Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/84

64 Brederoo was dead; Coster and Hooft became silent; gradually the old breach was healed, and the Academy and Eglantine united in the "Amsterdamsche Kamer," for which a new theatre was built, and opened in 1638 with the performance of Vondel's Gysbrecht van Amstel.

But the year 1620 marked not only the close of the "quarrel of the players," but the end of the first movement towards the creation of a new drama. Hooft, Brederoo, and Coster had certainly done much to raise the serious drama above the level of "rederijkers'" work, as may be clearly seen by comparing their plays with those of writers for the Brabantian Chamber such as Kolm and De Koning. Still, they had not succeeded in creating a drama at once poetic and dramatically interesting. The popular plays continued to be tragi-comedies—plays half history, half morality—and farces. Van der Eembd's Harlemse Belegeringh and Sophonisba (1620), Jan Harmensz. Krul's Diana (1628), Jacob Struys's Romeo en Juliette (based on Baudello's novel, but showing no acquaintance with Shakespeare's play), H. Roelandt's Biron (1629), are the names of one or two through which the present writer has struggled without finding much to reward the trouble. The style varies between bombast and utter banality. Roelandt's Biron has the brag of Chapman's hero, but not the lofty poetic eloquence. The best popular plays are the farces, often unspeakably coarse. The scholarly drama, on the other hand, passed from Hooft to Vondel,—a great lyrical poet certainly, but not