Joost van den Vondel

Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) was born at Cologne to Anabaptist parents who had fled the Spanish Netherlands, and was brought up in Amsterdam, where he worked in his father's hosiery business and wrote in his spare hours. Largely self-taught, he learned Latin and Greek late, and through friends such as Hooft, Grotius and Vossius became the leading poet of the Dutch Golden Age. He wrote satires, occasional verse, hymns, translations and, above all, verse tragedies on biblical and classical themes.

His best-known plays are Gysbreght van Aemstel (1637), long performed at the Amsterdam theatre on New Year's Day, and Lucifer (1654), the drama of the revolt in Heaven that has often been set beside Milton's Paradise Lost. Palamedes (1625), an attack on the judicial murder of Oldenbarnevelt, brought him a heavy fine. Vondel began as a Mennonite, sided with the Arminians, and in his later years became a Catholic.

The poems here are the English verse translations from John Bowring and Harry S. van Dyk, Batavian Anthology (London, 1824): choruses from his plays and a few shorter pieces. Lucifer is given in full, in Leonard Charles van Noppen's verse translation of 1898, among the long works.