Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/451

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 447 priest had, indeed, more than his share of the Carnival sarcasm. The learned pedant is also a subject for ridicule at the Carnival season. He is made a laughing stock in the plays of Solomon and Markolf(No. 60), of The Emperor and the Abbot (No. 22), and of Aristole (Nos. 128, VII). The Old Woman is as ruthlessly caricatured in the German Carnival farce as she was in the Attic comedy. 335 She still figures as a mummer in the Carnival folk-survivals, 336 where she repre- sents ther Germanic Mother Corn (Old Bessy in England). 337 In the Thracian festival play she is the rustic prototype of Dem- eter. 338 We have already seen that in some f oik-ceremonies she stands for the old and infirm vegetation spirit. 339 The fact that the peasant, first and foremost, is the object of derision and contempt while the burgher is seldom held up to ridicule does not necessarily contradict our theory of the countryside origin of the Carnival play. Everything, in fact, points to a rustic origin of the German Carnival play as of the old Attic comedy. 340 Since the peasant was the first successor to the phallic demon, he would naturally try his mimic arts first on his rustic friends and neighbors, the men and women who lived next door to him and whose foibles he well knew. But while the primitive peasant of earlier centuries carried on but a good-natured jesting with his co-devotees, the play became in the hands of the medieval burgher a vehicle of pitiless contempt for the weak and simple-minded countryman. This wholly un- Christian attitude towards the peasant is characteristic of medieval literature. The bourgeois satire, so lavished upon the helpless peasant, shows itself very rarely against the knights.. In a few plays, however, they are represented as cowards and degenerates. On the whole, the knight of the medieval farce is the counterpart of the miles gloriosus of the ancient mime. 336 Cf. W. Suss, De personarum antiquae comoediae atticae usu atque origina (1905), pp. sqq. 836 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., viii. 332sqq. 887 Cf. Mannhardt, W.u.F.K., i. 325. 838 Cf. Frazer, loc. cit. 839 Supra, p. 417; cf. also Schroeder, op. cit., p. 170. 840 Cf. Cornford,^. cit., p. 194.