The vigor and popularity of drama in German lands in the sixteenth century is wholly beyond dispute. The remotest corners of the German language area, from Brussels to Vienna, from Lübeck to Brixen, from Riga, Königsberg, and Elbing in the northeast to Straßburg, Colmar, and Bern in the southwest, witnessed dramatic performances in German or in Latin by German authors and actors and before German-speaking audiences.(1) Goedecke lists well over a thousand dramatic titles for the sixteenth century, some printed, some performed.(2) Of Neo-Latin dramas alone, the names of no fewer than one hundred authors have survived and no fewer than twice that many texts.(3)
These astonishing statistics incline to be taken for granted in the scholarship, and no serious attempt at explanation for the sheer bulk of dramatic practice in the sixteenth century has been forthcoming. Hennig Brinkmann proposed a sociological interpretation of the character of sixteenth-century drama in Germany, unheroic, "genrehaft," focussed on the family-circle, in short, bourgeois, but he disregarded the magnitude of the institution in sixteenth-century German life.(4) To be sure, drama was soon brought into the media war which accompanied the Reformation, on both sides.(5) Reformers and Counter-Reformers alike recognized the utility of drama for the indoctrination of the young.(6) The propagandists did not, however, create the German stage of the sixteenth century but rather employed an existing medium: school drama antedates the conflict by decades and popular, festival drama antedates it by centuries. The importance of the issues of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation certainly contributed to the frequency and intensity with which the medium was employed. That would account for the institutionalization of drama in cities and towns which might otherwise have received only an occasional wandering troupe of players.(7) Such explanations, however, remain ultimately fragmentary and leave the proportions of sixteenth century German drama somewhat of a mystery.
While largely disregarding the dimensions of the phenomenon, scholarly attention to sixteenth century German drama has otherwise not been slack. The comprehensive literary histories, east and west, have treated the subject with varying emphases.(8) Literary histories focussing on German drama, of course, cannot forego these years, although they are usually given relatively short shrift.(9) Ample monographic work has, however, made up for that, and may be found listed in the usual bibliographies.(10) Standing out from the crowd on such lists are the works of Expeditus Schmidt,(11) Max Herrman,(12) and H. H. Borchert,(13) who inclined as much to consider performance history as literary questions. The broad scholarly tradition has been maintained by the likes of Derek van Abbé,(14) Jean Lebeau,(15) and Wolfgang F. Michael.(16) And specific issues, chiefly related to the social history of the Reformation era and its poets, continue to attract learned attention.(17)
Comedy, as a subset of German Renaissance drama, assumes an agreement on questions of genre which has by no means been reached. Taken broadly, to mean drama with humorous content, satirical posture, and a generally happy outcome, comedy has its own tradition of German scholarship emanating as much from the importation of Terence into the schools of the sixteenth century(18) as from indigenous forms such as the Fastnachtspiel.(19)
Theoretical discussion on the nature of comedy accompanies this tradition from the outset,(20) the extravagant claims of later critics to the contrary notwithstanding.(21) The modern discussion is available in an anthology edited by Reinhold Grimm and Klaus L. Berghan,(22) and has been pursued further by Hans Joachim Schrimpf(23) and Wolfgang Trautwein.(24)
As subtle and differentiated as the theory of comedy has become in modern times, it is at its simplest and most influential in the sixteenth century. As long as comedy is understood narrowly, as the deliberate imitation of Roman models, less Plautus and more Terence, the theory makes two overarching demands on comedy: that it moralize and that it orate. The purpose of comedy is to hold vice up to ridicule, and its means is rhetoric.
Terence comes on the scene in the late fifteenth century as the "teacher of manners and virtue": thus the commentator Jacob Locher in 1499 and later, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Luther.(25) It was in positive distrust of Plautus, and later, of Aristophanes, as he became more popular, that Terence "offered safer and more familiar ground upon which schoolmasters and critics could expatiate on art, on manners, and on morals."(26)
Terence was considered particularly useful not just for the relative tameness of his plots but because his latinity was considered pure and appropriate to the day-to-day requisites of speaking Latin in the schools.(27) The standards of latinity implied by these qualities, while utilitarian, were not regarded as modest. On the contrary, German humanists as early as Heinrich Bebel (1496 and 1499) heap praise on the brilliance of the style, and Erasmus lent his towering authority toward the establishment of Terence as the stylistic norm.(28) Terence and his commentators marched in triumph over the school drama of the sixteenth century, borne by the requirements of the curriculum.
