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Literature of the Low Countries (1978)

Literature of the Low Countries

(1978)–Reinder P. Meijer–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

A Short History of Dutch Literature in the Netherlands and Belgium


Vorige Volgende

IV
Reformers and humanists
Sixteenth century

In the history of Dutch literature the sixteenth century is usually regarded as a period of transition in which the medieval conceptions gradually receded into the background and made way for those of the modern era. The term ‘period of transition’ is, of course, a facile one: from any given vantage point in time one can look down on a preceding period and regard it as a period of transition, pointing to the first appearance of certain phenomena of which one already knows the fully mature stage. But certain periods are characterized by particularly rapid and radical changes, and the sixteenth century in Dutch literature is undoubtedly one of those. The changes that took place are usually accounted for by that trinity of terms: Humanism, Renaissance and Reformation. These three factors, whether one regards them as an indivisible unity or as three separate movements, brought about a series of changes in the literature so farreaching that the term period of transition is fully justified. These changes were on the whole international, and the change of direction which Dutch literature took was due to influence from outside. But apart from this, the direction of Dutch literature was also affected by an internal development: as a result of the war against Spain the centre of gravity of Dutch literature shifted from the southern to the northern provinces, and then stayed there. The province of Holland became the cultural as well as the economic and political centre of the Low Countries, and from the end of the sixteenth century onwards the most important writers

lived in Holland. In view of all this one cannot object to a characterization of the sixteenth century as an age of transition, but the proviso must be added that no valuejudgment is implied. It is true, the sixteenth century did not produce writers of the calibre of Vondel, Hooft, Bredero and Huygens, but it would be wrong to demote the sixteenth-century writers automatically to the status of fore-runners of the great writers of the seventeenth century. Their achievements are more satisfactorily, and more justly, assessed in terms of what they themselves accomplished than in terms of what the later writers made of their achievements.

Generalizing and dramatizing a little, one can say that medieval literature in the Low Countries came to an end with the development of the printing press. The works that reached print were multiplied in more copies than had been possible for any previous work, so that the preservation rate rose tremendously and the literature that has come to us no longer seems a collection of works that by some good chance have been preserved, but presents itself under the new aspect of a collection of oeuvres of individual writers. We begin to know more names in literature and the names are no longer just labels stuck on to one or two works, but behind the names we begin to see the writers. This did not happen overnight, the emergence of the writer from behind his work was a slow process. The early sixteenth-century Rederijkers certainly did not rush into print any more than Anthonis de Roovere did. The first printed volume of Rederijker poetry, a collection made by the Antwerp printer and publisher Jan van Doesborch, appeared between 1528 and 1530. Another large collection, put together by Jan van Stijevoort in 1524, remained in manuscript until the twentieth century. A good example of delayed publication is also the play Spiegel der Minnen (Mirror of Love) by Colijn van Rijssele, a Rederijker from Brussels. We know that this play, which has the distinction of being one of the earliest bourgeois dramas in European literature, had gained considerable fame before 1530, but it was published as late as 1561, and not by its

author but by Dirck Coornhert. The situation was characterized by the publisher of the book that was perhaps the most famous Rederijker work of the sixteenth century, Matthijs de Castelein's De Const van Rhetoriken (The Art of Rhetoric). The book was finished in 1548 and published in 1555, that is five years after the death of its author. In his preface the publisher lamented the fact that so many poets did not publish their work but left it in manuscript because they regarded publication as a show of too much personal ambition. Not all writers suffered from the same inhibition: we know that Erasmus - who was about twenty years older than Matthijs de Castelein - sent his manuscripts to the printer as soon as the ink was dry. But Erasmus was the exception rather than the rule; in his dealings with publishers, with whom he negotiated fees and royalties, he was about two hundred years ahead of his time. The rank and file of the sixteenth-century writers published only hesitantly, as they did in England, where neither Thomas Wyatt, nor Philip Sidney, nor Surrey published anything in their lifetimes.

The remarks made in the preface to De Const van Rhetoriken are particularly telling as they were not prompted by the work of a run-of-the-mill author, but by that of one of the most prominent poets of his time, a poet whose work was widely known and praised sky-high by his contemporaries. The book in question was the first full-blown ars poetica in Dutch, written at about the same time as the first rhetorics in English appeared, such as Richard Sherry's A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes of 1550 and Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique of 1553. De Castelein's book is different from Wilson's as it is mainly concerned with poetic form whereas Wilson gives a systematic and Ciceronian treatise on oratory1, yet there are points of contact between the two works as for instance in Wilson's

sally against ‘ynkepot termes’ and De Castelein's call for a pure and simple language. De Castelein would not have approved of Wilson's book, had he known it, because it was written in prose. That was also his main objection to L'Art de Rhétorique by the Walloon Jean Molinet: by writing in prose, he says, Molinet had degraded his noble art, and he even advances Molinet's aberration as one of the reasons why he wrote his own book. And then in verse. Deficiency in the work of De Roovere was put forward as another reason, although he did not specify in what respect De Roovere had failed. Thirdly, he wrote his book as a protest against the deterioration in the standards of poetry, against ‘the idiots who with unwashed hands tear the clothes of Rhetoric’.

In spite of this criticism, De Castelein leant heavily on both De Roovere and Molinet whom he regarded after all as the masters. Writers of artes poeticae are naturally inclined to be conservative, to be more concerned with the status quo in poetry than with the advancement of new ideas, and De Castelein was no exception. He discussed the various forms in use at the time, in poetry and in drama, and from this discussion we come to know him as a middle-of-the-road Rederijker who had no love for excessively intricate ballads and refrains or for an over-ornate language. So far as the new developments in rhyme and metre were concerned he was sitting on the fence. Rhymes have to be pure, he does not accept assonance as rhyme, but on the other hand he is not in favour of extending rhyme into syllable rhyme, nor does he approve of a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes as the French rhétoriqueurs advocated: ‘I do not anticipate that the Flemings will observe this; each country should keep to its own style’. As to the question of isosyllabism, De Castelein's opinion was that rhyming lines should have the same number of feet, but he had no objection to the varying length of non-rhyming lines, provided that no line should ever be longer than fifteen syllables which he regarded as the maximum that could be recited in one breath (implying that one should never pause

to take breath within the one line).

