SOURCE: Remshardt, Ralf Erik. “The Birth of Reason from the Spirit of Carnival: Hans Sachs and Das Narren-Schneyden.” Comparative Drama 23, no. 1 (spring 1989): 70-94.

[In the following essay, Remshardt examines Sachs's rational approach to his material in Das Narren-Schneyden, which, the critic claims, puts him closer in spirit to Erasmus than to Luther.]

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 dull-witted 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 Narren-schneyden 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 the 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 theater. It partakes of several clearly recognizable traditions—first, the type of moral satire well known from Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff (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 to a chair and cut open, one by one the Seven Deadly Fools emerge under the sermonizing of the Doctor; their names are Pride, Greed, Envy, Wrath, and so forth. Finally, an entire nest of squirming, worm-like micro-Fools is excavated, proving the subject extraordinarily fertile in the fathering (or mothering?) of folly. The Doctor lectures him unmistakably (p. 16): “Von dem kamen die narren dein. / Das dir gefiel dein sinn allein” (“Your Fools sprang from one primary cause, / You made your lusts your only laws”).

As a stage piece, Das Narren-schneyden does well to utilize probably one of the most fundamental types of theatrical dynamics, the dynamics of discovery and revelation. One would generally expect the Shrovetide presentations to favor such archetypal situations with a strong visual or iconic thrust, but a review of Sachs' precursors and many of his own efforts at Carnival plays reveals a surprisingly static and loquacious tradition. Often a sequence of characters will appear, introducing themselves in their allegorical or social function, then each delivering a comic or ribald speech, but without engaging in meaningful dramatic interaction. The reason is to be sought in the fact that at least partially the Carnival plays are derived from and represent more or less dramatized versions of the Schwank, itself a popular form of short, poignant, often morally instructive narratives at which Sachs excelled.³

Das Narren-schneyden is no doubt patterned on such sequential or revue plays (Reihenspiele), even though the Fools themselves are mute. Its dynamics, though, arise not from any inherent dramatic tension of the sequence, but from being merged with a quack's play, which generates sufficient theatrical energy on its own. The Fools/Sins represent a conventional medieval topos which is here offered without significant variation—literally, the “rebirth” of this familiar topos from the quack farce which gives it a special theatrical vigor. A similar parade of vices occurs, of course, in many of the English moralities and still in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c.1592), though there they appear by necromancy rather than surgery. As in Doctor Faustus, and in contrast to the often pronounced eloquence of such characters in the morality plays, Sachs gives his Fools no voice, does not let them enter into the disputation for a mortal soul. Such, I suspect, is not a sign of a lack of originality; like Marlowe, the earlier playwright is well aware that he is quoting these Fools second-handedly, invoking them rhetorically like the Humanists who are his contemporaries.

No stage is set for a Manichaean agon of Vices and Virtues, for these Seven Sins are not the icons of an unimpeachable medieval moral epistemology, but rather are ciphers, contrivances, pretexts for the Doctor's extensive harangues. As the Fools in the text hardly exist outside of the protagonist's authoritative interpretation or exegetic reading of them (a “viereckichten narrn,” the Fool with a “sharp four-cornered gawk” is identified as representing oppressive Greed, a “mager, blaich und gelb”—“meagre, pale and yellow”—specimen quickly tied to Envy, and so on), we could say that they are present in a manner of speaking rather than in a manner of acting.

Carnival is essentially an occasion of catharsis: the in-effigy executions or expulsions of symbolic figures probably belong to the most fundamental of Carnival practices, and their energy informs Das Narren-schneyden as well. The traditional Nuremberg Carnival, the Schembartlauf, featured as the culmination of its festivities an exorcism of devils and demons from a pageant wagon known as “Hölle” (hell).⁴Das Narren-schneyden must be seen as a corresponding spectacle since it features an act of expulsion from the “hell-half” of the body (see below). But in the play healing rather than annihilation is the point, and the demons have been converted into clearly defined vices without a hint of atavistic menace, vices made to look foolish and risible. In the words of Barbara Könneker: “The evil human has taken the place of the evil spirit, prepared by the prevailing tendencies of late medieval demonology and satanology itself, which made the supplanting of the devil through the fool seem like an almost continuous and consistent process.”⁵

To be sure, we are speaking of an allegorical action in the play, but if we were literal-minded we might ask how the Fools got into the Sick Man in the first place. We shall explore cosmological and sexual possibilities later, but the play also supports the implicit (associative, that is) assumption that somehow he ingested them. The Fool-Eater is a satirical motif of some currency (viz. Sachs' poem Der Narren-Fresser, 1530), and “eating a fool” (“einen Narren fressen”) is still the German colloquialism for being infatuated with—or a sucker for—something. Binging and purging, gorging and disgorging, are part of the unsubtle Shrovetide rhythm, and Das Narren-schneyden is no exception to the Carnival plays which are predicated on this rhythm.

II

Little can be said for certain about the circumstances of production of the Carnival plays in general or of this one in particular. The sophistication of the presentations and their locales changed greatly in the span of Sachs' career. Sachs' early Carnival plays from 1517 on were probably acted in private houses or inns, as had been the tradition since the previous century. Since the Doctor in Das Narren-schneyden acknowledges the presence of an innkeeper and his guests, we are quite clear on the whereabouts of the scene. At first, neither costumes nor props were very elaborate, although it is possible that a raised platform was used as a stage. Mary Beare, for instance, speculates that a “particular scene or change of scene was indicated only by a pinned-up notice ‘This is a wood,’ or ‘This is a monastery’.”⁶ For reasons of obvious practicality—they were played at different venues several times a day—the Carnival plays long were theatrical bare-bones affairs.

Later performances moved to the secularized St. Martha's Church, where drama was staged throughout the sixteenth century; these dramas included in particular Sachs' more serious efforts, such as the Meistersinger plays. A wide but shallow stage platform, about three feet above the ground, would have been erected in the choir section of the church, ideal for the type of revue play mentioned above as the primary Carnival play pattern and replicating in theatrical terms the medieval predilection for the panoramic series as evidenced in Gothic reliefs, Dance-of-Death depictions, and so forth.⁷

Exactly how much exchange in staging matters occurred between the Meistersinger productions, which became quite splendid occasions, and the Fastnachtsspiele is debated. But in the years before 1550, when he is presumed to have reached artistic maturity, almost all of Sachs' Shrovetide plays could be performed, by doubling parts, with a troupe of only three actors. After this date, his plays became more elaborate and even utilized non-speaking “extras,” a testimony to the master's increasing standards. The fact that Das Narren-schneyden relies on the three-actor format, in combination with its strong moralistic slant—the Carnival play, after all, had become a voice for early Protestantism⁸—strengthens the assumption that it was written at some time before 1550.