The heart and soul of that curriculum was rhetoric. This may appear to be a peculiarly medieval holdover in the bosom of the Renaissance, but it was most certainly not so perceived by the humanists who promulgated the new eloquence. In fact, most of the leading propagandists of humanism specifically target the "grammaticasters" (Pico) and "sophists" of the previous age, as they saw it, as perverters of "true eloquence."(29) The humanists saw their scholastic predecessors as formalistic, abstract, intellectual, technical, "logical," and metaphysical, and themselves to be opposed to them at every point of this array. " 'The object of the will,' Petrarch maintained, 'is to be good; that of the intellect is truth. It is better to will the good than to know the truth'" (Gray 501).
Although the points of contention, "truth," "eloquence," "grammar," "rhetoric," "philosophy," and their meaning vary in this rather one-sided debate, the humanists persistently defined their position by contrast to rationalism. When Erasmus seeks to translate the logos of the Johannine gospel, anticipating the agonies of Goethe's Faust in the same task, he rejects verbum for much the same reason as Faust and chooses instead sermo, "because through him God, who in his own nature cannot be comprehended through any reasoning, wished to become known to us."(30) Not the syllogism but eloquence leads to divine truth. "Man imitates the Logos in oratio, not ratio," and Erasmus "seeks the triumph of grammar and rhetoric over logic."(31)
This posture was assumed by the German humanists from their Italian models and Erasmus wholesale. Melanchthon, whose authority in the Protestant north may even have exceeded that of Erasmus, picked up an old debate in which Pico seemed to be repudiating "rhetoric" in favor of "philosophy." The problem, Melanchthon concludes, is one of definition: what Pico calls "philosophy," Melanchthon calls "eloquence" and they are both, after Cicero, "Wisdom speaking copiously" (Gray 508-510).
The importance of this conviction among the humanists cannot be overstated, both for what it opposed and what it sought to cultivate. "The humanists' stand on eloquence implied an almost incredible faith in the power of the word" (Gray 503). When Renaissance humanists held Terence, or any other authority for that matter, up as a model of style and as a great teacher of rhetoric, their sites were set at the highest imaginable goals. Understanding this fundamental fact of intellectual life in sixteenth-century Germany goes some distance in dispelling possible misconceptions about the function of rhetorical analysis of any literary expression, but especially of comedy. When, therefore, Melanchthon designates Terence's Andrian as of the deliberative kind, he is, to be sure, classifying it within the universe of rhetoric as the highest of the types, the others being "judicial" and "demonstrative." But he is also elevating the play as a teacher: "Comedy is nothing unless it is the image of human counsels and events." Every scene of a play may be classified according to one or other of the types, or analyzed along the lines of an oration, teaching all along what the young need to know about rhetoric.(32) To take every moment of a comedy and determine its adherence to the conventions or structures of rhetoric must seem to a modern a highly formalistic, indeed rationalistic exercise of altogether scholastic character. To the Renaissance humanist, however, this exercise partook of the highest good.
The theory of comedy in the sixteenth-century German schools was, of course, more detailed, although perhaps not more complex than admonitions to moral behavior and instruction in the art of speech. Until the absorption of Aristotle's Poetics in the middle of the century, the Terence commentators held the field without competition. They addressed a broad range of particulars beyond the formalities of rhetoric, such as spectacle, appropriate matter ("faults, counsels, manners, actions, dangers, unexpected accidents"), social level ("personages...in comedy are of less account and plebian, in tragedy noble and royal"), style ("comedy is humble and popular, ...tragedy serious and removed from vulgar diction"), ending ("in comedy ... joyful, in tragedy dreadful"), and purpose ("... of comedy in general, as likewise with other common forms of poetry, is to imitate aptly and to teach with delight").(33) None of this was very new nor was it seriously challenged. Insofar as these observations and prescriptions build a theory of comedy and insofar as Terence and his imitators dominate the school drama of the sixteenth century right up to and beyond the publication of the Terentius Christianus of Schonaeus in 1591, one can safely speak of a harmony of theory and practice in the comedy of sixteenth-century Germany, at least in the schools.
Although the sixteenth century witnessed some uncomfortable speculation on the cause and nature of laughter, this seemingly obvious and common characteristic of comedy played a very small role in theory.(34) Only on rare occasions might one or other critic dare to suggest that "the chief purpose of comedy was to reduce the entire theater to inextinguishable laughter."(35) Terence and his high purpose in the hands of the humanists may not have been particularly suited to hilarity. That does not mean, however, that hilarity was not incorporated into the performances nonetheless. The source, however, was not Roman antiquity as the humanists understood it, but the indigenous traditions over against which they had such ambivalent feelings.
