Rederijker Poetry

The poetry of the Rederijkers was often mocked as being of low quality. There are a number of  possible reasons for this disparagement . Rederijiker poetry was written by amateurs learning the art. Demonstrated skill in literature was not necessarily a prerequisite for guild membership. It is possible that a member might join a chamber as a complete or virtual illiterate. Therefore a great expanse of skill levels are covered under the general heading of Rederjiker poetry from absolute beginners to accomplished masters –with beginners far outnumbering the masters. It is doubtless that as they took their first stumbling steps in composition, there were a great many Rederijkers who produced some truly awful poems as beginners are prone to do. Many chambers had rules that mandated participation. The Hague’s chamber demanded that each member contribute at least one roundel each year or would be subject to a fine. Other chambers had similar stipulations for participation. Verses composed to avoid paying a penalty may not have been of very high quality.

Some rederjiker works were art by committee. Originally no individual author was cited for text produced by a chamber.  Only towards the later part of their history were individual authors cited. This may indicate that works were edited by many hands before they reached the public. While such a process would tend to produce a highly polished end product, it might also generate works that were more bland and less spontaneous.

Rederjiker poetry tended to be formulaic. Often critics put higher value literary efforts that are mold-breaking or significantly foreshadow coming trends. The creative output of the rederijkerkammers was not meant to challenge contemporary tastes in entertainment fare.  Their work was clever, skilled, original, and highly competent.  The subject matter might be even be controversial.  However, often the form of a rederjiker’s work was pre-determined by rules set down in advance. A lot of their compositions were created for contest settings where creativity was encouraged within a strict formulaic structure. Few works challenged the structural guidelines themselves.

Finally, it must be acknowledged that one aspect of the claim that rederjiker poetry was of poor quality was classism pure and simple. Some people to this very day are prejudiced by the bourgeois backgrounds of the writers. Because they were self-educated, middle-class people who spoke a language that was not considered refined, nothing they produced -- no matter how well-constructed or original – can be worthy of their consideration.

Despite the prejudice of some critics, the rederjikers popularized and perfected some innovative forms of poetry such as:

The Roundel or Circle poem.  This type of poem usually consisted of eight lines. The first two lines of the poem are the same as the last two lines. The first line is also repeated in the fourth line. The overall effect is that of a poem that circles back in on itself.   A humorous example of this form put into practice is found in the play Klucht van de Coe (Farce of the Cow) (1612) in which Gerbrand Bredero uses the repetition to give us an indication of the speaker’s drunken state:

I drink to you once with discordation,
and I hope you want to do this to me too,
though and this is not a nice argument.
I drink to you once with discordation,
yes, although I make little dispensation,
would nevertheless accept this sermon.
I drink to you once with discordation,
and I hope you want to do this to me too,
you are my most precious shoe.¹

The Retrograde or Mirror.  The type of poem in which lines can be read back to front or front to back.  This example is a poem dedicated to Prince Maurice from 1612:

Eel Belgica vruchtbaar geeft Gode lof en prijs
veel Helden vroom baart gij ook scheepsvolk kloek end’ wijs
wijck geen neemt Mars vivit Prinsen Heren op waakt
rijk en sterk Nederland krijg en zeevaart maakt.²

[It roughly translates as:

Belgica fertile gives praise and prize to Gode
many Heroes pious give birth to you also people wise
which none picks up Mars visit Princes Gentlemen
rich and strong the Netherlands and makes sea shipping. ]

This poem was printed in 1612 Nicolaas van Geilkerken from Leiden in a collection of texts by rederjkerskamers in honor of Prince Maurits, with poems by shipping companies. The images in the border of the print list Maurits' victories.

Quadrant. Another exotic poetic genre favored by the Rederijkers was the quadrant in which the words formed a square that always connected to each other in such a way that a new word was formed.

Related to the quadrant but more familiar to modern readers was the acrostic in which every stanza starts with the letter of someone’s name or an important phrase.

As the complexity of these formats make clear, rederijker poetry was frequently driven by a games-play approach to mastering the intellectual challenge of complex rules-based genres rather that searching for idiosyncratic emotional inspiration and ecstatic self-expression.

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Copyright © 1997 Kelly S. Taylor