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Literature of the Low Countries (1978)

Literature of the Low Countries

(1978)–Reinder P. Meijer–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium


Vorige Volgende

II
Instructors and entertainers
Fourteenth century

The fourteenth century opened with a bang in 1302 when an army of Flemish townspeople defeated an army of French noblemen. In the history of the Low Countries, this battle - known as the Battle of the Golden Spurs - has become a celebrated event, as it was the first successful feat of resistance against the French predominance. It was, however, more important as a symptom than for any lasting results: it did not make Flanders independent of France, but it showed impressively how strong the resistance had grown. There were more revolts against France and also against the French-orientated Count of Flanders, but the Flemish towns still lacked the unity that would be necessary to consolidate their position. The Flemish leader, Jacob van Artevelde, realized this and tried to create some political unity by bringing Flanders and Brabant together in an alliance clearly directed against France. Another attempt towards political unity was made in the middle of the fourteenth century by Jan III, Duke of Brabant, who came to terms with France and then tried to forge Brabant and Limburg into a unit.

Holland was still outside these miniature power blocs; it was torn by internal strife in which family feuds combined with social and economic factors to produce a long drawn-out and destructive civil war. The most dramatic incident in those years of fighting took place in 1296 when the Count of Holland, Floris V, was killed by a number of noblemen who opposed his policies which among other things were pro-French. The circumstances surrounding and following his

death were echoed widely in literature, not only in a well-known poem of the fourteenth century, but also in seventeenth-century dramatizations by the poets Vondel and Hooft, and even at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a play by Willem Bilderdijk.

Economically too, the southern parts held a substantial advantage over Holland, thanks to the cloth industry of Bruges, Ypres and Ghent. Holland's industry was insignificant compared to that of the South, but when its sea-trade began to expand around the middle of the fourteenth century, Holland rapidly became a considerable economic power. At the same time Holland began to catch up on its cultural arrears.

In the literature of the fourteenth century one finds several reflections of what was going on in the political and economic life and on the battlefield. They are found particularly in what might be called the fringe of literature, the chronicles. One of the earliest works to be written in Holland was such a chronicle, Rijmkroniek van Holland (Rhyme Chronicle of Holland) by Melis Stoke, completed in 1305. The first part of it was written in 1283 and was dedicated to Count Floris V, of whom Stoke was a great admirer. Stoke's intention was to write the history of the Dutch Counts, not as an objective historian, but rather with the specific purpose of showing these Counts that they were high-born and had a legitimate claim to Friesland (a moot point indeed). The book had great appeal, and not only to the Counts of Holland. In particular Stoke's touching admiration for Floris V and the graphic details of his arrest, killing and funeral stirred the imagination, so much so that several popular notions about this Count can be traced back to Stoke's chronicle.

There are more of these rhyme chronicles, e.g. a Flemish one, Rijmkroniek van Vlaanderen , written by several authors, and Jan van Boendale's Die Brabantsche Yeeste (History of Brabant), but they are more interesting as early specimens of historiography than as works of literature.

They represent one facet of the didactic tradition which carried on from Maerlant and became very strong during the fourteenth century. Boendale must be regarded as the champion of fourteenth-century didacticism and as Maerlant's successor in his intention and attitude, but without Maerlant's cutting satire and his occasional flashes of poetry.

Boendale's principal work is Der Leken Spieghel (Laymen's Mirror), written between 1325 and 1333. It is a long noem of more than 20,000 lines, divided into four parts and dealing with ethics, biblical history, the history of Christianity up to the reign of Charlemagne, and concluding with an apocalyptic view of the end of the world, the whole supported by moral stories and anecdotes. In the third part Boendale included a kind of ars poetica (‘how poets ought to write’) in which he laid down his requirements for the poet: he must be a grammarian, i.e. he must know the technique of writing, he must be truthful, and he must be worthy of respect (‘eerwaardig’ is the word he uses). Boendale is very elaborate about the poet's obligation to deal only with facts; he polemizes against the author of Karel ende Elegast and assures us that Charlemagne never went out stealing and that he was not begotten on a cart as his name might suggest. As it is the earliest specimen of a medieval ars poetica in the vernacular, Boendale's poem is an important document in the history of medieval literary theory, not only so far as Dutch literature is concerned, but also with regard to the other literatures of Western Europe. At the same time one should not forget that Boendale represented only one strain of medieval literature, the moralistic-didactic strain, and that his ideas about what a poet should be and how he should write were determined by his moralistic and didactic preoccupation. His view of poetry was necessarily a very onesided one, although it may have been the majority view at his time and place. If Maerlant had lived to read Boendale, he would undoubtedly have subscribed to the theory. In fact, one gets the impression that Boendale's theory was to a large extent distilled from the work of Maerlant whom he