Early evidence from the printed record (1486) suggests that Terence was first received in the vernacular in a curious combination of stilted German speech and elegant or comical costume straight out of the popular theater.(36) The schoolmasters themselves, when they started observing the directions they received from Luther and Melanchthon, certainly learned from the popular traditions around them.(37) And those traditions had ample room for hilarity.
The unhappy rebuke of a Victorian English critic seems, unintentionally, to describe the situation of the popular theater fairly: "Old German comedy never attained to anything higher than farce. Bodily deformities, indecencies of all kinds, beatings, scoldings and curses, comic surnames, speeches in foreign languages, verbal misunderstandings, literal interpretations of figurative expressions, bombastic speeches--these were the means by which the wit of this age satisfied the taste of a laughter-loving audience,"(38) all of which was calculated to induce hilarity, "to reduce the entire theater to inextinguishable laughter."
German critics of the same period were no more comfortable with the broad, farcical character of the popular theater. To honor the triumphal entry of Charles V and Philipp II into Brussels on 1 April 1549, the citizens of that town threw a performance on a great stage erected in front of the city hall. One Dr. Franz Kram was present and reported on the events to his Duke. A Prologue praised the Emperor and the Prince and welcomed all the Spaniards who were now visiting the city. Thereupon two plays were performed, in which wives successfully cuckolded their husbands, hid their lovers, and walk off with everybody's trousers, wearing them finally as hats: "Deß lachten nicht allein die manspersonen, sondern auch weiber vnd junckfrawen, derer ein grosse anzahl und gewißlich nicht die geringsten alda waren und diesem spyl zuesahen." The Wilhelminian German scholar who published the report considered the event as sure sign of the "Verfall der Sitten in den Niederlanden im sechzehnten Jahrhundert," and concludes by suggesting: "Für die `Frei Bühne' sind die mitgeteilten Stoffe vielleicht brauchbar."(39)
It is not easy to explain the intellectual elite's ambivalent uneasiness with farce then, now, or back in the sixteenth century. One plausible explanation comes from a set of relationships which were probably still clear as the Middle Ages came to a close and were beginning to reorganize in different constellations in the Renaissance, those which kept comedy in the realm of the sacred.
A sensitive Erasmus scholar of the present day, links farce, laughter, and comedy with theology, ecstacy, and the eschatological.(40) Farce reverses the conventions of day-to-day life, making the fool into the sole possessor of wisdom. His function in the mystery play was to interrupt, as it seems, and ridicule actor and audience. But "only if you appreciated the mystery, did you understand the joke." Theologically, role reversals become "a mimesis of the inversions which the sacred rites memorialize and confer; namely, the divinization of man through the inhominization of God" (Boyle 114). If you appreciated that mystery, you understood why the fool was wise in his folly.
Laughter, the belly-laughter provoked by the ridiculous on a grand scale, "is a mime, however lowly, of the ecstatic seizure which is a transcendent response to the acts of salvation" (Boyle 28). Laughter in general, but heartfelt belly-laughter in particular, transports the subject momentarily out of the normal limitations of measured time and space, and imitates the transport of a mystic. To that extent, it is sacred or like unto the sacred.
And comedy knows that reversals of fortune will plague the hero until that last reversal, the catastasis, is overcome and a happy resolution awaits all,(41) as death and a resolution beyond death awaits the faithful in the eschata. "Erasmus needed no instruction in the alliance of laughter and the sacred, or in its eschatological context" (Boyle 29).
The consequences of this analysis, if it is accurate and more broadly applicable, point to a need to revise the story of the secularization of culture in early modern times. The traditional histories of German drama have long distinguished between "geistliche Dramen" and "weltliche." This asserts a process of secularization begun long before Renaissance ideas penetrated very widely in the North. If hilarity was, by definition, allied to the sacred, then the so-called "weltliche Dramen" of the Middle Ages, laced as they were with farce, were little more than a variation of their religious counterparts. If farce, wherever it appeared, had mystery, ecstacy, and eschatology hovering behind and over it, then it could never claim autonomy.
When recognizably modern comedy--modern because it was ancient and not medieval--comes on the scene in the fifteenth century it was soon coopted by rhetoric. Renaissance rhetoric in the North, especially in the hands of such humanists as Erasmus and Melanchthon, was not a secular enterprise, distinctly formalist and rationalistic, but rather what later times might have called "aesthetic." But neither was it ecstatic, mysterious in the theological sense of the Middle Ages, nor particularly sacred. Renaissance rhetoric was a propaedeutic for a moral life, and humanism was available to anyone with a will to study. It had nothing to do with grace.
