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Abstract
The author demonstrates that political verse with speaking heroes is to be seen as a genre in its own right Speaking heroes are used especially in contexts where religion (or more precisely: confession) and politics collide and where identity is therefore at stake in multiple perspectives. In order to demonstrate this, the figures of two speaking heroes in controversies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are analysed: Henry the Younger of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and William of Orange. The first is an example of constructing identity through dissociation from a negative figure, the second an example of positive identification. These possibilities seem to correspond to the Augustinian model of two states, so verse with speaking heroes may have been used to soften the aporias of good and evil by constructing collective identities.