The actors in these farces are not well documented, with the exception of a man named Hans Schmidtlein to whom Sachs dedicated a mastersong. From this dedication we can gather that Schmidtlein probably held a position resembling that of Will Kempe or Robert Armin in Shakespeare's company—although without being a professional actor. In Das Narren-schneyden, the part of the Sick Man would have been played by Schmidtlein, who was booked on the “grotesque types,”⁹ and Sachs himself would have appeared as the Doctor in keeping with his preference for parts of superior insight and authority. A young apprentice playing the Boy rounds out the traditional threesome.¹⁰

Das Narren-schneyden demands considerably more technical sophistication than most similar plays. Extracting seven Fools from an actor's body in full view of the audience remains first and foremost a problem of staging and one for which the extant script gives no apparent solution. Most likely, puppets or dolls were used. A woodcut from the cover of the first edition (1557) seems to confirm this notion: in it, we see a bespectacled Surgeon, scalpel in hand, pulling a pint-sized Fool by his ass' ears out of the opened belly of a prostrate man. The artist is clearly not conversant with theatrical convention, or he is ignoring it; the illustration is obviously not an accurate record of performance (for instance, there is no trace of the forceps mentioned in the text). The size of the Fool may merely be an example of the kind of idiosyncratic use of proportion with which we are familiar from much of medieval art.

A stage direction in König Saul (King Saul, 1557), a Meistersinger play, requires Goliath to be decapitated onstage, an effect which was produced with the help of a dummy head; in another play, Atlas is transformed into a rock (almost) before the eyes of the audience. Later Sachs plays will call for modest pyrotechnics or even a ship on the scene.¹¹ The props and presentational expertise necessary for these kinds of graphic displays could well have been used in a Carnival play such as Das Narren-schneyden. We sense a good bit of craftsman's pride invested in the fabrication of illusion, reminiscent of the efforts of the guilds in the English cycle plays. This is not merely a comment on the technical and instrumental progress of the stage. The increase in the spectacular value of both the Carnival plays and serious plays seems to suggest the closure of a particular “visionary” medieval paradigm where believing is seeing and the opening of a quintessentially modern, analytical, “ocular” paradigm where seeing is suspending disbelief. I am far from suggesting that Das Narren-schneyden is anywhere at the center of this larger transition, but the piece clearly addresses the audience as spectators rather than as participants and thereby marks a different tone and purpose which emerge with the Carnival plays of the early Reformation period. If we read the play as an example of Reformation literature, which it encourages, we notice how it tacitly acknowledges the breakdown of a centuries-old consensus according to which the moralistically oriented theatrical representation indeed represents the viewing “mankynde” in their entire social being much as its sponsor, the one and only true Church, represents their souls. The mere fact that the morality play pattern has been transposed into the minor key of Carnival comedy seems to suggest that the play can no longer assume either the homogeneity of a public sworn and held to irrefutable dogma or even the legitimacy of its own advocacy.

III

The boastful doctor and his sly helper are well recognized stock characters of the medieval popular stage. Sachs would have seen the medicus advertising his bogus panaceas, curing outlandish ills, and quarreling with his loudmouthed servant or shrewish wife in any number of short farces which had evolved since the fourteenth century. The popular imagination knew of the fabulous exploits of a character named Doktor Eisenbart whose ambulatory practice specialized in performing full cashectomies.

In these quack plays, the doctor's name is Master Uncian or Master Viviam, he invariably hails from a faraway country, and his reputation, according to his assistant, is simply stupendous (“He knows eight-and-a-half of the Seven Arts”).¹² His costume is probably as flamboyant as his claims to erudition are fanciful. His patients are commonly peasants, victims of severe constipation before they become his; uroscopy is the usual method of diagnosis, and in the ensuing exchanges the characters will usually work their way through the entire faecal-scatological vocabulary. This is the Carnival's home turf. Observes Klaus-Peter Koepping: “What better image [than the defecatory functions] … is available to show transgression, rebellion, the mundus inversus but that based on metaphors taken from the most uncontrollable element of human existence?”¹³ Sachs' plays, on the whole, are far less insistent on the low and lowest strata of verbal comedy, though surely less due to the innate nobility of intellect the Romantic critics ascribed to him than to the increased severity of municipal censorship.

The Surgeon of this play, most unusually for a quack, insists that he will not take any remuneration for his cure. With that, he is quite in line with the “socialized” medicine of sixteenth-century Nuremberg, which provided free medical care for the poor.¹⁴ (Is the Sick Man, metaphorically, not one of the “poor in the spirit”?) Of course, the Doctor is transparently the author in disguise—the author who has lured the members of his Carnival audience with the promise of predictable escapades of laughable and pompous ineptitude, but has instead presented them with a parable of superior competence. The implication is that Sachs, as the author and actor, sees himself in the role of the moral surgeon who, by skillful theatrical prestidigitation, attempts an equally nimble feat of social hygiene—the poeta doctus as poetical Doctor.¹⁵ The physician in Das Narren-schneyden is the mask persona of social satire and at the same time the trickster (Schelm/ picaro) and the savior, which are usually antagonistic positions in popular literature.¹⁶ Taken together, they suggest a sort of shamanistic authority, and indeed David Brett-Evans has argued that the quack doctor plays at least draw upon “pre-Christian death-and-resurrection spellcraft.”¹⁷

