SOURCE: “The Renaissance Revisited,” in Michel de Ghelderode, Twayne's World Authors on CD-ROM, 2000, pp. 1-33.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1997, Parsell discusses Ghelderode's Renaissance and late-medieval themes in his plays.]

Left to his own devices even as he remained nominally under contract to the declining VVT [Flemish Popular Theatre], Ghelderode returned in search of material to the time frame of his two previous “personal” efforts, Christopher Columbus and Escurial. Freed from any constraint of having to deliver a “message” the playwright's imagination actively sought, and readily found, in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance a fertile source of archetypal characters and situations to represent the human “truths”—most of them negative or at least disquieting—that lie just beneath the surface of Barabbas and Pantagleize. Still young (in his early thirties), Ghelderode embarked on what appears to have been a near frenzy of creative activity. By the time his health began to fail in 1936-37, he would have turned out no fewer than five plays later recognized among his finest and most memorable—Red Magic (1931), Lord Halewyn (1934), Miss Jairus (1935), Hop, Signor! (1936), and Chronicles of Hell (1937), all set in the distant past, as was the remarkable “puppet” drama Le Siège d'Ostende (1933), regrettably not published until nearly 20 years after Ghelderode's death.

Also dating from this period but set in modern times is Ghelderode's impressive homage to Renaat Verheyen, Sortie de l'acteur, back-dated by the author to 1930 but actually composed, as Beyen has ascertained, between 1933 and 1935. Ironically, most of the plays dating from the 1930s would not be performed until at least 15 years later, by which time Ghelderode had, for all practical purposes, discontinued writing plays.

RED MAGIC

Among the first efforts normally assigned to the post-VVT period is Red Magic, written as early as 1931 but without the VVT in mind. One of Ghelderode's few plays of the period to be first performed during the 1930s (in Brussels in 1934 and in Paris during 1938), Red Magic confirmed the author's reputation for unorthodox and memorable drama, attracting the attention of those French actors and directors who would subsequently “remember” Ghelderode in the years after World War II. For many critics and observers, Red Magic remains among the most typical and characteristic of Ghelderode's mature plays, both broadening and deepening the verbal and visual mastery present in Escurial.

Like the decrepit, half-mad monarch of Escurial, the main character of Red Magic is a late-medieval or early-Renaissance grotesque, in the present case an obese, obsessed miser known only as Hieronymus, the latin form of Jerome. In the course of a highly memorable opening scene consisting of a long soliloquy, Hieronymus takes inventory of his many possessions, including coins bearing both male and female likenesses. As he examines the coins he impulsively hatches a scheme to “breed” his “male” and “female” coins toward the procreation of innumerable shiny offspring. Hardly saner than the king of Escurial, Hieronymus, although not a ruler, is clearly a megalomaniac, seeking absolute power through absolute wealth. His ambition is to own the world, or at least all of the world that he knows, in order to maintain total control of his surroundings. Unlike other misers in literature as in life, Hieronymus has never, until now, sought to increase his wealth, preferring instead to savor its measure in an oft-repeated ritual of inventory. Indeed, what strikes him as most appealing about the “breeding” of his coins is that it offers him the prospect of return without investment.

Among his possessions Hieronymus counts also his wife and her clothes, a guard dog that saves money on food by eating its leash, and a ghost who presumably came with the house and helps to frighten off intruders. In time the spectator learns also that Hieronymus's wife, Sybilla, is still a virgin, Hieronymus having withheld himself from her as he has withheld his money from banks and bankers. In place of the child that Sybilla presumably wants, Hieronymus has given her a baby doll that, after all, costs nothing to feed. Last but by no means least, yet almost as an afterthought, Hieronymus counts among his possessions his immortal soul, which he has deliberately kept pure of the seven deadly sins, especially lust. Regarding the sin of avarice, Hieronymus prefers to describe himself as thrifty (“économe”). After all, he wonders aloud, who has ever seen a fat miser?

Oddly, Hieronymus has managed to grow fat without eating, as has the obnoxious monk who pays a daily call to remind Hieronymus of his mortality. When Sybilla rises from a sleepless night, interrupting her husband's inventory to tell him that she is hungry, he encourages her to feast with her eyes on the food depicted in his art collection, adding that he does not like fat women. Soon the Monk happens by on his morning rounds, and the two men trade insults regarding their shared, if unexplained, corpulence. Arguably, the Monk is Hieronymus's double as well as his antagonist, helping to bring about the miser's downfall.

Once he has crossed the threshold of reason by deciding to “breed” his money, Hieronymus easily falls prey to a scheme suggested to him by the local beggar, Romulus. Romulus, it seems, has a friend named Armador, an alchemist currently fleeing persecution for having transformed baser metals into gold. Again enchanted by the prospect of profit with little or no investment, Hieronymus agrees to shelter Armador under his roof, offering not only his basement as a laboratory but also his wife, as the virgin whose blood will be needed for Armador's experiments (hence the “Red Magic” of the play's title.)

By now, of course, the spectator has begun to suspect that Sybilla and Armador are already lovers, or would like to be, and that Romulus's outrageous suggestion is nothing more or less than a plot to bring the pair together under Hieronymus's roof and nose. Hieronymus, however, is so blinded by greed and the lust for power that he readily agrees, announcing, in a shorter soliloquy, his intention to “mend his ways”—in this case switching from virtue to vice—once he is assured of the absolute power that Armador's experiments promise to bring him: “What is happening to me? If it's a dream, it's stupendous, and I'm a dream better off. If it's real … then I shall be liberal, I shall live like a gentleman. I shall visit courtesans. The good time will have come, the end of hardship, fasting, calculation” (SP, 2: 13).

At the start of act 2 a full day has passed, and Hieronymus, his ear to the floor, anxiously awaits news of what is going on downstairs. In an extended soliloquy interrupted but not curtailed by dialogue with Romulus and with the Monk, Hieronymus begins to suspect, correctly, that he has been duped, even robbed, and threatens to kill Armador. Increasingly inflamed by imagination and resentment feeding off each other, Hieronymus ends by acting out the murder of Armador just as Armador himself arrives from the basement laboratory. Stagily outraged by the scene of his own death, Armador berates Hieronymus for his ingratitude. After all, he claims, his experiments have just made Hieronymus incredibly rich. Fawning, groveling, vainly trying to “eat” his words, Hieronymus curries favor with the alchemist, nearly bursting with delight when Armador hands over a sample of his “product,” in fact a coin taken from Hieronymus's own coffers. Hieronymus is about to accuse Armador of counterfeiting when the latter sends him out to buy some wine, claiming that it is needed in the alchemical process.

During Hieronymus's brief absence, Armador is examining the miser's hoard when Sybilla appears, disheveled and clearly transformed by her night of love with Armador. Their conversation soon reveals that they are former childhood sweethearts. Reunited with Sybilla, Armador now proposes that they flee abroad with Hieronymus's stolen funds, operating a tavern and brothel in a port town until they are rich enough to retire to the countryside. Their conversation is soon cut short by the return of Hieronymus, now burdened with six flasks of wine. Armador quickly leaves, warning Sybilla to remain silent while he is out of the room. Faced with her husband's hated presence, Sybilla does even more than she has been told to do, credibly imitating a statue, or perhaps a member of the living dead. Hieronymus, increasingly outraged by Sybilla's refusal to answer his questions about Armador's experiments, denounces and strikes his wife, threatening to disrobe her in search of gold stains when Armador returns, bearing what appears—and sounds—to be a sack full of coins.

