'A Survey of Dutch Drama before the Renaissance'

Outlines of the Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama, 1500-ca.1620

In 1963 I was given the task to compile an inventory of all dramatic texts of the rhetoricians or rederijkers. From the ‘waning of the Middle Ages’ until the beginning of the seventeenth century practically no plays were written which do not show the unmistakenable signs of the rederijker style, poetically and dramatically. According to all modern handbooks on Dutch literary history the era of the rederijkers began in 1430, the year in which the Duke of Burgundy moved his court from Dijon to Brussels. In political terms, and in the long run, this event was undoubtedly highly significant for the history of the Low Countries. But even though the move to Brussels also brought about a renewed flourishing of the arts in that city, the year 1430 does not have very much to do with the activities of the rederijkers. On the one hand it is possible to discern their activities as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century, on the other hand the tradition in manuscript or in printed form of the most important fruit of those activities, their plays, does not begin until the 16th century.

[p. 98]

In the present context that fact might not appear particularly important. After all, the literary products of earlier centuries, too, are often preserved in manuscripts of much more recent date. But unfortunately the texts of the rederijkers which have been handed down from the 16th and early 17th centuries contain very little information concerning the date of origin. Neither does dating on the grounds of style or language help us here, because the material is extremely homogeneous in this respect. With a few exceptions, the fifteenth-century plays which are presumably present in the voluminous corpus of surviving manuscripts and printed editions cannot be identified as such. In the case of printed editions, it can usually be shown that the writing of the play and the year of publication are either close together or coincide, but in the case of manuscripts the year in which a work was copied out, or the date in which the paper was made, may be the only ascertainable fact. Since a large number of plays have been transmitted in copies dating from about 1600, there is clearly a fair amount of room for speculation.

When one has to collect the texts of the rederijker plays, this situation does at least have one advantage, and that is that it is not difficult to draw the borderline of rederijker drama at the fifteenth-century end: I included only manuscripts and books written or printed after 1500. At the opposite end, in the 17th century, the line is much more difficult to trace. The influence of the Renaissance does not really make itself manifest until after 1600, but the speed with which this occurs differs according as one is at a smaller or greater distance from the cultural centres, particularly Amsterdam. This also has consequences for the form in which plays have survived. Modern plays are written first and foremost in the cultural centres where they are then printed. Old-fashioned plays, even some that can with certainty be dated as 16th-century, were still being bought, sold, performed, and copied in such far-flung corners of the country as 's-Gravenpolder, a village of a couple of hundred inhabitants in the province of Zeeland, as late as the eighteenth century.

When compiling my Repertorium van het rederijkersdrama I took account of this difference in tempo and the consequent difference between plays in print and those in manuscript form, by excluding printed plays, and including manuscript ones, dating from later than 1620. When sorting them out I started from the overall impression which a play made upon me, and as regards the printed material I included as many borderline cases as possible. On the basis of the Repertorium I today count 274 printed and 365 manuscript texts surviving. Of the total of 639, the forty-six plays of which a second version has also been preserved must be discounted, so that the total number of plays is 593.

I hasten to reduce my statement to more manageable proportions. In the first place, there are the borderline cases mentioned

[p. 99]

above. Furthermore included as separate plays are the parts of a play, as long as they have their own prologues and epilogues. Then the 593 plays which I have counted are not particularly long. The serious ones are between 1000 and 1500 lines long, the farces (ca.80) between 500 and 600, and the dinner-plays (ca.70) which were performed at meals, only about 200 or 300. Plays of even the average length of the allegorical plays of France, which is 4000 verses, are quite unknown. This has probably got something to do with the limited size of the performing bodies in the Low Countries, and the frequency and social status of the performances.

Of the plays in manuscript, 145 have been published in print since 1838, on average no more than one a year! Of course, plays which were originally printed have also been republished in the course of this century and the last, but that does not make such a big difference to the accessibility of those plays as it does to those originally circulated as manuscripts.

