As to its use, however, for the
purposes
of the
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered.
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
As for
the war, its final cause lay in the commercial jealousy between the
two nations, which made itself felt wherever English mercantile
enterprise was seeking to compete with that of a more successful
rival, and which, of course, came home most nearly to the city of
London. But it was also due to a general antipathy on the part of
the English against the Dutch, as of the naturally stronger, to the
actually wealthier, community. Dryden, accordingly, takes care to
dwell on the strength of England, as contrasted with the meanness,
baseness and so forth, of Holland. Moreover, the upper class of
English society was offended by Dutch burgherism and re-
publicanism, while the court resented the act excluding the
house of Orange from the stadholdership. When, therefore, war
was declared, a good deal of enthusiasm (of a kind), especially
among the gentry, hailed the event; and Evelyn gives an amusing
description of the outbreak of a universal passion for taking service
in the fleet. Dryden, in his preface, describes that part of his poem
which treats of the war as 'but a due expiation' on his part for
‘not serving his King and country in it. The navy, as the favourite
service of both the king and his brother the duke of York, was, at
i See Somers Tracts, vol. vrt, pp. 644—5, for a notice of pretended prophecies as to
the fire of London, stated to have been printed in 1661 or 1662, in the nonconformist
interest, under the title Annus Mirabilis primus et secundus. For a full account of the
proceedings against Francis Smith and others, supposed to be concerned in the
printing of Mirabilis Annus, or the Year of Prodigies and Wonders, printed 1661, see
Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus, pp. 183–8. The expression 'The Wonderful Yeere'
had, however, been used more than half a century earlier, and, curiously enough, of
the plague year 1602, when more than 30,000 persons were said to have fallen victims
to the epidemio in London. See Dekker's The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London
(Arber's edition), p. 5. Burnet, in his Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (1682),
p. 102, mentions that, 'in the year 1666, an Opinion did run through the Nation, that
the end of the world would come that year. ' Though Burnet says that this belief was
possibly 'set on by Astrologers,' and Dryden had a penchant for astrology, he does not
seem to make any reference to it in his poem.
>
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
Annus Mirabilis
II
this time, extremely popular; and Dryden's confessed anxiety to
have his sea terms correct was pedantry in season.
Altogether, his account of the progress of the war-from the
dearly-bought victory of Solebay to the barren triumph off the
North Foreland is full of fire and spirit; and it was not any
part of the poet's business to expound how, when the campaign of
1666 came to an end, the feeling began to spread that, with or
without further naval victories, the situation of the country, against
which France was intriguing in every part of the king's dominions,
would, before long, become untenable. Thus, when Dryden repre-
sents the terrible visitation of September 1666—the destruction of
the far greater part of London by fire-as having befallen England
at a season of undiminished confidence, and as a nemesis of this
national pride—he is putting a gloss of his own upon the actual
sequence of affairs. He had, moreover, omitted any account of the
plague, whose ravages were at their height at a date considerably
earlier than that of the events described in the introductory part
of his poem, and had thus made it easier to represent the fire as a
calamity which overtook the nation when 'palled' with the long
succession of its 'joys. The fury of the fire at its height is depicted
with splendid energy, and the daring figure of the witches' sabbath,
danced by the ghosts of traitors who have descended from London
Bridge, is not less apposite to the wild scene than that of the divine
extinguisher by which the fire is put out is preposterous. The
poet's prophecy that a greater and more august’ London would
arise from her fires' was fulfilled; but the companion political
prophecy had a lamer ending in the peace of 1667, which was all
that England gained from the glories of the wonderful year. '
Yet the literary achievement itself was wonderful. Without the
assurance to be derived from any great previous success, Dryden
had undertaken a task so full of pitfalls that nothing but a most
extraordinary impetus could have carried his course past these to
its goal—and this, though he had hampered himself with a metrical
form which, as he knew and confessed, had made a far more
exacting claim upon his ingenuity and skill than the couplet
6
1 The laments of sea-green Sirens' for the death of admiral Sir John Lawson are
of a piece with the mermaid's song' at the end of The Battle of the Baltic, and must
be censured or extolled in its company.
This was the occasion on which de Ruyter (whom Dryden compares to Varro at
Cannae) saved his ships, as has been observed, in order to sail up the Medway with
them another day. '
3 That they then seated themselves on the roof of Whitehall is a supposition due
to a persistent misprint in st. 224, pointed out and corrected in Sargeaunt's edition of
Dryden's Poems (1910).
6
## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################
I 2
Dryden
>
already familiar to him. The courage and dash of the whole
performance, which cast into the shade its lesser features, its far-
fetched conceits and other reminiscences of poetic schools that
were nearing their end, could not but apprise the critical world,
including king and court, that a combatant had descended into the
arena who was unlikely to find an equal there.
Meanwhile, like most of his would-be rivals, he had formed a
connection with the theatre, and continued to maintain it. In his
thirtieth year, on the very morrow of the restoration, Dryden
made his earliest known attempt as a playwright. His dramatic
productivity slackened very much during the latter half of his
literary life; but he cannot be said to have ever wholly abandoned
this form of production; indeed, in his very last year, he contri-
buted some new matter on the occasion of the revival, for his
benefit, of one of Fletcher's plays. Within this period, he tried his
hand at most dramatic forms in actual use, and, for a time, iden-
tified himself with the most conspicuous new development. In
view, however, of the assertion deliberately made by him in his
later days, that his genius never much inclined him to the stage,'
and of the general course of his literary career, which shows him
rather falling back from time to time on play-writing than steadily
attracted by it, the fact that he was the author, in whole or in
part, of nearly a score and a half of plays, would be surprising,
were it not for the extraordinary promptitude and adaptability of
his powers. It will be most convenient, before returning to his
other literary labours, to survey briefly his dramatic work as a
whole. Its fluctuations were largely determined by influences
which he could, indeed, sustain and develop, but into which, except
in the instance of one transitory species, he can hardly be said to
have infused any fresh life; so that his plays, as a whole, remain,
after all, only a subsidiary section of his literary achievements.
The principal currents in what, according to a rather loose
terminology, it has been customary to call the restoration drama,
will be discussed in other chapters of the present volume; and
what is said here is only so much as is necessary to make the
general course of Dryden's productivity as a dramatist intelligible.
Anasmuch as the primary object of the London stage, when re-
established with the monarchy, was to please the king, his court
and its surroundings, and, inasmuch as, in that court, many besides
the king himself had acquired a personal familiarity with the
1 See A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) (Essays,
ed. Ker, W. P. , vol. 11, p. 37).
## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################
Influence of French Tragicomedy
13
xx
French stage and its literature which, at all events in his case,
dated back to the earlier years of his exile, French influence upon
the English drama in the restoration age was, almost as a matter
of course, both strong and enduring. But it is equally certain that
the basis from which the English drama started on the reopening
of the theatres was no other than the old English drama, at the
point which it had reached at the time of their closing. Beaumont
and Fletcher, and the drama of tragicomic romance which, through
them, had, for a generation before the closing of the theatres,
established their supremacy on the English stage', were the
favourites there when the theatres reopened; nor had either
Jonson or Shakespeare been forgotten, and the former was still,
though the flow of humour among his followers had begun to
run dry, regarded as the acknowledged master of comedy. The
dominant power on the French stage down to about the middle of
the fourth decade of the seventeenth century had been that of
Hardy, whose most celebrated play, Mariamne, dates from 1610,
and whose vogue did not begin to give way till after his death in
1631? . Now, Hardy, like the dramatists who gave the tone to
English dramatic literature in the generation before the closing of
the theatres, kept the French stage popular by means of the mixed
species of tragicomedy, and thus prevented it from falling back on
the academical lines of Senecan tragedy represented by Garnier.
It is true that he was warming in his bosom the great reformer of
both French tragedy and French comedy, who said of himself that,
in his earlier plays, he had no guidance 'but a little commonsense
and the examples supplied to him by Hardy’; but Corneille's
epochal production of Le Cid did not take place till 1636 (Médée
appeared only a year earlier); and Le Menteur, which stands in
much the same relation to the development of French comedy as
that held by Le Cid to the progress of French tragedy, was not
produced till 1642. Thus, though Part I of Le Cid was brought
out in an English translation (by Joseph Rutter) in 1637 and
Part II (in a version in which Richard Sackville, afterwards earl of
Dorset, is said to have had a share) in 1640, both being republished
in 1650, it seems clear that the main influence exercised by the
French upon the English drama was due to Hardy and tragicomedy,
which dominated all the French dramatists—including Rotrou,
1 As to the long life of romantic tragicomedy, and its survival after the restora-
tion, see the lucid exposition in Ristine, F. E. , English Tragi-Comedy, its Origin and
History (New York, 1910), chaps. V and vi.
? See Rigal, E. , Alexandre Hardy et le Théâtre. Français à la fin du XVIe et
au commencement du XVIIme siècle, Paris, 1889.
a
18
## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################
14
Dryden
whose work synchronised with Corneille's earlier dramatic labours
-rather than to Corneille in the maturity of his creative genius.
When, however, the perennial conflict was renewed under new
conditions and on reasoned principles by Corneille, a loftier and
more logical conception of tragedy approved itself to the French
critical public; and, perfected in practice by the singularly refined
and sensitive genius of Racine, French classical tragedy reached its
consummation as a distinct species of dramatic literature. The
beginnings of Molière (though more than one of his plays have an
earlier date) may, for our present purpose, be placed in 1658, when,
both as actor and writer, he first appeared before Louis XIV and
his court. It was not long before the English drama, in the hands
of Dryden and others, revealed the impression made on it by these
new developments, the effects of which, whether direct or indirect,
will be summarised in later chapters'; but they should not be
regarded as what in no sense they were, the starting-points of our
post-restoration drama.
Of special importance for the progress of the English drama,
both before and after the closing of the theatres, was the influence
of prose fiction, operating either directly or through plays for
which it had furnished material. The two literatures which here
particularly come into question are the Spanish and the French
--of popular Italian fiction, the heyday seemed to have passed
away, as, in the seventeenth century, artificiality of taste estab-
lished its rule. Concerning Spanish influence, more will be said
below? ; while it is not unfrequently difficult to substantiate a
traditional derivation from a Spanish play, the direct indebtedness
of English dramatists to Spanish prose fiction was, beyond doubt,
considerable in extent, both before and after the restoration.
French prose fiction, on the other hand, in the course of the
seventeenth century, passed through an entirely new phase in its
history; and, inasmuch as this very directly influenced an English
dramatic species with which Dryden was, for a time, identified,
reference must be made to it here. With the Astrée of Honoré
d'Urfé (1610—2) began a literary movement representing, in the
first instance, a reaction towards a refinement of sentiment and
expression which had been incompatible with the turbulence of a
long epoch of civil war. This movement culminated in the school
See post, chap8. V, VII, and xvII.
See post, chap. v.
8 See also post, chap. XVII ; and of. Ward, Hist. of Engl. Dr. Lit. vol. I, pp. 307 ff.
For other authorities, see Hill, H. W. , 'La Calprenede's Romances and the Restoration
Drama' in University of Nevada Studies, vol. 11 (1910), p. 3.
9
## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################
Influence of French Romance
15
of romance associated with the name of La Calprenède and, still
more largely, with that of Madeleine de Scudéry, the authoress of
Le Grand Cyrus. Gomberville and the comtesse de La Fayette
belong to the same group, but that lady's last and most celebrated
novel, La Princesse de Clèves, is already differentiated from the
creations of Mlle de Scudéry by being, to some extent, based upon
historical fact, towards which, as a writer of memoirs, the authoress
had a leaning. The romances of this school invariably turned on
the pivot of heroic' love, or love in more than the usual number
of dimensions, and, though dealing with the deepest of human
emotions, they never fell out of the tone of elaborate conventional
formality. They were, in some instances, translated into English or
imitated by English writers, from the commonwealth times onwards,
when, no doubt, they had been welcomed, in many quarters, as
alternatives to the drab dulness of everyday life? ; and, after the
restoration, as will be seen, they supplied themes to dramatic.
writers whose object it was to heighten and intensify the charac-
teristics of stage romance. While prose fiction, of this class, con-
tinued to attract English readers to within the last quarter of the
century, in France, a reaction had already set in towards simplicity,
on the one hand, and satire, on the other; but, in these directions,
English dramatists were not, at all events at this time, prepared to
follow.
