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The Birth of Reason from the Spirit of Carnival: Hans Sachs and Dos Narren-Schneyden Ralf Erik Remshardt Deum immortalem! quod theatrum est illud, quam stultorum tumultus? [Immortal God! What a scene is this, what a pack of fools?]—Erasmus, Praise of Folly A play called Das Narren-schneyden (c.1536, publ. 1557) 1 stands out as something of an oddity in the rather large canon of about eighty-five Fastnachtsspiele, Carnival plays of the cobbler and sometime poet Hans Sachs (1494-1576). Known mostly as a purveyor of harmless festival fare peopled by dullwitted peasants, Sachs here takes up the sharp thorn of the moralist and satirist. For several reasons, among them its unusual length and its unwonted didactic qualities, Das Narrenschneyden seems in my view to embody a novel tone quite characteristic for a moment in time that is epitomized perhaps most mightily by Luther's watershed rebellion against the power of the Church of Rome—in 1517 the man whom Sachs extolled with the winged epithet "Nightingale of Wittenberg" nailed his theses to the Pope's portal. As with many of Sachs' plays, the aspects worthy of discussion tend to transcend die piece itself in their significance, and so this essay is less a stringent inquiry into the play as literary text than an investigation which takes the text as a point of departure to speak, in the spirit of medieval taxonomy, of matters "analogous" and "sympathetic." Das Narren-schneyden, to be sure, is a remarkable piece of RALF ERIK REMSHARDT is a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he is writing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of the grotesque in drama. 70 Ralf Erik Remshardi71 theater. It partakes of several clearly recognizable traditions— first, the type of moral satire well known from Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiß (Ship of Fools, 1494) or Erasmus' Moriae Encomion (1511), albeit it is less comprehensive than these. Secondly, it is an example of the ever-popular quack's play, a Carnival favorite, which is probably a derivative of the mercator scene of the Easter and Passion cycles.2 For both traditions, Sachs introduces significant variations. But third—and this is the true raison d'être of this essay—Das Narren-schneyden reverberates on so many levels with the discourses of the early sixteenth century, some opening up as others unravel, that it comes into focus as a seminal piece of literary and theatrical history, even though it is often accorded only a marginal place in the pantheon of German literature. I Conventionally enough, Das Narren-schneyden begins as a quack doctor play. The title literally translates as "cutting fools," with a possible phonetic allusion to Beutelschneiden (swindling or stealing), which would seem to cast a pejorative light on the Surgeon. The Doctor in question enters the scene with his Boy, singing his own praises and displaying lofty medical credentials. He is apologetic that he has obviously arrived at the wrong place, since all present seem to be in good health and spirits (an in-joke just begging for some cocky extemporizing? or a winking acknowledgement of the bourgeois self-confidence Sachs is about to puncture?). Sure enough, a Sick Man soon arrives on the scene (pp. 4-5), wheezing on his crutches with a belly "als sey ich ein gross-pauchet weib" ("like some woman pregnant grown"). Following a ritual uroscopy, the Doctor first concludes that it is sheer Shrovetide gluttony which has caused this monumental constipation. But a re-examination of the matter convinces him that the unfortunate patient is filled with Fools! Induced to drink his own urine and to regard his ass-eared mirror image—a combination of elementary homeopathic practice and primitive psychoanalysis—the at first reluctant man is persuaded that only a "foolectomy" will remedy his suffering: "So muss man dir die narren schneyden" (p. 6). (The mirror and the urine vial, appropriately, are the props most suggestive of the two literary/ theatrical traditions which intersect here: the speculum stultorum satire and the quack doctor farce.) As the patient is tethered 72Comparative Drama to a chair and cut open, one by one the Seven Deadly Fools emerge under the sermonizing...

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