Although De Castelein's approach was predominantly traditional, there are certain aspects of his work which show him to have been strongly influenced by Humanist ideas. All our knowledge, he wrote, has come to us through the pens of the classical writers, particularly the Greeks, who have explored the sciences and who have taught us how to write comedies, tragedies and epics. To the Latin writers, especially Martial, Horace and Virgil, we are indebted for the construction of the line and the stanza. He even made an attempt, though rather a weak one, to link up the poetic forms of the Rederijkers with those of the Greek and Latin writers. The thread running through his argument is that for the writers of his own day the study of classical literature is imperative. All this was largely theory, for although it is clear that he was well acquainted with the many classical authors whom he discussed, it is hard to see what positive contribution they made to his own poetry, apart from a greater than usual number of references to classical history and mythology. As a creative writer he stayed close to tradition, the themes of his poetry and the forms he used were the traditional Rederijker ones, very similar to the poetry contained e.g. in the Antwerp Song Book of 1544. Whatever the praise of his contemporaries, he does not strike us now as an exceptional poet, merely as a competent one, who in spite of his being a priest seemed more at ease in his love poetry than in his religious work which is often wooden and artificial. But he must be given the credit for having been the first Rederijker to state the Humanist view which expected great things from a return to the classics and made classical antiquity the norm for the new phase of western European literature. This does not mean, of course, that this was the first time that these ideas were expressed in the Low Countries, it only means that they were expressed for the first time in the vernacular literature. Erasmus had shown the way many years earlier in his own works and in his editions of the classics. But Erasmus wrote in Latin and had

no great faith in the vernacular. In his Ecclesiastes, published towards the end of his life in 1535, he said that he accepted the word of his friends that there were works of literature in the vernacular which were not inferior to works in Latin, but that was as far as he was prepared to go. His attitude to the vernacular as a vehicle for literature was perhaps not one of contempt, rather one of tolerance, but decidedly not one of enthusiasm. He never contemplated stopping writing in the international language, for that would have severely restricted his audience and at the same time would have laid him further open to criticism from the Church, which always considered new ideas more dangerous when they were expressed in the vernacular. Most other Dutch Humanists shared Erasmus's view and wrote in Latin, with the result that it was some time before the Humanist ideas began to put their mark on the literature in Dutch.

Latin Humanist literature, on the other hand, flourished in the Low Countries in the first half of the sixteenth century. Erasmus quickly became the most authoritative voice of Humanism and the tremendous influence which his scholarship and his ideas had on the Humanists all over Europe is so well-known that it hardly needs to be discussed here. Writers of the Low Countries also played an important part in the development of Latin school drama. Willem de Volder of The Hague, who wrote under the name of Gnapheus, was one of the founders of this genre and gained an international reputation with Acolastus (1529), a dramatization of the parable of the prodigal son, a favourite theme in the sixteenth century. Acolastus was translated into English in 1540 and gave rise to a whole series of ‘Prodigal Son’ plays, including George Gascoigne's Glass of Government of 1575. A German translation of Acolastus by George Binder appeared in 1535, and an imitation by Jörg Wickram in 1540. George van Langveldt, a headmaster at Utrecht, who latinized his name to Macropedius, became known through his Latin Elckerlijc adaptation (Hecastus) and through a considerable number of satirical and Biblical plays in Latin

(Aluta, Andrisca, Adamus, Josephus) which also found response in Germany and England.

Latin Humanist poetry, which began in the second half of the fifteenth century with Petrus Burrus of Bruges, reached a peak in the sixteenth century with the work of Janus Secundus, born in The Hague in 1511. As a poet Janus Secundus was one of the child prodigies of which the Renaissance period seems to have had the secret. He began to write when he was fourteen years old and celebrated the Ladies' Peace of Cambrai with a Hymnus before he had turned eighteen.

Between this year and the year of his death at the age of twenty-five he wrote a great deal, including three volumes of elegies, a volume of epigrams, a volume of odes, verse epistles, diaries of his travels, and the magnificent volume of amatory poetry Basia (published after his death in 1539) on which rests his fame of being far and away the best of the Neo-Latin poets. What distinguished Secundus from the other Neo-Latinists was the personal tone of his poetry. He was not just an imitator who borrowed both the form and the feelings of the classical writers, but a poet who really gave himself in his work and who expressed emotions that were entirely his own. This was one of the reasons why his poetry made such an impact on the group of Pléiade poets in France who in the 1550s and 1560s were very consciously striving to create a truly personal lyrical verse. They recognized Secundus as the great innovator of poetry and at least five of the original Pléiade group - Ronsard, Belleau, de Baïf, du Bellay and Dorat - translated from his work. He was also followed and imitated by several Neo-Latinists: Muret in France, Buchanan in Scotland, Douza and Daniël Heinsius in Holland, to mention only a few. His influence on Dutch literature was not immediately apparent. In the early sixteenth century the gap separating the vernacular literature from the poetry in Latin was probably too wide to allow of much interplay. For some time these literatures existed side by side, or perhaps on top of one another, with very little

influence from the Neo-Latinists on those who wrote in Dutch, and even less in the other direction, for there is little doubt that the sixteenth-century intelligentsia had a higher regard for the Neo-Latinists than for the vernacular poets. Yet the poetry of Secundus did contribute to the development of Dutch poetry, as it did to the development of poetry in German, French and English, but in a roundabout way. After the middle of the sixteenth century, when the poets of the Pléiade, and notably Ronsard, began to exercise a strong influence, several features which were originally part of Secundus's innovations found their way back to the Low Countries.

In general, the Rederijker poetry published before the middle of the sixteenth century showed no awareness of the achievements of the Neo-Latin poets. The Rederijkers of that period were traditionalists whose aesthetic ideas did not go beyond the conceptions of De Roovere and De Castelein. Only the influence of Erasmus was ubiquitous. His work was well-known in Rederijker circles and from 1523 onwards much of it was translated into Dutch by Rederijker writers. The playwright Cornelis Everaert of Bruges showed distinct affinities with the ideas of Erasmus in his views on war and peace, his criticism of the Church, his antipathy to Luther, in his satirical and critical attitude which stopped short of forcing a break. Another playwright and poet, Cornelis Crul, translated some of Erasmus's Colloquia. It was through Erasmus that the ideas of church reformation became known in Rederijker circles and several poets, like Crul and Everaert, wrote in the Erasmian spirit of reformation within the Church. But others went further and opted for Luther. In the 1520s and 1530s Lutheranism in the Chambers of Rhetoric had become so strong that the authorities, who up to that time had always morally and financially supported the Chambers, began to take measures against them. In Leiden a ban on stage performances was imposed, in Amsterdam several Rederijkers were ordered on a pilgrimage to Rome, in several places censorship of plays was

established, and in Antwerp a regulation was brought in prohibiting non-Roman Catholics from being members of the Chamber. Antwerp, with its many publishers and printers, was one of the strongest centres of Humanism and Reformation, and it was in Antwerp that some of the first heavy blows fell: in 1523 two monks from the Antwerp Augustin monastery were burnt at the stake in Brussels, a few years later another monk was burnt alive, three printers of heretical material were beheaded, the Humanist townclerk Grapheus - a friend of Albrecht Dürer's - was arrested and could only save his life by publicly recanting his heresies. Another of the early victims was the English Bible translator William Tyndale, who actually enjoyed a measure of protection in Antwerp but who was arrested when he left the city and was executed in Brussels in 1536. With the Reformation represented so strongly in Antwerp, it is perhaps not surprising that the loudest anti-Lutheran voice in literature was raised in the same city. It was the voice of Anna Bijns, a poet and school-teacher, and one of the last of the traditional Rederijkers.

