Jacob van Lennep’s Vondel Edition: a Tale of Idealism, a Bottomless Well and Shameless Piracy

Until the middle of the nineteenth century no scholarly edition had been published of the complete works of the most renowned poet and playwright of the Dutch Golden Age: Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679). Jacob van Lennep, one of the most renowned authors of the nineteenth century, took it upon himself to edit such a publication, augmented with especially-made illustrations, a biography and explanatory notes. It was published in twelve volumes by Hijman Binger in Amsterdam between 1850 and 1869. The project took much longer than Van Lennep could foresee, because there were many widespread works and editions of Vondel’s writings that had never been studied before. Although there were quite a few subscriptions, the project did not do well financially. In 1862 Van Lennep founded a ‘Society for the Continued Edition and Exploitation of the Works of J. van Vondel’, with shares of a thousand florins each. After completion of the de luxe edition Binger and Van Lennep would also publish a trade edition, but another publisher beat them to it. He was charged with plagiarism, but Binger and Van Lennep lost the lawsuit as the copyright laws of the time were not in their favour. When Van Lennep died in August 1868, he had just completed the last volume.