1658-75]

The heroic drama

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the human understanding, and the scholarship of Bentley, both in accordance with the spirit of the age. Finally, it was an age which, being full not only of curiosity but of controversy, perfected the form of didactic and argumentative poetry and wrought prose into a finished instrument. Possibly no one represents so completely the average man of his period as Samuel Pepys. His easy morality, his energetic curiosity, his serious practice of the arts combined with his characteristically uncertain taste, his materialism and his vulgarity, his care for detail and his earnest desire to be a man of culture and elegance, sum up in little the main features of his time.

The great representative of his age, the man who, like a journalist of genius, knew what his public wanted before they wanted it, and gave it them in the best possible form, was John Dryden. Instead of the

remoteness and exaltation of Milton, we have the lower aims, the strong sense, the strange lapses of taste, and the frequent experiments of Dryden. Milton may be held, on the whole, to give the best expression to the best minds of his time; Dryden to give the best expression to the reigning fashions of his. Neither spoke, as Shakespeare had spoken, for the nation. Milton was the voice of one of two opposed ideals, Dryden the voice of the Court and of what we should now call society.

The theatre, falling lower and lower since the early years of the reign of James I, was revived at the restoration, to be no longer a national institution, but the toy of the Court and the town. Sir William D'Avenant, in his tentative productions at Rutland House and elsewhere in and after 1658, had been led, partly by the necessity of a disguise, and largely by the influence of what he had seen in France and Italy, to introduce a form that lay between the heroic drama of France and the opera. The restoration brought back to England a large body of men whose notions were French in character and origin. Lacking a tradition, and knowing enough of the Elizabethan drama only to misunderstand its form and aim, they turned to French models for guidance. It was not long before they introduced, mainly by the aid of Dryden, a form of tragedy which, though expressive in its native country of national ideas and aims, was in England an exotic. It is true that English heroic drama is far from strictly French or "classical" in form. The "unities" are a bondage which the English have never borne complacently. The restoration dramatists studied Corneille and Racine only to dilute them, as it were, with something of the complexity of plot formerly learned of Spain and the freedom of movement characteristically English. The attempt to transplant the spirit of the French tragedy was more thorough in intention, but even less successful in result. The French Court of Louis XIV had at least an unbroken tradition of chivalry expressed in the typically French form of gallantry, an heroic past and a stately present. In France, Corneille's drama of the great problems of human life, Racine's drama of the ethical problems of a

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Dryden's heroic plays

[1665-75 polite age, expressed the facts of the society that enjoyed them. To the English Court, with no heroic past and with an idea of gallantry that had little in common with the chivalric, the two motives of love and honour were merely matters of fashion. Where the French drama embodied the difficulties and problems of real life, the English attempted to introduce actuality only by lowering the spirit of the problems to the morality of its patrons' practice. The morality was better than that of the later pre-Rebellion tragedy of Ford or Webster; that is all that can be said in its favour. "Ce qu'on appelle aimer en France," wrote SaintÉvremond," n'est que parler d'amour." It was not so in England. And the fact, to which the same excellent critic points that the English like to see blood and death on the stage instead of following the French and the classics in merely hearing of it-is another instance of the change undergone by the spirit of pseudo-classic drama in its transplantation. Again, having no heroic tradition as a standard, it was forced to substitute rant and bombast for appropriate loftiness. No one now can read the close of Dryden's Tyrannic Love (1669) without laughter. It is the work of a man groping in the dark after effect, and inspired partly by a misunderstanding of the heroic, partly, perhaps, by a failure to distinguish between the ebullient force of an Elizabethan author and deliberate, even painful, exaggeration.

