Spektator. Jaargang 5

[p. 660]

G.A. Bredero's Spaanschen Brabander
H. David Brumble III

Samenvatting

In het onderstaande artikel wordt gepoogd de Spaanschen Brabander vooral als geheel te interpreren, en de historische achtergrond, de thematiek, de beeldspraak en de boodschap van het stuk met elkaar in verband te brengen. Bredero ziet Amsterdam als een zieke stad, waar de materiële belangen ten koste gaan van de geestelijke waarden. Ten opzichte van de economische ontwikkeling neemt hij een ‘conservatief’ standpunt in, zich uitend in afkeer van de toevloed van vreemdelingen die de bron van Amsterdams welvaart vormde. Gemeten aan de huidige opvattingen zou Bredero's visie thuishoren bij hen die menen dat het primair de economische factoren zijn die de geestelijke ontwikkelingen hebben beïnvloed (i.c. gecorrumpeerd).

Most previous scholarship on Bredero's Spaanschen Brabander has devoted itself to the difficult task of making the play available to the modern reader. Besides this most basic work, there are studies, like Ten Brink's Gerbrand Adriaensz Bredero¹, which provide the background which is so useful to a reader of Bredero. There have also been attempts to make sense of the play's complex structure, most notably by B.C. Damsteegt, H. Prudon, and C.F.P. Stutterheim in their introductions to their respective editions of the play². But there has been surprisingly little written which interprets the play as a whole, which relates its historical context, its themes, metaphors, and social-moral concerns one to the others. The following is an attempt at defining some of these relations.

In reading the play, one is soon a ware that the Spaanschen Brabander is devoted much more to depiction of characters and talk than to action. It is a series of set pieces, connected thematically by the simple force of juxtaposition and contrast. Generally, those who mourn the weakness of the narrative thread seek consolation in the uninhibitedly vivid glimpses of a 17th century city the play provides us. Here are marble games, street-wise boys baiting a halt-legged beadle, bawdy tales, flax spinners, a goldsmith, an art dealer who can casually refer to Durers and Holbeins as articles for sale. Here are propositionings, bankrupts, a strutting notary, a corrupt sheriff, proclamations, gossip, beer, beggars, and alms-givers. Here is, if not all God's plenty, at least a good deal of Amsterdam's.

Comparisons with the Dutch painters are so irresistible that almost every account of Bredero or the Spaanschen Brabander makes some reference to painting or to Bredero's training as a painter. Perhaps his eventual attitudes toward realism in painting are mirrored in his apology for what some evidently considered the ‘shameful indecencies’ of the Brabander:

[...] nu waren wy ghenootsaackt volgens ons voorgenomen inhouwt, twee licte vrouwen sprekende te maken, de swaricheyt wel overdacht zijnde, vonden wy niet beters. dan datmen die van hare neeringh ooc souden laten spreken, alsoot oock wel te dencken en gelooven is, dat sy de Schriftuur niet al te kies, te keurelijk en te scherpsinnich door-soecken. en meer met vleeschelijcke dinghen haar bernoeyen [...]. (T.D.G.L., 66-73).

And so we are given Bleecke An and Trijn Jans with all their felicitous indelicacies intact and the whole host of time-shrinking incidental details. We can easily

1 Leiden 1859. See also the introduction to C.F.P. Stutterheim's edition of the Spaanschen Brabander (Noorduijn: Culemborg 1974). All my references to the play will be to this edition.

2 F.A. Stoett and B.C. Damsteegt. G.A. Bredero's Spaanschen Brabander Jerolimo (Zutphen 1967). H. Prudon,. G.A. Brederood's Spaanschen Brabander Jerolimo (Assen 1968). Stutterheim, op. cit.