Breaking his long habit of abstinence, Hieronymus invites Armador to share the wine that he has just bought with the “sample” coin. Armador, feigning drunkenness, claims that he carries the alchemical formula on his person, together with a mystical black gem that confers and assures immortality. When Armador further feigns loss of consciousness, Hieronymus, increasingly intoxicated, predictably strips Armador of both document and jewel. When the Monk unexpectedly drops by, Hieronymus invites him to join in the celebration of a recent inheritance and announces his intention to leave all of his earthly possessions to the Church. After all, Hieronymus reasons, he has just obtained the gift of immortality, and the Church will have an eternity to wait. Unknown to Hieronymus, the Monk has been part of the scheme against him all along and can hardly wait for Hieronymus to succumb to his unaccustomed intake of wine.

Once Hieronymus has passed out, more or less on schedule, the Monk calls out to his three co-conspirators for help in heaving the miser's bulk atop the hoard inside his treasure chest, but only after they have substituted counterfeit coins for the real ones. Armador and Sybilla depart for another night of love before leaving town at dawn; the Monk departs too, leaving only the beggar Romulus to keep watch over the sleeping Hieronymus. Soon thereafter, the miser rouses briefly, raising the lid of his coffer as he revels in the tactile presence of his “gold” beneath him. As the curtain falls on act 2, Romulus laughs uproariously but silently, his presence unnoticed and unsuspected by the drunken miser as he recloses the lid of his trunk from inside.

At the start of the third and final act Hieronymus awakens and raises the lid of his coffer, indulging in another lengthy monologue as he prepares to reap the double benefits of immortality and absolute wealth. Hearing Sybilla's amorous shrieks and moans from below, he promises to begin his new “life” with a visit to prostitutes. Although he has told Sybilla that he detests obesity in women, he now vows to seek the fattest women he can find, the most “meat” for his money. Mistaking Romulus for the household haunt, Hieronymus exits quickly, whereupon Romulus summons his co-conspirators to discuss changes in their plan. Hieronymus's unexpected departure might well foil their scheme to have him arrested at dawn on charges of counterfeiting, after which they will divide the real gold into four equal portions and make good their escape. There is, however, no honor among thieves, and the Monk warns the lovers that Romulus is about to betray them in order to collect more than his share of the booty. Armador fatally stabs Romulus and hides his corpse in the coffer as the now-lascivious Monk follows Sybilla upstairs for an assignation tacitly approved by Armador.

Howling in anguish, fearing contagion and pursued by “enemies” both real and imagined, Hieronymus returns early from his “night of love.” The experience has quickly turned disastrous, and he is now fleeing an angry brothelkeeper whom he paid with a coin instantly recognized as counterfeit. The Monk stumbles down from above, either drunk or (possibly) poisoned, just as the pimp and the law officers arrive all at once. Armador and Sybilla, disguising their voices as well as their faces, manage to slip down the back stairs before the officers find Romulus's body atop the counterfeit coins, charging Hieronymus with both crimes. (In a fit of pique, Hieronymus has stabbed the doll-child with a knife; the doll's presence at the scene suggests collusion with “dark forces,” strengthening suspicion of his guilt.) As he is led away to certain condemnation and death, Hieronymus remains oddly detached from the experience, honestly believing himself to be immortal.

Inevitably compared to such legendary literary misers as Molière's Harpagon and Balzac's Grandet, Hieronymus nevertheless remains closer to symbol than to stereotype or archetype. Visibly and audibly approaching madness even as the play begins, never fully credible as can be discerned from his outrageous speeches, Hieronymus is memorable mainly for his almost palpable fear of the human condition, including both life and death. He is man in flight from himself, seeking in absolute power a refuge from the ravages wrought by the “seven deadly sins.” Thus does Ghelderode, carefully avoiding the political “relevance” demanded by the VVT, manage still to question the maintenance of wealth for its own sake. As in his earliest effort, written in homage to Poe, Death still looks in at the window and takes what she (or he) can find. To be sure, Hieronymus, as he claims, is quite innocent of the charges leveled against him; still, it is hard to mourn his impending death. Having denied life in hopes of saving his own, he stands condemned in the eyes of both playwright and spectator as a member of the “living dead,” outshone despite his eloquence by the vitality of Armador, Sybilla, and even the Monk.

Hieronymus's very real anguish, metaphysical more than “existential,” continues to reach spectators and readers who find him hard to believe as a flesh-and-blood human being. Like Ghelderode, Hieronymus may well have been born onto the wrong planet, seeking a measure of security that, on planet Earth, is rarely to be found after birth. Threatened and eventually betrayed by the Monk, presumably God's earthly representative, Hieronymus proceeds toward the unknown, lulled, like many more credible mortals, into a false sense of security nourished by illusions held well into middle age.

Considered both as play and as document, Red Magic shows that Ghelderode had already learned much from his years with the VVT, even as he had disdained to watch over the production of his plays. The action of Red Magic is tightly condensed, well able to hold the attention of the average spectator. Only one stage set is needed, and there are only six main characters, plus extras, to be cast. The character of Hieronymus, however, poses several real problems that are not easily surmounted. Hieronymus's soliloquies occupy nearly one-third of the text as printed; even those actors accustomed to playing Shakespeare's Hamlet in the title role would find it hard to maintain the breath and force, let alone the memory and command of lines, to play the role of Hieronymus as Ghelderode appears to have intended. Early productions of Red Magic tended to taper off toward the end for precisely that reason. In 1971 a production prepared for French television (not broadcast until 1973) was deliberately edited in “tapered” fashion, with the later soliloquies all but suppressed (see Beyen 1974, 61-62). Notwithstanding, Red Magic remains among Ghelderode's best-known and most frequently anthologized plays.

LE SIèGE D'OSTENDE

Left to his own devices in his attic office, Ghelderode continued to write dramatic scripts at a prodigious rate in the early 1930s, with many scripts later deemed “disposable” by either the author or his critics. In 1933, however, he managed to turn out one true “masterpiece” which, however impossible to produce, began to attract favorable attention well before it appeared in print in 1980, nearly 20 years after Ghelderode's death. Initially planned and executed as homage to the Anglo-Belgian painter James Ensor (1860-1949), Le Siège d'Ostende (The Siege of Ostend), subtitled “A Military Epic for Marionettes,” contains some of Ghelderode's most expressively poetic prose, together with some of his most memorable conceits.

