Joost van den Vondel's Baroque play Lucifer - from their lofty nest / They see their dreaded foe

How I find books: Andrei The Untranslated posted a list of Baroque writers from Otto Maria Carpeaux’s massive História da Literatura Ocidental (1959-66), a marvelous list of marvelous writers including a number of favorites.

I’ve read at least something by all of them.  Not Comenius, who I think of as a writer on education; no idea what someone interested in literature might want to read.  And not Vondel.  Who the heck is Vondel?

Joost van den Vondel is the greatest early modern Dutch playwright.  I know little about Dutch literature and nothing about 17th century Dutch theater.  Nothing is close to what has made it into English.  But here we have an 1898 translation, by Leonard Charles van Noppen, of Vondel’s 1654 play Lucifer.  Good enough.

A faction of angels, led by Lucifer, is afraid of and insulted by the new creature Adam.

APOLLION: I covered with my wings mine eyes and face

That I might curb my thoughts and deep delight,

When erst she filled my gaze…

                                                        Their life consists

Alone in loving and in being loved –

One swept, one mutual joy, by then indulged

Perpetually, yet e’er unquenchable.  (Act I, pp. 277-8)

The bashful angel, who by the end of the play becomes one of the lords of Hell, embarrassed by sexy Eve is adorable.  The Lucifer faction debates the possibility of rebellion.  The loyalist faction tries to dissuade them.  The first four acts are static, with a lot of declarations and debates, and without the psychological intensity of Racine.  There is likely some political interest I do not care much about.  A scene where the future devils try to calm down their Luciferian followers, who are more radical than their leaders, clearly has an edge I only glimpse.  And anyway, I am looking for Carpeaux’s promised Baroque language, hidden, I know by the translation, the usual move of turning long Alexandrines into blank verse.

The civil war of the angels and the fall of the Lucifer faction occurs between Acts IV and Act V.  The victorious angles describe the battle.  The description is superb; here, finally, is the kind of writing I was hoping to find.  An angel is describing Lucifer in battle array:

Surrounded by his staff and retinue

In green, he, wickedly impelled by hate

Irreconcilable, in golden mail,

That brightly shone upon his martial vest

Of glowing purple, mounted then his car,

Whose golden wheels with rubies were emblazed.

The lion and dragon fell, prepared

For speedy flight, with backs sown full of stars

And to the chariot joined by pearly traces,

Panted for strife, and for destruction flamed.  (V, 407-8)

Etc., etc., for many colorful, inventive pages.  The angels counterattack:

… by his command

Begin by circling wheels to soar aloft,

To gain the wind-side of their battling foe,

Who also rises, but with heavier sail,

And finally to leeward slowly drifts:

As if one heavenward a falcon saw,

Mounting with pinions bold into the sky,

Ere that the drowsing herons are aware,

Who in a wood, hard by a pleasant mead,

Tremble with fright, when from their lofty nest

They see their dreaded foe.  (V, 411)

And the metaphor of the falcon and the heron goes on for several more lines.  The aerial maneuvering of the angels is first described as, really, a sea battle, familiar to the Dutch, before they angels are turned into birds in the extended metaphor.

I would have guessed Lucifer was a closet drama, but no, it was performed twice before being banned as irreligious.  What do I know about Dutch theater.

One great act.  A fortuitous find.  A bit like reading a retelling of the Ramayana or similar epic.