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...