[p. 661]

imagine Frans Hals and Jan Steen nodding approval. But to say that Bredero is concerned with his wealth of realistic detail is not to say that his art is the verbal equivalent of trompe-l'oeil. As Sir Thomas Brown wrote, ‘The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man³’. Of course, this is an expression of the old notion that the world is a Book of Nature which, upon close reading, will yield the same kind of allegorical significance as God's other book, the Bible. But what has happened since Augustine (see section II of De Doctrina Christiana) is a vast expansion of the ‘things’ that can, no, should be regarded as ‘signs’ pregnant with spiritual significance. Browne can be interested in the ‘Theological allusions’ of the rainbow not only insofar as it is a figure for God's covenant with man. With Browne we must also,

consider that the colours are made by refraction of light, and the shadows that limit the light; that the Center of the Sun, the Rainbow, and the eye of the Beholder must be in one right line; that the spectator must be between the Sun and the Rain-bow; that sometimes three appear, sometimes one reversed⁴.

This same kind of attention to emblematic detail that Browne devoted to ‘Meteorological Divinity’⁵ and his other studies, the Dutch painters devoted to their canvases⁶, and Bredero to Amsterdam. If we are to hear how Bleecke An came to be a member of‘ 't groote gilt’ (730); if we are to hear of Beatrice's greener days and if we are to hear lots of good 17th century Amsterdam gossip, we can be sure that, as Bredero assures us in his introductory poem,

Ick heb met lust, tot leer ghedaan,
En niet om dien wegh in te slaan;
Maar vindy wat dat u wanhaaght,
't Sy u tot les, ghy knaap of maaght.
Men weet so noodich het venijn,
Als dinghen die daer goedt voor zijn (3-8).

Part of this instruction is a simple presentation of negative exempla, examples of Avarice, Vainglory, Sloth, Official Corruption, Lust a'borning, and Lust Gone to Seed. Part of the instruction is more subtle, having to do with Bredero's whole perception of the temper of his time, for however fascinated we may be by the vitality of Amsterdam in its Golden Age, that vitality had a price, a price of which many contemporary observers were keenly aware. Fynes Moryson, for example, noted that there were but few churches in Amsterdam in 1617:

Yet were these Churches seldome full, for very many Sectaryes, and more marchants proeferring gayne to the duties of Religion, seldome came to Church, so [...] I often observed at tymes of divine service, much more people in the markett place then in the Church⁷.

Bredero was so far of the same opinion that he depicts Amsterdam as a diseased society. He has Floris Harmensz enter carrying coffin scaffolding for, as we soon learn, the play is set in a time of plague⁸:

Ick gae's nachts wel met de graefmaker in een kuyl van twintich doon [...[
En staemen in't rolletje, al hebje dan al de kruyen en drooghen van de stadt.
Ten boat gheen lieve moeren [...]. (317-21)

3 The Religio Medici, 1, 13. See further Erasmus' Enchiridion, the 14th chapter, which is entirely concerned with analogizing between the visible, material world and the realm of spiritual reality which the material world was designed to imply.

4 Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, VIII, 4.

5 Ibid.

6 See J.H. Huizinga. Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century. Tr. A.J. Pomerans (New York 1968), pp. 80-1.

7 Shakespeare's Europe [ ] Fynes Moryson's Itinerary (1617), ed. Charles Hughes (New York 1967), p. 281. This kind of characterization, especially of Amsterdam, is common in contemporary travellers' accounts. In fact, it becomes the basis for a stereotype of the Dutch. If all England knew the Italians to be lecherous, they were inclined to view the Dutch as money-grubbers.

8 This would have been timely: Amsterdam suffered a plague in 1617, the year the play was written. See H. Brugmans. Geschiedenis van Amsterdam (Haarlem 1950), vol. II, p. 403. Bredero probably had the plague of 1575 in mind as a setting for the play. See Stutterheim, p. 18.

[p. 662]

The plague afflicts the body; the city's lack of concern for things of the spirit afflicts its soul. If the plague is all-pervasive, the disease of the spirit is so widespread that some symptom is apparent in almost everyone this sprawling play presents us. Where there is love, it is a commodity for sale, cash in advance, as Bleecke An assures us (599). The notary works on the same clearcut basis. The sheriff has his price. The question of whether the hangman's is a desirable profession is decided by the rate of pay: ‘het is een eerlijck Officy’, says Trijn Snaps.

