She sure has.
And that's because the first Danish line on a theater was uttered on 23 September 1722 - at 17.00.
It was a translated play by Moliere.
- A Danish contemporary play-writer, Ludvig Holberg, who was very much influenced by the satirical plays by Moliere had his plays performed in Danish. That means that the ordinary Dane could go see a play in the theater and understand it. - Plays until then had been in French predominantly. Some in German and I believe some were in Latin as well.
The funny thing is that there was a translated transcript in the boxes with DRF members and senior courtiers when a Danish play was on. Because the main languages at the court was German and French.
In Denmark anno 1725 or so, German was spoken by the educated. Mainly civil servants. But also a lot of Danes, who either had German speaking relatives or who for various reasons went to Germany or had business with Germans. Every merchant would as a matter of course speak German.
French was spoken by mainly the nobility but also well educated people, because certainly up to WWI French was the international language.
Latin was spoken by the academicae. Priests, scientists, doctors and so forth.
The nobility would of course as a part of their general upbringing speak at least conversational Latin.
All of these would speak Danish. But far from all would speak Danish - or Norwegian for that matter, fluently.
Danish - and Norwegian - was for the peasants, the workers. And only being able to speak Danish marked you as an uneducated, low-born person. It was even worse if you spoke one of the dialects south of Copenhagen. That marked you as a redneck who probably only had one set of grandparents...
So when plays were suddenly written in Danish and performed in Danish for Danes it caused quite a stir!
It was no doubt a part of the Enlightenment that was the cause of a number of very revolutionary reforms of the societies in many European countries countries.
The Enlightenment deserves a full thread here, but suffice to say it came as a reaction to the many and quite barbaric wars for the 1600s. People wanted to look towards a future of learning, rational thinking, humanism, rights, free thinking and also to a considerable degree a distancing from religion.
All that culminated in the world-turning reforms of the French Revolution - and died in the Terror in the wake of that revolution.
