Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age literature

Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age literature is the

Reformation spread across Northern and Western Europe and the Netherlands fought for independence in the Eighty Years' War

.

Rhetoricians

In the middle of the 16th century, a group of

mythological fancy. His didactic poems are composed in a rococo style; of all his writings, Pegasides Pleyn ("The Palace of Maidens"), a didactic poem in sixteen books dedicated to a discussion of the variety of earthly love, is the most remarkable. Houwaert's contemporaries nicknamed him the "Homer of Brabant"; later criticism has preferred to see in him an important link in the chain of didactic Dutch which ends in Cats

.

Metrical Psalms

The stir and revival of intellectual life that arrived with the

Protestant congregations, Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566; Lucas de Heere and Petrus Datheen translated hymns of Clément Marot

. Datheen was not a rhetorician, but a person of humble origin who wrote in unadorned language, and his hymns spread far and wide among the people.

The Revolt

Battle hymns

Very different in tone were the battle songs of

martyrdom

, are still very rough in form and language.

Marnix of St-Aldegonde

theologians

.

This translation by Marnix proved the starting point for a new complete translation of the Bible into Dutch. The Synod had been convened to settle a number of politico-theological issues, but also decided to appoint a committee to translate the Bible. Representatives of nearly all provinces participated in the project, which sought to use a language intermediate between the main Dutch dialects to be intelligible to all Dutchmen. With the resulting translation, called Statenvertaling or "States' Translation", an important cornerstone was laid for the standard Dutch language as it appears today.

Coornhert

Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (1522–1590), was the Low Countries' first truly humanist writer. Coornhert was a typical burgher of

Boethius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst ("Art of Ethics", 1586), a philosophical treatise in prose in which he tried to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Michel de Montaigne's French. His humanism unites the Bible, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius in one grand system of ethics and is expressed in a bright style. Coornhert died at Gouda

on October 29, 1590; his works were first collected in 1630.

By this time, the religious and political upheaval in the Low Countries had resulted in 1581 in an Act of Abjuration of Philip II of Spain, a key moment in the subsequent eighty years' struggle 1568–1648. As a result, the southern provinces, some of which had supported the declaration, were separated from the northern provinces as they remained under Habsburg rule. Ultimately, this would result in the present-day states of Belgium and Luxembourg (south) and the Netherlands (north). The rise of the northern provinces to independent statehood was accompanied by a cultural renaissance. The north received a cultural and intellectual boost whereas in the south, Dutch was to some extent replaced by French and Latin as the languages of culture.

Literature of the Dutch Golden Age

At Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place thanks to their intelligence and modern spirit. The first,

Catholic prevented him perhaps from exercising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who in 1614 first collected Spieghel's writings and published them in a volume together with his own verse. Roemer Visscher (1547–1620) proceeded a step further than Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance

literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

It was in the salon at Amsterdam which Visscher's daughters formed around their father and themselves that the new school began to take form. The

republic of the United Provinces

, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to first rank among the nations of Europe and it was under the influence of so much new ambition that the country asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry.

The intellectual life of the Low Countries was concentrated in the provinces of Holland and

Latinity

.

Out of that generation arose the classic names in Dutch literature:

lyrics; she also translated Tasso

. Visscher's daughters were women of universal accomplishment and their company attracted to his house all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.

P. C. Hooft

Tacitus. Hooft is considered one of the greatest historians, not merely of the Low Countries, but of Europe. His influence in standardising the language of his country can hardly be overrated. The literary circle founded by Roemer Visscher later centered around Hooft, in whose castle at Muiden they regularly convened, and after which they were later called Muiderkring

or "Circle of Muiden".

Bredero

Francisco Badens

, but accomplished little in art. His life was embittered by a hopeless love for Tesselschade, to whom he dedicated his plays, and whose beauty he celebrated in a whole cycle of love songs.

His ideas on the subject of drama were at first a development of the

Klucht van de koe ("Farce of the Cow"). From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, his immediate contemporary. Bredero's last and best piece was De Spaansche Brabanber Jerolimo ("Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter"), a satire upon the exiles from the south who filled the halls of the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric with their pompous speeches and preposterous Burgundian phraseology. Bredero was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school and stands as a solitary figure in Dutch literature. He died on August 23, 1618, of complications caused by pneumonia

.

The Prince of Poets

Counter-Remonstrants

and a war of pamphlets in verse raged.

Vondel, as the greatest playwright of the day, was asked in 1637 to write the first-night piece for the opening of a new and soon leading public theatre in Amsterdam. On the January 3, 1638, the theatre was opened with the performance of a new tragedy out of early Dutch history and to this day one of Vondel's best-known works, Gysbreght van Aemstel. The next ten years Vondel supplied the theatre with heroic

Scriptural pieces, of which the general reader will obtain the best idea if we point to Jean Racine. In 1654 Vondel brought out what most consider the best of all his works, the tragedy of Lucifer, from which it is said Milton

drew inspiration. Vondel is the typical example of Dutch intelligence and imagination at their highest development.

Colonial Literature

The Republic's colonies, of which the

Willem Godschalk van Focquenbroch (1640–1670), who lived and worked from 1668 in the Dutch possession of Elmina in present-day Ghana. His comedy Min in het Lazarus-huys ("Love in the Madhouse

", 1672) was very popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In the North American colony of New Netherland, poems in Dutch were composed and published by Jacob Steendam and Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy.

Jacob Cats

While most of the writers of Holland clustered around the circle of Amsterdam, a similar school arose in Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland. The ruling spirit of this school was Jacob Cats (1577–1660). In this voluminous writer the genuine Dutch habit of thought, the utilitarian and didactic spirit reached its zenith of fluency and popularity. During early middle life he produced the most important of his writings, his didactic poems, the Maechdenplicht ("Duty of Maidens") and the Sinne- en Minnebeelden ("Images of Allegory and Love"). In 1624 he moved from Middelburg to Dordrecht, where he soon after published his ethical work called Houwelick ("Marriage"); and this was followed by an entire series of moral pieces. Cats is considered somewhat dull and prosaic by some, yet his popularity with the middle classes in Holland has always been immense.

Constantijn Huygens

A versatile poet was the diplomat Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), perhaps best known for his witty epigrams. He threw in his lot with the school of Amsterdam and became the intimate friend and companion of Vondel, Hooft and the daughters of Roemer Visscher. Huygens had little of the sweetness of Hooft or of the sublimity of Vondel, but his genius was bright and vivacious, and he was a consummate artist in metrical form. The Dutch language has never proved so light and supple in any hands as in his, and, he attempted no class of writing, whether in prose or verse, that he did not adorn by his delicate taste and sound judgment.

Philosophy

Two Dutchmen of the 17th century distinguished themselves very prominently in the movement of learning and philosophic thought, but the names of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) belong more to philosophy and politics than literature.

Summary

The period from 1600 to 1650 was a blossoming time in Dutch literature. During this period the names of great genius were first made known to the public, and the vigor and grace of literary expression reached their highest development. It happened, however, that three men of particularly commanding talent survived to an extreme old age, and under the shadow of Vondel, Cats and Huygens there sprang up a new generation which sustained the great tradition until about 1680, when decline set in.

References

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gosse, Edmund William (1911). "Dutch Literature". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 719–729.

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