WORK AND WORLD

The handle of Holberg’s cane has been preserved. It represents a bird, its beak pecking the nose of a fool’s mask on its own breast, illustrating the maxim: Nosce te ipsum – know thyself. The figure is also known as ‘the bird of self-knowledge’. It is quite literally searching its own heart, which wears a fool’s face. This tenet constitutes pivotal point, the point of orientation in Holberg’s path and productivity, the grip and stanchion underwriting his pilgrimage through life and art. But the image is not unequivocal. While Holberg stresses self-knowledge as prerequisite for an understanding of reality, he also questions – in a consistently dialectical way – the self itself, vividly depicting its instability and relativity. This interplay is a fundamental dynamic of his pen.

The writing and the reality are in a mutual give-and-take relationship. The concept of reality is largely a matter of interpretation. The biographical sketch below will therefore also indicate the themes and areas of focus that function as prisms in the relationship between pen and preconditions.

Ludvig Holberg was born in the dynamic Norwegian commercial centre of Bergen in the double-monarchy Denmark-Norway. His father, Christian Nielsen Holberg (c.1620–1686), came from the peasantry, had a military career, including active service with, for example, Venetian and Maltese armies, rising through the ranks to the position of lieutenant colonel in charge of the Bergen defences. He died when his son was but an infant; but Holberg later described his father, with obvious admiration, as an adventurous man. Holberg’s mother, Karen Pedersdatter Lem (1647–1695), was the grandchild of Ludvig Hansen Munthe (1593–1649), Bishop of Bergen.

Having graduated from the University of Copenhagen, Holberg expanded his intellectual and cultural horizons and expertise by undertaking several trips abroad. He spent time in Amsterdam during 1704–1705, purely for the experience and sensations; in 1706–1708 he and a well-heeled friend travelled to England, where he studied the new ideas current in Oxford at the time while supporting himself by giving private language and music lessons; 1708–1709 he travelled in Germany, working as mentor for the young son of a learned professor; in 1714–1716 he went to France and Italy, also with the aim of furthering his studies. He describes how students in Paris would queue up in the mornings outside the Mazarine library to be the first that day to read Pierre Bayle’s (1647–1706) Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–1697), which ventured to relate God to the evil in the world, and how in Rome he tried in vain to gain access to the heretical work. In Rome he saw commedia dell’arte during the carnival. His travels were undertaken on foot, hundreds of kilometres, and at one point during a bout of malaria he had contracted. In 1725–1726, by now a relatively well-established intellectual, he undertook his second Romanesque journey, this time something in the nature of a specific theatre tour, main destination: Paris.

Holberg’s literary undertaking went through fictional, historical and philosophical phases. Even though his posterity has largely connected his name with his plays, his work in the fields of history and moral philosophy was also pioneering. In fact, works of history made up half of his – enormous – output. As indicated, watertight bulwarks will not be placed between, for example, comic and philosophic areas of his literary output; themes in the more contemplative texts, which can elaborate upon and clarify statements and conflicts in the plays, will be deployed on the field.

Holberg saw fiction – expressing oneself through “digtning, fortællinger og lignelser”³ (writing, stories and parables) – as a way of ‘moralising’: critical reasoning on human behaviour. He set out one approach to this in his 1716 publication Introduktion til naturens og folkerettens kundskab (Introduction to the theory of the law of nature and of nations), underpinned by a modern secular philosophy of right and a corresponding view of human nature, with substantial reference to the work of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) and their theories of natural law and the law of nations. A general theme in Holberg’s analysing literary output is the view of fashions and conventions as secondary constructs, in the face of which ‘nature’ is claimed to be a more stable base. Human behaviour, which is controlled by all sorts of norms ascribed authoritative weight, will therefore fundamentally amount to a fiction – and thus ultimately constitute a form of theatre.

