Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/76

56 influence of Lope de Vega and also of the English drama; those of the latter equally clearly that of Garnier and the Pléiade.

The leaders in the dramatic activity of the Eglantine were Hooft—whose work from the first took a classical direction—Dr Samuel Coster, Brederoo, and Theodore Kodcnburg. Coster (1579-1660?), a leading Spirit in the life of the chamber, was a mediocre dramatist and poet. His best work is found in his farces, the Boerenklucht van Teeuwijs de Boer en men Juffer van Grevelinckhuysen (1612) and Tysken van der Schilden (1613), coarse but vigorous and genial plays. His later and more serious plays, as Isabella and the would-be classical Itys (1615), Polyxena (1619), and Iphigenia (1617?), an attack upon the Calvinist clergy, are crude and melodramatic.

Rodenburg's numerous tragi-comedies abound in incident, and his characters—e.g., in Jaloersche Studenten—are drawn with some sympathy, but his style is pedantic and affected. He had visited both Spain and England, and of his extant plays some are adaptations from Lope, one a translation of Cyril Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy. He might, like Hardy, have had historic interest if his work had led to important developments, but Rodenburg and Coster, with Hardy's fatal deficiency in style, have even less dramatic power.

Brederoo and Hooft alone wrote plays which deserve