Playwright Ladislav Stroupežnický: author of comedies (Naši furianti etc.) and historical plays

The one work from the oeuvre of the first Czech realistic playwright that continues to be staged to this day is the comedy Naši furianti; the principal value of this comedy is that it introduced to the stage a realistic picture of a typical Czech village and the life of ordinary village people in the second half of the 19th century. One of the major features of the comic dialogues between the overly confident fellows (furianti) is realistic language: Stroupežnický endowed his villagers with a real combination of common Czech (obecná čeština) and words typical of regions in south-western Bohemia, with one of the characters speaking the dialect associated with the Chodsko region. Stroupežnický’s other play set in his own day whose characters are characterized by realistic descriptions and distinctive language features is Václav Hrobčický z Hrobčic (with language characterizing the dramatis personae and the social differences among them). In his two historical comedies, Zvíkovský rarášek and Paní mincmistrová, Stroupežnický, having been inspired by reading Paměti (Memoirs) by the Renaissance scholar Mikuláš Dačický z Heslova (1555–1626), made an interesting attempt at stylizing the Czech language as it was used in Dačický’s day