Hans Sachs and Reformation Drama

Hans Sachs, the famed shoemaker-poet who wrote the “The Wittenberg Nightingale,” is more often mentioned in passing in studies of the Reformation than actually read. The contributors to Staging Luther: Four Plays by Hans Sachs[i] are to be commended therefore for bringing into English five of Sachs’s Reformation-focused works.

We should note at the outset that the title of this book is a bit of a misnomer; the works translated here are not, in fact, plays. Instead, they are prose dialogues. The author of the historical chapters in the book—which discuss historical context, the life and works of Hans Sachs, and the impact of Sachs’s Reformation writings—are careful to only ever refer to the works as dialogues, but the rest of the book (including, as noted, the title) regularly refer to them incorrectly as plays.

While the dialogues certainly include dramatic elements—in that they represent discussions between opposing sides—they are not dramas in the sense of being plot-driven. Moreover, unlike many of Sachs’s other works, there is no indication that these works were ever intended to be performed publicly (as the word “staging” in the title might suggest). Instead, the dialogues were published as pamphlets for personal reading.

That isn’t to denigrate the value of these works. During this period, such pamphlets “were vital to the growth and spread of Reformation ideas,” as the book rightly notes.[ii] An examination of the four dialogues (and one poem) in this book show how Sachs contributed to that growth. Sachs’s works encouraged readers to consider the religious debates of the Reformation for themselves and not leave such discussions only to the clergy. Through his dialogues, Sachs allowed the middle-class to listen in on imagined conversations between those attracted to Luther’s teaching and those opposed to them—all in language accessible to the common person.

The translators in Staging Luther have produced readily understandable English, even while aiming for a mostly literal (as opposed to literary) translation of Sachs’s words. The approach makes sense given that four of the five texts in question are prose works. The one exception—the aforementioned poem, “The Wittenberg Nightingale”—has at any rate been translated into English verse before; the more literal rendition here allows readers a clearer look at Sachs’s original words than might be found in other translations which attempt to reproduce Sachs’s poetic form.[iii]

One can find a few quibbles here and there. In “The Wittenberg Nightingale,” for example, the decision to translate “Mauser” as a “bird of prey” on page 64 muddles Sachs’s analogy (in the previous line, he refers to the same character in question as a “cat”). Presumably the translators considered the English word “mouser” too unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The book at least includes a footnote here explaining that the original German word is “Mauser,” meaning “a cat that hunts mice.”

There are also sometimes omissions where additional footnotes would have been useful for contemporary readers. Staying on page 64, for example, it might have been helpful to note that the name Cochlaeus is derived from the Greek word for “snail shell.” This explains Sachs’s decision to depict the figure as a snail in the poem.

But these are minor concerns. In general, the book provides fluent text, as well as notes that will be helpful especially to those less familiar with the issues under debate during the Reformation. The contributors deserve our thanks for bringing these works by Sachs into English.

The first three dialogues imagine discussions between Evangelicals (or Lutherans) and Conservatives (or Roman Catholics), touching on such subjects as the role of laity in studying Scripture; monasticism and man-made works; greed and the right use of money; and other doctrinal issues. As might be expected given Sachs’s own beliefs, the Lutherans come out on top in these debates.

The fourth dialogue differs from the first three in that it presents a discussion between two Evangelicals, with Hans (the “shoemaker”) chastising the other for his treatment of those who have not yet embraced Luther’s teachings. Sachs encourages his fictional dialogue partner (and us as his readers) not to put stumbling blocks in the way of the unconverted through our words and actions but instead to engage them in “gentleness and respect,” as the Apostle writes (1 Peter 3:15). This lesson is increasingly needed in our own polarized times, in which civil disagreement and respectful dialogue are too often in short supply.

In addition to the translations, Staging Luther includes a concise yet informative examination of Sachs’s life and work, allowing the reader to situate the dialogues within Sachs’s larger literary corpus as well as within the historical period in which he was writing. The book also hints at their literary influence, reminding us that dialogues like these, even if not plays themselves, were nevertheless “precursors to the genre of drama, which was slowly emerging in the realm of literature.”[iv] Sachs of course would have a more direct impact on the development of theatre in the writing of actual plays; Randall W. Listerman reminds us that Sachs wrote 61 tragedies, 65 comedies, and 85 Shrovetide plays (i.e., brief carnival farces).[v]

Of course, Sachs wasn’t the only one publishing dialogues of the sort included in Staging Luther. Those wishing to compare Sachs’s writing with similar works of the period may appreciate the selections in Erika Rummel’s book Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools.[vi] Those looking for Reformation-era plays in the proper sense—that is, plays intended to be performed publicly on a stage—may turn to C.C. Love’s book Five Sixteenth-Century Latin Plays.[vii] Finally, readers wishing to explore more of Sachs’s writing, including some of his actual plays, may look to William Leighton’s Merry Tales and Three Shrovetide Plays[viii] or Listerman’s Nine Carnival Plays.[ix] Of particular interest in the latter collection is a play entitled “The Grand Inquisitor in the Soup.”[x] This brief comedy—written nearly thirty years after Sachs’s Reformation-themed pamphlets—also highlights abuses in the Roman church (represented here by monks), making it an interesting companion to the dialogues in Staging Luther.

Hans Sachs holds an important place not only as a major figure in German literary history but also within the Lutheran literary tradition—a tradition which remains sadly understudied. The contributors to Staging Luther deserve our thanks for making that tradition a little more accessible to the English reader.

[i] Annis N. Shaver, Ian A. Macphail-Fausey, Clara G. Hendrickson, and Robert Kolb, Staging Luther: Four Plays by Hans Sachs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023).

[ii] Shaver et al., Staging Luther, 27.

[iii] For a verse translation of the complete poem, see Hans Sachs, The Wittenberg Nightingale, trans. C.W. Schaeffer (Allentown: Brobst & Diehl, 1883). Compare also with a later verse translation covering roughly the first half of the poem in Hans Sachs, “Martin Luther: The Wittenberg Nightingale (Now Heard by All on Hill and Dale),” trans. P.C. Croll, American Lutheran Survey 6, no. 9 (June 20, 1917): 267-9. A much briefer selection of the poem (again in verse translation) but easier to access than the two previously mentioned is Hans Sachs, “From ‘The Nightingale of Wittenberg,’” trans. Charles Harvey Genung, in Library of the World’s Best Literature: Ancient and Modern, ed. Charles Dudley Warner (New York: The International Society, 1897), 32:12614-5.

[iv] Shaver et al., Staging Luther, 218.

[v] Sachs, Hans. Nine Carnival Plays, trans. Randall W. Listerman (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1990), 16.

[vi] Erika Rummel, Scheming Papists and Lutheran Fools: Five Reformation Satires (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

[vii] C.C. Love, Five Sixteenth-Century Latin Plays: From the Collection of Comedies and Tragedies edited by Nicholas Brylinger, Basle, 1540 (Toronto: [University of Toronto], 1992/1996), https://ccltlp.artsci.utoronto.ca/.

[viii] Hans Sachs, Merry Tales and Three Shrovetide Plays: Now First Done into English Verse, trans. William Leighton (London: David Nutt, 1910; reis. Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1978).

[ix] Sachs, Nine Carnival Plays.

[x] Sachs, Nine Carnival Plays, 74-81.

Mathew Block is editor of The Canadian Lutheran magazine and communications manager for the International Lutheran Council.