Comedies by Holberg : Jeppe of the Hill, The Political Tinker, Erasmus Montanus Part 1

Comedies.

by Ludvig Holberg.

INTRODUCTION

Ludvig Holberg is generally considered the most remarkable of Danish writers. Though he produced books on international law, finance, and history, as well as satires, biographies, and moral essays, he is chiefly celebrated for his comedies, which still--nearly two hundred years after then composition--delight large audiences in Denmark, and bid fair to be immortal. These comedies were the fruit of the author's actual experience; they are closely related to his other works and reflect the range and diversity of his pursuits. To understand fully Holberg's creations, one must first become acquainted with the events of his life.

Ludvig Holberg was born in Bergen, December 3, 1684, of good parentage on both sides. His mother was a granddaughter of a distinguished bishop, and his father an army officer who had risen from the ranks by personal merit. Bergen had long been a trading-post of the Hanseatic League, and in the seventeenth centurv was distinctly cosmopolitan in character. Perhaps as a result of his environment, Holberg seemed early to have acquired a desire to travel. In any case, he devoted most of the years of his young manhood to seeing the woild.

In 1704, shortly after receiving his degree at the University of Copenhagen, he made a journey to the Netherlands. About a year later, he went to England, where he spent more than two years, partly in Oxford and partly in London, studying history and absorbing new ideas. In

1708, as the tutor of a young Danish boy, he visited Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle. Soon after his return to Copenhagen, he obtained a small stipend in a foundation for students, called Borch's College, While there he wrote two historical treatises of enough value to win him an appointment as "extraordinary" professor in the university. Though this position gave him the right to the first vacancy that might occur in the faculty, it did not ent.i.tle him to any salary, and it was only through the good offices of a friend at court that he obtained a stipend of about $150 a year for four years, during which time he was to be a sort of travelling fellow of the university. In the spring of 1714, Holberg, then thirty years of age, left Copenhagen for his fourth journey abroad.

This excursion was far more extensive and picturesque than any he had undertaken before. He travelled first to Paris, by way of Amsterdam and Brussels, and later to Genoa and Rome, by way of Ma.r.s.eilles. Except for the necessary sea voyages, most of the journey was made on foot. After staying in Rome for six months, hara.s.sed the entire time by malarial fever, he turned his face towards home. In order to escape the discomforts and perils of travel by sea, he decided to return to Paris overland, and walked from Rome to Florence in fourteen days. Finding his health improved by the regular exercise, he continued on foot over the Alps to Lyons, and subsequently to Paris and Copenhagen, where he arrived in the autumn of 1716. Holberg had gone abroad to satisfy his keen intellectual curiosity; he remained to study in foreign lands, and to observe life as a philosopher and artist. Without his seemingly aimless years of wandering, he might conceivably have become an able historian; he could hardly have developed his brilliant talent for satire and comedy.

When Holberg returned home, he found no vacancy in the faculty.

While waiting in penury for the death of some professor, he wrote one of his most successful works of scholars.h.i.+p, an Introduction to International Law. At last, in December, 1717, he inherited, as it were, the chair of metaphysics in the university, being thus forced to begin his academic career by teaching a subject that he held in contempt. Fortunately this situation was not permanent. In 1719, he became professor of Latin; in the following year, a member of the university council; later in life, professor of history, the subject he liked best; and finally he was elected treasurer of the corporation. Holberg was thus a.s.sociated all his life with academic pursuits. The greater part of his intellectual work was devoted to regular university duties and to the composition of scholarly treatises and moral essays, while the writing of the comedies that won him permanent fame formed but a short interlude in his busy life. He became a dramatist almost by chance.

In 1721, some influential citizens of Copenhagen decided that the time was ripe for establis.h.i.+ng native drama in Denmark. A company was formed under the direction of a cas.h.i.+ered French actor, Montaigu, who obtained royal permission to bring out plays in Danish. Holberg, having become well known by his mock-heroic poem Peder Paars, was at once invited to furnish the company with original comedies, and responded enthusiastically. For the next few months he wrote with almost incredible swiftness, and by the time the theatre was opened, on August 23, 1722, he had finished five of his best plays, among which were Jeppe of the Hill (Jeppe paa Bjerget) and The Political Tinker (Den politiske Kandestober).

During the six years in which the company eked out its precarious existence, Holberg produced twenty-six comedies, most of which were successfully performed. His literary fecundity seems the more remarkable when it is remembered that he had no Danish models.

