“When they were come to Nemmegyn it fortuned on the same that it was the dilycacyon of a chyrche, and when they were within the Towne than sayde Emmekyn to Satan let us goo see howe my aunte dothe, than sayde Satan ye nede nat go to hyr for she is dead more than a yere a goo, than sayd Emmekyn is it trewth, than sayd Satan ye, than sayd Emmekyn to the dyuell what do all yender folks that be yender gathered than sayde the dyuell the play a play that is wont every yere to be played, than sayde Emmekyn good love let us goo here it for I have harde my vnckyll say often tymes that a play were better than a sermant to some folke.”
The Englishman who perpetrated this murder of a good book was not more guilty in intention than Willem Vorsterman, only the result of his labor, due to the different task he undertook, makes him seem the greater sinner of the two.
Although extraneous to the play as it was acted, the prose is not altogether a negligible accretion. For its writer evidently drew on his recollections of the play as he had seen it staged for his description of some of the incidents. The quarrel between the aunt and her gossips, enacted by their shouting and cursing and pulling of each other’s hair; the row stirred up by Moonen among the crowd that listened to Mary’s recital of a “goodly ballat”, one among the folk being stabbed to death, whereupon “he who did this had his head smote off”; the manslaughter committed by one of Mary’s potmates at the Golden Tree; the uncle locking the rings round Mary’s neck and hands; these are apparently bits of pantomime as essentially part of the play as is the written context. And because of its value as the only testimony we possess of an eye-witness of the drama’s production on the mediaeval stage, the prose has been retained by the present translator, his book being a faithful reproduction in English of the earliest version of the play as printed by Willem Vorsterman.
Of the author of our little drama nothing is known. He was, doubtless, not a native of the good town of Nimmegen. For it appears from verse 652 that he imagined Mary’s uncle to live at Venlo, and a citizen of Nimmegen would have known that the distance between these two places was not a three hours’ walk but four times as long. The poet was evidently more familiar with the city of Antwerp, and his picture of the drinking scene in the tavern of the Golden Tree is vivid enough to be a first-hand impression. He was a poet of no mean talent, and not unconscious, it seems, of his own excellence in the noble art of rhetoric. The pride of the poets of the Renaissance is forestalled in his praise of poesy, of which he made Mary his mouthpiece:
“Rhetoric is not to be learned by skill.
’Tis an art that cometh of itself solely.
The other arts, if a man giveth himself thereto wholly,
These be to be learned and eke taught.
But rhetoric is to be praised beyond aught.
’Tis a gift of the Holy Ghost’s bestowing.”