wholly in the rhymed couplet, which was then regarded as the appropriate form for English epic poetry. Unlike other English tragedies of the time, they contain no comic underplot, and they usually have a happy ending. Their plots are frequently taken from the French romances. In character-drawing and diction they are powerfully affected both by the romances and by epic poetry. Love and chivalric honor are practically the only passions that animate their characters. Their diction, high-flown, often bombastic, makes no pretense at realism; the spectators, like those at an opera in our own day, were expected to leave their common sense at home. Indeed, the plays as a whole, besprinkled with dances and songs, and decorated with scenery more elaborate than had hitherto been used for the regular drama in England, were themselves half operatic in their effect. By their tumult and bustle these plays continue the traditions of the English stage, with no regard for French decorum; in this respect they remind us of Marlowe's Tamburlaine. Their plots, however, are constructed with some outward regard for the rules of French dramatic criticism: in the two parts of The Conquest of Granada a whole series of battles is compressed within the space of two days. The heroic plays offend our twentieth-century taste by their bombast and artificiality; in their own time they pleased audiences French enough to relish artificial gallantry, English enough to love sound and fury.

By the success of The Indian Emperor Dryden became the most prominent living English dramatist, with the possible exception of the veteran Davenant, who died soon after, in 1668. Between The Indian Emperor and Tyrannic Love, he produced a tragi-comedy, Secret Love (1667), and two comedies, Sir Martin Mar-All (1667) and An Evening's Love (1668), (the former a mere adaptation of Molière's L'Étourdi), and collaborated with Davenant on a debased version of Shakespeare's Tempest (1667). Secret Love, by its mingling of a comic intrigue with a serious plot taken from Le Grand Cyrus, a famous romance, by Mlle. de Scudéry, reminds us at once of the heroic plays and of the romantic tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. In this play and in An Evening's Love Dryden made his first essay at the comedy of manners, attempting to depict on the stage the life of court society. About 1668 he became a shareholder in the King's Company, one of the two licensed companies of players in London, contracting in return to write three plays a year for his associates. This arrangement gave him an income of three or four hundred pounds a year until 1672, when the profits of the company were much diminished by the burning of their playhouse. Though he did not fulfil his part of the contract, apparently writing less than one play a year, he seems to have enjoyed the benefits of it until 1678, when he deserted his partners, whose fortunes had been gradually waning, and gave his plays to their rivals, the Duke's Company. The great success of his best heroic play, The Conquest of Granada, probably reconciled the King's Company to his neglect of the letter of his agreement.

In 1668 Dryden published his most important critical work, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in which he attempted both to lay down the general principles of dramatic criticism and to defend his own dramatic methods. In this essay he dismisses in a few words the drama of the Greeks and Romans, with which he was but superficially acquainted, as being little adapted to delight modern audiences, or to instruct modern dramatists. The older English drama he regards as the greatest in the world. At the same time, the principles

1 In the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher signs of this conventional drawing of character had already begun to appear. Professor J. W. Tupper, however, in his article on The Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romance of Beaumont and Fletcher (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xx), seems to over-estimate the kinship between the two types he discusses.

of the French dramatists, he admits, are superior to those of the English, though their performance as a whole, owing to inadequate style and character-drawing, is inferior. In but one type of construction is the English theater manifestly superior to the French, in tragi-comedy, which Dryden boldly exalts as "a more pleasant way of writing for the stage than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation." This daring statement is at once a defense of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and a plea for Dryden's own practice in such plays as Secret Love. Further, in order to justify his beloved heroic plays, Dryden gives a long argument in favor of the use of rhyme in the drama, and of tumult on the stage, in contrast to the French theatrical decorum.

At the present time An Essay of Dramatic Poesy is less interesting for its substance than for the style in which it is written. The critical dicta are for the most part borrowed from older authors, notably Scaliger, Ben Jonson, and, above all, Corneille. The style, easy, graceful, flowing, is a model of what good critical prose should be. In its combined dignity and simplicity, Dryden's prose his "other harmony," as he later terms it (page 741) — has never been surpassed. Though he writes only a few years after Milton and Browne, his essays are so modern in their diction that they might seem, except for an occasional quaint phrase, the work of a great artist of our own day.

