Harlequin Stock-Jobber

This short comic harlequinade is written in the rich and enormously popular theatrical tradition of the Italian commedia dell’arte, imported into the Netherlands via France. Langendijk borrows a range of well-known commedia character types to populate his farce. In a series of twelve scenes he tells the story of Capitano. who plans a voyage to the South Sea (the Mississippi country) to trade in shares. Harlequin, himself a speculator in shares, undertakes to sell Capitano provisions for his voyage. When Capitano discovers that the provisions Harlequin has sold him are nothing but wind-filled bladders and animal guts, a battle ensues between two squadrons armed with inflated pig’s bladders. The cowardly Capitano faints from shock, and Harlequin is taken captive but is set free when he promises to bequeath his paper shares to his captors. The play concludes with Harlequin auctioning off a candle stub, which is handed back and forth between the characters until Gilles, who buys the candle, burns his fingers and drops the stub on a pile of shares that go up flames. The foolish investors are left with nothing, an ending that provides a comic warning to those who risk being burnt by the bubble craze.

Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders

This full-length tragicomedy in three acts explores the thematic opposition between traditional Dutch commercial and republican virtue, and the speculative corruption of 1720. Set in Amsterdam at the height of the “wind trade” that inflated the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, as well as local Dutch speculative bubbles, the play dramatizes both market mania and intergenerational conflict between parent and child, with a predictable victory for the younger generation. In this instance, Hillegond, daughter of the merchant Bonaventure, loves a sensible, virtuous young man named Hendrik, but she is also pursued by Windbag, a pompous, self-important speculator in bubble shares. Windbag is a French popinjay blown ashore from Paris and London by the shifting winds of speculation. Bonaventure is dazzled by Windbag’s fortune and is drawn into the speculative activity, but his brother, Noble-Heart, prefers Hendrik, who personifies the native steadfastness of the Dutch character. Hendrik’s name recalls the wise Prince Frederik Hendrik (a ruler associated with proclamations opposing uncontrolled speculation). At the close of the play Bonaventure faces the prospect of financial ruin, but he is rescued from his own imprudence by his brother, who buys back the “futures” contracts that had threatened to undo him. Noble-Heart counts the cost of this financial rescue as a trifle compared to the value of preserving the family’s honour and its credit or reputation.

Opportunity in an Age of Folly

1720 is remembered in European history as the year of folly, when the financial markets ballooned and then collapsed in the capitals of England and France. The financial crisis was of great import to the subsequent history of both countries: England emerged from the crisis on the way to becoming an international financial powerhouse, whereas France failed to modernize its financial infrastructure, which collapsed during the French Revolution. Much less is known, however, outside the Netherlands about the third economy involved in the Bubble, namely, the proto-capitalist economy of the Dutch Republic. This chapter makes the case that the Dutch financial economy, which in 1720 was more advanced than that of its neighbours, bore the brunt of the crisis much better than they. The Bubble in the Dutch Republic channelled some of the country’s previously underused capital reserves back into the economy and allowed for the rise of a number of municipal Bubble companies, chiefly devoted to shipping and insurance. Several of these survived the Bubble and developed into bona fide businesses with surprising longevity. The foremost example of this is the Rotterdam insurance company which lasted until the twenty-first century and continues to exist as a philanthropic foundation.

John Law, the South Sea Bubble, and Dutch Satire

This chapter examines the financial history behind the Bubbles of 1720, with a special focus on their effects in the Netherlands, by offering a number of observations and speculations concerning two economic comedies penned by Pieter Langendijk in 1720, collected in Het groote Tafereel der dwaasheid [The Great Mirror of Folly], and now published in this volume in English translation. As well as examining what the plays can tell us about the financial knowledge of Langendijk’s audiences, this essay explores how literary critic and historian C.F.P. Meijer attempted to explain economic history to a new readership in his 1892 edition of the plays. Dutch familiarity with finance and share trading is evidenced in Langendijk’s use of sophisticated financial language, indicating that his audience understood the world he was satirising. That Langendijk could, or thought he could count on a certain familiarity with finance on the part of his Dutch viewers stands in contrast, for example, to what we may extrapolate from English plays of the same period, which merely caricature stock market activity, likening it to gambling. This chapter shows that Langendijk painted a more nuanced view of finance than his English contemporaries, and argues that, while Quincampoix and Harlequin Stock-Jobber share some common themes with English plays (such as anti-Semitism and the humbling of the nouveau riche), Langendijk, like many in his Dutch audience, was no financial neophyte.

