Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde

Frans-Willem Korsten

De waarde van hypocrisie: Vondels spel met politiek en religie in Lucifer, Salmoneus en Faëton

Abstract -- Hypocrisy is often seen as a skill that pragmatic and ambitious politicians must be able to use (Machiavelli) or as a inevitable phenomenon in complex organisations (Krasner 1999). An analysis of three plays by the Dutch seventeenth-century playwright Joost van den Vondel -- Lucifer, Salmoneus and Faëton -- provides us with a different possibility. These plays study three different modalities of hypocrisy in order to find out how hypocrisy can destroy or underpin a workable or valid political organisation. The three modalities are: God's ultra-hypocrisy (which destroys society), pragmatic hypocrisy (which allows a society to keep going) and structural hypocrisy (which produces an ongoing questioning of the validity of political representation). With regard to the latter, the contention in this article is that hypocrisy is structurally, functionally built in into any form of political representation.

TNTL 122-2 (juni 2006), 97-116