Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/429

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 425 Neither can we find in the ritual drama, which we have attempted to reconstruct out of a thousand and one fragments gathered from Germanic custom and tradition, the roots of the Carnival play. Mr. Cornford's attempt to lead back the old Attic comedy through the folk-play to the ritual procedure, which he reconstructed with great ingenuity, has in the opinion of the writer, not been very successful. The old Attic comedy, like the medieval German farce, does not show in its plot a similarity to the ritual sufficient to warrant any such assump- tion. The ritual in itself had but few histrionic possibilities. The parts of the medieval religious drama which were based on the Church liturgy also proved incapable of dramatic evolution. Between the ritual and the drama, as we understand' it, there yawns a mighty chasm. We can have drama only when a wholly new content has been given to the ritual. This fact applies with special force to comedy. The ritual plot, above all, can not be used for the comical drama. The marriage, which forms the canonical ending of all our comedies, may, as Cornford sug- gests, 194 be a survival of the ritual union of sexes, but the central episode of the ritual drama, the death and resurrection of the fertility god, would in comedy, as Cornford admits, 195 be either too serious or too silly. The motive of rejuvenation is only burlesqued in the Carnival plays. 196 The marriage, though forming the ending of Aristophanic comedy, is totally lacking in the Carnival plays of Germany, perhaps owing to the fact that, because of the late arrival of spring in Northern Europe, the magical marriage did not seem to form a part there of the Carnival customs. A few Carnival plays, however, have a wedding as a background (Nos. 7, 41, 86, 115, 130, and XVIII). 197 The ritual drama never passed into the literary stage, but sank to the plane of a degenerate folk-play, of the kind that we still find in Northern Greece, England and Germany. These mummers' shows are just what we would expect of a ritual 194 Op. cit., p. 18. 196 Ibid., p. 75. Infra, p. 445. 197 The Arabic numerals refer to the edition of Fastnachtsspiele by Adalbert von Keller (1853 & 1858). The Roman numerals designate the plays from Sterzing which were edited by Zingerle (1886).