In a large sense, Holberg's comedies arc closely related to the rest of his work. His treatises, histories, essays, satires, and comedies are all diverse expressions of one definite purpose. Holberg's early life and natural cosmopolitan interests made him a citizen of eighteenth-century Europe, as a whole, and he strove steadily to bear the intellectual light of that urbane age to his native country, then backward in culture. Holberg—professor, scholar, and philosopher—seized with avidity the opportunity to write comedy, not from a desire to display his own versatility, or from an absorbing devotion to the drama as a form of art, but because he believed that through his plays he could fulfil most completely what he conceived to be his intellectual mission.
OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL, JR.
May 20, 1914
JEPPE OF THE HILL OR THE TRANSFORMED PEASANT [JEPPE PAA BIERGET]
A COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS 1722
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
JEPPE OF THE HILL, a peasant.
NILLE, his wife.
JACOB SHOEMAKER, an innkeeper.
BARON NILUS, lord of the district.