A Brill Calendar: March 15

The Life of Corneliszoon Hooft

Few superb authors of great literature exemplify the socio-cultural setting in which they lived and acted their part better than Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (Amsterdam, March 15 1581 – The Hague, May 21, 1647).

Hooft was a grand-master in all four categories. He was born in a prospering, internationally-oriented merchant family – just at a time when Amsterdam ceased to be just another city in Holland, and when rebellion against Spanish Habsburg was still in the balance. Hooft died 66 years later in a Republic which regarded itself second to no other European State in terms of wealth and power.

Even the unexpected way he came to ‘join the majority’ and meet his Creator is characteristic. His position as a high civil servant and a European ‘Grand Seigneur’ obliged him to attend the funeral ceremony for Frederik Hendrik, the 2nd Orange ‘Stadholder’ of the Republic, who died in The Hague March 14 1647. The exertion of the arduous journey from Amsterdam proved to be too much for the ageing gentleman; an infection (pneumonia? cholera?) became fatal.

It had been the same Count of Nassau & Prince of Orange who saw to it that Hooft - like Frederik Hendrik a Leyden alumnus and three years the Prince’s senior - had undertaken a venture resulting in his ‘chef-d’oeuvre’: the ‘Nederlandsche histooriën’ (‘Histories of the Low Countries’). He started work on it in 1628; and the first 20 books appeared in print in 1642. In a brilliant style - adapted from Tacitus’s bench-mark - Hooft told an epic of less than thirty years; from the abdication of Charles V of Habsburg in 1555 until the assassination of Frederik’s Sire, William the Taciturn, in 1584.

In the birth of a formal literary language and grammar out of a tangle of dialects it is seldom that one artist with a deep love for language creates almost single-handedly a bias how to write non-fiction prose: dignified, compact and to-the-point. It is clear that Hooft intended to celebrate the heroism of the generation before his own; but the ‘Histooriën’ became a lasting celebration of the contemporary language of his peers.