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137

JACOB AYRER AND "THE FAIR SIDEA."

THE following account of Jacob Ayrer and the fair Sidea formed part of an article on Shakespeare, contributed by me in 1861 to the Quarterly Review.-H. M.

THERE is a special interest for us in the misty beginnings of the German stage, for we see in it some of the light shed by our Elizabethan dramatists. In the oldest German mummeries the taste for allegory was displayed. One of them, Death Expelled, represented at Easter time the fight between summer and winter, and closed with the conveyance through the streets, and final drowning in the river, of an idol made out of old rags, and carried in the midst of youth and song, and waving of green boughs and blossoms. There was the usual progress through mysteries and legends. In

the year 1480 the nearest approach to a play was Frau Jutten, written by a priest, who represented in it heaven and hell at war. For many years after this date the German drama was but a half pious, half profane ingredient in Shrovetide follies. One disadvantage was the want of a capital. The nearest approach to a great centre of life and action, which contained a public free enough to follow its own humours, was Nuremberg; and it is in Nuremberg therefore that (to say nothing of Rosenplüt and Hans Folz) we find Hans Sachs, who died in 1578, and Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1618, the year in which his dramatic works were published. In Hans Sachs

know how

Ex sutore Deus vatem magnumque poetam
Fecit."

we

His is a good memory for Germany to cherish, for he is the Udall, Sackville, and Norton of the Germans. But if in his rude plays, which simply tell a story straight through, by means of a dialogue wanting in character, he shows a wider grasp of thought than his successor Jacob Ayrer, he concerns us less because he did not look to England for his inspiration. This, in the latter half of his

The date of this folio

life, Ayrer did. He was only four years older than Shakespeare, and they both ceased to write, as nearly as we can tell, in the same year. The German dramatist began life as owner of an iron shop at Nuremberg, then studied law at Bamberg, throve, retired to Nuremberg, became imperial notary, and died at about the age of fifty. Some of his writings were collected as an Opus Theatricum, containing thirty plays, and a good number of brief Shrovetide entertainments. volume is 1618, only two years subsequent to Shakespeare's death, and its editor "recommends its contents as being represented after life, and so produced (according to the new English manner and art) that all can be personally acted and placed so that it shall seem to the spectators to be really happening." Among the plays are three founded upon the same materials that Shakespeare used, with versions of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and some more of our old dramas that are no longer extant in this country. For, in Ayrer's time, the vigorous dramatic spirit of the English was begetting not only famous playwrights, but together with them troops of actors. In one instance it appears that the fame of our stage could cause a German prince to furnish his court with a company of English

players; and some English companies made circuits of their own through German towns, acting their native plays in their native tongue, but producing so much applause by the vivacity of their clowns, the rapidity of action in their plots, their ghosts, their storms, their battles, and their murders, that the German public grew weary of its own past dulness, and craved heartily to be supplied with entertainment in the English manner. Ayrer had been working in the mines of Livy and the Bamberg Chronicles, and had been writing twenty-five acts upon Valentine and Orson (he divided the story into four parts, the last of which was, like his tragedy of Theseus, an eight act play), but he freely shared the enthusiasm of his public for the English drama, and was prompt in placing upon his own stage the Spanish Tragedy. This he produced as The Tragedy of the Greek Emperor at Constantinople, and his daughter Pelimperia, with the hanged Horatio, &c. Germany cared for the Turks, and England for the Spaniards; the King of Spain, therefore, was translated into Amurath, sultan of Constantinople, but Portugal remained the country from which came the prince, who remained Balthazar; and while there was no change in the names of Lorenzo and Horatio, Jeronimo became

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