Joost van den Vondel

• Born: November 17, 1587
• Birthplace: Cologne, Germany
• Died: February 5, 1679
• Place of death: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Other Literary Forms

Joost van den Vondel mastered numerous other genres besides drama, including sonnets, odes, elegies, epics, and a great volume of religious and occasional poetry. Vondel’s great strength as lyricist profoundly influenced the writing of Dutch poetry. He also became renowned for his biting political satire. Besides writing religious polemics, hagiography, and literary criticism, Vondel translated many classics, including works by Sophocles, Ovid, and Virgil.

Achievements

Although no formal national or international book awards existed in Joost van den Vondel’s time, his achievements were widely recognized. The emergent Dutch nation regarded him as its national poet. He was as much in demand as a poetic dispenser of public praise as he was feared for his caustic satires. As the leading author of Amsterdam theater, he sometimes had as many as three of his plays in performance during the same year. Of the thirty-three tragedies he wrote, eighteen were presented onstage. The performance of Gijsbrecht van Aemstel became an annual tradition until 1968.

Vondel’s authority as critic was seldom challenged. He applied the most modern views on drama theory of his time to his art and represents a culmination of dramatic achievement in a genre that, according to sixteenth century humanist thought, reflected an ideal balance between aesthetic and religious goals.

The esteem of the artistic community for this great Dutch poet and playwright of the Golden Age was dramatically demonstrated when on October 20, 1653, at the age of sixty-six, Vondel was honored at a dinner by more than one hundred painters, poets, architects, sculptors, and lovers of the arts and in a splendid ritualistic ceremony was crowned with a laurel wreath as King of the Feast. After his death, he was eulogized as the first poet of his age, “the oldest and the greatest.”

Biography

Joost van den Vondel was born in Cologne on November 17, 1587. His parents had moved there shortly before from Antwerp, a predominantly Calvinist city that had become unsafe for Mennonites. After some years, Roman Catholic Cologne also became uncomfortable for the Vondels. In 1596, the family settled in Amsterdam, where the father became a prosperous hosier. Little is known of Joost’s early years and education. Apparently he was largely self-taught. His inclination toward poetry came to expression in his teenage years, his first known poem dating from 1605. Five years later, Vondel married Mayken de Wolff. His wife assumed responsibility for the daily management of the family hosiery business, which Joost had taken over from his father. This allowed the young husband to devote much of his time to the study of the classics and the writing of poetry and plays. In fact, Vondel lived primarily for his art and studies; to him, poetry was as basic as breathing.

In 1610, Vondel’s first dramatic work, Het Pascha (the passover), was performed. This tragicomedy on the Exodus from Egypt had obvious parallels to the Dutch liberation from Spain. More plays and much poetry soon followed. In the 1620’s, Vondel suffered a prolonged period of depression. Still he managed to publish Hierusalem verwoest (Jerusalem destroyed) and Palamedes of Vermoorde Onnoselheit (Palamedes of murdered innocence), the latter a Greek tragedy about the conflict between Ulysses and Palamedes but with such undisguised insinuations about the power politics of the local centralized government that it was quickly seized. Vondel was fined by the court, but his play went through seven more editions within the year. His fame grew rapidly in the 1630’s, even as Vondel suffered the deaths of three of his five children, followed by the death of his beloved wife in 1635. These heartbreaking losses confronted Vondel as never before with the religious question of life’s ultimate purpose and value. He emerged from this valley of darkness a more mature artist, as though his technical and moral vision had been refined in the crucible of suffering, demonstrated amply in his celebrated Gijsbrecht van Aemstel.

At the age of fifty-four, Vondel converted to Roman Catholicism. He had found Calvinism too tyrannical in its orthodoxy and often hostile to the aesthetic beauty of art and freedom of expression. It was a courageous decision in a time when Calvinism dominated and the Catholic Church was officially forbidden. However, joining the universal church gave Vondel a much-needed peace of mind. His poetry had always conveyed a mystical longing for the divine, but now it also celebrated the joy of life. His drama in this decade included De Leeuwendalers in 1647, a pastoral play and a glorification of the Peace of Munster; it was designated as “the most perfect drama that our poet has left us.”

