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How did Johan Herman Wessel parody Danish imitations of Italian opera and French tragedy in Love Without Stockings?

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Danish literature Jelling stone, raised by King Gorm the Old in the 10th century as a memorial to his wife, Queen Thyre.

In his 1772 work Kærlighed uden strømper ("Love Without Stockings"), Johan Herman Wessel effectively parodied the contemporary Danish imitations of French tragedies and Italian operas that had become popular after the era of Ludvig Holberg.1

Wessel utilized several specific techniques to mock the rigid conventions of these neoclassical works:

Absurdist Plotting: While the play is structured as a formal five-act tragedy, the plot centers on a trivial, domestic crisis: an apprentice’s inability to find his stockings for his wedding day.2
Strict Formalism: Wessel adhered to the classical unities of time, place, and action with exaggerated precision, using formal alexandrine verse to highlight the absurdity of applying such elevated structures to mundane subject matter.2
Excessive Tragic Endings: He satirized the dramatic conventions of the time by having all the characters die in the same place on the same day, pushing the tropes of tragic theater to a ridiculous extreme.2

By applying these high-flown stylistic devices to a petty, everyday conflict, Wessel exposed the artificiality and pretension of the period's imitative dramatic trends.21