Nigel Smith (Princeton University): Plays, Poems, Politics and Protest: Why Joost van den Vondel Matters
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Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) is regarded as the most significant and consequential author in the Dutch language, the quintessential Amsterdam literary figure, and he has this reputation for a number of reasons that make him quite different from his comparable European contemporaries: Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson, Pierre Corneille, Milton. In this lecture Nigel brings him to the global arena. Vondel lived in the Dutch Republic and was born just after this new state began to emerge through a revolt against what had become brutal Spanish governance. The cities of Holland, Amsterdam foremost among them, rapidly developed into the leading global mercantile power, a situation that coincided with Vondel’s lifespan. This was a new way of living, and Vondel’s writing gave voice to it: new freedoms in several ways, but very many risks – the possibility of great wealth, yet you might lose it in a day; a world in which ordinary citizens were still vulnerable to the whims of powerful princes, politicians and clergymen even within a kingless state. Vondel’s plays and poetry fearlessly exposed the risk and the violence at the heart of their world.
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Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton)
Nigel Smith is currently Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton, to which he came from the University of Oxford, England, in 1999. He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century; his work is interdisciplinary by inclination and training.
His interests have included poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas. The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips.
His major works are Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (Yale UP, 2010; pbk 2012), a TLS ‘Book of the Year’ for 2010, Is Milton better than Shakespeare? (Harvard UP, 2008), the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems (2003, pbk 2007), a TLS ‘Book of the Year’ for 2003, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989). He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983; revised edn. 2013), and co-edited with Nicholas McDowell the Oxford Handbook to Milton (Oxford UP, 2009, pbk 2011).
New work, The State and Literary Production in Early Modern Europe, involves the comparison of English with literatures in other European (especially Dutch, German, French and Spanish) and some oriental vernaculars in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800. With Sara Poor he is editing Mysticism and Reform (Notre Dame UP), a collection of essays mapping the passage of mysticism from the medieval to the early modern worlds.