Liberally “borrowed” from an episode in Flemish history, the plot and setting of Le Siège d'Ostende concern an invasion of the Flemish city by Spanish forces. Sir Jaime l'Ostendais, chosen to take charge of defending the city, is a supposed ancestor of James Ensor and is closely modeled on Ensor. Commanding the Spanish army based in Brussels (waggishly called “Brisselles” in the script) is one Duke Albert, whose duchess (dussèche) Isabella goads him on to victory by refusing to change her underwear (chemyse) until Ostend has been taken. Sexual and scatological humor abounds, as does biting satire of war, politics, nobility and the clergy. If performed, the action—divided into 19 scenes with nearly 50 characters—would last for approximately two hours. To Ghelderode's disappointment, the aging Ensor was less than honored by the “tribute” offered to him, and Ghelderode in time abandoned whatever further plans he might have had for the script. In retrospect, however, the writing of Le Siège d'Ostende seems to have served Ghelderode well in the development of his verbal and scenic talents—talents soon to be exercised again in such plays as La Balade du grand macabre (Death Takes a Stroll; 1934) and La Farce des ténébreux (The Farce of the Dark Band; 1936).

LORD HALEWYN

During his years with the VVT Ghelderode had considered writing a stage version of the Halewijn (or Halewyn) legend, a Flemish folk tale similar in theme and content to that of Bluebeard. At the time, however, another, lesser-known playwright claimed priority rights to the material, and Ghelderode would not begin work on his own version until 1933, having proposed the play as a radio project several months earlier.

A superior example of early radio drama, Lord Halewyn recounts the life and death of the title character, a nobleman whose lust for nubile virgins inevitably results in murder. As in the original legend, Halewyn will meet his match in the young countess Purmelende, arguably the one woman who could truly satisfy him. Like Halewyn, Purmelende is haunted by strange needs and voices. As she deliberately rides off in search of Halewyn, she fully expects to meet death as have seven young maidens before her. At the “moment of truth,” however, Purmelende awakens as if from a trance and severs Halewyn's head from his body with the sword that he had planned to use on her. Welcomed as a heroine on returning to her father's castle, Purmelende pours out her tale of ecstasy and death, Halewyn's name on her lips as she in turn suddenly dies, her heart “broken” by an excess of emotion.

As befits a play written for radio performance, the action of Lord Halewyn is narrated rather than portrayed. The text, however, has proved sufficiently tempting to actors and directors that the play has been staged more than once, with predictably ambiguous results; the actors, indeed, have little more to do than stand in place reciting their lines, more monologue than dialogue. The tale, however, is extremely well retold by Ghelderode, for whom the intermingled themes of sex and death were becoming something of a trademark.

By 1934, when he completed the manuscript of Lord Halewyn, Ghelderode was already well-launched on two other projects that would soon come to fruition as La Balade du grand macabre and Miss Jairus. The former effort seems to have offered Ghelderode some measure of recreation and respite while he worked with the “Jairus” material that he claims to have been haunted by since childhood (see Beyen 1974, 58). Although Death figures prominently in both plays, the portrayal of Nekrozotar in La Balade du grand macabre allows for a lightness of touch and tone that is quite absent from Ghelderode's brooding exploration of death and dying in Miss Jairus.

LA BALDADE DU GRAND MACABRE

Earlier in 1933, presumably inspired by figures portrayed on an old tapestry, Ghelderode had composed Adrian et Jusémina, a pastoral “diversion” resembling a ballet with dialogue. The title characters and soon to be lovers are shepherd and shepherdess. The names Adrian and Jusémina would be retained to designate the “archetypal” lovers in La Balade du grand macabre, although the characters are no longer presented as shepherds. Once again, however, Ghelderode has clearly drawn his inspiration from visual models. The setting of La Balade du grand macabre is described as “Breugellande,” with scenes clearly recalling Brueghel paintings. It is into this rural setting that the Grim Reaper, Nekrozotar, drops from a tree, initially mistaken for a corpse by the local drunkard, Porprenaz (“purple nose”), who has himself climbed a tree to spy on Adrian and Jusémina.

Brandishing a scythe, Nekrozotar proceeds to announce the end of the world, enclosing the young lovers in a tomb and refusing Porprenaz's offer of his own life as a symbolic sacrifice to spare the people of Breugellande. Mounted on the drunkard's back, Nekrozotar then goes about his business, seeking and finding examples of abuse that more than justify his attentions. In a rapid succession of tableaux, characters and spectators will meet the henpecked astrologer Videbolle (“empty-head”), forced to dress as a woman while his insatiable wife, Salivaine, quite literally wears the pants, smoking a pipe as well. They will also meet the portly, benign Prince Goulave of Breugellande, whose ministers bore him to distraction by advising him to govern badly.

Notwithstanding the acknowledged debt to Brueghel, La Balade du grand macabre derives also from Le Siège d'Ostende, as from Ghelderode's earlier experiments with puppet theater. Here, however, the scenes and characters are expressly conceived for performance by human actors rather than puppets, convincingly capturing the tone and spirit of such late-medieval farces as Pierre Pathelin and The Tub/La Farce du cuvier. The latter play, in particular, looms large over Ghelderode's portrayal of Videbolle's troubled life with the salivating Salivaine, who forces him to choose between making love and getting flogged. Videbolle, whose astrological researches have foretold the end of the world, can hardly wait for the event and, in fact, has often prayed for death in order to get away from his shrew of a wife. Salivaine in turn prays to Venus for satisfaction, complaining that her first husband was no better in bed than Videbolle.

When Porprenaz arrives at his friend Videbolle's house bearing Nekrozotar on his back, Videbolle welcomes them with open arms, quite ready to be the first to die. Not so, says Nekrozotar; he will be among the last, because he deserves to witness the “purification” process that is soon to follow. Salivaine, asleep and dreaming, continues to cry out for satisfaction. Nekrozotar, addressing her by name, seizes Salivaine in a vampirelike embrace and bites her shoulder until she faints. In time it will become clear that Nekrozotar is none other than the maligned first husband of Salivaine, who sent him off years ago in search of a mysterious “red herring.”

During the action to follow, rich in movement and “stage business” but in fact very tightly constructed, Videbolle, Porprenaz, and Nekrozotar will proceed about the latter's mission; Prince Goulave, who at first hides under a table to avoid the Grim Reaper, looks on with increasing admiration as his principality is purged of its least savory inhabitants. As Goulave will observe, the people in question die not from Nekrozotar's actions but rather from their own fear of what is about to happen. Gluttons, for example, have choked on their food, and misers have swallowed their money in a vain attempt to take it with them. Salivaine, however, remains alive to face a settling of scores, as do the ministers Aspiquet and Basiliquet. After Salivaine, held in place by three old soldiers who have also been spared, has received a ritual flogging at the hands of Videbolle, the two ministers stand revealed as her lovers, taking turns for her dubious affections. It is in fact none other than Salivaine who is responsible for the repressive government forced on Goulave by Aspiquet and Basiliquet, who compete in trying to please her.