held in high regard and whom he called in his poem ‘the father of all Dutch poets’. But there were also other views, and the author of Vanden Vos Reinaerde would have laughed at Boendale's prescriptions. Boendale's little ars poetica is a very interesting document, but one cannot help feeling that it would have been more so if it had come from a greater poet.

There are didactic poems in this century that are more convincing as works of literature than Boendale's poetry. Vander Feesten (The Feast) is one of those. It tells how a man meets a woman at a banquet and engages her in conversation. She appears to him to be in love, but he also notices that she looks sad. He asks her why, and she asks in return: what is love? The conversation then develops into a dialogue in which several aspects of love (courtly love) are discussed and analysed: how love is born, how do you win someone's love, how do you lose it, who is more steadfast in love, man or woman?

The most poetic didactic poem of this time is Spieghel der Wijsheit (Mirror of Wisdom) by Jan Praet, a Fleming of whom we know next to nothing. Within the framework of an allegory, the poem deals with man's life and death, heaven and hell, sin and salvation. But it is not so much for its content as for its form that the poem is noteworthy. Praet was a man who showed great interest in poetic form and who was one of the first to experiment with it. He did not write in the customary rhyming couplets but tried his hand at various kinds of form: stanzas with crossed rhymes, quatrains, poems in the form of motets with the rhymes aab ccb dde ffe. He also experimented with metrical schemes and every now and then came close to the modern iambic metre. From the point of view of form his work stands out from the other didactic poems of the time and represents a big step forward from poets like Boendale who coasted along comfortably on their never-changing rhyming couplets.

In the moralistic-didactic literature of the fourteenth century, a special place was taken by the literature of

mysticism. Its great representative, Jan van Ruusbroec, continued to a certain extent the tradition of Hadewych, although the differences between the two are probably more striking than their similarities. In the first place, Ruusbroec wrote no poetry, but only prose. Secondly, Ruusbroec was far more systematic and didactic in setting out his religious ideas than Hadewych ever was. Hadewych was essentially lyrical in all her work, whereas Ruusbroec was a thinker and a writer of treatises rather than a man of literature.

Ruusbroec was born in 1293 in the village from which he derives his name, near Brussels. He became a priest and spent most of his life in an abbey which he and his followers established at Groenendaal, also close to Brussels. How highly his work was regarded can be seen from the fact that during his lifetime important parts of it were translated into Latin by several authors, among whom were Willem Jordaens and also Geert Groote, the leader of the Devotio Moderna. In this way Ruusbroec's work overcame the linguistic barriers, gained fame in Europe, and exercised a strong influence on the German mystics Suso and Tauler (who came to visit him several times at Groenendaal) and on the mystic movements in France, Spain and Italy.

His best-known work is Die Chierheit der Gheesteliker Brulocht (The Adornment of the Spiritual Wedding). It is a book on the theory of mystical aspiration, presented as an analysis of the text ‘Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him’. The four component parts of the text are analysed three times in their relation to the three levels of spiritual life, the highest of which is the ‘god-seeing’ life, attainable for only a few. A full description of Ruusbroec's mystical theory is a matter of theology rather than of literature; what we are concerned with here are his achievements as a prose writer. In a period when prose was still lagging a long way behind poetry as a means of literary expression, Ruusbroec's achievements were considerable. He wrote in a lucid, though not particularly fluent style and interspersed his work with many comparisons

and parable-like passages of undoubted literary value. This applies not only to Die Chierheit, but also to other works such as Vanden Blinckenden Steen (The Sparkling Stone)) and Vanden Rike der Gheliven (The Kingdom of the Beloved).

