Enslaved to the Passions Slavery, emotions and trade in a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Comedy

This chapter investigates how the gross inequality of slavery in Dutch society was stylised in Bredero’s comedy Moortje (‘Little Moor’, 1617), an adaptation of Terence’s TheEunuch. Considering the polyphony of comic theatre, it shows how Moortje brings diverging views of slavery into discussion, countering the prevailing view that fundamental discussion of slavery did not occur in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Moortje is a product of white imagination, written and performed in Amsterdam, the metropole of an emerging trade imperium. This chapter shows how the play adopts two classical commonplaces of slavery –the Stoic metaphor of enslavement to the passions and the comic reversal of master and slave – to establish a white, masculine, and Christian norm that served to legitimise the enslavement of the Other. However, Moortje also presents the classical commonplaces as outdated: in a mercantile society such as Amsterdam, nobody could escape ‘enslavement’ to the passions of trade. Moortje, this chapter argues, presents slavery in its entanglement with the omnipresent af fect of colonial trade. Demonstrating how Amsterdam’s inhabitants were implicated en masse in global networks they could no longer oversee, the play both reproduces and questions the legitimisation of the enslavement of the emotional Other.