Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

taking laughter seriously 155
countryside. Such images of robust, uninhibited peasant celebrations
would have formed a rustic but not inappropriate counterpoint to the
presumably more sophisticated and refined festivities in an urban dining
room.
And thus we return to the question once posed by Peter Burke: did
the upper classes “associate popular culture with times and places of relaxation?”
22 This question, as I have suggested, can be answered in the
a‹rmative. Further support for this claim comes from an unexpected
source, a carnival entertainment presented in 1593 at the court of Philip II
of Spain. 23 The king asked Jehan Lhermite, a native of Antwerp and a
member of the royal household, to organize a masque in the “Flemish
fashion.” In response, Lhermite staged an upper-class wedding feast: first
came the noble bridal pair and then the guests in order of rank, all wearing
the fashions of Brabant and Holland; after them came the cook and
his wife, he wielding a big spoon, she carrying a basket of warm carnival
wa›es. The banquet was interrupted by the appearance of a party of peasants,
also dressed in the Flemish style, complete with bagpipes and flails.
After several of the wedding guests had successfully pleaded for their admission
to the banquet, the whole company danced, the peasants performing
their native dances. The presence of these mock peasants, we
are assured, contributed much to the hilarity of the occasion, and Philip
is recorded as saying approvingly that it reminded him of the masked entertainments
he himself had enjoyed in the Netherlands. Philip had sojourned
in the Netherlands at various times between 1549 and 1558, some
forty-five to fifty years before, that is, in Bruegel’s lifetime. But while I
am not aware of any Flemish court masques featuring peasants from the
mid–sixteenth century, we cannot completely discount their existence
in view of the peasant characters that appear in the farces and tafelspelen
of the period. It is also possible that Philip had something quite diªerent
in mind, but even so, the Spanish entertainment of 1593 shows the
peasants, not as objects of derision and social satire, but as honorable participants
in a festive occasion. This is not likely to have been an invention
on Lhermite’s part, but reflects a practice begun much earlier. 24 To