In a climactic scene anticipating the end of Ionesco's Bald Soprano, Salivaine and her two “lovers” will trade insults and accusations, taking the art of name-calling to new extremes. As order is restored to Breugellande, the three will be left alive as a negative example, kept in a cage to yell and scream at one another for all eternity, or at least for the foreseeable future. Nekrozotar, his mission accomplished, at last feels free to die. As Porprenaz and Videbolle prepare to bury him, the lovers Adrian and Jusémina emerge from the tomb very much alive yet totally unaware of what has been going on around them. The continuity of life in Breugellande is thus assured, the couple signifying renewal and fertility as Videbolle and Proprenaz join hands with Goulave, their newly liberated and enlightened monarch, to celebrate the future.

Delicately (and not always successfully) balanced between fantasy and farce, La Balade du grand macabre remained unperformed for nearly 20 years after its composition. Its “ideal” audience would seem to be one already familiar with the twists and turns of Ghelderode's theatrical expression. Even then, in 1953, the recurrent theme and conceit of the “red herring,” often mentioned but never seen, continued to pose problems for actors, director, and potentially for spectators. According to Beyen (1974, 75), Ghelderode agreed to sharpen or develop the theme in a revised acting script but in fact never managed to do so. Critics, meanwhile, continued to ponder the symbol on the basis of textual references. For Nekrozotar, the “red herring,” once compared to the Holy Spirit, represents the philosopher's quest for the ideal or the absolute. Salivaine, however, quite obviously sees the herring as a phallic symbol, the idealized fulfillment of her insatiable and tyrannical lusts. Such conflicting views of the mythical, even mystical, fish lie at the heart of the “battle of the sexes” embedded in the dialogue. Postwar reviewers, however, seem to have had relatively little difficulty making sense of such references. More than one critic, in 1953, saw La Balade du grand macabre as derivative of the connubial farce in the works of Aristophanes, and badly derivative at that.

Other critics, meanwhile, saw in La Balade du grand macabre a correction or revision of the negative view of politics espoused in Barabbas and in Pantagleize. Arguably, however, the setting of La Balade du grand macabre is fantastic from the start, an imaginary land harking back, through Goulave's yearnings, to an even more fantastic state of almost prelapsarian perfection, without strife and, perhaps most important, without women. For Beyen (1974, 77), the triumphant, seemingly affirmative final scene of La Balade du grand macabre has less to do with brotherhood, as some critics have supposed, than with male bonding, as Porprenaz celebrates the newfound freedom of both Videbolle (from Salivaine) and Goulave (from his ministers). Seen from such a perspective, La Balade du grand macabre falls far short of contradicting Ghelderode's earlier views on society and politics. Quite to the contrary, the play emerges as a baroque parable on the intertwined fortunes of politics and sex, either one of which would suffice to render a harmonious society quite impossible indeed.

Women, seldom treated kindly in Ghelderode's dramatic universe, take perhaps their strongest beating—figuratively as well as literally—in La Balade du grand macabre. Salivaine, her ugliness underscored by her predilection for masculine dress and mannerisms, is further characterized as cruel and oversexed. If the various images throughout the play are to be taken at face value, Salivaine's sex drive has ruined not only the lives of both of her husbands but also the peaceful society of Breugellande, thanks to her manipulation of the “statesmen” Aspiquet and Basiliquet. Significantly, Salivaine is treated throughout the play as a representative “daughter” of Eve, whose creation gave rise also to the invention of the rod and the whip. The only other female character portrayed is young Jusémina, whose coy words to Adrian hint at fickleness. For want of a better specimen of female humanity, Jusémina will simply have to suffice in order to assure the perpetuation of the human race.

Apart from the negative portrayal of women, a major problem with La Balade du grand macabre resides in the shifting role of Nekrozotar, who enters the action as a fearsome, other-worldly Grim Reaper figure only to leave it as yet another failed, henpecked “philosopher” who, sensing the approach of his death, has returned to his homeland on a final mission of “mercy.” The resulting changes in tone remain hard to manage in performance, given the need for maintaining the rhythm of physical and verbal farce. Ideally, productions of La Balade du grand macabre should accentuate the visual and verbal “distractions” provided by the author, moving fast enough that spectators have little or no time to reflect on the more incongruous aspects of the plot.

Reduced to human scale, Nekrozotar memorably demonstrates the “human” side of death when his victims in fact die of fright, having feared life as much as they fear death. For Ghelderode, such a “demystification” of death helped to defer the more fearsome aspects of his next project, Miss Jairus, planned as early as 1929 but with roots reaching back into his earliest childhood. In the Interviews Ghelderode would recall hearing his mother tell of a girl nearly buried alive during the 1870s; although rescued from the grave, the girl would remain in a trancelike, other-worldly state until her actual physical death some years later. The premise of deferred death, recalling the biblical tales of Jairus's daughter and of Lazarus, had continued to grow and develop in Ghelderode's mind even as he seems to have procrastinated in committing his thoughts and feelings to paper. Finally, having “buried” Nekrozotar and temporarily exorcised his own demons, the still-young playwright began work on Miss Jairus during the fall of 1934, just one day after finishing La Balade du grand macabre.

MISS JAIRUS

Among the best-known and most frequently discussed of Ghelderode's plays, Miss Jairus is set during the late Middle Ages in the ancient city of Bruges. As their daughter Blandine lies on her deathbed, Jairus and his wife, otherwise unnamed, await the inevitable attended by such hangers-on as a witch, a doctor, a priest, professional mourners, and a cabinetmaker who boasts of his skill at constructing coffins. Jairus, ineffectual yet given to histrionics, searches in vain for the proper words and tone for such a crucial moment in his life. Also present, and greatly mistrusted by the other characters, is a mysterious thaumaturge (witch doctor) known only as Le Roux (“the redhead”), to whom Ghelderode has assigned, however incongrously, certain Christ-like attributes. Le Roux, it seems, has been summoned by Blandine's fiancé, Jacquelin, who, alone among those present, refuses to accept the fact of the young woman's impending death. In time Le Roux reluctantly agrees to work a miracle out of respect for Jacquelin's faith. He takes care, however, to warn both parents and fiancé that they will come to regret his action and, over time, to hate him for what he has done.

Resuscitated, Blandine awakens in a kind of trance, refusing Jacquelin's attentions and demanding to be left alone. Soon a strange, shrouded figure appears in the doorway to announce that he and Blandine will both die come springtime, some six months later. Dismissing Jacquelin from her presence, Blandine joins the stranger in an eerie, erotic dialogue mixing references to love, lust, and a common desire for death. The two are about to embrace when Jacquelin returns, brandishing a knife. Before long, however, he decides that both Blandine and the stranger are more dead than alive and leaves them alone. As the stranger makes good his escape, promising Blandine that they shall soon meet again, Blandine addresses him as Lazarus.

The fourth and final act of Miss Jairus takes place on Good Friday, as the people of Bruges prepare for the ritual execution of three “heretics,” including Le Roux. Blandine, deceptively calm at first, breaks into a strangely disjointed monologue as soon as she is left alone. Her speech, anticipating Lucky's monologue in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, introduces the play's true climax. When the town crier arrives to announce the death of Lazarus, Blandine asks that her own name be added to the list; she then proceeds to die, her last breath coinciding with that of Le Roux—who dies in the arms of the witch Mankabena, who may or may not be his mother. Jacquelin, returning to close Blandine's eyelids, appears to have undergone some kind of conversion experience and announces his imminent departure to spread the word. Blandine's parents, meanwhile, remain quite as bewildered as ever.

