[11] Notable poems include Het stockske van Oldenbarneveldt ("The Cane of Oldenbarnevelt"), Roskam (Curry Comb) and Kinder-lijck (Childlike), about the death of his son.

[15] The Vondel family was left adrift and lived at Frankfurt am Main, Bremen, Emden, and Utrecht, before eventually settling at Amsterdam in the newly formed Dutch Republic.

[5] Joost van den Vondel the Elder managed to acquire Dutch citizenship, which enabled him to set up a business, on 27 March 1597, and he became a silk merchant on the Warmoesstraat.

[16] Amsterdam at the time was in the process of taking over the position of Antwerp as the most important trading centre of the Low Countries and was soon becoming the wealthiest city of the Dutch Republic.

[6] By 1606 he was a member of the Chamber of rhetoric Het Wit Lavendel (The White Lavender), a literary society founded by Flemish Protestant refugees from the Spanish Netherlands.

[22] In 1606 he received Mennonite adult baptism from the congregation led by Cornelis Claesz Anslo and the following year his father died, so Vondel was brought into the family silk business as a partner.

[26] Apart from the virtuosic poetry, Het Pascha already contained two important aspects that would later turn out to be exemplary for Vondel's work: firstly the usage of literature to comment on political matters, and secondly an admiration for classical antiquity.

[33] As a consequence, the trial and subsequent execution of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt by Maurice of Orange not only had a great impact on Vondel, it also resulted in religious persecution of followers of Roman Catholicism, Anabaptism and Arminianism.

[30] These meetings at the house of Roemer would later continue with a more diverse group of people, including Constantijn Huygens, Gerbrand Bredero, Casparus Barlaeus, Gerardus Vossius, Dirck Sweelinck (the son of Jan Pieterszoon) and P.C.

[60] What certainly helped was the fact that his daughter Anna already converted to the Catholic faith and his friend Hugo Grotius earlier made pleas for a reconciliation between Christians and a return to the church of the first centuries AD.

[67] Vondel's understanding of Vossius's Institutiones poeticae, a compilation of everything that was known at the time about ancient poetics (but the work also covered principles regarding the composition of music and drama), was important for the dramatic development of his future tragedies.

In the play Vondel demonstrated his deepened knowledge of the principles of the Ancient Greek drama, largely because of his careful study of the notions that were theorized by Aristotle in his Poetics.

[67] Around this time several of his long-time friends died; first Grotius succumbed to a shipwreck in 1645, then Hooft passed away in 1647, followed by the suicide of Barlaeus in 1648 and eventually the death of Vossius in 1649.

[73] In Lucifer Vondel not only achieves what has been called "a triumph of the poetic imagination", but also a dramatic effect that is the result of characters who are at the height of their powers, but have conflicting aspirations, so that their relationships are leading to the greatest tensions.

[80] In the same year the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54) broke out and caused great poverty in Amsterdam; as a result Joost Jr. went bankrupt and his father had to take over his debts.

[80] In the meantime - as a result of his debts - Vondel's son Joost went to the East Indies in 1659 and died on the outward journey; along with the death of his wife Mayken, this was certainly his biggest personal tragedy.

[95] In the meantime the Third Anglo-Dutch War broke out, along with the Rampjaar in 1672; events that were particularly devastating for Vondel, because Johan de Witt, who was greatly admired by him for defending the policy of toleration, was murdered by an angry mob.

[101] Vondel's main objective in writing dramas for instance, is not so much entertainment, but the increasing of competence, as the theatre was for him especially a means that could be used to elevate the spectator; it had the function of conveying knowledge.

[89] It is with his literary work that Vondel took part in the great debates of his time, for instance the theological-political struggle between the Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants, the trial of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the politics of toleration or the occasional poetry for regents and stadtholders.

[4] Vondel's work as a poet has to be seen in the context of the tradition of the Chamber of rhetoric, which were literary societies that originated in the Southern Netherlands in the 15th century, but spread to the Northern provinces, where members studied and composed poetry together especially for specific occasions.

[114] And just like in his plays, Vondel aims to elevate the reader of his poetry and at the same time to propagate a certain point of view (often of a moralistic and didactic nature) on an abstract level of truths and values.

[135] The abundance of language, with its rich imagery, extended comparisons, sound effects and “the majestic rhythm of his alexandrines” can therefore be explained through Vondel being a writer of the Baroque, but also through his connection with the Chamber of rhetoric.

[138] For this reason, the individual characterization and development of the inner life of the characters of his play is only given to a certain extent; the real drama that rages in the protagonists's mind is achieved with Vondel's poetry.

[141] During the 18th century, although the dominant style switched to French classicism, Vondel's work continued to be admired, for instance by Balthasar Huydecoper, as representing the “language of the Parnassus”.

The first was Jacob van Lennep, who was vital in arranging and editing his complete works and eventually established Vondel's reputation as the national poet of The Netherlands.

[146] Moreover, some of the most important literary figures of the 19th and early 20th century were distinctly influenced by Vondel's work, examples are Guido Gezelle, Hendrik Tollens, Albert Verwey and Herman Gorter.

[151] Partly through Gryphius, but also through motifs that were common in Vondel's drama's, playwrights like Daniel Casper von Lohenstein and Johann Christian Hallmann were indebted to his work as well.

During the 1880s, it was suggested by George Edmundson, that John Milton drew inspiration from Vondel's Lucifer (1654) and Adam in ballingschap (1664) for the writing of his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667).

[98] Theodoor Weevers for instance writes that Vondel “surpasses all Dutch poets by his versatility, by the scope and profundity of his thought, and by his apparently effortless command of all metrical forms with the exception of one, the sonnet, in which his achievement, although notable, is second to that of Hooft.

Examples include comparisons to Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Johann Wolfgang Goethe.