SOURCE: “Michel de Ghelderode: The Theater of the Grotesque,” in Theater of Protest and Paradox: Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama, New York University Press, 1964, pp. 98-113.

In the following essay, Wellwarth examines typical aspects of Ghelderode's grotesquerie.

Among modern dramatists Michel de Ghelderode stands by himself. If we must have a classification for him, then he can most nearly be compared to that group of novelists who have concentrated on the creation of a fictional world of their own, a microcosm in which to reflect their view of human behavior in the world as a whole. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Charles Dickens with his nineteenth century London, or James Joyce with his Dublin, Ghelderode has created an enclosed world that reflects and comments upon the larger world outside. Ghelderode's world is medieval Flanders, and his view of the world can best be described as savagely...