Introduction

Summary

Dutch drama, it appeared, had ushered the world onto its stage. While a slave girl of Angolan extraction was cast as a character in Gerbrandt Adriaensz Bredero's early seventeenth-century drama, Moortje (1615), P.C. Hooft's Granida (1605) told of love between a Persian princess and a shepherd, and Nicolaas Simon van Winter's 1774 play Monzongo of de koningklyke slaaf was set in the Spanish Americas. Dutch playwrights in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had taken to heart Vondel's verses: “The world is a stage, / Each plays his role and receives his share.”

Variety, it so happens, was not the only interesting feature of Dutch drama in the period. Three playwrights in the Republic—Joost van den Vondel, Frans van Steenwyk and Onno Zwier van Haren—ensured that their dramas gave cause for greater bewilderment. They dramatized historical events in Asia which were either contemporaneous or within a century of their own lifetimes. Joost van den Vondel took the Manchu conquest of Ming China in 1644 as the subject for Zungchin, of ondergang der Sineesche heerschappye (1667), Frans van Steenwyk's Thamas Koelikan of de verovering van het Mogolsche Rijk (1745) rehearsed Nadir Shah's invasion of India in 1739, and Onno Zwier van Haren drew the attention of his readers and spectators to the Dutch conquest of Banten in 1682 in his 1769 play entitled Agon, Sulthan van Bantam. In these dramas, the playwrights cited names and recalled events with such precision that contemporaries who watched or read these literary pieces could easily have believed that these dramatists had witnessed first-hand the episodes that they wrote about. In truth however, whether these playwrights had ever so much as ventured beyond the precincts of the Dutch Republic, let alone those of Europe, is doubtful. Their modest travel experiences notwithstanding, the historical events they sought to dramatize took place in China, India and Java, all of which were a part of the Company's Orient—that expanse of Asia “from the Cape of Good Hope to Deshima” which was opened up to Dutch cultural mentalité by the Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie, or the Dutch East India Company in their mercantile pursuits in these waters from 1602 to 1796. The playwrights were inhabitants of a historical setting where the need to travel eastwards in the quest for information about the Orient had become redundant.