Perhaps the most noted of these was Andrieni (1578-1652), who wrote the "Adamo," a tragedy in five acts, whose subject is the fall of man. This drama, however, is a rather crude affair, such allegorical abstractions as Death, Sin, and Despair being the chief characters.
About the same period, strange to say, the Netherland imagination, not long awakened from its medieval torpor, also became fired with this theme. The youthful Grotius was the first to attempt it in his "Adamus Exul," a Latin drama of considerable merit. This was in 1601, several years before the "Adamo" of Andrieni. Two other Dutchmen of the same generation, both far greater poets than Grotius, were also attracted by this subject. One was the distinguished Father Cats in his idyll, "The First Marriage;" the other was Justus van den Vondel in his "Lucifer."
We would, in passing, call attention to the curious coincidence that so many poets of so many different nations, most of them doubtless without knowledge of the others, should about the same time have chosen this subject of such historical and symbolical importance. For besides the poets mentioned were many others: the Scotchman Ramsay, the Spaniard de Azevedo, the Portuguese Camoens, the Frenchman Du Bartas, and two Englishmen, Phineas Fletcher and John Milton. A more remarkable instance of telepathy is not, we believe, on record.
Of all of the works of the many authors who have treated this theme, only two, however, have withstood the critical test of time; only two have been awarded the palm of immortality. These two are Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Vondel's "Lucifer": the former, the grandest of English epics; the latter, the noblest of Dutch dramas. It is the "Lucifer" that we have been asked to discuss.
The "Lucifer" was published thirteen years before "Paradise Lost." The scheme of the English poem had, however, already been crystallized in the mind of its author for fifteen years. This scheme originally contemplated a drama, which the poet's powerful imagination gradually developed into an epic.
To whom Vondel was indebted for the foundation of his tremendous drama is easily ascertained. He himself mentions his authorities in his admirable and learned preface. Among these were, besides the Holy Writ, the various Church Fathers, the "Adamus Exul" of Grotius, the work of Du Bartas, and a treatise on the fallen angels, by the English Protestant, Richard Baker. His own imagination, however, soared far above the fundamental hints that he received from any of these works on the subject, so that the "Lucifer" is rightly considered one of the most original and comprehensive poems in literature.