It was, then, under these influences, that Dryden gradually
settled down to the particular forms of dramatic composition
which he chose from time to time, and in no regular succession,
to make his own, and which he frequently illustrated by signally
suggestive prose commentaries, written with consummate grace
and ease in the form of dedications, prefaces or essays, thus
bringing his dramatic productions into harmony with rules of good
sense and good taste evolved from established theory and, still
more largely, from approved practice. Dryden's plays would often
lose much, if not most, of their interest if read without reference
to their prefaces and other critical apparatus; neither, however, is
it advisable, except in a few special instances, to detach these from
the texts which gave rise to them.
In the actual year of the restoration, or, at all events, within a
few months from that date, Dryden, perhaps stimulated by the use
1 See Dorothy Osborne's Letters (chap. In), 1653, from Chicksands, where La Cléo-
pâtre and Le Grand Cyrus appear to have been her habitual companions, and Pepyss
Diary, 7 December 1660 (when he sat up till midnight reading Fuller's Abbeys, while
his wife, whose devotion to these romances he did not share, was immersed in Great
Cyrus') et al. As to the chief English translations and imitations of these French
romances, see post, chap. XVI.
+
## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################
16
Dryden
made in the commonwealth period of quasi-dramatic dialogue as
a vehicle of political satire or invective-, proposed to himself to
read a political lesson to the public by means of a historical
tragedy, The Duke of Guise, applying the doubtful parallel of the
Catholic league to the recent memories of puritan ascendancy.
But the attempt was not thought successful by judicious advisers,
and what had been written of the play was left over to be utilised
by the author in the tragedy which, many years later, in 1682, be
produced in conjunction with Lee. Thus, the first play by Dryden
produced on the stage was The Wild Gallant, first acted in
February 1663. It has no further claim to be singled out among
the comedies, at the same time extravagant and coarse, in which
the period of dramatic decline abounds; though there are some
traces of the witty dialogue, often carried on by a flirting couple,
in which Dryden came to excel. The statement in the prologue
that the author was ‘endangered by a Spanish plot' (i. e. a rival
'Spanish' play) has been perverted to the direct opposite of
its meaning, and the most humorous incident in the piece is
conveyed straight from Ben Jonson. The play did not find favour,
except, apparently, with lady Castlemaine; and, in the sequel,
Dryden only intermittently returned to comedy proper. He wrote
of himself, early in his dramatic career, that he was 'not so fitted
by nature to write comedy' as certain other kinds of drama; ‘he
wanted,' he confesses, 'that gaiety of humour which is required to
it''; and he also wanted, as he might have added, the facility of
invention-whether of situations or of characters—which relieves
the productions of a comic dramatist from the sameness which is
noticeable in this class of Dryden's plays. He consoled himself
with the notion that a reputation gained from comedy' was hardly
worth the seeking; 'for I think it is, in its own nature, inferior to
all sorts of dramatic writing5. ' Thus, he only returned to it from
time to time, and wholly eschewed 'farce, which consists principally
of grimacese,' and from which he naturally shrank, devoid as he
6
1 As to these political squibs in dramatic form, cf. Ristine, F. H. , u. 8. pp. 151–3.
2 Cf. post, chap. v. The Spanish plot' in question was that of Tuke's Adventures
of Five Hours. Cf. Modern Language Notes, vol. XIX (1904), p. 166. Fitzmaurice-
Kelly, History of Spanish Literature, p. 263, had already pointed out that El Galán
escarmentado, which was supposed to have suggested Dryden's plot, could hardly have
reached Dryden before it was published. The borrowing from Jonson's Every Man
out of His Humour is in act 1, sc. 3.
3 A Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 116).
'
4 See, also, the dedication to Aureng-Zebe, where he freely confesses that some of
his contemporaries have, even in his own partial judgment, outdone him in comedy.
5 See preface to An Evening's Love (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 135).
6 Ibid.
## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################
Comedies
17
Lo
may generally be asserted to have been of any inclination to what
was grotesque, or even merely odd or quaint. And, in the critical
essays and excursuses which illustrated his practice, he discusses
the comic drama with comparative rarity?
The Wild Gallant was written in prose, as was Sir Martin
Mar-Al, or The Feigned Innocence (1667, printed 1668), an
adaptation by Dryden, whose name was not attached to it till
thirty years later, of the duke of Newcastle's translation of Molière's
early comedy L'Étourdi, with certain touches suggested by two
plays by Quinault. The translation is not close, nor the treatment
refined; but the play was very successful. In prose is also the
main portion of The Assignation or Love in a Nunnery (1672,
printed 1673), worthless, except where in some blank verse passages
it rises to a higher literary level. Marriage-à-la-Mode (produced at
the same dates), which, unlike The Assignation, greatly pleased the
town, thanks to the admirably drawn coquette Melantha, presents
the same mixture of prose and blank verse. Of Dryden's remaining
comedies, Limberham, or The Kind Keeper (acted in 1678), which
is entirely in prose, has unmistakable dramatic merits; but it was
speedily withdrawn, having been judged a gross libel on a well
known public personage, generally supposed to be Lauderdale? .
Dryden's last comedy, Amphitryon (produced so late as 1690), for
which both Plautus and Molière were put under contribution, is,
again, a mixture of prose and blank verse; none of Dryden's plays
more brilliantly attest his literary gift, and none have more of the
wantonness to which he afterwards pleaded guilty.
In Dryden's second acted play, The Rival-Ladies (acted 1664),
he had already passed from comedy into tragicomedy, where his
genius was more at home. Its complicated plot (two ladies disguise
themselves as pages in order to take service with a gallant whose
affections are set on a third) caused it to be supposed, rightly or
wrongly, to have a Spanish origin; its dialogue falls into the stagey
antithesis which, though it was as old as Shakespeare, The Rehearsal
and Butlers were to ridicule without mercy. What, however, is
most noticeable in this play is the first, though still tentative, use of
* See, however, a Defence of the Epilogue (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. I, pp. 172 ff. ),
where Dryden criticises Jonson, not without a certain severity; the comparison between
French and English comedy in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, passim; and preface to
An Evening's Love, already cited.
* Scandal was very busy with Lauderdale's private as well as his public morals; but
there is nothing . convincing' in the caricature. Others thought it intended for
Shaftesbury, who was attacked in similar fashion by Otway.
3 Repartees between Cat and Puss at a Caterwauling.
2
به سوریه نیاز
E, L. VIII.
CH. I.
## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################
18.
Dryden
rime as a proper feature of dramatic verse. This use is defended
in a dedication to lord Orrery—the earliest of Dryden's critical
excursions. It should be remembered that, since Fletcher's short
preface to his Faithfull Shepheardesse (printed 1609 or 1610), such
discussions of dramatic problems as these had fallen out of use,
and that the public was now neither 'railed into approbation,' as
it had formerly been by Ben Jonson, nor gently led on to acquies-
cence in the precepts of its critical guides. Following the example
of Corneille? , Dryden took advantage of the revived interest in the
stage to address its patrons, as it were ex cathedra, but without any
assumption of academical solemnity or rigour. To the subject of
the dramatic use of the heroic couplet which he here broached, he
afterwards returned at greater length, both in his Essay of
Dramatick Poesie and in his Essay of Heroick Plays; but he did
not claim the innovation as primarily his own, and he recalled the
fact that the rimed five foot couplet, in a form approaching as near
as possible to that which it owed to Waller, had been first applied
to its 'noblest use' by D'Avenant in the quasi-dramatic Siege of
Rhodes (1656, enlarged 1662). Dryden, however, was the first to
employ the rimed couplet in the dialogue of an ordinary stage
play, though he, too, only introduced the innovation tentatively.
Etherege went a step further, and, in The Comical Revenge, or
Love in a Tub (acted and printed 1664), put the whole serious
part of the play into heroic couplets. Inasmuch, however, as, in
the same year 1664, lord Orrery's Henry V, which is entirely in
heroic couplets, was performed, Etherege and he must be left to
divide the crown' of having introduced the innovation with
Dryden and D'Avenant. If it could be proved that Orrery’s ‘first
play,' mentioned in king Charles's letter of 22 February 1662 was
Henry V, there would be no doubt as to Orrery's priority over
Etherege.
It does not seem to be necessary here to enter into a re-
examination of the question of the suitableness, or unsuitableness,
6
6
1 See post, p. 23.
i
* See Siegert, E. , Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery u. seine Dramen (Wiener Beiträge
zur Engl. Philologie), Vienna and Leipzig, 1906, p. 19. Orrery claimed to have
written his tragedy The Black Prince 'in a new way,' by which he means the rimed
couplet ; but this play was not acted till 1667, or printed till 1669. Henry V, how-
ever, and Mustapha, which were likewise in rime, were first performed in 1664 and
1665 respectively. See post, p. 22, note. As to Etherege, for whom Gosse (Seventeenth-
Century Studies, ed. 1883, p. 238) claims that he was the first to carry out, though
Dryden was the first to propose, the experiment of writing ordinary plays in rime,
see post, chap. v.
## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################
The Heroic Couplet in the Drama 19
of the heroic couplet as a form of dramatic verse. Not only in
certain kinds of romantic comedy, for which it has been claimed
as a suitable vehicle, but, also, for various eccentric species which
have been or may be invented-such as pantomime, burlesque or
extravaganza-it may readily be allowed to be both well fitted
and effective.
As to its use, however, for the purposes of the
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered. Partly, of
course, the objection lies in the tendency of the couplet, as treated
by Dryden and his successors, to make against continuity of flow,
to shut up the sense within fixed limits and, because of the con-
sequent demand for precision of statement, to impart to dialogue or
soliloquy a didactic rather than dramatic colouring. And, further,
with regard to the use of rime itself in English dramatic verse, the
caveat of Taine cannot be put aside, that'rime is a different thin
for different races': the Englishman being transported by it into
a world remote from the actual, whereas, for the Frenchman, it is
nothing more than a conventional costume? The heroic couplet,
as used in Dryden's plays and those which followed their example,
therefore, operates against, rather than in favour of, theatrical
illusion and the sway of the imagination on the stage, and helps
to urge the dramatist who employs it in the direction of con-
ventionalism and artificiality. Against this general result, it is
useless to argue that passion, and even mere eloquence, at times
gets the better of the outward form, and, by its driving force,
moves and disturbs the hearer in spite of himself.
No sooner had Dryden, in The Rival-Ladies, produced a tragi-
comedy, containing an element of rimed verse, in which he had
made successful use of his gift of poetical rhetoric, than he was
characteristically ready to take a leading part in evolving an
ulterior dramatic species not precisely new, but with features of
its own so marked as to differentiate it from tragicomedy proper.
The tragicomedy bequeathed to him and the restoration dramatists
in general by their predecessors was wont to possess a double plot,
consisting, to use Dryden's own phraseology? , of one main design,'
serious in kind, executed in verse, and 'an underplot or second
walk of comical characters and adventures subservient to the chief
fable, yet carried along under it and helping to it'; although, in
point of fact, the connection between the two was frequently very
slight. At different stages of his career, he produced three more
1 Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, bk, i, chap. II, sec. IV,
? A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (Essays, ed. Ker,
vol. 11, pp. 102 f. ).