Holberg’s more regular academic position was, after 1717, as professor at the University of Copenhagen, first teaching – much against his inclination – metaphysics and logic, then oratory and classical Latin literature. Eventually, in 1730, he was promoted to teaching his actual subject: history. In 1735–1736 he was in addition rector of the university. As ‘quaestor’ – an administrative official in charge of revenue and expenditure – he subsequently handled the finances of the institution, with great pecuniary skill. This was a job with no lecture-room responsibilities, which was not unwelcome given that teaching was neither Holberg’s aspiration nor his area of expertise – on the contrary, he was known as an entirely mediocre teacher and lecturer.

In 1719, the lengthy comic epic Peder Paars, written in alexandrines with inspiration taken from Don Quijote as a Grotesque parody of the Homeric-Virgilian epic and the lavish Baroque writing style, launched what Holberg called his “poetiske raptus”⁴ (poetic rapture, in the sense of outburst, frenzy): a frenetic comic-satiric productivity that also encompassed philosophical satirical poems. Peder Paars created a sensation. The epic put Holberg on a collision course with the mythological implications of the Baroque. In terms of storyline, it is close to Virgil’s Aeneid, but taking place in a very simple setting on a small and backward Danish island, Anholt, a micro-society with all the essential institutions in miniature, where the eponymous hero, an artless shopkeeper, is stranded on his voyage. The intervention of the gods is played out in a Grotesquely parodic register as a frontal collision between an older and a modern perception of reality. In form, the poem referenced popular genres such as the printed broadside – in itself an ingredient of the cavorting with references, masks and fictions in which Holberg indulged with great relish and ingenuity.

Holberg here demonstrated a talent for satire and character delineation, however the poem created quite a scandal. Satire as technique and strategy was alien and unfamiliar. The inclination was to view it as persiflage, with a specific and not general target, an accusation against which the satirist continually had to defend himself. The Grotesque depiction of fundamental social structures mirrored in a microcosmos nearly cost the writer dear. The owner of Anholt, one of the realm’s extremely mighty men, lodged a complaint with the king in which he called for the book to be burned by the executioner. One accusation in the charge of general subversive activities was a perceived contempt for the literature of Antiquity. The case ended up being dismissed, but that it had been brought at all was a serious matter. The next symptom of the ‘rapture’ was four “Skæmtedigte” (lit.: jestful poems), satires in which Holberg took a critical look at the contemporaneous position on, for example, gender roles, and also displayed an outlook on life and human nature that points to futility as a condition of existence – to such an extent that he almost burst the demarcated framework of the poem. In 1722 Holberg looked to a different creative medium in which he would be able to expand his thematics, and now in three dimensions: in the setting of the new playhouse, where his poetic rapture reached a frenetic tempo.

Holberg personally was of the opinion that he had laid the foundation of Danish drama – or at least the comic part of it – per se. This is true in the sense of professional theatre. Previously, church and school drama had featured as a didactic project in which not least humanist and in particular Lutheran virtues were to be trained.

Karrig Nidding (Stingy Miser), a play by Latin school (: academic secondary school) headmaster Hieronimus Justesen Ranch (1539–1607) in approximately 1600 – making it a contemporary of William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Hamlet – represents a refreshingly original contribution to the genre, written as it was for amateurs in the Danish school. The play is a farce-like comedy of character, including a comical pair of servants, in five Acts, drawing particular inspiration from Aulularia by Plautus (c.254–c.184 BC). Unlike Plautus’ miser, however, Ranch’s is a wealthy man whose miserliness makes life a misery for all and sundry, especially the servants and his beautiful wife Jutta, despite a store cupboard bulging with hams, pork and bread. His pathological meanness leads him to lock everything away and leave his estate for a while, taking the keys to the larder with him, in order to subsist by begging. In walks merry Jep Skald, who has his pleasure of the wife, breaks open all the locks and has them changed; clad in Nidding’s first-class outfits, he now acts the part of master of the house. When Nidding returns, compelled by a dream in which a beggar has usurped his place, the plot machinations are played out where no one will recognise him, but instead threaten to give him a thrashing. Nidding becomes confused and begins to wonder if this is even his own home. Discovering that his keys do not fit the locks, he is convinced he must have dreamt that he is the master of the household; wearing Jep Skald’s beggar cloak he sets forth to find his estate and his wife! Underneath the comic plot and the horseplay, we can quite clearly see the Shrovetide-farce motif with its battle between carnival and Lenten fast.

