In the early modern Dutch Republic, three playwrights wrote dramas based on political revolutions that were occurring at that same time in Asia. Reflecting on this remarkable phenomenon, Staging Asia traces the transmission of the stories surrounding the seventeenth-century Asian events and their ultimate appearance in Europe as Dutch dramas. Manjusha Kuruppath explores the nature of the representation of the Orient in these works and evaluates how this characterization was influenced by the channels, including some connected to the Dutch East India Company, that the dramatists relied on to gather information for their plays.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Representation and Information Transfer
- Organization
- Chapter 1. The Republic, Its Stage, and Its East India Company
- Introduction
- The Dutch East India Company
- The Dutch East India Company: The Merchant and Manufacturer of Information
- The Amsterdamsche Schouwburg
- Dutch Drama and the Orient
- Chapter 2. When Vondel Looked Eastwards: Joost Van Den Vondel’s Zungchin (1667)
- Introduction
- “One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd”: Representation in Zungchin
- Historicity in Vondel’s Zungchin
- Two Playwrights, One Tale
- The Benefits of Extensive Reading: Vondel and the Sources for Zungchin
- Batavian Holidays and Information Packages: Martino Martini and the VOC
- News Channel Formosa
- Discourses, Dispositions, Despotisms: Imagining the Middle Kingdom
- Discerning Oriental Dispositions: Tartar Bloodbaths and Chinese Bookishness
- Begetting Sinister Children: Benevolent and Oriental Despotisms
- Arms or Amiability: To Talk or Terrorize the Chinese into Trade
- The Playwright Sorts and Sieves: Motives behind the Scripting of Zungchin
- Conclusion
- Chapter 3. Casting Despots in Dutch Drama: The Case of Nadir Shah in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan (1745)
- The Plot (The Historical and the Literary)
- Van Steenwyk, Dryden, and their Sophies
- Passage to (Mughal) India: Information Transfer and Its Resultant Discourses
- The Mughal Discourse
- The Company Discourse of the Dutch Factory in Hoogly (Bengal)
- The European Correspondence
- The Politics of Representation in Van Steenwyk’s Thamas Koelikan
- Conclusion
- Chapter 4. Swimming against the Tide: Onno Zwier Van Haren’s Agon, Sulthan Van Bantam (1769)
- Introduction
- Bad Blood over Banten: The English and Dutch Hostilities in Print
- Antecedents to Agon’s Anti-Colonial Indictment
- Accounts of Travel and Travelling Company Correspondence
- Making the Other’s Business One’s Own: Information Gathering and Intelligence Acquisition
- Salacious and Sordid Spectacles: Representation of Banten’s Women and Sultan Abdul
- Anxieties over Apostasy: The Company and Its Renegades
- The Other Side of the Story: Banten’s View of Batavia
- Intentions, Influences, and the Inevitable Scholarly Tussles
- Van Haren, Fence-sitting, and the Other Side
- Closing in on Van Haren’s Intentions
- Conclusion
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Archival Sources
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
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