Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/77

Rh to be dignified with the name of literature. After his first crude essays Hooft took for his models Italian pastoral drama and French Senecan tragedy. Brederoo followed in his earliest plays the more romantic and popular line of Rodenburg, of Hardy, and of the English dramatists, blending scenes from popular romances or novelle with humorous and realistic pictures of servants and peasants. But nothing is more characteristic of the difference between the English and the Dutch drama than the complete failure of the romantic part of Brederoo's plays and of those of his fellow-dramatists. His three first plays, Treurspel van Rodderick en Alphonsus (1611-16), Griane (1612), and Lucelle (1616), are dramatised Spanish romances or love-stories, but the serious scenes lack entirely that poetic and romantic spirit with which not only Shakespeare, but lesser men like Greene and Dekker, Middleton and Fletcher, invested their versions of Italian and Spanish novellas. The serious part of a Shakespearean comedy is, Hazlitt says, generally better than the comic. Be that as it may, the exact opposite is the case with Brederoo, whose dramatic reputation rests entirely upon the comic interludes in the above-mentioned plays, the three farces, Klucht van de Koe, Klucht van Symen sonder Soeticheyt, and Klucht van den Molenaer, which he wrote between 1612 and 1613, and his two more regular and elaborate comedies, 't Moortje (1615-17) and De Spaensche Brabander (1617-18).

The reason of Brederoo's failure to rise on the ethereal wings of romance is to be found doubtless