Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720 by Joyce Goggin and Frans De Bruyn (review)

Why should theatre historians invest in a book about a financial scandal in the Netherlands? People have been investing in commodities for as long as traders have sailed the seas, but the first stock market was in Antwerp, and the first joint stock was issued by the Dutch East India Company. By early in the 18^th century, investing in stocks or commodities was popular across Europe despite the way that bubbles occurred, a bubble being the point when a stock’s price is far higher than its value. When investors ignore this disparity, they lose their money when the market crashes. Specifically in 1720, investors in England, France, and the Netherlands lost fortunes. The South Sea Bubble in London, the Mississippi Bubble in France, and the Wind Trade (or windhandel) in the Netherlands ruined thousands.

As one might imagine, such an economic collapse created a “cultural outpouring” of mocking satire, as well as angry demands to repair the system, particularly in the Netherlands. As Goggin and De Bruyn write,

the scope and complexity of the Dutch cultural response to the windhandel, evidenced by the volume of publications that it generated (from economic and political pamphlets to satirical poems, plays, and engravings), is considerably greater than the comparable output at the time in Paris and London.

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This book offers translations and close analysis of two plays by Pieter Langendijk, the best among the 12 Dutch plays written. But it also places those plays in a cosmopolitan context, discussing intertextual relationships among those two Dutch plays, the eight French plays on the Mississippi Bubble, and the twenty-four English plays, to say nothing of the half dozen older plays by Jonson, Shadwell, Centlivre, and Taverner that were revised with reference to the South Sea Bubble (255–262).

The introduction by De Bruyn explains the situation briefly, offers a good account of Langendijk’s life, and introduces the first English translations of Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders and Harlequin Stock-Jobber. The translations by Goggin, Merlijn Erken, and De Bruyn offer new prose renditions of verse plays. They have chosen prose so that the reader can more easily follow the meaning, a reasonable decision. Given the chaos of any stock market, especially as it crashes, the action in both plays is zany enough to make the prose version both great fun and occasionally confusing to a reader who is not a business aficionado. Excellent notes help clarify such moments, and the editors have also translated many notes from C. H. P Meijer, a nineteenth-century Dutch scholar who prepared the standard scholarly edition of the play. They also include a translation of Meijer’s 1892 preface to that translation. The volume does not stop with the text itself, but also offers a full and learned set of six essays to supply cultural context.

The first of these is Helen Paul’s “John Law, the South Sea Bubble, and Dutch Satire,” which begins with an explanation of what a bubble is. She then offers a discussion of John Law, “an illustrious figure who has been portrayed variously as a ladies’ man, a swash-buckling entrepreneur, and a short-sighted monomaniac” (108). She explains Law’s involvement with international banking, his creation of France’s Banque Générale Privée (and the introduction of paper money), as well as his role in the Mississippi Bubble. Turning to Langendijk’s play, Paul demonstrates how the plays make sophisticated use Law’s of economic innovations to satirize greed and folly.

The essay that follows Paul’s is Henk Looijesteijn’s “Opportunity in an Age of Folly: The Bubble of 1720 in the Dutch Republic.” In it, the discussion moves from the bubbles in England and France to the Dutch bubble or Wind Trade. The writing in this essay is perhaps the...