ABSTRACT
In order to establish what mystery play quack troupes might have looked like, it is necessary to differentiate between visual representations of genuine quacks and of stage quacks. One picture that clearly features actors, rather than real quacks, is a late sixteenth-century coloured drawing by Caulery (Plate 8). It depicts a large group of spectators, women as well as men, in front of a raised outdoor trestle stage. The blazon above the backdrop of this stage identifies its onstage characters as members, not of an itinerant quack troupe, but of an all-male rederijkerkamer, one of the rhetoricians’ chambers to be found in every sizeable Netherlandish town, that regularly staged amateur plays in competition with each other. Onstage, an actor playing a quack diagnoses the health of a client from the bottle of urine brought by a woman. Possibly his assistant, her long journey is indicated by her hobbyhorse.