Among the more perplexing, if oddly fascinating, of Ghelderode's published plays, Miss Jairus would not be performed until 1949, amid the outbreak of Acute Ghelderoditis on the Paris stage. The play depended on an audience familiar with Ghelderode's work and its characteristic themes, but even such seasoned spectators were baffled by the mixture of sublime and grotesque elements, together with unexplained and seemingly gratuitous references to the New Testament. The three “paid mourners” in particular—three old women all named Marieke who carry onions to induce weeping and whose speech is a curious mixture of French, Dutch, and Latin—struck a discordant note with many observers, as did the ambiguous portrayal of Le Roux, seen by some as a parody of Christ. As with the first performances of La Balade du grand macabre some four years later, the irreducible Flemishness of Ghelderode's expression worked at cross-purposes with his total mastery of French poetic prose to keep Paris audiences at bay. Subsequent productions, both within and outside France, took liberties with Ghelderode's original instructions as to costumes and staging, usually in order to accentuate the “romantic appeal” of death embodied in Blandine and in Lazarus.

D'UN DIABLE QUI PRêCHA MERVEILLES

Soon after completing Miss Jairus Ghelderode continued work on Sortie de l'acteur, begun as early as 1933 although back-dated to 1930, the date of Renaat Verheyen's early death. Late in 1935 he began work on a curious text to be known as D'un diable qui prêcha merveilles (Of a Devil Who Preached Marvels), designated, as was Le Siège d'Ostende, as a play for puppets. Roland Beyen is careful to point out, however, that by the mid-1930s the “puppet” designation had come to hold a somewhat different meaning for Ghelderode than it had during the 1920s when he actually rehearsed his scripts with marionettes. Beginning with Le Siège d'Ostende, the term had come to designate a kind of closet drama or reader's theater uniquely tailored to Ghelderode's own needs without regard for the specific demands of the stage. In the case of D'un diable, creative license permitted Ghelderode to invent approximately two dozen characters, involving them in one of his longest and most convoluted scripts.

Set in “Breugelmonde,” the action of D'un diable recalls that of La Balade du grand macabre as well as Miss Jairus and Le Siège d'Ostende. The scene opens with the lamentations of the sorceress and beggar Fergerite, abandoned by her demon lover Capricant. The town of Breugelmonde, recalling both the Breugellande of La Balade du grand macabre and the Bruges of Miss Jairus, soon erupts into widespread panic as word travels that the Pope himself has sent an emissary to mend the people's ways. Corruption runs rampant, embodied in such colorful characters as the gluttonous, profane Bishop Bredemaag and the seductive Abbess Didyme, who is about to compound the sin of fornication by attempting an abortion.

Most of the action to follow, divided into three acts, revolves around a case of mistaken identity: Capricant, egged on by his former mistress, Fergerite, impersonates the dreaded monk Bashuiljus, preaching a “sermon” that, in effect, exhorts the townsfolk to remain just as they are.

The Pope, he claims, has been misinformed of their activities by inhabitants of rival villages envious of Breugelmonde's prosperity. When the real Bashuiljus at last appears, Capricant gains his confidence by passing himself off as Breugelmonde's purest and most virtuous soul. At the end of the play Capricant has persuaded the monk to leave with him for Rome, where both will be canonized. Life in Breugelmonde will continue just as before, while Capricant will in fact lead the unsuspecting Bashuiljus off to Hell, where he presumably belongs.

Despite rich lyrical and scenic possibilities similar to those of other Ghelderode plays written around the same time, D'un diable qui prêcha merveilles remains more often read than performed, notable mainly for its elaboration of Ghelderode's characteristic themes. As in La Balade du grand macabre, the intrusion of an other-worldly character serves to reaffirm, albeit in a warped way, the lusty joys of living. The late-medieval setting, meanwhile, provides just enough exoticism to blunt the sharpest edges of Ghelderode's anticlerical satire. Still, the liberal use of long-winded speeches—Capricant's bogus “sermon,” for example, occupies the entire second act—tends to work against the text's playability.

LE FARCE DES TéNéBREUX

Ghelderode's subsequent effort, La Farce des ténébreux (The Farce of the Dark Band) is written in much the same vein as its predecessor, denouncing hypocrisy and exhorting the lusty enjoyment of life's transitory pleasures. For once, however, Ghelderode's characteristic anticlericalism is all but absent. He was saving his next full assault on the clergy for Chronicles of Hell, to be written the following year. Reminiscent of Baudelaire's prose poem “Laquelle est la vraie?” (“Which One Is for Real?”). The play opens with the monumental grief of one Fernand d'Abcaude, pining away after the sudden death of his fiancée, Azurine. Fernand's servants, including the physician Mops, have tired of their employer's sense of gloom and doom and will stop at nothing to lighten his mood.

With the help of a friend, the actress Emmanuèle, the servants stage an apparition of Azurine's ghostly remains, after which “Azurine” presents Fernand with her maggot-covered heart as a memento. Fernand, deep as ever in despair, fails to get the message, whereupon the conspirators, now including Emmanuèle, proceed to hatch an even bolder scheme. The play's second act takes place in the local bordello, where a most reluctant Fernand has been invited to attend a perverse “memorial service” for one Putrégina, “queen of whores.” The other guests, first seen wearing masks, are the “dark band” of the play's title, a “brotherhood” of Putrégina's former customers that includes some of the town's most prominent inhabitants. As the service proceeds, the late prostitute's clothing and other relics are displayed for veneration. It is left to Fernand to unveil the dead woman's statue and thus to discover the true identity of his beloved Azurine. Emmanuèle comes quickly to the rescue, inviting the thunderstruck Fernand to dance with her as the curtain falls.

The third act of La Farce des ténébreux takes place, as did the first, in Fernand's room, where the valet Ludion will in time explain to Fernand that what he has recently experienced was no nightmare, but the truth. Pressed for details, Ludion will recall numerous instances of Azurine's lascivity, willfully inviting punishment from his master as he explains that all women are alike and that Fernand would no doubt have been cuckolded in marriage. Left to his own devices, Fernand repeatedly stabs the full-length portrait of Azurine that he has kept in her memory. When Emmanuèle returns, again playing the role of the shrouded Azurine, Fernand continues his interrogation, in time asking the young woman her true identity and profession. When Fernand recoils in horror at the presence of an actress in his house—at a time when actors are deemed unworthy of the sacraments or of Christian burial—Emmanuèle further admits to being a prostitute as well, with Azurine/Putrégina as her role model.

Faced with Fernand's indignation, Emmanuèle is about to leave when Fernand calls her back for further questioning: Why did she play the role of the dead Azurine? For the money, she replies, but also to cure Fernand of his disease, virginity. Patiently, she explains to an astonished Fernand that his rectitude has made him a laughingstock of the community, and that his honor depends on proof of his virility. In a reversal of traditional roles, Emmanuèle then drags a protesting Fernand offstage, presumably into an alcove where she proceeds to undress and seduce him, to the great delight of his entourage. La Farce des ténébreux thus comes to an end on a somewhat more disquieting note than Ghelderode seems to have intended. Perhaps, as certain of his critics suggest, Ghelderode unwittingly projected onto his main character some of his own anxieties about women, sex, and death. In any case, his portrayal of the grieving Fernand is shot through with ambiguities that tend to work against the mourner's ribald “liberation” in the final scene.

