Dutch Drama and the Company's Orient

Author(s):
Kuruppath, M.
Published
2014
Publication type
Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, three Dutch playwrights who are not known to have ventured beyond the precincts of Europe dramatized historical events which occurred in Asia. The episodes which became the plots for their plays were either contemporaneous or occurred very close to their own times. This study analyses these plays, namely Joost van den Vondel’s Zungchin (1667), Frans van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan (1745) and Onno Zwier van Haren’s Agon (1769). It studies the information networks which made these literary endeavours possible and evaluates the role played by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in transferring information about these historical events from Asia to the Dutch Republic. This study also appraises how Asia was represented in these plays and how these characterizations were influenced by its channels of information transfer. This study concludes that these plays revolved around the idea of transfer and the information that the playwrights used originated in the archives of the VOC. This information consequently featured in popular printed works in the Republic which provided the playwrights with the necessary fodder for their plays. This study argues that the striking feature of this transcontinental passage of information was the metamorphosis of Oriental imagery

Dutch dramaDutch East India Companyinformation transferRepresentation
Defense date
2014-11-04
Language
English
Supervisor(s)
Gommans, J.J.L.
Qualification
Ph.D.
Degree granting institution
Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, Leiden
hdl
1887/29589

Funding

Sponsorship
The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) sponsored my PhD research. The Leids Universiteits Fonds sponsored my participation in the Conference on Dutch Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 15th to 17th September, 2011. The paper presented at the conference was published in "Shifting the Compass: Pluricontinental Connections in Dutch Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Jeroen Dewulf, Olf Praamstra and Michiel van Kempen ed. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 91-111. A revised version of this article features as chapter two in this dissertation.