Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

[p. 275]

Chapter XXXI Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Jacobus Struys. The Morality Plays in the Netherlands

In Modern Philology of July, 1906, Mr. Harold de Wolf Fuller published an extensive article on Romeo and Juliet, on the first page of which he says: ‘At the present time, the only recognized sources of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are Arthur Brooke's long poem, Romeus and Juliet published in 1562, and William Painter's novel, contained in his Palace of Pleasures, 1566-67, both of these works being based directly on a French novel by Boaistuau, written in 1559. Painter's story is merely a close prose translation, whereas the poem shows a much freer handling of its original; of the two productions, it was chiefly from the poem that Shakespeare drew his material. But in addition to these two sources, there seems to have existed once in England a pre-Shakespearian play on this subject. Brief mention of it is made in the address to the reader which Brooke prefixed to his poem. He says: ‘Though I saw the same argument lately set forth on stage with more commendation than I can look for (being there much better set forth than I have or can do) yet the same matter penned as it is, may serve the like good effect.’ Unfortunately, this play seems to have been short-lived in England, for no other explicit reference to it has been found, and, so far as we are aware, it is no longer extant. The important part, therefore, which

[p. 276]

it may have played in the history of the drama, and the influence which it may have exerted on Shakespeare have remained hitherto matters of profitless speculation: ‘But though this play in its original form be irrevocably lost, we shall find, I think, that it has been fairly well preserved in a foreign application; namely, in the Romeo en Juliette, a Dutch play in Alexandrine couplets by Jocob Struys, written about 1630.’¹

Mr. De Wolf Fuller tells us nothing more about Jacob Struys, and indeed not much is known about him; only that he was a playwright in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and wrote the following plays: Albonus and Rosamunde, Amsterdam, 1631; Rape of Proserpina, with the wedding of Pluto, Amsterdam, 1634; Styrus and Ariane, Amsterdam, 1642; Romeo and Juliette, Amsterdam, 1634; and Het Amderamsch Juffertje (The young lady of Amsterdam), 1633. All these plays are written in Dutch.²

The Romeo and Juliette was written not only ‘about 1630,’ as De Wolf Fuller says, but more accurately in 1634, and was played on the stage at Christmas of the same year at Amsterdam.

In his extensive article, Mr. De Wolf Fuller has succeeded in showing us, that according to Arthur Brooke's statement, there must have been a play on the subject Romeo and Juliet, and that probably this play has been preserved in the later application of the theme by Jacob Struys.

But Arthur Brooke does not tell us where he saw it on the stage; whether in England, or in Flanders, where during the time before Shakespeare morality plays were very popular. He does not tell us whether the play, as he saw it, was in English or in Dutch.

1 Modern Philology, July, 1906, p. 1.

2 Van der Aa. Biographical Woordenboek, in voce Jacob Struys.

[p. 277]

And it is a possibility that the original was written in Dutch, as in the case of ‘Elckerlyck and Everyman.’ The enormous number of plays written in Flanders, and in Holland during the fifteenth century, the brilliant ‘land jewels’ in the cities of the Netherlands, where sometimes more than thirty ‘chambers of rhetoric’ went into competition; the great number of playwrights, one of whom, by the name of Mathys de Casteleyne, wrote more than a hundred plays, and in general the whole civilization in which especially the Southern Netherlands were far ahead of England, make us feel as if we, looking for the sources of Shakespearian plays, might find some material to help us among the mass of plays produced in the Low Countries.

The able article of De Wolf Fuller has brought us as far as Jacob Struys; he has brought us to the Netherlands, and we have to wait for somebody, who as in the case of Elckerlyck and Everyman, can trace the story further back and perhaps bring us to more discoveries of the same kind.

In the fifteenth, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, general probability is in favor of a source in the Southern Netherlands, on account of the great superiority of civilization there at that time.