SOURCE: “Tragedy, Poetry and the Burlesque in Ghelderode's Theatre,” in Yale French Studies, No. 29, 1962, pp. 92-101.

In the following essay, Herz asserts that Ghelderode uses burlesque in his plays to emphasize the ambiguity of the human condition.

At every level, including the level of appearance, Michel de Ghelderode's theatre abounds in burlesque elements. There is nothing glorious about his men, nor about his women either. However upsetting some people may find this, it is clear that Ghelderode himself, as manifested in his plays, reveled in such an atmosphere. Monsters and misshapen beings accost us at every turn. Women, apart from a few saints and other privileged creatures, tend to be fiftyish, ample as to breast and buttock, with a gash by way of a mouth and peroxide hair: typical residents of a low-grade brothel. Their names are evocative: Salivaine, Visquosine, Crême, Chose, Boule, Olympia, Aurora, Venuska, and...