The literature of Flanders and Holland must be considered as a whole until about 1585, when the fall of Antwerp marked the final rift between the Protestant north and the Roman Catholic south. The new art of the Renaissance, coming to the Netherlands from Italy through France, first found expression in writers such as Lucas de Heere, who had fled from the Catholic southern provinces for religious reasons. Chapbooks, containing prose versions of medieval romances, folk songs, and rederijkers (“rhetoricians”) verse; Reformation propaganda; marching songs of the Calvinist revolt against Spain; these and the first sonnets, the first dissertations in the vernacular, and the first grammars of the Dutch language displayed the restlessness of an age of change. So, while the Catholic Anna Bijns was fulminating against Lutheranism in her glowing satirical verse, which was countered later by the Calvinist Marnix van Sint Aldegonde in his polemical attack on the Catholic church, the echoes of Classical antiquity were reaching the Netherlands in the odes, sonnets, and translations of Jan Baptista van der Noot and Jan van Hout. Carel van Mander, painter and poet, introduced scholarly vernacular prose writing, though the Latin prose of Erasmus had been famous throughout Europe for nearly a century.
Van der Noot’s Petrarchan sonnets, written in the manner of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard, were published in London, where he was then in exile for participating in an insurrection in 1567. The two great moderates of the age were the Erasmians Henric Laurenszoon Spieghel and Dirk Volkertszoon Coornhert, liberal humanists who espoused a social, undogmatic Christian ethic. Spieghel’s poetry is generally more intellectual than Coornhert’s prose, which was influenced by Montaigne and the Bible, with a remarkably supple and lucid, even entertaining, style. It was Coornhert and his successors, in particular the translators of the Dutch authorized version of the Bible (published in 1637), who laid the foundations of the standard language.
The 17th century
While the Spanish hold on the Catholic south of the Netherlands during and after the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) caused a decline in Brabant and Flanders, there was a spectacular expansion in Holland, to which artists, intellectuals, and financiers had fled from the Spanish armies. The emergence of Amsterdam and The Hague as capitals of an empire and the birth of civic pride in writers of the “Golden Age” symbolized the final passing of a medieval age belonging to Ghent, Bruges, Liège, and Antwerp.
The writers of the “Golden Age”
Spieghel, the greatest of a generation straddling the old and the new, wrote for both the burgher and scholar. His Nieujaarliedekens (“New Year Songs”) and Lieden op ’t Vader Ons (“Songs on the Lord’s Prayer”) continued a medieval tradition in a Renaissance style echoing Erasmian moderation; his learned Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (1584; “Dialogue on Dutch Literature”) was intended to popularize the use of a national language. His most scholarly work, the unfinished Hertspieghel (1614; “Mirror of the Heart”), was particularly abstruse because it represented a first attempt at philosophizing in the vernacular and in poetry.
The dichotomy inherent in the Renaissance—between popular religious revival and humanism—was particularly marked in Holland because of the incompatibility of Calvinistic principles with the ideals of pagan antiquity. This caused a tense ambivalence in many writers of the 17th century who took both their religion and their art seriously. Daniël Heinsius, a celebrated humanist at the University of Leiden, wrote plays in Latin, but he also contributed to the vernacular by writing Hymnus oft lof-sanck van Bacchus (1614; “Hymn in Praise of Bacchus”) and an equally devout Lof-sanck van Jesus Christus (1615).
A poet, playwright, and painter, Gerbrand Adriaenszoon Bredero took his material from the life of the commoner; his medium was the folk song, farce, or comedy. His secular songs in medieval style and devotional songs in Renaissance verse told of a passionate devotion to women and yearning for religious moderation. While his three tragicomedies were not successful, his three farces marked the zenith of the medieval genre. Contemporary life in Amsterdam provided material for his two comedies, including his masterpiece, Spaanschen Brabander (performed 1617).
Amsterdam was the home of the poet and dramatist Joost van den Vondel. Like Bredero, he was self-educated, and he resolved the conflict between artistic and religious leanings only when he entered the Roman Catholic Church at age 54. This was a courageous act of faith at a time when Catholics formed an unpopular minority. It is a measure of van den Vondel’s indomitable personality that his attitude toward contemporary people and events, of which he was a fearless chronicler, still prevails even when history has recorded a different view. His plays, however, are too austere for modern readers, although, in his Sophoclean Jeptha (1659) and his Baroque masterpieces Lucifer (1654) and Adam in ballingschap (1664; Adam in Exile), he was as great an artist of the Counter-Reformation as his contemporary the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens.
The aristocratic Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft was one of a fortunate few in Holland to bring the refinements of the new art directly from Italy. He lavished an Italianate flourish on his sonnets and plays, the studied prose of his letters, and a monumental unfinished history of the war against Spain. His castle at Muyden became a thriving centre for the entertainment of artists and scholars attracted not only by a mutual interest in poetry, music, and learning but also by the charm of such gifted young women as the Roemer Visscher daughters, Anna and Maria.
Anna Visscher in verse, like her father Roemer in prose, popularized ethics in a manner that was to bring Jacob Cats unmerited fame. Cats’s prolix moralizing, pedestrian doggerel, and patronizing tone forced their way into his country’s literature if only because of the disastrous influence they had on the taste of their middle-class readership.
A more harmonious individual, Constantijn Huygens, had all the qualities to which Dutchmen of his day might aspire. A man of strict Calvinist principles, he was an able diplomat who wrote trenchant, shrewd, and witty verse and made excellent translations of John Donne’s poetry.