Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/96

76 they have any special feature which distinguishes them from the purely artificial Senecan tragedy of the Renaissance. Such an aspect has been indicated by Professor Te Winkel. In an interesting and exhaustive study of Vondel's tragedies, he has pointed out that in spirit and intention Vondel's dramas are a direct continuation of the Mysteries and Miracle-plays of the Middle Ages, and may be as justly styled the last flowering of the sacred drama in the north as Calderon's religious pieces were in the south. This statement applies to the form as well as the content of Vondel's earlier attempts, Het Pascha and Hierusalem Verwoest. Similar Biblical plays were composed by other members of the Brabantian Chamber, and both their spirit and naïve structure are those of the Mysteries, though the style is that of the Rederijkers. Vondel, however, as we have seen, rejected these plays, and his later tragedies were shaped by his study of Seneca, of the school drama of Buchanan and Hugo Grotius, of Sophocles and Euripides, as well as of the classical critics interpreted for him by Heinsius and Vossius. But none of these altered radically his conception of the character of a dramatic action, and none of them affected the spirit and motive with which he wrote his plays.

The mode in which an action was presented in a classical play of the Renaissance was, after all, despite