Hanswurst
Hanswurst or Hans Wurst (German for "Johnny Sausage") was a popular coarse-comic stock character of German-speaking impromptu comedy. He is "a half doltish, half cunning, partly stupid, partly knowing, enterprising and cowardly, self indulgent and merry fellow, who, in accordance with circumstances, accentuated one or other of these characteristics."[1]
Through the 16th and 17th centuries, he was a buffoon character in rural carnival theaters and touring companies.
History
The name first appeared in a Middle Low German version of Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494) (using the name Hans myst). "Hanswurst" was also a mockery and insult. Martin Luther used it in his 1541 pamphlet Wider Hans Worst (Against Hanswurst),[2] when he railed against the Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick.
In 1712, Joseph Anton Stranitzky developed and popularized the role of Hanswurst.[3] The theater historian Otto Rommel saw this as the beginning of the so-called Viennese popular theater. Stranitzky's Hanswurst wore the garb of a peasant from Salzburg, with a wide-brimmed hat on. His humor was often sexual and scatological. The character found numerous imitators.[4]
In the "Hanswurst dispute" of the 1730s the scholar Johann Christoph Gottsched and the actress Friederike Caroline Neuber strove to banish the buffoon from the German-speaking stage, in order to improve the quality of German comedy and raise its social status, holding a public "banishing" of Hanswurst.[5] This met with resistance, especially in Vienna. However, the staged banishment has generally been regarded as an emblematic moment in German theater history for the transition from popular, improvised, so-called Stegreiftheater to a modern bourgeois literary mode.[6]
The last notable Hanswurst was
20th century to present
The German film comedy
References
- ^ Pischel, Richard (1902). The Home of the Puppet Play. Luzac & Company. p. 22.
hanswurst puppet.
- ^ Lohse, Bernhard (1980). Martin Luther: an introduction to his life and work. Fortress Press. p. 87.
- ^ "Joseph Anton Stranitzky". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. 2011.
- ^ Wagner, Irmgard. Das Wiener Volksstück (PDF). p. 4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-20. Retrieved 2011-09-10.
- ^ Mitchell, Phillip Marshall (1995). Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766): harbinger of German classicism. Columbia, SC: Camden House. p. 45.
- ^ Jürs-Munby, Karen. Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjection and Abjection in Enlightenment Censorship of the Comic Figure (PDF). p. 125.
- ^ "Franz Schuch nv w". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. 2011.
- ^ Jürs-Munby, Karen. Hanswurst and Herr Ich: Subjection and Abjection in Enlightenment Censorship of the Comic Figure (PDF). p. 125.