erforschen, dann sein Fürwitz, Freyheit vnd Leichtfertigkeit stache vnnd reitzte ihn also." He makes a pact with the devil, who opens up to him new worlds of unlimited sensual enjoyment; he travels far and wide, to Italy, to the East, conjures up the most beautiful women of all lands, amongst them Helen of Troy, who lives with him a year and bears him a son; until at last the twenty-four years for which he had stipulated elapse, and he is carried off in triumph to hell. Thus, it might be said, the evangelical spirit of Protestant theology avenged itself on the genii of knowledge and inquiry, which it had itself set free. Two centuries of intellectual evolution had still to pass before a new humanism and a new philosophy of life were able to vanquish the narrow standpoint of Lutheran Protestantism; it was almost the end of the eighteenth century before Goethe discovered that the longings and ambitions which bring about the tragedy in Faust's life do not merit damnation, but belong to the most precious attributes of humanity. dramatic Comö Towards the close of the sixteenth century the German New drama entered upon-or, at least, gave promise of entering beginupon a new stage of its history. From the last years of nings. this century to the middle of the following one, Germany was repeatedly visited by companies of strolling English players, the so-called "Englischen Comödianten." These actors The "Engbrought with them not only the theatrical effects of the lischen Elizabethan theatre, but also the highly developed histrionic dianten." art of the English stage; and above all, they brought the comic personage of the English drama, the clown, or "Pickelhering," as he soon came to be called in Germany. On their first visits to the Continent, the "Englischen Comödianten" played only in English, and, in the serious parts of their dramas, had to depend upon their pantomimic abilities to attract the public. But the music and costumes, the bloodcurdling scenes and buffoonery with which the plays were liberally furnished, made up for the disadvantages of the foreign tongue, and, at an early date, the comic rôles were either played entirely in German, or interspersed with as much broken German as the actor could command. Soon these English troupes found German imitators, and thus the German theatre, as an institution, may be said to have begun with troupes of strolling actors who, to commend their perfor mances, described themselves as "English." The repertories of these companies consisted in the main of translations, or rather of mangled stage-versions of popular English dramas. The plays were in prose and constructed solely with a view to crass effect; they are devoid of literary worth and have no value, except that they opened a new horizon to the German drama. Two volumes, containing eighteen dramas and a few comic interludes, were published in 1620 and 1630, under the titles Englische Comödien vnd Tragödien and Liebeskampff oder ander Theil der Englischen Comödien vnd Tragödien.1 The Thirty Years' War was largely responsible for the fact that the initiative of the English actors met with so little encouragement. An immediate influence of their art on the German drama is only to be found in three authors, Landgraf Moriz von Hessen, Herzog Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig -at both of whose Courts English actors were maintained from 1592 on-and Jakob Ayrer, a notary of Nürnberg. Landgraf Landgraf Moriz of Hesse (1572-1632) is credited with a number of original plays, but none has been preserved; a 1572-1632. dozen plays by the Duke of Brunswick (1564-1613), however, Duke were published in 1593 and 1594.2 Duke Heinrich Julius Heinrich stands completely under the influence of his players; his Julius of Brunswick, dramas are full of the horrors which the English actors 1564-1613. delighted in; indeed, the tragedies Titus Andronicus and Von Moriz von Hesse, einem vngerathenen Sohn exceed in this respect anything to be found in the collections of Englische Comödien und Tragödien. Music and dances form a large part of the entertainment, and the clown retains a name of English origin, "Johan Bouset." The humorous interludes are more refined than those in the Englischen Comödien, but not very original; the Duke of Brunswick usually creates his humorous effects by making the clown speak "Plattdeutsch." construction of the plays is only a helpless imitation of their models; their subjects-and the Duke, it may be noted, shows a preference for "gallant" themes-are rarely chosen with a view to their suitability for dramatic treatment. The 1 Die Schauspiele der englischen Komödianten, ed. W. Creizenach (D.N.L., 23 [1889]); another selection is edited by J. Tittmann in Deutsche Dichter des 16. Jahrh., 13, Leipzig, 1880. 