Another example – not in the school play tradition – is Grevens og friherrens komedie (c.1678; The Comedy of the Count and the Baron) by nobleman Mogens Skeel (1650–1694); the play is a tough satire on the new nobility, which was created by the absolute monarchy in 1671 and considered by the old nobility to be a bunch of upstarts. The somewhat trivial plot – based on the French model – is divided into five Acts, revolves around the newly-minted Baron Klingenbeutel (: the clanking purse), to whom the new Count and Countess would like to see their daughter married – even though she loves a reliable, but untitled squire. The Baron, meanwhile, has acquired his title by means of trickery. The quick-witted pair of servants hatch a plot against the Baron, he swallows the bait, and his daughter ends up with the man of her choice. The play, which circulated in transcriptions, was not intended for performance, nor is it a masterpiece of literature or drama.

In short: before Holberg arrived on the scene, a quantifiable Danish tradition of playwriting only existed in the form of sporadic preambles.

Besides members of the French artists’ colony in Copenhagen, actors in the new Danish theatre were recruited from students who had gleaned some stage experience when they were pupils at the Latin school. Meanwhile, their university hinterland did not look favourably upon this ‘frivolous’ activity. In his “rapture”, Holberg penned play after play in record time: a total of twenty-six between 1722 and 1727. The main source of inspiration was Molière, with the plot structured around a foolish protagonist – Holberg’s versions usually drawn with rather Grotesque lines – plus the comedy of Antiquity, particularly Plautus, and commedia dell’arte, the Italian masked comedy with its robust and disrespectful jesting. The plays are often set in a universe peopled by the bourgeoisie and artisans of Copenhagen. Holberg swiftly developed a regular gallery of types: Jeronimus, Leonard, Magdelone, Leander, Leonora, Henrik, Pernille, Arv. Stock characters, but with a wide variety of individuals within the categories: parents, lovers, comic servants, and so forth. In the same way, the localities – the stage design – were standardised settings for the action, without adhering too strictly to the actual logistics of the fiction; the realistic mindset of his posterity has liked to characterize this particular feature as ‘sloppiness’ on Holberg’s part. The point here is that in Holberg’s day no contract had been made with the audience stating that the fiction was real – an idea that first became current later in the century. Holberg was more concerned with probability and familiarity. A flying dragon, therefore, is only an option as parody.

The fruits of Holberg’s “poetic rapture”, including the plays, were published under the pseudonym “Hans Mikkelsen, priviligeret hvidtølsbrygger udi den stad Kalundborg” (Hans Mikkelsen, licensed brewer in the city of Kalundborg), ostensibly a worthy man living in the (real) city of Kalundborg. When the plays started being published in 1723, they were supplied with a preface written by the learned ‘Just Justesen’ – another of Holberg’s masks, and a man who had also written scholarly comments and annotations to Peder Paars and the verse satires – in defence of the performance stage that, for religious reasons, was a controversial topic at the time.

So, the purpose underlying the project was to ‘moralise’: to take a critical look at human behaviour, from a belief that exposure of irrationality and foolishness had a therapeutic effect, that satire operated “som en Chirurgisk Kniv, der heeler naar den skiær”⁵ (like a surgical knife, healing as it cuts). At the same time, the enormity of ludicrousness contained its own fascinating wonder. Grotesque comedy was a vital necessity: energy and survival strategy rolled into one. Social and psychological satire, it should be added, had to be developed with an eye to entertainment value. Theatre was also a matter of box-office business.

In addition to the comedies of character, of intrigue, of manners, and so forth, written in the 1720s, the six plays Holberg wrote in his later years also show a more didactic-allegoric approach to the scripts, plus a single heroic-serious drama. By and large, however, everything is about making a fool of others or being the one made to look a fool, about the strange and wonderful interplay between fiction and reality. Knowing oneself, which, on the face of it, is the be-all and end-all, involves a critical ironic eye for the reality in which this ‘self’ is located. The theme references the playfully dialectical Socratic method; insomuch as Holberg had heroes, then the ironist Socrates (489–399) was one of them. Socrates challenged people via questions that forced the interlocutor to see the seemingly obvious – and ultimately his- or herself – in a different light. “Thi, hvis Mennesker ikke først lærer at kende sig selv, er det umueligt for dem at komme til noget grundigt Videnskab”⁶ (For if people do not first learn to know themselves, it is impossible for them to reach any profound insight) states Holberg in a portrait of the philosopher – which has undertones of self-portrait. Irony is dialogic, involves the other party, provokes dizziness.

