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• Comedy and Crisis: Pieter Langendijk, the Dutch, and the Speculative Bubbles of 1720 by Joyce Goggin and Frans De Bruyn
• Fran Teague (bio)

Why should theatre historians invest in a book about a financial scandal in the Netherlands? People have been investing in commodities for as long as traders have sailed the seas, but the first stock market was in Antwerp, and the first joint stock was issued by the Dutch East India Company. By early in the 18^th century, investing in stocks or commodities was popular across Europe despite the way that bubbles occurred, a bubble being the point when a stock’s price is far higher than its value. When investors ignore this disparity, they lose their money when the market crashes. Specifically in 1720, investors in England, France, and the Netherlands lost fortunes. The South Sea Bubble in London, the Mississippi Bubble in France, and the Wind Trade (or windhandel) in the Netherlands ruined thousands.

As one might imagine, such an economic collapse created a “cultural outpouring” of mocking satire, as well as angry demands to repair the system, particularly in the Netherlands. As Goggin and De Bruyn write,

the scope and complexity of the Dutch cultural response to the windhandel, evidenced by the volume of publications that it generated (from economic and political pamphlets to satirical poems, plays, and engravings), is considerably greater than the comparable output at the time in Paris and London.

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This book offers translations and close analysis of two plays by Pieter Langendijk, the best among the 12 Dutch plays written. But it also places those plays in a cosmopolitan context, discussing intertextual relationships among those two Dutch plays, the eight French plays on the Mississippi Bubble, and the twenty-four English plays, to say nothing of the half dozen older plays by Jonson, Shadwell, Centlivre, and Taverner that were revised with reference to the South Sea Bubble (255–262).

The introduction by De Bruyn explains the situation briefly, offers a good account of Langendijk’s life, and introduces the first English translations of Quincampoix, or the Wind Traders and Harlequin Stock-Jobber. The translations by Goggin, Merlijn Erken, and De Bruyn offer new prose renditions of verse plays. They have chosen prose so that the reader can more easily follow the meaning, a reasonable decision. Given the chaos of any stock market, especially as it crashes, the action in both plays is zany enough to make the prose version both great fun and occasionally confusing to a reader who is not a business aficionado. Excellent [End Page 350] notes help clarify such moments, and the editors have also translated many notes from C. H. P Meijer, a nineteenth-century Dutch scholar who prepared the standard scholarly edition of the play. They also include a translation of Meijer’s 1892 preface to that translation. The volume does not stop with the text itself, but also offers a full and learned set of six essays to supply cultural context.

The first of these is Helen Paul’s “John Law, the South Sea Bubble, and Dutch Satire,” which begins with an explanation of what a bubble is. She then offers a discussion of John Law, “an illustrious figure who has been portrayed variously as a ladies’ man, a swash-buckling entrepreneur, and a short-sighted monomaniac” (108). She explains Law’s involvement with international banking, his creation of France’s Banque Générale Privée (and the introduction of paper money), as well as his role in the Mississippi Bubble. Turning to Langendijk’s play, Paul demonstrates how the plays make sophisticated use Law’s of economic innovations to satirize greed and folly.

The essay that follows Paul’s is Henk Looijesteijn’s “Opportunity in an Age of Folly: The Bubble of 1720 in the Dutch Republic.” In it, the discussion moves from the bubbles in England and France to the Dutch bubble or Wind Trade. The writing in this essay is perhaps the...

审核人：

• 喜剧与危机：彼得·朗根代克、荷兰人和 1720 年的投机泡沫，乔伊斯·戈金和弗兰斯·德布鲁因
• 弗兰蒂格 (bio)

为什么戏剧历史学家要投资一本关于荷兰金融丑闻的书？只要贸易商在海上航行，人们就一直在投资大宗商品，但第一个股票市场是在安特卫普，第一个联合股票是由荷兰东印度公司发行的。到 18 世纪早期，^尽管存在泡沫，但投资股票或商品在欧洲很流行，泡沫是指股票价格远高于其价值的点。当投资者忽视这种差异时，他们会在市场崩盘时赔钱。特别是在 1720 年，英国、法国和荷兰的投资者失去了财富。伦敦的南海泡沫、法国的密西西比泡沫和风能贸易（或Windhandel) 在荷兰毁了数千人。

正如人们可能想象的那样，这样的经济崩溃造成了嘲讽讽刺的“文化倾泻”，以及修复系统的愤怒要求，尤其是在荷兰。正如 Goggin 和 De Bruyn 所写，

荷兰文化对风车的反应的范围和复杂性，从它产生的出版物的数量（从经济和政治小册子到讽刺诗歌、戏剧和版画）证明了这一点，远远大于当时在巴黎的可比产出和伦敦。

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这本书提供了彼得·朗根迪克的两部戏剧的翻译和仔细分析，这是 12 部荷兰戏剧中最好的一部。但它也将这些戏剧置于一个世界性的背景下，讨论了这两部荷兰戏剧、八部密西西比泡泡上的法国戏剧和二十四部英国戏剧之间的互文关系，更不用说乔森·沙德维尔的六部老剧本了, Centlivre 和 Taverner 参考南海泡沫进行了修订 (255–262)。

De Bruyn 的介绍简要解释了情况，很好地描述了 Langendijk 的生平，并介绍了Quincampoix 或 Wind Traders和Harlequin Stock-Jobber 的第一个英文译本。Goggin、Merlijn Erken 和 De Bruyn 的翻译为诗歌戏剧提供了新的散文演绎。他们选择散文是为了让读者更容易理解意思，做出合理的决定。考虑到任何股市的混乱，尤其是在股市崩盘时，这两部剧中的动作都非常滑稽，以至于散文版既有趣又偶尔让非商业爱好者的读者感到困惑。优秀[完第350页]笔记有助于澄清这些时刻，编辑还翻译了 CH P Meijer 的许多笔记，这位 19 世纪的荷兰学者准备了该剧的标准学术版。它们还包括梅杰 1892 年对该翻译的序言的翻译。这本书不仅限于文本本身，还提供了一套完整的、学识渊博的六篇文章，以提供文化背景。

其中第一个是海伦·保罗的“约翰·劳、南海泡沫和荷兰讽刺小说”，它首先解释了泡沫是什么。然后，她讨论了约翰·劳，“一个杰出的人物，曾被描绘成不同的女人，一个虚张声势的企业家和一个短视的偏执狂”（108）。她解释了 Law 参与国际银行业务、他创建法国的 Banque Générale Privée（以及纸币的引入）以及他在密西西比泡沫中的角色。转向朗根代克的戏剧，保罗展示了戏剧如何巧妙地利用劳的经济创新来讽刺贪婪和愚蠢。

Paul 之后的文章是 Henk Looijesteijn 的“愚蠢时代的机会：荷兰共和国 1720 年的泡沫”。在其中，讨论从英国和法国的泡沫转移到荷兰泡沫或风能贸易。这篇文章的写作可能是...