The comedic sublime in a dynamic of worlds: the work of Frans Hals in a Dutch Baroque

Abstract

The relation between the sublime and the comic has never been fully developed theoretically. In the European context laughter and the sublime would seem to be awkward partners. Yet in the work of Hals the two are brought together, provoking the question of how the sublime is related, formally and in terms of content, to happiness and the comic. It is possible on the basis of Hals’s work to define a distinctly Dutch baroque that prefigures the unfolding of key philosophical issues concerning the nature of history and the actualization of worlds.