Comparative Drama

Scandinavia’s only extant Shrovetide farce, Den utro hustru (The Unfaithful Wife), embodies a unique ethos in regard to mating and gender relations.¹ The school play, presumably written by a university-educated teacher around 1500, dramatizes humanistic, pre-Lutheran views on sex and marriage—yet from a perspective of marginalized urban men. The European Marriage Pattern (EMP) had relegated apprentices to a life phase without copulation or pair-bonding.² In northwestern Europe after the Plague, young men and women of the low and middle classes typically married late—after years of wage labor—and then established a new household.³ By restricting marriage mostly to those who could afford their own domicile, Europeans instituted a nuptial valve that lessened population growth. By depriving young people of reproductive opportunity, Europe reduced the threat of mortality crises during the late-medieval and early-modern periods that were marked by stagnant per-capita growth.⁴ The EMP provided stability for European communities and later helped facilitate industrial growth when the nuptial valve was released.⁵ A significant burden of this regime was placed upon young men and women who were prevented from living out their evolved mating preference. The ideology of courtly love encouraged them to hold out for their one true beloved, a morality that was conveyed through medieval romances and ballads.⁶ I read Den utro hustru to be the first recorded, extant literary response that engages how Nordic lower classes experienced the injustice and hypocrisy of the era’s mating markets.

The EMP was part of a larger program that Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich in his 2020 magnus opus, The WEIRDest People in the [End Page 283] World, refers to as the Church’s Marriage and Family Practices (MFPs).⁷ By first prohibiting cousin marriage and changing rules for ownership and inheritance, the Church dissolved Europe’s kinship societies and set in motion the psychological-institutional coevolution that would underpin the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modernity itself. The second phase commenced after the turn of the millennium. Striking down harder on polygyny provided mating opportunities for low-status males, while sacralizing female consent empowered women vis-à-vis kin and men in general.⁸ These MFPs comprised the most influential change to human mating since the Neolithic revolution. Instead of submitting to kin preference, which typically meant marrying a cousin, the new European individual had to create their own identity, work to increase their mate value, and—in a growing number of towns—compete among masses of single men and women on impersonal markets full of strangers.

Den utro hustru offers rare insight into how marginalized young men—those on the lower rungs of society—experienced this novel environment, the late-medieval “sex in the city.” The around half-hour-long play may have been staged by late-teen students from Our Lady’s School in Odense, writes Leif Søndergaard, “but it is still the craftsmen’s living conditions and way of thinking that are reflected in The Unfaithful Wife, in structure and motifs as well as in dramaturgy and values.”⁹ The unknown author appears to have built on a handful of Shrovetide plays written by German craftsmen. He adapted these works, transforming them through his own perspective, into a unique mix of early humanism, fifteenth-century sexual permissiveness, and a crudeness meant to elicit charity from drunk craftsmen and merchants, or perhaps in particular from their apprentices and journeymen.¹⁰ On the eve before Lent, around ten student-actors would sledge from guild party to guild party, performing Den utro hustru in order to earn food and drinks, in addition to cash that was much needed during this time of the year. Den utro hustru was “not a didactic school play, but one aimed at their physical survival,” writes Graham Caie.¹¹

This secular motivation opened up for uniquely honest drama, although the farce genre can give a different surface impression. The era’s didactic plays were situated in an unrelatable story world, informed by biblical ideals, with the intention of instilling moral lessons. Shrovetide [End Page 284] plays caricatured townspeople...