queer masculinities

Wilhelm von Rosen: Denmark 89
and insult. Dorothea Biehl (1731–88) was a successful author of plays
and comedies in the vein of Holberg in which she argued for the acceptance
of women as beings capable of thinking, reading and writing.
With age she also became somewhat bigoted.
In her autobiography (published in 1909) Dorothea Biehl freely
admitted that the ‘Moral Tale’ with the title, ‘The False Friend,’ was an
act of revenge. A few years previously the managing director of the
Royal Theatre, Hans Wilhelm von Warnstedt, whom she, not without
hesitation because of a face that ‘indicated a black and deceitful soul,’
had accepted as her true friend, had returned one of her plays with ‘an
extremely offensive letter.’ Warnstedt had excluded her from the Royal
Theatre through ‘sly schemes and crafty intrigues.’ She had been
deprived of every hope of future income. However, ‘The False Friend’
was a succès fou. Volume II of Moral Tales sold 200 copies. Everybody
in Copenhagen knew that Don Varini, a papal courtier and the villain
of the tale, was Warnstedt.
And Don Varini was thoroughly villainous. Hiding ‘a conceited,
false, ambitious, ungrateful and hating heart’ behind a mask of
modesty and loathing of vice, he cultivated the naive and romantic
scholar, Don Carlos, whose friendship and feelings he pretended to
reciprocate. In reality he slandered and undermined Don Carlos and
prevented him from obtaining a deserved position that could alleviate
his poverty. Because Don Carlos was a morally superior being, Don
Varini came to hate him so much that he paid a pair of scoundrels to
murder him. But justice was fulfilled: by mistake they killed Don
Varini. His fate was an example, which demonstrated to ‘malicious
hearts’ that their wickedness was in vain.
Don Varini’s real motive for ingratiating himself with Don Carlos was
that he wanted him to become a tutor to the young Sebastiano and
thereby further his prospects. The real Sebastiano had to be the ballet
dancer, later actor, Frederik Schwarz. In 1767 or shortly afterwards, when
Schwarz was 14–15 years old, Warnstedt had become his patron, instructor
and friend. In Miss Biehl’s Moral Tale Don Varini had taken notice of
Sebastiano, ‘a young boy’ of 14 or 15 years who performed in the houses
of the rich and the powerful by playing the zither. Don Varini took so
much pleasure in him that he did not rest until he had established a
closer relationship: ‘This pleasure turned into a violent passion of the
mind and led to that shameful confidence for which fire fell from the
Heavens and destroyed Sodom and Gomorra.’ 29
Thus, to his biographers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Warnstedt became an early example of the artistic degenerate and