The theatre was not well supported by the public. After the first year, the receipts of an evening amounted to no more than $13, and sometimes the actors were compelled to tell the spectators who had gathered that they could not afford to present the play to so small an audience. In 1728, the company was at last granted a royal subvention of about $2500 a year by Frederick VI, and it had begun to play under the proud t.i.tle of Royal Actors, when Copenhagen was swept by a devastating fire. The theatre itself was not destroyed, but the town was so badly impoverished that for the moment all forms of public amus.e.m.e.nt had to be discontinued. Furthermore, the pietists, to whose doctrines the crown prince was a devout adherent, a.s.serted that the fire was G.o.d's scourge for the wickedness of Copenhagen, the most impudent form of which, they believed, was the drama. Before conditions in the city were enough improved to warrant the resumption of his subsidy to the actors, the king died, on October 12, 1730. Under the reign of his pietistic successor, Christian VI (1730-1746), no dramatic performances of any sort were sanctioned; the theatre building was sold at auction, the company disbanded, and Holberg ceased writing plays.

In the year of Christian VI's accession to the throne, Holberg was made Professor of History at the university. Pietist though he was, the new monarch was an enthusiastic patron of scholars.h.i.+p, and during his reign Holberg devoted himself almost exclusively to research, particularly for his History of Denmark, on which his present reputation as an historian rests. The one important work of pure literature that he produced at this time was his Niels Klim's Subterranean Journey (1741), written in Latin, and published in Leipzig to evade the Danish censor. It is an account of a series of visits that Niels Klim pays to certain strange nations within the hollow of the earth. Like Robinson Crusoe, its partial prototype, it contains much pointed satire on the customs of contemporary society.

It was soon translated into most other languages of Europe, and it is one of the very few among Holberg's works that have been put into English in any form.

At the death of Christian VI, in 1746, the obscurantist character of the court immediately changed. One of the first forms of amus.e.m.e.nt to be restored was the Danish theatre. Although Holberg had no official connection with the actors, he seems to have agreed to advise them about their repertory, and soon his a.s.sociation with the stage revived his inteiest in dramatic composition. During the year 1751-52, he wrote six new plays, but they lacked the spirited criticism of contemporary society which gave life to his earlier work. They are either founded on Latin models, or are heavily didactic plays, in which the author's humor fails under the burden of the moral.

The latter part of Holberg's life was spent in peace and affluence.

His interests were more and more devoted to his large estates, and particularly to improving the conditions under which his own peasants labored. In 1747, he was elevated to the rank of baron, after bequeathing his estates to the crown to endow the old academy at Soroe. He died on January 28, 1754, and was buried in the abbey church of Soroe, beside the great Bishop Absalom.

The plays in this volume will give a fair idea of Holberg's best work. They are all domestic comedies of character, in which the foibles of some one central figure are held up to ridicule, particularly as they are revealed in his relations with a well-defined family group. The scene in such comedies, usually the home of a peasant or a member of the bourgeoisie, is pictured with uncompromising realism. Holberg insisted that his audiences should see everything that he saw. If a Danish peasant actually lay at times in a drunken stupor on a dunghill, he saw no reason why Jeppe should not appear on the stage in an equally disgusting condition.

If a peasant girl in life was not averse to simpering vulgarity, why should Lisbed talk any more circ.u.mspectly to Erasmus Monta.n.u.s?

Holberg, however, had none of the interest of the modern scientific naturalist in a.n.a.lyses of motive and conduct. His sense of fact was, therefore, picturesque rather than profound. Yet he never wasted his accurate realism upon insignificant things. Vulgar facts invariably led beyond themselves to situations of universal interest and significance.

"Jeppe of the Hill" is a very old story The original version is found in the "Arabian Nights," and it has been told over and over again. Shakespeare embodies it in "The Taming of the Shrew," and seven other versions occur in Elizabethan literature alone. This hackneyed farce, amplified by material from Biedermann's "Utopia,"

Holberg made the vehicle of profound delineation of character Dr.

Georg Brandes says of Jeppe, "All that we should like to know of a man when we become acquainted with him, and much more than we usually do know of men with whom we become acquainted in real life or in drama, we know of Jeppe. All our questions are answered."

[Footnote: "Om Ludvig Holbergs Jeppe paa Bjerget,"] We know not only how he has lived, but even how he will meet death. Jeppe possesses enough of the common stuff of human nature always to awaken comprehension and delight; yet he is more than an extraordinarily complete and convincing individual, and his story is more than an amusing farce. Widely prevalent social conditions of a past time are here expressed in human terms of lasting truth and vitality. In Jeppe the peasant of the eighteenth-century Sjaelland lives for all time.

