Lucifer (play)

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The play Lucifer is a 1654 tragedy set in Heaven, written by the Dutch playwright and poet Joost van den Vondel, and premiered on 2 February in the city theater of Amsterdam. When God decides to elevate Man above the Angels, the high-ranked angel Lucifer initiates a revolt which ends when archangel Michael ejects the revolters from Heaven with a bolt of lightning. Lucifer then avenges himself on earth by seducing Adam and Eve to commit original sin, causing their banishment from the Garden of Eden. After the second performance on February 5 the burgomasters of Amsterdam, pressed by the clergy, banned further performances. Lucifer is widely regarded as Vondel's masterpiece and one of the greatest works of Dutch literature. It has been said that Lucifer is "one of the rare products of Dutch literature that occupies a steady place in the Western canon." As a young poet, Vondel associated the Lucifer character with the theme of unjust uprising. The many examples of Luciferism in international politics of the 1640s finally prompted him to give life to the Lucifer-conception inside him. The result is an original work: though all names derive from the Bible, the plot itself is not based on any existing story. In Vondels collected plays in two octavo volumes of 1662, edited by the playwright himself, Lucifer appears in the volume with non-Biblical plays. Dedicated to kaiser Ferdinand III of the Holy Roman Empire, the play is written in alexandrines, with the choirs concluding each act in four- to three-foot iambes. The structure follows the five stages of classical Greek drama, yet timeless and spaceless Heaven does not accommodate all three of Aristotle's unities of time, place, and plot. Literary scholars have long been confused by the question whether the Fall of Man does obstruct the unity...