Comedic entrepreneurship in the Dutch Republic: Hieronymus Sweerts and his Koddige en ernstige opschriften
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article deepens our understanding of printed comedy as an early modern business by studying Dutch publisher and poet Hieronymus Sweerts (1629–1696) as a comedic entrepreneur. The term ‘comedic entrepreneur’ means to highlight publishers as driving forces in the production of printed comedy and scrutinise their involvement in shaping the comedy they sold. Sweerts’s entrepreneurship is scrutinised through his collection of humorous inscriptions, the Koddige en ernstige opschriften. Clues contained in the opschriften allow for a reconstruction of Sweerts’s roles as collector, editor, and poet in relation to the collection. This approach uncovers how, and to what effect, Sweerts combined the premise of comedy collected from public life with texts of other genres familiar to his readership. His decisions in the three roles illustrate how Sweerts was primarily concerned with the amusing function and commercial viability of the opschriften. The large share of commercial inscriptions from shopkeepers’ signs provide the collection with a distinct flavour of advertisement humour, which allowed the reader to reflect on the pre-capitalist economy and culture wherefrom both the advertisements and the opschriften emerged. The variety of non-inscriptions (satirical epitaphs, anecdotes, lottery rhymes), on the other hand, expanded Sweerts’s comedic toolbox with comic mechanisms not granted by the inscriptions proper. Finally, the inclusion of poems written by or about himself reveal how Sweerts employed his collection for purposes of self-fashioning as a respected poet. This case study, then, uncovers the myriad of creative and entrepreneurial decisions at the heart of seemingly derivative comic printed material.
Source: Comedy Studies
Author: Thom Tolboom
Institution: Radboud University Nijmegen
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415522900