The historical, the immanent, the this-worldly characterizes all versions of Renaissance humanism, even the most Christian, pious, and northern. Transcendence seems thoroughly alien to it. It is surely some such intuition on Luther's part that underlies his attack on Erasmus as "nicht fromm." When comedy comes into the service of humanism, eschatology does not join it, neither does mystery, nor ecstacy. Popular manifestations of drama in the same era seem still to cling to the jocus serius of the medieval mystery. But the borrowings of the schoolmasters from these very manifestations seem to have stripped the sacred from them, while keeping the "religious" (pious, moral, catechetical) in their own works. The secularization of German drama would then originate neither in the slapstick farces of the late medieval country towns, nor in the tableaux vivants honoring princely visits, nor even in the polemical dramas of Reformation politics, but in the subordination of a fundamentally ecstatic art form to a pedagogic function. Released from the sacred, though still tied to the moral, comedy could find a place at court or in town in the subsequent century, and begin a history as a more or less autonomous art form.
Let this assessment stand not as a judgment but as an hypothesis. Adducing the categories of "sacred" and "secular" is an attempt to deal fairly with a highly problematical phenomenon: sixteenth-century German comedy, a mass medium in an age before mass media. The works are, by and large, not easily accessible to the modern reader. The aesthetic is fundamentally alien, or has become so. And the corpus lacks talents like Machiavelli, Ariosto, or even Bruno, and, a fortiori, a genius like Shakespeare. The absence of the bright light cast by such figures, shining onto the modern stage, makes the task of evaluating the German counterpart infinitely more difficult. The evidence becomes murky and hard to interpret. The vigor and sophistication of the present discussion of European Renaissance comedy, excluding Germany, is altogether enviable.(42) The relative modernity of the works makes the enterprise of modern criticism, however, much more plausible. The German corpus, if not sui generis, looks to its own time and does little to welcome spectators from the future.
The story of comic theory in the same period, however, reads very differently. German humanists participate in the discussion from its earliest moments in the fifteenth century, and take their place among the authorities in the sixteenth. The discussion is wholly international, chiefly in Latin, and would suggest the existence of a European res publica litteraria. Insofar as not only Latin but a common rhetoric unites the learned such an impression is accurate. But the practice of comedy in the various countries is another matter.
To take the theoreticians at their word and abide by their precepts in the investigation of the works leaves the student comfortably in the rule-based environment of the critics. But processes were at work which the theoreticians did not understand and which took the dramatic forms in a variety of surprising directions. New sets of questions need to be asked of this vast body of evidence. "Sacred" and "secular" is only one such set.
NOTES
1. Wilhelm Creizenach: Geschichte des neueren Dramas, III. Bd. Halle 1923. p. 140, 165-66, 173-176, 404-5.
2. Grundrisz, II. Bd. Dresden 1886. p. 131-148, 328-408, 519-527, 545-557.
3. Leicester Bradner: A Checklist of Original Neo-Latin Dramas by Continental Writers Printed before 1650. In: Publications of the Modern Language Association 58 (1943) p. 621-633.
4. Anfänge des modernen Dramas in Deutschland. Versuch über die Beziehung zwischen Drama und Bürgertum im 16. Jahrhundert. Jena 1933. (= Jenaer Germanistische Forschungen. 22) p. 42, 50, 53.
5. Hugo Holstein: Die Reformation im Spiegelbilde der dramatischen Litteratur. Halle 1886. (= Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte. 14-15.) p. 189-190, 219-220 for the examples of the less well-known anti-Lutheran polemical dramas.
6. Thomas I. Bacon: Martin Luther and the Drama. Amsterdam 1976. (= Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur. 25.); Jean Lebeau: Théologie luthérienne et Théatre: Le "Jeu Divin" de la Justification. In: Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses 63 (1983) p. 33-47, esp. p. 33-35; William J. Young: Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Chicago 1959. p. 189; Johannes Müller: Das Jesuitendrama in den Ländern deutscher Zunge vom Anfang (1555) bis zum Hochbarock (1665), I Bd. Augsburg 1930. (= Schriften zur deutschen Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft. 7-8) p. 5-8.
7. James L. McConaughy: The School Drama. New York 1913. (= Teachers College Columbia University Contributions to Education. 57.) p. 49. Some fifty-eight German cities and towns had schools with drama prescribed in the curriculum.
8. Joachim G. Boeck, et al. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von 1480 bis 1600. In: Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, IV. Bd. Berlin 1961. p. 80-92, bibliography p. 92-93; Hans Rupprich. Vom späten Mittelalter bis zum Barock. In: DeBoor/Newald. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, IV. Bd. München 1970-1973. Erster Teil, p. 265, 269-272, 276, 286, 626-651; Zweiter Teil, p. 312-391.
