Civic Babylonian Pride in Vondel’s Mars Tamed: Baroque Allegory Performing Contradiction in the Dutch Republic

In 1647, one year ahead of the official celebrations of the Peace of Westphalia, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel published a long panegyric called De getemde Mars (‘Mars Tamed’), a poem fully translated into English for the first time in this article. Despite celebrating the Peace, Vondel did not refrain from presenting extremely violent scenes of war in the middle part of the poem. Surprisingly, however, the war scene shifts from the wars that devastated Europe to a war which Mars wages against Jupiter and his circle of gods. Unable to control Mars, and on the verge of seei... Mehr ...