‘Tis een smeerich Ambacht waren sy wat goet spaars,
Sy mochtender hondert pont gróót op verteeren s'Jaars.

‘Ja seecker’, says Els Kals, full of wonderment that anyone with wits would neglect such an opportunity, ‘isser soo veel me te winnen,/Soo geeftet me wongder, datter geen groote Kadetten Dief-leyers sinnen’ (1298-1303). And even while we delight to see Amsterdam boys at their marble game, Bredero forces us to realize that in Joosje and Kontant we are seeing Amsterdam's next generation in training, because for these boys marbles are merchandise - ‘Wie wil knickeren koopen? wie? wie? ses om een duytje’ (454) - merchandise to be bought, sold, won, or fought for. Their attitude toward their toys is fundamentally the same as Otje Dickmuyl's attitude toward the paintings (by Durer, Holbein, van Heemskerk...) he deals in - ‘En maken wy de koop, het sal al veel bedraghen’ (2055) - merchandise, not art.

But this is not to say that the play is only about avarice. Avarice is simply a symptom. The disease is the substitution of material for spiritual values. Where previous generations would strive to sustain life until the coming of the priest and the administration of the last rites, the present generation strives to keep its candle lit until the coming of the notary (1962). The disease is the substitution of material for spiritual values, either the inability or the refusal to see beyond the appearances of this world to the reality of the spirit in the Platonic and Christian sense. This is a play about Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter. He is the character most obviously diseased. He is a poor, rural Brabanter who affects the lordly airs of the Spaniards, precisely those airs that the Dutch had come to loathe in the courtiers Philip II had sent to rule the Netherlands. Jerolimo is a man of dubious descent, a man without a penny who cherishes huge ruffs, combs, curls, and vaulting sleeves. He pretends to a wide knowledge of matters of trade and finance, and he is a man with all the froth of learning, but none of its substance:

Goddinnekens ghy verwint in schoonheyt en sciency,
De wyse Pallas. en de suyvre Diaan,
[..] Venus [..]
De Spartsche Coningin [...]. (627-30).

And Jerolimo vaunts his Flemish poets and his Brabant dialect, interlarded as it is with half-understood, and sometimes wholely garbled, foreign phrases. All of this pretense from a Brabanter would have pleased Bredero's audience immensely - the Flemings and Brabanters had touted the superiority of their culture too long for it to have been otherwise. Gierighe Geeraart offers us another example of the workings of the disease as he deftly turns the smallness of his faith into an economic maxim:

[...] trouw is weynich; hoe grooter Monseur,
Hoe gróóter ghelóóf; hoe gróóter dief, hoe eerder deur (1904-5)

[p. 663]

Do not trust anything you cannot see. ‘Betrouwen bedrieght’ (1904) is Geeraart's credo, and the credo of many other Amsterdamers. So, instead of putting their faith in invisible (spiritual) things, they put their faith in visible froth; they trust Jerolimo! Otje the art dealer, Balich the pewtersmith, Beatrice, Jasper the goldsmith, even Geeraart - they all rent their houses, consign their goods, rent their beds to Jerolimo with entire faith in his appearance. As Otje says, ‘Ick hadse hem niet ghedaan, en waar de man niet rijck,/Want daar isser soo veel om een Saal te stoffeeren’ (2061-2). After they are all undeceived, Geeraart thinks that he has learned a great truth, ‘Al siet men de luy men kentse daarom niet’ (2223), but this is something he should have learned about all the world. He and all the rest are like the old duffer in the story told by Floris Harmensz late in the first act; they are all blindly feeling their way through a dark world until they stumble, all amazed, into a pile of ‘mostert’ (441).

