1.Republican baroque: a thunderclap, a city hall and two executions --1.1.Artifice: multiple worlds and one actualized --1.2.Why a Dutch republican baroque; and why not a Golden Age? --1.3.City hall: affect -- or what moves and what drives --1.4.Thunderclap: moment and event --1.5.Two executions: theatricality and dramatization --1.6.Republican baroque and slavery --2.dramatic potential in history: Rome and the Republic -- Grevius, Vondel, Knupfer, and Job --2.1.Two incompatible political models: transfer or disruption? --2.2.Allegory tied into a knot: history's continuity dramatically disrupted --2.3.Perverse powers, or how to make fun of the theater of torture --2.4.Catholic Rome and the figure of Job: subjection to the only possible world --3.cruel death of worlds and political incompatibility -- the brothers De Witt --3.1.Foundations of law: the master/father of a political house --3.2.lynching of the De Witts: condensation and spectacle --3.3.ship of state and the cruel political choice between incompatible worlds --3.4.Combat, the dramatic logic of cruelty, and the potential of difference --4.Happy Split of Worlds or the Comedic Sublime -- Frans Hals --4.1.Happiness, the comedic, and the sublime --4.2.From Steen to Vondel: comical and tragic counterpoints to the comedic --4.3.sublime intensity of the moment --4.4.Freedom: necessity and contingency --5.seas or the world as scene -- Focquenbroch and Grotius --5.1.Pre-colonial mise-en-abyme: Focquenbroch and a non-republican baroque --5.2.Moment of exchange and the non-existent ?proper' --5.3.Juridical staging: commerce and the seas --5.4.precariousness of mise-en-scene --5.5.Amsterdam: city and sea as world scene --6.Not a frame but a lens: the touch of knowledge -- Rumphius, Vossius, Spinoza --6.1.Spectacle or theater: Rumphius as knowledge-trader --6.2.Nature internalized: res cogitans reconsidered --6.3.Sensing the world differently: the telescope --6.4.Reading through a lens: intensity and texture before scripture --7.Public theater, collective drama and the new -- Van den Enden and Huygens --7.1.Theatrum mundi, public acting and the plane of collective imagination --7.2.Speaking for those who understand: a school drama in a theater --7.3.Dramatization: Theatrum mundi versus mundus dramaticus --7.4.Fluid borders between theatricality and dramatization: Huygens' S?unday' --8.Interrupting time for the sake of division: history and the tableau vivant -- Rembrandt (Abraham and Isaac), Quast, Vondel, and Vos --8.1.Abraham and Isaac: the opening of history through the what-if --8.2.virtual: narrative versus interruption --8.3.Fool Waiting for the Political Moment: Tableau Vivant Between Retrospection and Anticipation --8.4.political potential in the tableau and the nature of freedom --8.5.Moment of closure: spectacle and a revolting tableau.