Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)

A playwright from a generation beyond Shakespeare. The language sounds similarly Shakespearean, but this playwright is no Shakespeare. He is less interested in molding a compelling story than in telling a particular story to favor a particular point of view, which is that Mary Stuart had absolutely no flaws, not one, and her only crime was being the rightful heir to the English throne that had been usurped by Elizabeth. This is no secret, as the playwright includes a dedication that says show more essentially as much. While the play is interesting as a piece of historical propaganda, a look at what some people were thinking at that time, it is not that compelling as a drama. This story has been told much better (from both sides) in other places. Interesting, in other words, as history, not as literature. show less

The play starts somewhat slow. It's the end of the Trojan war retold with Amsterdam taking the place of Troy. The name of the ship that plays the role of the Trojan Horse, the Seahorse, is an early amusing reference. The dialogue is quite good throughout most of the play, but sadly the ending is incredibly cheesy: it's a silly "prediction" of the future, presumably meant to make a certain contingent of expected spectators like the mayor and other magistrates feel good about themselves show more through an explicit mention.

I'd give Vondel four stars, but the specific edition left me less enthused. The footnotes didn't seem to clarify who a certain speaking character was upon their first introduction (something you can find at the beginning of the play), except for the occasional character of larger historical importance, yet every time there was a reference to "the bastard" the footnotes seemed to feel the need to point out who exactly was being referenced over and over again. There were also a few times that the footnote numbers got messed up (e.g. from 39 it went on to 340 or something) and some of the footnotes ended up on the wrong pages. Neither was a big issue, but it just doesn't look too good. Some of the clarifying margin notes seemed quite redundant, e.g. that wisse means certain, whereas it didn't mention anywhere that words like genade are written like gena in the text. Okay, in the list of a few clarifying words at the beginning it says that “spa(de)” means late, but that's a word that's no longer in use and is really more about the word as such than about whether or not there's a de at the end. What most annoyed me is that there were various times when an expression still exists and it was only the spelling of a vowel that differed, e.g. star is now spelled (and spoken) ster, but instead of just giving that as clarification it gave a synonym. In the example of star I figure that would mean clarifying it by saying something like luminous celestial sphere, although that particular example is made-up and perhaps a bit far-fetched. I imagine any native speaker of Dutch who reads this should have fairly little trouble understanding the text, but the text still seems stuck somewhere in between two or even three different goals: the first, to make the text accessible for a student of Dutch whose introduction to the language of the 17th century has (mostly) been through other means and knows what dictionaries to utilize in case something needs further clarification. For this public there should be no issue. The second goal seems to be to make the text accessible to (almost) every native speaker of Dutch. It doesn't fail in this regard, but given certain issues like mentioned above it doesn't exactly succeed either. The third and least likely goal is to make the text accessible to speakers of Dutch as a foreign language. The various clarifications of perfectly ordinary words and expressions lead me to suspect this as a goal for some future edition, although it could be that as someone from Holland (as opposed to the rest of the Netherlands and Belgium), I might consider these ordinary while people from the east and south of the Dutch language area would not. show less

READ IN DUTCH

One of these works we had to read for Dutch Literature in school. Actually a rather clever retelling of the Fall of Troy set in early Amsterdam. Quite nice. However, beware because 17th century Dutch is way more difficult in my opinion compared to 17th century English.

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