Vondel 1867

Abstract

Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), master of Baroque classicist theatre and the most outstanding writer of the Dutch Golden Age, was a prominent representative of the flourishing city culture of Amsterdam in the decades that saw the emerging independence of the United Provinces. His Mennonite parents had fled religious persecution from Antwerp to Amsterdam by way of Cologne (where Vondel was born) and Utrecht. Settled in Amsterdam from 1597 onwards, Vondel ran a hosiery shop, raised a family, and through self-education became part of the city’s literary scene. In the political-religious tensions of his day, he sharply opposed the strict Calvinist faction surrounding the autocratic stadholder Maurice of Orange, and would eventually (in 1640) convert to Catholicism. By then his position in the Dutch literary pantheon was already secured; his history play Gysbrecht van Aemstel (on the medieval conquest of Amsterdam by feudal nobles) was performed to inaugurate the newly built municipal theatre in 1638, enjoyed 110 performances between 1638 and 1665, and in the following centuries became a fixture in the theatre’s programme, performed annually on New Year’s Day. Gysbrecht was rooted and enmeshed in Amsterdam’s city culture and its triumphant assertion of a fresh Dutch independence: a sequel to a play by the city’s other great literary luminary, P.C. Hooft, on a similar theme (Geeraert van Velsen, 1613), it was dedicated to the great legal scholar and constitutionalist Hugo Grotius, and as a historical commemoration of the city’s history it came to mark a ritually re-enacted civic festival in Amsterdam’s temple of municipal culture.