Ruusbroec's influence also extended to the religious movement of the Devotio Moderna which sprang up in the second half of the century in the eastern part of the Netherlands. Its centres were the towns in the valley of the river IJssel, another indication, that the towns were gradually replacing the monasteries as the centres of cultural life. Although it cannot be called a really mystical movement, there were several points of contact between the Devotio Moderna and mysticism proper, particularly in their reaction against formalism in religion and their emphasis on asceticism. There were also some personal contacts between the two, as we know that Geert Groote, the founder and the leader of the movement, paid some visits to Ruusbroec at Groenendaal and translated part of his work into Latin. But the Devotio Moderna was far more directed towards practical purposes, far more concerned with the ethics and religion of every-day life than Ruusbroec was: its followers tried to improve the world from which Ruusbroec was escaping. It also lacked the atmosphere of ecstasy and exaltation which characterizes mysticism in its pure form, and it contained a greater element of rationalism. The Devotio in general was pragmatic, critical, sober-minded and free from theological hair-splitting. It was a movement which in a short time spread very widely: after some years its institutions were to be found not only in Holland and Brabant (Antwerp), but also in the Rhineland and Westphalia, and even in Prussia.

Geert Groote was born in 1340. This means that he grew up during the years when the Pope was exiled at Avignon and the authority of the Church was at a low ebb. There was a great deal of opposition to the secular power of the Church, particularly in towns which lay within Church territory.

Groote was born in such a town, Deventer, one of the Hanseatic towns on the IJssel. His father was a well-to-do magistrate who could afford to give his son a good education. Groote studied in Holland and abroad, including three years at the University of Paris. His interests must have been almost universal, as he took courses in philosophy, medicine, logic, law, and even studied magic for some time (a lapse of which he was much ashamed in later years). After having lived the life of a worldly scholar for some fourteen years, enjoying a stipend, and sinning profusely according to his own testimony, he suddenly put his past behind him, entered a Carthusian monastery near Arnhem and was ordained a deacon there. Then he started travelling around as a kind of revivalist preacher of penitence, attacking immorality where he saw it, inside or outside the Church, and passionately calling for repentance. Judging by reports from his contemporaries, he must have been a brilliant orator, who gained his effects by blending his scholarly background with a common touch. Also, the combination of his personality and the predisposition of the environment in which he worked, goes a long way to explain the rapid and wide spread of his ideas. The reverse side of the popularity medal shows a strong opposition from within the Church, resulting in a ban on his activities as a preacher, imposed by the Bishop of Utrecht in 1383, a year before his death. After he had been silenced, he devoted much of the time that was left to him to translating parts of the Latin church service into Dutch, an almost heretical occupation as many considered this as an attack on the sacredness of the liturgy. Apart from these translations we do not have much literature in Dutch by Groote, or by the other members of his movement. They usually expressed themselves in Latin, which of course helped to spread their ideas so quickly and so widely. Groote's work in Dutch consists only of some rather dry treatises which are without any great consequence as works of literature: he was clearly first and foremost an orator. Only Hendrik Mande, a lay brother, wrote exclusively

in Dutch, strongly under the influence of Ruusbroec.

It is clear, therefore, that Groote's importance lies not so much in what he contributed directly to Dutch literature, but rather in his indirect contributions: in the climate that he created. The religious communities which grew out of his movement, known as the Brethren of the Common Life, concerned themselves with education, establishing schools and student homes, and also with book production, copying manuscripts at first, and later on printing them. Their practical and critical attitude prepared the way for the Dutch Humanists: Rudolf Huisman, better known as Agricola, Wessel Gansfort, whom Luther called one of his predecessors, and Erasmus, all of whom were brought up in the atmosphere of the Brethren. When Erasmus, the cosmopolitan who had seen a great deal of Europe and who had little time for his native country, in later years sang the praise of the high standard of general education in the Low Countries, a large share of this honour must be credited to the Brethren of the Common Life.

In the purely religious field, the Devotio Moderna resulted in the Congregation of Windesheim, established by Groote's followers a few years after his death. The Congregation derived its name from the first monastery at Windesheim, near Zwolle. Like the association of the Brethren, the Congregation developed rapidly and comprised at its peak about one hundred monasteries and convents. The most famous personality to emerge from the Windesheim congregation was Thomas à Kempis, a monk in the Agnietenberg monastery near Zwolle, whose Imitatio Christi , written entirely in the spirit of Geert Groote's teachings, became one of the best-known books of all time.

