Vondel

Joost van den Vondel
Joost van den Vondel by Philip de Koninck (1665)
Born	(1587-11-17)17 November 1587 Cologne, Holy Roman Empire
Died	5 February 1679(1679-02-05) (aged 91) Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
Occupation	Writer, playwright
Period	Dutch Golden Age
Spouse	Mayken de Wolff
Children	4 children

Joost van den Vondel (Dutch: [ˈjoːst fɑn dɛn ˈvɔndəl]; 17 November 1587 – 5 February 1679) was a Dutch poet, writer and playwright. He is considered the most prominent Dutch poet and playwright of the 17th century. His plays are the ones from that period that are still most frequently performed, and his epic Joannes de Boetgezant (1662), on the life of John the Baptist, has been called the greatest Dutch epic.

Performances of his theatre pieces occurred regularly until the 1960s. The most visible was the annual performance, on New Year's Day from 1637 to 1968, of Gijsbrecht van Aemstel.

Vondel remained productive until a very old age. Several of his most notable plays like Lucifer (play) () and Adam in Exile () were written after 1650, when he was already 65, and his final play Noah (play) (), written at the age of eighty, is considered one of his finest.

Vondel was born on 17 November 1587 on the Große Witschgasse in Cologne, Holy Roman Empire. His parents were Mennonites of Antwerpian descent. In 1595, probably because of their religious conviction, they fled to Utrecht, and from there, they eventually moved to Amsterdam in the newly formed Dutch Republic.

At the age of 23, Vondel married Mayken de Wolff. Together they had four children, of whom two died in infancy. After the death of his father in 1608, Vondel managed the family hosiery shop on the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam. In the meantime, he began to learn Latin and became acquainted with famous poets such as Roemer Visscher.

Around the year 1641, he converted to Catholicism. This was a great shock to most of his fellow countrymen because the main conviction and de facto state religion in the Republic was Calvinist Protestantism. It is still unclear why he became a Catholic although his love for a Catholic lady may have played a role in this (Mayken de Wolff had died in 1635).