Still, Vondel was more than sixty years old when he wrote some of his best poems, remarkable works of prose, and his greatest plays. Lucifer was published in 1654 and is a masterpiece of lyrical power. Other magnificent biblical tragedies followed, closely patterned after classical models.

Personal tragedy struck again when Vondel’s son mismanaged the family business, then died at sea while sailing for the East Indies. To pay off the debts his son left behind, Vondel gave up all his savings and, at the age of seventy, took a salaried job as a clerk in a pawnshop. During the ten years of his employment, he still managed to write an impressive number of lyric, dramatic, and didactic verses.

Interest in his plays, however, declined at a time when some of his best dramatic work was still to be written. Popular interest shifted away from sacred drama to the livelier romantic tragedies and social satires of Vondel’s contemporaries. Today, none of Vondel’s plays is performed, and the author, despite his artistic achievements, is seldom seriously studied.

Vondel had outlived all his children when he died at age ninety-one, on February 5, 1679. He was carried to his grave by fourteen poets and lovers of poetry, a fitting tribute to this prolific and supremely gifted Dutch poet and dramatist.

Analysis

Though Joost van den Vondel ranks higher perhaps as a poet than as a dramatist, his unique contribution to seventeenth century religious drama ensured his renown. Renaissance drama was steeped in the Senecan tradition, practiced also by Vondel’s contemporaries, P. C. Hooft and Hugo Grotius. Vondel’s early works, especially the highly pictorial Hierusalem verwoest, show the influence of the French theater’s Senecan religious tragedy. However, Vondel, following the Renaissance tradition of adapting religious drama to the form and language of classical theater, found himself increasingly attracted to the Aristotelian concept of tragedy, coming to expression already in his Joseph plays of 1640. His maturing religious view of human beings’ sinful nature and people’s yearning for goodness while being unable to attain it found a good fit in the Greek or Sophoclean depiction of the tragic hero. The later plays, such as Lucifer and Jeptha, demonstrate Vondel’s significant contribution: As a neoclassicist, he transformed the humanist religious drama from a celebration of a virtuous hero and the educability of humankind to a more provocative portrayal of a fallen, tragic hero in need of divine redemption. His heroes changed from innocent victims of injustice to fatally flawed protagonists who caused their own destruction. Vondel went beyond the more idealized depiction of the sixteenth century to complicate the relationship between a holy God and sinful humankind, holding up for a more thoughtful contemplation the universal human dilemma.

The influence of the Bible on Vondel’s art and drama was both extensive and comprehensive. From early in his writing career, Vondel saw the Scriptures as ideal and significant subject matter for tragic drama. Only a handful of Vondel’s plays (Palamedes, Gijsbrecht van Aemstel, Maeghden, Mary Stuart, De Leeuwendalers) deal with nonbiblical subject matter. In particular, the Old Testament stories provided him with a continuous source of inspiration and insight into what matters most in the Christian’s life. They also supplied the recurring theme for his religious works, the tension between human beings’ will to rebel and their quest for God. The conflict between right and wrong, Christ and Satan, obedience and revolt, God and humanity, faith and reason, and redemption and despair was at the center of nearly every dramatic work Vondel produced. However, Vondel, a profound man of faith, never failed to affirm the mystery and hope of Redemption and the presence of the grace of God.

Thus Vondel assimilated his intellectual admiration of non-Christian Greek and Roman culture into his devout Christian faith and the creation of his art. As a follower of Aristotle, Vondel strictly observed the classical unities of action, place, and time in his tragedies. He strove for simplicity and dignity, though he could also soar to extravagant Baroque exuberance, for he had the gift of a verbal artistry that seemed effortless and spontaneous, setting the highest of standards for Dutch diction in the seventeenth century. Still, Vondel’s true genius might have found greater fulfillment in the writing of epics than in drama. His greatness lies in the power of his poetry rather than in his drama, which too often substitutes description for action. Perhaps his very strength as lyricist weakened his achievement as dramatist.

Gijsbrecht van Aemstel

Vondel wrote this play in honor of the opening of the new Amsterdam Performance Hall in 1637. Its strong appeal to civic pride ensured its success from the beginning; it enjoyed more than one hundred productions in Vondel’s own lifetime. In contrast to most of Vondel’s plays, it had staying power: It was the annual New Year’s selection of choice for more than three hundred years.

