Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/80

60 thoughtful laughter, Brederoo was not, nor had he any large measure of the creative genius and all-comprehending humour of Shakespeare; but he could paint with a masterly hand, and with some of Aristophanes', Rabelais', and Shakespeare's wealth of phrase, the life and conversation of the people.

The scholarly Hooft naturally shared the taste of his age for classical tragedy and comedy and Italian pastoral. His earliest plays hardly count. Achilles en Polyxena and Theseus en Ariadne are "rederijkers'" plays, though the language is purer and more poetic, and the latter contains one lovely song—

"Ick schouw de werelt aen,          En nae gewoonte gaen           Sie ick vast alle dingen,           Sij sijn dan groot of cleen;           Maer ick helas! alleen           Blijf vol veranderingen."

Granida (1605)—a pastoral, the plot of which was apparently derived from the English Mucedorus, the spirit and language, especially of the charming opening scenes, from Tasso and Guarini—is the first artistic Dutch play, and its art is, characteristically, poetic rather than dramatic. The same is true of his Senecan historical tragedies, Geeraert van Velsen (1613) and Baeto (1617, pr. 1626). They both have a political interest,—Geeraert patriotic, the Baeto a noble and poetic plea for peace without and within, written a year before the execution of Oldenbarneveldt and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The subject of