I, Who Used to Serve as Jupiter’s Lightning on Earth
Geeraerdt Brandt’sDe Veinzende Torquatus(1645), Providentially Assigned Stadtholders and the Politics of Rational Deception
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6055424 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tom Laureys (0000-0003-3372-2045, Ghent University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 21-33 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Dutch Crossing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-6564 • E-ISSN: 1759-7854 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03096564.2019.1615761 |
| OpenAlex | W2944478187 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
This article aims to show that Geeraerdt Brandt's popular revenge tragedy De veinzende Torquatus (1645) engages with the political debates concerning the rightful succession of monarchs based on primogeniture, and - be it in a grotesque, even parodic way - the Calvinistic belief that the Dutch stadtholders were God's providential instruments, assigned to guide His chosen people. Subsequently, I show that the play offers a confrontation between two conflicting conceptions of power. The play's eponymous protagonist holds what I call an intellectual (idealistic) conception of power, in which man's rational faculty, including his capacity for rational deception, is all-decisive. This vision, though, clashes with the more physical (materialistic) conceptualization of power which Torquatus's antagonist Noron upholds
Epistemology · Materialism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Tragedy (event · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
| Highly cited | No |
|---|