2 Ed. W. L. Holland (Stuttg. Litt. Ver., 36), 1855; selections by J. Tittmann in Deutsche Dichter des 16. Jahrh., 14, Leipzig, 1880. /The best side of the Duke of Brunswick's work is his skill in characterising his personages;\ Vincentius Ladislaus, for instance, in the play of that name, is an excellent specimen of the favourite Renaissance type, the boasting soldier, regarded in the light of grotesque caricature. But Heinrich Julius is, after all, almost as far as Hans Sachs from a true understanding of the nature of the drama and of dramatic construction. A much more important dramatist is Jakob Ayrer (died Jakob 1605), in whose seventy odd pieces-sixty-six were published Ayrer, died 1605. in 1618 under the title Opus Theatricum1-an attempt is made to ingraft on the indigenous drama of Hans Sachs the art of the "Englischen Comödianten," with which, since 1593, the citizens of Nürnberg had had repeated opportunity of making themselves acquainted. In the essentials of his literary art, Ayrer is Sachs's successor: he adopts the rhymed couplets of his master; he employs the same broad, undramatic method of unrolling his story, and even in his choice of themes he follows to a large extent Sachs's example. But he is more ambitious, his serious dramas being invariably longer, and he shows a preference for subjects which can be extended over whole cycles of plays. Livy's Römische Historien der Stadt Rom, from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, are, for instance, the theme of a cycle of five pieces; the Comedia von Valentino vnd Vrso is divided into four plays, Die Schöne Melusina into two, while the Heldenbuch is spread over three long dramas-Vom Hueg Diterichen, Von dem Keiser Ottnit, and Vom Wolff Dieterichen. What Ayrer learned from his English models, on the other hand, was mainly of a technical nature. He had a sharper eye for stage effects than Hans Sachs; he borrowed from the "Comödianten" their sensationalism; like them, he made the most of scenes of bloodshed and murder, and in his later dramas, at least, he adopted the improvements of the stage introduced by the English guests. The most satisfactory of Ayrer's longer pieces are the Comedia von der schönen Phoenicia and the Comedia von der schönen Sidea, both of which were probably written after 1600. The plot of the latter, it is worth noting, bears a strong resemblance to Shakespeare's Tempest, a fact which would 1 Ed. A. von Keller (Stuttg. Litt. Ver., 76-80), 1864-65. Cp. also J. Tittmann, Schauspiele aus dem 16. Jahrh., 2 (Deutsche Dichter, 3), 121 ff. Ayrer's "Singspiele." seem to imply that both pieces had the same source. The comic element is less genuine and spontaneous in Ayrer's plays than in the Fastnachtsspiele of Hans Sachs; he introduced clowns on the English model, but usually made them personages of the play, not merely jesters whose duty it was to entertain the audience between the acts. The most interesting and original of Ayrer's dramatic works are not the longer dramas, or even the "Fastnachtsspiele,” but his "Singspiele." Although not perhaps the actual inventor of the German "Singspiel," Ayrer was the first to make it a popular form of dramatic art. The themes of these plays are the same humorous anecdotes which did service for the Nürnberg "Fastnachtsspiele," with the difference that the dialogue is here interspersed with songs set to popular melodies. Ayrer was on the right road towards the realisation of a German national drama. His work shows an unquestionable advance upon that of his predecessor, Hans Sachs — an advance, not in dramatic construction or characterisation, but in the practical quality of stage-effectiveness. But his talent was not strong enough to give the drama a literary stamp. His plays did not-any more than those of the wandering actors whose repertory he imitated-rise above the level of ephemeral productions intended to amuse the public of his day. 203 CHAPTER VI. THE RENAISSANCE. THE Renaissance, which spread from Italy to France in the sixteenth century and attained its maturity in the great century of Louis XIV., was essentially a Latin movement; it is the supreme expression of the Latin spirit in art and literature. But it was too momentous an upheaval in the intellectual life of Europe to remain restricted to the Latin races, and, sooner or later, it spread to Germanic and Slavonic lands. Here, however, that inner harmony between the spirit of the Renaissance and the national temperament, which existed in Italy, in France, and in Spain, was absent, and, in consequence, it remained in the north of Europe-even in Sweden, where it found most favourable soil-essentially a foreign movement. From it, however, the non-Latin races obtained their models of literary form and style. In Germany, the Renaissance cannot The Rebe said to have set in before the first years of the seventeenth century, and what good effects it might have had were, in many. great measure, thwarted by the Thirty Years' War. Thus for the intellectual life of the German people as a whole this movement had, and could have, but little importance, and the lessons which German poetry might have learned from it had practically all to be learned over again at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The humanists were naturally the pioneers of the Renaissance in Germany; they were the true cosmopolites in the age of the Reformation, and, through their activity, the channels between Germany and Italy were kept open. We have already seen how they had assisted the spread of Romance literature north of the Alps, and how under their stimulus naissance in Ger |