The whole play is thus a kind of set of variations on a theme by Jerolimo. But is the play, filling Amsterdam as it does to overflowing with the avaricious, the frivolous, the false and the foolish, an indictment of the city? Not actually. I think Bredero would say that though Amsterdam is surely sick, the sickness has not yet attacked the city in its fibers; that there is a cure; and that the cure is more than a simple call to individual citizens to abjure the Jerolimo within themselves. This larger cure is in part detailed in the proclamation that is read on the Dam as signed by one ‘Brederood’. All the ‘vagebonden’ and the ‘menichte der vreemde armen’ must leave the city on pain of public pillorying and whippings. This is necessary not only because they all get their living by robbery and Godless gambling, not only because they are whorers and drunkards and brawlers, but also because the city's grain supply simply cannot support this added parasitic burden (following 1149). The play is full of accusations against foreigners, and not just against the foreign poor. In fact, the reading of the proclamation interrupts an argument on the same subject. Harmen and Andries, foreigners (the former all the way from the province of Drente), argue that Amsterdam owes its riches and its intellectual vitality to foreign trade and foreign merchants. Jan's is an amazing reply:

Wie brocht hier de bóósheyt om onze deucht te winnen?
Wanneer ick dit gedenck in waarheyt, soo dunckt mijn
Dat wy noch verre as de quaatste kóóp noch zijn.
En wat Wissel dat wy met vreemdelinghen sluyten
Soo weten sy altijd de Burghers wel to snuyten (1035-9).

And:

D'ouwde eenvoudigheyt daar wy soo veel van spreecken,
Quam door het nieuw' bedroch wel haest den hals te breecken

(1026-7).

It would seem that all the horrid foreigners play a kind of Lucifer to Amsterdam's Eden. One of the consequences of this ‘Fall’, the contraction of this disease, is that Amsterdam can scarcely afford to take care of its own. As Jan says:

De luy die werden moe van dus en so veel ghevens.
Sy verluyen daar op die Jottoon en kromstevens:
Sy zijn de óórsaack van der rechter armen nóót (1164-6).

[p. 664]

Lest we should doubt Jan's judgement, he is soon corroborated by one of Amsterdam's ‘rechter armen’⁹, Jut Jans. There may be a few souls whose generosity is undiminished, but:

De luy werpen nou so niet over, sy bestellent nou met duytjes,
Die wel eer guldens gaven, doe ginge de vaars grof (1325-6)

Later, when Els is trying to think of some occupation for Robbeknol, she worries that many a ‘kromtong’ is getting work. It would be better, she assures us, if Hollanders got the jobs (1896-7). And, of course, we can't forget Jerolimo, the perfect foreigner - condescending, vain, without substance, dishonest, a bankrupt, and a spreader of (spiritual) disease. Even the fact that the play is set in the time before the Protestants gained control of the city (1578) from the Catholics and their hated (foreign) Spanish collaborators is significant in this context. But the fascinating part of all this is that Harmen and Andries are right. Foreign trade, merchants, and minds were the making of Amsterdam. The city's huge population expansion (from which Bredero's father, through his real estate dealings, derived some profit) was, of course, largely the result of the influx of ‘foreigners’: the rurals, the exiled Protestants and Jews, the merchants from foreign ports. The resulting cultural diversity was something of a wonder in its day. James Howell's response (1619) is typical:

I believe in this street where I lodge there be well near as many religions as there be houses; for one neighbor knows not nor cares not much what religion the other is of, so that the number of conventicles exceeds the number of churches here¹⁰.

That all these immigrants contributed tremendously to Amsterdam's prosperity and its culture is one of the commonplaces of Dutch historiography, but Bredero was convinced to the contrary. With all Jan's and Andries' concern for the unfair advantage the smugglers of foreign beers enjoy by cheating Amsterdam's tapmen of their rightful custom; with all of their concern for the vats of foreign wines that avoid their proper tax; with all their conviction that, unless the magistrates begin enforcing tariffs more tightly, ‘sullen sy het Landt dapper ten achter setten’ (1210-21); with all of this it would seem that Bredero is fondly remembering a time when tariffs were high and trade and foreign traders were very tightly restricted. Two paragraphs from Geoffrey Cotterell's Amsterdam, I think, provide us a glimpse of the workings of Bredero's mind:

