ABSTRACT
Yet while Holberg’s importance for Danish culture in general is indisputable, his specific significance for Kierkegaard is more tenuous. There are relatively few scholarly treatments of the connections between these two larger-than-life Danish thinkers,2 perhaps because Kierkegaard himself did not acknowledge any particular stylistic or philosophical debt to Holberg, aside from making several casual allusions to various Holberg comedies in his private writings. In various works, Kierkegaard quotes from a total of 18 of Holberg’s comedies, testifying to a thorough familiarity with Holberg’s work. F.J. Billeskov Jansen points out that Holberg is the author most frequently quoted in Kierkegaard’s writings, but cautions that Kierkegaard was generally more interested in adapting motifs and tropes from Holberg’s texts than in engaging with Holberg’s ideological opinions:
The matter that Holberg provides for SK is fairly uniform: words, situations, characters of comic content and shape. But we shall see now how SK can use this material for
1 F.J. Billeskov Jansen, “Holberg,” in Kierkegaard Literary Miscellany, ed. by Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1981 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 9), p. 65. 2 The most notable of these are Billeskov Jansen’s “Holberg” and Birgit Bertung’s essay “Kierkegaard og Holberg-i meddelelsesdialektisk perspektiv,” Kierkegaards inspiration. En ed. by Birgit Bertung, Paul Müller, Fritz Norman, and Julia Watkin, Copenhagen:
very varied purposes: to characterize fictional characters; in philosophical argument; in aesthetic definitions; to caricature J.L. Heiberg; as well as in religious polemic.3