Charles and his Court demanded heroic tragedy, and Dryden, who was not a dramatist of internal compulsion, gave it them, and gave it them, all things considered, very good. If he helped to turn The Tempest into an opera, he wrote All for Love on the basis of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is scarcely too much to say that All for Love is as good a play of its order as Antony and Cleopatra is. And, though there is a wide difference between The Conquest of Granada and the Scudéry romance on which it is founded, we cannot deny to it that "kind of generous and noble spirit" which has been claimed for it. How the "refined" age, which, in Evelyn's phrase, was "disgusted" with the "old plays," could have tolerated the lapses of taste to be found in these heroic plays would be hard to understand, were it not clear that, lacking its own tradition and standard, it took from another nation a standard which it misinterpreted. That there were some who deplore the resultant excesses, The Rehearsal (1671) is there to prove; but it is easy to overestimate the significance and effect of that burlesque. Aimed originally, not at Dryden but at D'Avenant, the character of its "hero" was a piece of patchwork. It has even been supposed that Sprat, Butler, and Clifford, three of the authors of the play, were not above making sly hits at the fourth, Buckingham. Dryden's first heroic drama, The Indian Emperor, had appeared in 1665; it was not till Aurengzebe (1675) that he announced his intention of deserting the heroic metre which was only one of the distinctive features of the heroic play, and so late as 1698 we find Crowne still employing that form. Dryden, with his unerring

1671-82]

eye

Crowne, Lee, and Otway

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for what his public wanted, was not likely to continue the use of a form of expression which had been outgrown. The heroic play satisfied a need of its time, and was, in one particular especially, of service to English literature. Dryden avoided blank verse because he regarded it as too "easy" for long works; the blank verse which he meant, however, was not that of Marlowe or of Shakespeare, but the blank verse run to seed of its last pre-Rebellion practitioners. And, if in English hands and to English ears the rhymed heroics of Dryden are not suitable for dramatic use, as the rhymed Alexandrines of Corneille and Racine were in French ears, they at least brought back point, concentration and reasonableness, though at some loss of naturalness and ease. The discussions on questions of ethics which we find in Dryden's dramas are neither so sincere nor no sensible as those of the French dramatists; but at least they are, within their limits, to the point, and they show an argumentative power and a measure of reason which were new. And when, after 1675, Dryden in All for Love (1678) turned to blank verse, it was all the firmer and more effective for his years of work in the heroic metre. There are elements, therefore, in the heroic drama, which, though imitated from the French, are adapted to the needs and express the characteristics of the English intellect of the period. The "grandeur d'âme bien exprimée qui excite une tendre admiration," according to the prescription of Saint-Évremond, was, no doubt, a makeshift substitute for the actual possession of a lofty ideal, and replaced a national aim by the worship of the person, especially that of the King; but, such as it was, it was better than anything that the dregs of the pre-Rebellion tragedy had had to offer.

Of the other writers of tragedy, Crowne is chiefly remarkable for the lyrics introduced into his plays. In Nathaniel Lee we find the popular bombast carried to extremes, though combined with "infinite fire." Otway, lacking Dryden's humour, has a more poignant tenderness than Dryden, quite as good a sense of character, and a greater sense of the theatre. The Orphan and Venice Preserved outlived all Dryden's plays on the stage, and showed what tragedy could achieve in this age, when it had cast off the heroic influence.

In the comedy of the period we find the reverse of the picture. Having exchanged, as it has been said, the telescope of the Elizabethans for the microscope, the Restoration authors used the microscope nowhere to better effect than in their comedy. Romantic and poetic comedy were dead. The opera and the ballet had come to take their places. Jonsonian comedy, the comedy of "humours," or single characteristics carried to the point of eccentricity, survived in the wholesome but extravagant comedies of Shadwell, whose Epsom Wells, and the comedies of which it is an example, are valuable pictures of contemporary manners. To some extent the Jonsonian principle of letting a characteristic stand for a character survives in the Restoration drama, at least as far

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Dryden, Wycherley, and Congren

a comedy of the old Jonsoniar Type of humour.” Ir vri Etherege's work may be seen by a comparison of the play of Zeni and the plays of Wilson and Suac well with Dryder's later parte and the school of younger writers. Wycheriey, Congreve As B Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Dryder's comedy, as a whor. ShNo6 I? sense and less wit than that of his fellows. In general. it borrower of plots, scenes, and characters from the French whch 1 Vever, he stamps with his own mark and that of his coun coarsens what he takes, as a comparison of Se Marin Maral 1 with its original. L'Etourdi is enough to show.

