Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2009 - 15

the gillyflowers
Figure 3. The House of
Spain as it looked in the
seventeenth century.

upper level most likely served the same function while the two
other windows could accommodate the musicians. This stage is
the last flowering of the rhetoricians' traditions: no comparably
elaborate stage would be build after 1561.
The model was based on an engraving that appeared shortly after the Landjuweel (fig. 2). The engraving does not show
anything beyond the frons scenae and therefore requires some
degree of speculation. However, based on other contemporary
stages and on the plays written for the Landjuweel stage, it is
possible to create an acceptable model. The original stage will
most likely have been painted in bright colors; for this model,
however, I have opted to keep it as simple as possible, allowing
me to integrate elements of the original engraving.

In 1568 the low Countries entered a period of religious war
that would last until 1648. Antwerp took side with the Protestant
rebels, but was conquered by the Spanish (Catholic) troops in
1585. Of its 100,000 inhabitants, nearly 60,000 left the city and
moved to the Northern Netherlands or Germany. The catholic
authorities were wary of the liberal rhetoricians and banned
their performances. Only after 1609, when a temporary ceasefire called the Twelve Years Truce was signed, were the rhetoricians able to reemerge, without ever regaining their former
cultural or social importance however. These changes forced
the rhetoricians to play behind closed doors and no longer on
the streets for a large audience.
little is known about the circumstances in which the
chambers of The Olive branch and The Marigold performed,
but we have more information on The Gillyflowers. From 1619
onwards the rhetoricians of The Gillyflowers rented the third
(second) floor of the largest guild house on the Great Market
Square. The house, called the Pant van Spaengien (the House
of Spain), was owned by the Guild of the Old Crossbow and
had only recently been rebuilt after the original building was
destroyed in the Spanish Fury of 1576. The ground floor had
been converted into an open market with little stalls, the Guild
of the Old Crossbow inhabited the second (first) floor and the
other floors being available for rent.
The House of Spain (fig. 3) is one of the few original
buildings at the Great Market Square of Antwerp to have survived history relatively intact: most of the surrounding buildings are nineteenth- or twentieth-century reconstructions. The
interior however has undergone quite a few changes though. It
has been used as a warehouse and today it is an office building.
The height of the floors, the position of the staircases, the size
of the rooms have all been altered and no original drawings
survive either, but both the archives and the building's exterior
give us some good ideas on how the third (second) floor must
have looked like.
At the front of the building, facing the Great Market
Square, the Gillyflowers and the Guild of St. luke had their
conference room. Immediately behind the conference room a
large hall could be found, 19.20 meters (ca. 63 ft.) long, 8 and
a half meters wide (ca. 28 ft.) and 4.40 meters (14.4 ft.) high.
This hall had multiple purposes and was used to receive guests,
exhibit paintings and other objects by the illustrious members
of the Guild, celebrate holidays and perform plays (fig. 4). The
entire third (second) floor has a floor area of over 225 square
meters (ca. 2,422 square feet), of which 163 square meters
were available for the theatre (ca. 1,744 square feet). Since
the hall had several purposes the stage was not intended to be
permanent: at least part of it would have been removable.
The plays confirm that performances were given on a
small, raised stage with three entrances, including a central
compartment used for tableaux vivants. No painted scenes were
used, only curtains. This kind of stage is reminiscent of the 1561
stage but even more so of the simple, everyday, open air kind of

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2009

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2009