Pardes Shoshanim-Asirei HaTikvah [allegorical poetic drama in three acts]

PENCO [DE LA VEGA], JOSEPH BEN ISAAC

Joseph ben Abraham Athias

Amsterdam

1673

FIRST EDITION. Title within typographical border

Vinograd, Amsterdam 405; Fuks, Amsterdam 396

THE FIRST HEBREW DRAMA. First dramatic poem written in Hebrew, calling for the victory of ones will over ones passions. This allegorical drama was written by Penco at the age of seventeen. A poet of considerable talent, he was a member of the Academia de los Floridos, where Jewish Sephardic poets from Amsterdam would meet to recite both Spanish and Hebrew verses and stage Spanish plays. Penco’s drama; “was more reminiscent of a medieval Christian mystery play than of a fashionable French drama, but nonetheless, it was the first Hebrew play to portray true drama.” See: M. H. Gans, Memorbook (1977), p. 117. With Hebrew and Spanish approbations by Penco’s teachers, Isaac Aboab and Moses Raphael de Aguilar as well as Abraham Pimentel, Samuel Pinto and Isaac Nieto