Reading Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: An Emblem Book of the Folly of Speculation in the Bubble Year 1720

Of the many polemical, literary, and artistic productions inspired by the great financial speculation that swept across Europe in 1719-20, the lavish folio Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid or The Great Picture [Scene] of Folly, which first appeared in Amsterdam at the end of 1720, is perhaps the most remarkable and undoubtedly the most elaborate. Het groote tafereel gathers numerous topical materials from satirical and didactic poems, plays, and farces to polemical pamphlets, engravings, and conditien (the terms of subscription for many of the Bubble companies hastily formed in the Netherlands in 1720). The collected riches of the volume are a blessing to the historian, since many of the texts and prints are preserved nowhere else. But they are, by the same token, a bane to the bibliographer, for whom the sheer number of texts and their accretion with the passage of time have greatly complicated the task of describing the book's provenance and history. Some sense of its bibliographical complexities can be gained from the last issue of Eighteenth-Century Life, in which I recount the book's genesis and publication. ¹

Yet the fact that Het groote tafereel remains something of a bibliographical puzzle need not hinder us from critical reassessment thanks to new strategies in literary and cultural theory for reading such heterogeneous texts. An awareness, for example, of intertextuality, of the relations between literary and other kinds of texts (in this case, the juxtaposition of poems and plays with legal terms of subscription for commercial enterprises), can offer insights into the compiler's aims and can shed light on the kinds of reading practices that made sense of the resulting melange. Similarly, an awareness of the interaction of "high" and "low" or "official" and "popular" culture in the eighteenth century can illuminate (among other peculiarities) the inclusion of a set of playing cards and numerous vulgar engravings alongside more sophisticated prints, or the insertion of popular broadsides, ballads, and doggerel verse alongside the more self-consciously literary productions of such writers as Pieter Langendijk and Gijsbert Tijsens. The book is a text composed of texts, a kind of anthology, which demands an awareness of the interaction between the larger genre of the book as a whole and the different literary and artistic genres, especially satiric and didactic forms, of the book's component works.

Het groote tafereel is not simply a book: it is a unique record of the full-scale cultural response that an important economic or political event could generate in eighteenth-century western Europe. As such, the book stands as a kind of paradigmatic instance, and in learning how to read it, we come to understand how different kinds and levels of cultural production in a society interact and influence one another. For the student of English culture, the book has an especial usefulness. Not only were the Dutch engravers an important source of Bubble prints in London, but their work led to the subsequent flowering of graphic satire in Georgian England. As Ronald Paulson reminds us, "the influx of emblematic satires from Amsterdam...served the same function as the migration of the Huguenot silversmiths and reproductive engravers: they set English engravers first to copying and then to inventing their own versions, the ultimate consequence of which was an indigenous tradition of graphic satire." ²

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Perhaps the best place to begin a critical reading of Het groote tafereel is with the "Na-berigt" or "Afterword" that appears at the end of the initial collection of poems in the volume. (The "Poems" section of the book was subsequently enlarged, in two stages, and eventually more than doubled in size.) The "Na-berigt" is the only real indication we have of the compiler's (or compilers') reasons for gathering the materials that comprise the volume. Undoubtedly commercial...