Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/89

Rh a favourite character with Vondel as the ancestor and type of Christ, and the play was written to celebrate his eminent piety, and because of the tragic character of the story—as "tragic" was understood by admirers of Seneca like Vossius and Grotius. They praised the play enthusiastically, and it was performed forty-six times before the poet's death. An interesting record of the actors who performed, and of the staging prepared for the representation, has been preserved. The altar, candlestick, and priest's robes were all accurately and gorgeously reproduced, and the description emphasises the strangeness of the phenomenon presented by these sacred plays in so Protestant a country—the large element of the Middle Ages which the Chambers of Rhetoric preserved. In the following year (1640) Vondel composed a couple of plays intended to form, with his translations of Sophompaneas, a trilogy on the story of Joseph—Joseph in Dothan and Joseph in Egypten. Characters of the pure and simple piety of Joseph, as Vondel portrays him, or saints and martyrs like Ursula and Jephtha's daughter, were specially dear to Vondel's heart, and are drawn with considerable charm. With his wicked characters he was too entirely out of sympathy to lend them strength and dignity. But the voluptuous passion of Jempsar, the wife of Potiphar, in Joseph in Egypten, and of Urania in Noah, is painted with colour and power. Pieter en Pauwel (1641) is another saints' play, more edifying to believers than dramatic, and so is Marie Stuart (1646). Mary dies a stainless martyr for the Catholic