Queeste. Tijdschrift over middeleeuwse letterkunde in de Nederlanden. Jaargang 1995

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Dutch Drama in English Performance Texts
Erik Kooper

Mariken van Nieumeghen. A Bilingual Edition. Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Therese Decker and Martin W. Walsh. Columbia, sc: Camden House, 1994. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture; Medieval Texts and Translations. (144 blz.)
Een Esbattement van sMenschen Sin en Verganckelijcke Schoonheit / Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty. Edited, annotated and revised by Elsa Strietman, translated from the Dutch by Robert Potter and Elsa Strietman. Leeds, 1994. Leeds Medieval Studies; Medieval Texts and Translation Series, Middle Dutch 1. Leeds, 1994. (xxv-116 blz.).

Medieval and Renaissance Dutch literature is not widely known outside the Low Countries. This is not so much due to its insignificance as to the inaccessibility of the language in combination with the relative paucity of texts in translation.¹ Two new and important titles, both in doubletext editions, have now been added to what was available, and since each is issued as part of a series of texts with translations, there is every reason to expect that this is the beginning of a readily accessible corpus of Middle Dutch texts for English readers.

In spite of their many differences, the two plays under review share many characteristics. Both are products of rhetoricians, both contain a play-within-the-play, both boast passages with perplexingly complex rhyme schemes, that most distinctive hallmark of rhetoricians' poetry, and, most important of all, both are creations of the highest literary and dramatic quality.

Mariken van Nieumeghen, the oldest of the two (it is usually dated ca. 1500), survives in a postincunabulum printed in Antwerp by Willem Vorsterman in 1514-15, which invariably serves as the basis of modern editions. An early prose translation in English was also printed in Antwerp around 1518; modern research has shown that this translation must go back to a Dutch prose version which predates that of the Vorsterman text. The latter has in itself been the cause of much controversy due mostly to its form, a combination of narrative prose and dramatic poetry, written, it is now generally believed, by two different authors, with the poetry inserted into an older prose text. The man who is responsible for the drama sections was most likely a member of an Antwerp Chamber of Rhetoric, an institution which flourished in every self-respecting town in the Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The prose author, on the other hand, shows an up-to-date knowledge of historical events relevant to the Duchy of Guelders and the city of Nijmegen. Who it was that put these two texts together, or why, or for what kind of audience, are questions that will probably never be answered.

In their introduction the editors have made quite an effort to provide a survey of the many complexities that critics of the text are faced with. Under the deceptively simple heading of ‘Author’ they discuss a variety of issues, such as the identity of the poet, the date of composition, the internal historical references and the external historical situation, the form of the original story, the connexion between the narrative prose and dramatic poetry parts, the reasons why the play was never performed until the nineteenth century, its relation to the veneration of the Holy Virgin, and much more, in the space of less than seven pages. It stands to reason that not all of these could be dealt with extensively; still, it seems to me that where this work so clearly bears the stamp of the Rhetoricians, a phenomenon not met with outside the Low Countries and therefore most likely unknown to most readers, this specific feature needs to be explained at some length (as is done by Elsa Strietman). Especially the opening paragraph of this first section, which deals with the speculations about the possible author of the poetic parts, is rendered

1 For a bibliography of English translations of Middle Dutch texts, see Erik Kooper, ed., Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 21 (Cambridge: University Press, 1994), pp. 297-304.

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virtually incomprehensible by the clumsy and highly idiosyncratic habit of giving full bibliographical references between brackets in the text.

The second section of the ‘Introduction’, entitled ‘The Power of Language’, presents a new interpretation of the play, suggesting that ‘In a sense, the whole play seems to comment on the power of words, their use and abuse, their positive and negative impact on the lives of people’ (p. 8). Interesting as this may appear, there is, as the authors say themselves, too little space to ‘permit a complete investigation of this question’. However, it is not merely due to lack of space that the reader is left with feelings of doubt. In her final exhortation to the audience Mary says:

O mensche vol ghebreken ende vol sonden
Hier aen moechdi nemen exempele
Ende ter eeren deser weerdicheit sonder gronden
Den almoghende god eewighen lof vermonden
Naer v arm macht seer sempele
Weldaet dient wel ghedaen in gods tempele

On this the editors comment that the last and ‘most enigmatic [line] may mean nothing more controversial than the good work of penance as endured by Mary/Emmeken for over twenty years’. But since they are of the opinion that there must be a (more) logical link with the preceding five lines, they give the following ‘more daring reading’: ‘Good works [of poetry] deserve to be well performed in the House of the Lord’ (p. 11). In my view this comes very close to reading one's interpretation into the text.

The last section, ‘Stage Directions and Performance Reconstruction’, is certainly the best of the three. It contains convincing analyses of a number of dramatic aspects of the text, e.g. when they discuss the ‘onward movement, both physical and spiritual, through a fictive space of Lowland towns and countryside, and through a kind of negative pilgrimage, from error into sin into indifference, to find salvation in the end’ (p. 14).

Two sections on the Middle Dutch text and the translation conclude the ‘Introduction’, but I will deal with these topics for the two texts together.