Dryden's eminence was now universally recognized. In 1662 he had been elected a member of the newly founded Royal Society. His early poems give evidence of a strong, though of course a dilettante interest in science. In his critical essays he insists that a poet must not only be skilful in the use of language, but must be conversant with all arts and sciences, and must acquire polish and a knowledge of men and manners by constant association with the best society. This ideal, of the cultivated man of letters, as distinguished from the Grub Street writer, he himself strove to attain. In Annus Mirabilis, the chief work of his first period, aside from his dramas, he parades, somewhat pedantically as yet, the learning derived from his special studies. In August, 1670, he received the posts of Poet Laureate (vacant since the death of Davenant in 1668) and Historiographer Royal (vacant since the death of Howell in 1666). These two positions yielded him a salary of two hundred pounds a year, to which a further pension of one hundred pounds was subsequently added. Dryden's reputation as a writer, and his worldly prosperity, now rested apparently on secure and lasting foundations.

Soon after his triumph with The Conquest of Granada, however, Dryden's position was vigorously assailed. The high-flown style, the exaggerated character-drawing, and the complicated plots of the heroic plays made them an easy mark for ridicule. In an effort to bring contempt on the whole type, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, aided by some other wits of the time, wrote the stinging farce of The Rehearsal, which was first acted in December, 1671. In this play, Mr. Bayes, a fashionable poet, who represents Dryden, invites two gentlemen to attend a rehearsal of his new drama, which proves to be a mess of nonsense, concocted largely of parodies of Dryden's plays, especially The Conquest of Granada. Lacy, the actor who created the part of Mr. Bayes, was costumed to imitate Dryden, and was taught to mimic his tricks of speech and his halting manner of recitation. To modern readers the wit of this clever satire seems irresistible. It naturally raised a laugh at Dryden's expense, but it did him little serious harm. Just as we can now enjoy Calverley's parodies of Browning, while still admiring their originals, so "gentlemen of wit and sense " in Dryden's time could applaud both The Rehearsal and The Conquest of Granada.

Perhaps Buckingham's attack deterred Dryden from immediately producing another heroic play. His succeeding works were Marriage à la Mode, The Assignation, and

Amboyna, all apparently first acted in 1672, though Marriage à la Mode was probably written in the preceding year. Of these plays the first is a lively comedy of manners, mixed with a rather crude tragic plot, in the heroic style; the second is an inferior comedy, a poor attempt at humorous work; and the third, a still more wretched tragedy, huddled up in haste to serve a political purpose. In Amboyna, Dryden sought to inflame the English against the Dutch, with whom they were then at war, thus supporting a policy for which he later fiercely condemned Lord Shaftesbury. The play (and notably the prologue and epilogue, which are printed in this volume) is interesting as the author's first attempt at political satire.

A more serious vexation than The Rehearsal came upon Dryden in 1673, when Elkanah Settle, a young poet of twenty-five, won a startling triumph with his heroic play, The Empress of Morocco. This drama, which, though not wholly without poetic merit, is unworthy of being compared to The Conquest of Granada, was performed at court by a company of ladies and gentlemen, before being presented at the public theatre, an honor to which none of the Laureate's pieces had ever attained. To make matters worse, Lord Mulgrave, one of Dryden's patrons, wrote the prologue for the first court production, and Lord Rochester, to whom he had dedicated Marriage à la Mode, that for the second. When The Empress of Morocco was printed, it was adorned with illustrations, or "sculptures," which had never before been used in a printed drama; and to it the author prefixed a preface aimed directly at Dryden. Literary people began to compare Settle's merits with Dryden's, the younger set favoring the younger poet.