The mystic writers of the fourteenth century whom we know by name were all prose writers; there was not a single poet among them. This is surprising when one considers the high standard of poetry reached in the work of Hadewych. One would expect that her example would have been followed and that some of the later mystics would have

continued her work. If that was done at all, most of this poetry has been lost. There are only a small number of anonymous mystic poems, which resemble Hadewych's work so closely that they could have been written by her and which, in fact, were attributed to her until fairly recently:

 
Alle dinghe
 
Sijn mi te inghe:
 
Ic ben so wijdt.
 
Om een onghescepen
 
Hebbic ghegrepen
 
In ewighen tijt.
 
 
 
Ic hebt ghevaen.
 
Het heeft mi ontdaen
 
Widere dan wijt;
 
Mi es te inghe al el;
 
Dat wette wel
 
Ghi dies oec daer sijt.1

On the whole it is hard to say whether the fourteenth century was rich or poor in religious lyrical poetry. So much is certain that little has been preserved. Apart from that small group of mystic poems, only a few songs have come to us. One of these is an early Christmas song (‘In dulci jubilo singet en weset vro' - sing and be merry) which is still very close to the Latin church hymns.

We have been more fortunate with regard to the secular lyric. Two important manuscripts have been preserved, the Gruythuyse manuscript and the Hulthem manuscript, which contain many songs and lyrical poems of the fourteenth century. Some of them are courtly love lyrics, continuing the tradition of Hendrik van Veldeke and Jan, Duke of Brabant, Others are laments about a dead lover or friend, such as the famous Egidius song. Among them is also a remarkably

modern-looking poem in which the poet fights against his own thoughts:

 
Vaer wech ghepeins, God gheve dir leit
 
Dattu ye quaems in mijn ghedacht.2

This poem, like the Egidius song and several others, was written in the rondeau form - two rhymes and lines recurring with subtle variation - which was very popular in France at that time. Others were written in the French ballade form, others again in forms that are reminiscent of the German love lyric. Several also show in their language a slight German colouring. It is not always easy to say whether this means that the poems were of German origin or whether they were made to look slightly German because that was fashionable at the time when Holland was ruled by the dukes of Bavaria who had married into the House of the counts of Holland. That this latter possibility should not be dismissed too lightly is suggested by the work of Dirc Potter, a Dutch civil servant attached to the court of the Bavarians in Holland, who very consciously gave his poetry a faintly German look to keep up with the fashion.

In some of these poems we find echoes of what was going on in political and social life. There is for instance a song of lament for Count Willem IV of Holland who was killed in 1345 on an expedition against the Frisians. Another one describes the death of Count Floris V; it is a curious poem, as it completely ignores the political factors involved and simply blames Floris's tragic ending on the fact that he seduced the wife of Gerard van Velzen, one of the rebellious noblemen. Most notable of all these poems is the Kerelslied (The Song of the Churls), which reflects the hatred that the nobleman must have felt for the peasants who were challenging his power. It probably dates back to the 1320s when there were several peasants' revolts against the Count

of Flanders. It is one of the angriest poems of the Middle Ages; the author spits out his contemptuous hatred (and perhaps also his fear) of these uncouth peasants and tries to hurt them where it hurts most, by ridiculing their inane behaviour, sloppy dress and unsavoury manners. As is the case with all poems contained in the Gruythuyse manuscript, the melody is given with it, so that we know for certain that the poem was meant to be sung.

