Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/449

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 445 They show all the characteristics of demonic acts. They are the bequests of the phallic demons to their successors in the fertility cult. The Carnival plays, having originated in the buffoonery of the phallic demons, are mainly occupied with the familiar facts of human life. Their subject-matter deals chiefly with the follies and vices of the men and women present or comical events of the day. The most popular acts were domestic quarrels and conjugal fights. The physician in the midst of sick peasants, the peasant-wedding, the comic discussions, the market-scenes and court-proceedings are frequent themes. In a later stage of its development the Carnival plays were also used for satirical, controversial, and didactical purposes. The herald or the principal actor, as a rule, pointed out at the end of the perform- ance the lesson which the spectators were to take home with them. This pious interpretation of the Carnival play is due to the influence of the Church drama. The playwrights, later, also drew for their material upon heroic legend (Breton, German and Trojan), beast-fables (in Liibeck), popular story (German and Italian), and even upon biblical history. A few plays deal with the lives and legends of the saints. But whatever the subject- matter may be, it is always expressed in the crude realism of contemporary life. But although the Carnival plays did not evolve out of the ritual dramas, they naturally borrowed themes and types from them. The clownish demons in their cheerful mood, it would seem, mimicked not only the on-lookers, but also the sacred acts and their performers. We have seen that the motive of death and resurrection could not be used as a comical plot. However, executions of the type which we still find as an episode in the sword-dances of modern Germany occur in the play of Dietrich of Bern (No. 62) and in the play of the magician (No. IX). In Tanawaschel (No. 54) the execution is more of the nature of the expulsion of evil. The magical act of rejuvenation is bur- lesqued in the comical attempts by the quack doctor to turn old women into young girls, a motive very common in the Swiss plays. In the lost Liibeck play of the three knights, who won a young maiden from the world of the dead, and in Julia (No. Ill), who was redeemed from hell upon the intercession of the Virgin Mary, we have a dramatization of the motive of the descent into