Stung to the quick, Dryden forgot his accustomed dignity, and joined Shadwell and Crowne, his friends and fellow dramatists, in writing a scurrilous pamphlet, published in 1674, under the title, Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco; or, Some few Erratas to be Printed instead of the Sculptures with the Second Edition of that Play (see page 905). In this he abuses Settle roundly as a foolish pretender to poetry, and holds up to contempt the plot, character-drawing, and style of his tragedy. His usual method is to quote a few lines from The Empress of Morocco, and then, in a paragraph or two of mordant criticism, to point out their defects. To such an assault Settle had no difficulty in replying. He issued a pamphlet "contumaciously entitled," as Sir Walter Scott remarks, Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco Revised; with some few erratas, to be Printed instead of the Postscript, with the Next Edition of The Conquest of Granada, in which he subjects Dryden's favorite play to the same sort of petulant analysis. The outcome of the whole controversy is well stated by Scott:

"Dryden seems himself to admit that the principal difference between his heroic plays and The Empress of Morocco was that the former were good sense, that looked like nonsense, and the latter nonsense, which yet looked very like sense. A nice distinction, and which argued some regret at having opened the way to such a rival. . . . It was obvious that the weaker poet must be the winner by this contest in abuse; and Dryden gained no more by his dispute with Settle than a well-dressed man who should condescend to wrestle with a chimney-sweeper. The feud between them was carried no further, until, after the publication of Absalom and Achitophel, party animosity added spurs to literary rivalry." 1

It is, then, small wonder that Dryden undertook no new work for the theater during the years 1673 and 1674. He was not a little disenchanted with the plays that had brought him fame, and was driven to form new ideals of style. In this he was assisted by three critical works that appeared in France during 1674: Rapin's Reflexions sur la Poëtique,

1 Life of Dryden, in Scott-Saintsbury edition, i. 160, 161.

Boileau's Art Poétique, and Boileau's translation of the treatise of Longinus On the Sublime. The whole drift of these works, which Dryden undoubtedly read soon after their appearance in France, and for which he had a lively admiration, was against the extravagant "bladder'd greatness"1 of the heroic plays, and in favor of chastened, refined character-drawing and diction.

To abandon entirely the heroic plays, however, would have been to confess defeat and discomfiture. Accordingly, in 1675, Dryden returned to his task and produced his Aureng-Zebe. This drama, though superficially resembling The Conquest of Granada, is in its nature more like a French tragedy than a typical heroic play. Dryden has completely altered the historic background of his story, and constructed a plot modeled on the Mithridate of Racine. But in drawing his characters he did not submit to the restraints of French etiquette, choosing rather as his models the heroes of Shakespeare. "The personages are imperial," to use Dr. Johnson's courtly phrase, "but the dialogue is often domestic, and therefore susceptible of sentiments accommodated to familiar incidents." In the prologue Dryden admits that:

he has now another taste of wit;

And, to confess a truth, (tho' out of time,)
Grows weary of his long-lov'd mistress, Rhyme.
Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,
And nature flies him like enchanted ground.
What verse can do, he has perform'd in this,
Which he presumes the most correct of his;
But spite of all his pride, a secret shame
Invades his breast at Shakespeare's sacred name:
Aw'd when he hears his godlike Romans rage,
He, in a just despair, would quit the stage.

(Page 77, col. 1, lines 6-16.)

In the dedication to the play he makes more explicit his wish, at which he hints above, of retiring from dramatic writing. (See page xxvi.)