Apart from these songs and poems which were written down comparatively soon after they were composed, there is also a group of songs known as popular songs or folk songs, sometimes also called ballads, or romances. Some of these were written down during the Middle Ages, others as late as the nineteenth century, which makes it difficult to indicate with any degree of accuracy to which period they actually belong. The subject-matter of several of these poems is very old indeed and often goes back to legends and fairy-tales. Judging by its very simple form and the repetitiveness of the narration, the ballad of Heer Halewijn must be one of the oldest. It is the story of a kind of Bluebeard who lures young girls with a song that they cannot resist and who then kills them; finally, however, he is outwitted and decapitated by a cunning maid. The poem contains several elements of Germanic legend, for instance in Halewijn's magic song, which is reminiscent of the song of the Swedish water-sprite ‘strömkarl’; the poem is also related to a number of German songs and to the English ballad of May Colvin, or False Sir John (known in a modernized version as The Outlandish Knight). In all its simplicity of form and language, it is a magnificent poem which in ninety matter-of-fact lines suggests a world of mysteriousness and drama. The twentieth-century Dutch composer Willem Pijper used it as the basis for his opera Heer Halewijn, for which the poet Martinus Nijhoff wrote the libretto.

Although many of the songs and poems of this time deal with subjects from the world of chivalry, it is clear that the knights no longer occupied the central position in literature.

A considerable amount of chivalresque literature was still written, but none of the epic romances of the fourteenth century can be compared with the best of the preceding centuries, with Karel ende Elegast , or with Walewein . They no longer brought anything new, they no longer contributed to the development of literature, and they give the impression of being reflections of a past age. It also seems that the genre of the romance of chivalry no longer attracted the best poets, as the writing of most of the fourteenth-century specimens is very much flatter and slacker than that of the earlier romances. As a genre the romance of chivalry was clearly in decline.

Most of the epic romances of this period, too, were adaptations from the French, e.g. De Borchgravinne van Vergi (The Viscountess of Vergi) and De Borchgrave van Couchi (The Viscount of Couchi). Some are originals, such as Flandrijs , of which only parts have been preserved, and the long Roman van Heinric en Margriete van Limborch, which must have been a popular poem as it was translated into German by Johannes von Soest as late as 1480. Holland made its debut in the literary world just after 1300 with a Lancelot romance, Lantsloot van der Haghedochte, written by un unknown author.

More important than these epic romances is the work of Hein van Aken, who was born in Brussels and who was a priest in a village near Louvain. He introduced something new to Dutch literature with his poem Hughe van Tabariën . It is an adaptation of the French De l'Ordene de Chevalier and can best be described as a cross between chivalresque and didactic literature. Didacticism as a feature of chivalresque literature was in itself nothing new. There had never really been a significant gap between the literature of entertainment and the literature of instruction in the Low Countries. Maerlant, after all, had used his epic romances to a certain extent as vehicles for instruction. But in the fourteenth century, didacticism began to weigh more heavily and began to turn the scales. The interest was shifting away

from the heroic deeds and gallant adventures of the knight and the attention of the reader or listener was drawn towards the knight as a model of moral behaviour. Hein van Aken's poem - a strophic poem of 37 stanzas - is primarily didactic, intended to show what the virtues of chivalry are and what a good knight should be like. In certain respects it might be compared with a much later German poem, Der Ritterspiegel (Mirror of Chivalry), written at the beginning of the fifteenth century by Johannes Rothe, who had a similar admiration for the knight as Hein van Aken had (although Rothe was far more interested in the military aspects of chivalry than Van Aken was).

Hein van Aken is also known as the translator of the French Roman de la Rose, the monumental allegory begun by Guillaume de Lorris and finished about 1280 by Jean de Meung. Because of the different approaches and ideas of the two authors, the Roman de la Rose was a curious example of the marriage between courtly literature and didacticism. Its first part is a description of courtly love, presented in the form of a dream in which the author wanders through a mysterious garden seeking for the rose, symbol of the beloved. The second part, although continuing the allegory, is of a totally different nature: it is a didactic poem, full of learning, and also full of satire and attacks on the evils of society of the time. The poem became tremendously popular in medieval Europe, in spite of fierce resistance from the clergy, and it remained popular and influential for a very long time.

Hein van Aken made his translation shortly after 1300, which was early, certainly much earlier than the English translation made by Chaucer in the 1360s. Van Aken translated the first part quite faithfully, but he threw up a barrier against the heretical thoughts of Jean de Meun by making many changes in the second part: he left out or toned down several passages which to his mind were too daring, too indelicate, too cynical or too satirical (this in contrast to Chaucer who seems to have been very taken by

the ideas of Jean de Meung). It is hard to decide whether Van Aken did this only to suit his own taste or because he was afraid of offending his Dutch public, or perhaps because he did not want to get into trouble. In any case, through his translation the poem became a great success in the Low Countries and we can follow its influence in the several allegorical poems about love that were written shortly after this translation, just as we can see the impact of the Rose in Chaucer's own allegories written after he had made his translation.