The play describes the siege and burning of Amsterdam by the partisans of Count Floris V in revenge of his death. Gijsbrecht, unjustly accused, is forced to go into exile, but the angel Raphael comforts him with the promise that one day Amsterdam will be reborn and rise to international greatness, a prophecy well on the way to fulfillment in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century.

This play marks the first time that Vondel acknowledges the Greeks as his models and masters. He emulates their qualities of naturalness and freedom of movement while observing the classic conventions of five acts, the use of the chorus, the classic unities, and Alexandrine verse; moreover, in closely following the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), he makes the similarity to the fall of Troy obvious. However, here, too, Vondel integrates his Christian convictions into the political and social fabric of the subject matter. God’s providence guides those who suffer adversity if they in humility submit to God’s leadership, symbolized by Gijsbrecht’s submission to Rafael.

Lucifer

This play marks Vondel’s greatest poetic achievement. Along with Adam in Exile, the continuation of the Lucifer story, Lucifer represents the full-blown maturity of Vondel’s art. It is of course high celestial and earthly drama: the fall of the rebellious angels, the fall of the first man Adam, and the promise of salvation. It premiered in the Amsterdam theater on February 2, 1654, and immediately unleashed both praise and protest. The praise endured, the protest did not. In fact, the banning of the play by the religious community only served to make Lucifer an instant best seller, though the criticism hurt Vondel deeply. The rejection of the conservative Christian leaders was purportedly because of the presence of angels onstage but was in essence a rejection of Vondel’s avoidance of the heavy moralism and transparent meanings of traditional religious drama. Vondel’s Lucifer, though ultimately God’s fallen rebel, has moments of magnificence as a tragic hero; the anguish of his inner conflict in act 4 forms the poignant climax of the whole play.

Published thirteen years before John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), Lucifer pulsates with the turbulent passions and lofty dreams of the Golden Age, here wrapped around the main theme of unchecked ambition. Revolt, freedom, and individualism constitute the tensions in the conflict and allude to the struggle between the Netherlands and Spain. However, Vondel did not write this as political but rather as cosmic allegory: the moral struggle of the soul for its rightful place in the universe. The interplay of majesty, malignity, and mercy comes to riveting expression through an artful blending of characters, chorus, and action. However, since much of the action cannot be staged, perhaps Lucifer might better have been cast as an epic than as a drama.

Jeptha

Vondel found the story of the biblical judge, Jeptha, ideal for a Sophoclean tragedy. Jeptha, in a rash moment, vows to God that he will sacrifice whoever first comes to meet him after God grants him victory in battle. When his daughter is the first one, Jeptha becomes an instant tragic hero.

Vondel wrote this play specifically to demonstrate that a biblical topic could easily be adapted to neoclassic form. He succeeded admirably. It is remarkable for its simplicity, restraint, close adherence to the classic unities, and use of iambics rather than Alexandrines. Moreover, Vondel continued to develop his notions of humankind’s fallibility, influenced by his study of Greek tragedy. As exemplified in Jeptha, human beings are irreversibly prone to such sins as pride and self-serving piety, to a misguided faith and understanding of God, to terrible action and the anguish of its consequences. However, as in all of his tragedies, Vondel ends on a note of hope: Recognition leads to contrition, and contrition to the reaching out for grace and forgiveness.

Bibliography

Barnouw, A. J. Vondel. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. A complete discussion of Vondel’s life and works, with emphasis on the major works, especially drama. Also places Vondel in the context of his contemporaries and the political and cultural currents of the time.

Kirkconnell, Watson. The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature with Translation of the Major Analogues. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952. Includes a discussion and translation of Lucifer and Adam in Exile.

Kirkconnell, Watson. That Invincible Samson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964. Includes his translation, Samson: Or, Holy Revenge.

Meijer, Reinder P. Literature of the Low Countries: A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium. New York: Twayne, 1971. Includes a section on Vondel’s life and a number of his major dramas.

Noppen, Leonard Charles van. Vondel’s “Lucifer.” Greensboro, N.C.: Charles L. van Noppen, 1917. A superb translation of Vondel’s masterpiece, as well as an analytical discussion of the play and of Vondel’s life and times.