Holberg’s satirical exposures of various forms of (self)delusion and affectation are rendered in harmony with the view of civilisation as convention and construct. They go from the practices and superstition of the peasantry to the ridiculous ambitions of the bourgeoisie and the ritual self-promotion of the elite, exhibited with merciless mockery – albeit under the disarming mask of comedy – as theatricality. Side-by-side with the theme of reason and rigour, his artistic – and philosophical – universe accommodates a deep-rooted perception of inconstancy as condition and of madness as dynamic necessity. Seen in this perspective, constancy is, in a word, illusion, and stasis is a hazard. Holberg does not merely engage ‘theatre’ for the depiction of everyday life, but fundamentally and absolutely as thematic instrument in itself. His delight in absurdity and nurturing of paradox should be seen as an almost visceral carnivalism and a Socratic sabotage of noetic rigidities, in a tactic that undermines the fortifications of the other party rather than launching a frontal attack.

When the theatre had to close temporarily for the 1725–1726 season, due to financial and attendance woes, Holberg was staying in Paris – one reason being his hope of an international breakthrough. He tried in vain to win favour with the French-Italian troupe, where a new drama genre with focus on emotional sensitivity and moralism was beginning to surface, which ran contrary to his ironic usentimentality, burlesque comedy and a view of human nature devoid of illusion.

During the period 1728–1747, religious factors led to theatre being, in practice, banned in the Danish king’s territories. During the final years of his reign, King Frederik IV (r. 1699–1730), had been overcome by religious contrition, and his successor, Christian VI (r. 1730–1746), was a sworn devotee of the radical pietism Christian movement, which was in effect imposed as the state religion. At this theatreless time, Holberg devoted himself mainly to historical writing – works dealing with, for example, history of the Jews, the Church, heroes and heroines, and Denmark-Norway – and literary activities addressing issues of moral philosophy, with principal essayistic works such as Moralske tanker (1744; Moral Thoughts) and Epistler (1748–54; Epistles) in addition to his major administrative efforts on behalf of the university. In 1741 he published the satirical fantasy travel novel Niels Klim’s Journey Underground, originally written in Latin. The protagonist falls through a hole leading to a universe in the inner globe, where he experiences the most Grotesque and strange planets, countries and continents, with masked references to the oddities of the outer globe. His trajectory is embedded in an overarching composition around the philosophy of government, dealing with the greater or lesser efficacy of governmental forms. Klim’s unrestrained pretentions of greatness come to an abrupt halt once he falls back to earth again.

Holberg was his own bookseller. He was a small, slight man, unmarried and childless, and he led a spartan life – with something of a reputation for parsimoniousness. He had a lucky touch when it came to business – marketing his own works, for example – and gradually accumulated such a fortune that he was able to buy up estates, eventually becoming a property-owner with substantial farmlands. Furthermore, in 1747, he was ennobled to the rank of ‘baron’, as part of a transaction that involved him bequeathing his possessions and capital to a modern educational institution: Sorø Akademi (Sorø Academy). The academy was set up as an alternative university, giving prominence to knowledge and skills with practical and meaningful relevance to the day – unlike the University of Copenhagen, which, seen from that perspective, was theoretical and out of touch with the real world.

When the theatre reopened in 1747, after the death of the pietist king, Holberg became actively involved in undertakings and wrote, as mentioned, a further six plays, which lack however the inspired wit of his first period. By this time, he was a notable intellectual and cultural figure with, for example, considerable influence on the direction taken by the theatre and a voice in the European debate, in French. He died in the exercise of his official duties; an affliction of the lungs, which he had contracted on an inspection trip of university lands, got the better of his frail constitution.