The poetry of Anna Bijns is almost entirely innocent of the ideas of Humanism. She does refer to classical writers, but she does it in such a stereotyped way and her references read so much like echoes from medieval literature - especially when she confounds Biblical history with mythology and classical history - that it does not seem likely that she had studied them herself. She made her attitude to Humanist study clear enough:

 
What is the use of studying many books?
 
What is the use of acquiring many goods
 
Or of following in the skies
 
The course of the stars and planets?
 
What is the use of measuring the earth
 
Or of learning many hidden secrets
 
Through astronomy?

What she saw of the Renaissance she did not like either. She berated the artists for painting nude portraits of Cupid,

Venus and Lucrece, and against the Renaissance glorification of the human body she placed her own view of it: ‘Human figure, chalice of earth, mudlike bag of worms, created weakest of all’. Her whole attitude can be summed up in her own words: ‘The old songs are the best’. And these she followed, violently rejecting anything that was new. Her poetry, published in three volumes between 1528 and 1567, encompasses the normal range of Rederijker verse: amatory, religious and comic refrains, and like so many of her colleagues she was at her most convincing in her love poems. Some of them celebrate almost ecstatically the joys of love, but most are in a minor key and lament a lost love, either real or fictitious. She extended the conventional range with her special brand of polemic verse, directed at Luther and his followers. Here her passionate temperament found an outlet and her attacks on Luther are so bitter, so personal, and so invariably below the belt that one has to restrain oneself from concluding that she was taking a frustrated love out on him. ‘If sin is virtue, the Lutherans are saints’ is one of her themes and she expands it through a whole spectrum of abuse. Luther is the devil incarnate, Lucifer's own pupil, who will finally receive the crown from his master as a reward for his destructiveness; he allows monks to marry nuns; he encourages people to live like dogs, nuns to become whores, monks pimps; the Lutherans talk big about the spirit, but the only thing they are interested in is the flesh; the Lutherans don't like sleeping alone and they borrow each other's wives even when they have one themselves: it is all a matter of common property; Luther's sect cannot bear virgins; there are rumours that Luther himself has a girl with whom he likes to play behind the curtains, and so on. No holds are barred when she sets upon Luther. Her fury makes her inventive and one cannot deny that several of her poems, in spite of the meagre content, acquire a certain stature through the very concentration of her fury. It would be too much to describe her as a great poet, but she occupies a special place in the history of literature, as it was her voice

that sang the swan-song of medieval literature, for the most part eloquently, often melodiously, and at times strained to the point of breaking.

If Anna Bijns may be called the representative of the reactionary wing of the Rederijkers, Lucas de Heere represented the progressives. It was through his work that the poetic forms of the Renaissance were introduced into Dutch literature. Lucas de Heere was a painter as well as a poet. He was born in 1534, served his artist's apprenticeship with Frans Floris at Antwerp, then went to France where he stayed for some years. He was there in the 1550s, not too late to undergo the influence of Clément Marot, and in time to witness the clash between Marot's school and the new movement of Ronsard. There are several parallels between the work of Marot and that of De Heere, and with caution one might even call him the Dutch Marot. Like Marot, De Heere was a transitional figure, standing between the Rederijkers and the Renaissance poets. Both were rooted in tradition, experts in the old forms, yet both were closer to the new poetry than any of their predecessors. Neither was a great lyrical poet, yet both hold the distinction of having written the first sonnets in their own language. Lucas de Heere was the prototype of the trail-blazer. He was not a strong enough poet to put the stamp of his personality on the poetry that was coming, but he was intelligent and sentitive enough to see what was coming and enthusiastic enough to help it take shape.

In 1565 De Heere published his Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poesiën (The Garden and Orchard of Poetry), a curiously hybrid volume containing poetry in the old Rederijker forms side by side with Renaissance forms such as sonnets, odes and epigrams. A large part of his work was modelled on Marot, whose social satire appealed to him and with whose Protestantism he was in sympathy (De Heere broke with the Roman Catholic Church in 1566). His love poetry, on the other hand, tended more towards Ronsard. He was well aware of his lack of originality and made no

attempt to mask it. In the dedication of his book he wrote unequivocally that he was content to be ‘a good imitator of the other excellent poets’, basing himself on the principle of imitatio, which had also been warmly recommended by Marot and du Bellay. De Heere only believed in imitating the classics and the French poets, and firmly dissociated himself from the older Dutch poetry ‘which (to tell the truth and with your permission) in many respects was too rough, too clumsy and too undisciplined’. At the same time he was as patriotically proud of his own language as befitted a Renaissance poet, and, like du Bellay again, was critical of the Neo-Latinists who had no regard for their mother tongue. In a laudatory poem to Jan van der Noot's Het Theatre he explicitly praised the author for having shown that Dutch was in no way inferior to French, German, Greek, Latin or Italian. The dedication of Den Hof en Boomgaerd der Poesiën is also of interest for the technical recommendations which De Heere makes there. He states that he was careful to give each line of a poem a fixed number of syllables, following the practice of the French poets. This innovation, foreshadowed but not prescribed by Matthijs de Castelein, and in fact not strictly adhered to by De Heere himself, now became a permanent feature of Dutch poetry, and would remain so until the end of the nineteenth century. De Heere's favourite metre was the alexandrine, which shortened the sometimes very long lines of Rederijker poetry to twelve or thirteen syllables, but the decasyllabic line also occurs frequently in his work. There is no strict organization of his verse into the iambic metre yet, and in many cases one finds the ten-syllable line, or even the twelve-syllable line, combined with the old principle of the four-beat line. In his rhymes De Heere used a much larger number of masculine rhymes than the older Rederijkers, but he no more committed himself to a regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes than Marot or Ronsard had done.

