ABSTRACT
The biographical profile and career path traced in the first part of this Introduction have amply shown that Ludvig Holberg was at one and the same time an establishment figure and something of a maverick. His lack of sociability, contrariness and tendency towards professional jealousy may not in themselves have been unusual for his kind, but they were combined with a restless mind that pursued a bewildering variety of paths untypical of a settled professor. The most striking example of this was his role as a theatre man. As we have seen, the professor of classical literature not only wrote plays – many of them – but was directly involved in the theatre as an enterprise. It was, however, as an author that he was and remains most famous, not least because he was a literary jack of all trades to a degree rarely seen.
