De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2004

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Summaries

Kornee van der Haven
‘That the Theatre Should Never Slander or Libel Religion...’ The Revised Theatre Prints of 1729 and the Prohibition of Religious or Indecent Plays in the Amsterdam Theatre.

During the early eighteenth century a ban was imposed on religious theatre in the Schouwburg of Amsterdam. The orthodox Calvinist church government of Amsterdam succeeded only temporarily in its attempts to close the city theatre. In 1677 the governors of the theatre to some extent pandered to the strong Calvinist criticism of the Amsterdam theatre and decided to formulate several ‘theatre-laws’. One of these laws defined the ban on religious theatre while others stressed the importance of banning indecent and immoral plays as well. There are only a few examples of attempts on the part of the church government to influence directly the contents of the plays that were part of the theatre programme between 1680 and 1750. During these years the governors of the theatre sincerely tried to observe the theatre-laws of 1677. The Amsterdam Schouwburg was in fact subject to the self-censorship of its own governors. A unique and interesting case occurred in the year 1729. Because of a conflict with one of the theatre-printers over the privilege on printing the texts of different plays, the governors of the Schouwburg stressed their right to revise these texts any time they desired to do so. They wrote to the burgomasters that some older plays could no longer be presented to the public in their original version. Obviously the governors of the orphanage in Amsterdam who, together with the governors of the old men's house, were the managers of the theatre, had a financial interest in using this argument. To show the importance of maintaining the privilege on printing the textbooks, two plays were reprinted and strongly expurgated: Vondel's Gysbrecht van Aemstel and Brederode's Spaanschen Brabander. The expurgated textbooks show us how the governors of the Schouwburg excluded any references to religion and especially to God, and also demonstrate how they removed passages in which people of high descent were criticized, as well as passages containing indecent language.

Edwina Hagen
‘The Giant Whore’. Fear of Catholics in the Royalist Political Weekly Press, 1781-1788

On the basis of political weeklies published by orangists in the 1780s, this article examines the development of Dutch antipapism. The orangists believed in the Stadtholder as the protector of the public reformed church and with that the religious and political status quo. In general antipapism in the orangist press manifested itself when authors attacked the pro-French politics of the patriots, who critized Stadtholder William V's preference for an alliance with England. According to them the ‘enlightened’ French still worshipped the ‘Whore of Babylon’ and given the opportunity would reintroduce papist practices such as the Inquisition to the Netherlands, ruining its precious protestant character.

Two political events increased the prominence of the Catholic issue in the orangist press. The first was a proposal made by William V on 9 October 1783 to exclude all non-reformed citizens from public office. The second was the decision by the States of Holland on 25 Jan-

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uary 1787 to abolish the practice of ‘recognition money’, costs Catholics had to make in order to receive dispensation of anti-Catholic measures (‘plakkaten’).

Politically the patriots and orangists were rivals, but both parties believed in the idea that religion could provide a unifying moral basis to the nation. It was widely believed that religion enabled the citizens of the Republic to shape their inner selves in a moral sense, which would help them to become upstanding members of the community, regardless of their religious background. It thus included Catholics as well as the other religious groups as long as they ‘behaved’ themselves. This rather mild tone changed into a very hostile one, when the Catholics in 1787 gained one of their first political successes.

Over all, most antipapist remarks in the orangist weeklies (and pamphlets) were directly aimed at their political enemy, the Patriot movement, rather than at the Catholics themselves. They were designed to erode the reputation of the patriots, by calling them Jesuit intriguers and by recalling popish plots against the Protestants in the past while simultaneously depicting patriot leaders as crypto-Catholics. In this respect the way antipapism functioned in orangist magazines was very similar to the role it fulfilled in the spectatorial press, the difference being that here it was the orthodox Protestants who were being accused of papist ideology.

Thierry Allain
‘Without Help or Assistance from Outside’. The Celebration of the Enkhuizen Revolt against the Spanish in 1772

The history of Enkhuizen in the eighteenth century is characterized by a spectacular decline. This maritime city of Holland lost two thirds of her population between 1622 and 1795. The collapse of the herring fishing and the growth of Amsterdam are the chief explanations of this. In these circumstances the celebration of the bicentenary of the Revolt against the Duke of Alva takes on a special significance. Were the festivities of 21 May 1772 only an ordinary commemoration, or rather an endeavour to push forward the glorious past of the city in a context of slump?

The magistrates of Enkhuizen organized gorgeous festivities throughout the day and well into the night: a show of orange flags, ringing of the bells, religious ceremonies, parade of the militia, a dinner-party in the town hall with speeches and declamation of poems. The citizens of Enkhuizen seem to have had a share in the celebrations, according to the witnesses and to the amount of money collected in the churches. The poems, play, and historic summary especially printed for the commemoration show a common theme. They stress the horrible dictatorship of the Duke of Alva, against which the city appears as a cornerstone of Dutch freedom. According to these texts - promoted by the city council - Enkhuizen played a glorious part in the national past. The city could be proud.

We cannot speak, in this case, of an ordinary commemoration. The vroedschap of Enkhuizen organized the celebrations of 1772 to deflect attention from the economic problems of the city. The citizens were invited to unite around this sense of identity: as champions of freedom they might feel better motivated in dealing with their present problems.

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Peter Rietbergen
Becoming famous in the eighteenth century. Carl-Peter Thunberg (1743-1828) between Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan

Thunberg's fame, both in Sweden and in Europe at large, is now a thing of the past. Yet after his return from a protracted stay in South Africa and the East Indies in the service of the Dutch East India Company, he was hailed as one of his country's leading scholars on account of his merits as a botanist and the publication of his travel reports. Though many people may have read all volumes, they undoubtedly were most interested in the part describing his long sojourn in Japan. After all, since the publication of Kaempfer's analysis of the closed island empire in the 1720s - describing Japan as he had seen it in the 1690s - no first-hand accounts had been published. Consequently, Thunberg was able to still the hunger of a Europe craving for information about that enigmatic country - a Europe moreover that, accustomed to the positive, indeed enthusiastic appreciation of China, was willing to see Japan in an equally rosy light. In their constant self-reflection and self-criticism, many literate Europeans needed these two countries as models of an ‘enlightened’ society and culture. Little did they know that Thunberg, as indeed many of his predecessors, had been unable to look beyond the surface of Japanese society, beyond, that is, the ‘official’ world of the Tokugawa shoguns. This had posed severe restrictions on his analysis - for which, moreover, he had borrowed freely from the books written by earlier visitors to Japan. At the same time, this situation allowed him to idealize what he saw and, in consequence, to offer Europe the idealized vision he himself craved, too.