Baroque Comedy and the Stability of the State

Abstract

German Baroque dramatists employed various exempla to illustrate the instability of earthly existence. The damnation of the conceited Cenodoxus, the transformation of Cardenio's beloved into a skeleton and the downfall of the ambitious African queens Sophonisbe and Cleopatra all served to represent the worthlessness of temporal pursuits. Man's attempt to endure the calamities which would inevitably befall him was most frequently treated by Baroque tragedians. Indeed, Gryphius had held that the purpose of all tragedy was the presentation of the verganglichkeit menschlicher sachen.' In contrast, Baroque comedies were so diverse that their didactic function could not be reduced to a similarly convenient statement of intention. Comedy itself connoted several different types of plays in the seventeenth century ranging from the amusing antics of the actors in Gryphius's Herr Peter Squenz (1657) to the Christian martyrs of Bidermann's Philemon martyr (c. 1618). Accordingly, the lessons which comedies conveyed, be they social criticism or pious warnings, were just as varied as their plots. Among these numerous religious dramas and farces, three comedies on the legend of the peasant king-for-a-day stand out because of the thematic similarity to the vanitas theme of tragedy: Ludwig Hollonius's Somnium vitae humanae (1605); Jacob Masen's Rusticus imperans (1647-48) and Christian Weise's Ein wunderliches Schau-Spiel vom Niederliindischen Bauer (1685).2 The verganglichkeit menschlicher sachen is represented in these works by the commonplace seventeenth-century image of life as a dream from which man will awaken through death into eternal happiness or damnation. This adaptation of the tragic vanitas motif to comedy resulted, however, in its application to a practical worldly end. The demonstration of the transitoriness of human existence which had contributed to the pessimism in the tragedies of Gryphius and Lohenstein now acted as the means whereby courtly audiences received a moral and political education. Through an analysis of the comedies of Hollonius, Masen and Weise on the peasant king, it will be shown that the escapades of the unruly rustic did not so much induce spiritual reflection as suggest social reforms to strengthen the stability of the state. The legend of the peasant who fancied himself a king had traditionally been used for didactic purposes. Originally a political episode from the Arabian Nights, the tale was transferred into a European setting by the