Poets, playwrights and pamphleteers. Political culture and the stage in the Dutch Republic, 1610-1638

Project Description

 

This research project aims to address a number of issues concerning the role of the stage in seventeenth century Dutch political culture. The period it covers saw the first efflorescence of Dutch Renaissance drama (usually taken to begin with P.C. Hooft's classicizing drama Achilles and Polyxena, first performed in 1610) and the gradual professionalization of the stage, a process stretching from the founding of Samuel Coster's Nederduytsche Academie in 1617 until the opening of the Amsterdamse Schouwburg, the first city theatre, in 1638. After the conclusion of the Twelve Year Truce, the first decades of the seventeenth century saw a rapid growth of religious and political tensions. The controversy between the Leiden theologians Arminius and Gomarus about grace and predestination spilled over into the public sphere, causing a schism within the Calvinist church, and deepening pre-existing divisions about questions concerning the status of the public church and the relationship between the clergy and the worldly magistrate. In the political debate which flared up poets and playwrights from different political and religious persuasions participated with gusto; employing their literary skills to counsel and admonish, but equally, though this side of the period's literary production has been somewhat neglected, to satirize those whom they held responsible for their country's misfortunes.

Although what remains of the theatre production of the period reflects the whole political and religious spectrum, this project focuses on the relatively small group of poets and playwrights, many of whom connected to Samuel Coster's Academy, who made up a substantial part of the ‘literary vanguard', and who, although certainly no Arminians, where at least sympathetic to the Arminian cause and to the religious policy of Grotius and Oldenbarnevelt. While the work of poets such as Hooft, Coster and Vondel have been the object of intensive study, this project aims to offer a new perspective, extending the scope of what we define as political culture by analysing theatre plays not as literary artefacts that register or, in the often-used mimetic metaphor ‘reflect' current moral, religious and political ideas, but as political actions; interventions in a political debate that it in turn helped to create and give shape to. Such an approach requires a levelling of boundaries, not simply between literary genres, but between ‘high' and ‘low', between elite -, and popular culture. In the case of poets like Vondel and Coster, it analyzes tragedy and satire in conjunction, looking at the flow of ideas, rhetorical and literary strategies, tropes and metaphors between these different literary domains, rather than at genre-bound differences. At the same time it tries to situate the texts in a broader discursive context which comprises not only political treatises and academic texts, but pamphlets and other, more ephemeral, cultural artefacts such as the broadsheet, the ballad and the mocking rhyme.

Tracing the origin and development of politico-religious conflict, and looking at the dynamics of the pamphlet polemics that ensued, this project aims to do justice to the dual role of the stage in Dutch seventeenth century political culture, paying attention to its consensual and celebratory, as well as it more openly polemical purposes. In the first part of the thesis, emphasis will therefore come to lie on a number of plays for which the stage is harnessed into the service of the divulgation and canonization of myths of national identity. The second part, covering roughly the later 1610's and first half of the 1620's shows poets and playwrights gradually being drawn into the ambit of politico-religious controversy, exploiting the satyrical and scatological potential of their medium to expose the political ambitions of the Calvinist clergy, and, after the political take-over of 1619, to vindicate the cause of the States' party. The third part, finally, stretching from the late 1620's to the late 1630's shows how, after the gradual calming down of political passions, the stage contributed in a by no means insignificant manner to the perpetuation of the rhetoric and imagery generated by the pamphlet wars of the Arminian controversy, more than a decade earlier. The stage continued to fulfil a commemorative and celebratory function, but more often than not, it did so in a manner that highlighted the fissures and fault-lines in Dutch society; fault-lines which in turn cast a light on the element of ideological conflict and contestation which formed an integral part of Dutch Golden Age political culture.