When the epic romance began to lose its appeal, a new genre emerged known as the sproke, which might be translated as ‘metrical tale’, and which was closely related to the French dit as written by Guillaume de Machaut. They were relatively short poems, usually of no more than a few hundred lines, written by professional poets who travelled around with them from town to town and from court to court. The material for these poems came from internationally known collections of stories, such as the Gesta Romanorum, produced in England during the last years of the thirteenth century. It contained a variety of stories, some of them of Roman origin, whereas others originated in the East. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe was a great favourite among them: we meet it in several literatures - Shakespeare used it later on for his Midsummernights's Dream - and it also became the basis of one of those sproken in Dutch under the title of Van Tween Kinderen Die Droeghen ene Starke Minnen een Ontfermelijc Dinc (A Moving Story of Two Children Who Bore a Strong Love). Again, most of these poems were essentially didactic, and a number of them show the combination of chivalresque subject-matter and moral purpose that was so typical of this period.

The best-known writer and reciter of this kind of poetry in the Low Countries was Willem van Hildegaersberch, one of the first authors to come from Holland. He lived in the second half of the century and came from the village of Hillegersberg, now a suburb of Rotterdam. He was the

typical professional poet, a kind of didactic troubadour, who was hired regularly by the Count of Holland to perform at his court in The Hague, as the ducal account books show. His livelihood depended entirely on his poetry, and as he was not a very strong personality, he gave clear evidence that he knew on which side his bread was buttered. No dangerous or heretical thoughts are to be found in his work; on the contrary, he constantly gives the impression of being right behind the authorities on whom he depended. When he became satirical, he attacked only things that it was safe to attack, usually abstractions such as hypocrisy, flattery, immorality, corruption and parsimony (an unforgivable sin from the point of view of the professional poet). From what we know about him, we may assume that he wrote only what he could expect to be in demand, so that through his work we also get a good idea of what kind of poetry was popular in those days and in those circles.

He left about 120 poems on a variety of subjects. Some have a religious theme, others criticize the social evils mentioned above, others again discuss politics or history; some are lyrical, others could almost be described as mystical, several are in the form of an allegory, or use fables to drive their points home. But the common denominator of all his poetry is didacticism. Even when he let himself go most, as in his comic poems, the moralistic purpose is always there. He said so himself:

 
Een dichter die te dichten pliet,
 
Die pijnt hem gaerne te vinden yet
 
Dat den luden in den oren
 
Wat ghenoechte brenct te voren,
 
Ende int verstaen oeck wijsheit mede;
 
Want gherechte dichters zeede
 
Dat is, die waerheit bringhen voert.3

This, of course, is still very much the theory of Boendale, although Hildegaersberch's verse had moved a long way from his. Willem van Hildegaersberch may not have been a great poet or a strong personality, but he did possess a certain amount of originality, a good command of poetic technique with an adroitness in handling different types of form, and every now and then a surprisingly acute sense of imagery.

The sproken and their author-performers, the sprooksprekers, may have played a significant part in the development of Dutch literature, as it is not impossible that from them the first plays originated. The Hulthem manuscript contains a remarkable set of four serious plays, the abele spelen (noble or beautiful plays), together with six farces, all dating back to the middle of the fourteenth century. These plays give the Low Countries an important ‘first’ in the history of medieval literature, as no earlier plays of this kind are known in Europe. Neither in Germany nor in England do we find secular plays at this time. In French literature one could point to the two plays of Adam de la Halle, written in the second half of the thirteenth century, but they are comedies and cannot be regarded as serious drama. The conclusion must be that the abele spelen are the very first specimens of serious secular drama in European literature.

