Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/453

 The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy 449 In Germany he was sometimes called Schul-Bischof, or derisively A pfeln-Bischof. Ludi were played at both these feasts. 345 The French sottie was a farce played by the sots, the ribald folk, who for a long time continued on the secular stage the traditions of the Fool- Ass rites. 346 The Sotternien, the Dutch equivalents of the German Fastnachtsspiele, may be traced as far back as the fourteenth century. The solemnities of the Church continued to be burlesqued in these productions even in their burghal form; and while these farces originally satirized the canons and the burghers they later in their burghal form, turned their satire chiefly against the peasants; and the canons, too, fared no better in the hands of the burghers than in those of their inferior brethren. The Carnival inherited from the Fool-Ass rites the inversion of the social status and the idea of the univer- sal dominion of folly, which had prevailed at the Kalends, Saturnalia and kindred Roman festivals. 347 To the diffusion of the softies throughout Europe may be attributed the abundance of fool-literature at the close of the Middle Ages and the suc- ceeding century. The union of the Carnival carrus navalis and the Feast of Fools is best symbolized in the Narrenschi/ ("Ship of Fools"), which was a standing feature of the Carnival customs in many medieval German towns, and which gave the title to a satirical work by Sebastian Brandt (1494). 348 The fool of the German Carnival play also coalesced with the old stupidus or parasitus of the Roman mime, who was of similar origin. The Fastnachts spiel would thus serve as a connecting link between the ancient and the modern drama. That some dramatic tradition was handed down from the mimi of the Empire to the mimi of the Middle Ages, is, in the opinion of Chambers, exceedingly likely, although not capable of demonstration. 349 "The renaissance of farce in the fifteenth "*Ibid., i. 295. 546 Ibid., i. 38Qsq; Petit de Julleville, Histoire du theatre en France (1886), p. 61; G. G. Smith, op. cit., p. 261. 347 Cf. Frazer, op. cit., ix. 308, 337, 339, 350, 407. 348 New edition by Zarncke (1854) and by F. Bobertag (1889). Engl. translation by Alex. Barclay (London, 1874). 349 Op. cit., ii. 202; cf. also ibid., i.83.