SOURCE: Best, Thomas W. “Gryphius and the Squentz-Stoff.” Monatshefte: Fur Deutschen Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache und Literature 76, no. 2 (summer 1984): 182-91.

In the following essay, Best offers his viewpoint on the authorship of Absurd Comedy; or, Mr. Peter Squentz, arguing that the original play was written by University of Altdorf professor Daniel Schwenter (1585-1636) and that Gryphius in his version enlarged the cast and added the dimension of religious allegory.

In “Zur Frage der Verfasserschaft des Peter Squentz,”¹ an article which has been strangely uninfluential, Peter Michelsen musters the evidence against Gryphius's authorship of the comedy and concludes that it may be entirely by the Altdorf professor Daniel Schwenter (1585-1636). The main point cited by Michelsen is Sigismund Jacobus Apinus's categorical assertion in his biography of Schwenter (1728) that the latter wrote Squentz, in spite of its publication with Gryphius's works: “Et licet GRYPHII poematibus sit annexus, non tanem GRYPHIVM, uti...