Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/97

Rh the Unities, not very different from that of the Mysteries and Moralities. In both cases the story was generally familiar, the plot a series of episodes. There was—as I will indicate more fully in the chapter on the French drama—little or no endeavour to develop a story from the interaction of character and circumstance in such a way as to excite suspense. The finest tragedies consist of a series of statuesque scenes draped in oratorical and lyrical verse. Vondel's tragedies are built on the same plan. He takes a well-known story, generally from the Bible, and presents it in a series of scenes filled with long speeches or balanced dialogue. Single scenes are dramatically written, and in some of the best plays—Salomon, Joseph in Dothan, Leeuwendaelers—the story is simply and naturally conducted. But only in Lucifer is our interest aroused as to the final choice and consequent fate of the hero; and even in Lucifer the attention is, for dramatic effect, too frequently distracted from the central figure.

But dramatic effect is not the end which Vondel had first of all in view. If the classical drama modified the form of his tragedies, the spirit remained unaltered. With all their faults, his tragedies are no frigid classical reconstructions, but the expression of his deepest feelings, and their purpose is that of the Mysteries—edification and exaltation. He would doubtless, like Grotius, have chosen for his chief play the central theme of the Mysteries, but Vondel wrote in the vernacular and for the stage, and the reception of the Lucifer, which