deadline for submissions: 
September 14, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
Queen's University Belfast



The Dutch Revolt was one the early modern period’s most significant conflicts, leading to eighty years of war in Europe. Ostensibly a revolt by the largely Protestant Low Countries against the rule of Catholic Spain, it led to the establishment of the Dutch Republic, and eventually drew in other European powers such as England and France. The war influenced thinking around issues as varied as sovereignty, republicanism, political theory and guerrilla warfare, and its impact was felt around the globe as fighting took place in European colonies. The conflict and its aftermath coincided with the Dutch Golden Age, and it generated a range of literary responses in Dutch, seen in the work of playwrights such as Joost van den Vondel and P.C. Hooft. But the cultural influence of the war was felt in contexts beyond the Dutch Republic, as Spanish, English, French and Portuguese dramatists and poets reflected upon and explored eighty years of war. English playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger depicted the fate of one of the Revolt’s most significant figures in their Sir John van Olden Barnavelt. The Low Countries occupied the thoughts of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega in his Los españoles en Flandes. Later in the seventeenth century, English writers would use the war as a means of thinking through the English Civil War and execution of Charles I.

We are proposing a special issue of an interdisciplinary journal that will explore a diverse range of questions, relating to the representation and utilisation of the Dutch Revolt in the contemporary European Theatre. A journal has already expressed interest, and we require a number of abstracts to complete our proposal.


We welcome papers related, but not limited to, the following areas:

Theatre and the interrogation of military intervention

Texts, atrocities and the practice of war

Plays as propaganda

Theatre and the development of political theory

The afterlife of the conflict in the culture of the period


Please send your abstracts (c. 500 words) to by 14 September 2018