The Beaver Coat- Mrs. Wolff

The Beaver Coat: Mrs. Wolff

            The Beaver Coat is a comedy that revolves almost exclusively around the unforgettable figure of that of the washwoman, Mrs. Wolff. With great skill and exuberance, she manipulates friends and foes alike. She dominants both her family and her friends, and she enlists their aid in outwitting the arrogant justice of the peace who threatens her schemes for increasing her family’s wealth.  

Mrs. Wolff is a character all right. And I believe she is the most important character in this play. She understands how to get involved with the people who can help her and to get what she wants she wants from them. Although she is responsible for a series of crimes, her victory of getting away of such crimes was not entirely of her own doing. Judge Von Wehrhahn was too distracted by what he considers his greater mission, which is rooting out the tendencies he suspects in Krueger and even more in the quiet young scholar Dr. Fleisher, to notice what is happening under his very nose.

            Manipulation of others for one’s private ends is not an endearing trait to have, but the play has Mrs. Wolff direct it against her natural enemies Wehrhahn and Motes and even her husband, Julius. Manipulating her husband is no challenge for Mrs. Wolff given his naïve nature and limited intelligence. And she does so almost scornfully by appealing to his fatherly instincts, casting slanders on his manhood, and plying him with alcohol before giving him his marching orders.

            The Beaver Coat’s ending is a bold difference from the sacred tradition that the guilty must be punished and justice is served. That Mrs. Wolff escapes punishment and will continue in her wicked ways focuses attention on the relativity of legality and introduces an element of reality into the plot.

Carnival Play - The Power of Manipulation

Manipulate, to control or influence a person or situation cleverly, unfairly or unscrupulously.

Reading through the plays, this was the one element that stood out the most to me, except the obvious humor factor. Almost all the plays assigned had it, the Stolen Bacon, the Wife in the Well, the Farmer with the Blur, the Grand Inquisitor in the Soup and the Pregnant Farmer.

Humans are easily persuaded, even when they know that the explanation given to them doesn’t make sense. Take the Stolen Bacon for instance, Hermann started freaking out as soon as he realized that his bacon was gone. Before meeting the priest, he was certain that his bacon was stolen and that he wanted the thief caught red handed and punished. But the priest and his neighbors manipulated him into believing that he is indeed the real thief and there could be no wrong since he tasted the “evidence” with his own tongue, he let the situation turned him into the bad guy and started wondering if he was forgetting anything else that he had stolen. Humans in real lives are very much like that. We tend to believe things that are put in front of our faces and refuse to look beneath the surface where the real truth lies. We think that we are looking straight at the evidence but we don’t realize that they might be put there to blind us.

The Pregnant Farmer is another good example. How is it possible for a person, not to mention a male person, to be pregnant with a horse? Kunz is obviously a full-grown man with a wife and he probably understands how sex and babies work and yet he would rather believe the words of a doctor or his farm hand (who does not have the advantage of a proper education) and believe that he “purged” a horse that ran away as soon as it was borne. Think of it, he never actually met the doctor in person, he doesn’t know if the doctor actually saw his urine or what his farm hand handed him to drink as a cure. For all he knew, he could have been handed a jar with poison. If his farm hand wanted to kill him, he would have been dead, easily. This reminds me of how unethical doctors, who put profit before human rights, would tricked their patients into thinking that they have a much bigger problem than they actually do. After manipulating the patients and getting them worried and scared, they would do anything to be fixed, including paying a really big bill just to get a cure worth half the price paid.

Therefore, manipulation is a powerful tool that could make or break a person’s ethics and should never be taken lightly.

Doctor and Patient

Among the plays by Hans Sachs, the one that stood out to me the most was The Pregnant Farmer. Today, when a health care professional does not properly explain every element of their patient’s disease and treatment options, the results can include the continued suffering or death of the patient and a lawsuit. It is also wrong of a health care professional to talk to their patients and their relatives like they are stupid, to get upset with the patient when they cannot grasp a concept, and to take advantage of patients. Sachs, however, was able to create a character with these negative traits we see in our physicians today, and probably seen in the 15^th century physicians as well, and use them to entertain an audience.

In the play, Isaac says, “he [Kunz] must take the strongest purge possible. He has to drive that filly right out of there.” This is to the extent to which Isaac explains the prescription Isaac is telling Heinz to give to Kunz and how Kunz’s condition of being “pregnant with a filly” will be resolved. Since Kunz is scared for his life and both he and Heinz have no knowledge of medicine, they believe whatever their doctor tells them as most patients do today. Isaac also gets angry with Heinz for not answering his questions the way he wishes him to. For example, when Isaac asks if Heinz’s master had “the urge for a stool”, Heinz misunderstands and believes he said something about school. Isaac gets upset at this and says, “My God! Can’t you understand a word?” These exchanges are what I believe makes the situation funny because the audience is distracted from the trick being played by the Jew on Heinz. Instead of feeling sorry for Heinz, the audience is focused on how Heinz is unintentionally making this doctor and con-man look foolish.

Perhaps, Sachs decided to create this scene because doctors were as ill mannered to their patients as they are today. If this was the case, the audience would have loved seeing a doctor, con-man, or anyone else who thought that they were smarter or better than the common people being made a fool of and teased by a simple-minded farmer.

Carnival Plays: Perception or Reality?

            In The Farmer with the Blur, the farmer’s perception was manipulated so heavily. He was so sure he saw something that was real but someone came along and told him otherwise. He experienced what is called a psychological manipulation. It is a social influence where someone or something tries to change the perception or behavior of others through underhanded, deceptive tactics. 

            We all get caught up in our stories. Most of us think we are our stories. It is when those stories take on a life of their own, and that life is not the one we want, and things start to suck.

If there is no link between perception and reality, you could think that there is no reality at all, that there are infinite realities, or that there are just images that we mistake for the real thing.

            Most of us are naïve realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it. But really there is no such thing as a reality. There’s only “your” version of it, which is essentially just your perception. Remember that what you believe to be true is only as true as your worldly experience and it does not go any further than that. It is important to note that how you choose to perceive things is how they come across to you. I believe that your power to choose how to perceive things makes them appear that way to you. Your reality is much more different than my reality.

So was it really just his reality, or was it just his perception? Knowing what he saw was so real, will you let someone come in and tell you otherwise? So many people will go a long way to make others believe something. What do we call those people? Liars? Deceitful? Conniving? Or just plain evil?