When De Heere went over to the Protestant Church, he

left the country and went to England. There he wrote a short prose book, Corte Beschrijvinghe van Enghelant, Schotland en Irland (Short Description of England, Scotland and Ireland), followed by a short history of England. It is a very readable account, written for the purpose of acquainting the Dutch with the English, with whom they had so many commercial contacts. The book never fulfilled its purpose, however, for it was not published and remained in manuscript until 1937! De Heere seems to have been unlucky with his manuscripts, for another book of his, a history of Flemish painting (which would have made him the first art-historian in the Low Countries), was also lost, and was never recovered in spite of a very extensive search. In England De Heere made the acquaintance of another exiled Dutch poet, Jan van der Noot, five or six years younger than he was, just as interested in the new poetry, but with a much stronger creative potential.

Jan van der Noot came from Antwerp and had become a Protestant in 1566. He fled the city a year later when the Spanish troops under the Duke of Alva approached to suppress the rebellion in the Low Countries, and when an attempt by the Antwerp Calvinists to take over the administration of the city had failed. Van der Noot belonged to the aristocracy and had been a member of the city council. If the Calvinist coup had been successful, he would have been appointed Margrave of Antwerp; under the circumstances he became an exile, lived for some years in England where he came into contact with Edmund Spenser, travelled through the Rhineland, visited Paris in 1578 where he claims to have met Ronsard and Dorat, and finally came back full circle to Antwerp and Roman Catholicism. In England Van der Noot published his first volume of poetry, Het Theatre, in 1568, and two or three years later his second volume Het Bosken (The Grove). The second volume contained his early poetry and its title, derived from Ronsard's Le Bocage which had appeared some fifteen years earlier, clearly indicated whom he considered the leader of

the new poetry. It begins with two poems in the old Rederijker style, then continues with some odes, sonnets, epigrams, elegies and closes with religious poetry including sixteen translations of Marot's psalms. Het Theatre has an entirely different character and was written from a strongly moralistic point of view. In the dedication, to the Lord Mayor of London, Van der Noot presents the book as the fruit of his exile which has made him conscious of the vanity of all worldly matters. He now wants to put heart into the Calvinists at home, to make them stand firm by convincing them too of the worthlessness of the world. He does this in a series of twenty-one poems, sonnets and epigrams, each accompanied by an engraving. Only the last four sonnets are originals, the other sonnets being translations of du Bellay whereas the epigrams were translations of Petrarch. It is actually not certain whether one should regard the book primarily as a volume of poetry since the greater part of it is taken up by a long treatise in prose which, as the author says, was there to expand and elucidate the poetry.

One of the ambitions which Van der Noot shared with most other Renaissance poets was to write a great epic, but, like most other Renaissance poets - even Ronsard never finished his Franciade - he was not equal to the task. The history of Van der Noot's epic is particularly curious. It first appeared in a German version under the title of Das Buch Extasis (The Book Ecstasy), published in Cologne about 1576, and was then followed three years later by a bilingual edition in Dutch and French, under the double title of Cort Begryp der XII Boecken Olympiados, Abrégé des Douze Livres Olympiades (Summary of the twelve books of the Olympiad). The German version is the longest and seems to have been translated from the French version which must probably be regarded as the original, although Van der Noot himself states that he wrote the Dutch version first. The poem is cast as a dream in which the poet has to overcome numerous obstacles before he can be united with his beloved Olympia, the incarnation of virtue and beauty. As the title

indicates, neither the Dutch nor the French version was to be regarded as a finished epic; it seems that Van der Noot had intended to follow up the preliminary publication with a full epic of twelve cantos, which, however, remained unwritten.

From the two earlier volumes and the Olympia epics we come to know Jan van der Noot as the man who took Dutch Renaissance poetry well beyond the stage of experimentation. The forms and prosodic innovations which Lucas de Heere had recommended and tentatively applied were handled by Van der Noot with a remarkable sureness of touch, and although he may not have been the great poet that he himself and some nineteenth-century critics thought he was, and although much of his poetry pales when placed next to the work of Ronsard, he did instil the new forms with so much personal sentiment that he has full claim to a place which is more than just a historical one.

One of the characteristics which makes Van der Noot stand apart from all his predecessors is his tremendously high appreciation of the function of the poet and the hyperbolic terms in which he described his own literary value. Lucas de Heere had made no greater claim for himself than to be a ‘good imitator’, with a humility that was of the Humanist rather than of the Renaissance writer. Van der Noot was made of different stuff. Sir Philip Sidney may have regarded the poet as ‘the monarch of all Sciences’ and Edmund Spenser may have believed that heroes and famous poets were born together, they were moderates in comparison with Jan van der Noot. He firmly believed, or at least said he believed, that his poetry had the power to accord immortality. The idea itself was not new. We know it also from Ronsard who in one of his sonnets to Hélène promised her and himself a similar immortality (although there is in Ronsard's poem an elegiac undertone which softens the superbia). Van der Noot's assertions were much bolder and much more bare-faced. Het Bosken does not give much evidence of this attitude yet, apart from the fact that he included a considerable number of laudatory poems about

himself, followed by his own replies. There may have been some justification for this, though, as his book did mean a break with the traditional poetry and he may have felt the necessity of having some poetic authorities acclaiming and supporting the newness of his work, in French, Latin and Spanish. The second volume, Het Theatre, was too much an abnegation of the world to allow much room for self-glorification and window-dressing; even so he managed to include some laudatory poems: Was there ever a poet equal to this one? asks Goossenius, and Lucas de Heere proclaims him ‘the foremost of our poets’. But then, in a separately published poem Lofsang van Braband (Ode to Brabant), Van der Noot declared that he was to Brabant what Homer had been to the Greeks, Virgil to the Romans and Petrarch to the Tuscans, and that, if so desired, he would spread the fame of Brabant over the whole world for many hundreds of years to come. He reached an all-time high in a later poem, Ode Tegen d'Onwetende Vyanden der Poëteryen (Ode Against the Ignorant Enemies of Poetry), in which he again mentioned himself in one breath with Homer, Pindar, Virgil and Horace, then stated in passing that he wrote better poetry than any of his Dutch predecessors, and really got into his stride with the promise that he would carve his name in the temple of Fame and would become known over the whole world for all eternity, specifying the world this time as Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Bohemia, Switzerland, Burgundy, Spain, Scotland, Ireland, England, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Hungary and India. One may regard this as poetic hybris run wild, and it does, of course, look slightly ridiculous in retrospect, particularly when one knows that ten years after his death he was completely forgotten, even in the Low Countries, not to be rediscovered before the middle of the nineteenth century. But a poem such as this Ode should perhaps not simply be taken at its face value. The self-glorification of the poet was a common theme in the European poetry of that time, but who knows what personal experience of humiliation or frustration made

Van der Noot overstress it to such an extent and made him create such a tremendous distance between himself and those ‘ignorant enemies of poetry’.

