scenes as Shakespeare. He has not succeeded, however, in presenting the crisis—the conflict between outraged pride and filial affection—with the logical precision and eloquent fulness with which Corneille would have handled the theme. The French drama had to travel a long way and through a variety of experiments before it attained the shining summit of the Cid.
The main road through which it was to travel was indicated by Hardy not in the tragedies, but the tragi-comedies Tragi-comedies. based on Spanish and other "novelle," and the closely related pastorals inspired by the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. The former are, as has been said, the characteristic story-plays of the Renaissance in all countries where the romantic or mediæval type of drama was not entirely superseded by the classical. Spain, France, England, and Holland all produced them in abundance.[1] There is no evidence that Hardy's were modelled on the plays of Lope de Vega. They are drawn from the same source as those of the English and Dutch dramatists
- ↑ Even in Italy, where the influence of classical tragedy and comedy predominated (see The Earlier Renaissance, pp. 323-334), there were composed, besides the imitations of Plautus and Terence, a number of novelle or adventure comedies. Such were the comedies of Araldo, J. Nardi, B. Accolti, &c., most of the comedies of the Accademici Intronati of Siena, and of the more famous Giovanni Battista della Porta. The plots of many of the French tragi-comedies of this period were borrowed from them, as well as from Spanish sources. See A. S. Stiefel, Unbekannte italienische Quellen Jean de Rotrous, 1891, contributed to the Zeitschrift für französische Sprache, 1879, where the same writer has continued his investigations of the debt of French comedy to Italian.