The lack of predecessors is a puzzling aspect of these plays. It immediately poses the question of the origin of secular drama in the Middle Ages. It has often been argued that secular drama developed from religious drama, but as there is no positive evidence for the existence of religious drama in Dutch prior to the abele spelen this development seems unlikely for the Low Countries. There were, however, dramatic elements in the poetry of the sprooksprekers. Some of their poems were written as dialogues, for instance Twee Coninghen, Deen Levende ende Dander Doot (Two Kings, One Living and One Dead) or Disputacie Tusschen den Sone ende den Vadere (Dispute Between the Son and the Father). Poems such as these were

probably recited as dialogues, either by two performers, or by one who acted out both parts. From these dramatized dialogues the early secular plays may have grown.

The lack of certainty about the origin of the genre as such is not the only puzzling aspect of the abele spelen. It is not too much to say that they are surrounded by mystery. We have no idea who wrote them, nor do we know whether they are the work of one author or of several. On the basis of style and language a case can be made out for single authorship, at least for three of the four. It is also possible that these plays formed the repertoire of a travelling company of actors. This possibility is strenghened by the presence in the manuscript of the six farces which were performed after the serious plays. The language of the plays suggests that they were written by someone from Brabant about the middle of the fourteenth century, but it is impossible to give any more precise information about date or place.

Three of these plays, Esmoreit, Gloriant and Lanseloet van Denemarken, are romantic plays, dealing with love and showing it as an irresistible force in life. The main characters in these three plays are princes and princesses, the setting is foreign and exotic, the subject-matter is closely related to that of the romances of chivalry, in particular the courtly eastern romances. One might say that the outmoded chivalresque literature was given a new lease of life in the form of the stage play, which at that time was probably a novelty.

The main theme of Esmoreit is that of the royal foundling, a much used theme in medieval literature. Esmoreit, son of the king of Sicily, is sold into captivity by his evil cousin who wants to clear his own way to the throne. The Sicilian prince is brought up at the Saracen court of Damascus by Damiët, the daughter of the king. The two fall in love, but when Esmoreit hears that he is a foundling, he feels that he cannot marry Damiët until he has solved the mystery of his origin. This attitude provides the dramatic conflict of the

play, as his origin is of no interest at all to Damiët: she only wants him and is afraid of losing him. The motif of religious difference, which the modern reader might expect to lead to dramatic developments, is only of secondary importance. When Esmoreit returns to Sicily, he is quickly converted back to Christianity: his father simply tells him that he now ought to honour Mary and God. Esmoreit does not even reply, but shows that he has been converted by invoking ‘holy mother and maid’ and ‘the lord that made me’ instead of Mahomet and Apollo. To the medieval audience it must have been self-evident that Esmoreit became a Christian after he had been told the truth, so unthinkable that he should do anything else but accept it, that there was no need for words to be wasted on it. His conversion, if that is the word, was for the audience only an anticipated satisfaction, for the playwright only a matter of dotting his i's; it could not be material for dramatic conflict.

The play of Gloriant portrays the passionate love between the Christian prince Gloriant and Florentijn, a Saracen princess from Abelant. Both had said that they would never find a partner worthy of them. When Gloriant said this, he was warned that the Lady Venus would not like his rejection of love and would take revenge on him. The revenge comes when he is given a portrait of Florentijn: he falls wildly in love with her in spite of the hopelessness of the situation, as Florentijn is the daughter of his father's arch-enemy. His love, however, is so powerful that it overcomes all difficulties and after a dangerous expedition Gloriant takes Florentijn home. Her conversion takes place even more as a matter of course than Esmoreit's as she is never directly told or asked to become a Christian. At one stage Gloriant prays that Florentijn may escape death and may receive Christianity, and a little later, without any more information, we hear Florentijn pray to ‘God who was born of the virgin’.

From a modern critical point of view, plays such as Gloriant and Esmoreit represent dramatic art in its infancy. There is little attempt at characterization, the characters are

worked out only so far as is absolutely necessary for an understanding of the plot, psychological motivation is completely absent, the heroes are white, the villains an unrelieved black. The plays simply make statements, they do not search for what goes on behind the actions.

