Hans Sachs

[This page by Madeleine Brook]

Hans Sachs (1494-1576)

A Meistersinger, dramatist and shoemaker, Hans Sachs put his literary work in the service of the Reformation. He was one of the most prolific and versatile poets of the 16th century and is considered an important example of German middle-class urban culture.

Please note that spellings in texts taken from https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/autoren/namen/sachs.html have been modernised.

Biography

The son of a tailor, Sachs was born in Nuremberg and attended a Lateinschule (Latin school) until he was fifteen years old. He then became a shoemaker’s apprentice for two years, before completing his journeyman training by travelling around Bavaria and along the Rhine. It was during this period of training that he was also introduced to the art of Meistersingen and began to practise it. He returned to Nuremberg in 1516 to practise his profession and married for the first time in 1519. After the death of his first wife, he married again in 1561.

Sachs was an active Meistersinger up to the 1560s, and he produced the greatest proportion of his carnival plays, some of which are still performed today, between 1550 and 1560. He came to fame, however, in the 1520s, when he began writing pro-Lutheran works, most famously his poem, Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall; The Wittenberg Nightingale (1523), and a series of prose dialogues in 1524, which discuss key aspects of Reformation teachings. Sachs accumulated an extensive library of contemporary and classical literary works, as well as works of Reformation thought, which all contributed materially to his own literary output, around 6000 works of poetry and drama. He was a master of the Knittelvers form and the genre of the Schwank (comic tales and episodes).

Fastnachtspiele; Carnival Plays

Sachs was a leading figure in the composition of carnival plays in the 16th century. Carnival plays were a comic tradition carried over from the mid-15th century. They were based on forms of monologue and dialogue and were part of the spirit of misrule and social inversion of carnival celebrations at Shrovetide (though order is always restored by the end). Its form in the 16th century altered to a certain extent to include more dramatic and plot devices, rather than simply a series of speeches, although the plays now often included an introductory monologue from one of the characters. The content of the plays also changed: although the humour often continued to be coarse and explicit, they also now incorporated more serious elements, especially as Sachs began including Reformation ideas in his Fastnachtspiele. Right (and wrong) relations between the sexes continued to be a popular theme. Actors were usually craftsmen, the audience most likely largely male (since they were performed in inns), and the plays depicted ordinary, everyday situations with popular characters such as the foolish peasant, the cleric, the nagging wife, the unfaithful spouse. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (see below, (1997), pp. 106-107) notes that the carnival plays functioned as a mirror image for the early modern biblical play because they ‘serve the same normative social function’. A selection of carnival plays by Hans Sachs are listed here:

Der fahrendt Schuler in Paradeiß; The wandering student in Paradise (1550)

Das Kälberbrüten; How to Hatch Calves (1551)

Das heiss Eysen; The Hot Iron (1551)

Der gross Eyferer; The Jealous Husband (1553)

Der dot im stock; Death in the Tree Stump (1555)

Der Neidhart mit dem Veilchen; Neidhart and the Violet (1557)

Das Narrenschneiden; The Foolectomy (1557)

Das Teufelsbannen; The Exorcism (1561)

Other texts by Hans Sachs include:

Poetry

Die Wittenbergisch Nachtigall; The Wittenberg Nightingale (1523)

Reformation Dialogues (1524)

Please click on the above links for further information.

English Translation

Hans Sachs, Nine carnival plays, ed. Randall W. Listerman (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1990)

Further Reading

Robert Aylett and Peter N. Skrine (eds.), Hans Sachs and folk theatre in the late Middle Ages: studies in the history of popular culture (Lewiston, NY; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995)

Eckhard Bernstein, ‘Hans Sachs’, in James Hardin and Max Reinhart (eds.), German Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, 1280-1580 (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1997), pp. 241-52

Albrecht Classen, ‘Women, wives, and marriage in the world of Hans Sachs’, Daphnis 32 (2003), 491-521

Edelgard E. DuBruck, ‘Money as Incentive and risk in the Carnival Comedies of Hans Sachs (1494-1576), Fifteenth-Century Studies 33 (2008), 74-85

Edelgard E. DuBruck, Aspects of fifteenth-century society in the German carnival comedies: speculum hominis (Lewiston; Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993)

Gerald Gillespie and Martin Esslin (eds.), German theatre before 1750 (New York: Continuum, 1992)

Samuel Kinser, ‘Presentation and Representation: Carnival at Nuremberg 1450-1550’, Representations 13 (1986), 1-41

Barbara Könnecker, Hans Sachs (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971)

Ralf Erik Remshardt, ‘The Birth of Reason from the Spirit of Carnival: Hans Sachs and Das Narren-Schneyden’, in Clifford Davidson and John H. Stroupe (eds.), Drama in the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays (New York: AMS, 1990), pp. 331-55 (also published in Comparative Drama 21.1 (1989), 70-94)

Richard E. Schade, Studies in Early German Comedy (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1988)

Eli Sobel, ‘Martin Luther and Hans Sachs’, Michigan Germanic Studies 10 (1984), 129-41

Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, 'The early modern period', in The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 92-146

A. K. Wimmer, Individualizing characterization of occupational figures in the Shrovetide plays of Hans Sachs (Ann Arbor, MI, 1975)

Dieter Wuttke, Nuremberg. Focal point of German Culture and History / Nürnberg als Symbol deutscher Kultur und Geschichte, 2nd edn (Bamberg: Stefan Wendel, 1988)

Further Reading in German

Wolfgang Spiewok, Das deutsche Fastnachtspiel: Ursprung, Funktionen, Aufführungspraxis, 2nd edn (Greifswald: Reineke, 1997)

Brigitte Stuplich, Zur Dramentechnik des Hans Sachs (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1998)