ANÁLISIS DEL PUNTO DE FALLA EN SEM

In these first two dramas Gengenbach explained some o f the causes and the course o f the Italian campaigns, and the involvement o f the Confederacy. He also addressed the need for effective controls over the recruitment and deployment o f Swiss mercenaries if the Confederacy was to be a political and military power. Theatre here was playing a highly political role, agitating, making propaganda in support of Basel council’s war policy. Theatre, printed texts and their accompanying woodcuts provided a unique means for the city’s ruling elite to reach out and mobilise a popular audience independent o f whatever might have been preached from the pulpit. The papacy’s ambitious policies in Italy under Pope Julius II did not enjoy unconditional support as Gengenbach made plain.

Gengenbach’s two dramas supported the majority political position o f the Basel council who favoured participation in the campaigns in Italy. It is probably a mistake, however, to regard him as an apologist; when for example the council later agreed to an alliance with the French in 1516, Gengenbach’s hostility to the French did not abate. So, in Der Nollhart (1517), the French are criticised and he continued to publicly support the

For a summary map of the expansion of the Confederacy see: Martin Alloth, Ulrich Barth, and Dorothee Huber, Easier Stadtgeschichte 2 - vom Brückenschlag bis zur Gegetiwart (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, 1981), p.47.

Emperor enthusiastically at least until 1521.

What is o f particular interest about these two dramas is the Eydgnosz character. There was no such thing as an "Eydgnosz\ as the Eydgenossenschaft - the Swiss Confederacy - did not have individual membership or citizenship. Soldiers and others on the business of the Confederacy remained citizens of their own canton and subject to the discipline of their cantonal council. When Holbein, for example, travelled to England he remained a citizen o f Basel and applied to Basel council for leave of absence, and continued to do so on a regular basis. So what did the concept o f an "Eydgnosz' convey to an audience ? Can he be regarded as an embodiment o f ‘Confederateness’, o f ‘Swissness’, o f some idea of national feeling ? Meyer believed that Gengenbach did express a national consciousness in Welsch Flusz, and in the Fastnachtspiel of 1517, Der Nollhart.

Vor der warmen Liebe zur Eidgenossenschaft tritt auch das ReichsbewuBtsein Gengenbachs, das sich im ‘Welschen FluB’ und im ‘Nollhart’ geltend macht, in den Hintergrund. So besitzen wir im Werk des Basler Dichters Pamphilus Gengenbach ein prachtiges Zeugnis dafur, daB in Basel das eingenossiche NationalbewuBtsein schon im zweiten Jahrzent des 16. Jahrhunderts kràftig entwickelt war.^^

Prietzel believes that Gengenbach’s interest in the Confederation was over by 1515. She says: ‘Eine eigenstandige eidgenossische Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte wird nach 1514 bei Pamphilus Gengenbach nicht mehr thematisiert.’^^ Certainly the theme became less important for Gengenbach, although this is more likely to date from the humiliating Swiss defeat at Merignano in 1515, the impact of which is discussed in chapter 5, Ila. However, Prietzel’s position is hard to defend as Der Nollhart not only includes a Swiss character, der Eidgenosse, but even the dedication on the front page o f the play reads:

Gespilt Z Ù lob dem Romschen reich

Eyr eydgnoschafft deBselben gleich Das sy dest bewaren seich.

Friedrich Meyer, Die Beziehung zwischen Basel und den Eidgenossen in der Darstellung der Historiographie des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Basel: Helbing und Lichtenhahn, 1951), p .125.

Prietzel, AGB, p.321.

Hobsbawm expresses a widely accepted understanding o f Nationalism when he says: ‘Nations [...] are not, as Bagehot thought, ‘as old as history’. The modern sense of the word is no older than the eighteenth century, give or take the odd predecessor.’^^ This begs the question as to whether the Swiss can be regarded as one o f the ‘odd

predecessors’. Hobsbawm argues that one feature o f nationalism is the urge to conquer territory, to expand, and for a few years the Swiss did indeed pursue expansion into Lombardy before lapsing back into local politics and religious division.

It is interesting that a popular carnival play o f this period, the Urmr Tellempiel of 1512 celebrates William Tell.^^ The play draws a parallel between Uri and the republic of Rome and it is from this time that one could date the emergence o f Tell as a symbol of the foundation o f Swiss political independence.^* Here are echoes o f Machiavelli, but from the side o f the militarily competent, republican Swiss that he feared. Urner

Tellempiel was the first of a new type o f political play that was special to the Swiss Confederacy, a theme which is explored below in section VI. The national theme is also considered again in the discussion about Ulrich von Hutten in chapter 6, Ic (page 165).

