The Pietisterey in a whalebone skirt
The Pietisterey in a whalebone skirt by Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched , initially published anonymously in 1736, is a comedy from the early Enlightenment period . In the drama, the Protestant movement of Pietism is satirically criticized.
content
The place of action is the house of the Glaubeleicht family in the Prussian Königsberg . While the man of the house spends two years in England on business, the Pietists manage to influence the family. As her name suggests, Frau Glaubeleicht believes the Pietists blindly. Magister Scheinfromm is able to seize the opportunity by trying to prevent the planned marriage between the youngest daughter and Herr Liebmann. He would like to put his relative Mr. Muckersdorff in the place of the actually intended groom. A marriage contract is to be concluded, which transfers the entire property of the Glaubeleicht family to Muckersdorff. At the last moment, the master's deceitful machinations can be uncovered and rejected by the brother-in-law Wackermann. The woman's eyes are easily opened and nothing stands in the way of a happy love marriage.
Background: The satirical type comedy
General
The aim of all of Johann Christoph Gottsched's rules and regulations was to raise German comedy to a European level; his wife basically pursued the same claim with her work. The Saxon type comedy became the German variant of a European, satirical form of comedy; foreign texts were initially translated. The “Pietisterey” is the adaptation of the comedy La Femme docteur ou la théologie janséniste tombée en quenouille by the French poet Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant , but all other comedy poets (including Johann Elias Schlegel and Gottsched himself) were also comedy translators. For the translators, however, it was not about a verbatim reproduction of the original texts; rather, Germanizations were produced; H. Names, motifs and storylines adapted to German conditions.
structure
If you take Horst Steinmetz's (controversial) terminology as a basis, it is a "binomial comedy": This assumes a disturbed relationship between the vicious type and the sensible environment . The reason for this is, on the one hand, an individual mistake on the part of the hero (in the case of the "Pietisterey" of the heroine, namely the woman who is a believer), but on the other hand, a more general socio-moral grievance . This in turn is represented by a certain person (here: by the Magister Scheinfromm) or by a group of people (the Pietists). Due to the machinations of these people, who are often criminals, the hero is their victim, but also the victim of the general grievance. Thus, personal and general failure complement each other in satirical type comedy.
swell
- Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched (1736): The Pietisterey in the whalebone skirt , ed. by Wolfgang Martens. Reclam, Stuttgart 2010 (with a detailed afterword from which much of the above information is taken).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Horst Steinmetz: The Comedy of Enlightenment . 3. Edition. Metzler, Stuttgart 1978