxxii).*  Ibsen was one strange bird.  He would have seen plenty of Holberg plays a young fellow, though.

And they turn out to be, unsurprisingly, awfully good.  I was at first planning to read only Jeppe of the Hill; or, The Transformed Peasant (1722), Holberg’s most famous, most translated play, but many months ago a friendly commenter suggested I try Erasmus Montanus; or, Rasmus Berg (1723), and since Jeppe was pretty good, why not, and then Erasmus Berg turned out to be pretty good, and who would want to resist something titled Pernille’s Brief Experience as a Lady or The Burial of Danish Comedy?  Both of the latter are from 1727 – as you can see, Danish comedy was lived a jolly but short life.

Jeppe of the Hill uses the old, old story of the poor man who becomes, as the result of a prank, king for a day, or in Jeppe’s case baron for a few hours before he drinks himself into a stupor.  I most strongly associate the idea with Sancho Panza achieving his dream of governing an island in Don Quixote, but there are versions of the story going back to classical Sanskrit and Chinese.

JEPPE:  There’s no mistaking that I am Jeppe of the Hill; I know I’m a poor peasant, a serf, a scoundrel, a cuckold, a hungry louse, a maggot, a scum; how can I, at the same time, be an emperor and lord of a castle?  No, it’s only a dream…  Maybe I drank myself to death yesterday at Jacob Shoemaker’s.  Died and went straight to heaven.  Death must not be as hard to pass through as we imagine; I didn’t feel a thing.  (II.1.)

Jeppe turns out to be a great character, obviously great fun for an actor and audience, a drunken peasant stereotype who somehow is full of life even when he thinks he is dead.  After the baron and his minions have played the prank making Jeppe the baron, and then returning him to the dungheap {“I thought when I woke up again I’d find my fingers covered with gold rings, but they are (to be polite) encrusted with something else entirely,” IV.1.) they launch a second, even crueler prank, arresting him, condemning him to death, and even hanging him, which he takes in stride.

NILLE:  Oh my beloved husband, how can you talk when you’re dead?
JEPPE:  I don’t know that myself.  But listen, my sweet wife, run like wildfire and bring me eight pennies’ worth of brandy!  I’m thirstier now then when I was alive.  (V.1.)

She responds by beating him; that’s her answer to everything.  The baron restores Jeppe to life (“the court that sentenced you to death can also sentence you to life again”) and the topsy-turvy world to order.

For the brief period that Jeppe ruled, he becomes a revolutionary tyrant, threatening to hang everyone around him.  The baron, the prankster, who is obviously a dangerous lunatic himself, ends the play by wondering if he should have allowed the hangings.  “I believe, without reservation, that you [his servant] would have allowed yourself to be hanged rather than spoil this delightful joke” (V.6.)  How it took over two hundred years after this to get to the Marx Brothers and Duck Soup I do not understand.  Holberg was almost there.

*  Gerald S. Argetsinger and Sven H, Rossel,  Jeppe of the Hill and Other Comedies, 1990, Southern Illinois University Press. The source of all the quotations.