Over the years, Holberg has had considerable audience appeal and has periodically been a veritable father figure for Danish theatre. In his day, he had substantial success in Germany, where he could play his part in the modernisation of the repertoire. The situation in France, however, was almost the opposite: here, his base in the Molièresque comedy was now seen as outdated. Despite a personal attempt to launch his work, and although he started a project to translate his plays into French editions, he did not manage to make his name in France. The significance of fashionable trends on the fate of the works is now a matter for the history of drama. We are left with the stage vitality and thematics of the plays.

AN ‘ALIEN’ CULTURE

One route into the more subtle qualities of Holberg’s work for the stage is to ask: to which questions are the playtexts answers? This is a matter of, among other things, the intense polemic about theatre as non-reality that raged while the new Danish stage was being established. Particular focus will therefore now be directed at the contemporaneous understanding of theatre as art form – and to fields that were intimately linked with theatre in the wider sense: staging, role-playing, and so forth. Mask, fiction and theatricality seen as staging of reality are fundamental themes in the entire Holbergian perception of world, culture and history.

In this respect, it is important to keep in mind that the conceptual environment was essentially different to that of later ages. The enlightenment, rationality and secularism that we now link with the period were not prime points of orientation, albeit pragmatics and realpolitik were a natural element of the overall strategic methodology. So when, in 1743, one of Holberg’s university colleagues, eminent theologian Erik Pontoppidan (1698–1764), characterised theatre as “Eet af Sathans Mester-Stykker”⁷ (one of Satan’s masterpieces), he was not merely uttering bombastic rhetoric, but literal reality for people both of high intelligence and high status. And this is far from a specifically Danish motif. On a European level, the issue is familiar from the Molière case, for example – the troubles encountered in getting the great performer and playwright properly buried – which is, conversely, merely a notorious detail in the larger narrative of theatre as a depraved zone, a story that has not yet really been told. And the story probably remains untold because certain conceptual norms of the past seem so alien that later generations have had difficulty in focussing on them in a discerning way. In a sense, they belong to an ‘alien’ culture that is nonetheless our own. And their threads can be traced running through the annals of history.

Therefore – as already suggested – focus will be placed on ostensibly secondary circumstances in which to reflect the texts, including voices that were central at the time but became peripheral or silent as that time became the past. Plus: Holberg’s philosophical-existential relationship to theatre as mode of expression. Theatrum mundi is more than just a cliché.

In other words, being the essential medium for the dramatist – ‘dramatist’ in the sense of someone working in three dimensions and five senses and in ongoing creative dialogue with the audience and the times – theatre looms large both as controversial institution and metaphorical motif. The same applies to the masque, which is related to theatre and is, in both a concrete and an abstract sense, its prerequisite: masquerades were a financial necessity for the running of the playhouse, masked comedy was a significant inspiration, fiction involves masks, which can reference the world as a location for role-playing. In the Holbergian harlequinades, theatre and masks robustly manifest the motifs ‘fiction’ and ‘power’ through the lens of theatricality and staging. The question is thus: for which day and age and for which stage did Holberg write?

DAY OF THE THEATRE

At the time, the double monarchy Denmark-Norway was ruled by an absolute monarch, a king whose scheme of ideas and articulation were essentially organised in line with the French absolutist model. Absolute monarchy was imposed in Denmark in 1660 – which was actually the year before Louis XIV’s personal assumption of power in France. The king was a lofty figure, above and beyond the earthly dimension. Official governance was ritualised as a total stage production in the Baroque’s antiquisation, the grandiose-heroic form of manifestation that the regime saw as expressive of a deeper truth, and which, conversely, in a more sober light, looked like empty theatricality.

