Urban Theatre in the Low Countries: 1400–1625 (review)

Since the 1980s a rebirth of scholarly interest in Middle Dutch drama has had Dutch early drama specialists carefully re-examining its multifaceted terrain, though much of the scholarship in Dutch has remained difficult for an English-reading audience to access. Elsa Strietman and Peter Happé’s collection of essays crosses this Anglo-Dutch linguistic divide; they have gathered—and translated— several recent articles by prominent Dutch scholars on the urban drama of the Low Countries. Thorough accounts that elucidate the interwoven political, religious, and theater-related components of the Rederijkers’ world are hard to come by in English; this one will be especially valuable as a scholarly resource and teaching tool in European drama and/or literature survey courses.

This collection provides the first comprehensive text of its kind in English on the Low Countries’ urban drama and their illustrious (and notorious) Rederijkers. Along with contributions by Strietman and Happé, included here are translated essays by Dutch early drama scholars as well as contributions from medieval English and French drama experts. Although passages in the translated articles sometimes lack syntactical grace and present occasionally frustrating word choices, the content as a whole works cohesively as an interconnected compilation of genre analyses and case studies; the collection provides readers with an inclusive mosaic of early theater in the Low Countries. Many of the citations and references to secondary Dutch literature can also serve as an incentive to inspire additional English translations of this kind (a brief but helpful glossary of Middle Dutch drama terminology is appended).

Strietman and Happé’s introductory essay on the history between 1400 and 1625 in the Low Countries elegantly relates the complexities of Burgundian and Spanish royal marriages and the impositions of the Reformation. Into this historical setting the authors place the origins and development of the Rederijkers in a way that makes sense; they provide a detailed time line and clear, reproducible maps of the Low Countries.

The first of the volume’s five sections, “Precursors,” begins with Carla Dauvenvan Knippenberg’s insightful and connective case study, “Borderline Texts: The Case of the Maastricht (Ripuarian) Passion Play” (on the early life of Mary Magdalene) offers a significant reconsideration of this redemption play’s fourteenth-century historical backgrounds based on manuscript details, in which the Cistercian Lindburgse Sermoenen (Lindburgh Sermons) are also recorded. In his study of early Marian play texts, W. M. H. Hummelen closely examines the stage directions pause and selete in the manuscripts of Die eerste blijscap van Maria and Die sevenste blijscap van Onser Vrouwen (The First Joy of Mary and The Seventh Joy of Our Lady). Hummelen claims these terms referred to “musical performance” intervals (either sung or instrumental) and supports his point with contemporaneous documentation from city archival records, other play texts, the Livre de conduite (among a variety of several period-relevant play texts and books), and two appended excerpts from the plays under discussion.

Speaking to the volume’s second topic—“Politics and Religion”—Gary Waite elucidates the complex sixteenth-century theological content of the more serious Rederijker plays. He clarifies the Rederijkers’ twofold authorial intent to “promote the reforms they believed the Gospel called for” and to “express their deep loyalty to their urban commune and to preserving the peace … and social stability.” Waite’s contextualization resuscitates for the modern audience the didactic and political power of Rederijker drama’s now-obscure biblical content in relationship to its sixteenth-century audience. Complementing Waite’s contribution, Wim Hüsken’s “ ‘Heresy’ in the Plays of the Dutch Rhetoricians” studies the changing meaning of the Middle Dutch words for heresy, ketter and ketterien, in several Rederijker plays. As Hüsken shows, these changes directly reflect the shifting attitudes and subsequent grim events relative to heresy in the plays and its prosecution within the Low Countries’ urban theater community.

In the third section—“Literary Traditions of Rederijker Plays”—Bart Ramakers lays out and analyzes the Rederijkers...