But there is no doubt in my mind who the shaman behind the salutary operation is: one of the aliases of Sachs' Doctor is clearly Doctor Martin Luther. Das Narren-schneyden is also an allegory of the Reformation. Luther, as Marx remarked scowlingly somewhere, had taken the clergy and transplanted it into man's interior. For this action, some initial displacement was necessary, and Sachs' play graphically illustrates precisely that. Sachs skirts the possible charge that he is writing inflammatory propaganda by leaving his Doctor nameless and his Fools generic rather than converting them into Papist gargoyles, but the ideological undercurrent cannot be mistaken. The author's Protestant sympathies are well known to his audience, which largely shares them, and when the viewers are addressed as “healthy” in the beginning, this may allude to the correctness of their religious orientation. Surely there is a modicum of irony in the fact that Sachs utilizes such an arch-Catholic topos as a parade of Deadly Sins for his display. Even the drastic image of the foolectomy, although long established as a satirical motif, seems to invoke a bit of Luther's vehement spirit. In one of his diatribes against Erasmus, Luther uses a similar image: “If I could cut open Erasmus' heart, I would find vain laughing mouths deriding the Trinity, the Holy Sacrament, and so forth.”¹⁸

Clearly, the direct inspiration for Sachs must be attributed to Thomas Murner's Von den grossen Lutherischen Narren (On the Great Lutheran Fool, 1522). Murner's is a sprawling, often acerbic indictment of Lutheranism in verse and image which in turn owes its form to Brant's Ship of Fools. Murner has a woodcut of a “Great Lutheran Fool” chock full of little fools, but the motif is surely not of his invention. As a matter of fact, we find quite a vogue for this particular subject matter in the early 1520's. An anonymous pro-Lutheran pamphlet entitled Ain schöner Dialogus (A Pretty Dialogue, probably dated 1521, from Suebia or Franconia) features a conversation between two fictitious champions of the Reformation. Their latest gossip about one of Luther's key adversaries, Johannes Eck, is that

now, when he was operated on his Fool, which had grown so large in him that it had gotten out of hand, so that it was quite a miraculous thing which he issued forth, he went to Rome. There, he wasn't well for long. Treated with the same medicine the wound opened up again and the Fool grew much larger than before. And if he doesn't have it cut soon, I'm worried that he will die of it or that he could infest the entire monastery of Bollingen, where he is at present, with Fools.¹⁹

Anti-Papist iconography, too, is replete with drastic depictions of birth and excretion (a monstrous demon excreting the Pontifex; the Pope in turn giving birth to the Cardinals, etc.). The language of the body, so felicitous for the economical exposition of power relations, became the language of political polemics.

It is rare for the genre of doctor's plays to display such a traumatic and invasive process as surgery on stage, although in the instance of Das Narren-schneyden this will be taken metaphorically rather than literally and ameliorated at least by the comedy of the scene. The spectator would have been able to sympathize with the unfortunate patient who had to endure without the benefit of anaesthesia: operations for cataracts and hernias as well as lithotomy and trepanning were current and frequently painful as well as lethal. We have images: Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel the Elder both depicted that popular medieval operation, the removal of the “stone of folly” from a patient's head. This, admittedly, was a craft of charlatanry and prestidigitation, and more often than not the surgeon had procured the object he purported to have removed from the poor wretch's skull himself so as to leave nothing to chance. Sachs' Doctor, too, pitilessly heeds the advice given in a contemporary medical manual: “A good leech [physician] does not desist from cutting or burning because of the weeping of the patient.”²⁰ The patient's tearful protests are to no avail against the Lutheran resolve of the Surgeon, and the audience is very much supplied with an objective correlative for the pains of moral rectitude.

The quack doctor plays are mostly crude little pieces which rely almost exclusively on the theatrical energy of the situation between the vainglorious quack and dim-witted patient, their loose structure often demanding contests of comic improvisation. One can assume, however, that the doctor gained such popularity for reasons external to the histrionic business which he made possible. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser argues that all Carnival plays reflect a clearly designated function within the ecclesiastical plan. According to Moser,

These doctors' plays were popular because they offered the easiest access to the intended theme of human carnality. The doctor could most easily diagnose human “weaknesses”. … The popularity of this genre does not only have its reason in the fact that the doctor was perceived as the focal figure onto which one's own worries could be projected, but also in the ability of the doctor to diagnose the infirmities of the body which were supposed to come into view from a catechetical angle.²¹

IV

If Moser means to imply that all Carnival activity was unwittingly serviceable to religious doctrine—or indeed ideologically remote-controlled by the Church—we have reason to doubt his opinion. Nonetheless, the profession of the doctor was fraught with a certain amount of symbolic significance in itself, for at the opposite end of quackdom stood the mighty model of God or Christ as the Divine Physician and Healer, exerting authority over the restitution of both body and spirit. Medicine itself was a borderline discipline in transition, still relying on numerology and alchemy, yet reaching for objective scientific insight.

Sachs' Doctor arrives at a juncture at which the figure of the healer, owing in part to scientific advances, ceases to be associated exclusively with the inveterate prevaricating huckster or the shaman and emerges as a repository of cogent analysis: naming and taxonomizing diseases, developing a coherent symptomatology and anamnesis. The factor which had rendered the mercator or medicus so integral to the Passion and Easter plays of the previous centuries and had accorded that character a contrapuntal status so entirely out of proportion with his strictly dramaturgical role was precisely the convenience with which he could be recruited to serve an inverse “figural” function (in the sense of Erich Auerbach²²) to the figure of the true Savior and Healer. The play of this proto-quack's final ineptitude was the negative matrix against which the eschatological power-play of salvation unfolded. But this unquestioned symbolic bipolarity is no longer tenable at the outset of the sixteenth century either on stage or in life. Sachs appropriates the new-found authority of the doctor for his didactic cause; as a matter of fact, the “ontogeny” of his plot (from the blustering of the apparent charlatan to the assertiveness and triumph of the moral surgeon) in a sense recapitulates the “phylogeny” of the quack doctor farce.