As developed throughout the action of La Farce des ténébreux, Fernand d'Abcaude is simply too complex a character to be set free from his inhibitions (or are they moral convictions?) in the manner described. The “pillars of the community” who comprise the “dark band” may well be hypocrites, but Fernand himself is not. As presented and developed, Fernand is either a pious man of principle or a case of arrested development. Perhaps, indeed, he is both at once—a dreamer truly obsessed with an ideal of purity equally binding on himself and on the woman he loves. His “liberation” therefore strikes something of a false note, as if Fernand were being punished for his chastity with what amounts to an act of rape.

Owing no doubt to ambiguities in the portrayal of Fernand, La Farce des ténébreux was among the last of Ghelderode's efforts to be staged during the “epidemic” of Acute Ghelderoditis in Paris. Jean-Louis Barrault, seldom daunted by the difficulties of a dramatic text, nonetheless abandoned plans to mount the play during the 1950-51 season at the Théâtre Marigny, having already had sets built and posters printed. The sets, constructed by Félix Labisse, were finally used in November 1952 when Georges Vitaly staged the play at the Grand Guignol, taking considerable liberties with the text in order to render it playable as comedy. Even so, the production was less than a rousing success, and nearly two decades would pass before a second attempt at production, in Brussels in 1970.

By 1936 Ghelderode's health was beginning to fail him, which may or may not help to account for the increasingly morbid concerns to be found in his plays of the period. True, the mingled themes of sex and death had characterized most of his plays from Red Magic onward; still, the paralyzing scruples—or inhibitions—of Fernand in La Farce des ténébreux sound a new, discomfiting note in Ghelderode's dramatic canon. Despite the author's avowed intentions, there is little or nothing to celebrate in Fernand's eventual “destiny.” The affirmative spirit that came to Ghelderode's rescue in such efforts as La Balade du grand macabre somehow appears to have deserted him, replaced by strong intimations of mortality, sterility, and man's—or, more frequently, woman's—inhumanity to man.

HOP, SIGNOR!

Soon after completing La Farce des ténébreux in July 1936, Ghelderode turned his attention to a project first outlined some 18 months earlier and loosely based, like Lord Halewyn, on folklore. The result, known even in translation as Hop, Signor!, would in time become one of the author's most notorious and frequently reprinted plays, even as the themes and tone expressed would, as in the case of La Farce des ténébreux, assure relatively few productions, at least in France.

Having attempted a comic treatment of lust and inhibition in La Farce des ténébreux, Ghelderode in Hop, Signor! would revisit the same themes in a tone rather delicately balanced between tragedy and melodrama yet partaking of the scenic vigor associated with Red Magic. If the earlier play, at least in intent, constituted an attack on hypocrisy, Hop, Signor! goes even deeper into perceived human nature to show the basic incompatibility of the sexes—a perennial problem to which death would appear the only possible solution.

Based on the well-documented medieval punishment (or torture) of tossing an offender in a blanket or tarpaulin to break his bones—a tradition recalled down to the present day in the children's game known in Dutch as Opsignoorke and played with a doll—Hop, Signor! centers on the troubled career and marriage of the sculptor Juréal, deformed and aging, who hides his insecurities beneath a superficial arrogance that has earned him the sobriquet of Signor, or “milord.” In constructing the play Ghelderode borrowed from yet another folkloric/historical source to present as Juréal's wife one Marguerite Harstein, executed for witchcraft during the sixteenth century.

Unable either to adapt his art to changing tastes or to consummate his marriage to the alluring, demanding Marguerite, Juréal easily falls prey to the blandishments of Helgar and Adorno, two handsome young noblemen who curry favor with him in hopes of getting closer to his wife. Marguerite, while expressing nothing but contempt for her husband and ridiculing his attempts to practice the manly art of fencing, keeps her two admirers at bay by playing them off against each other. As will soon become clear, Marguerite's inhibitions, similar to those of Purmelende in Lord Halewyn, are hardly less severe than those of her unfortunate spouse. Notwithstanding, her speech and actions exude a strong sexuality that helps to precipitate the play's dramatic, even tragic, action.

When Juréal, as proud as he is insecure, invites Marguerite to accompany him to a public procession in order to keep up appearances or at least to save face, Marguerite brutally informs him that there are no appearances to be kept up and no face to save. Everyone knows that he is virile only in his arms, she says, and only for the humble craft of carving tombstones. If only she were so inclined, she adds, she would already have betrayed him many times over. His pride mortally wounded, Juréal flies into an impotent rage, heaving an enormous carved stone that nearly hits and kills the monk Dom Pilar, who has been spying on him for Helgar and Adorno.

Close kin to the monk in Red Magic, as to the corrupt clergy in the forthcoming Chronicles of Hell, Dom Pilar plays both ends against the middle by arousing Juréal's jealous anger and then attempting, unsuccessfully, to receive Marguerite's confession. Juréal, meanwhile, alerted by the two dwarfs who work for him that the play being performed in the public square has to do with cuckoldry, takes the matter personally and goes off to avenge his honor, brandishing a sword. The focus then shifts to a curious scene between Marguerite and the executioner Larose, alternately described as strongly built, athletic, and catlike, who chews on an eponymous rose stem as others might chew on a blade of grass. Their dialogue and interaction is intensely sensual, even as both parties profess their chastity. Oddly uninhibited in the presence of Larose, Marguerite admits to a kind of ecstasy when she watches his public beheadings, to which Larose evasively replies that many women become pregnant after watching him at work.

Soon thereafter curious sounds and silences announce the agony and death of Juréal, who has been tossed in a blanket and then dropped fatally to the ground when someone let go of the blanket. Marguerite, a less-than-bereaved widow, refuses to sign the cross on her late husband's forehead when Dom Pilar bids her to do so. She also asks that the corpse continue to be tossed in the air as it is carried out of town. Unable to attract Larose, who has conveniently made himself scarce, Marguerite then summons her two noble admirers, provocatively offering herself to the one who will claim greater responsibility for her husband's death.

As Marguerite leaves to wait in her room for her “deliverer,” the two noblemen—identified by Dom Pilar as foreign spies—draw swords as they vie for the honor just offered to them by Juréal's widow. Adorno wins the duel and flees, leaving the dying Helgar to be comforted by Marguerite who, promising to love him “for the rest of his life,” offers to close his mortal wound with her lips. Dom Pilar then emerges from yet another hiding place. Marguerite, covered in Helgar's blood, beside herself with anger and desire, presents one bare breast to the astonished Dom Pilar, offering to stuff it down his throat as she gives herself to the most monstrous bidder—himself. Pilar, unwillingly seized by lust, denounces Marguerite as possessed by the Devil, murmuring the Agnus Dei as he slips from her embrace onto the ground, covering his face. Marguerite is still trying to seduce the monk when the dwarfs reappear, closely followed by the executioner Larose.

