Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/98

78 dealt with the first act in the great drama, warned him from venturing on dangerous ground. It was driven from the stage by the Amsterdam preachers after three performances, and the Salmoneus, one of his two plays on classical subjects, was written to make use of the artificial heaven prepared for the Lucifer. But though he did not venture on the subject of the Passion, not only are the great majority of his plays taken from the Bible, but, as Professor Te Winkel points out, those subjects are generally selected (as in the Mysteries) which were regarded as typifying the death and resurrection of Christ—the sacrifice of Jephtha's daughter, the death of Samson type of Him


 * "Who in His death gave death a mortal wound,"

the stories of Noah, Joseph, and David.

This devotional purpose set rigid limits to Vondel's dramatic art. He could not handle his stories as Shakespeare did Holinshed, or Corneille Roman and Byzantine history, altering the record and supplying the motives. He stood with bowed head before the incidents and the persons as he found them in Scripture. He expressly accepts Vossius' rule, "What God's Book says, of necessity; what it does not say, sparingly; what conflicts with it, on no account." He does best work, therefore, where the story is already well motived, or where the record is scanty. But Vondel's dramas, to be fully appreciated, need to be read in the devotional spirit in which they were written,—a difficult task for readers