Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/431

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 427 are still or were down to recent times quite common on Shrove Tuesday in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. 202 A chief variant is the so-called hemp or flax dance on Shrove Tuesday in Germany. 203 That dancing tends to become mimetic did not escape the attention of Aristotle. 204 The dance has been called the cradle of the drama. 205 From this point of view the drama is but a differentiated form of the dance. 206 Pearson ventures to assert that originally the comedy was a winileod, a choral dance at a sex or fertility festival. 207 The origin of the drama in India was in religious dances of a fertility cult, 208 and the mime in Magna Graecia and Lower Italy also arose out of the mimic dance. The drama of savage peoples is for the most part danced. 209 The dances of the Mexicans at their religious festivals remained for a long time the basis of all their dramatic acts. 210 The fertility ritual was everywhere performed in pantomimic dances. 211 We may, therefore, safely assume that the dance has been a great factor in the development of the drama among the Germanic peoples. This fact will account for the prevalence of the dance in the Carnival plays. Quite a number of them close with an invitation to dance and a call for music (Nos. 6, 51, 59, 67, 89, 111). The word dance occurs even in the titles of a few plays (Nos. 14, 67, 89, XIV). The dance seems to have formed such an essential part of the Carnival plays that even Hans Sachs provided for it in two of his earlier pieces (Nos. 2, 9). This fact leads Creizenach 212 to the conclusion that the Carnival plays were for the most part but little more 202 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., ix. 238s^. The round dances typified the circular rotations of the heavenly bodies; cf. H. O'Brien, The Round Towers of Ireland (1898), pp. 110, 517. 203 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., i. 138^., viii. 326. 204 Cf. Chambers, op. cit. i. 188. 205 On the union of dance and drama among the savage peoples see also Havemeyer, op. cit., p. 186. 206 Cf. Schroeder, Mysterium u. Mimus im Rigveda (1908), pp. 13sqq. 207 Op. cit., ii. 136. 208 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., ix. 384s?. 209 Cf. Havemeyer, op. cit., p. 98. 210 Cf. K. Th. Preuss, "Phallische Fruchtbarkeitsdamonen als Trager des altmexikan. Dramas," Archivf. Anthropologie xxix. (1904) 1695?. 211 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., ix, 375sqq. 212 Op. cit., i. 4Q9sq.