Medieval society was breaking down and the chief explosive factor was the change in commercial methods [...]. Medieval Europe had really been a vast network of restrictive practices. The towns were jealous of their own particular area of business, and no foreigner or stranger could come in without being given a special privilege - as the Hanseatic League in London or the English ‘merchant adventurers’ in Bruges. Trade had only been free at city fairs. At these, restrictions had been eased, anything could be exchanged, and credits could last from one fair to another [...].
But at Antwerp the conditions of a fair operated all the year around. A succesful fair showed that self interest was best served not by the old restrictions but by promoting as great a volume of trade as possible, whoever did the trading. And they bought up the rights of landowners who were exacting tolls on the river, not to exact tolls of their own, but to let things flow¹¹.

9 I.e., one of the native working poor. Jut, Tryn Snaps, and Els Kals are all spinsters, and spinning was the work to which almost all of the female paupers were set.

10 Epistolae Ho-Elianae (Boston 1908), vol. I, p. 19.

11 Boston 1972, pp. 28-9.

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So Antwerp blossomed, just as Amsterdam was to blossom when it had learned the same lesson. As most historians agree, much of the tolerance that so amazed visitors to Amsterdam was the result of the city fathers' awareness that tolerance was profitable. This Bredero also recognized - and rejected. But Bredero was no simple-minded reactionary concerned to cut welfare rolls. He was very much aware that the poor must eat. It is directly after Jan's tough speech in support of the proclamation against mendicancy that we hear Jerolimo's poor, hungry servant, Robbeknol, lament:

O bloedt! nu machmen sien de vasten van ons huys,
En d'inwoonders zijn zoo stil als een muys,
Wy spreken niet een woort, zoo seer zijn wy bedroeft,
Niemand weet vande noot, dan diese treurich proeft
(1230-3).

Of course, the impish Robbeknol is not immune to exaggeration, but we can hardly doubt that his hunger is real; however, the question for Bredero was never whether or not it hurt to be hungry. The question was, what is the best way to alleviate that hunger. His answer, of course, is the good, old, Dutch response: work¹². However gruesome Robbeknol's plight, and however lovable he may appear (to us not less than to the adoring Els Kals and Tryn Snaps) Bredero makes it clear that Robbeknol could escape his own plight by his own efforts: dikework, masonry, fish hauling are all possibilities, according to Els and Tryn (1887-1900). Even if these labors prove insufficient to maintain Robbeknol and his hearty appetite, his efforts would at least make him deserving of charity. The alms he manages to get by his wits, though they be sometimes prodigious, only confirm him in his aimless ways. As Jan says, ‘Indien sy haar ghebreck en commer maar angheven,/ Men salder in versien’ (1157-8).

But Robbeknol is not all bad. The contrast between the unaffected, quick, and witty Robbeknol and the dissimulating, lumbering Jerolimo is one which would have appealed immensely to Bredero's fellow citizens. They had been made to feel inferior long enough by the culture of Brabant and Flanders. Whatever Robbeknol's faults may be, he sees through appearances. Just as he had learned to respect the generosity of his stepfather behind the blackness of the man's face, Robbeknol also manages to winnow away enough of Jerolimo's shallow grandeur to appreciate the little measure of good that remained: ‘Nochtans heb ick hem lief’ (972). His other masters were cruel and selfish; this master is at least willing to share the food that Robbeknol begs.

