Author. Johan Herman Wessel (1742-85) was born 25 miles south of Oslo in the kingdom of Norway. The king ruled Denmark too, lived in Copenhagen, where Wessel was sent for grade school, and stayed there.
His great uncle Peter Wessel Tordenskjold (1690-1720) from Trondheim was and is the greatest naval hero of both kingdoms, due largely to his recklessness, which twice got him court martialed, also earned him the rank of vice-admiral at age 28, and got him killed in a rigged sword duel at age 30.
Long after the author's death, his brother Caspar (1745-1818) invented the complex-numerical Argand diagram – published in 1799 – which Argand himself did not invent until 1824.
French rules. Neoclassical plays were written in alexandrine verse – ie, iambic hexameter couplets alternating between masculine and feminine rhyme, the so-called feminine being a two-syllable rhyme thanks to an extra trailing unaccented syllable. The 6th and 7th syllables of a line were never allowed to be in the same word. No action was allowed on stage: no swooning, no eating, no singing, no stabbing, nothing but pure poetry – couplet after couplet after couplet for five long acts. Also, no soliloquies and no gods! The characters in the comedies were commoners. The characters in the tragedies were nobility or royalty. Et cetera et cetera ad nauseam – they really did love their rules.
It lasted for over a century. European royalty loved it, as did the aristocrats, the mercenary officers, and pretty much anyone who pretended to any social significance, regardless of whether they ever actually understood even a word of it. It was mostly French, so it effectively died under the guillotine, but a generation earlier there was a movement to have the same nonsense in Danish, even though Norway and Denmark already had their own theater, thanks largely to the efforts of yet another Norwegian, Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754) from Bergen. Fortunately Wessel served up this parody to nip the home-grown neoclassical movement in the bud.
He obeyed enough of the rules to make clear what he was lampooning, then broke as many of the rest as he could within just five acts, even doubled the length of the final act to allow time to break several more. Effectively, he dropped Holberg-style characters onto the royal stage, compelled them to put on tragic airs and speak in alexandrines, and otherwise turned them loose with no hint as to the quantity of French thespian glassware out there just begging to be shattered.
Then, to screw things up royally, he also parodied the other imported theatrical genre, Italian opera, by throwing in several spoofs of arias.
Context. The young king was insane, so the kingdoms were effectively ruled by whoever could best control him. The play first appeared in 1772, soon after a palace coup featuring prominently a young German officer named Koller. The coup succeeded, and young Koller was elevated to aristocracy and dubbed von Koller for heroically catching the royal doctor in bed with the queen. The doctor and his assistant were publicly executed in a most grisly manner, and the 20-year-old queen was quickly divorced and would die 3 years later in exile. Wessel must have inherited some of his great uncle's recklessness, for it was a very dangerous time to be joking about cowardly heroes and undeserved titles.
