‘Sincere Simplicity’: Gerbrand Bredero’s Apprenticeship with Coornhert and Spiegel

Abstract

Like many authors in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch poet and prose writer Gerbrand Bredero prided himself on his defence of the mother tongue. The main reason for Bredero’s preference can be found in his consideration for the ‘unlearned’ public, perhaps to be associated with his being ‘unlearned’ himself. In his appreciation of the mother tongue, he closely responds to predecessors like Dirck Coornhert and Hendrik Spiegel. Moreover, he shared ideas about purism and ‘language building’ with the leading voices of the Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, of which Bredero was a member. In this article, it will be shown how and to what extent linguistic aspects of Bredero’s prose are in line with his Amsterdam predecessors. Some of the imagery used by Bredero fits in with the idiom of Coornhert, while Spiegel’s writing exemplified the use of innovative compound words and genitives. Though Bredero is far less extreme in his experimentation with both forms, he did not refrain from leaving his own creative mark on language use, as a supposed result of a direct and active focus on common, Amsterdam burghers.