Return to Sender: Constantijn Huygens as a Man of Letters

Return to Sender takes as its starting point Constantijn Huygens’ letters and shows us the author in his different guises: intimus of Rene Descartes, translator of John Donne, collector of art, writer of flirtatious love letters and the author of a long consolatory letter-poem for an ailing friend who threatened to go blind. In his letters, Huygens emerges as an often playful yet always ambitious fashioner of his own social image. Return to Sender gives us Huygens as ‘a man of letters’ in a very literal way: conceiving and construing his texts with an addressee in mind, but also with the distinct intention to fashion for that reader a persona that could be represented by means of the text at hand.