Being a veritable Versailles-imitating ruler, the Danish monarch retained a troupe of French players at his royal court. New appointments to the troupe were made regularly. In 1686, Christian V (r. 1670–1699) hired an actor – René Magnon, known as Montaigu – who was the son of one of Molière’s colleagues: dramatist Jean Magnon (d. 1662). In 1700, when the new king, Frederik IV, after the period of court mourning, came to the business of setting up a new French troupe, Montaigu was called upon to be their leader. Montaigu was of the Molièresque school. In Paris he had made the acquaintance of Luigi Riccoboni’s (1676–1753) Italian troupe, from which he drew inspiration for his work in Copenhagen. Riccoboni could be called a forerunner of a reformer such as Carlo Goldoni, whose transformation of the genre was, in outline, to shift the stylised types of the masked play towards more nuanced contemporaneous characters, complying with regular dramaturgical guidelines derived from Molière. Dramatist and dramaturg Ludvig Holberg must also be inscribed into this European context. He was quite simply one of the first reformers in the eighteenth century, not merely on a par with Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), but actually ahead of them. Holberg drew, as we shall see, on the same sources as Riccoboni and later Goldoni.

Montaigu assembled a troupe of French artists for the Danish royal court: twelve actors, singers and dancers, a production manager and a balletmaster. From 1703, plays and music dramas were performed in a newly-built ‘opera house’, located close to the fashionable centre of Copenhagen. The opera house had been planned for both court and city, but did not function as intended – custom was insufficient. In 1712, a theatre opened in the royal castle, devised by the king after a lengthy pleasure trip to Venice. In this venue, stagings by Montaigu were in many ways consistent with principles from Molière’s theatre. This practiced continued a few years later when he started working with theatre in the Danish language. In addition, he drew on his knowledge of French-Italian masked comedy, which he updated on a number of trips to Paris in pursuance of his duties as leader of the royal troupe. Montaigu’s production manager at the court troupe was Étienne Capion (d. before 1759), an immigrant from Gascony in southwest France, a man with a varied career – including that of chef, wine merchant, sutler, candidate for debtors’ prison – and thus a valid exponent of the shadier aspects of the theatre profession.

During the eighteenth century, the kingdom had more than one string to its bow and operated with Danish, Norwegian and German components; the Danish kings, at the time also monarchs of Norway, were dukes of the north German territories of the Habsburg Empire. A final attempt was made to recapture the Swedish region of the kingdom, which had been lost after wars in the mid-1600s, during Den Store Nordiske Krig (1700–1720; the Great Northern War) – but in vain. Once this enervating war had come to an end, a material and mental vitality was freed up to kick-start greater civic self-assurance. This was accompanied by the awakening of a need for entertainment; a market for potential earnings began to flourish. Thus, the aftermath of war generated Danish professional theatre as an outlet for energy following the lengthy period of horror.

In practice, the art form was supranational. Professional drama in Copenhagen had hitherto been synonymous with French or German theatre. English players, too, visited Denmark and at an early date: just three years after The Theatre playhouse had opened in London (1576), a troupe of English players was appointed by King Frederik II (r. 1559–1588). They performed at, for example, Kronborg Castle in the town of Helsingør (Elsinore), known throughout the world as the setting for the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. A troupe from Lord Leicester’s Men later came to the Danish royal court, one member being the comic actor William Kempe (Will Kemp, d. 1603). Three of these performers later joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, where Shakespeare wrote roles such as Bottom, Falstaff and Toby Belch for them – thus forging a link between the Danish court and the writer of Hamlet. During the seventeenth century, German and Dutch companies came to Denmark: significant names such as Carl Andreas Paulsen (c.1620–c.1685), Johann Velten (1640–1697) and Michael Daniel Treu (1634–1708) performed a typical touring-troupe repertoire, consisting of biblical, mythological and dramatically spectacular plays about, for example, Faust – modelled on Christopher Marlowe’s (1564–1593) Doctor Faustus – or thoroughly adapted versions of German Baroque, Spanish and Italian dramatic and epic material, plus Shakespeare plays such as King Lear and Titus Andronicus.Der bestrafte Brudermord oder Prinz Hamlet aus DänemarkDer unschuldige Brudermord oder das blutige Rom, unter der Regierung des Römischen Kaisers Antonini Bassiani Caracallä –Großmüttiger Rechts-Gelehrter, oder Sterbender Aemilius Paulus Papinianus –⁸.