Staging the merchant: commercial vices and the politics of stereotyping in early modern Dutch theatre

Abstract

The business sense of the merchant class has for a long time represented Dutch identity both nationally and internationally. In this article, the author utilizes early modern Dutch theatre to research the phases that this identification process had to go through before Dutch character and Dutch commerce could become definitively interlinked in the national literary imagination. The well-known negative stereotype of the money-grubbing merchant gradually transformed into that of the honest merchant, a native variant with whom the Dutchman could and should identify without any sense of opprobrium.