SOURCE: "The Seventeenth-Century Dutch Faust Play," in Husbanding the Golden Grain: Studies in Honor of Henry W. Nordmeyer, edited by Luanne T. Frank and Emery E. George, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1973, pp. 238-54.

In the following essay, Pott discusses adaptations of the Faust legend in Dutch drama.

Holland's contribution to the Faust literature is a modest one. But with much of sixteenth-century Europe it shared an early interest and knowledge regarding the notorious doctor. For in the course of his wanderings Faust came also to the Low Countries. He even gained a kind of prominence there: he was imprisoned most probably in the castle Batenburg in the province of Gelderland as punishment for one of his typical escapades the nature of which is unknown.¹

The Spies Faustbuch of 1587 elicited an almost immediate response in Holland. In 1592 appeared DE WARACHTIGHE HISTORIE VAN DOCTOR JOHANNES...