Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/82

62 thing in either of the plays is the antiphonal song of exile, chanted by bands of maidens:—

"O soete beecken! waer nevens in swang           Te gaen eendraghtig plagh onse sang                          Hoogheffende 't doen                          Der helden koen                                  Van overlang."

In the Cluchtige Comedy van Warenar, dat is, Aulularia van Plautus nae's lants gelegentheid verduitscht (1616), which Hooft was stimulated to write by the success of Brederoo's 't Moortje, he showed that he knew the people and their speech as well almost as Brederoo himself, and had more constructive though less descriptive power, and less wealth of humorous phrase. Besides these longer plays, Hooft wrote Tafelspelen, and he adapted Aretino's lo Ipocrito as Schijnheyligh, not softening the realistic details.

The literary and dramatic reforms which Coster, Hooft, and Brederoo initiated in the Eglantine soon led, as such movements often do, to disagreements. The reasons were in part personal. Rodenburg's tragi-comedies, which he produced with something of the fertility of Hardy—twenty-two have survived—were regarded as barbarous by the admirers of the classical drama, while at the same time their popularity, and the vanity of Rodenburg, excited disgust. But there were other and less personal reasons. The growth of a more artistic drama necessitated some change in the