If you were fortunate enough to be living in the city of Lübeck between 1430 and 1540, then in its glory days as queen of the Hanseatic League, you could have witnessed the performance of about two hundred carnival plays. Some were the usual kind, called Einkehrspiele, that young men put on in many German towns. In a medieval form of home invasion, costumed mummers would go from house to house and perform brief sketches before carnival revelers gathered in a large room. In Lübeck, most players were choristers from the four church schools, making the rounds in groups of two to six, often led by their teachers. Their playlets dramatized traditional comic themes: the wicked old hag, the widow too easily comforted, here comes the judge, the marriage game. These plays, some eighty in number, have all been lost. We know about them because one carnival theatre stop was the clubhouse of a merchant confraternity – called Greveradenkompanie after its founder – whose stewards recorded the tips paid out to carnival ‘rhymers’ (rymers), as they refer to them, in the company book of 1495 to 1539 that happens to survive.

That the hand of time is hard on light student sketches is perhaps not surprising. But in Lübeck, carnival playmaking was also the concern of men who governed the largest and most powerful north German city and ran its trading economy, its merchants and administrators. They socialized and protected their interests in two elite confraternities. The old money belonged to the Squire Company or Confraternity of the Zirkel, meaning ‘compass’, an emblem symbolic of the Trinity. The new rich who hoped to become Squires one day joined the Merchant Company. Both confraternities produced carnival plays and staged them on wagons drawn to the marketplace.