Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic

This chapter deals with the writing, publishing, and staging of epic drama in the Dutch Republic. In the flourishing cultural climate of the Republic epic poetry was much loved, but ‘epic drama’, as such, is not a category recognized in either modern or contemporary poetics, and thus it is necessary to establish what would have counted as ‘epic’ at this time. The subset constructed here consists of drama based on what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources consider epic poetry, classical and newly composed, but also drama that takes other subject matter (biblical or historical) and dramatizes this in an ‘epic’ manner. This is illustrated by an analysis of the play Gysbreght van Aemstel (1638) by Joost van den Vondel, which treats subject matter taken from Amsterdam’s medieval history in a Virgilian manner: a new epic drama befitting the Dutch Republic’s new Rome.