242
## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################
20
Dryden
X
plays', of various merit, which belonged to this class. Secret Love,
or The Maiden Queen (acted 1667), of which probably because of
the frank gaiety of Nell Gwynn's scenes in it-Charles II approved
so greatly as to dub it ‘his play,' is founded, as to its main plot, on
Le Grand Cyrus, and, as to its comic underplot, partly on that
romance and partly on the same novelist's Ibrahim, ou L'illustre
Bassa. The interest in the serious plot is impaired by the quite
unheroic character of Philocles intended, as Dryden says, to
represent queen Christina of Sweden's favourite Magnus de la
Gardie); and the chief attraction of the play consists in the
'discoursive' passages between Celadon and Florimel. In The
Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery, again (acted and printed
1681), which seems certainly to have been designed as a tragi-
comedy by Dryden, the comic effect preponderates over that of
the serious plot, though the latter cannot be said to be without
interest. The interweaving of the two has been praised-perhaps
overpraised—by more than one eminent critic? . The comic
dialogue of this play is excellent, and the character of the friar
by no means a replica of Fletcher's Spanish Curate (though there
are points of resemblance in the two plays), but a new variety of
an unctuous type which, from Chaucer to Dickens, has afforded
unfailing delight to the public, and which it must have given
Dryden, who hated priests and parsons with a consistent hatred,
much satisfaction to elaborate. His last tragicomedy, Love
Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail (acted 1694), in which
there is a large admixture of rime, merely repeated in its main
plot that of Marriage-à-la-Mode, and the play justly proved a
failure.
Dryden, as already noted, had not brought out more than two
plays, in the second of which he had made occasional use of the
rimed five foot couplet, when he was found ready to assist his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in the composition of what may
be described as the first heroic play? The shortcomings in the
1 Marriage-a-la-Mode, of which the main interest lies in the comic action, has been
reckoned above among the comedies. Scott suggests that it may have been at first
designed as a heroic play, but that one effect of The Rehearsal was to induce the
author to recast the piece.
2 Dryden himself, in A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695), refuses to defend The
Spanish Fryar on this score, and declares its faults to be those of its genre, which is
of an unnatural mingle' (Ker, vol. II, p. 147).
3 Sir Robert Howard, who was also a politician and a placeman, figured both as a
historical and political writer, and among the poets and playwrights of the age. His
comedy The Committee (1662) satirised ex post facto the doings of the puritan party
whon in power. Of the tragedies for which he was solely responsible, the most
>
## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################
Dryden and the Heroic Play 21
versification of part of this play, which was printed as Howard's,
suggest that it was submitted by him for revision to Dryden, whose
superior skill in the handling of the couplet he freely confessed.
Though devoid of any kind of interest except that which this and
later heroic plays sought in the remoteness and consequent
strangeness of scene, The Indian Queen was successful; and
Dryden was thus encouraged to write a 'sequel' to it under the
title The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the
Spaniards (acted 1665), by which the success of the new species
was established and his own reputation as a playwright defini-
tively assured. His other plays, which, both in form of verse and
in treatment of subject, fall under the same designation, were
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (acted in 1668 or 1669), the
two parts of Almanzor and Almahide, or The Conquest of Granada
(1669 and 1670) and Aureng-Zebe (1676). It will thus be seen
that the number of heroic plays by Dryden was small, and written
at considerable intervals. The earlier of these breaks (1665—8)
was largely due to the closing of the playhouses in consequence of
the plague and the great fire. The later (1670–6) interruption
was, no doubt, partly caused by the appearance of The Rehearsal
(1670). Although that celebrated burlesque cannot be said to have
killed heroic plays, there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding
the brilliant features which some of these plays displayed, the
elements of vitality were wanting in the species. The list of plays
which, as written partly or wholly in the rimed couplet, have any
claim at all to be reckoned as heroic, is small in itself, and, if
reduced by certain obvious omissions, contains, with the exception
of Dryden’s, few works of even secondary significance? . In a word,
Dryden completely dominates the English heroic play.
interesting is The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668), of which the matter
was taken from recent historians. Sir Robert Howard, who had kept himself as
prominent as he could in life, was buried in Westminster abbey. He is the Crites of
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie ; Shadwell ridiculed him under the less courteous
appellation Sir Positive Atall. His brothers Edward and James likewise wrote plays;
the former was author of The Usurper (1668), a tragedy in which Oliver Cromwell
was represented in the character of Damocles, and Hugh Peters appeared as Hugo de
Petra ; the latter perpetrated a version of Romeo and Juliet (1662), with a happy
ending,' which was performed on alternate nights with the catastrophe. James
Howard's comedy Au Mistaken (printed 1672) was acted before Charles II at Trinity
college, Cambridge, in October 1667.
1 See the list in appendix D of Chase, L. N. , The English Heroic Play (New York,
1909). Besides Otway, Crowne and Lee (for certain of their plays), only lord Orrery,
Sir Robert Howard, Elkanah Settle and Banks seem to call for consideration. Of
the latter two, something will be said elsewhere (see post, chap. VII); as to Orrery, a
note may be subjoined in this place. Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, who, as lord
Broghill, played a part of some importance in Anglo-Irish relations, is, in literature,
## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################
22
Dryden
Like The Indian Emperor, Tyrannick Love treats with much
freedom a theme out of the common track--in this case, the
persecution of the Christians by Maximin and the martyrdom of
St Catharine. The argument of Aureng-Zebe deals, again quite
freely, with a notability of the writer's day, though largely fol-
lowing the course of Racine's Mithridate, and borrowing the
matter of one scene from Le Grand Cyrus. On the other hand,
the most important and the most typical of Dryden's heroic plays,
The Conquest of Granada, is essentially based on Madeleine de
Scudéry's Almahide, while one of its episodes is taken from her
Le Grand Cyrus and another from her Ibrahim. But the im-
portant point is that these subjects, as treated in the plays in
question, all resemble one another in their substance, and, more or
less, in its adjuncts. The plays are all of them ‘heroic' plays, and
the metre which they employ is called the 'heroic'couplet, because
they follow and imitate the example of 'heroic' romance, as set
forth by Ariosto himself. Their themes, like those of heroic poetry
and fiction in general, are the ‘emprises’ and conflicts of absorbing
human passions-love, jealousy and honour-all raised to a trans-
normal height and expressed with a transnormal intensity? . Their
men and women are, if the term may be thus applied, “supermen’
and 'superwomen,' and their master passions are superlove and
superhonour. From these out-of-the-way premisses flow a number
of out-of-the-way results. The actions must be suited to the
motives; their conditions must be unexpected changes and chances
and tumultuous backgrounds, their complications must be in-
soluble except by violent means, and deaths as numerous as
a
most notable as the author of the romance Parthenissa (1654–65). As a dramatist,
he is frigid and uninteresting, though his subjects were unusually varied and treated
in the approved heroic style, and though he was not unskilful in the use of the couplet
which he claimed (not very distinctly) to have first used on the stage. His most effective
play was, perhaps, Mustapha (1665), taken from an episode in Georges de Scudéry's
Ibrahim (founded on his sister's romance); his most interesting drama, The Black Prince,
like all Orrery's plays, in heroic verse, was not acted till 1667. The History of Henry the
Fifth, which ends with an act of heroic renunciation on the part of Owen Tudor, was
the earliest produced by Orrery on the stage, and, probably, the earliest written ky him.
According to Pepys, when Orrery's “heroique plays could do no more wonders,' he turned
to comedy. But it was too late. (For a full account of him, see Siegert, E. , u. s. )
See the magnificently audacious passage in An Essay of Heroick Plays (Essays,
ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 150): ‘I opened the next book that lay by me, which was an Ariosto
in Italian ; and the very first two lines of that poem, gave me light to all I could desire :
Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto,' etc.
2 · When I invent a History,' says one of the characters in Clélie, 'I think I should
make things much more perfect than they are. All Women should be admirably fair,
and all Men as valiant as Hector. ' (Cited by Hill, H. W. , u. s. p. 29. )
&
## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie
23
>
leaves in Vallombrosa. Furthermore, the personages of these
dramas must conduct themselves in a manner wholly unlike the
usages obtaining in the daily round of life; it must be a manner
appropriate to spheres into which the imagination alone can trans-
plant us ancient Rome, Jerusalem, or Troy, or, still better, because
-still less familiar, Mexico or the east Indies. Finally, the verse, as
well as the words, must be suited to the action, and the 'heroic'
couplet must serve the purpose of a sort of 'cothurnated,' which is
interpreted 'stilted,' speech'.
It was inevitable that a succession of plays of this type should
soon pall upon the spectator, because of the sameness of their
method (one of Dryden's most persistent assailants, Martin Clifford,
accused him of 'stealing from himself'), unless each new pro-
duction sought to force the pace, and to outvie its predecessors.
The interest in the action, cut adrift, as it was, from probability
and from the sympathy which probability begets, had to be sus-
tained by all sorts of adventitious expedients—supernatural
apparitions and magic processes, with fantastic songs, serenades
and dances. But, notwithstanding the resources of Dryden's
rhetorical genius, and the wonderful mental buoyancy with which
he carried out any task undertaken by him, the species was
doomed to self-exhaustion, nor can its master long have deceived
himself on this head.
Dryden's apologetic Essay of Heroick Plays was preceded in
date of publication by his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668),
written in reply to Sir Robert Howard's preface to his Foure New
Plays (1665). The earlier essay is in that dialogue form which
had preserved its popularity in the literatures of Europe since it
had been revived by Erasmus and others in the renascence period,
with which Dryden's age was familiar from both Spanish and
French precedents, and which was practised by many contem-
porary English writers, including Clarendon and Burnet. But
there can be little doubt that Dryden derived the most direct
impulse to the composition of the essays in dramatic and other
literary criticism with which he enriched the library of English
prose from the three Discours severally prefixed by Corneille to
the three volumes of the 1660 collection of his plays, and the
Examens which, in the same edition, preceded each drama”.
* All this is put at length in some valuable papers entitled “Dryden's heroisches
Drama,' contributed by Holzhausen, F. , to Englische Studien, vols. x—XVI (1889–92).
See Ker, u. s. introduction, p. xxxvi, as to Martin Clifford's charge against Dryden
of pilfering from other French critical writers.
## p. 24 (#46) ##############################################
24
Dryden
may be.
.
Dryden's famous essay is written with great spirit, and with a
fusion of vigour and ease altogether different from the vivacity
by which literary critics appealing to a wider public at times
strive to hide their thoroughness, or the want of it, as the case
The dialogue form is employed with Platonic grace,
the venue being laid under the sound of the guns discharged in
the battle of Solebay, and audible in the Thames 'like the noise
of distant thunder or swallows in a chimney. ' The conclusions
reached may be described as eclectic and, at the same time, as
based upon experience, albeit the latter was, necessarily, of a very
limited range. As a matter of fact, Dryden's opinions on most
subjects and not the least on dramatic theory-were sufficiently
fluid to respond without reluctance to the demands of common-
sense ; nor did he ever take pride in a doctrinaire consistency-
even with himself. The arguments, in this Essay, of Neander
(who represents Dryden's own views) lead to the conclusion that
observance of the timehonoured laws of dramatic composition, as
reasonably modified by experience—in other words, adherence to
the principle of the unities as severally interpreted by Corneille-
is reconcilable with the greater freedom of treatment assumed by
the masters of the English drama; while the plea for the use of the
rimed couplet, based on its dramatic capabilities, especially in
tragedy, comes in as a sort of corollary!
The immediate occasion for Dryden's Essay had been the
confession of a doubt by Sir Robert Howard (who, as Crites,
reproduces it in the dialogue) with regard to the appropriateness
of the use, in which he had formerly taken part, of the rimed
couplet in dramatic verse. Howard having replied to Dryden's
answer in the preface to his play The Great Favourite, or The
Duke of Lerma (1668), without losing his temperas why should
he have done, except to give grounds for the persistent misrepre-
sentation of a literary difference as a personal quarrel ? -Dryden
wound up the controversy by A Defence of an Essay of Drama-
tick Poesie (1668), prefixed to the second edition of The Indian
Emperor, from later editions of which, however, he omitted it.
This piece, which is an admirable example of light raillery, though
with just a suspicion of a sting, adds little to the previous force
of his argument; but the incidental remark that 'poetry only
1 As Ker says, the substance of the Essay is aptly summed up by the triplet in
Dryden's Prologue to Secret Love (1667):
The Unities of Action, Place and Time,
The Scenes unbroken, and a mingled chime
Of Jonson's manner and Corneille's rhyme.
## p. 25 (#47) ##############################################
The Conquest of Granada.
The Rehearsal 25
instructs as it delights' explains the failure of many attempts
made in defiance of the truth conveyed by the saying.
J
The Conquest of Granada (1669–70) may be justly described
as the heroic play par excellence, and exhibits Dryden as exult-
antly carrying through a prolonged effort such as only the splendid
vigour of his peculiar genius could have sustained throughout at
so tremendous a pitch as is here essayed. The colouring of the
whole is gorgeous, and the hero, Almanzor, combines, on Dryden's
own showing, the imposing features of the Achilles of the Iliad,
Tasso's Rinaldo and the Artaban of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre.
Dryden had now reached the height of his popularity-it was in
the year 1670 that he was appointed poet laureated. With an
arrogance which Almanzor himself could hardly have surpassed-
though it is hidden behind the pretence that
not the poet, but the age is praised -
the Epilogue to the Second Part declares the dramatist superior
to all his predecessors, including Jonson, in 'wit' and power of
diction. The poets of the past could not reply; but, among the
critics of the day who took up the challenge, Rochester, for one,
retorted with a rough tu quoque which is not wholly without
point? Other protests may have ensued; at all events, Dryden
did not allow the hot iron time to cool, but followed up his
rodomontade (for it deserves no other name) by A Defence of the
Epilogue, or An Essay on the Dramatick Poetry of the last Age
(1672), which cannot be called one of the happiest, and is certainly
one of the least broadly conceived, of his critical efforts. Finding
fault with a series of passages in the chief Elizabethan and Jaco-
bean dramatists was not the way to make good the general
contention on which he had ventured. He appealed once more
to his own generation against its predecessors; but he was wise
enough not to appeal to posterity.
Meanwhile (in December 1671), the nemesis provoked by the
arrogance of success had descended upon Dryden, though in no
more august shape than in that of a burlesque dramatic concoction
by a heterogeneous body of wits. The Rehearsal, as the mock
play with its running commentary was called, had gone through a
period of incubation spread over nine or ten years, and among
the contributors to the joke were the duke of Buckingham,
Thomas Sprat (already mentioned), Martin Clifford, master of the
a
i See, as to the date, Malone, Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of Dryden,
vol. 1, part i, p. 87.
? Cited in Scott-Saintsbury edition, vol. iv, p. 244.
## p. 26 (#48) ##############################################
26
Dryden
Charterhouse, a very learned and foulmouthed writer, and, it is
said, though without proof, Samuel Butler. They included in their
ridicule anything which seemed to offer them a chance in any
of Dryden's plays; but they also impartially ransacked the pro-
ductions of other dramatists ; indeed, it would seem that, before
Dryden, D'Avenant and Sir Robert Howard, had, in turn, been
thought of as the central figures of the farce, and that it was only
the triumphant success of The Conquest of Granada which had
concentrated the attack upon its author. The recent appointment
of Dryden to the poet laureateship, of course, suggested the name
Bayes, which the lampooners continued to apply to him for the
rest of his literary career.
The Rehearsal, which, if the long line of its descendants,
including Sheridan's Critic, be taken into account, proved an
important contribution to the literature of the stage, is an
amusing revue of now for the most part forgotten productions,
diversified by humorous sallies of which the spirit of burlesque
always keeps a store for use. Its satire against heroic plays is
incidental, except in so far as they carried artificiality, exaggeration
and bombast further than had any other of the species of plays
ridiculed. Its satire against Dryden himself glanced off, practically
harmless, from a personality in which there was nothing to provoke
a
derision, and from a genius to which no adversary could seriously
impute poverty of invention or sameness of workmanship. Thus, he
was able to treat the satire, so far as it concerned him personally,
with more or less goodhumoured contempt”; and his revanche on
Buckingham, when it came, was free from spite. As for heroic
plays, he certainly did not leave off writing them because of The
Rehearsal ; nor did it deter him from publishing a reasoned essay
in defence of the species. But he could not expect to outdo his
chief effort of the kind; and no other playwright was likely to
seek to surpass him in a combination of treatment and form which
he had made peculiarly his own.
In 1672, The Conquest of Granada was published in company
with a prefatory essay Of Heroick Plays. The essay opens with the
assertion—the latter half of which Dryden was afterwards himself
a
14
· Sprat and Mat' afterwards assisted Settle in his Absalom Senior, or Achitophel
Transpros'd. Cf. Malone, u. s.
? He even made occasional use of the fun of the piece by way of illustration ; but,
when, in his Discourse on Satire (1693), he sought to depreciate the force of the satire,
he was not very happy, or, at:least, remains rather obscure (vol. 11, p. 21, Ker's edition).
It is curious that, in the scene cited by Chase (The English Heroic Play, appendix C)
from Arrowsmith's Reformation, & comedy (1673) satirising rimed tragedy, there
should not be any apparent reference to Dryden.
## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################
Aureng-Zebe and
27
Other Plays
to help to refute—that heroic verse was already in possession of
the stage, and that 'very few tragedies, in this age' would be
received without it. ' For the rest, this essay only develops
propositions previously advanced, besides fearlessly engaging in
a defence of the non plus ultra of the heroic character-type,
Almanzor, the Drawcansir of The Rehearsal.
It was not till three (or four) years later that Dryden took
a final leave of heroic tragedy with Aureng-Zebe, or The Great
Mogul (acted 1675, and printed in the following year). As the
prologue, one of the noblest of Dryden's returns upon himself,
confesses, he was growing 'weary of his long-loved mistress,
Rhyme,' and, while himself abandoning dramatic for other forms of
composition, inclined to‘yield the foremost honours' of the stage
to the early masters on whose want of refinement he had previously
insisted? The play itself, while already less rigidly adhering to
the self-imposed rules of the species, is visibly influenced by the
example of the refinement and restraint of Racine.
Between The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, Dryden
had produced, besides two comedies already noted, a tragedy
d'occasion, of which the plot is, indeed, as in a heroic play, based
upon amorous passion, but which was thrown upon the stage to
inflame popular feeling against the Dutch (with whom the country
was now at war). Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the
English Merchants, a production unworthy of its author, was
hastily written in prose, with an admixture of blank verse. On
the other hand, in the opera The State of Innocence and Fall of
Man (printed in 1674, shortly after the death of Milton) Dryden
had, no doubt, taken his time in 'tagging the verses' of Paradise
Lost; for his dramatic version of the poem was meant as a
tribute to its great qualities and not intended for performance on
the stage, any more than Milton's own contemplated dramatic
treatment of his theme would have been. The Author's Apology
for Heroick Poetry and Poetic Licence, which accompanies the
published 'opera,' does little more than vindicate for the treatment
of sublime themes the use of a poetic diction from which convention
shrinks; but it is valuable, if for nothing else, for its opening
definition of true criticism, which they wholly mistake 'who think
its business is principally to find fault. ' The ‘operatic' version of
Paradise Lost must be pronounced a failure, not the least in
1
-Spite of all his pride, & secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare's sacred name.
A more magnanimous literary confession was never made.
## p. 28 (#50) ##############################################
28
Dryden
what it adds to its original; its chief interest in connection with
Dryden's literary progress lies in his skilful handling of certain
celebrated argumentative passages.
With Dryden's remaniement of Milton's greatest work may be
compared his handling, before and after this well meant attempt, of
two Shakespearean dramas. In the case of The Tempest, or The
Enchanted Island (acted 1667, but not printed till 1670), Dryden's
own preface, dated 1 December 1669, shows that the workmanship
was mainly D'Avenant's, who, as Dryden, with his habitual generous
frankness, declares, 'first taught him to admire Shakespeare. ' To
D'Avenant was owing the grotesque notion of providing a male
counterpart for Miranda, a sister for Caliban and a female com-
panion for Ariel; and he would appear to have generally revised
- the work of his younger partner? Quite otherwise, Dryden's
All for Love, or The World Well Lost is not an adaptation of
Antony and Cleopatra, but a free treatment of the same subject
on his own lines. The agreeable preface which precedes the
published play, written in a style flavoured by the influence of
Montaigne, which was perceptibly growing on Dryden, takes the
censure of his production, as it were, out of the mouths of the
critics, and then turns upon the poetasters with almost cruel
ridicule, which may have helped to exasperate Rochester, evidently
the principal object of attack. In All for Love, Dryden, with as
little violence as might be, was reverting from the imitation of
French tragedy to Elizabethan models. The dramatist seems as
fully as ever to reserve to himself the freedom which he claims as
his inherent right; if he pays attention to the unities, especially to
that of place, it is with more exactness 'than perhaps the English
theatre requires'; and, if he has 'disencumbered himself' from
rime, it is not because he condemns his “former way. His
purpose was to follow—we may probably add, to emulate-
Shakespeare, treating the subject of a Shakespearean tragedy in
his own way, uninvidiously, but with perfect freedom. In the
result, Dryden has little to fear from comparison in the matter of
construction; and, though, in characterisation, he falls short of his
exemplar, at all events so far as the two main personages are
concerned, there is much in the general execution that calls for
1 So, in act III, sc. 1, the vision suggested to Eve by the whisperings of Satan.
2 In 1673, The Tempest was turned into an opera by Shadwell, who shifted the scenes,
and added, besides at least one new song, an entirely new masque at the close. It is this
version, and not D'Avenant and Dryden's, printed in 1670, which was printed in the
1674 and all subsequent editions of the restoration Tempest. This rectification of a
longstanding blunder is due to the researches, conducted independently in each case,
of W. J. Lawrence and Sir Ernest Clarke: see bibliography, post, p. 398.
6
6
## p. 29 (#51) ##############################################
The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy 29
2
9
the highest praise. He was conscious of his achievement, and
declared that he 'never writ anything for himself but Antony and
Cleopatra! /
Once again, in Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found too Late
(printed 1679), Dryden concerned himself with a Shakespearean
play, this time, however, adapting his original plot with scant
piety-in his own words, 'new-modelling the plot, throwing out
many unnecessary Persons; improving those characters which
were begun and left unfinished, as Hector, Troilus, Pindarus and
Thersites, and adding that of Andromache. ' It cannot be gainsaid
that Shakespeare, for whatever reason, failed to carry through the
action of his Troilus and Cressida with vigour and completeness ;
but what he left was marred rather than mended in Dryden's
adaptation, the catastrophe being altered and the central idea of
the play, the fickleness of the heroine, botched in the process—and
all to what ends ?
With this attempt, which must be classed among Dryden's
dramatic failures, was printed the remarkable Preface concerning
the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, which, although not actually
the last of Dryden's contributions to dramatic criticism, may be
said to complete their cycle. Here, at last, we find a plain and
reasonable application of the fundamental Aristotelian theory of
tragedy to the practice of the English drama. Shakespeare and
Fletcher—the former in particular-are set down as deficient in
'the mechanic beauties of the plot; but, in the 'manners' of
their plays, in which the characters delineated in them are com-
prehended, the two great masters of the English drama are
extolled at the expense of their French rivals. Although ex-
ception must be taken to the distinction between Shakespeare
and Fletcher as excelling respectively in the depiction of the
more manly and the softer passions, 'to conclude all,' we are told,
'Fletcher was a limb of Shakespeare'-in other words, the less!
is included in the greater. Thus, though neither of much length
nor very clearly arranged, this essay signally attests the soundness
of Dryden's critical judgment, with his insight into the fact that
the most satisfactory dramatic theory is that which is abstracted
from the best dramatic practice. It was not given to him to
1 See A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. II, p. 152).
* I. e.
the war, its final cause lay in the commercial jealousy between the
two nations, which made itself felt wherever English mercantile
enterprise was seeking to compete with that of a more successful
rival, and which, of course, came home most nearly to the city of
London. But it was also due to a general antipathy on the part of
the English against the Dutch, as of the naturally stronger, to the
actually wealthier, community. Dryden, accordingly, takes care to
dwell on the strength of England, as contrasted with the meanness,
baseness and so forth, of Holland. Moreover, the upper class of
English society was offended by Dutch burgherism and re-
publicanism, while the court resented the act excluding the
house of Orange from the stadholdership. When, therefore, war
was declared, a good deal of enthusiasm (of a kind), especially
among the gentry, hailed the event; and Evelyn gives an amusing
description of the outbreak of a universal passion for taking service
in the fleet. Dryden, in his preface, describes that part of his poem
which treats of the war as 'but a due expiation' on his part for
‘not serving his King and country in it. The navy, as the favourite
service of both the king and his brother the duke of York, was, at
i See Somers Tracts, vol. vrt, pp. 644—5, for a notice of pretended prophecies as to
the fire of London, stated to have been printed in 1661 or 1662, in the nonconformist
interest, under the title Annus Mirabilis primus et secundus. For a full account of the
proceedings against Francis Smith and others, supposed to be concerned in the
printing of Mirabilis Annus, or the Year of Prodigies and Wonders, printed 1661, see
Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus, pp. 183–8. The expression 'The Wonderful Yeere'
had, however, been used more than half a century earlier, and, curiously enough, of
the plague year 1602, when more than 30,000 persons were said to have fallen victims
to the epidemio in London. See Dekker's The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London
(Arber's edition), p. 5. Burnet, in his Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (1682),
p. 102, mentions that, 'in the year 1666, an Opinion did run through the Nation, that
the end of the world would come that year. ' Though Burnet says that this belief was
possibly 'set on by Astrologers,' and Dryden had a penchant for astrology, he does not
seem to make any reference to it in his poem.
>
## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################
Annus Mirabilis
II
this time, extremely popular; and Dryden's confessed anxiety to
have his sea terms correct was pedantry in season.
Altogether, his account of the progress of the war-from the
dearly-bought victory of Solebay to the barren triumph off the
North Foreland is full of fire and spirit; and it was not any
part of the poet's business to expound how, when the campaign of
1666 came to an end, the feeling began to spread that, with or
without further naval victories, the situation of the country, against
which France was intriguing in every part of the king's dominions,
would, before long, become untenable. Thus, when Dryden repre-
sents the terrible visitation of September 1666—the destruction of
the far greater part of London by fire-as having befallen England
at a season of undiminished confidence, and as a nemesis of this
national pride—he is putting a gloss of his own upon the actual
sequence of affairs. He had, moreover, omitted any account of the
plague, whose ravages were at their height at a date considerably
earlier than that of the events described in the introductory part
of his poem, and had thus made it easier to represent the fire as a
calamity which overtook the nation when 'palled' with the long
succession of its 'joys. The fury of the fire at its height is depicted
with splendid energy, and the daring figure of the witches' sabbath,
danced by the ghosts of traitors who have descended from London
Bridge, is not less apposite to the wild scene than that of the divine
extinguisher by which the fire is put out is preposterous. The
poet's prophecy that a greater and more august’ London would
arise from her fires' was fulfilled; but the companion political
prophecy had a lamer ending in the peace of 1667, which was all
that England gained from the glories of the wonderful year. '
Yet the literary achievement itself was wonderful. Without the
assurance to be derived from any great previous success, Dryden
had undertaken a task so full of pitfalls that nothing but a most
extraordinary impetus could have carried his course past these to
its goal—and this, though he had hampered himself with a metrical
form which, as he knew and confessed, had made a far more
exacting claim upon his ingenuity and skill than the couplet
6
1 The laments of sea-green Sirens' for the death of admiral Sir John Lawson are
of a piece with the mermaid's song' at the end of The Battle of the Baltic, and must
be censured or extolled in its company.
This was the occasion on which de Ruyter (whom Dryden compares to Varro at
Cannae) saved his ships, as has been observed, in order to sail up the Medway with
them another day. '
3 That they then seated themselves on the roof of Whitehall is a supposition due
to a persistent misprint in st. 224, pointed out and corrected in Sargeaunt's edition of
Dryden's Poems (1910).
6
## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################
I 2
Dryden
>
already familiar to him. The courage and dash of the whole
performance, which cast into the shade its lesser features, its far-
fetched conceits and other reminiscences of poetic schools that
were nearing their end, could not but apprise the critical world,
including king and court, that a combatant had descended into the
arena who was unlikely to find an equal there.
Meanwhile, like most of his would-be rivals, he had formed a
connection with the theatre, and continued to maintain it. In his
thirtieth year, on the very morrow of the restoration, Dryden
made his earliest known attempt as a playwright. His dramatic
productivity slackened very much during the latter half of his
literary life; but he cannot be said to have ever wholly abandoned
this form of production; indeed, in his very last year, he contri-
buted some new matter on the occasion of the revival, for his
benefit, of one of Fletcher's plays. Within this period, he tried his
hand at most dramatic forms in actual use, and, for a time, iden-
tified himself with the most conspicuous new development. In
view, however, of the assertion deliberately made by him in his
later days, that his genius never much inclined him to the stage,'
and of the general course of his literary career, which shows him
rather falling back from time to time on play-writing than steadily
attracted by it, the fact that he was the author, in whole or in
part, of nearly a score and a half of plays, would be surprising,
were it not for the extraordinary promptitude and adaptability of
his powers. It will be most convenient, before returning to his
other literary labours, to survey briefly his dramatic work as a
whole. Its fluctuations were largely determined by influences
which he could, indeed, sustain and develop, but into which, except
in the instance of one transitory species, he can hardly be said to
have infused any fresh life; so that his plays, as a whole, remain,
after all, only a subsidiary section of his literary achievements.
The principal currents in what, according to a rather loose
terminology, it has been customary to call the restoration drama,
will be discussed in other chapters of the present volume; and
what is said here is only so much as is necessary to make the
general course of Dryden's productivity as a dramatist intelligible.
Anasmuch as the primary object of the London stage, when re-
established with the monarchy, was to please the king, his court
and its surroundings, and, inasmuch as, in that court, many besides
the king himself had acquired a personal familiarity with the
1 See A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) (Essays,
ed. Ker, W. P. , vol. 11, p. 37).
## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################
Influence of French Tragicomedy
13
xx
French stage and its literature which, at all events in his case,
dated back to the earlier years of his exile, French influence upon
the English drama in the restoration age was, almost as a matter
of course, both strong and enduring. But it is equally certain that
the basis from which the English drama started on the reopening
of the theatres was no other than the old English drama, at the
point which it had reached at the time of their closing. Beaumont
and Fletcher, and the drama of tragicomic romance which, through
them, had, for a generation before the closing of the theatres,
established their supremacy on the English stage', were the
favourites there when the theatres reopened; nor had either
Jonson or Shakespeare been forgotten, and the former was still,
though the flow of humour among his followers had begun to
run dry, regarded as the acknowledged master of comedy. The
dominant power on the French stage down to about the middle of
the fourth decade of the seventeenth century had been that of
Hardy, whose most celebrated play, Mariamne, dates from 1610,
and whose vogue did not begin to give way till after his death in
1631? . Now, Hardy, like the dramatists who gave the tone to
English dramatic literature in the generation before the closing of
the theatres, kept the French stage popular by means of the mixed
species of tragicomedy, and thus prevented it from falling back on
the academical lines of Senecan tragedy represented by Garnier.
It is true that he was warming in his bosom the great reformer of
both French tragedy and French comedy, who said of himself that,
in his earlier plays, he had no guidance 'but a little commonsense
and the examples supplied to him by Hardy’; but Corneille's
epochal production of Le Cid did not take place till 1636 (Médée
appeared only a year earlier); and Le Menteur, which stands in
much the same relation to the development of French comedy as
that held by Le Cid to the progress of French tragedy, was not
produced till 1642. Thus, though Part I of Le Cid was brought
out in an English translation (by Joseph Rutter) in 1637 and
Part II (in a version in which Richard Sackville, afterwards earl of
Dorset, is said to have had a share) in 1640, both being republished
in 1650, it seems clear that the main influence exercised by the
French upon the English drama was due to Hardy and tragicomedy,
which dominated all the French dramatists—including Rotrou,
1 As to the long life of romantic tragicomedy, and its survival after the restora-
tion, see the lucid exposition in Ristine, F. E. , English Tragi-Comedy, its Origin and
History (New York, 1910), chaps. V and vi.
? See Rigal, E. , Alexandre Hardy et le Théâtre. Français à la fin du XVIe et
au commencement du XVIIme siècle, Paris, 1889.
a
18
## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################
14
Dryden
whose work synchronised with Corneille's earlier dramatic labours
-rather than to Corneille in the maturity of his creative genius.
When, however, the perennial conflict was renewed under new
conditions and on reasoned principles by Corneille, a loftier and
more logical conception of tragedy approved itself to the French
critical public; and, perfected in practice by the singularly refined
and sensitive genius of Racine, French classical tragedy reached its
consummation as a distinct species of dramatic literature. The
beginnings of Molière (though more than one of his plays have an
earlier date) may, for our present purpose, be placed in 1658, when,
both as actor and writer, he first appeared before Louis XIV and
his court. It was not long before the English drama, in the hands
of Dryden and others, revealed the impression made on it by these
new developments, the effects of which, whether direct or indirect,
will be summarised in later chapters'; but they should not be
regarded as what in no sense they were, the starting-points of our
post-restoration drama.
Of special importance for the progress of the English drama,
both before and after the closing of the theatres, was the influence
of prose fiction, operating either directly or through plays for
which it had furnished material. The two literatures which here
particularly come into question are the Spanish and the French
--of popular Italian fiction, the heyday seemed to have passed
away, as, in the seventeenth century, artificiality of taste estab-
lished its rule. Concerning Spanish influence, more will be said
below? ; while it is not unfrequently difficult to substantiate a
traditional derivation from a Spanish play, the direct indebtedness
of English dramatists to Spanish prose fiction was, beyond doubt,
considerable in extent, both before and after the restoration.
French prose fiction, on the other hand, in the course of the
seventeenth century, passed through an entirely new phase in its
history; and, inasmuch as this very directly influenced an English
dramatic species with which Dryden was, for a time, identified,
reference must be made to it here. With the Astrée of Honoré
d'Urfé (1610—2) began a literary movement representing, in the
first instance, a reaction towards a refinement of sentiment and
expression which had been incompatible with the turbulence of a
long epoch of civil war. This movement culminated in the school
See post, chap8. V, VII, and xvII.
See post, chap. v.
8 See also post, chap. XVII ; and of. Ward, Hist. of Engl. Dr. Lit. vol. I, pp. 307 ff.
For other authorities, see Hill, H. W. , 'La Calprenede's Romances and the Restoration
Drama' in University of Nevada Studies, vol. 11 (1910), p. 3.
9
## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################
Influence of French Romance
15
of romance associated with the name of La Calprenède and, still
more largely, with that of Madeleine de Scudéry, the authoress of
Le Grand Cyrus. Gomberville and the comtesse de La Fayette
belong to the same group, but that lady's last and most celebrated
novel, La Princesse de Clèves, is already differentiated from the
creations of Mlle de Scudéry by being, to some extent, based upon
historical fact, towards which, as a writer of memoirs, the authoress
had a leaning. The romances of this school invariably turned on
the pivot of heroic' love, or love in more than the usual number
of dimensions, and, though dealing with the deepest of human
emotions, they never fell out of the tone of elaborate conventional
formality. They were, in some instances, translated into English or
imitated by English writers, from the commonwealth times onwards,
when, no doubt, they had been welcomed, in many quarters, as
alternatives to the drab dulness of everyday life? ; and, after the
restoration, as will be seen, they supplied themes to dramatic.
writers whose object it was to heighten and intensify the charac-
teristics of stage romance. While prose fiction, of this class, con-
tinued to attract English readers to within the last quarter of the
century, in France, a reaction had already set in towards simplicity,
on the one hand, and satire, on the other; but, in these directions,
English dramatists were not, at all events at this time, prepared to
follow.