Transnational Networks in 1720 and the German Quincampoix

Soon after the performance of the stage version of Quincampoix in Amsterdam, a German translation appeared. The text is substantially the same, though ‘localised’ with German place names and relocated to the city of Hamburg. The German text is one of a number of satirical and other texts about the Bubbles, which circulated in the German lands and which bespeak the interest and involvement of Germans in the global financial excitement of the years around 1720. The specific occasion of the German Quincampoix is very likely the project for a joint-stock insurance company that led to a mini-bubble in Hamburg in the summer of 1720. This chapter explores the text itself, identifying specifically German aspects of it and their referents. It considers how and by whom the anonymous translation may have been produced, and who its readers may have been, setting it in the context of what we know of the publishing history of other German Bubble texts, the specific resonances of the global crisis in the city of Hamburg and the evidence for flows and exchanges of financial information and debate between Germany’s principal outward-facing port and the seats of Bubble activity in London, Paris and Amsterdam.

Meijer’s Endnotes (1892)

Present editors: A selected number of Meijer’s endnotes have not been translated because they concern philological or other matters purely of interest to Dutch-speaking readers. These are indicated below as ‘Omitted’. 1.Quincampoix, or the coffeehouse. The name ‘Quincampoix’ was given to the English coffeehouse in the Kalver Street [Kalverstraat], the third house in from the Dam Square on the west side of the street, because that is where the largest part of the trade took place. A very clear representation of the coffeehouse after it was attacked by a rioting mob can be found in engraving no. 57 of ...

Introduction

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the book, with biographical information about Pieter Langendijk, his literary career, and the times in which he lived. It explores the influence of French neo-classical dramatic theory in the Netherlands (the comedy of manners and the theatrical unities of time, place, and action) and the example of the French playwright Molière.

Harlequin Stock-Jobber

This chapter is an introduction to Harlequin Stock Jobber, intended to supplement the introductory discussion provided by Meijer in 1892 with an updated consideration of the play’s continuing historical and cultural value. Harlequin Stock Jobber remains an eminently performable play-text with wonderfully funny moments and comic business. Its continuing appeal is partly owing to the durability of the comic types that populate the world of the commedia dell’arte, the rich comic theatrical tradition that informs the play. At the same time, this comic farce has importance for us as a historical document that bears witness to a key formative moment in the history of modern capitalism. De Bruyn shows how the play invites examination as one constituent in a dense network of bubble texts (especially those collected in the 1720 Dutch satirical folio Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid [The Great Mirror of Folly])—an array of visual, verbal, and even aural documents that offer access to a bygone mentalité. The play testifies to the ways in which people in 1720 perceived, conceptualized, and came to understand a series of seemingly unprecedented economic events that unfolded very rapidly and appeared to be transforming people’s lives in hitherto unheard-of ways and at apparently unheard-of speed.

Culture and Finance

This chapter supplements the introductory and contextual discussion of Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders provided by Meijer in 1892, with an updated consideration of the play’s continuing historical and cultural value. It explores cultural stereotypes of various “foreigners” that appear recurrently in these Dutch texts, particularly in the figure of John Law, portrayed as a Frenchified Scotsman; the French more generally; and outsiders, particularly the Jewish community. The popular theatre was a medium in which social anxieties were frequently expressed - focused in this instance on a fear of contagion from France and its corrupt financial schemes. This chapter explores how Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders culturally expresses this fear at the level of language and character. It shows how national identities were shaped and challenged by the desire to trade in an new, globalizing market that encompassed several countries in Western Europe, and it shows how national stereotypes hardened in the rush to attribute culpability and cupidity, or rationality and innocence, as apparent financial catastrophe loomed. And because these plays enjoyed an afterlife in the nineteenth century with the publication of Meijer’s edition, Quincampoix is discussed in this chapter as an early example of the thematization of finance in popular culture.

‘New Plays resemble Bubbles, we must own’

This chapter addresses how finance and the theatre became interwoven in the early eighteenth century, with the theatre functioning as a platform for the production and dissemination of financial knowledge. The eighteenth-century theatre in Amsterdam and London served as a source of news, and political and social commentary. The Bubble plays of 1720, and especially Langendijk’s comedies, helped to conceptualize stock trading by analyzing and illustrating its specific dynamics. This essay also addresses differences between the nations that participated in the Bubble and argues that, while in the Netherlands the public generally approved of stock trade, few stepped forward in England to defend openly the new securities market or those responsible for financial governance. Likewise, French plays of the period tended to focus criticism on John Law’s new system of paper currency, rather than attempting to explain it as did their Dutch counterparts. This essay discusses such cultural distinctions in detail, with Langendijk’s plays as central source texts, arguing that, notwithstanding the views of economic and financial historians, who see the long-term economic impact of the Dutch Bubble of 1720 as minimal, the cultural impact of the Bubble left a lasting mark in the Netherlands.