Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/92

72 and character, than anything he had written. Lucifer's deeply wounded pride, Belial's Iago-like instigations, Beelzebub's "policy," Michael's stern and unbending loyalty, Raphael's pleading, are clearly and grandly drawn. The interviews are not mere interchanges of argumentative platitudes, but show us the clash of contending passions. It is not so much with Milton's epic treatment of the same theme that Vondel's play invites comparison, except in the descriptive passages,—and even here the differences are as great as the resemblances,—but, one is tempted to say, with Shakespeare's earlier Marlowesque histories, their comparatively simple but intense characters and vehement eloquence. Even the choral odes are not undramatic excrescences. The chorus of angels takes an active part in the debates, and their songs are evoked naturally and directly by the events of the moment. The faults of the tragedy are the necessary exclusion of God from direct participation in the action, and the inclusion of the fall of Adam in what might be called a postscript. The latter action should have been left for another play, and Vondel felt this, for he wrote another on the subject.

In none of his subsequent plays does Vondel come so near to a dramatic and tragic as well as a literary and poetic masterpiece. Excluding translations from Sophocles and Euripides, he wrote eleven more tragedies. Jeptha (1659), Koning David in Ballingschap (1660), Koning David Herstelt (1660), Samson (1660), Adonias (1661), Adam in Ballingschap (1664), and Noah (1667), are Biblical;