'Where at the Doorway Crouches Revenge'. The 'Floris V Plays' (1613-1638) as a Revisitation of Revenge Tragedy in the Republic of the United Provinces

It was P.C. Hooft who for the first time in 1613 staged a crucial episode of the history of Amsterdam and the County of Holland: the conspiracy which led around 1300 to Count Floris V’s assassination and its aftermath of revenge. The vicissitudes of medieval Amsterdam evoked variously the (still on-going) Revolt of the Provinces against the Spanish rule and their dramatization was meant as a contribution to topical political and constitutional discourse in the young Republic. Other playwrights (Suffridus Sixtinus, J.J. Colevelt) added other episodes and perspectives in the ensuing years. In 1637, Joost van den Vondel inaugurated the first stone theatre in Amsterdam by bringing on stage the culminating episode of the revenge on the conspirators: the siege and attack to Amsterdam. In my paper I shortly discuss how these tragedies are partially encoded as ‘revenge plays’. I mostly focus on Vondel’s play, which has been barely interpreted as such, despite its overt Senecan intertextuality and its allusions to both the Argive and the Theban mythic cycles. I contend that this mythical framework, mediated by ancient and modern dramatic intertexts, is latently conjured up in the play and importantly contributes to the creation of meaning. However, its anthropological, religious, political, juridical, gendered assumptions are subverted in the end: when the circularity of mutual revenge is broken and overcome, there rises an utterly new perspective.