Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/75

Rh en den zoeten Reyn, are significant titles, and recall the names of Heywood's Merry Interludes.

Both Moralities and Scripture-plays continued to be composed and performed by the chambers in the seventeenth century. In the southern and Catholic Low Countries especially they were popular, and in the Brabantian Chamber at Amsterdam, whose members came from the southern provinces, they continued in fashion when the "Oude Kamer" or "Eglantine" was experimenting in secular romantic and classical plays. Vondel's earliest work was a "rederijker's" Biblical drama, and his religious tragedies thus stand in a direct line of descent from the Mediæval Mysteries, however much their final form may have been influenced by Garnier, Seneca, Grotius, and Sophocles. But though the Zinnespelen lingered, the movement in the opening seventeenth century was towards the secular drama, and this movement, as elsewhere, manifested itself in two distinct but often quaintly blended results. The one was the so-called tragi-comedies (treur-bly-einde-spelen), the dramatised novelle or romances which are found everywhere at the Renaissance, full of incident, regardless of the "unities," and mingling serious with farcical scenes. Even in these the influence of the classical drama is traceable in the occasionally Senecan character of the story, in the division into acts, and the oddly tagged-on choruses. The other result is the more regular imitation of Seneca, Plautus, and Terence. The plays of the first kind in Holland show unmistakably the