In the popular mind, the body was a microcosm which reflected the larger principles of universal order, but it was susceptible to the malignant invasion of chaotic forces. In Leonardo's still quite medieval view, for instance, medicine “is the restoration of discordant elements; sickness is the discord of the elements infused into the living body.”²³ Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the time of the French physician and novelist François Rabelais, who was born in the same year as Hans Sachs, was “the only time in the history of European ideology when medicine was the center not only of the natural sciences but of the humanities as well; indeed it was assimilated into philosophy.”²⁴ It is the hesitant beginning of what Michel Foucault calls “the medical gaze,” a way of analytically approaching (and speaking of) the microcosm as well as the macrocosm:

The clinician's gaze and the philosopher's reflection have similar powers, because they both presuppose a structure of identical objectivity. … The doctor's discursive, reflective perception and the philosopher's discursive reflexion on perception come together in a figure of exact superposition, since the world is for them the analogue of language.²⁵

A proponent of the microcosmic view of the body was the Swiss-German physician, philosopher, and alchemist Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus zu Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus, another man of Sachs' very generation. To Paracelsus, the affliction, which is an obstinate parasitical being all its own that acts like “a man hidden in man”(!), has gone astray from the healthy body and must be returned, by medical or magical means, to the body's mainstream. Like only the preacher, the Paracelsian physician has a spiritual mission that endows him with nearly divine powers. This “moral” idea of illness as a deviant principle, in which the doctor becomes the agent of salvation, is only the obverse of Sachs' presentation of moral depravity as illness.²⁶ Even the form of Das Narren-schneyden may owe something to Paracelsus, for these little Fools resemble nothing so much as an allegorical version of his homunculi, those small, alchemically produced beings which had also found their way into the Faust folklore then making the round. Interestingly, I have encountered several depictions of an alchemist harvesting homunculi from the swollen belly of a seated man by means of an enormous faucet attached at the navel!

By some quirk of German intellectual history, the mystic Jakob Böhme, born a year before Sachs' death, was also a cobbler, although of opposite sensibilities. In his enigmatic Aurora (1612) he drew up a detailed body cosmology in which the body is the analogue of the world and the world indeed is “the analogue of language.” According to Böhme, the interior (“hollowness”) in man's body “signifies the deep between the stars and the earth”; the entrails “signify the consuming of all which is in the power of the stars”; and so forth.²⁷

Thus, Sachs' patient (by analogy, if not chronology) possesses a fully catalogued body onto which a symbolic topography is already inscribed, a body open to (and prepared for) signification. When he issues forth his Fools, they may indeed come from the “deep between the stars and the earth,” from that sphere where constellations decide man's fate. The oscillating perspective between macroscopy and microscopy has its precedent in Menippean satire—Menippos regarding the absurd insect-like bustle of his fellow humans from the distance of the Moon—and Sachs applies similar satirical telescopy to the Sick Man's belly where he uncovers a “wilder wüster wurm,” a repulsive worm-shaped appendage teeming with embryonic Fools, all quite ready to develop into full-grown specimens who will take their place in the Great Fools' Society as

Allerley gattung, als falsch juristen,
Schwartzkünstner und die alchamisten,
Finantzer, alifantzer und trügner,
Schmaichler, spotfeler und lügner. …

(p. 15)

Various species: corrupted judges,
Black magicians, alchemical drudges,
Financiers, flim-flams, various tricksters,
Liars and scoffers, fat ass-lickers. …

and so on, down the entire inventory of folly, courtesy of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools. Just as Alcofrybas, Rabelais' anagrammatic surrogate in Gargantua and Pantagruel, marches onto the tongue of the giant to find fields and towns, so Sachs' Surgeon finds a small reproduction of the larger world within the Patient.²⁸ Yet he finds it not in the mouth, but nearer the opposite end, an orifice which, if we believe Bakhtin (see below), is intimately connected with the Carnival. This is significant, for, as Jan Kott writes in a recent essay on the medieval microcosm/macrocosm motif, “In the vertical imagery man is divided in half: from the waist up he represents the heavens, from the waist down hell. But all hells, from the antique Tartarus through the hells of Dante and Hieronymus Bosch, are the image of the Earth.”²⁹

But we must take note of an interesting shift in the play's point of view, a shift which is best expressed in rhetorical terms. The topos of the Fools no doubt is manifestly conventional: it is purely an allegory of vices. The topos of the Nest of Fools, on the other hand, is synecdochic in nature and therefore is more complex. Oft-invoked products of a platitudinous didacticism, the allegorical Fools are, if not stillborn, at least somewhat of a pallid abstraction against which the embryonic Fools' Nest teems with good “organic” health. A satirical out-growth rather than a moralistic apparition, it is quite particular in its reference to Sachs' own society and time.

V

The Sick Man of Sachs' farce is lastly not so much an Everyman as he is a “universal man,” carrying within himself the image of the earth that breeds its own corruption in its innards. The body of fool-ridden Mankind becomes a body-world, a host body to the parasites of depravity. Stylistically, the play acknowledges this change by veering from the conventional literary motif of the Seven Deadly Sins into the realm and imagery of corporeality, of birth, placenta, and uterus; from the metaphoric vision (“man is so foolish, it is as if he were inhabited by fools”) to the vision of an almost Rabelaisian satirical grotesque that is in its tangible repulsiveness both laughable and profoundly disturbing.

Sachs, like his contemporaries, is wont to “read” the body allegorically and in moral terms. When his Surgeon removes the Fool of Pride, a specimen with a mightily swollen head, one is reminded of a Spruchgedicht (anecdotal poem) of 1557 where he reports the “wondrous birth” of an apparently hydrocephalic child and interprets its distended head as a sign of warning to all “heads of state” to beware of God's imminent wrath.³⁰

This monstrous being, like the Seven Fools, springs from the “hell-half” of the body, and like them it bodes ill. Both, in fact, are products of “wondrous births” (with all of the religious analogies that hang thereby), although the “pregnant” man may be slightly more unnatural. It seems, then, that we receive mixed signals when Bakhtin tells us that the lower body is one of the incontestably positive locations within the Carnival code: “The material bodily lower stratum is productive. It gives birth, thus assuring mankind's immortality. All obsolete and vain illusions die in it, and the real future comes to life.”³¹ However, Bakhtin draws an interesting and valid analogy when, in true Rabelaisian fashion, he sees the total human body as the icon of the Carnival. This is not so much the individual as the social, cosmic, “universal body,” the positive idea(1) of the material body per se. In Bakhtin's Carnival, everything is reduced to its bodily functions. To this “principle of grotesque realism” (Bakhtin, passim), degradation is essential. The body stands for sexuality and the ingestion of food; in the carnivalistic obsession with noses, genitalia, and other physical protrusions it is portrayed as growing beyond its natural, aesthetically acceptable boundaries, as is demonstrated in much of popular pageantry. (Erasmus, too, lets Folly exalt “that foolish, even silly, part which cannot be named without laughter” and which is “the propagator of the human race.”³²) Metaphorically, this Carnival body is the shape of the body politic and social during the festival, and in a sense it represents an “anti-body” to the body of Christ, which is solemnly celebrated only a little while later. But we must beware of fully subscribing to Bakhtin, or even to Erasmus' enlightened sixteenth-century humanism, for fear of repressing the rich and sinister ambivalence of late medieval sexuality which Bakhtin's Carnival, by celebrating it, to a degree displaces. In the positive view of the lower body, the Carnival is easily trivialized into a ritual of unfettered (“genuine”) sensuality, a mere taunting of the ecclesiastical hostility to the flesh, a temporary repudiation of the Lenten conscience—and thereby in essence affirmative. Julia Kristeva, though, reminds us that the “scene of parody” is really identical to the “scene of law,” and that true Carnival approaches a “murderous, revolutionary” dimension which is in fact the “scene of its other.”³³