The Spaanschen Brabander then, describes an Amsterdam ruled by Catholics, beset by foreigners and spiritual ills, a city too busy buying and selling to cherish the old virtues and Amsterdam's own beer. There are no heroes in the play. Like Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, it is al play whose norms are implied rather than presented. We are asked to emulate none of the play's characters. Yet the thirty-three year old Bredero was no misanthrope. He obviously enjoyed creating Amsterdammers and foreigners alike. He created prodigally. Some of Bredero's characters appear only for a marble game, and he is not afraid to have his folk tell stories about people we never see or otherwise hear of. We hear loud, lewd complaints about a Jan, who may or may not be the Jan represented in the dramatis personae; we hear of the death of these, the marriage of those, and the folly of others. All these seemingly uncontrolled references put the whole of Amsterdam bustling before us. It is this uninhibited delight in his creations and his affection

12 There is considerable scholarly debate as to whether this ‘work ethic’ was a Protestant ethic (see Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) or a continuation of a Catholic attitude toward work and idleness [M.J. Kitch's Capitalism and the Reformation (New York, 1967) is a good introduction to the controversy] but it was certainly a Dutch tradition.
See John J. Murray, Amsterdam in the Age of Rembrandt (Norman: Oklahoma 1967), pp. 53-5.

[p. 666]

for the city he criticizes which are surely Bredero's most endearing - and enduring - qualities.

A Concluding Postscript on Bredero and the Weber Thesis:

The debate on Protestantism and capitalism is of long standing. Very briefly, Max Weber, in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, contended that the rise of capitalism was not solely determined by material-economic causes; that there were also ‘spiritual’ causes. These spiritual causes were the new ideas and attitudes toward work, usury, importance of the individual, and the accumulation of wealth, which were made available by (especially Calvinistic) Protestantism. Weber's thesis was to be qualified, expanded, and documented by numerous subsequent writers, the most important of whom were Ernst Troeltsch (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches) and R.H. Tawney (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism). H.M. Robertson¹³ and Albert Hyma¹⁴ were later to turn Weber on his head, arguing that it was capitalism that altered Protestantism, not the other way around. Perhaps predictably, the latest scholarship tends either to ‘reinterpret’ Weber¹⁵ or to compromise between Weber and his critics. Jelle Riersma, for example, writes that, for the Netherlands, capitalism affected Protestantism, as it had been slowly affecting Catholicism, and that Protestantism affected capitalism: ‘Our evidence suggests that Protestant ideas were a contributory factor in a development which started long before, rather than an independent factor¹⁶.

However we might judge the merits of the scholars' arguments, Bredero would undoubtedly have sided with Robertson and Hyma. In his ‘Calvinism and Capitalism in the Netherlands, 1555-1700’, Hyma documents a fascinating change in official attitudes toward money lenders. In 1574, it seems, a provincial synod convoked at Dordrecht decided that bankers should not be allowed to partake of communion:

No, for he has been allowed by the magistrates to operate his bank only because of the hardness and evil of men's hearts, and not because of God's will.
Hundreds of persons would be scandalized by the admittance of such a person to the communion services¹⁷.

A 1627 decision by four members of the theological faculty at Leyden was in substantial agreement. A certain ‘Lombard’, (that is, a money lender) though he had reduced his rates to 16 percent, should still not receive communion. Even wives of bankers and Lombards were to be denied communion, according to the theological faculties at Utrecht and Leyden¹⁸. Hyma supplies many other examples of like kind, but by 1658, the estates of Holland declared that ‘henceforth no church had the right to deprive any banker of participation in the communion service because he was a banker. In due course the other provinces followed suit¹⁹. This is exactly the kind of erosion of spiritual values by economic pressures that Bredero deplores in the Spaanschen Brabander.

13 See Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism (Cambridge 1933).

14 See Renaissance to Reformation (Grand Rapids 1951), pp. 440-552; Calvinism and Capitalism in the Netherlands, 1555-1700, Journal of Modern History. X, no. 3, 1938, pp. 321-343.

15 See, for example, S.N. Eisenstadt's ‘The Protestant Ethic Thesis in an Analytic and Comparative Framework’, pp. 3-45 of The Protestant Ethic and Modernization, ed. S.N. Eisenstadt (New York 1968).

16 Religious Factors in Early Dutch Capitalism, 1550-1650 (The Hague 1967), p. 85.

17 Op. cit., p. 327.

18 Ibid., p. 332.

19 Ibid., p. 333.