Love without Stockings

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This is a verse translation from Danish of a parody of neoclassical tragedy by Norwegian Johan Herman Wessel entitled Kiærlighed uden Strømper, second edition (1774) ie, with epilog a masterpiece of Scandinavian literature. Look it up if you want, but the descriptions are all full of spoilers.

Neoclassical tragedy was a century-old theatrical genre designed by a committee of Frenchmen. What could possibly go wrong. It was so overspec'd that the actors could barely move no swooning, no eating, no stabbing, no soliloquies, not even any deus ex machina! Nonetheless, Louis XIV aka the Sun King and all his descendents up until the guillotine cut them off just loved it, as did everyone who was anyone in France during that past century, especially if they wanted to go on breathing. Because it said only nice things about royalty, the other royals of Europe all loved it too, as did their associated aristocracies, mercenaries, merchants, bishops, hangers-on and assorted other parasites. But not in the British Isles.

After dominating the European royal stages for a century, it was long overdue for a good parody. Instead there arose a movement to create such plays in Danish and Norwegian essentially different dialects of a single language. (Don't tell them I said that.) Fortunately this author lampooned it before it got started, thus sparing the northern kingdoms from an even greater tedium than winter solstice. You know it's really bad art when the parody becomes more famous than the original, at least in the lands where they can understand it.

That's a problem because, even though it's supposed to be theatrical not poetic, the entire genre was written in alexandrines ie, iambic hexameter couplet verse! How ya gonna translate that? So for the past quarter millennium, it's been the exclusive delight of the Scandinavians, except for a bad French translation, a really bad German translation and another French one not so much bad as execrable all done back when the genre was still dying, not yet dead.

Here's how he did it. Wessel obeyed enough of the rules to make clear what he was lampooning, then broke as many of the rest as he could within just five acts, even doubled the length of the final act to allow time to break several more. Effectively, he dropped Holberg-style commoners onto the royal stage, compelled them to put on tragic airs and speak in alexandrines, and otherwise turned them loose with no hint as to the quantity of French thespian glassware out there just begging to be shattered every time they in any way behaved like real people. Then, to screw things up royally, he also parodied the other imported theatrical genre, Italian opera, by throwing in several spoofs of arias, which were of course also forbidden from the French genre 2 for 1.

If anyone in France had done what Wessel did, but in French, they would have been looking at serious jail time make that dungeon time. But he was safe up in Copenhagen, right? No, it was still kind of a gutsy thing to do, since they had recently held a palace coup where the losers were publicly executed and the pieces stuck up on the city wall for the birds to peck at. Oh, and the king was insane. That was one royal court that you really didn't wanna mess with. But Wessel had courage or at least recklessness and talent, and style.

Dettagli