Lanseloet van Denemarken strikes us as more modern than Gloriant and Esmoreit. The reason for this is that there is more ‘psychology’ and development in it than in the other two, and that there is more gradation between good and evil in the main character. Lanseloet, the prince of Denmark, is in love with one of his mother's servants, Sanderijn. The mother wants a princess for her son and tries to destroy Lanseloet's love. She makes him a proposition: she will send Sanderijn to him once to satisfy his desire, but afterwards he shall send her away, saying: ‘I am as sick of you as if I had eaten seven sides of bacon’. Lanseloet is torn between his desire and the cruel vulgarity with which he will have to pay for it, but he soothes his conscience by telling himself that he does not mean what he is going to say. Sanderijn goes to Lanseloet in good faith, thinking that he is ill, but comes out of his room in utter despair. She leaves the court, goes away to another country where she meets a knight with whom she becomes very happy. Lanseloet in the meantime is consumed by remorse and sends one of his servants to find her. Sanderijn is found but she prefers to stay with her knight. The servant realizes that she will never go back to Lanseloet and decides to tell him that she is dead. Lanseloet then dies of a broken heart.

For a medieval play the character of Lanseloet is quite subtly drawn. He is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. His love for Sanderijn is sincere enough, and certainly not only sensual, as has sometimes been suggested, but his moral weakness causes him to treat her in such a contemptible way. His main fault is this weakness, this lack of moral courage to resist the miserable scheme that his mother has thought up. It is the flaw in his personality that leads to his destruction, not any influence from outside. But even this

weakness is not presented as incapable of remedy, for through his grief after Sanderijn has gone he grows strong enough to say to his servant: ‘I will marry her spite my kindred all’.4

Not only its psychological approach but also its poetry makes Lanseloet van Denemarken superior to the other two. One of the highlights occurs in a speech of Sanderijn's. After she has met the knight, he asks her to marry him, but she feels she has to tell him first what has happened to her:

 
Look at this tree shapely and tall,
 
How gloriously it blossoms out.
 
Its noble smell goes all about
 
The orchard and the lovely dell.
 
So sweet it is, and grown so well,
 
That all this orchard it doth adorn.
 
If now a falcon nobly born
 
From high upon this tree flew down,
 
And picked one flower, only one,
 
And after that never one more,
 
Nor ever took but that one flower,
 
Now pray you tell me faithfully,
 
Would you therefore hate the tree?5

After this the knight can only reply: ‘One single flower, that is nought’. The image of the falcon must have pleased the poet himself, for he used it again, in a slightly different version, when Sanderijn rejects Lanseloet's plea to come back to him.

Lanseloet van Denemarken is also the only play of the three that contains some humour. Gloriant and Esmoreit are both very serious, without any humorous or comic relief, but in Lanseloet we find the part of the gamekeeper who is so impressed by his master finding a beautiful woman in the forest that he goes to that same spot every day for a full

year, hiding behind a bush, hoping that he may meet with the same kind of good fortune. All he finds, though, is Lanseloet's servant. Through his long and fruitless wait he has become so tense and so fierce-looking that the servant takes fright when he sees him:

 
Deus God! How shall I know
 
What the man wants who there appears!
 
Methinks he has a mien so fierce,
 
And so heavy a club to bear,
 
He is a murderer, I swear.6

The understated dry humour that we find in Lanseloet becomes very ‘wet’ in the farces that were played after each abel spel. The Hulthem manuscript contains six of them, which might indicate that two serious plays have been lost. The farces provide a contrast in almost every respect: they are not set in the refined, courtly and noble atmosphere of the serious plays, but in a kind of lower middle-class environment. They are coarse, hardly humorous but broadly comical and slapstick. The tenor of most of them is the same: to show the stupidity of man and the superior cleverness of woman.

The fourth serious play, Een Abel Spel vanden Winter ende vanden Somer (A Beautiful Play of the Winter and the Summer) is in a different category from the other three. It is an allegory which presents in a light-hearted way a dispute between the summer and the winter about their respective importance. When the dispute threatens to degenerate into a duel, Venus arbitrates by pronouncing them eternal brothers. Although it is well-written and not as lifeless as some of the later allegories, it does not measure up to the standard of the romantic plays, certainly not to that of Lanseloet . It also seems that our modern preference for Lanseloet was shared by medieval man, for it was the only one of the four to be printed as a chapbook (about 1486) and also the only one

that crossed the border, in a German translation made at the end of the fifteenth century and printed in Cologne.


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