In the opening sentence of the introduction to Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty Elsa Strietman most rightly says that this play represents one of the highlights of the in itself extraordinarily rich period of the sixteenth century. The structure is a complex one: it starts with the encounter, on stage, of two ‘normal’ people, a citizen of Gouda (where the play is set) and a woman from Leiden, who asks the citizen about a play that is to be performed that day by the Rhetoricians. After a second dialogue, by the citizen and his neighbour, the Rhetoricians perform their play of the allegorical characters Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty, ending with a tableau vivant, and some concluding lines by the so-called sinnekens (‘personifications of evil, allegorizing negative aspects of sinful mankind’, p. xvi). A final dialogue between the two citizens concludes the play.

Strietman opens her introduction with a brief but enlightening exposition on the Chambers of Rhetoric, followed by sections on ‘Genre’, ‘Structure’ (which is in fact mostly about the intricate verse forms used), ‘Staging and Dramatic Method’, ‘Properties and Costumes’, ‘Realism and Allegory’, ‘The Sinnekens’ and ‘Allegory and Theme’. She is an acknowledged expert on medieval Dutch drama, and this shows in the apparent ease with which she discusses these subjects. Once or twice her great familiarity with the subject causes her to overlook the needs of her readers, as when she forgets to explain that, in the context of the play, the Rhetoricians are the actors who perform the play-in-the-play, or discusses the message of the play and the tableau vivant (when the moral is shown to the audience written out on a tapestry) without giving that moral. But on the whole this is a sound, informative and quite readable introduction.

A question that must inevitably come up when reviewing double text editions is that of the type and quality of the edition and of the translation. To begin with the translations: about theirs Decker and Walsh say that it ‘served as the basis for a production of the play’ (‘Acknow-

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ledgments’), and that they have opted to render the sense ‘as faithfully as possible’ rather than give a line by line translation (p. 21). What they might have said more explicitly is that they preferred ‘performable’ prose to ungrammatical or stilted verse. Nevertheless, considering the purpose for which they made their translation this seems a sensible decision, and the text will certainly have served its end well. On the other hand Man's Desire and Fleeting Beauty is a verse translation, and quite a clever one at times, although the translators have to admit that it was impossible to follow the intricate rhyme scheme of the original. It is therefore all the more commendable that in spite of such difficulties both translating couples have included one example in which they reproduce the metrical tour de force of the Dutch poets. It is quite sufficient to prove the point that for the text as a whole this simply will not do. True as this may be, it also means that both translations have rendered the originals rather freely; consequently, the presence of the original side by side with the translation is by no means superfluous.

Where so much attention is paid to the translation there is always the risk that insufficient light is shed on the original text. Strietman's book has appeared in a series which, as the blurp says explicitly, ‘is designed for classroom use’, and in the introductory paragraph to the ‘Notes on the Text and Translation’ she shows herself aware of this: ‘These notes aim to elucidate words and phrases for readers who are able to read the Dutch or aim to to show the reader the literal meaning of words and phrases which could not be rendered literally in the translation’ (p. 103). The translations provided are indeed informative, but unfortunately not complete, and since a glossary is lacking even the Dutch reader is sometimes at a loss, e.g. when the line ‘Ja, hûe sûet mögen sij beijde leggen möselen!’ (714) is translated as ‘They'll sweetly lie, enjoying it and clawing’, without so much as a gloss to explain the word möselen. Another, more general point is that if the Dutch text is so important then why is nothing said about it? We must learn from a cursory remark in the ‘Preface’ that the text has survived in a manuscript - but we never hear whether there is only one manuscript, how old it is, or what other texts are found in it. Also in the ‘Preface’ we are told that the edition ‘contains the Dutch text of the play as published in the Dutch edition’ (Zwolle, 1967). As far as I can see Strietman has indeed strictly adhered to this text, even to the extent that she indicates the foliation of the manuscript, includes the single slash which the manuscript occasionally employs for a comma, and copies the double slash to signal extra rhyme words in the text. In itself this is useful but in combination with the single slash with its different function it is rather confusing and does not make for easy reading. If this seems a negative appraisal it is nothing in comparison with what must be concluded about the presentation of Mariken. For reasons which escape me entirely the editors have reproduced ‘as faithfully as possible’ (p. 20) Vorsterman's chapbook, complete with all its printing errors and missing capitals, and without providing any form of punctuation, capitalization or spelling adjustment (e.g. modernization of i/j and u/v). The result is a text that is not even accessible to a Dutch audience, so what can the editors have hoped to achieve for an English language readership? What is worse, this kind of naive presentation will estrange the reader not only from this text but from early Dutch literature in general, whereas a well prepared edition could made him curious and desirous to know more.

To sum up what has been said: the two editions-cum-translations form a much appreciated addition to the small collection of available Dutch texts in translation. It is hoped that more will follow, but also that the critical remarks aired here will not go unheeded.

Adres van de auteur: Universiteit Utrecht, Vakgroep Duits/Engels/Keltisch, Trans 10, nl-3512 jk Utrecht