Romantic Comedy as Religious Allegory: The Millennial Kingdom in Caspar Stieler's Die erfreuete Unschuld

Abstract

Romantic Comedy in Baroque Germany has usually been ignored or even tacitly maligned by scholars.' One gets the distinct impression that it is beneath the notice of the dignified profession of Germanistik to deal with works in which the protagonists get married at the end with every expectation of living happily ever after. Satirical comedy, like Gryphius' Peter Squentz, on the other hand, is seen to have a serious social function which sets it above its frivolous cousins. Additionally, the satirical comedy type has German roots and traditions. These nominal excuses--explicit or implicit in the accusations levelled at many German romantic comedies of the period-boil down to the notion that they are derivative, merely slavish imitations of a foreign fashion in trivial literature.2 Such statements only betray the regrettable xenophobic taint with which Germanistik has been burdened since before World War I, a prejudice which, fortunately, shows every sign of abating, in order to produce a scholarly climate in which German literature can proudly take its place among the European literatures and in the panEuropean traditions, abandoning the early chauvinism. In the case of romantic comedy, it is still necessary today to turn to the less prejudiced scholars of English, French, Italian, and Spanish literatures in order to find serious treatments of the romantic comedy as a genre, and particularly of the theoretical raison d'etre of the requisite happy ending. In the especially fruitful realm of English language theory of comedy one finds a tendency to elevate comedy, particularly Shakespearian or romantic comedy, to a level of cosmic significance not exceeded by that of tragedy. Joseph Campbell' and Northrop Frye,4 for instance, have tied comedy to archetypal myths and rituals of regeneration and