Jan Vos (poet)

A glassmaker by trade (in that position he provided all windows for the new city hall on the Dam), he also played an important role as stage-manager and director of the theatre.

In his Klucht van Oene ("The Farce of Oene", 1642), a number of dishonest practices by Amsterdam merchants and industrialists are criticized - bakers of bread short-selling their customers, tailors filching pieces of cloth owned by their patrons, glassmakers cheating with glass quantities, dyers of silk tampering with their material.

In addition, house-agents, pawnbrokers, cashiers, notaries public and secretaries, landlords, millers, doctors, barbers, pharmacists and booksellers enter the stage.

Jan Vos had a good eye for the public taste, and was repeatedly entrusted by the city authorities with designing and overseeing pageants and spectacles.

At the visit of Maria Henrietta Stuart, the widow of William II, it turned out that one of the floats represented the beheading of Charles I of England, Mary's late father.