The Play about Common Trade and Play about Empty Purse: Cornelis Everaert’s Prequels to Elckerlijc/Everyman?

Abstract

This paper proposes a possible link between Elckerlijc, the Dutch-language allegorical play that provided the basis for the well-known English translation Everyman, and two plays by Cornelis Everaert, a sixteenth-century playwright from Bruges writing from within the amateur literary society Chambers of Rhetoric (rederijkerskamers). The two plays are The Play about Common Trade (Spil van Ghemeene Neerrynghe), a serious play, and The Comedy about Empty Purse (Esbattement van Aerm in de Buerse), a lighter comic play. The primary basis for this link is the presence in these two plays of a secondary character named Elckerlijc, the only two known examples of this character name besides the eponymous play that were roughly contemporary with Elckerlijc. There are, however, more than surface-level similarities built into the three incarnations of this character, which have their roots in his status as a mercantile character who has forgotten how to live according to God’s command. In both Common Trade and Empty Purse, Elckerlijc is portrayed as a thoughtless, excessively prudent hoarder of wealth whose lack of virtue and charity in specifically commercial behaviour harms less fortunate tradesmen and labourers by driving them out of the workforce; Everaert blames this unvirtuous behaviour to the continuing dire economic situation that faced sixteenth-century Bruges. The paper draws on Deirdre McCloskey’s theory of “bourgeois virtues” to show how Everaert uses the Elckerlijc character as a foil to participants in a healthy, functioning, and virtuous marketplace. Everyman has been experiencing a resurgence in popularity; directors (and, even more importantly, translators) drawn to that play may also wish to look at Common Trade and Empty Purse as different takes on the character of Elckerlijc, one from a playwright whose work has been too long overlooked.