Publishing strategies and celebrity in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. The case of Gerbrand Bredero

In the Dutch Golden Age every literary publication of major importance was packed with preliminary laudatory poems. These paratextual poems provide indications about the content of the work and contain praises to the author and his work, sometimes in rather excessive terms. As publishers used to arrange these contributions, there is certainly also a strategic aim involved: they manipulate the image of the author involved. Moreover, they not only strengthen the fame of the author but also steer the interpretation of the author’s work and personality in a particular direction and exclude alternative ways of giving meaning to the data. In this article, I discuss these means of manipulative practices. As an example I consider the literary career of the Dutch playwright Gerbrand Bredero (1585-1618). His regular publisher Cornelis vander Plasse supported Bredero’s publications never neglecting his commercial instinct. Some of the strategies of this publisher are discussed, one of them being the publication of almost 30 elegies immediately after the death of Bredero.