Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/71

Rh who has been imprisoned for years by her husband's jealousy, and marries the daughter of the Turkish king. Lanseloet tells of a lady, Sandrijn, wronged by her princely lover at his mother's instance, of her marriage, and her first lover's repentance and death. Parts of the story are narrated, not dramatised, and the whole is closed with a moral. Gloriant, the longest, is a story of a Christian Duke of Brunswick's love for a Saracen maiden, the daughter of a bitter foe of the Duke's family. They are well-constructed little plays—none is longer than 1142 lines—and evidently written for a stage with fixed stations and its own conventions. Winter ende Somer is more of a simple "débat" or "estrif," a dispute between Summer and Winter as to their respective merits, in which some boers and a beggar take part, and which is closed by Venus. The "sotternien," or farces, which followed the "abele spelen"—

"Nu swight en maeckt een ghestille       Dit voorspel is ghedaen        Men sal u eene sotternie spelen gaan"—

were dramatised short stories of humorous and coarse incidents in the life of the people.

These purely secular plays are older than any religious plays which have survived in Dutch. The Maastrichtsche Paaschspel, written in the dialect of Limburg, dates possibly from the second quarter of the fourteenth century, but the oldest extant Flemish Mystery, De eerste Bliscap van Marie, was performed at Brussels in 1444.