Joost van den Vondel was born in Cologne to Mennonite parents who had fled persecution in Antwerp, and the family moved on until they settled in Amsterdam when he was about ten. Amsterdam was then becoming the richest city in Europe, and a refuge for religious dissenters of every kind. Vondel would become its poet.

He did not have a learned education. He went into the family business, selling silk and stockings from a shop in the Warmoesstraat, near the old harbor, and taught himself Latin as a grown man so that he could read the classical poets. He wrote poems for weddings, funerals and public events, translated Virgil and Ovid, and wrote plays, more than thirty of them, many on biblical subjects.

He was also brave. When the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was executed in 1619 after a religious and political struggle, Vondel wrote a play, Palamedes (1625), about a just man destroyed by his enemies. Everybody knew who it was really about. He was fined, and the play made him famous.

In 1638, Amsterdam opened its first city theatre, the Schouwburg, with Vondel’s new play Gijsbrecht van Aemstel, set during the medieval siege and burning of Amsterdam. It is a story of loss and hope set at Christmas, and the theatre staged it at New Year almost every year until 1968.

In his fifties, to the shock of many of his Protestant friends, Vondel became a Catholic. His great drama Lucifer (1654), about the angel’s rebellion against God, was banned after only two performances when the city’s Reformed ministers objected. Some scholars think Milton may have known it when he wrote Paradise Lost.

Vondel’s old age was hard. His son ran up huge debts, and Vondel, in his seventies, took a job as a clerk at the city pawnshop to repay them. He worked there for about ten years. He lived to ninety-one. Amsterdam’s largest park, the Vondelpark, is named for him, and his statue stands in it.