9. R. F. Arnold. Das deutsche Drama. München 1925. p. 48-106, 212-163; Walter Hinck. Handbuch des deutschen Dramas. Düsseldorf 1980. p. 31-45 with bibliography and notes p. 529-34.
10. For example, Josef Körner: Bibliographisches Handbuch des deutschen Schrifttums. Bern 1966. p. 129-133, 160-165.
11. Die Bühnenverhältnisse des deutschen Schuldramas und seiner volkstümlichen Ableger im sechzehnten Jahrhundert. Berlin 1903. (Forschungen zur neueren Literaturgeschichte. 24).
12. Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance. Berlin 1914. Controversial.
13. Das europäische Theater im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance. Leipzig 1935.
14. Drama in Renaissance Germany and Switzerland. Melbourne 1961.
15. Salvator Mundi. L'"Éxemple" de Joseph dans le Théâtre allemand au XVIe Siècle. Nieuwkoop 1977. (= Bibliotheca Humanistica et Reformatorica. 20), [reviewed in: Renaissance Quarterly 32 (1979) p. 128-29].
16. Das deutsche Drama der Reformationszeit. Bern/Frankfurt/Nancy 1984 [reviewed by Adalbert Elschenbroich. In: Germanistik 26 (1985) p. 114-5].
17. For example, Thomas W. Best: Eccius Dedolatus. A Reformation Satire. Lexington 1971 (= Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. 1.); Barbara Könneker: Die Deutsche Literatur der Reformationszeit. München 1975; Paul F. Casey: Paul Rebhun. A biographical Study. Stuttgart 1986.
18. Max Herrmann: Terenz in Deutschland bis zum Ausgang des 16. Jahrhunderts. Berlin 1893 (= Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte. III. 1.).
19. Karl Holl: Geschichte des deutschen Lustspiels. Leipzig 1923. p. 1-77; Eckehard Catholy: Das Fastnachtspiel des Spätmittelalters. Gestalt und Funktion. Tübingen 1961. (= Hermaea. N.F. 8) and: Das deutsche Lustspiel vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende der Barockzeit. Stuttgart 1969.
20. Marvin T. Herrick: Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana 1964. (= Illinois Studies in Language and Literature. 34).
21. Otto Rommel: Komik und Lustspieltheorie. In: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 21 (1943) p. 252-253.
22. Wesen und Form des Komischen im Drama. Darmstadt 1975. (= Wege der Forschung. 62).
23. Komödie und Lustspiel. Zur terminologischen Problematik einer geschichtlich orientierten Gattunstypologie. In: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 97 (1978) p. 152-183.
24. Komödientheorien und Komödie. Ein Ordnungsversuch. In: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 27 (1983) p. 86-123.
25. Herrmann: Terenz in Deutschland. p. 12, 20.
26. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 5.
27. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 215.
28. Herrmann: Terenz. p. 11.
29. Except as noted, the following argument adheres to Hannah H. Gray: Renaissance Humanism: the Pursuit of Eloquence. In: Journal of the History of Ideas 29 (1963) p. 497-514.
30. Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle: Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology. Toronto 1977. p. 23.
31. Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle: Christening Pagan Mysteries. Erasmus in Pursuit of Wisdom. Toronto 1981. p. 18.
32. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 6-7, 14-15.
33. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 81.
34. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 39-57.
35. Thus Victor Faustus in his 1522 Terence edition. See Herrmann: Terenz in Deutschland. p. 13.
36. Herrmann: Terenz in Deutschland. p. 18-20; Borcherdt: Das deutsche Theater. p. 184.
37. Friedrich Michael: Das Mittelalter und sein Ausklang. In: Das deutsche Drama. Hrsg. von Robert F. Arnold. p. 58.
38. Alfred Bates: German Drama. London & New York 1903. (= The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization. 10.) p. 9.
39. Theodor Distel: Inhalt zweier, 1549 in Brüssel aufgeführte Theaterstücke. In: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renaissance-Literatur. N.F. 1 (1887/88) p. 354-359.
40. Boyle: Christening Pagan Mysteries. p. 28. Except as noted, the following argument proceeds from Boyle's interpretation of Folly, pp. 27-29 and notes pp. 111-115.
41. Herrick: Comic Theory. p. 119-121.
42. Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella: Comparative Critical Approaches to Renaissance Comedy. Ottowa 1986. (= Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation. 9).