The Political Tinker, while it contains no such deep study of personality as Jeppe of the Hill, is no less clearly a comedy of character and no less obviously a good human satire. In it the foibles of the central figure are displayed more definitely in their relation to the rest of his family. [Footnote: The play is probably founded upon the story of the political upholsterer which appears in an essay of The Tatler. For a general discussion of Holberg's relations to foreign literature, the reader is referred to The Comedies of Holberg, by O. J. Campbell, Jr. (Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, vol. iii, Harvard University Press, 1914).

This is the only full treatment of Holberg in English. Ed.] "The satire," says Holberg, in his introduction to the first published edition of the play, "is directed against those boasters among common people in free cities who sit in taverns and criticise the mayor and Council; they know everything and yet nothing.... I doubt if any one can show me a comedy more honorable and more moral....

The comedy, besides, is not less merry than moral, for it has kept spectators laughing from beginning to end, and for that reason, of all my comedies, it is played with the greatest profit for those concerned." The word "moral" as applied to this work ill.u.s.trates the somewhat unusual meaning which Holberg attaches to it. Though he is continually at pains to speak of his "moral" comedies, it is manners and not morals that he satirizes. He is interested, not so much in effecting a fundamental reform in the lives of his characters, as in giving them a little social sense. He preaches, not against distinct moral turpitude like hypocrisy and avarice, but against inordinate affection for lap-dogs (Melampe), pietistic objections to masked b.a.l.l.s {Masquerades}, and superst.i.tious belief in legerdemain (Witchcraft). Holberg voices the urbane humanistic spirit that characterized the eighteenth century at its best.

Erasmus Monta.n.u.s seems at first sight a mere farce, in which the author ridicules academic pedantry and the vapid formalism of logic as once taught at the University of Copenhagen. But it is much more than that. Holberg gives us a memorable series of genre paintings of Danish life of his day, and at the same time presents a situation of universal interest. Erasmus is a prig who has adopted some new ideas, not so much from righteous conviction as from the feeling that they will give him intellectual caste. His revolutionary theories raise an uproar in the village. Each apostle of the old order opposes them in his characteristic way, and Erasmus has not enough real faith within himself to prevail against the combined attacks of the Philistines; he renounces with oaths the a.s.sertions that the world is round. Still, there is nothing tragic in his renunciation, for we feel that he is as great a fool as any one in the play. Erasmus Monta.n.u.s is a pure comedy, in which the author's humor plays freely upon all the figures in the drama; and it is just because the characters rather than the action absorb our interest that we do not regard it as a farce. Professor Vilhelm Andersen correctly described it as a "Danish culture-comedy of universal significance."

Holberg is often called the Danish Moliere. It is true that he learned many lessons of technique from the great trench dramatist, and borrowed freely and often from his work; but he differs from Moliere both in the quality of his humor and in the spirit that animates his critical view of life. He might as justly be called the Danish Plautus, or the Danish Spectator. The truth is, not only that Holberg possessed a profoundly original comic spirit, but also that his work is clearly related to many dramatic and literary traditions besides those of French comedy, notably to the commedia dell'arte, and the essays of The Tatler and The Spectator.

Out of these various and diverse elements, nevertheless, he contrived to construct dramas at once original and national.

In a large sense, Holberg's comedies arc closely related to the rest of his work. His treatises, histories, essays, satires, and comedies are all diverse expressions of one definite purpose. Holberg's early life and natural cosmopolitan interests made him a citizen of eighteenth-century Europe, as a whole, and he strove steadily to bear the intellectual light of that urbane age to his native country, then backward in culture. Holberg--professor, scholar, and philosopher--seized with avidity the opportunity to write comedy, not from a desire to display his own versatility, or from an absorbing devotion to the drama as a form of art, but because he believed that through his plays he could fulfil most completely what he conceived to be his intellectual mission.

OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL, JR.

May 20, 1914

JEPPE OF THE HILL OR THE TRANSFORMED PEASANT [JEPPE PAA BIERGET]

A COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS 1722

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

JEPPE OF THE HILL, a peasant.

NILLE, his wife.

JACOB SHOEMAKER, an innkeeper.

BARON NILUS, lord of the district.

Secretary to the Baron.

ERIC, a lackey.

A Valet.

MAGNUS, the village gossip.

A Judge, two Lawyers, two Doctors, a Bailiff and his Wife, Lackeys, Retainers, and others.

ACTS I, IV, AND V

SCENE: A village road; on the left, Jeppe's house; on the right, Jacob Shoemaker's inn. The court in Act IV is held in the open, and a tree is used for the gallows in Act V.

ACT II

A bedroom in the Baron's castle.

ACT III

Dining-room in the same.

ACT I