Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/79

Rh comic art. In the more elaborate comedies, which Brederoo, who was no scholar himself, wrote at the instance of his cultured and pedantic friends, the construction and character-drawing are weak, but there is the same wealth of language and the same power of vivid description. The best things in 't Moortje (1617), a not altogether successful attempt to adapt the Eunuchus of Terence to the conditions of life in Holland, are the long digressions, in one of which he describes, with a Rabelaisian extravagance of racy detail, a stroll through the markets of his native town; in another a skating party on the canals; while in a third an old servant details her recollections of life in a wealthy burgher's house. He was even happier in the picture of Amsterdam life which he gave in De Spaensche Brabander (1617), a dramatisation and adaptation of the picaresque romance Lazarillo de Tormes. The hero of Brederoo's play is a boastful Brabander, a bankrupt fugitive from Antwerp, living on the trustful "botte Hollanders" of Amsterdam. His servant is an adroit beggar whose wits bring in more than his master's boasts. The story is slight, and the connection between the scenes loose. It is a study of humours, not in the analytic, microscopic style of Jonson, but vivid and genial. The realism of the Spanish original was quite in the Dutch taste, and some of the scenes, as that in which two courtesans relate their history, has a realism unrelieved by poetry which is quite foreign to the Elizabethan drama, and hardly appears in our literature before Defoe. A comic dramatist such as Molière, a compeller of