Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/102

82 en Weerwraek, a vigorous but bombastic and melodramatic version of the Titus Andronicus story, which the Dutch poet may have derived from Shakespeare's play. If he did he was careful to exclude the poetry with which Shakespeare relieved his painful scenes. The impression which this melodramatic piece produced was due to the fact that, so far as it goes, melodrama is drama, which stately pageants, long speeches, and choral odes are not. The taste of scholars was not shocked by horrors which Seneca had taught them were appropriate to tragedy so long as crime ended in punishment, and learned and unlearned alike enjoyed the interest of incident and suspense. But Aran en Titus indicated unmistakably the failure of the effort inaugurated by the Eglantine—the miscarriage of the Dutch drama. The popular and the scholarly had failed to blend in a living and cultured drama. The classical remained a school drama, the romantic degenerated rapidly. Vos's Medea, with which the second new theatre in Amsterdam was opened in 1662, was a melodrama furnished with elaborate stage-effects, and "Konst en vliegh-werck" were soon reckoned to be of more importance than characters and poetry. It is unnecessary to speak of slipshod translations from Spanish and French. The society whose motto was "Nil volentibus arduum" spoke much in the closing years of the century about the reform of the stage; but their vanity was greater than their genius, and they did not rise above translation.

It fared a little better with that vigorous native