English has Shakespeare, Russian has Tolstoy, and Dutch has Joost van den Vondel. He was born November 17, 1587 in Cologne to Flemish-speaking parents who were refugees of a sort. They were faced with religious persecution in their original Antwerp and fled to Cologne, then had to escape again, to Amsterdam. At the time the Dutch Republic had just recently been formed.
In Amsterdam the family lived in a Flemish-speaking neighborhood, but Joost joined the “Chamber of Rhetoric,” a literary society where members studied Dutch and wrote poetry in that language. His first preserved poem was written in 1605 (he was 17), and he kept writing for the next seven decades — he lived to be 91; quite a long life for the time.
Vondel primarily wrote poetry and plays, and by the time he was in his early fifties he was already considered the greatest poet in the Dutch Republic. His plays were mostly tragedies, and modeled after Ancient Greek dramas, which he had studied extensively. One called Lucifer, written in 1654, is still considered his masterpiece, and his epic poem Joannes de Boetgezant is considered the greatest Dutch epic ever written.
During his whole literary career, though, Vondel had a day job. His father had started a silk business that stayed in the family, and both Vondel and his son worked at it. In the mid-1650s, though, the First Anglo-Dutch War began and clobbered the Amsterdam economy — so Vondel got a job as a bookkeeper in a bank. He kept the job until he was 80, when he retired and actually had a retirement plan. I don’t know how common this was in 1600s Amsterdam, but when Vondel retired he continued receiving his salary for the rest of his life. It’s possible this was in recognition of his outside-of-work fame as a writer, of course.
In some places Dutch is still called “the language of Vondel.” He had at least as much influence over Dutch literature as Shakespeare has had in English — possibly more. In spite of that, he wasn’t widely known elsewhere, probably because his work was only ever translated into German, where he was also influential. The “father of German literature,” Martin Opitz, copied Vondel’s rhythm and meter, and Andreas Gryphius, who created the whole genre of German Baroque tragedy, was also a follower of Vondel. There is even speculation that Vondel’s Lucifer was the inspiration for John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was written just a few years later. It’s just speculation, though; nobody knows for sure whether Milton ever had a copy of Vondel’s work.
Nearly every city in the Netherlands is said to have a street named for Vondel, and before the Euro came along, he was depicted on the Dutch five guilder bill. And the biggest park in Amsterdam is Vondelpark, which features a large statue of the writer. Even so, Vondel is still not well known outside of his native country, and translations of his work are nowhere near as available as are the works of writers generally mentioned in the same breath: Shakespeare, Goethe, Dante, Schiller (great German playwright) and Racine (great French playwright).