Das Narren-schneyden lacks any explicitly neurotic or even “revolutionary” undertones, but by its invocation of procreation and birth—even though the “body” of the play is circumscribed predominantly by moral, not carnal parameters—it opens up a dichotomous context. Taking place in such anatomical and topological proximity to the areas of defecation, the act of delivery cannot but be regarded as repulsive, conjuring up infernal images, reminders of man's condemnation to the flesh (Beckett's “they give birth astride the grave” comes to mind). On the other hand it is the microcosmic analogue of the regeneration of the larger universe, biologically with Spring, spiritually with Easter. Bakhtin, again, reminds us of a “pregnant” image that symbolizes this double significance: “In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth.”³⁴

VI

Das Narren-schneyden, as in the case of any good Carnival play, turns on this profound ambivalence, combining death (of Sin or Folly) with the “rebirth,” the twofold “delivery” of the Sick Man in an odd, or grotesque, theatrical image denoting both surgery and birth. The “pregnant man,” of course, is a Carnival topos par excellence. It feeds on physical humor and sexual inversion and takes the customary carnivalistic role reversal (men in women's clothes and vice versa) to its logical extreme into an area of danger where male fears and wishes at their most hidden and complex reside.

Male pregnancy, incidentally, is not entirely a matter of literary or carnivalistic satirical inversion only. Ethnologists know of a custom among “primitive” societies called the couvade in which the husband of a woman in labor will receive nursing as if he were bearing the child (while she immediately returns to work afterwards) or indeed will exhibit psychosomatically induced physical pregnancy symptoms.³⁵ Bruno Bettelheim, reversing a familiar Freudian idea, informs us that this conduct is chiefly the result of the husband's feelings of envy and inferiority: “The man wishes to find out how it feels to give birth, or he wishes to tell himself that he can.” References to acts of male cross-dressing with imitations of the pregnant female physiognomy and symbolic birth rituals within the realm of initiation rites abound in ethnological literature.³⁶

It seems that the mundus inversus notion of the carnivalistic male pregnancy, even in such a rarefied recasting as Das Narrenschneyden, reflects a far more remote and primary substratum of human behavior than is immediately apparent. Surely, it has long been acknowledged that many aspects of the Carnival celebration had been rationalized into the ecclesiastical calendar from far older pagan fertility rites, and I think it would be too far-reaching to suggest that the celebration of Carnival is in essence a derivative form of the Rite of Passage, but if we remember that the sixteenth-century Nuremberg Carnival is very much a male-dominated occasion, the thematic echo becomes quite persistent.

Sachs used the theme of the “pregnant man” twice again, in a more farcical manner. In his Carnival play Der schwanger pawer (The Pregnant Peasant, 1544), based on a story from the Decameron, three crafty friends decide to cheat a stingy peasant out of his recent inheritance. They convince their victim that he looks deathly ill and enlist a dishonest doctor to diagnose the affliction as pregnancy. The peasant whines, fearing his imminent death, since he is physically unequipped to give birth. Of course, for an appreciable sum of money the doctor is prepared to administer a wonder drug. The patient “recovers,” and the conspirators go off to carouse.

An even later version, Der schwanger bawer mit dem fül (The Peasant Pregnant with a Foal, 1559), works the motif into a relatively elaborate comedy of errors. Here, Cuntz the badly constipated farmer sends out his pea-brained yokel Heintz with a urine sample to a “Jewish quack” of most questionable competence. Predictably, the fool loses the precious cargo when his mare stumbles, but blithely substitutes the animal's urine instead. After much head-scratching the quack concludes that the peasant must be pregnant with a foal. Thus informed by his menial, Cuntz, who unquestioningly accepts the diagnosis (as Carnival peasants will), complains only that now, surely, his reputation is ruined. Eventually, the peasant's bowel movements scare off a sleeping rabbit which, generically thick and myopic as he is, he takes for his offspring. In typical couvade behavior, the man imagines that he deserves at least six weeks of uninterrupted childbed for this extraordinary feat of which he is visibly proud.

In both of these plays the pregnancy is indeed wholly fictitious, and the topos in each instance is displayed with a certain comical innocence. I have introduced them as a point of comparison to illustrate the unique quality of Das Narrenschneyden. In these later variations the satirical impetus is not engaged (the knuckleheaded peasant was already a tired Carnival cliché) and the point of attack is markedly more conventional. If we were to employ standards of modern criticism, we would need to label them regressive, but such criteria are meaningless for a form like the Carnival play that had no concept of itself as art within a context of progress by innovation nor any mandate for originality. Yet can we let these peasant plays stand as harmless, good-natured farces, or is there not more we should at least remark upon in passing?