V. lU E FASTNACHTSPIEL TRADITION

Quite when these secular political plays would have been performed is a puzzle because of the lack o f performance information.^^ It was noted in section I above that although

^ Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p.3.

‘Das Urner Spiel von Wilhelm Tell’, ed. by Hans Bodmer, in Schweizerische Schauspiele des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. by Jakob Baechtold, 3 vols (Zurich: Buber, 1890-93), i, pp. 13-48.

Given that Gengenbach ignored the Tell story one must assume that it had not achieved anything like the popular interest that it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, epitomised in Schiller’s play.

Felix Platter’s Tagebuch describes fourteen theatrical performances taking place in the 1540s while he was a child, including a youthful performance o f Gengenbach’s Alter. None o f them was apparently at carnival, though two performances in summer

Gengenbach does describe Welsch Flusz as a play, it is not clear from the timing of its publication or from other evidence that it was written for carnival. Alt Eydgnosz, on the other hand, was published in early 1514 so is perhaps the more likely o f the two to have been performed as a Fastnachispiel. Carnival - Fastnacht - was the obvious and possibly only opportunity and the plays share the simple structure of QzxXxtx Fastnachtspiele. the Reihenspiel form with no plot, the Knittelvers, the brevity, and the lack o f any

meaningful division into Acts.

The publication o f these two dramatic pieces were part o f an important development in the history of carnival theatre, a break with the so-called Nuremberg tradition.^® In presenting actual political events to the public in a dramatic form, Gengenbach was using a new way to reach a wide popular audience. There had been politics in Fastnachtspiel, but of a very general nature on such topics as class distinction and anti-clericalism. Carnival had always had a political dimension as it was a time when the world was

turned upside down, when the nature o f authority was under intense scrutiny, when it was mocked and occasionally, directly challenged. DuBruck, for example, has noted more than twenty fifteenth century carnival plays that presented a negative image o f the clergy.^’ A long-lived popular play of the period was Das Spiel von Konig Salomon und Markolfo (1490) by Hans Folz. Markolf is a peasant fool who mimics Salomon’s wisdom

and mocks the pretensions of the king, demonstrating that Solomon is no wiser or

1546 were in public; ‘Sysanna’ in the Fischmarkt (p.83) and ‘Conversion o f St.Paul’ in the Kornmarkt (p.82): Felix Platter, Tagebuch: Lebensbeschreihung 1536-1567, ed. by Valentin Lotscher (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1987). Ladurie has combined the various entries to make a short narrative about theatre in the 1540s in Basel: Ladurie, Beggar, pp.93-100.

For further details about the celebrations of Fastnacht in Nuremberg, see: Samuel L. Sumberg, The Nuremberg Schembart Carnival (New York: Columbia University,

1941). DuBruck notes that there is evidence o f carnival plays being mounted in 57 other cities besides Nuremberg: Edelgard DuBruck, Aspects o f Fifteenth Century Society in the German Carnival Comedies (Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press, 1993), p. xvi.

DuBruck, p.46.

socially superior than he is.32

Gengenbach not only presented contemporary political and religious affairs on stage, but in five o f his seven plays he portrayed real, contemporary political characters. The Pope, the German Emperor, the King o f France, and even Henry VIII do not appear simply as role representatives, but as the actual individuals whose thoughts and deeds were being represented and discussed on stage for the first time. This was a bold step for the theatre, a new form o f travesty. Perhaps most shocking would have been the portrayal o f the pope (who appears in four o f the seven dramas) and the stage discussion o f the Word o f God.

Michael Bristol documents the opposition generated by quoting the bible in a play (as Gengenbach's characters sometimes did). Many felt that; ‘it can only mimic and therefore diminish’.B e c a u s e the Pope, unlike the Emperor, had his very own and very powerful local enforcer in Basel in the person o f the bishop, Gengenbach was running a significant risk with these plays, even at carnival time. Not only divine authority was undermined:

An actor is not just someone whose speech is ‘dissembling’: the deeper problem is that he is most valued for his ability to dissemble convincingly. Because o f this, the theater may indeed be the site o f a diabolical pedagogy, a ‘school o f abuse’ or at least a setting in which authority may be radically challenged.

Perhaps because the two early Gengenbach plays did break new ground there has certainly been some confusion among the critics over whether to call them

Fastnachtspiele. Goedeke, for example, only describes three o f Gengenbach’s later plays as Fastnachtspiele - X Alter (1515), Der Nollhart (1517) and die Gouchmat ( 1519).^^ He classifies Alt Eydgnosz as an ^Historische Gedichf and Welsch Flusz as a 'Biichlein'\

For a history of the Solomon and Marcolf story and its literary versions, see: Enid Welsford, The Fool, his Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935; repr. Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1966), pp.34-42.

Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebian culture and the Structure o f Authority in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1985), p.l 15.

Bristol, p.l 13.

Goedeke, Grundrisz, ii, pp. 147-48. 86

why he makes a distinction between them when the content and the structure are rather similar is not clear. Bartsch, and, more recently. Van Abbé agree with Goedeke's classification of the three later plays as Fastnachtspiele, but Van Abbé adds Die

Totenfresser as a possible fourth.^^ Baechtold and Van Abbé did find evidence that the three had actually been performed at carnival whereas no evidence o f performances has been found for Welsch Fhisz, Alt Eydgnosz, or indeed for Die Totenfresser.^^ Because these critics fail to make clear their criteria for defining a Fastnachtspiel, one suspects that Goedeke, Bartsch and Van Abbé each based their categorisation o f the three later plays on Gengenbach's own statements in the opening lines of the plays, that they were for performance on Herrenfastnacht.

Catholy takes a ‘purist’ position, denying that any o f Gengenbach’s plays were

Fastnachtspiele as they did not concern themselves with Fastnacht. He placed them in a category o f his own (group c), which he defines as follows;

c). weltliche Spiele die zwar zur Fn. aufgefuhrt wurden und auch meist als ‘Fnspp.’ bezeichnet werden, in Wirklichkeit aber mit der Gattung nichts zu tun haben. Sie besitzen keine Verbindung mit Fn.-Unterhaltungen und unterscheiden sich deshalb in Form, Inhalt und Funktion vom Fnsp.^^

Brett-Evans is not sure if they would have been performed at carnival, but he did not exclude the p o ssib ility .H e argues that it is a complex problem trying to define what was or what was not a Fastnachtspiel because contemporary use o f the term was not

Bartsch, pp.566-68. Van Abbé, Drama, p.31

)

\ / o n A Q 1 !

Baechtold, Geschichte, pp.57-58 (footnotes), reports performances o f X A lter and Der Nollhart but not of Die Gouchmat. Van Abbé reports a performance o f Die

Gouchmat in i516 {Drama, p. 124), but neither author gives their original source. This is very frustrating, especially in the latter case as most critics believe that Die Gouchmat was not written until 1519 !

Catholy, p.79.

David Brett-Evans, Von Hrotx\Ht bis Folz mid Gengenbach II: Religiose und weltliche Spiele des Spatmittelalters, 2 vols (Berlin: Schmidt, 1975), ii, p. 174.

systematic/^ This meant that all sorts of plays got described as Fastnachtspiele. Catholy believes that this occurred because the carnival tradition in the south-west was losing its distinctive nature in relation to other forms:

In dem so die zur Fn. aufgefiihrten Stücke denselben Zielen dienen wie die auBerhalb der Fn. gespielten Dramen, ist es leicht erklarlich, daB diese ‘Fnspp.’ sich in keiner Wei se formal von der übrigen Dramatik der Zeit unterscheiden.'*^ Catholy wants to emphasise the sharpness o f the break with Nuremberg, represented by Gengenbach: ‘Seine eigenen in Basel verfaBten Fnspp. zeigen jedoch keine deutliche Verbindung zu Nürnberg: Wolfgang Michael is not convinced and points to Gengenbach’s links with Nuremberg, particularly his apprenticeship there under Anton Koberger when Gengenbach must have seen and even been involved in performances.'*^ Catholy is mistaken to ignore the continuities and links. It is argued in the next chapter that two o f Gengenbach’s X Alter and Die Gouchmat, deal with themes central to the tradition, in particular with sex and its regulation. Subsequent discussions will examine anti-clericalism, another traditional theme, in two other plays, Der Nollhart and Die Totenfresser. Catholy reaches the provocative conclusion that if the plays had

changed then so had their function: ‘Damit muBte notwendig auch die Funktion der Fnspp. ein andere werden.’'*^ Unfortunately he does not explore this, because the function of the Fastnachtspiel was indeed in the process of change.

VI. POLIT1SCHEMORALITÀTEN

Some o f the first stirring o f secular theatre in the German-speaking world was in

)

/

'** Brett-Evans, II , p. 143.

'*^ Catholy, p.77. Catholy, p.75.

'*'* Wolfgang F. Michael, Das Deutsche Drama des Mittelalters (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971), p.211.

'*^ Catholy, p.76.

Switzerland in the fourteenth century, with the Mai-Herbst-Spiel,^^ along with Des Entki'isi Vasnacht, a play thought to have been first performed in Zurich in 1354. Nevertheless there had been no consistent tradition o f carnival or other secular plays in Switzerland before the beginning o f the sixteenth century such as there had been in Nuremberg and other cities.