The accessibility of plays is important because it determines the picture which literary historians may have of the rederijkers' work. For many years - indeed even now - the 16th- and 17th-century editions have been the most accessible, gradually supplemented by modern editions. But these most accessible of the rederijkers' plays are by no means representative of the genre as a whole. The plays most often printed were those which were less likely to be performed after their first performance and which had therefore lost their value as objects of exchange with other chambers: competition plays and other occasional plays associated with particular historical events and the like. In all they account for over fifty per cent of all printed rederijker plays. Also printed was the work of the occasional author, such as the influential humanist Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert, who was unconcerned that in rederijker circles, especially in the 16th century, having one's plays printed was condemned as a sign of ambition and vanity. Quite commonly printed, too, were anti-Catholic plays which could be distributed as pamphlets, and dinner-plays intended for performance in a more intimate circle - at weddings, for instance - which was a fringe area in which others besides the officially organised rederijkers were undoubtedly also active. But in the contemporary printed editions of the 16th century there is a virtually total absence of biblical plays and farces.

It was also certainly not only the best plays which went into print. The publication of a collection of all plays entered for a competition meant of course that the work of all competitors was published, good and bad alike. And if this basis of printed plays upon which the literary historians of the nineteenth century founded their opinions was scarcely representative, both in diversity and in quality, the climate in which those opinions had to be formed could hardly be called particularly favourable either.

[p. 100]

When considering the 16th century it was common to see things from the point of view of the 17th, our ‘golden age’, and in particular that of a certain group of authors characterized by a strong sense of national self-awareness and a clear orientation on the example of classical antiquity. While developing a 17th-century cultural language these very authors and their immediate forerunners had reacted strongly against the language of the rederijkers, who used a profusion of gallicisms. The same authors, of course, considered the rederijkers' dramatic forms totally passé. It is hardly to be wondered at, then, that literary historians of the nineteenth century generally judged the rederijkers fairly hard. The art of the rederijkers was seen as a transitional phenomenon, happily of relatively short duration because as early as 1580 the first signs of resistance to it might be seen in the work of those who even at that early stage were arguing for a purer use of language.

What happens when one tries to describe the Dutch morality on the basis of the plays preserved in early printed editions is demonstrated in extreme form by Hardin Craig's English religious drama in the Middle Ages (1955, 1978²). At the end of the chapter about the morality one finds some remarks about the morality outside Britain. He indicates that there are no German plays but quite a few in France. ‘Holland, if one excepts Elckerlijk, had nothing significant. Dutch moralities seem to have been written on set subjects for prices, apparently in answer to proposed questions; such as, What is the greatest service that God has brought forth for the happiness of man?’. In Craig's defence it must be said at once that twentieth-century handbooks of Dutch literature are scarcely any better at helping to avoid misunderstandings such as his. They are likewise based on what has been printed of the rederijkers' plays. It is true that this basis no longer consists solely of contemporary editions, and it has also been broadened by the addition of editions of plays surviving only in manuscript form, but the process of broadening progresses slowly and largely unsystematically. In so far as there is any system in it at all it does not always constitute a contribution to the greater representativeness of the material available to the writers of handbooks.

As regards the farces, for example, there is much that has been improved. But here, of course, we are dealing with a genre which came to be better appreciated at quite an early stage, and of which the prospective publisher can easily obtain an overall picture because the majority of the plays have been preserved in only a few clusters. But publishers' concentration on plays by individual playwrights such as Cornelis Everaert, Robert Lawet, and Louris Jansz has thrown up practically no better representatives of the biblical plays. For that reason I concentrated my activities as a (co-)editor of rederijker plays on texts of this category.

[p. 101]

My dream, however, that the Repertorium would direct other editors in their choice is changing into a nightmare. Finding a play that is not mentioned in the Repertorium seems to become a sufficient reason to publish it.

In the Repertorium the texts are arranged in four groups: 1A-1Z (later supplemented with 5A): manuscript collections of plays; 2 01-2 30: single manuscripts; 3A-3Z (later supplemented with 6A-6E): printed collections of plays; 4 01-4 39: single printed plays. In each category the plays are described in the same way as the plays of the period 1400-1500 and the plays found since the completion of the Repertorium, of which a description is given at the end of this article. In the Repertorium then follow indices of the places where manuscripts are deposited; of the authors, scribes, and owners; of the technical terms occuring in the material and used to indicate a play; an enumeration of the farces and of the plays based on (hi)story, among which 80 biblical plays (20 based on parables). The Repertorium finally summarizes those plays in manuscript the contents of which are not available elsewhere, and concludes with a bibliography and a title-index.

(transl. H.S. Lake)