Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age literature

This period saw great political and religious changes as the Reformation spread across Northern and Western Europe and the Netherlands fought for independence in the Eighty Years' War.

In the middle of the 16th century, a group of rhetoricians (see Medieval Dutch literature) in Brabant and Flanders attempted to put new life into the stereotyped forms of the preceding age by introducing in original composition the new-found branches of Latin and Greek poetry.

Houwaert's contemporaries nicknamed him the "Homer of Brabant"; later criticism has preferred to see in him an important link in the chain of didactic Dutch which ends in Cats.

For the Protestant congregations, Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566; Lucas de Heere and Petrus Datheen translated hymns of Clément Marot.

In 1585 he translated Boethius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst ("Art of Ethics", 1586), a philosophical treatise in prose in which he tried to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Michel de Montaigne's French.

By this time, the religious and political upheaval in the Low Countries had resulted in 1581 in an Act of Abjuration of Philip II of Spain, a key moment in the subsequent eighty years' struggle 1568–1648.

Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to first rank among the nations of Europe and it was under the influence of so much new ambition that the country asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry.

The intellectual life of the Low Countries was concentrated in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, while the universities of Leiden, Groningen, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Harderwijk and Franeker were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant.

Visscher realised that the path of literary honour lay not along the utilitarian road cut out by Jacob van Maerlant and his followers, but in the study of beauty and antiquity.

In this he was aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch but chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity.

Visscher's daughters were women of universal accomplishment and their company attracted to his house all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.

In his poetry, especially in the lyrical and pastoral verse of his youth, he is full of Italian reminiscences both of style and matter; in his noble prose work he has set himself to be a disciple of Tacitus.

From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, his immediate contemporary.

Bredero was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school and stands as a solitary figure in Dutch literature.

The first work of one of the best-known of all Dutch writers, Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679), was Het Pascha ("The Passover", 1612), a tragedy on the Exodus of the people of Israel.

The short and brilliant life of Bredero, his immediate contemporary and greatest rival, burned itself out in a succession of dramatic victories, and it was not until two years after the death of that great poet that Vondel appeared before the public with a second tragedy.

On the January 3, 1638, the theatre was opened with the performance of a new tragedy out of early Dutch history and to this day one of Vondel's best-known works, Gysbreght van Aemstel.

The next ten years Vondel supplied the theatre with heroic Scriptural pieces, of which the general reader will obtain the best idea if we point to Jean Racine.

During early middle life he produced the most important of his writings, his didactic poems, the Maechdenplicht ("Duty of Maidens") and the Sinne- en Minnebeelden ("Images of Allegory and Love").

The Dutch language has never proved so light and supple in any hands as in his, and, he attempted no class of writing, whether in prose or verse, that he did not adorn by his delicate taste and sound judgment.

Two Dutchmen of the 17th century distinguished themselves very prominently in the movement of learning and philosophic thought, but the names of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) belong more to philosophy and politics than literature.

It happened, however, that three men of particularly commanding talent survived to an extreme old age, and under the shadow of Vondel, Cats and Huygens there sprang up a new generation which sustained the great tradition until about 1680, when decline set in.