Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/314

294 "novelle," or stories of a similar character from classical sources. The universal theme is the adventures of lovers. In Felismène he dramatises the story from Montemayor's Diana, which Shakespeare used for the Two Gentlemen of Verona. La Force du Sang and La Belle Égyptienne are versions of stories by Cervantes, which Middleton has woven together in The Spanish Gypsy.

There is not much to be said critically of Hardy's tragi-comedies. There is less character-drawing than in the tragedies. They have none of the brilliant complication and dialogue of the Spanish, nor of the exquisite poetry of the English. If the serious scenes are not inferior to those of Rodenburg and Brederoo, there are none of the vigorous comic scenes, vivid pictures of popular life in Amsterdam, with which the latter brightened his dull love-stories. Hardy never ventures outside the four corners of the story he is dramatising to draw from real life, polite or vulgar. The pastorals differ from the tragi-comedies only in the conventional setting. They are stories of the cross-wooing of shepherds and shepherdesses, the wantonness of satyrs, the avarice of parents, and the dark oracles of gods. To indicate their more poetic and unreal character, Hardy uses an octosyllabic line instead of Alexandrines; but he was quite unable to give them the charm of sentiment and poetry which distinguished their Italian originals, and alone could give life to these forerunners of opera and its banalities.

Five of Hardy's plays on mythological