Whatever the interpretation of Van der Noot's assertions, so much is certain that he was one of the very first poets in any vernacular language to aim consciously at an international audience. That is clear from the way he published his Olympia epics, it is clear from the bilingual French-Dutch publication of Lofsang van Braband, and from the various efforts he made to have his work translated: Het Theatre was first translated into French, then into English - with the help of young Edmund Spenser who was a teenager at that time, and with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth - and a few years later into German. Van der Noot's earnest endeavour was to win social recognition for the poet in general, and for himself in particular. His Lofsang van Braband is really nothing else but an application to the provincial government of Brabant for the imaginary position of official state poet: since the state supports so many administrators, magistrates, councillors, bailiffs, burgomasters, treasurers, policemen, executioners and soldiers, what harm would it do if it also supported a nightingale, nay, a swan who would sing the praise of Brabant in both Dutch and French? Brabant did not fall in with his suggestion, and Van der Noot had to turn to private persons for financial support. Much of his later poetry has a distinctly mercenary ring, and is of little literary value. The poems often follow the same pattern: in a few lines the poet describes his prospective Maecenas and states the reasons for celebrating his subject, and then in the last lines without any further ado he declares him or her immortalized. These poems were published in a kind of adaptable edition, entitled Poeticsche Wercken (Poetic Works), which was made up for each buyer individually in accordance with his personal taste, his political and religious convictions, and, presumably, with what he was prepared to spend. It is true that much of this later poetry degenerated into beggary-in-disguise, it is also true that Van der Noot habitually overplayed his hand, yet he still stands

as the first poet who was seriously concerned with the social function of poetry and the poet's place in society.

Jan van der Noot was a southerner, like Anna Bijns, Matthijs de Castelein and Lucas de Heere. Generally speaking, one can say that up to the middle of the sixteenth century the great majority of the writers came from the South. But this pattern changed. The South, which had always been much more culturally advanced than the North, lost its lead and slipped back into stagnation, whereas the North leapt ahead and took over the hegemony which it was not going to give up again.

It is always difficult to give simple and specific reasons for a cultural rise or decline. Political, intellectual and artistic freedom is probably one of the most important conditions for a flourishing civilization, economic prosperity is another. In the second half of the sixteenth century, and right through the seventeenth, these conditions obtained to a much higher degree in the North than in the South, owing mainly to the different courses which the revolt against Spain took. After the beginning of the revolt in the 1560s, Spanish troops gradually recovered the South, crowning their successes in 1585 with the capture of Antwerp. While the South was being reconquered, it was at the same time converted back to Roman Catholicism and cleaned up of Protestants: at first, under the Duke of Alva, with an iron fist and wholesale executions, later, under the Duke of Parma, with a little more subtlety when the Protestants were given the choice of exile. As a result many thousands of Protestants left the South in the 1580s and settled in the North. The exodus was tremendous: Ghent lost nine thousand families within a few years, Antwerp, which was hit particularly hard when the North closed the Scheldt, lost forty thousand inhabitants out of a population of a hundred thousand. This migration greatly strengthened the North culturally and economically as among the immigrants there were many scholars, scientists, merchants and manufacturers who brought in considerable intellectual and monetary capital. The parents of the

seventeenth-century poets Joost van den Vondel, Constantijn Huygens and Daniel Heinsius were among them; others were Simon Stevin, a writer, engineer, mathematician, physicist, and close collaborator of the Stadtholder Maurits; Petrus Plancius, the geographer who was the master-mind behind the epic voyages seeking a northern route to the Indies in the 1590s; Marnix van St. Aldegonde, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most eloquent enemies the Roman Catholic Church ever had; Carel van Mander, poet, painter and the first Dutch art-historian; Louis de Geer, arms manufacturer, banker and royal money-lender; Lodewijk Elsevier, the publisher who in 1580 moved his firm from Louvain to Leiden; Willem Usselincx, one of the most powerful merchants and ship owners. The departure of each of these men meant a serious loss to the South, and a great asset to the development of the North.

Also, after some initial victories, the Spanish troops suffered serious set-backs in the North when they had to abandon the sieges of Alkmaar and Leiden in 1573 and 1574. Later on, the successful campaigns of Maurits in the 1580s and 1590s resulted in an absolute stalemate along the great rivers. This stalemate, and the frozen front line which was the result of it, had far-reaching consequences, for it broke up the national unity the Burgundians had been at such pains to establish: it must be regarded as the primary cause of the division of the Low Countries into the Netherlands and Belgium and of the differences which now exist between the Dutch-speaking populations in both countries.

When the South reverted to Spanish rule, it came into an atmosphere that was not at all conducive to the development of an independent cultural life. The Reformation had stimulated the use of the vernacular, the Counter-Reformation did the opposite and discouraged the use of Dutch, the language of the rebellious and heretical North. Dutch was relegated to a secondary position in the South and became largely restricted to domestic use, while Latin and French became the languages of literature. In the North, where the Reformation had won

the day, the situation was the reverse. The military and political successes intensified the feelings of national pride which expressed themselves in a high appreciation of the vernacular. Several of the foremost writers in the North, notably Hendrick Spiegel and Dirck Coornhert, were at the same time ardent propagandists for their native language. They did more than just gratuitously proclaim Dutch to be equal or superior to any other language, they actively worked to shape it, to purify and enrich it, to regulate it, in much the same way as Thomas Wilson and George Puttenham did in England in the same period. They were also concerned about the varieties of dialect in spoken and written Dutch, and they drew up proposals aimed at building a standard language that could be used in all parts of the country. The most influential book in this respect was Spiegel's Twespraeck van de Nederduytsche Letterkunst (Dialogue of Dutch Grammar), published in 1584, in which matters of spelling, pronunciation, declension, conjugation, purification and enrichment of the language were discussed. At the same time the first attempts were made to substitute Dutch for Latin in scientific publications. The great partisan of this cause was Simon Stevin, who after he had left the South settled in Leiden and became Maurits's adviser on fortification. Stevin published books on mathematics, geography, physics and engineering in Dutch, and, determined purist as he was, created a great number of new terms for the subjects he discussed, many of which caught on, so that Dutch is now unique in having its own terminology for arithmetic, algebra, geometry, mathematics etc.

