Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/95

Rh "Stervende zingtze een vrolijk liet                                     In 't suikerriet                                       In 't suikerriet.                      Zy tart de nijdighe doot uit lust                                      Met quinckeleeren                                      En triomfeeren                                      En sterft gerust."

The dramatic weakness of Vondel's tragedies, the failure of any one of them to present quite adequately a great dramatic action or impressive characters, was pointed out in an unsparing review by Jonckbloet, who was acutely out of sympathy with both the classical pedantry of the seventeenth century and Vondel's religious sentiment. Much of what he said is undeniable, and applies not only to Vondel's plays but to the whole range of Renaissance classical tragedy, under which head I do not include the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Yet the fact remains that Vondel's plays were written to be acted; that they enjoyed a considerable measure of popularity; and, moreover, that they were the work of a poet of genius—even if that genius was lyrical rather than dramatic—and a poet who, despite a touch of the pedantry of his age, was inspired in general, not by pedantic but by personal, patriotic, and religious motives. It is worth while, therefore, to try and look at Vondel's tragedies not from the point of view of any hard and fast aesthetic theory of the drama, whether classical or romantic, but from the poet's own point of view; not comparing them with the very different tragedies of Shakespeare or Racine, but trying to discover whether