Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter - AAAARG.ORG

174 notes to pages 26–27
is borrowed from Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of
the Perfect Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 25. The
motif of the supposedly therapeutic water appears again in a tale in the
Nyeuwe clucht boeck 1983, pp. 141–142, no. 132, in which a husband feigns
illness and orders his wife to fetch water from a fountain in the forest,
where he has arranged for her to be murdered by a confederate.
89. Hüsken 1996, p. 130, notes that the kluchten were usually presented after
the allegorical plays. For their medieval forerunners, see Hüsken 1987,
pp. 40–44, who aptly characterizes them as delectatief, or “pleasurable.”
90. Erasmus-Miller 1979, p. 9. Folly varies an old topos, found as early as
classical antiquity, in which a speaker, finding his audience bored, interrupts
his serious subject with a frivolous story, and upbraids his listeners
for paying more attention to the story than to the serious matter; see
William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical
Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 75–79,
under “Catch-Tale: Demades the Orator.”
91. Theodor Distel, “Inhalt zweier, 1549 in Brüssel ausgeführter Theaterstücke,”
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte und Renaissance-Literatur
4 (1891): 355–359. How often farces were performed on such occasions
is not known, but see Ramakers 1996, p. 108, who notes that several
kluchten were staged before the illuminated city hall of Oudenaarde during
the triumphal entry of Margaret of Parma into the city in 1561. Kram’s
disparaging account of the audience is curious; presumably he had encountered
similar reactions to the carnival plays of his native Germany.
92. This condemnation occurs in the afschieds spel (farewell play) presented
by the Violieren in the Antwerp landjuweel of 1561; see Coigneau 1994,
pp. 117–118. In this regard, it is significant that while the chief prize in
the landjuweel of 1561 went to a spel van sinne, in the dramatic competitions
of 1496 and 1539, the top prize had been awarded to an esbattement (ibid.).
93. For the rederijker fools and their activities, see Verberckmoes 1999, pp.
22–23; and esp. Hüsken 1996.
94. For this event, see Hüsken 1996, pp. 122–125. The original text of the
“proclamation” is published in R. J. Marijnissen, “De Eed van Meester
Oom. Een Voorbeeld van Brabantse Jokkernij uit Bruegels Tijd,” in Von
Simson and Winner 1979, pp. 51–61. The part of the king was played
by the Brussels painter Jan Colyns, alias Welravens, for whom see also