The Broken Jug, a full-length play in one act, is considered one of the finest of the few great comedies of the classic German stage. Farcical by nature, it is also a play of enormous subtlety and underlying seriousness. The play takes place in a provincial village in Holland in the eighteenth century. The problem of the play is the withholding of truth and the detection and revelation of deceit and duplicity. It is also a version of the Garden of Eden story, in which the original sin is not the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the refusal to acknowledge what they, Adam and Eve, know.