Whether Stevin came to the North for reasons of religion is uncertain; we are not even sure what his religious convictions were. With Marnix van St. Aldegonde we are on firmer ground. Marnix was a fervent Calvinist, who had studied in Geneva under Calvin, had travelled around extensively in the service of William of Orange, was burgomaster of Antwerp for some years, and then settled permanently in the North when in 1585 the city fell to Parma. As a writer he is known

for his translations from the psalms and particularly for a prose work, Biencorf der H. Roomscher Kercke (Beehive of the Holy Roman Church), of 1569. The book was an assault on the Roman Catholic Church such as there had not been before. In the form of a reply to a pamphlet by a French priest against the Protestants, it attacked the Church left, right and centre, it bombarded it with serious dogmatic arguments and sniped at it with mockery and innuendo, combining the verbal inventiveness of Rabelais with the satirical sharpness of Erasmus. The modern reader who can look at religious questions with a little more tolerance than Marnix was able to muster, will weary every now and then of Marnix's obsessive tenaciousness which leaves no argument unexhausted, but he will be over-awed by his mastery over the language. Biencorf is an exercise in prose that does not have its equal in the sixteenth century, and not in many other centuries either. It is hard to say whether his contemporaries were more impressed by the style or by the subject-matter, but we do know that the book became immensely popular and had a great influence on the development of Dutch prose. During Marnix's life it went through six editions, and after his death through about twenty more; in 1578 George Gilpin translated it into English, a year later Johann Fischart made a German adaptation of it.

Marnix is also often regarded as the author of the Dutch national anthem, the Wilhelmus , although the evidence for his authorship has never been conclusive. The Wilhelmus in its full form is a poem of fifteen stanzas which constitute an acrostic on the name of William of Orange, the Stadtholder of Holland in the early days of the revolt. In the poem William discusses his own background, the sacrifices he has made for the people in their struggle, and prays for their deliverance. The poem was one of a large collection of resistance poems, the so-called Geuzenliederen2 the first of which were published in 1574.

Another of the emigrant writers, Carel van Mander, gained great fame as an art-historian with his Schilderboeck (Book of Painters) in which he gave the biographies of a great number of Dutch, German and Italian painters. The plan of the book was clearly suggested by Vasari's Lives of the most excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), parts of which Van Mander translated and incorporated in his own work. As a painter Van Mander was a pupil of Lucas de Heere; in his book he mentions De Heere's manuscript on the history of Dutch painting and regrets bitterly that he has never been able to lay hands on it. His own Schilderboeck, apart from its value for the history of painting, is a very entertaining prose book, written with a sharp eye for detail and for characteristic biographical data, and enlivened by a great number of anecdotes. As a poet, Van Mander began very much in the Rederijker tradition with a volume of religious poetry, De Gulden Harpe (The Golden Harp), and then gradually evolved towards the Renaissance style. In the long didactic poem about the principles of painting which introduces the Schilderboeck, he made some remarks on prosody which are interesting because they show that unlike most other Dutch poets he received his Renaissance ideas from Italy rather than from France: the connoisseurs, he says, would probably have preferred him to write in the French metre, but that would have made the poem harder for him to write and more difficult for the young to understand; besides, he was not very well at home in the French metre, and therefore chose the Italian octaves, so that the poem, although printed without divisions, in fact consists of a great number of stanzas with the form abaabbcc, with each line having a feminine ending.

By the middle of the sixteenth century the traditional Rederijker poetry as we know it from the collections of Jan van Stijevoort and Jan van Doesborch, or from the work of Anna Bijns, had become out of date. The Chambers of Rhetoric had become thoroughly impregnated with the ideas

of Humanism and Renaissance and the poets began to turn away from tradition. In the North this was a gradual process and one cannot point to any full-blooded Renaissance writer of the type of Van der Noot. Some poets adhered to the old forms while writing in the spirit of the Renaissance, others used the new forms for old ideas, others again evolved by degrees from old to new.

The Humanism of the northern Chambers of Rhetoric found its most complete expression in the work of Dirck Coornhert, engraver, printer, public servant and writer. Born in 1522, he was in his forties when the revolt against Spain began and much of his work reflects the conflicts of that period. In modern terms, Coornhert was very much an engaged writer, without being committed to either the Protestant or the Roman Catholic cause. His main commitment was to the cause of tolerance. He was its great champion in days when tolerance was regarded by many as a dirty word and when life was not made easy for those who had the courage to think along subtler lines than the crude black-and-white schemes presented by the die-hards on either side. Coornhert was not lacking in courage. During the riots of 1566, when the Roman Catholic churches were sacked, and images and paintings destroyed, he reacted against the rioters and hid some church treasures in his own house. The next year, however, he was in prison as a suspected Protestant. He was closer to Protestantism than to Roman Catholicism, but his dislike of dogmatic Calvinism was intense. In 1561 he wrote a treatise against the Calvinist doctrine which Calvin himself honoured with a furious reply in which he denounced his opponent as a ‘raving dog’ and an ‘uncircumcised Goliath’. The Roman Catholics, on the other hand, suspected Coornhert because of his connections with William of Orange whom he met frequently in his capacity of secretary of the Haarlem city council. He spent some time in prison, then went into exile in Germany where he met Jan van der Noot, for whose Olympia epic he cut the engravings. After his return to Holland he continued to attack all forms

of intolerance whether Roman Catholic or Protestant in writing and in public debates, until he was forced to leave the country again. In 1585 he returned to Haarlem, determined to start an academic study at the University of Leiden (he was then 63 years old). In a letter to the University administration he promised that he would keep quiet in matters of religion and not publish anything against the ministers of the Calvinist Church, with the characteristic addendum: ‘unless they force me to it with their own publications’. Leiden seems to have turned him down, however, for Coornhert remained in Haarlem.

