A marvelous history of Mary of Nimmegen / Who for more than seven year lived and had ado with the devil

by Unknown

Women in the Netherlands were evidently emancipated before their sisters elsewhere. The Italian Quirini, Venetian envoy to the Court at Brussels, in the early sixteenth century, was amazed at the freedom the women of Antwerp enjoyed. “The ladies”, he wrote in 1506, “wear bright costumes and spend all their leisure, when the work is done, in dancing, singing, and playing musical instruments, giving themselves entirely over to pleasure. They keep house, in addition, and manage all domestic affairs, without their husbands’ control.” And when Albrecht Dürer visited Antwerp, with his wife and maid, in the autumn of 1520, he found it difficult to bring his own ideas of decorum into line with the equality which there prevailed between the sexes. At the banquet given in his honor by the Guild of St. Luke, the artists’ wives were all present, and Dürer could not do otherwise than bring his women companions to the feast. But at his inn in the Woolstreet where he could live in German fashion, he let his wife and maid have their meals in the kitchen, and took his own in the parlor with mine host.

The Antwerp that Dürer knew can not have been much different from that where Moonen and Mary lived for seven years. For hardly more than a generation had passed, in 1520, since the author conceived his play. The wicked aunt’s fealty to Duke Adolf of Guelders is a motif extraneous to the plot, as poetic justice demands that her suicide be an atonement for her cruelty to young Mary, but it reconciles the historian to its preposterous intrusion by affording him a clue to the date of composition of the drama. The old Duke Aernout was imprisoned by his son in the year 1465, and in 1471 occurred his release, which stirred the virago’s wrath to such a pitch that “she cut her throat out of pure spite”. At the time of Mary and Moonen’s return to Nimmegen three years had gone by since her death, and Mary, after her pilgrimage to Rome, is said in the Epilogue to have survived the miracle of the rings for “about two years.” The play does not tell us how many years her penance lasted, but supposing that it was short and that the author wrote soon after Mary’s death, the date of composition can hardly have been much earlier than 1480. It matters little whether the poet dramatized historical events or an invented story. The records of the town of Nimmegen contain no reference to a performance of the wain-pageant of Maskeroon, nor has a trace been found of Mary’s grave, with the three rings suspended over it, in the convent for converted sinners at Maastricht. But even if she were a fictitious character, the author, while inserting these chronological data into the play, imagined the incidents of his female rake’s progress as actual occurrences in a recent past, which justifies the historian’s use of these data in trying to fix the date of composition.

If the poet were also the writer of the prose sections, it would be wrong to ignore the statement that Mary’s uncle, after their visit to the Pope, lived yet, according to the earliest version, for twenty-four years in his village near Nimmegen. The author recording events of a quarter of a century ago would, in that case, have written, at the earliest, in the year 1498. But there is good ground to believe that the poet was not responsible for the interpolated prose, which is not essential to the play on the stage. Some Dutch critics hold the prose to be part of the drama as originally written, and intended to be spoken by a stage manager who supplied in his narrative the missing links between the scenes. But the fact is that only in a few instances does the prose serve that purpose, and in those isolated cases the imagination of the audience could be relied upon to help itself. By far the greater part of the prose narrative either repeats the drift of the preceding dialogue or anticipates the incidents of later scenes. The first meeting between Mary and her aunt is introduced by a short account in prose from which we gather that the aunt “held of the side of the young Duke, and after did destroy herself whenas she learned that the old Duke was made quit of prison”. If this was destined to be addressed to the audience from the stage, not the past, but the present, tense would have been in order. But apart from this grammatical unfitness for a speaker’s role, these words are dramatically unfit as they forestall the surprise of the audience at the aunt’s scornful reception of her niece. That the author can not be guilty of thus crudely spoiling his own creation is sufficiently evident from many instances of his insight into the exigencies of dramatic technique. By premonition and foreboding he will give the audience an inkling of imminent calamity, but to blurt out the full truth before the truth is seen in action is not his manner. When Mary has departed from her uncle, the good priest becomes aware of a heaviness that he can not explain:

“Scarce had the maiden from me gone,

It came o’er my spirits, how I can not tell.

I fear with her or me ’twill not go well.”

The audience get an intimation that something awful is impending, but they are kept in suspense as to what it will be and who will be the victim, whether Mary or her uncle. In that we observe the subtle touch of the artist who wrote the dialogue. He can not have been the same man who inserted the superfluous and meddlesome prose.

How, then, must we account for its intrusion if the prose did not originally form part of the play? The manner in which the drama has been preserved accounts for it. “Mary of Nimmegen” has not come down to us in manuscript form. The earliest known version is a printed chapbook from the press of Willem Vorsterman of Antwerp, who was admitted as a member of St. Luke’s Guild in 1512, and remained at work in that city until 1543. The volume is not dated but probably came from the press in 1518 or 1519. Printed plays were a novelty at that early date. Vorsterman may have felt that to publish a drama in book form needed some justification. The word that was intended to be spoken could not be made to serve the reader’s purpose without a compromise between the dramatic and the epic. For the book is the story-teller’s domain, and the dialogue was not felt to be a story until the narrator’s “quoth he” subordinated every speech to his control. That seems to be the purpose of the inserted prose sections. They were not written, in the first instance, to elucidate situations left indistinct by the dramatist, but to lend to the drama the semblance of a narrative and thereby justify its appearance in print. Willem Vorsterman was careful not to offer his book to the public as a play: “A very marvelous story of Mary of Nimmegen who for more than seven years lived and had ado with the devil”, is his description of the contents of the volume on its title-page. And the three subsequent editions, that of 1608 by Herman van Borculo, of Utrecht, that of 1615 by Pauwels Stroobant, of Antwerp, and a reprint of the latter probably published in Holland, though falsely bearing the imprint of Stroobant on the title-page, all persist in calling the book a “story”, be it a “very marvelous” according to Vorsterman, or a “beautiful and very marvelous and true” according to Van Borculo and Stroobant. The printers knew too well that the play’s dramatic qualities would not secure its ready sale. The moral tale it embodied, not its literary form, was its chief attraction, and as a “story” it made its appeal to the reading public.

This popular estimate of the drama as literature accounts for the manner in which an English translator of “Mary of Nimmegen” felt free to handle the original. “Here begynneth a lyttell story that was of a trwethe done in the lande of Gelders of a mayde that was named Mary of Nemmegen that was the dyuels paramoure by the space of vij yere longe”, runs the title of this rendering, and its “Amen” is followed by the statement, “Thus endeth this lyttell treatyse Imprynted at Anwarpe by me John Duisbrowghe dwellynge besyde the camer porte.” The story in dialogue as printed by Vorsterman became a “treatyse” in the English version as printed, in probably the same year, by his fellow citizen Jan van Doesborch. Vorsterman left the dialogue of the playwright intact from no scrupulous respect for an author’s work of art. It suited his convenience to print it as it was written, his own prose, or that of the scribbler he employed, being sufficient to justify his labeling the book a “story”. But the translator, who had to re-word the entire dialogue in any case, had no reasons of convenience to make him spare the poet’s creation. He made a fairly literal rendering of the interpolated prose and turned the dramatic dialogue into a clumsily phrased narrative, of which the following extract may serve as a sample: