ccessful.
Thus no national Dutch drama was permanently called into life.

i. _Scandinavian Drama._

Denmark.

The modern Norwegian drama.

Still more distinctly, the dramatic literature of the Scandinavian
peoples springs from foreign growths. In Denmark, where the beginnings
of the drama in the plays of the schoolmaster Chr. Hansen recall the
mixture of religious and farcical elements in contemporary German
efforts, the drama in the latter half of the 16th century remained
essentially scholastic, and treated scriptural or classical subjects,
chiefly in the Latin tongue. J. Ranch (1539-1607) and H. S. Sthen were
authors of this type. But often in the course of the 17th century,
German and French had become the tongues of Danish literature and of the
Danish theatre; in the 18th Denmark could boast a comic dramatist of
thorough originality and of a wholly national cast. L. Holberg, one of
the most noteworthy comic poets of modern literature, not only marks an
epoch in the dramatic literature of his native land, but he contributed
to overthrow the trivialities of the German stage in its worst period,
which he satirized with merciless humour,[318] and set an example, never
surpassed, of a series of comedies[319] deriving their types from
popular life and ridiculing with healthy directness those vices and
follies which are the proper theme of the most widely effective species
of the comic drama. Among his followers, P. A. Heiberg is specially
noted. Under the influence of the Romantic school, whose influence has
nowhere proved so long-lived as in the Scandinavian north, A.
Ohlenschlager began a new era of Danish literature. His productivity,
which belongs partly to his native and partly to German literary
history, turned from foreign[320] to native themes; and other writers
followed him in his endeavours to revive the figures of Northern heroic
legend. But these themes have in their turn given way in the
Scandinavian theatre to subjects coming nearer home to the popular
consciousness, and treated with a direct appeal to the common experience
of human life, and with a searching insight into the actual motives of
human action. The most remarkable movement to be noted in the history of
the Scandinavian drama, and one of the most widely effective of those
which mark the more recent history of the Western drama in general, had
its origin in Norway. Two Norwegian dramatists, H. Ibsen and Bjurnsterne
Bjurnson, standing a