Coornhert was one of the most versatile and prolific writers of his time. He was an active translator, mainly of the classics - Seneca, Boethius, Cicero, the Odyssey (from the Latin) - but also from Boccaccio. As a dramatist he wrote a number of plays, mainly comedies, in the tradition of the Rederijker theatre but with the classical element of choruses after each act. His poetry, collected in the Liedboek (Song Book) is also rather traditional. He preferred the Rederijker verse to the modern method of syllable counting and was in general opposed to too many prosodic restrictions. On the other hand, he did practise the iambic metre and even wrote some sonnets. But his fame as a writer really rests on his prose, and in particular on his Zedekunst, dat is Wellevenskunste (Ethics, that is the Art of Living Well), written in 1586. It was the first prose ethic in the vernacular and was written at the instance of his younger friend Spiegel. In spite of the many borrowings from classical authors and contemporary Humanists, it is a very original and independent book in which he sets forth his personal philosophy and with great psychological insight discusses man's strengths and weaknesses, not only theoretically, but with practical recommendations for his behaviour as a social being. It is not a polemic book, but Coornhert's attitude towards intolerance and immoderateness, his aversion to dogmas such as original sin and predestination, come through very clearly. His philosophy is not specifically Protestant or Roman Catholic, but has

its roots in Erasmian Christianity, with a strong element of stoicism. Zedekunst is a monument of sixteenth-century prose, written in a clear and concise style, all the more admirable since this was the first time that Dutch prose was used for material of this kind. It was not, however, Coornhert's first prose. Apart from translations, he had also published several treatises, among them a book on prison reform where he expressed remarkably modern ideas: the prisoner should be educated and given useful work instead of being brutally treated and kept idle. Mention should also be made of his Kruythofken (Herb Garden), a book of short prose pieces on topical subjects, containing a famous chapter on the killing of a heretic, in which in less than two pages he demolishes the arguments of the fanatics and at the same time paints an unforgettable picture of the court official and his victim:

‘My dearest man, why do you so obstinately stick to these accursed errors of yours, or don't you believe that there is a Hell?’ ‘I certainly believe that there is a Hell’, said the old man, ‘but that I am in error, I am not aware’. ‘Yes, you are in error’, said the court official, ‘You are in such horrible error that if you should die in it you will be damned forever’. ‘Are you sure of that’, said the old man. ‘Yes, surer than sure’, said the court official, now hoping to gain half the credit of converting the old man; but the latter gave him a completely unexpected reply, saying: ‘So then you will be the murderer of my poor soul’. (whereupon the court official had the old man executed as quickly as he could).

In the South, Coornhert had a kindred spirit in Jan Baptist Houwaert, who was also for all practical purposes a Protestant - which cost him a year in jail - but a very liberal and tolerant one, critical of all dogmatic pedantry. Like Coornhert, he was a great translator and in general a very productive writer of plays, didactic poetry and short lyrics in the Rederijker manner. He was famous in his time for Pegasides Pleyn ende den Lusthof der Maeghden (Pegasus's Plain and the Pleasure Garden of the Maidens), a very elaborate ethic for women, consisting of no less than

58,000 lines and written to the astonishment of his contemporaries within the space of six months. In spite of the tempo of writing, it is a very long-winded poem, and the modern reader has great difficulty in sharing the enthusiasm with which the sixteenth-century writers, including Jan van der Noot, greeted it. Placed next to the work of Van der Noot himself - who was only five years younger - both form and prosody of Houwaert's poem strike one as rather old-fashioned.

In the North, too, the generation that followed Coornhert produced several kindred spirits, of which Hendrick Spiegel, born in 1549, was the most important. Spiegel shared many of Coornhert's views on matters of language and literature, politics and religion, although he himself never left the Roman Catholic Church. Spiegel carried out a plan which Coornhert had cherished for many years but had never been able to complete, namely the writing of a grammar of Dutch, Twe-spraeck van de Nederduytsche Letterkunst ) (Dialogue of Dutch Grammar), followed by works on dialectics and rhetoric. His way of thinking and his social attitude are neatly characterized by his refusal to accept a public position to which the city of Amsterdam had appointed him: in a letter of appeal to the provincial government he pointed out that his conscience forbade him to accept the appointment because he had once sworn an oath of allegiance to the city administration which was bound by agreement to maintain the Roman Catholic religion; then the administration had changed, had become Protestant, and he had even renounced his citizenship of Amsterdam to avoid being asked for a new oath; he could never accept an appointment which would make him break his former oath; he further considered that he would be more useful to the country as a writer than as a reluctant public servant. Spiegel won this, that is to say, the government regarded him as ‘of such strange opinion and disposition that it would not be advisable to use him in a public office’, and imposed a fine. Spiegel paid the fine, with the request that the money might be spent on the poor. This

incident characterizes Spiegel as much as it does the government, and shows that in times of great stress and much extremism the opinion of a dissenting writer was respected, even if he was considered a crank. The problem of social responsibility was a very concrete one in those days and Spiegel came back to it in his only play, entitled Numa ofte Amptsweygheringe (Numa or the Refusal of Office), which dramatizes a story by Plutarch about Numa's doubts and self-searchings before he allowed himself to be crowned king of Rome.

Spiegel's main work is Hertspiegel (Mirror of the Heart), a philosophical poem in seven cantos in which he describes his outlook on life. It is clearly reminiscent of Coornhert's Zedekunst and must have been strongly influenced by it, although Spiegel's philosophy differs from Coornhert's in some respects, for example in his insistence on the indivisible unity of God, Nature, Reason and Virtue, against Coornhert's endeavours to define them separately. An important difference between the two works is that Coornhert's book was written as a didactic book, almost as a textbook of ethical behaviour, whereas Spiegel stressed that Hertspiegel was written for himself, to help him formulate and elucidate his own thoughts. That he was sincere in this is supported by the fact that he made no effort to have it published: it appeared in 1614, three years after his death. Hertspiegel is a more personal book than Zedekunst, more concerned with Spiegel's personal problems than with those of others or with generalities, more a demonstration of his own Christian-Stoic philosophy than a handbook with general prescriptions. It was written very much in the modern manner, in strictly counted alexandrines and regularly alternating pairs of masculine and feminine rhymes. There is a considerable formal difference between this poem and his earlier work, and it seems that Spiegel rather suddenly came to appreciate the Renaissance prosody. In his Twe-spraeck of 1584 he appeared to be unaware of its existence, whereas a year later, in a theoretical poem Kort Begrijp des Redekavelings

(Summary of Dialectics) he recommended and used the new forms.

If one wants to use the term Renaissance for Spiegel - and in view of his prosody, his concern for his native language, his individualism, his knowledge and appreciation of the classics and his philosophical foundations it would be difficult not to - one should be aware that there is nothing in his work of the exuberance or the sensuousness that is usually associated with Renaissance poetry, nor anything of the self-glorification of the poet, Spiegel is consistently levelheaded and sober-minded, and also unduly modest about his own achievements as a poet. In the first canto of Hertspiegel he states bluntly that he is not a poet, and turns against those who call themselves poets and violate the truth with their exaggerated praise of each other, with their farces and their foreign-inspired love poetry: he would not even like to be a poet if it meant being part of this.