It was, then, under these influences, that Dryden gradually
settled down to the particular forms of dramatic composition
which he chose from time to time, and in no regular succession,
to make his own, and which he frequently illustrated by signally
suggestive prose commentaries, written with consummate grace
and ease in the form of dedications, prefaces or essays, thus
bringing his dramatic productions into harmony with rules of good
sense and good taste evolved from established theory and, still
more largely, from approved practice. Dryden's plays would often
lose much, if not most, of their interest if read without reference
to their prefaces and other critical apparatus; neither, however, is
it advisable, except in a few special instances, to detach these from
the texts which gave rise to them.
In the actual year of the restoration, or, at all events, within a
few months from that date, Dryden, perhaps stimulated by the use
1 See Dorothy Osborne's Letters (chap. In), 1653, from Chicksands, where La Cléo-
pâtre and Le Grand Cyrus appear to have been her habitual companions, and Pepyss
Diary, 7 December 1660 (when he sat up till midnight reading Fuller's Abbeys, while
his wife, whose devotion to these romances he did not share, was immersed in Great
Cyrus') et al. As to the chief English translations and imitations of these French
romances, see post, chap. XVI.
+
## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################
16
Dryden
made in the commonwealth period of quasi-dramatic dialogue as
a vehicle of political satire or invective-, proposed to himself to
read a political lesson to the public by means of a historical
tragedy, The Duke of Guise, applying the doubtful parallel of the
Catholic league to the recent memories of puritan ascendancy.
But the attempt was not thought successful by judicious advisers,
and what had been written of the play was left over to be utilised
by the author in the tragedy which, many years later, in 1682, be
produced in conjunction with Lee. Thus, the first play by Dryden
produced on the stage was The Wild Gallant, first acted in
February 1663. It has no further claim to be singled out among
the comedies, at the same time extravagant and coarse, in which
the period of dramatic decline abounds; though there are some
traces of the witty dialogue, often carried on by a flirting couple,
in which Dryden came to excel. The statement in the prologue
that the author was ‘endangered by a Spanish plot' (i. e. a rival
'Spanish' play) has been perverted to the direct opposite of
its meaning, and the most humorous incident in the piece is
conveyed straight from Ben Jonson. The play did not find favour,
except, apparently, with lady Castlemaine; and, in the sequel,
Dryden only intermittently returned to comedy proper. He wrote
of himself, early in his dramatic career, that he was 'not so fitted
by nature to write comedy' as certain other kinds of drama; ‘he
wanted,' he confesses, 'that gaiety of humour which is required to
it''; and he also wanted, as he might have added, the facility of
invention-whether of situations or of characters—which relieves
the productions of a comic dramatist from the sameness which is
noticeable in this class of Dryden's plays. He consoled himself
with the notion that a reputation gained from comedy' was hardly
worth the seeking; 'for I think it is, in its own nature, inferior to
all sorts of dramatic writing5. ' Thus, he only returned to it from
time to time, and wholly eschewed 'farce, which consists principally
of grimacese,' and from which he naturally shrank, devoid as he
6
1 As to these political squibs in dramatic form, cf. Ristine, F. H. , u. 8. pp. 151–3.
2 Cf. post, chap. v. The Spanish plot' in question was that of Tuke's Adventures
of Five Hours. Cf. Modern Language Notes, vol. XIX (1904), p. 166. Fitzmaurice-
Kelly, History of Spanish Literature, p. 263, had already pointed out that El Galán
escarmentado, which was supposed to have suggested Dryden's plot, could hardly have
reached Dryden before it was published. The borrowing from Jonson's Every Man
out of His Humour is in act 1, sc. 3.
3 A Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 116).
'
4 See, also, the dedication to Aureng-Zebe, where he freely confesses that some of
his contemporaries have, even in his own partial judgment, outdone him in comedy.
5 See preface to An Evening's Love (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 135).
6 Ibid.
## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################
Comedies
17
Lo
may generally be asserted to have been of any inclination to what
was grotesque, or even merely odd or quaint. And, in the critical
essays and excursuses which illustrated his practice, he discusses
the comic drama with comparative rarity?
The Wild Gallant was written in prose, as was Sir Martin
Mar-Al, or The Feigned Innocence (1667, printed 1668), an
adaptation by Dryden, whose name was not attached to it till
thirty years later, of the duke of Newcastle's translation of Molière's
early comedy L'Étourdi, with certain touches suggested by two
plays by Quinault. The translation is not close, nor the treatment
refined; but the play was very successful. In prose is also the
main portion of The Assignation or Love in a Nunnery (1672,
printed 1673), worthless, except where in some blank verse passages
it rises to a higher literary level. Marriage-à-la-Mode (produced at
the same dates), which, unlike The Assignation, greatly pleased the
town, thanks to the admirably drawn coquette Melantha, presents
the same mixture of prose and blank verse. Of Dryden's remaining
comedies, Limberham, or The Kind Keeper (acted in 1678), which
is entirely in prose, has unmistakable dramatic merits; but it was
speedily withdrawn, having been judged a gross libel on a well
known public personage, generally supposed to be Lauderdale? .
Dryden's last comedy, Amphitryon (produced so late as 1690), for
which both Plautus and Molière were put under contribution, is,
again, a mixture of prose and blank verse; none of Dryden's plays
more brilliantly attest his literary gift, and none have more of the
wantonness to which he afterwards pleaded guilty.
In Dryden's second acted play, The Rival-Ladies (acted 1664),
he had already passed from comedy into tragicomedy, where his
genius was more at home. Its complicated plot (two ladies disguise
themselves as pages in order to take service with a gallant whose
affections are set on a third) caused it to be supposed, rightly or
wrongly, to have a Spanish origin; its dialogue falls into the stagey
antithesis which, though it was as old as Shakespeare, The Rehearsal
and Butlers were to ridicule without mercy. What, however, is
most noticeable in this play is the first, though still tentative, use of
* See, however, a Defence of the Epilogue (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. I, pp. 172 ff. ),
where Dryden criticises Jonson, not without a certain severity; the comparison between
French and English comedy in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, passim; and preface to
An Evening's Love, already cited.
* Scandal was very busy with Lauderdale's private as well as his public morals; but
there is nothing . convincing' in the caricature. Others thought it intended for
Shaftesbury, who was attacked in similar fashion by Otway.
3 Repartees between Cat and Puss at a Caterwauling.
2
به سوریه نیاز
E, L. VIII.
CH. I.
## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################
18.
Dryden
rime as a proper feature of dramatic verse. This use is defended
in a dedication to lord Orrery—the earliest of Dryden's critical
excursions. It should be remembered that, since Fletcher's short
preface to his Faithfull Shepheardesse (printed 1609 or 1610), such
discussions of dramatic problems as these had fallen out of use,
and that the public was now neither 'railed into approbation,' as
it had formerly been by Ben Jonson, nor gently led on to acquies-
cence in the precepts of its critical guides. Following the example
of Corneille? , Dryden took advantage of the revived interest in the
stage to address its patrons, as it were ex cathedra, but without any
assumption of academical solemnity or rigour. To the subject of
the dramatic use of the heroic couplet which he here broached, he
afterwards returned at greater length, both in his Essay of
Dramatick Poesie and in his Essay of Heroick Plays; but he did
not claim the innovation as primarily his own, and he recalled the
fact that the rimed five foot couplet, in a form approaching as near
as possible to that which it owed to Waller, had been first applied
to its 'noblest use' by D'Avenant in the quasi-dramatic Siege of
Rhodes (1656, enlarged 1662). Dryden, however, was the first to
employ the rimed couplet in the dialogue of an ordinary stage
play, though he, too, only introduced the innovation tentatively.
Etherege went a step further, and, in The Comical Revenge, or
Love in a Tub (acted and printed 1664), put the whole serious
part of the play into heroic couplets. Inasmuch, however, as, in
the same year 1664, lord Orrery's Henry V, which is entirely in
heroic couplets, was performed, Etherege and he must be left to
divide the crown' of having introduced the innovation with
Dryden and D'Avenant. If it could be proved that Orrery’s ‘first
play,' mentioned in king Charles's letter of 22 February 1662 was
Henry V, there would be no doubt as to Orrery's priority over
Etherege.
It does not seem to be necessary here to enter into a re-
examination of the question of the suitableness, or unsuitableness,
6
6
1 See post, p. 23.
i
* See Siegert, E. , Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery u. seine Dramen (Wiener Beiträge
zur Engl. Philologie), Vienna and Leipzig, 1906, p. 19. Orrery claimed to have
written his tragedy The Black Prince 'in a new way,' by which he means the rimed
couplet ; but this play was not acted till 1667, or printed till 1669. Henry V, how-
ever, and Mustapha, which were likewise in rime, were first performed in 1664 and
1665 respectively. See post, p. 22, note. As to Etherege, for whom Gosse (Seventeenth-
Century Studies, ed. 1883, p. 238) claims that he was the first to carry out, though
Dryden was the first to propose, the experiment of writing ordinary plays in rime,
see post, chap. v.
## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################
The Heroic Couplet in the Drama 19
of the heroic couplet as a form of dramatic verse. Not only in
certain kinds of romantic comedy, for which it has been claimed
as a suitable vehicle, but, also, for various eccentric species which
have been or may be invented-such as pantomime, burlesque or
extravaganza-it may readily be allowed to be both well fitted
and effective.
As to its use, however, for the purposes of the
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered. Partly, of
course, the objection lies in the tendency of the couplet, as treated
by Dryden and his successors, to make against continuity of flow,
to shut up the sense within fixed limits and, because of the con-
sequent demand for precision of statement, to impart to dialogue or
soliloquy a didactic rather than dramatic colouring. And, further,
with regard to the use of rime itself in English dramatic verse, the
caveat of Taine cannot be put aside, that'rime is a different thin
for different races': the Englishman being transported by it into
a world remote from the actual, whereas, for the Frenchman, it is
nothing more than a conventional costume? The heroic couplet,
as used in Dryden's plays and those which followed their example,
therefore, operates against, rather than in favour of, theatrical
illusion and the sway of the imagination on the stage, and helps
to urge the dramatist who employs it in the direction of con-
ventionalism and artificiality. Against this general result, it is
useless to argue that passion, and even mere eloquence, at times
gets the better of the outward form, and, by its driving force,
moves and disturbs the hearer in spite of himself.
No sooner had Dryden, in The Rival-Ladies, produced a tragi-
comedy, containing an element of rimed verse, in which he had
made successful use of his gift of poetical rhetoric, than he was
characteristically ready to take a leading part in evolving an
ulterior dramatic species not precisely new, but with features of
its own so marked as to differentiate it from tragicomedy proper.
The tragicomedy bequeathed to him and the restoration dramatists
in general by their predecessors was wont to possess a double plot,
consisting, to use Dryden's own phraseology? , of one main design,'
serious in kind, executed in verse, and 'an underplot or second
walk of comical characters and adventures subservient to the chief
fable, yet carried along under it and helping to it'; although, in
point of fact, the connection between the two was frequently very
slight. At different stages of his career, he produced three more
1 Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, bk, i, chap. II, sec. IV,
? A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (Essays, ed. Ker,
vol. 11, pp. 102 f. ).