Thus we are not surprised to find that when Dryden, two years later, determined after all to resume writing for the stage, he composed a blank verse drama, in which he attempted a full synthesis of the form of the French classic drama with a characterdrawing and style imitated from Shakespeare. In his All for Love he recast the old story of Antony and Cleopatra into the form of a French tragedy, laying the emphasis not on action, but on psychological analysis. He is no longer influenced by the mechanical rules of Corneille's examens, but by the spirit of Racine. On the other hand, each speech bears witness to his careful study of Shakespeare. The play is beyond doubt the finest of Dryden's dramatic works, and it contains some of his truest poetry; fresh from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, we can still read with intense pleasure Dryden's version of the story. With the possible exception of Congreve's Mourning Bride, All for Love is the happiest result of the French influence on English tragedy, an influence that continued in force, practically undisputed, until the rise of the romantic movement. At about the same time that All for Love was first acted, there appeared an important critical work, which helped to confirm Dryden in his altered point of view. Late in 1677 Thomas Rymer published his book, The Tragedies of the Last Age, Considered and Examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common Sense of All Ages, the most ambitious piece of criticism that had been written in England since Dryden's Essay of 1 For the phrase, compare page 515.

2 See Holzhausen: "Dryden's Heroisches Drama," in Englische Studien, xv. 14, 15.

Dramatic Poesy, to which, despite the interval of nine years that separated them, it was in some sense a reply. Whereas Dryden, a superficial scholar but a practical dramatist, who understood the taste of the British public, had dismissed the Greek theater as worthy of only sentimental respect, and had exalted the Elizabethan drama as the greatest in all history, Rymer, a man of real though prejudiced erudition, with no sympathy whatever for popular taste, condemns the English tragedy of Shakespeare and his school as brutish, and exalts Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as models to be imitated by all later playwrights. Unlike Dryden, Rymer has no independent literary taste; he does not judge of any play immediately, as it appeals to him; instead of this, he has certain fixed tests, derived from the classical school of criticism, by which he tries all the tragedies that he discusses. For him the plot is the main subject of consideration; to character-drawing and style he pays little attention. Repelled as Dryden was by many of Rymer's opinions, he could not help respecting the critic's learning, and admiring the strictly logical method so akin to one side of his own mind-by which he reached his results. On first reading Rymer's book, Dryden made some notes for a reply to it, which a happy chance has preserved to us. "My judgment on this piece is this," he tells us, "that it is extremely learned, but that the author of it is better read in the Greek than in the English poets; that all writers ought to study this critique, as the best account I have ever seen of the ancients; that the model of tragedy he has here given is excellent, and extreme correct; but that it is not the only model of all tragedy, because it is too much circumscrib'd in plot, characters, etc.; and lastly, that we may be taught here justly to admire and imitate the ancients, without giving them the preference, with this author, in prejudice to our own country." He will not admit that the plot is of any such exclusive importance in tragedy as Rymer maintains, and makes a strong plea for English character-drawing and style.1

In the year 1678 Dryden produced three dramas: The Kind Keeper, a comedy, the most indecent of his plays, but one not lacking in the comic spirit; Edipus, a tragedy of the French type, on which he worked in collaboration with Nathaniel Lee; and Troilus and Cressida, an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy of that name into a form less at variance with the French rules. With this last play he published (1679) an important essay, The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy. In writing this treatise he borrowed much from the fashionable French critics of the time, Boileau (especially from his translation of Longinus), Rapin, and Bossu (a new French critic, whose Traité du Poëme Epique had appeared in 1675); and by the whole tenor of his argument he showed the strong influence that the ideas of the English theorist Rymer had had upon him. By a new dictum on tragi-comedy, which was in striking contrast with his previous words in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden here made plain his conversion to the classic point of view:

"Two different independent actions distract the attention and concernment of the audience, and consequently destroy the intention of the poet; if his business be to move terror and pity, and one of his actions be comical, the other tragical, the former will divert the people, and utterly make void his greater purpose. Therefore, as in perspective, so in tragedy, there must be a point of sight in which all the lines terminate: otherwise the eye wanders, and the work is false. This was the practice of the Grecian stage."

After this time Dryden in his critical works remains true to the classic theory of the drama, of which he never questions the validity. Yet his very next play, The Spanish

1 Dryden refers to Rymer in the preface to All for Love, published in 1678. But as Rymer's book is mentioned in the Term Catalogue for Michaelmas Term, 1677 (licensed for the press on November 26), it appeared too early to have influenced him in the composition of the play.