It is probably true that writers like Coornhert and Spiegel and many others did not consider themselves artists and regarded literature as no more than a pastime, diverting and useful, but not all-important. Jan van der Noot, with his exalted ideas on poetry and the place of the poet, stood quite alone. Spiegel's friend and fellow-Amsterdamer Roemer Visscher went even further than Spiegel in his show of modesty, so far in fact that one sometimes suspects that a certain coquetry lurks behind the denigrating terms in which he described his own work. Visscher published his poems - admittedly, many years after they had been written - under various belittling titles: Brabbeling (Jabbering), Rommelsoo (Mixed Bag), Tepelwercken (Trifles). Whether his modesty was sincere or not, it was appropriate, for he was a lightweight poet and most of his work was trifling. He combined a delight in the description of broadly farcical situations with an uncontrollable urge to pun, a combination which only rarely led to anything approaching humour. He was at his best in his satirical poems, in his attacks on the clergy or on social evils, but on the whole his poetry palls quickly

because of its lack of sophistication. So far as form is concerned, he belonged to the modernists but his subject-matter and his way of thinking were closely related to the Rederijker tradition. Visscher was a Rederijker, and an active one: like Spiegel, he was for some time head of the Amsterdam Chamber ‘De Eglantier’. Visscher and Spiegel, and later on Hooft, brought the Chamber to great prosperity and raised its standard so much that it became the most influential Chamber in the Low Countries in which in later years Vondel, Hooft and Bredero could feel at home.

While the Amsterdam Chamber of Rhetoric became the centre of the Renaissance poetry in the North, Leiden developed into the centre of Humanist studies. After the city had successfully withstood the siege of 1574, under the most abominable conditions of famine and epidemics, it had been rewarded with the establishment of a university, the first in the North. The new university was able to attract several scholars of great international fame, among them Justus Lipsius, who held a chair at Leiden until 1592 when he went over to the Roman Catholic Church and moved to Louvain, and the equally famous Josephus Scaliger, son of Julius Caesar Scaliger. One of the governors of the university was Jan van der Does, better known under the latinized name of Janus Douza, a nobleman who had distinguished himself as one of the most energetic leaders of the defence during the siege, and who was also a Neo-Latin poet of great repute. Apart from his translation of Janus Secundus's Basia which he made together with Jan van Hout, Douza wrote hardly anything in Dutch. On the whole the atmosphere in Leiden seemed biased against the use of Dutch in literature, possibly under the influence of the university, where the official language was Latin. Leiden was to produce the great Neo-Latinists of the seventeenth century, Daniel Heinsius and Hugo Grotius, whereas Amsterdam, which had no university, was the home of Spiegel and Roemer Visscher, propagandists for the native language, and was to produce or adopt three of the four great poets in Dutch of the seventeenth

century: Hooft, Vondel, Bredero. In Leiden the only poet of any importance writing in Dutch in this period was Jan van Hout, friend and collaborator of Douza. Van Hout was also a friend of Spiegel's yet cast in an entirely different mould. Instead of shunning public offices in the way Spiegel did, he seemed to collect them: he was town-clerk of Leiden, secretary of the Board of Governors of the University, public notary, manager of the city press, and he also made quite a name for himself as a man of action during the siege. As a Protestant, his friendship with several avowed Roman Catholics seems to speak for his tolerance and liberal-mindedness, an impression which is not enhanced by a well-known anecdote, which describes him as sitting in church, listening with mounting indignation to the minister who preached about the struggle against Spain as a fight for religion rather than one for freedom, then drawing his pistol and saying to the burgomaster who was sitting next to him: ‘Shall I bring him down?’ Whether the story is true or not, the aggressiveness that speaks from it is matched by his attack on the old poetry in an address delivered at the University of Leiden as an introduction to his translation of George Buchanan's Franciscanus. In his opening sentence, which runs into thirty-eight lines of print without jumping the rails of syntax, he derided the taste of the masses and made a plea for individuality and independence in literature: ‘I have more regard for the judgment of the least among you than for all the criticism of those who mistakenly call themselves Rhetoricians’. In his poetry, too, he ridiculed the Rederijkers, and with a pun on the popular term of retrozijnen, called them retrozwijnen: retro-swine. His attacks on the Rederijkers suggest the influence of Joachim du Bellay who had made very similar attacks on the old school of French poetry, and Van Hout's ideas were undoubtedly strongly influenced by the poets of the Pléiade. He was an active translator of Ronsard and Desportes, as well as of Petrarch, Buchanan and Janus Secundus, but not many of these translations have been preserved. In general,

most of his work has been lost to us; he published little during his lifetime and bequeathed all his manuscripts to a friend who seems to have lost them all when he was forced to leave the country. All that is left is a collection of about twenty poems, some prose including the first part of what was to be a full history of the city of Leiden, and a humorous play in five acts, Loterij-spel (Lottery Play). It is not enough to enable us to make an accurate assessment of the literary value of his work, but it does show him as a very progressive poet who even wrote some blank verse, a daring venture that was not repeated in Dutch until the eighteenth century.

Jan van Hout's influence was probably greater than the extent of his own work would suggest. Time and again he is mentioned by his contemporaries as the master of the new poetry. In the introduction to the poem on the principles of painting, Carel van Mander names only Van Hout when he writes about the new iambic verse in Dutch. Spiegel, too, in the fourth canto of Hertspiegel, mentions only Van Hout and Coornhert as the representatives of the new poetry in the North. It was probably also Jan van Hout who was responsible for Spiegel's transition from the old to the new style in his Kort Begrijp des Redekavelings which was dedicated to Van Hout. Even Janus Douza, who took no great interest in the vernacular literature, praised him as the poet who wrote a pure Dutch, as against the Rederijkers who in his opinion had wrecked the language. Van Hout may also have had great value as an intermediary between the Neo-Latin poets and the poets who wrote in the vernacular. He was linked to both by feelings of admiration and criticism. He was Douza's friend and admirer, yet in his attack on the Rederijkers he criticized in one and the same breath also the poets who despised the vernacular and wrote in foreign languages. On the other hand, his criticism of the Rederijkers did not mean that he turned away from them: he took part in their functions and wrote his play for them. Through his friendship with Spiegel and Coornhert, and his influence on

Spiegel's development, he also served as an intermediary between Leiden and Amsterdam. Though the Leiden school may not have directly contributed as much to Dutch literature as did Amsterdam, it did have a considerable influence on the course Dutch literature was taking through this intermediary function of Jan van Hout and through the contacts that existed in the seventeenth century between the Leideners Hugo Grotius and Daniel Heinsius on the one hand, and Vondel, Hooft and Huygens on the other.


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