Redefining the Dutch: Dryden’s Appropriation of National Images from Renaissance Drama in Amboyna

It was that memorable day, in the first Summer of the late War, when our Navy ingag’d the Dutch: a day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed Fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the command of the greater half of the Globe, the commerce of Nations, and the riches of the Universe.

(8)

Dryden thus begins his Essay of Dramatick Poesie: four friends discuss the nature of drama as they wait for the outcome of one of the battles in the Second Anglo-Dutch War. An Essay of Dramatick Poesie was probably written during the plague-induced closure of the theaters in 1666, a mere six years after drama returned from its eighteen-year hiatus. By the time Dryden penned the essay, Spanish naval power was on the wane, and the English and the Dutch were indeed the possessors of “the two most mighty and best appointed Fleets” in history; moreover, the contest between the two nations was indeed a battle that had great repercussions, certainly in “the commerce of Nations,” even if “the riches of the Universe” were not literally at stake. There were likewise vast portions—though not perhaps “the greater half”—of the globe in dispute, as England and the Netherlands both held extensive colonial territories. These territories were mostly in the same areas: North America, the Caribbean, and “East India,” as the official trading companies of both nations termed southern Asia and Indonesia.

Dryden’s famous discussion of drama in the Restoration literally begins with his striking redefinition of the Dutch. A serious student of Renaissance drama—as he is about to demonstrate—Dryden was familiar with former images of the Dutch in English drama: friendly foreign workers in early Elizabethan plays like The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Englishmen for My Money; military allies based on shared religion and the common Spanish enemy in 1599’s A Larum For London; and political opportunists in the changing geopolitical landscape of 1619’s Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt. Now, however, Dryden’s “Essay” presents the Dutch as open and sworn enemies of England. In 1672,¹ four years after the 1668 publication of An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Dryden would write once again about a conflict between the English and the Dutch, but not the one he had witnessed during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1666, nor about the Third Anglo-Dutch War that was raging even as he wrote. Instead, Dryden returns to the old sore spot, the subject that the English nation could still rally round fifty years after the fact: Amboyna. In February of 1623, several English citizens who worked on the East Indian island of Amboyna, including the overseer of English operations on the island, Captain Gabriel Towerson, had been charged with treason by the Dutch. Things escalated quickly, and soon some ten to twelve Englishmen were dead, and reports of gruesome torture by means of fire and water reached England (Raman 18, 197; Airey 72).

Dryden’s treatment of these events in the play Amboyna, or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants has been called “propaganda” by critics like Jennifer L. Airey (71), J. Douglas Canfield (110), Shankar Raman (200), and James Thompson (211). Dryden’s use of anti-Dutch pamphlets—hardly objective sources—from the 1620s has been well documented by Robert Markley (5–6), Steven Pincus (25, n.1), and Candy Schille. Canfield (110) and Bridget Orr (159) both note that Dryden recasts English merchants as gentry and the Dutch traders as boors. However, one important tool at the disposal of the author of An Essay of Dramatick Poesie has not been fully addressed: Dryden’s conscious use of tropes and stereotypes from earlier English plays. In Amboyna, Dryden assigns to the Dutch negative traits associated with Spain, the traditional enemy in Renaissance drama, thus redefining the Dutch as Great Britain’s most formidable foe in the Restoration geopolitical climate dominated by commerce and colonialism. Dryden’s rescripting of the Dutch uses Renaissance stereotypes to recast the place of the Dutch in...