In the sudden presence of Larose, Marguerite falls into a kind of stupor from which she will not awaken even when denounced by townsfolk and authorities for the violent deaths of Juréal and Helgar. Larose then leads her off to the only “consummation” in which either of them might find satisfaction, leaving the last words to the two dwarfs, Mèche (“Wick”) and Suif (“Tallow”) whose antics opened the play. Mocking the theater itself, Tallow observes that it is not only on the stage where several people die in one day. When Wick asks him if it is right to mourn a dead man, Tallow replies that it would be better to mourn him at birth, on his entry into this miserable world. The play then ends with the two dwarfs, ugly and deformed like their late master, tossing in a blanket a broken puppet dressed in Juréal's clothes, chanting “Hop, Signor!” as the puppet rises and falls.

Rich in sight and sound, Hop, Signor! as written is every bit as arresting as Red Magic and even more tightly constructed, hardly longer than the traditional one-act play. Having uncharacteristically indulged himself in prolixity and verbosity with such efforts as La Balade du grand macabre and La Farce des ténébreux, Ghelderode in Hop, Signor! returned to the procedure first used to advantage in Escurial, allowing theme and subject matter to determine length and form instead of tailoring both to fit the perceived demands of traditional drama. The result is extremely stageworthy. If Hop, Signor! is less frequently performed than Escurial or Red Magic, this has less to do with its construction than with the audacity of its themes and the negations implied in its conclusion. It is likely, too, that many would-be directors or performers have shied away from the text because of what it seems to reveal about the author.

As Beyen observes, seldom did Ghelderode write himself into a text so visibly as he did in preparing and developing the character of Juréal, a sexual and social misfit whose art is anchored in the past and hopelessly out of touch with the prevailing taste. Denied the contrived, implausibly “happy” fate reserved for Fernand d'Abcaude, Juréal can only fall victim to an implacably hostile universe made even more hostile by the presence of his fellow mortals. Citing a letter written at the time by Ghelderode to a friend, the engraver Jac Boonen, Beyen shows that Ghelderode sought in Hop, Signor! to show the cruelty of man that religions have not only been unable to correct but have in fact tended to cultivate (Beyen 1974, 103).

Dom Pilar, to be sure, does considerably more harm than good, as do most clerics in Ghelderode's dramatic canon. He is, however, only a part of the problem so graphically set forth in Hop, Signor! Cruelty, it would seem, is embedded in the nature of the sexes, doomed to incompatibility by conflicting needs and demands. In Marguerite Harstein Ghelderode has managed to combine elements of Purmelende, Salivaine, and the charming but two-faced Azurine/Putrégina to provide his most disquieting, even unnerving, portrait of woman. Undeniably attractive, as Salivaine surely is not, Marguerite denounces Juréal for his impotence even as she proclaims her own disinclination toward extramarital affairs, and her continued “baiting” of the two young noblemen ends, not surprisingly, in Helgar's death. No man, it seems, can provide the ecstasy toward which her sexuality tends—a longing that can be satisfied only in her death at the hands of the equally “virginal” Larose, who bears, moreover, a feminine name.

Although infrequently staged since its first production (in French) in Brussels in 1942, Hop, Signor! remains among the most frequently read and discussed of all of Ghelderode's plays, notable, like Escurial, for its efficiency and economy of expression. Such autobiographical (or autopsychological) overtones as there may be are quite literally upstaged by the utter bleakness of the play's apparent “message,” as by the author's scathing portrayal of the possible interactions among life, death, sex and art.

CHRONICLES OF HELL

Once he had, in a sense, dramatized his nagging distrust of women and, indeed, of the reproductive process itself, Ghelderode returned with a vengeance to yet another of his bêtes noires with Chronicles of Hell, in which all of the male characters are members of the Roman Catholic clergy. If, as his written statement to Jac Boonen implies, Ghelderode saw religion as fostering mankind's innate cruelty, he arguably set out to prove as much in his evocation of riot and celebration surrounding the death of a bishop murdered with a poisoned communion wafer.

Although dated 1929 in the Gallimard edition of Ghelderode's collected plays, Chronicles of Hell would appear, in Beyen's chronology, to have been composed, for the most part, during the fall of 1936 and the fall of 1937. While Ghelderode might well have framed or outlined the play's basic premise toward the end of the preceding decade, his technique and style tend to support, in Beyen's view, the documentary evidence favoring the later date (Beyen 1974, 104).

Chronicles of Hell begins in Flanders with an unseen crowd of worshipers clamoring to view the remains of the just-deceased Bishop Jan in Eremo of Lapideopolis, whom they revere as a saint. The bishop's fellow clergymen, meanwhile, indulge themselves in food and drink to celebrate their liberation from the bishop's strict rule. Six riotous scenes bordering on farce precede the arrival of the allusively named Sodomati, secretary to the papal nuncio. In Sodomati's presence, the auxiliary bishop, Simon Laquedeem, identified as a converted Jew, begins to eulogize the deceased cleric's life and career. Suddenly, amid thunder and lightning, Jan in Eremo rises from his deathbed brandishing his episcopal staff. All the clerics flee except for Laquedeem, who attacks the “dead man” with an ax. A brief struggle finds the ax in the hands of Bishop Jan, who is about to strike back when he “freezes” as if entranced, having recognized the aged servant Vénéranda as his mother.

The bishop then tries to speak but cannot produce audible sound. When he points toward his throat, the old woman orders him to his knees and pulls from his throat a foreign object that turns out to be the poisoned Host. Faced with her son's abiding anger, Vénéranda further orders him to pardon those who have sinned against him if he expects to be pardoned himself, then slaps him across the face when he is slow to respond, exhorting him to obey his mother. A dutiful son once more, the septuagenarian bishop, no doubt already dead, unclenches his fist to form the upraised palm of benediction. Vénéranda then helps him back to his deathbed, where he can die in peace, the fact of his murder having been revealed.

Sure at last that his arch-enemy is dead, Simon Laquedeem, who administered the poison, takes back the wafer from the hands of Sodomati and, announcing Communion, force-feeds it to Vénéranda, who predictably falls dead not long thereafter. Once the bishop's body has been removed by a team of “athletic” butchers, the clergymen once again celebrate their deliverance. Since all have eaten and drunk at least their fill, the “celebration” soon degenerates into a paroxysm of scatology, with the priests sniffing each other's backsides like dogs as they indulge in flatulence and defecation. In the final scene Laquedeem squats suggestively before the audience, a fiendish smile on his “rabbinical” face as the curtain falls.

Although devoid of the sexual references that permeate Hop, Signor! and La Farce des ténébreux, Chronicles of Hell proved soon after its initial performances in 1949 to be Ghelderode's most controversial play, at least in France, defying not only good taste but also the ingrained Gallic sense of logic. Even in a country inured to anticlerical sentiment, Ghelderode's all-out attack on the clergy seemed gratuitous at best, offensive at worst, with strong overtones of anti-Semitism in the author's portrayal of Laquedeem, whose name recalls that often assigned to the Wandering Jew of legend (see Blancart-Cassou, 163). Still, the verbal and visual qualities of Chronicles of Hell would bring Acute Ghelderoditis to its height on the Parisian stage, assuring a ready, if temporary, audience for a number of Ghelderode's earlier work.