Then between 1512 and 1527 a small, unique group o f plays appeared in Switzerland, which included Gengenbach’s seven dramatic pieces; the Unier Tellenspiel (1512);"** Voti den alien midjmigen Eidgenossen by Balthasar Spross (1513);"^^ Niklaus Manuel’s two plays, Vom Papsi mid seiner Priesterschaft (Die Totenfresser) in 1523^® and Der

Ahlasskramer in 1524 or 1525;^^ and finally Utz Eckstein’s Reichstag (1526).^^

46_{Friihe Schweizerspiele, ed. by Friederike Christ-Kutter (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963).} 47 _{Catholy, p.74. For a discussion o f the early days o f German secular theatre, see:} Eckehard Simon, ‘Weltliche Schauspiele vor dem Nurnberger Fastnachtspiel’, in

Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache mid Literatur, ed. by Hans Fromm et al (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), pp.299-313.

The William Tell theme had in fact previously appeared in a fifteenth century play called Etter Heini. Jakob Ruf later reworked the Urner Tellenspiel as Das neue

Tellenspiel. The 1545 edition was republished in: Baechtold, Schweizerische Schauspiele, i, pp.57-136.

Balthasar Spross, ‘Das Spiel von den alten und jungen Eidgenossen’, in Deutsche Spiele und Dramen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Helmut Thomke (Frankfurt: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1996), pp.59-91. Quotes from the play in this dissertation are taken from this edition. Spross’s authorship is not completely certain, but Christ-Kutter who edited an earlier version also attributes it to him: Benjamin Spross, Das Spiel von den alien und den jungen Eidgenoss, ed. by Friederike Christ-Kutter (Bern: Francke,

1963).

‘Vom Papst und seiner Priesterschaft’, in Niklaus Manuel, ed. by Jakob Baechtold (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1878), pp.29-102.

Der AblaBkramer’, in Baechtold, Niklaus Manuel, pp. 112-32.

Utz Eckstein, Rychsztag der Edlen vnd Pauren bricht vnd klag z. Friedberg ghandelt a u ff dem Rychtztag (Leipzig: 1526). There is no published version generally

available, only an early edition in the British Library: BL: C.107.aa.l9. 89

Another play can be added called the ‘Gumpist’ Spiel, that appeared in Basel in 1513 printed by Nicholas Lamparter which Goedeke and the editors o f VD16 think was written by Gengenbach/^ It used the same motif as Welsch Flusz of the card game being played between the powers. The national representatives do not take over the dialogue until the second half; the first is entirely taken up by a series of ordinary people, including a ‘Helvetius’ rather than an ‘Eidgenosse’. Schanze says o f it:

Es steht gleichrangig neben dem ‘Urner Tellenspiel’ und dem Zürcher ‘Spiel von den alten und jungen Eidgenossen’. Als Beitrag Basels bildet es den Anfang einer Tradition, die sich unmittelbar in den Spielen Gengenbachs fortsetzt [...]^'^

Schanze does not reject the possibility that it was by Gengenbach, but like other commentators is puzzled why Gengenbach would not have also printed it if he had written it.

The whole group o f plays can best be described by the term ‘polHische MoralitateW Brett-Evans says of them:

Im starken Gegensatz dazu sind aber ganz andersartige Fastnachtspiele

anzutreffen, darunter vor allem die ‘politische Moralitaten’ aus der Schweiz, die einen durchaus emsthaften Ton anschlagen, indem sie brennende Zeitfragen, nicht zuletzt wichtige Angelegenheiten von Staat und Kirche ''auf die Bühne ’ bringen.

The first, the Umer Tellenspiel, appeared a year before Gengenbach published Welsch

Goedeke, Gengenbach, pp.292-309 under the title ‘Combiszt’.

Frieder Schanze, ‘Kartenspiel der Machte. Zu eineijn unbekannten politischen Spiel von 1513 aus der Schweiz’, 'm Festschrift fiir Walter Hàug undBurghari Wachinger, ed. by Johannes Janota, Paul Sappier, et al (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1992), ii, pp.849-72, p.867.

Sidler uses the term 'historisches Tagesschrifttum\ which suggests the plays were no longer concerned with morality. I would argue that they were indeed about political morality and highly appropriate for the celebration o f morality/immorality that was carnival: Victor Sidler, Wechselwirkungen zwischen Theater und Geschichte untersucht anhand des schweizerischen Theaters vor Beginn der Reformation (unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Zurich, 1973), p. 18. Bartsch called them Tendenzstiicke which is equally too bland: Bartsch, p.567.

Brett-Evans, I I , p. 143.

Fhisz. Much closer in content to Gengenbach’s two early plays is Vofi den alien und jungen Eidgenossen, believed to have been written by Balthasar Spross in Zurich in late