Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/206

188 siege of Troy, and the representation of the whole Odyssey, all of which Holberg has parodied in the most exquisite manner in his comedy, "Ulysses of Ithacia" (sic!).

From the latter half of the seventeenth century, about fifty years before Holberg's plays were produced, we possess an interesting dramatic satire, "Grevens og Friherrens Komedie" (the comedy of the count and the baron), which apparently was written by the nobleman, Mogens Skeel (1650-94). This comedy ridiculed, with a considerable degree of humor, the new fangled, chiefly German, court nobility, which had risen in the time of Christian V, and it is remarkable as the first effort at introducing the new school of drama, which had been created abroad, but it also remained the only effort before Holberg.

In 1720 Etienne Capion, a member of a French theatrical company which had been giving representations at the court, obtained the privilege of building a theatre, where in the beginning French and German plays alternated. Two years later permission was granted to the French actor René Montaigu "to arrange and act comedies in the Danish language." He therefore associated himself with Capion, and on the 23d of September, 1722, the Danish theatre was opened with a translation of Molieve's "l'Avare." In order to secure original plays, they now addressed themselves to the author of Peder Paars, and he was at once ready for the task. Already the same year he furnished five plays, and in the course of a few years he had written more than twenty. Still the theatre was not a financial success, and the greatest effort was necessary to sustain it. When afterward, in 1728, Copenhagen was visited by a great conflagration, and when the puritanic king, Christian VI, a few years subsequently ascended the throne, the taste for the theatre died away, and thus there was for the present an end to Holberg's writing of comedies.