As John Tailby notes,³⁷ the image of the peasant on the Carnival stage is quite unconcerned with immediate social reality. But the explicit feminization of the peasant's body, particularly in the festive and unearnest context that is so conducive to the unwitting revelation of the suppressed, eloquently bespeaks, in the form of undisguisable “body language,” the position accorded to the lowest estate in the purview of the sophisticated city-dweller and the overarching hierarchy he sustained. The comic metaphor contains, only thinly veiled in its condescension, a history of submission for which the implicit sexual domination that serves as precursor to the unnatural pregnancy is merely an alternate, albeit graphic expression. Here is not the place to pursue this notion any further except to remind ourselves of the ignominious part which Luther played precisely in the public justification of this submission (I refer of course to his stance in the Peasants' War of 1524-25). Thus the Carnival play of the pregnant peasant, innocuous as it appears, sets the scene within which both a politics of subjugation and a neurosis of male womb-envy are implicitly staged. Significantly, the only time Sachs introduces us to a pregnant Bürger (Der schwanger purger zu Costnicz [The Pregnant Burgher of Constance], 1557),³⁸ it is the wealthy protagonist who, with the help of a complicitous doctor, tricks his wife into allowing him to sleep with the maid. Of course, the maid has previously been illicitly impregnated by her employer, but to elude the peril of imminent discovery, the doctor reports to the wife that it is the man who is expecting, and that this situation can best be remedied by letting him sleep with a “virgin” (the maid's part) to dispose of the child by transferring it to her womb. An example of smirking male humor, this piece puts both women soundly in their place—as victims.

Two later theatrical versions of the motif which have come to my attention may be mentioned. One comes from an eighteenth-century illustrated Dutch scenario of the commedia dell' arte, The Marvellous Malady of Harlequin. Here, the dottore is unable to diagnose Harlequin's case, and the latter is shortly delivered of three boys, only one of which survives. The play, which centers on Harlequin's child rearing efforts, rests on the comic but realistically treated premise of the character's perfect androgyny.³⁹ Harlequin, incidentally, can trace part of his ancestry to the dithyrambic Dionysos, born from the “male womb” (Euripides) of Zeus.

A second variation on the theme is recounted by Goethe, who chronicled the Roman Carnival of 1788 in detail. There he observed “all kinds of grotesque performances,” one of which is worthy to be reproduced at length:

Here, for example, comes a group of men, wearing short jackets over gold-laced waistcoats, the Sunday clothes of the common people, and with their hair gathered up in nets which hang down their backs. With them are other young fellows dressed up as women, one of whom seems to be far advanced in pregnancy. They are all strolling up and down peacefully until, suddenly, the men start to quarrel. A lively altercation ensues, the women get mixed up in it, and the brawl grows more and more violent, until both sides draw huge knives of silver cardboard and attack each other. The women cry murder and try to part them, pulling them this way and that. The bystanders intervene, just as if they believed the affair were in earnest, and try to calm both parties down. Meanwhile, as if from shock, the pregnant woman is taken ill. A chair is brought, and the older women give her aid. She moans like a woman in labour, and the next thing you know, she has brought some misshapen creature into the world, to the great amusement of the onlookers. The play is over, and the troupe moves on to repeat the performance, or some farce like it, elsewhere.⁴⁰

The topos of which Das Narren-schneyden makes use, then, seems to be founded on a central idea of the Carnival, which combines the motif of fertility with a sense of the uncanny or grotesque. As I have suggested (but left unexplored), the male pregnancy topos carries within itself the faint and possibly ironic resonance of the Nativity, like so many medieval motifs which retain allusive bonds with the historia sacra. And again, as in the case of the mercator plays, it figures largely contrapuntally. For the fruit these men bear, in contrast to Mary's salutary offspring, is illusory, debased, futile, or, as in the case of our Infirmus, sin personified. The medieval mind, steeped in the myth of the one birth, could hardly fail to recognize the utter contrariness of the other. Yet we are referred further back still: “Eva causa mortis, Maria causa salutis” ran the formula summarizing the equilibrium of biblical history. Eve and her sinful nature had in time been transmogrified into the Fool Mother and her Seven Sons, a frequently depicted scenario in German medieval art, and a corresponding Carnival procession ditty claimed that “Adam had seven sons.”⁴¹ Indeed, according to biblical account and legend it was Adam who issued forth Eve, and thereby he became, in a manner of speaking, the first pregnant man, as Roberto Zapperi has observed⁴²—and thus he should be seen as the wellspring of the Seven Deadly Sins.

By implication, then, this Sick Man on the Nuremberg Carnival stage is created in the image of Adam, but he bears marks and traces of a mythology receding far into the subhistory of male consciousness, a mythology weaving its tales of the pregnant man, projecting its rituals of the couvade or inventing its androgynous Dionysian, Harlequinian, Falstaffian heroes at the perilous fringe of man's internalized sexual and moral identity, transcending momentarily the jealously guarded borders to the female and the divine.

VII

What finally, is the result of Sachs' “medical gaze” after the patient is freed of the fruit of his folly? The conclusion voiced by the Doctor seems quite orthodox indeed:

Vor solcher kranckheyt zu bewaren,
Las ich zu-letzt ein gut recept:
Ein yegklicher, dieweil er lebt,
Las er sein vernunfft mayster sein
Und reytt sich selb im zaum gar fein. …

(p. 17)

To preserve you from the like dismay
I leave you this nostrum in the end:
Each one, as we through life do wend,
Let Reason his sole master be
To bridle in all vanity. …

That “reason” should be the result of the removal of folly follows logically enough, but it is also inimical to the spirit of Carnival. Further, the play does not by chance end with such an admonition. Even while on the Nuremberg stage Schmidtlein groans and twitches under Sachs' scalpel, the Middle Ages are irrevocably coming to an end and with them the age of the Fastnachtsspiel.

Das Narren-schneyden, while still drawing its vigor from the intellectual and theatrical world of the past, is essentially advocating its own obsolescence. One could say that Sachs is “deconstructing” his own premises, whether he is aware of it or not. Sachs has centralized the marginal, domesticated the contradictory and put it to task for a fundamentally unoffensive adhortatio coram publico in which the potentially grotesque, although present, is toned down and muted. This reflects a dilemma of the Carnival in the era of the Bürger. The old dionysian forms are still pulsating somewhere in the souterrain of the sixteenth-century mind, but when they reach consciousness they have been reshaped, censored, and married to humanist figures of thought and allegories of speaking. That Sachs' intentions are ultimately didactic, that he aims to present a corrective spectacle for which the medical metaphor serves only as a readily available, familiar outward guise is unquestionable and has recently been argued by R. E. Schade with detailed reference to the author's general use of instructive allegory.⁴³ But this intended instruction no longer partakes of a unilateral, authoritative communication backed by the weight of ecclesiastical approval; it must therefore change its strategy to mirror transformed circumstances. The Sick Man serves as exemplum upon whom the process of defollycization is manifested as possible and salutary, but the entire demonstration must be contained within the dramatic fiction, referring to the realm of outside behavior of its projected constituency only in its appeal to reason. No doubt the Reformation is the key to this development. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser contends that the experience of metanoia, of repentance and change of ways, is the central concept for the understanding of the Carnival play tradition:

The late medieval Carnival play is … a play which for its completion demands the additional moral “investment” of the spectator: his individual active repentance which, after the change of heart of the “metanoia,” he must accomplish in the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter as an “opus operatum.” Taken by itself, the play remains a torso, because it only represents the first part of a three-part structure (Carnality-Metanoia-Repentance).⁴⁴

Sachs' plays could not count on this “contribution” of the audience any more; the play, although theatrically still effective, became an ideological “torso” in the context of the Carnival. But the context of the festival proper had become increasingly secondary: we know that Sachs' plays were performed apart from the Carnival, that they had loosened their institutional ties with the Organized Folly, which had at the same time become an event of self-conscious bourgeois civic pride rather than the spontaneous expression of the folk character Bakhtin would have it be. The Battle of Carnival and Lent, as depicted in Breughel's splendid canvas, had ended in an odd Pyrrhic victory for the Carnival. Lent being vanquished in the strongholds of the Reformation, Carnival lost its counterpart, its natural enemy, so to speak, and succumbed to surfeit. In Samuel Kinser's analysis, the Carnival had become “representational” rather than “presentational,” a social event rather than a ritual.⁴⁵ Maybe it is this type of Fool as well that Sachs, who was a proud and respected citizen himself, is excising from the bowels of Nuremberg—an act of auto-catharsis, as it were? After all, the Sick Man of Das Narren-schneyden is not the usual target of urban derision and victim of wily quacks—the peasant—but a burgher like Sachs himself and his audience, an alter ego. We should not forget that the title's double entendre (preserved in translation) asks us to think of the patient as the Fool. If the womb is only the microcosmic simulacrum of the orbis terrarum, as is conventional reasoning at the time (finding authority, among others, in Albertus Magnus), then it needs little audacity to suggest that the womb-like Nest of Fools is the simulacrum of Sachs' orbis urbi. Nuremberg, Sachs' beloved city, is here cut open and exposed. Patient and Doctor share an almost conspiratorial identity, and if there is indeed evidence to suggest that Sachs played the Sick Man, not the Doctor (in some performances?),⁴⁶ this would lend a particular poignancy to Foucault's remark that, “If the disease is to be analysed, it is because it itself is analysis; and ideological decomposition can be only the repetition in the doctor's consciousness of the decomposition raging in the patient's body.”⁴⁷ The thrust of the little play may appear obscure to us, yet so saturated is the early sixteenth century with a belief in the overabundance and ubiquity of foolishness (of one's ideological adversary, mostly) that the very reluctance of Das Narrenschneyden to name culprits is symptomatic. One particular episode more than others, however, may have made the play's call for restraint resonate with its Shrovetide audience, if we can indeed assume the date of composition to be around 1536: the Anabaptist takeover of Münster in 1535 was not only anathema to mainline Lutherans like Sachs, but also an example of the kind of immoderation that must have strongly offended the poet's sensibilities.

Even if the analysis of Sachs the physician is not overwhelmingly profound (and I find nothing slanderous in suggesting that it is not), his criticism is not purse-lipped and joyless—a fault of much of the condemnatory moralizing of the time. Unlike the great Reformationist, Sachs does not despair of human rationality. Luther firmly insists that man's principal endowment is naught without faith, that his ratio is “given to vanity, that is, fool's work.”⁴⁸ Like most critics, I will not easily accuse Sachs of philosophical trenchancy, but I think we must credit him with a certain dogged confidence in human perfectibility and in man's faculty to rid himself of “fool's work” by his own moral surgery, a position which has been referred to as “neostoical”⁴⁹ and which at times seems closer to the perspicacious Erasmus than to the emphatic Luther.

Notes

1. The text, “Ein fassnacht-spiel mit dreyen personen. Das narren-schneyden,” is quoted from Hans Sachs, Werke, ed. Edmund Goetze and Adelbert von Keller (1870; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), V, 3-17. For the English passages I have used, with kind permission, the unpublished translation and adaptation of Martin Walsh and Margarete Orlik-Walsh (Fool Surgery/Das Narrenschneiden: A Shrovetide Play of 1557 by Hans Sachs, Meistersinger von Nürnberg). I have followed the play's earliest editor, Goetze, in assigning the play to 1536, which is fairly probable for stylistic reasons.

2. See Erich Krüger, Die komischen Szenen in den deutschen geistlichen Spielen des Mittelalters (Phil. Diss., Univ. of Hamburg, 1931), p. 18.

3. For a comprehensive collection of mostly anonymous carnival plays of the fifteenth century, see Fastnachtsspiele aus dem fünfzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Adelbert von Keller (1853; rpt. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1965), 3 vols. Typical for the form of the serial play are Pamphilius Gengenbach, Spiel von den zehn Altern dieser Welt (1515) and Der Nollhart (1517), in which the ten ages of man and the representatives of all social stations, respectively, appear.

4. See Samuel Sumberg, The Nuremberg Schembart Carnival (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1941), esp. chap. 7.

5. Barbara Könneker, Wesen und Wandlung der Narrenidee im Zeitalter des Humanismus: Brant-Murner-Erasmus (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1966), p. 246. Here and elsewhere where not otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

6. Hans Sachs, Selections, ed. Mary Beare (Durham: Univ. of Durham, 1983), p. xci.

7. For details of staging and audience of the German carnival plays, see Heinz Kindermann, Das Theater der Renaissance, Theatergeschichte Europas, 2 (Salzburg: Müller, 1959), pp. 271ff, and Heinz Kindermann, Das Theaterpublikum des Mittelalters (Salzburg: Müller, 1980), pp. 74ff.

