A Performance of the Farce 'Een Cluyte van Plaeyerwater' (A Clod from Plaeyerwater) at a Flemish Kermis

The play on the stage can be named. It is Een cluyte van Plaeyerwater, a farce well known in the Netherlands of the 16th century. A husband has hidden himself in a pedlar's basket and so discovers that his wife is deceiving him with a priest, and that is the moment the actors are playing while the crowd presses in. Around the stage the rest of the fair goes on regardless. People eat, drink, dance, court, cook, make music and fight. On the left a procession carries a saint's statue past an inn, and in front of the church there are market stalls and a group of civic guardsmen. The Dutch word kermis comes from kerk and mis, church and mass, because the fair began as the feast day of the parish church. Balten painted this around 1570, and the heirs of the collector C. Hoogendijk gave it to the Rijksmuseum in 1912.