Das Narrenschneiden; The Foolectomy
[This page by Madeleine Brook]
Das Narrenschneiden; The Foolectomy (1557)
Das Narrenschneiden; The Foolectomy is a humorous allegorical carnival play involving three main characters: the doctor-surgeon, his servant, and the patient.
The doctor enters with his servant and addresses the audience:
[...] Ich bin dort nieden
von einem worden rauf beschieden,
wie etlich krank heroben wärn,
die hätten einen Arzet gern.
Nun sind sie hie, Frau oder Mann,
die mügen sich mir zeigen an.
Sie haben faul Fleisch odern Stein,
die Husten odern Zipperlein,
den Meuchler oder trunken z'viel,
den Grimm gewunnen ob dem Spiel,
Eifersucht oder das Sehnen,
das Laufend, Krampf, mit bösen Zähnen,
auch sunst für Krankheit was es sei,
dem hilf ich durch mein Arzenei
[...] I have been asked to come up here from down below because there are many sick people up here who would like to see a doctor.
Now they’re here, whether man or woman, they may present themselves to me. Whether they have infected wounds or stones, a cough or gout, fever or drunk too much, fallen in a rage over gaming, jealousy or pining, the runs, cramp, rotten teeth – whatever ailment there might be, I can help it with my medicine
The doctor’s servant looks round the audience and professes amazement that there appears to be no person in need of treatment among them – they are all ‘fröhlich, frisch, gesund und frei’; ‘happy, vital, healthy, and free’, but before they can leave, a man weighed down with a grossly swollen stomach hobbles in on crutches asking to be diagnosed and treated, for he knows ‘Euch der Kunst nie ist zerrunnen’; ‘your arts have never failed you’. He produces a urine sample and the doctor inspects it. The doctor declares that his patient will have to swallow a special medicine, which the patient comically interprets as some kind of alcoholic beverage. When the doctor then suggests a special diet will also be necessary, the patient declares that he ate two hundred plums that really made him feel quite ill.
This is in fact part of the diagnostic process. The man is diagnosed as being full of fools and is provided with proofs that this is the case. He is told to drink his own urine sample (which makes the fools in his stomach jump around in his stomach) and given a mirror to see his reflection – there he sees he is wearing a pair of fool’s ears like those of an ass (‘Narrenohren’). Aghast, the patient agrees to surgery, though he is worried about the cost. The doctor declares that there will be no charge for his services because ‘Mich dünkt, du seist ein armer Mann’; ‘I think you are but a poor man’, which refers both to his financial poverty and to his spiritual poverty.
The doctor proceeds to conduct surgery. One by one, the fools are removed from his stomach, seven in all, followed finally by the ‘Narrennest’; ‘nest of fools’, a twisted knot of writhing worms, which has to be removed if the patient is to avoid developing the ‘fools’ or foolish behaviour again in future. As each fool is removed from the patient’s stomach, the doctor describes it with attributes associated with that vice and the symptoms that come with it. For example, the envious fool is ‘dürr, mager, bleich und gelb’; ‘scrawny, skinny, pale, and yellow’ and its effect on the patient:
Der machet dich so untreu gar.
Dich freut des Nächsten Unglück
und brauchest viel hämischer Tück.
Des Nächsten Glück das bracht dir Schmerz.
Also nugst du dein eigen Herz.
Mich wundert, daß der gelb Unflat
dein Herz dir nit abgfressen hat.
He makes you so very disloyal.
You are overjoyed at your neighbour’s misfortune and get up to malicious tricks.
Your neighbour’s fortune gives you pain. So you eat away at your own heart.
I’m surprised that this yellow filth
hasn’t completely devoured your heart.
The nest, however, is the most difficult to remove and the doctor struggles to tear it from the patient’s body, to which it is firmly attached. The patient asks what sort of fools he would have produced had the nest remained in him and the doctor responds with a long list of different foolish behaviours, which he eventually concludes with the words:
Summa summarum, wie sie nannt
Doktor Sebastianus Brant,
in seinem Narrenschiff zu fahren.
In total, all those that have been named by Dr. Sebastian Brant as sailing in his ship of fools.
This is a clear reference to Das Narrenschiff; The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, a best-selling late 15th-century satire on foolishness in society, with which the audience will have been familiar at least by repute.
As the patient is sewn up and is shown to be perfectly healthy once more, he is told how his foolishness developed:
Weißt nit? man spricht nach alter Weis,
daß iedem gfällt sein Weis so wohl,
des ist das Land der Narren voll.
Von dem kamen die Narren dein,
daß dir gefiel dein Sinn allein
und ließt beim eigen Willen Raum.
Hieltst dich selbert gar nit im Zaum,
was dir gefiel, das tätst du gleich.
Don’t you know? A wise old saying tells us that since everybody likes doing things according to his own way so much, the land is full of fools. That’s how your fools came about, because you only liked following your own whim and only did your own will. You didn’t discipline yourself: whatever you liked, you did at once.
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/sachs/3fassnac/3fassnac.html
The patient promises to send anybody he sees with similar symptoms to his own to the doctor. The doctor’s servant cries out an advertisement for the doctor’s services to the audience. The doctor addresses the audience with the final, moralising speech, a ‘prescription’ for foolishness:
Ein ieglicher, dieweil er lebt,
laß er sein Vernunft Meister sein
und reit sich selb im Zaum gar fein
und tu sich fleißiglich umschauen
bei Reich und Arm, Mann und Frauen,
und wem ein Ding übel ansteh,
daß er desselben müßig geh,
richt sein Gedanken, Wort und Tat
nach weiser Leute Lehr und Rat!
Every person, while they live, should let himself be ruled by sense and reason and keep himself well in check, and he should look around himself diligently at rich and poor, men and women – and if things are not well with somebody, if he is letting things slide, then he should direct his thoughts, words, and deeds according to the teachings and advice of wise people!
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/sachs/3fassnac/3fassnac.html
The doctor’s opening speech indicates that he is a figure from beyond the earthly realm, that he is summoned possibly from hell to do a divine task. His patients are universal, as are his skills: the symptoms and illnesses he claims to be able to treat are both physical and moral. Some of the symptoms/ailments he lists are clearly related to vice – gout and drunkenness, for example.
The fools removed from the patient correspond to the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, envy, lust, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. The pain the patient apparently feels during ‘surgery’ and his reluctance to have any more removed as a result of the pain is symbolic of the difficulty in ‘curing’ a person of sinfulness. The removal of the nest in particular implies that in fact the state of sinfulness is part of the human condition: the nest is grown into the patient and is part of his body. In this sense, the allegorical surgery cannot be reproduced in any real sense on the human (the Christian) and his or her soul. Hence the doctor’s prescription to society to advise and prescribe limits on individuals so that they and those around them may be kept safe. This echoes Lutheran thought in, for example, Luther’s texts Von der Freyheyt eynisz Christenmenschen; The Freedom of a Christian (1520) and Von weltlicher Uberkeyt; On secular authority (1523) on the role of law and authority in governing Christian society, as well as on the nature of the true Christian.