8. Concerning the importance of the drama for Reformation and anti-Reformation propaganda, see the selection of plays and especially the introduction to Die Schaubühne im Dienste der Reformation, ed. Arnold E. Berger (1935; rpt. Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 2 vols. A new study is Wolfgang F. Michael, Das deutsche Drama der Reformationszeit (Berne and New York: Peter Lang, 1984).

9. Beare, ed., Selections, p. lxxxix.

10. See Kindermann, Das Theater der Renaissance, p. 297.

11. Ibid., p. 286.

12. Fastnachtsspiele, I, 365 (No. 48).

13. Klaus-Peter Koepping, “Absurdity and Hidden Truth: Cunning Intelligence and Grotesque Body Images as Manifestations of the Trickster,” History of Religions, 24, No. 3 (February 1985), 213.

14. Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Politics and Life between Middle Ages and Modern Times, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), p. 195.

15. Alvin Kernan's words about Ben Jonson's Volpone could just as easily apply to Sachs: “Under cover of the medicinal metaphor, so typical in satire, the satiric author now offers his play as a purge for the ills of the time. The medicinal properties of his product are no longer concentrated in the railing speeches of a satyr satirist but are present in the entire spectacle he places before us” (The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959], p. 168).

16. Koepping, “Absurdity and Hidden Truth,” p. 202.

17. David Brett-Evans, Von Hrotsvit bis Folz und Gengenbach: Eine Geschichte des mittelalterlichen deutschen Dramas (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1975), p. 156.

18. Luther im Gespräch, ed. Reinhard Buchwald (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), p. 165.

19. Satiren und Pasquille aus der Reformationszeit, ed. Oskar Schade (1863; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966), II, 124.

20. Quoted in Joseph and Frances Gies, Life in a Medieval City (New York: Harper, 1981), p. 115.

21. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, “Fastnacht und Fastnachtsspiel: Zur Säkularisierung geistlicher Volksschauspiele bei Hans Sachs und ihrer Vorgeschichte,” in Hans Sachs und Nürnberg, ed. Horst Brunner et al. (Nürnberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1976), pp. 211f.

22. Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 53: “Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first.”

23. Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. Irma A. Richter (Oxford and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 279.

24. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iwolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), p. 359.

25. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 96.

26. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Basel and New York: Karger, 1982), pp. 117, 140; Heinrich Schipperges, Kosmos Anthropos: Entwürfe zu einer Philosophie des Leibes (Stuttgart: Klett-Kotta, 1981), p. 169.

27. Alex Wayman, “The Human Body as Microcosm in India, Greek Cosmology, and Sixteenth-Century Europe,” History of Religions, 22, No. 3 (November 1982), 182.

28. For a study of this motif, see Erich Auerbach, “The World in Pantagruel's Mouth,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 262-84.

29. Jan Kott, The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Carnival Tradition, trans. Daniela Miedzyrzecka and Lillian Vallee (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1987), p. 39.

30. “Ein Wundergepuert eines kindes mit ainem ser grosen kopff,” in Selections, ed. Beare, pp. 56f.

31. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 378.

32. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 14.

33. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), p. 80. With regard to the “revolutionary” aspects of Carnival, at least one historical incident is recorded (in the French village of Romans in 1580) in which the Carnival celebration served as the pretext for a bloody insurrection. See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival In Romans, trans. Mary Feeney (New York: George Braziller, 1979).

34. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 25f.

35. See, for example, Robert L. and Ruth H. Munroe, “Male Pregnancy Symptoms and Cross-Sex Identity in Three Societies,” Journal of Social Psychology, 84 (1971), 11-25.

36. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier, 1962), pp. 111ff.

37. John Tailby, “Peasants in Fifteenth-Century ‘Fastnachtsspiele’ from Nuremberg: The Problems of their Identification and the Significance of their Presentation,” Daphnis, 4 (1975), 172-78.

38. Hans Sachs, Sämtliche Fablen und Schwänke, ed. Edmund Goetze and Karl Drescher (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913), VI, 230-32 (No. 988). Sachs derived his idea for this Schwank from Jörg Wickram's Rollwagenbüchlein (1555).

39. Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy: The Improvisations, Scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits, and Masks of the Illustrious Characters of the Commedia dell' Arte, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966), pp. 56ff.

40. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey: 1786-1788, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Pantheon, 1968), pp. 460f. Goethe, not surprisingly, was familiar with Sachs' Carnival plays and even performed Das Narren-schneyden with his Weimar amateur theater in 1778-79; see Gisela Sichardt, Das Weimarer Libhabertheater unter Goethes Leitung (Weimar: Arion, 1957), pp. 154ff. The surgeon's final exhortation to self-restraint fits nicely with Goethe's concept of Entsagung.

41. Werner Mezger, Narretei und Tradition: Die Rottweiler Fasnet (Stuttgart: K. Theiss, 1984), p. 13.

42. Roberto Zapperi, L'uomo incinto: La donna, l'uomo e il potere (Cosenza: Lerici, 1979), p. 3. Zapperi is to my knowledge the only author to undertake a full study of the pregnant man in literature, and his book gives an inventory of a number of versions, mostly from European folk tales (pp. 213-15).

43. Richard Erich Schade, “‘Das Narren schneyden’ (1557): The Deadly Sins and the Didactics of Hans Sachs,” Studies in Early German Comedy 1500-1650 (Columbia, S. C.: Camden House, 1988), pp. 73-95.

44. Moser, “Fastnacht und Fastnachtsspiel,” p. 214. Robert Potter sees a similar indwelling three-part structure at work in the morality play, “a sequence of innocence/fall/redemption” (The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975], p. 8).

45. See Samuel Kinser, “Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg, 1450-1550,” Representations, 13 (Winter 1986), 1 and passim.

46. See Martin W. Walsh, “Quacks, Empirics, Spiritual Physicians: The Dramatic Functions of the ‘Medicus’ in 15th and 16th Century ‘Fastnachtsspiele’,” Fifteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1983), 268.

47. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, p. 130.

48. Luther im Gespräch, p. 159.

49. Marade Ansorge and Klaus Lüpke, “‘Mors omnia aequat’: Zur Verwendung einer antifeudalen Kategorie bei Hans Sachs,” in Hans Sachs: Studien zur frühbürgerlichen Literatur im 16. Jahrhundert, ed. J. Bumke et al. (Berne, Frankfurt, and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1978), p. 181.