Leseprobe_Holm_Holberg Plays Volume I

Should Molière wish folk to swallow a Misanthrope, it must be gilded with a Doctor
in Spite of Himself. To mix folly into plays is thus just as necessary as greasing the
wheels of a carriage and drinking with your meal; because without the first, the
last cannot be digested. Herein, as well as in many other instances, you could
easily come to an agreement if you go to the correct source and examine what is
the only and rightful cause of such conflicts.
Personally, I consider it perfectly needless to speak for or against in this
matter. I shall restrict myself exclusively to two small questions submitted of late
on account of recently presented Danish plays, being: (1) if the writing of plays
conflicts with the station and character of certain persons, (2) if it is seemly and
decent for the children of respectable men to be employed in theatrical activities.
The first is not too difficult to answer, given that we have plays and merry
novels written by princes, counts, barons, knights, yes priests, monks and Jesuits
in our day, and by the most capable and greatest men in olden times, who either
wrote their own works or helped others to do so. The Greeks had such great
respect for playwrights that they claimed Aristophanes made Athens stronger with
his plays than did its military forces by land and sea alike. Indeed, in the crucial
questions he posed to the Lacedaemonian envoys, the King of Persia probed them
about the nature of Aristophanes’ life, as the aforesaid playwright himself testifies
in one of his plays called Acharnians, which, albeit almost as exaggerated as the
Chinese philosophers opining that a state could not be well governed without
music, nonetheless shows the degree of respect in which the most judicious nations
held theatre dramas in olden times, when plays were far from as pure and chaste
as they are nowadays, nor so ingenious or moral.
It is indeed true that Amphitryon and The Miser, translated by Molière from
Plautus’ plays, are still in our day of the very best. The remainder, on the other
hand, are in no way their equal, far less the plays of Terence and Aristophanes.
Although those who are patrons of the old plays might say, as is true in certain
ways, that each nation, each century has its taste, and thus what was of the greatest
beauty in the Greeks’ day will now mostly grate upon our ears, and what now grates
most upon our ears might be considered most tasteful by our descendants. Of this
Blackmore, 8 an Englishman, gives strange examples in his nation alone. Now, he
says, I find that our nation has taken greatest delight in extravagant occurrences
8 Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–1729), to whom Holberg refers a number of times in his works, was
a physician and prolific writer. He considered much contemporary literature to be decadent, and
determined to counteract this via his own publications. Here, Holberg is possibly summing up
some of Blackmore’s thoughts as expressed in his Essay upon Wit (1716), plus elements from Satyr
against Wit (1700), the Prefaces to Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books (1695) and King Arthur:
An Heroick Poem in Twelve Books (1697), and his ongoing conflict with the Wits of the day in, for
example, the competing 1700 publications Commendatory Verses (the Wits) v. Discommendatory Verses
(Blackmore’s supporters).
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