Ludvig Holberg, a Danish Playwright on the European Stage. Masquerade, Comedy, Satire by Bent Holm

Author:Bent Holm [Bent Holm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783990124802
Publisher: Hollitzer

BUT DOES HE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE RIGHT?

After Jeppe of the Hill, Holberg thus wrote another play set in the countryside, and again in the fictional mini-society of ‘the Hill’. The parents of the central character even share names with the couple in Jeppe of the Hill, but no other characteristics, apart from the fact that they are peasants, albeit in this instance competent and fairly well-to-do. Erasmus Montanus addresses the academic state of affairs at the University of Copenhagen, an institution with which the theatre presumably had no interest in further disputes – relations were already highly strained. At all events, the play was not staged until long after it had been written.

Erasmus Montanus draws inspiration from a number of theatre sources. The Sophist discussion of the child’s ‘duty’ to beat the parents recalls Aristophanes’ Clouds. Military enlistment by means of a trick is taken straight out of George Farquhar’s (1677–1707) The Recruiting Officer (1706), which Holberg might well have seen given that he was actually in London when the play opened. The lieutenant who brings it all to a conclusion by cutting the dramatic knot, recalls the official sent by the king at the end of Molière’s Tartuffe – although in Erasmus Montanus it is not the all-powerful monarch’s representative who intervenes as a deus ex machina, but the spokesman for natural rationality who disentangle the threads and puts things in their place. Holberg was, incidentally, no stranger to military affairs: his admired father had worked his way up to lieutenant and lieutenant colonel, and had also enrolled at the University of Siena. Building up expectations by means of the main character only being present in the words of other characters in Act 1 clearly draws on the technique employed in Tartuffe. At the same time, Erasmus can be read as a Molièresque misanthrope – without social intelligence and cutting a comic figure with his insistence on truth at the expense of love. Holberg later develops the device of immature academic pomposity in his novel about Niels Klim’s Journey Underground in which, moreover, the eponymous hero feels disparaged in inner and outer world alike.

There are various additional circumstances at work, with more reference to the stage than to reality. The idea that a student could take his betrothed to Copenhagen in order to marry her there has no correlation with reality. Students lived in a hall of residence: accommodation exclusively the preserve of men. The subject of marriage was not broached until the course of education had been completed, and preferably once the young man had secured employment. Nor could academics be recruited as solders. The details of the plot are simply designed so the play can follow the prototype based on the protagonist with a flaw that is some kind of obstacle to the wedding planned for the finale.

The process of conflict dissolution is painfully discordant – the protagonist is indisputably correct in his basic contention, but he is forced by physical violence to maintain the opposite of the truth so as not to be excluded from the community.

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