SOURCE: “The Fool-Hero of Michel de Ghelderode,” in Drama Survey, Vol. 4, No. 3, Winter 1965, pp. 264-71.

In the following essay, Hellman examines Ghelderode's use in his plays of the Renaissance buffoon character.

Michel de Ghelderode frequently affirmed in his plays, prefaces, letters, notes and conversations that he was the heir of Brueghel, Bosch and Erasmus. He appeared to have inherited their vision of man's folly and wisdom which prevailed during the Renaissance. Like them he stressed the folly, rather than the sinfulness of human conduct, always recognizing, however, the dual aspect of man's nature. He was a cruel moralist and critic of human conduct, and he described himself in the preface to the first book-length study of his work as “resembling those preachers of the past who confounded Matter and Spirit, in the style of the good old days of Erasmus, that inventor of ideas, and of Bosch, that...