For Jacqueline Blancart-Cassou, Chronicles of Hell embodies a type of “solitary laughter” characteristic to Ghelderode's final phase, a grating laughter on the author's part that, by its nature, defies audience participation (168). It is clear in any case that Ghelderode by 1937 was writing increasingly “for himself,” perhaps to exorcise his private demons. As in the case of Hop, Signor!, it is frequently difficult for an audience to share in the author's projected vision. Indeed, as Beyen has demonstrated, Ghelderode in the late 1930s feared the decline of his dramatic talents along with his health. On the evidence, he doubtless had cause for concern on both counts. Turning increasingly toward composition of the genre fiction to be collected in Sortilèges, Ghelderode would complete no more than three plays prior to being “discovered” by the French avant-garde soon after World War II, and only one play thereafter.

Late in 1937, after finishing Chronicles of Hell, Ghelderode returned to the general theme of a 1935 radio play to create La Pie sur le gibet (Magpie on the Gallows), portraying the arrest and execution of the legendary trickster Tyl Eulenspiegel against the background of an eponymous painting by Brueghel the Elder. L'Ecole des bouffons (School for Jesters) was outlined as early as 1937 but not actually written until 1942, after publication of Sortiléges. Le Soleil se couche (The Sun Sets) recalls the last days of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V in a manner reminiscent of Escurial yet lacking that play's tight construction. Ghelderode was quite literally “played out” by the time he became famous as a dramatist. Acute Ghelderoditis would, however, lead not only to the Ostend Interviews but also to the composition of what turned out to be his final play, Marie la misérable.

MARIE LA MISéRABLE

During the summer of 1950 the newly rediscovered Ghelderode received a request from the Belgian community of Woluwé-Saint-Lambert to dramatize the legend of the local martyr Lenneke Mare, the spectacle to be staged outdoors, on the actual site, in June 1952 to commemorate the six-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of her death. Although ill and frail, Ghelderode found the legend quite to his liking and took no more than two days to decide in the affirmative. He would not, however, actually begin work on the script until the fall of 1951, after taping the Ostend Interviews.

As first performed—on schedule—during the summer of 1952, Marie la misérable puts the virtuous, virginal Marie La Cluse, in her early thirties and known also as Lenneke Mare, in apposition to the hot-blooded young nobleman Eglon d'Arken, several years her junior, whose unrequited longing for Marie turns gradually to hate. Marie, who devotes her life to the poor and infirm although she has not actually taken the veil, harbors few illusions about men and treats her would-be suitor with candid scorn. He is, she points out, both rich and idle, lacking only the opportunity to prove his manhood in battle. Repeatedly rejected, d'Arken is about to renounce his suit when his jester Rostenduvel (“Red Devil”) resolves to avenge his master's honor by “framing” Marie for the theft of a golden goblet belonging to Jean II, duke of Brabant. In time, the young woman is falsely accused, tried, convicted and sentenced to death for the crime, further accused by Rostenduvel of practicing witchcraft. At Marie's execution Rostenduvel is thrown onto the pyre as well, only to be resuscitated in the third and final act, where he exhorts his master, ostracized by the townsfolk for his part in Marie's death, to commit suicide.

The priest Adam Gherys, who tried in vain to save Marie's life, intervenes to show d'Arken that Rostenduvel was no more than an hallucination. When the duke arrives on the scene, d'Arken begs his forgiveness, admitting that he conspired in Marie's death out of love turned to hate, to destroy what he could not have. Marie then appears in a vision shared by the duke and all the townsfolk, whereupon d'Arken dons the garb of a pilgrim and prepares to leave for Jerusalem and Rome, accompanied by the mysterious Marie Cantilie, who may or may not be Marie La Cluse's mother. The action then ends on a decidedly affirmative note recalling that of Carnival as the duke drinks from the once-lost golden vessel, exhorting his loyal subjects to join him in commemorating Marie's exemplary life and sacrifice.

Among the longest—and wordiest—of Ghelderode's plays, Marie la misérable, although included in the Gallimard edition of his plays, is suitable for production only on the premises for which it was intended, and where it has indeed frequently been revived. In Beyen's view, however, it is markedly superior in verbal and scenic quality to the average run of historical pageants and “sound and light” spectacles commonly performed across Europe (1974, 117). Despite the necessarily archaic setting and tone, Ghelderode has managed to create vivid, credible characters who elicit and sustain the spectator's interest. Given the exemplary nature of the legend, the “message” of Marie la misérable is rather more affirmative than those to be deduced from Ghelderode's last plays of the 1930s, in particular, Hop, Signor! and Chronicles of Hell. Unlike Marguerite Harstein, whose virginity masks a perverted lust, Marie La Cluse is presented as a prototypical saint who dies so that Eglon d'Arken and the other townsfolk might be saved. Unlike Bishop Jan in Eremo, she is thus shown not to have died in vain.

Ghelderode's ingrained pessimism might well have been held in check by the promise of a check. Marie la misérable was, after all, prepared in response to a commission, and the spectacle was meant to be somewhat uplifting. It would be misleading, however, to infer that Ghelderode here perjured himself as he refused to do for the VVT, when dealing with Barabbas or Saint Francis of Assisi. As in his earlier plays, the forces of evil are quite evident and credible. Indeed, it is hard to imagine another author bringing the material to life as convincingly as does Ghelderode. The effort, however, seems to have dealt a final blow to his creative energies even as it rekindled his interest in playwriting. Although new dramatic projects would be announced following the generally favorable reception of Marie la misérable, none would be completed.

Ghelderode's “return” to the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance in search of material appears to have assured his place in literary and dramatic history. Had his evolution as a dramatist stopped with his association with the VVT, Ghelderode might well be remembered—if at all—among the few expressionists who wrote in French, with the truly ground-breaking Escurial either overlooked or forgotten. By digging deeper into the vein that had produced Escurial, Ghelderode during the 1930s developed a singular dramatic voice and style that would resist assimilation into any school or movement, even as Acute Ghelderoditis helped to create a climate favorable to the reception of such Absurdist playwrights as Beckett, Ionesco, and the early Adamov. By the time Acute Ghelderoditis had run its course in the mid-1950s, the best of Ghelderode's plays, including Red Magic, La Balade du grand macabre, and Escurial, had passed into the worldwide dramatic repertory.

Ghelderode, working on his own and for himself, might well have returned to the medieval and renaissance period in search of private demons to exorcise. If so, it might also be argued that the demons finally got the better of him, particularly in Hop, Signor! and Chronicles of Hell. Although the language and style are forceful, Ghelderode's authorial voice in those two plays veers away from the universal toward the particular and even the personal, making it hard for the spectator or even the actor to take part in the experience portrayed. The universality of his earlier plays, however, continues to assure his place in the international dramatic canon.