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COMEDIES
COMEDIES LUDVIG HOLBERG JEPPE OF THE HILL THE POLITICAL TINKER ERASMUS MONTANUS
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY
OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL JR. PH.D.
Assistant Professor of English in the University of Wisconsin
AND
FREDERIC SCHENCK B. LITT. OXON.
Instructor in English in Harvard University
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL JR.
NEW YORK
1914
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 entitle 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
Marseilles. Except for the necessary sea voyages most of the
journey was made on foot. After staying in Rome for six months
harassed 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 scholarship 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 associated 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 establishing native drama in Denmark. A company
was formed under the direction of a cashiered 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 title 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 amusement had to be discontinued. Furthermore the
pietists to whose doctrines the crown prince was a devout adherent
asserted that the fire was God'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 scholarship 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 amusement
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 association 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 circumspectly to Erasmus Montanus?
Holberg however had none of the interest of the modern scientific
naturalist in analyses 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 illustrates 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
balls {Masquerades} and superstitious belief in legerdemain
(Witchcraft). Holberg voices the urbane humanistic spirit that
characterized the eighteenth century at its best.
Erasmus Montanus 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 assertions
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 Montanus 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
SCENE I
(Nille alone.)
NILLE. I hardly believe there's such another lazy lout in all the
village as my husband it's as much as I can do to get him up in the
morning by pulling him out of bed by the hair. The scoundrel knows
to-day is market-day and yet he lies there asleep at this hour of
the morning. The pastor said to me the other day "Nille you are
much too hard on your husband; he is and he ought to be the master
of the house." But I answered him "No my good pastor! If I should
let my husband have his way in the household for a year the gentry
wouldn't get their rent nor the pastor his offering for in that
length of time he would turn all there was in the place into drink.
Ought I let a man rule the household who is perfectly ready to sell
his belongings and wife and children and even himself for brandy?"
The pastor had nothing to say to that but stood there stroking his
chin. The bailiff agrees with me and says "My dear woman pay no
attention to the pastor. It's in the wedding-service to be sure
that you must honor and obey your husband but it's in your lease
which is more recent than the service that you shall keep up your
farm and meet your rent--a thing you can never do unless you haul
your husband about by the hair every day and beat him to his work."
I pulled him out of bed just now and went out to the barn to see how
things were getting along when I came in again he was sitting on a
chair asleep with his breeches--saving your presence--pulled on
one leg; so the switch had to come down from the hook and my good
Jeppe got a basting till he was wide awake again. The only thing he
is afraid of is "Master Eric" as I call the switch. Hey Jeppe you
cur haven't you got into your clothes yet? Would you like to talk
to Master Eric some more? Hey Jeppe! Come in here!
SCENE 2
(Enter Jeppe.)
JEPPE. I've got to have time to get dressed Nille! I can't go to
town like a hog without my breeches or my jacket.
NILLE. Scurvy-neck! Haven't you had time to put on ten pairs of
breeches since I waked you this morning?
JEPPE. Have you put away Master Eric Nille?
NILLE. Yes I have but I know mighty well where to find him again
if you don't step lively. Come here!--See how he crawls.--Come here!
You must go to town and buy me two pounds of soft soap here's the
money for it. But see here if you're not back on this very spot
inside of four hours Master Eric will dance the polka on your back.
JEPPE. How can I walk four leagues in four hours Nille?
NILLE. Who said anything about walking you cuckold? You run. I've
said my say once for all now do as you like. [Exit Nille.]
SCENE 3
JEPPE. Now the sow's going in to eat her breakfast while I poor
devil must walk four leagues without bite or sup. Could any man
have such a damnable wife as I have? I honestly think she's own
cousin to Lucifer. Folks in the village say that Jeppe drinks but
they don't say why Jeppe drinks: I didn't get as many blows in all
the ten years I was in the militia as I get in one day from my
malicious wife. She beats me the bailiff drives me to work as if I
were an animal and the deacon makes a cuckold of me. Haven't I good
reason to drink? Don't I have to use the means nature gives us to
drive away our troubles? If I were a dolt I shouldn't take it to
heart so and I shouldn't drink so much either; but it's a
well-known fact that I am an intelligent man; so I feel such things
more than others would and that's why I have to drink. My neighbor
Moens Christoffersen often says to me speaking as my good friend
"May the devil gnaw your fat belly Jeppe! You must hit back if you
want your old woman to behave." But I can't do anything to protect
myself for three reasons: in the the first place because I haven't
any courage; in the second because of that damned Master Eric
hanging behind the bed which my back can't think of without
blubbering; and thirdly because I am if I do say it who shouldn't
a meek soul and a good Christian who never tries to revenge
himself even on the deacon who puts one horn on me after another. I
put my mite in the plate for him on the three holy-days although he
hasn't the decency to give me so much as one mug of ale all the year
round. Nothing ever wounded me more deeply than the cutting speech
he made me last year: I was telling how once a savage bull that had
never been afraid of any man took fright at the sight of me; and he
answered "Don't you see how that happened Jeppe? The bull saw that
you had bigger horns than he so he didn't think it prudent to lock
horns with his superior." I call you to witness good people if
such words would not pierce an honorable man to the marrow of his
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