242
## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################
20
Dryden
X
plays', of various merit, which belonged to this class. Secret Love,
or The Maiden Queen (acted 1667), of which probably because of
the frank gaiety of Nell Gwynn's scenes in it-Charles II approved
so greatly as to dub it ‘his play,' is founded, as to its main plot, on
Le Grand Cyrus, and, as to its comic underplot, partly on that
romance and partly on the same novelist's Ibrahim, ou L'illustre
Bassa. The interest in the serious plot is impaired by the quite
unheroic character of Philocles intended, as Dryden says, to
represent queen Christina of Sweden's favourite Magnus de la
Gardie); and the chief attraction of the play consists in the
'discoursive' passages between Celadon and Florimel. In The
Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery, again (acted and printed
1681), which seems certainly to have been designed as a tragi-
comedy by Dryden, the comic effect preponderates over that of
the serious plot, though the latter cannot be said to be without
interest. The interweaving of the two has been praised-perhaps
overpraised—by more than one eminent critic? . The comic
dialogue of this play is excellent, and the character of the friar
by no means a replica of Fletcher's Spanish Curate (though there
are points of resemblance in the two plays), but a new variety of
an unctuous type which, from Chaucer to Dickens, has afforded
unfailing delight to the public, and which it must have given
Dryden, who hated priests and parsons with a consistent hatred,
much satisfaction to elaborate. His last tragicomedy, Love
Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail (acted 1694), in which
there is a large admixture of rime, merely repeated in its main
plot that of Marriage-à-la-Mode, and the play justly proved a
failure.
Dryden, as already noted, had not brought out more than two
plays, in the second of which he had made occasional use of the
rimed five foot couplet, when he was found ready to assist his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in the composition of what may
be described as the first heroic play? The shortcomings in the
1 Marriage-a-la-Mode, of which the main interest lies in the comic action, has been
reckoned above among the comedies. Scott suggests that it may have been at first
designed as a heroic play, but that one effect of The Rehearsal was to induce the
author to recast the piece.
2 Dryden himself, in A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695), refuses to defend The
Spanish Fryar on this score, and declares its faults to be those of its genre, which is
of an unnatural mingle' (Ker, vol. II, p. 147).
3 Sir Robert Howard, who was also a politician and a placeman, figured both as a
historical and political writer, and among the poets and playwrights of the age. His
comedy The Committee (1662) satirised ex post facto the doings of the puritan party
whon in power. Of the tragedies for which he was solely responsible, the most
>
## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################
Dryden and the Heroic Play 21
versification of part of this play, which was printed as Howard's,
suggest that it was submitted by him for revision to Dryden, whose
superior skill in the handling of the couplet he freely confessed.
Though devoid of any kind of interest except that which this and
later heroic plays sought in the remoteness and consequent
strangeness of scene, The Indian Queen was successful; and
Dryden was thus encouraged to write a 'sequel' to it under the
title The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the
Spaniards (acted 1665), by which the success of the new species
was established and his own reputation as a playwright defini-
tively assured. His other plays, which, both in form of verse and
in treatment of subject, fall under the same designation, were
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (acted in 1668 or 1669), the
two parts of Almanzor and Almahide, or The Conquest of Granada
(1669 and 1670) and Aureng-Zebe (1676). It will thus be seen
that the number of heroic plays by Dryden was small, and written
at considerable intervals. The earlier of these breaks (1665—8)
was largely due to the closing of the playhouses in consequence of
the plague and the great fire. The later (1670–6) interruption
was, no doubt, partly caused by the appearance of The Rehearsal
(1670). Although that celebrated burlesque cannot be said to have
killed heroic plays, there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding
the brilliant features which some of these plays displayed, the
elements of vitality were wanting in the species. The list of plays
which, as written partly or wholly in the rimed couplet, have any
claim at all to be reckoned as heroic, is small in itself, and, if
reduced by certain obvious omissions, contains, with the exception
of Dryden’s, few works of even secondary significance? . In a word,
Dryden completely dominates the English heroic play.
interesting is The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668), of which the matter
was taken from recent historians. Sir Robert Howard, who had kept himself as
prominent as he could in life, was buried in Westminster abbey. He is the Crites of
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie ; Shadwell ridiculed him under the less courteous
appellation Sir Positive Atall. His brothers Edward and James likewise wrote plays;
the former was author of The Usurper (1668), a tragedy in which Oliver Cromwell
was represented in the character of Damocles, and Hugh Peters appeared as Hugo de
Petra ; the latter perpetrated a version of Romeo and Juliet (1662), with a happy
ending,' which was performed on alternate nights with the catastrophe. James
Howard's comedy Au Mistaken (printed 1672) was acted before Charles II at Trinity
college, Cambridge, in October 1667.
1 See the list in appendix D of Chase, L. N. , The English Heroic Play (New York,
1909). Besides Otway, Crowne and Lee (for certain of their plays), only lord Orrery,
Sir Robert Howard, Elkanah Settle and Banks seem to call for consideration. Of
the latter two, something will be said elsewhere (see post, chap. VII); as to Orrery, a
note may be subjoined in this place. Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, who, as lord
Broghill, played a part of some importance in Anglo-Irish relations, is, in literature,
## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################
22
Dryden
Like The Indian Emperor, Tyrannick Love treats with much
freedom a theme out of the common track--in this case, the
persecution of the Christians by Maximin and the martyrdom of
St Catharine. The argument of Aureng-Zebe deals, again quite
freely, with a notability of the writer's day, though largely fol-
lowing the course of Racine's Mithridate, and borrowing the
matter of one scene from Le Grand Cyrus. On the other hand,
the most important and the most typical of Dryden's heroic plays,
The Conquest of Granada, is essentially based on Madeleine de
Scudéry's Almahide, while one of its episodes is taken from her
Le Grand Cyrus and another from her Ibrahim. But the im-
portant point is that these subjects, as treated in the plays in
question, all resemble one another in their substance, and, more or
less, in its adjuncts. The plays are all of them ‘heroic' plays, and
the metre which they employ is called the 'heroic'couplet, because
they follow and imitate the example of 'heroic' romance, as set
forth by Ariosto himself. Their themes, like those of heroic poetry
and fiction in general, are the ‘emprises’ and conflicts of absorbing
human passions-love, jealousy and honour-all raised to a trans-
normal height and expressed with a transnormal intensity? . Their
men and women are, if the term may be thus applied, “supermen’
and 'superwomen,' and their master passions are superlove and
superhonour. From these out-of-the-way premisses flow a number
of out-of-the-way results. The actions must be suited to the
motives; their conditions must be unexpected changes and chances
and tumultuous backgrounds, their complications must be in-
soluble except by violent means, and deaths as numerous as
a
most notable as the author of the romance Parthenissa (1654–65). As a dramatist,
he is frigid and uninteresting, though his subjects were unusually varied and treated
in the approved heroic style, and though he was not unskilful in the use of the couplet
which he claimed (not very distinctly) to have first used on the stage. His most effective
play was, perhaps, Mustapha (1665), taken from an episode in Georges de Scudéry's
Ibrahim (founded on his sister's romance); his most interesting drama, The Black Prince,
like all Orrery's plays, in heroic verse, was not acted till 1667. The History of Henry the
Fifth, which ends with an act of heroic renunciation on the part of Owen Tudor, was
the earliest produced by Orrery on the stage, and, probably, the earliest written ky him.
According to Pepys, when Orrery's “heroique plays could do no more wonders,' he turned
to comedy. But it was too late. (For a full account of him, see Siegert, E. , u. s. )
See the magnificently audacious passage in An Essay of Heroick Plays (Essays,
ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 150): ‘I opened the next book that lay by me, which was an Ariosto
in Italian ; and the very first two lines of that poem, gave me light to all I could desire :
Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto,' etc.
2 · When I invent a History,' says one of the characters in Clélie, 'I think I should
make things much more perfect than they are. All Women should be admirably fair,
and all Men as valiant as Hector. ' (Cited by Hill, H. W. , u. s. p. 29. )
&
## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie
23
>
leaves in Vallombrosa. Furthermore, the personages of these
dramas must conduct themselves in a manner wholly unlike the
usages obtaining in the daily round of life; it must be a manner
appropriate to spheres into which the imagination alone can trans-
plant us ancient Rome, Jerusalem, or Troy, or, still better, because
-still less familiar, Mexico or the east Indies. Finally, the verse, as
well as the words, must be suited to the action, and the 'heroic'
couplet must serve the purpose of a sort of 'cothurnated,' which is
interpreted 'stilted,' speech'.
It was inevitable that a succession of plays of this type should
soon pall upon the spectator, because of the sameness of their
method (one of Dryden's most persistent assailants, Martin Clifford,
accused him of 'stealing from himself'), unless each new pro-
duction sought to force the pace, and to outvie its predecessors.
The interest in the action, cut adrift, as it was, from probability
and from the sympathy which probability begets, had to be sus-
tained by all sorts of adventitious expedients—supernatural
apparitions and magic processes, with fantastic songs, serenades
and dances. But, notwithstanding the resources of Dryden's
rhetorical genius, and the wonderful mental buoyancy with which
he carried out any task undertaken by him, the species was
doomed to self-exhaustion, nor can its master long have deceived
himself on this head.
Dryden's apologetic Essay of Heroick Plays was preceded in
date of publication by his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668),
written in reply to Sir Robert Howard's preface to his Foure New
Plays (1665). The earlier essay is in that dialogue form which
had preserved its popularity in the literatures of Europe since it
had been revived by Erasmus and others in the renascence period,
with which Dryden's age was familiar from both Spanish and
French precedents, and which was practised by many contem-
porary English writers, including Clarendon and Burnet. But
there can be little doubt that Dryden derived the most direct
impulse to the composition of the essays in dramatic and other
literary criticism with which he enriched the library of English
prose from the three Discours severally prefixed by Corneille to
the three volumes of the 1660 collection of his plays, and the
Examens which, in the same edition, preceded each drama”.
* All this is put at length in some valuable papers entitled “Dryden's heroisches
Drama,' contributed by Holzhausen, F. , to Englische Studien, vols. x—XVI (1889–92).
See Ker, u. s. introduction, p. xxxvi, as to Martin Clifford's charge against Dryden
of pilfering from other French critical writers.
## p. 24 (#46) ##############################################
24
Dryden
may be.
.
Dryden's famous essay is written with great spirit, and with a
fusion of vigour and ease altogether different from the vivacity
by which literary critics appealing to a wider public at times
strive to hide their thoroughness, or the want of it, as the case
The dialogue form is employed with Platonic grace,
the venue being laid under the sound of the guns discharged in
the battle of Solebay, and audible in the Thames 'like the noise
of distant thunder or swallows in a chimney. ' The conclusions
reached may be described as eclectic and, at the same time, as
based upon experience, albeit the latter was, necessarily, of a very
limited range. As a matter of fact, Dryden's opinions on most
subjects and not the least on dramatic theory-were sufficiently
fluid to respond without reluctance to the demands of common-
sense ; nor did he ever take pride in a doctrinaire consistency-
even with himself. The arguments, in this Essay, of Neander
(who represents Dryden's own views) lead to the conclusion that
observance of the timehonoured laws of dramatic composition, as
reasonably modified by experience—in other words, adherence to
the principle of the unities as severally interpreted by Corneille-
is reconcilable with the greater freedom of treatment assumed by
the masters of the English drama; while the plea for the use of the
rimed couplet, based on its dramatic capabilities, especially in
tragedy, comes in as a sort of corollary!
The immediate occasion for Dryden's Essay had been the
confession of a doubt by Sir Robert Howard (who, as Crites,
reproduces it in the dialogue) with regard to the appropriateness
of the use, in which he had formerly taken part, of the rimed
couplet in dramatic verse. Howard having replied to Dryden's
answer in the preface to his play The Great Favourite, or The
Duke of Lerma (1668), without losing his temperas why should
he have done, except to give grounds for the persistent misrepre-
sentation of a literary difference as a personal quarrel ? -Dryden
wound up the controversy by A Defence of an Essay of Drama-
tick Poesie (1668), prefixed to the second edition of The Indian
Emperor, from later editions of which, however, he omitted it.
This piece, which is an admirable example of light raillery, though
with just a suspicion of a sting, adds little to the previous force
of his argument; but the incidental remark that 'poetry only
1 As Ker says, the substance of the Essay is aptly summed up by the triplet in
Dryden's Prologue to Secret Love (1667):
The Unities of Action, Place and Time,
The Scenes unbroken, and a mingled chime
Of Jonson's manner and Corneille's rhyme.
## p. 25 (#47) ##############################################
The Conquest of Granada.
The Rehearsal 25
instructs as it delights' explains the failure of many attempts
made in defiance of the truth conveyed by the saying.
J
The Conquest of Granada (1669–70) may be justly described
as the heroic play par excellence, and exhibits Dryden as exult-
antly carrying through a prolonged effort such as only the splendid
vigour of his peculiar genius could have sustained throughout at
so tremendous a pitch as is here essayed. The colouring of the
whole is gorgeous, and the hero, Almanzor, combines, on Dryden's
own showing, the imposing features of the Achilles of the Iliad,
Tasso's Rinaldo and the Artaban of La Calprenède's Cléopâtre.
Dryden had now reached the height of his popularity-it was in
the year 1670 that he was appointed poet laureated. With an
arrogance which Almanzor himself could hardly have surpassed-
though it is hidden behind the pretence that
not the poet, but the age is praised -
the Epilogue to the Second Part declares the dramatist superior
to all his predecessors, including Jonson, in 'wit' and power of
diction. The poets of the past could not reply; but, among the
critics of the day who took up the challenge, Rochester, for one,
retorted with a rough tu quoque which is not wholly without
point? Other protests may have ensued; at all events, Dryden
did not allow the hot iron time to cool, but followed up his
rodomontade (for it deserves no other name) by A Defence of the
Epilogue, or An Essay on the Dramatick Poetry of the last Age
(1672), which cannot be called one of the happiest, and is certainly
one of the least broadly conceived, of his critical efforts. Finding
fault with a series of passages in the chief Elizabethan and Jaco-
bean dramatists was not the way to make good the general
contention on which he had ventured. He appealed once more
to his own generation against its predecessors; but he was wise
enough not to appeal to posterity.
Meanwhile (in December 1671), the nemesis provoked by the
arrogance of success had descended upon Dryden, though in no
more august shape than in that of a burlesque dramatic concoction
by a heterogeneous body of wits. The Rehearsal, as the mock
play with its running commentary was called, had gone through a
period of incubation spread over nine or ten years, and among
the contributors to the joke were the duke of Buckingham,
Thomas Sprat (already mentioned), Martin Clifford, master of the
a
i See, as to the date, Malone, Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of Dryden,
vol. 1, part i, p. 87.
? Cited in Scott-Saintsbury edition, vol. iv, p. 244.
## p. 26 (#48) ##############################################
26
Dryden
Charterhouse, a very learned and foulmouthed writer, and, it is
said, though without proof, Samuel Butler. They included in their
ridicule anything which seemed to offer them a chance in any
of Dryden's plays; but they also impartially ransacked the pro-
ductions of other dramatists ; indeed, it would seem that, before
Dryden, D'Avenant and Sir Robert Howard, had, in turn, been
thought of as the central figures of the farce, and that it was only
the triumphant success of The Conquest of Granada which had
concentrated the attack upon its author. The recent appointment
of Dryden to the poet laureateship, of course, suggested the name
Bayes, which the lampooners continued to apply to him for the
rest of his literary career.
The Rehearsal, which, if the long line of its descendants,
including Sheridan's Critic, be taken into account, proved an
important contribution to the literature of the stage, is an
amusing revue of now for the most part forgotten productions,
diversified by humorous sallies of which the spirit of burlesque
always keeps a store for use. Its satire against heroic plays is
incidental, except in so far as they carried artificiality, exaggeration
and bombast further than had any other of the species of plays
ridiculed. Its satire against Dryden himself glanced off, practically
harmless, from a personality in which there was nothing to provoke
a
derision, and from a genius to which no adversary could seriously
impute poverty of invention or sameness of workmanship. Thus, he
was able to treat the satire, so far as it concerned him personally,
with more or less goodhumoured contempt”; and his revanche on
Buckingham, when it came, was free from spite. As for heroic
plays, he certainly did not leave off writing them because of The
Rehearsal ; nor did it deter him from publishing a reasoned essay
in defence of the species. But he could not expect to outdo his
chief effort of the kind; and no other playwright was likely to
seek to surpass him in a combination of treatment and form which
he had made peculiarly his own.
In 1672, The Conquest of Granada was published in company
with a prefatory essay Of Heroick Plays. The essay opens with the
assertion—the latter half of which Dryden was afterwards himself
a
14
· Sprat and Mat' afterwards assisted Settle in his Absalom Senior, or Achitophel
Transpros'd. Cf. Malone, u. s.
? He even made occasional use of the fun of the piece by way of illustration ; but,
when, in his Discourse on Satire (1693), he sought to depreciate the force of the satire,
he was not very happy, or, at:least, remains rather obscure (vol. 11, p. 21, Ker's edition).
It is curious that, in the scene cited by Chase (The English Heroic Play, appendix C)
from Arrowsmith's Reformation, & comedy (1673) satirising rimed tragedy, there
should not be any apparent reference to Dryden.
## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################
Aureng-Zebe and
27
Other Plays
to help to refute—that heroic verse was already in possession of
the stage, and that 'very few tragedies, in this age' would be
received without it. ' For the rest, this essay only develops
propositions previously advanced, besides fearlessly engaging in
a defence of the non plus ultra of the heroic character-type,
Almanzor, the Drawcansir of The Rehearsal.
It was not till three (or four) years later that Dryden took
a final leave of heroic tragedy with Aureng-Zebe, or The Great
Mogul (acted 1675, and printed in the following year). As the
prologue, one of the noblest of Dryden's returns upon himself,
confesses, he was growing 'weary of his long-loved mistress,
Rhyme,' and, while himself abandoning dramatic for other forms of
composition, inclined to‘yield the foremost honours' of the stage
to the early masters on whose want of refinement he had previously
insisted? The play itself, while already less rigidly adhering to
the self-imposed rules of the species, is visibly influenced by the
example of the refinement and restraint of Racine.
Between The Conquest of Granada and Aureng-Zebe, Dryden
had produced, besides two comedies already noted, a tragedy
d'occasion, of which the plot is, indeed, as in a heroic play, based
upon amorous passion, but which was thrown upon the stage to
inflame popular feeling against the Dutch (with whom the country
was now at war). Amboyna, or The Cruelties of the Dutch to the
English Merchants, a production unworthy of its author, was
hastily written in prose, with an admixture of blank verse. On
the other hand, in the opera The State of Innocence and Fall of
Man (printed in 1674, shortly after the death of Milton) Dryden
had, no doubt, taken his time in 'tagging the verses' of Paradise
Lost; for his dramatic version of the poem was meant as a
tribute to its great qualities and not intended for performance on
the stage, any more than Milton's own contemplated dramatic
treatment of his theme would have been. The Author's Apology
for Heroick Poetry and Poetic Licence, which accompanies the
published 'opera,' does little more than vindicate for the treatment
of sublime themes the use of a poetic diction from which convention
shrinks; but it is valuable, if for nothing else, for its opening
definition of true criticism, which they wholly mistake 'who think
its business is principally to find fault. ' The ‘operatic' version of
Paradise Lost must be pronounced a failure, not the least in
1
-Spite of all his pride, & secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare's sacred name.
A more magnanimous literary confession was never made.
## p. 28 (#50) ##############################################
28
Dryden
what it adds to its original; its chief interest in connection with
Dryden's literary progress lies in his skilful handling of certain
celebrated argumentative passages.
With Dryden's remaniement of Milton's greatest work may be
compared his handling, before and after this well meant attempt, of
two Shakespearean dramas. In the case of The Tempest, or The
Enchanted Island (acted 1667, but not printed till 1670), Dryden's
own preface, dated 1 December 1669, shows that the workmanship
was mainly D'Avenant's, who, as Dryden, with his habitual generous
frankness, declares, 'first taught him to admire Shakespeare. ' To
D'Avenant was owing the grotesque notion of providing a male
counterpart for Miranda, a sister for Caliban and a female com-
panion for Ariel; and he would appear to have generally revised
- the work of his younger partner? Quite otherwise, Dryden's
All for Love, or The World Well Lost is not an adaptation of
Antony and Cleopatra, but a free treatment of the same subject
on his own lines. The agreeable preface which precedes the
published play, written in a style flavoured by the influence of
Montaigne, which was perceptibly growing on Dryden, takes the
censure of his production, as it were, out of the mouths of the
critics, and then turns upon the poetasters with almost cruel
ridicule, which may have helped to exasperate Rochester, evidently
the principal object of attack. In All for Love, Dryden, with as
little violence as might be, was reverting from the imitation of
French tragedy to Elizabethan models. The dramatist seems as
fully as ever to reserve to himself the freedom which he claims as
his inherent right; if he pays attention to the unities, especially to
that of place, it is with more exactness 'than perhaps the English
theatre requires'; and, if he has 'disencumbered himself' from
rime, it is not because he condemns his “former way. His
purpose was to follow—we may probably add, to emulate-
Shakespeare, treating the subject of a Shakespearean tragedy in
his own way, uninvidiously, but with perfect freedom. In the
result, Dryden has little to fear from comparison in the matter of
construction; and, though, in characterisation, he falls short of his
exemplar, at all events so far as the two main personages are
concerned, there is much in the general execution that calls for
1 So, in act III, sc. 1, the vision suggested to Eve by the whisperings of Satan.
2 In 1673, The Tempest was turned into an opera by Shadwell, who shifted the scenes,
and added, besides at least one new song, an entirely new masque at the close. It is this
version, and not D'Avenant and Dryden's, printed in 1670, which was printed in the
1674 and all subsequent editions of the restoration Tempest. This rectification of a
longstanding blunder is due to the researches, conducted independently in each case,
of W. J. Lawrence and Sir Ernest Clarke: see bibliography, post, p. 398.
6
6
## p. 29 (#51) ##############################################
The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy 29
2
9
the highest praise. He was conscious of his achievement, and
declared that he 'never writ anything for himself but Antony and
Cleopatra! /
Once again, in Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found too Late
(printed 1679), Dryden concerned himself with a Shakespearean
play, this time, however, adapting his original plot with scant
piety-in his own words, 'new-modelling the plot, throwing out
many unnecessary Persons; improving those characters which
were begun and left unfinished, as Hector, Troilus, Pindarus and
Thersites, and adding that of Andromache. ' It cannot be gainsaid
that Shakespeare, for whatever reason, failed to carry through the
action of his Troilus and Cressida with vigour and completeness ;
but what he left was marred rather than mended in Dryden's
adaptation, the catastrophe being altered and the central idea of
the play, the fickleness of the heroine, botched in the process—and
all to what ends ?
With this attempt, which must be classed among Dryden's
dramatic failures, was printed the remarkable Preface concerning
the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, which, although not actually
the last of Dryden's contributions to dramatic criticism, may be
said to complete their cycle. Here, at last, we find a plain and
reasonable application of the fundamental Aristotelian theory of
tragedy to the practice of the English drama. Shakespeare and
Fletcher—the former in particular-are set down as deficient in
'the mechanic beauties of the plot; but, in the 'manners' of
their plays, in which the characters delineated in them are com-
prehended, the two great masters of the English drama are
extolled at the expense of their French rivals. Although ex-
ception must be taken to the distinction between Shakespeare
and Fletcher as excelling respectively in the depiction of the
more manly and the softer passions, 'to conclude all,' we are told,
'Fletcher was a limb of Shakespeare'-in other words, the less!
is included in the greater. Thus, though neither of much length
nor very clearly arranged, this essay signally attests the soundness
of Dryden's critical judgment, with his insight into the fact that
the most satisfactory dramatic theory is that which is abstracted
from the best dramatic practice. It was not given to him to
1 See A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. II, p. 152).
* I. e.