towards farce. and is no wit less licentious that his fellows II the £T on the other hand, he does not suffer from the beak cicism mi cruelty of Etherege and Wycherley. Some of his women, indeed, breadth and sweetness. Possibly, his best dramatic work is to be fond in some of his tragi-comedies. Marriage a ia Mode 1672 1row Seat (1690), Amphitryon (1690) and even Love Triumphant 184. A even more important figure is that of Wycherley, a born playwright, To The Plain Dealer we have already referred. This, with his three other comedies, was written before he had reached forty. His gaiety is almost hideous: he sees the worst of everything, and has no spark of nobility to counteract his bitterness: but he is an effective if clumsy satirist, and the possessor of strong dramatic power.

With Congreve we reach the summit of this form of expression. His output was very small being checked party by Collier's Short View and partly by the social ambitions of the playwright, whom offices and rewards bad relieved of the necessity of work. The Old Bachelor (acted in 1693) had been highly praised and adapted for representation Dryden. The Double-Dealer (1688) we have mentioned before. The skill and vigour with which the single plot is kept alive and full of interest to the end are mastery. With Love for Love (1695) he opened the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields after the secession of Betterton and others from Drury Lane: and in 1701 after the attack of Collet appeared his finest play. The Way of the World. It was his aim in this play to substitute the folly of affectation for the folly of grossness, and the result is a severe satire on the world of fashion and foppery. Congreve cannot be acquitted of the charges of frivolity, cynicism, and indecency. On the other hand, he is never like Wycherley, Vanbrugh or Otway in his comedies, offensive, and Mamant, in his last play, is a woman so entirely fascinating in her wit and her wilfulness as to prove him aware of something higher than the gross attractions dwelt on by his fellows. It may be pointed out, too, that in The Double-Dealer virtue is rewarded; and, on the whole, it may be said that the faults of Congreve are largely the faults of his age, while his merits are of his own contriving. In him the characteristic "wit" of the age finds its most perfect expression. Like Etherege, he suffers from too much f

1673-1707]

Politics in the drama

131

t; his servants talk as elegantly and pointedly as their masters and nistresses; but, as representing the talk of a society which had leisure and ambition to be "polite" and exquisite, it is, in all probability, not far from the truth, while the attainment by English prose of such inish, flexibility, and point as his marks the advance on the previous ge. The writers of comedies in deserting poetry, with Etherege, endered invaluable service to the development of prose. On Mrs Behn and other writers we need not dwell. Sir John Vanbrugh, a writer and rchitect of mixed English and Flemish parentage, is noteworthy for he unsurpassed gaiety and ease of his dialogue and his vivid pictures of ontemporary life. In Farquhar we reach a writer of greater signiicance. No fine gentleman, but an Irish adventurer of genius, he xtended the field-especially in his last two plays, The Recruiting ficer (1706) and The Beaux's Stratagem (1707) to embrace types utside the little parish of St James' and sentiments more modern and umane than those of the "beaux" and "belles." His comedy comes learer to being national, to dealing with the life of the people at large, han that of his contemporaries. His frequent references to current vents are apt and diverting, and his rejection of the traditional topics of Restoration comedy in favour of wider and more actual material was he basis of a similar advance on the part of Lessing, whose Minna von Barnhelm owes more to Farquhar than some of its incidents.

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It was in this age that the drama, especially the tragic drama, began o be used for political ends, if not with the virulence shown by Henry ielding and others in the next century, at any rate with almost nabashed openness. In Dryden's own case we have, notably, Amboyna 1673), which raked up an old story for the purpose of inflaming public pinion against the Dutch, and The Spanish Friar, a " Protestant play 1681); and The Duke of Guise (1682), written by Lee with Dryden's id, drew a parallel between Guise and Monmouth, and practically oretold for the latter in spite of the disclaimer in the epilogue and he subsequent Vindication-an end similar to that of the former. tway's shameful caricature of Shaftesbury as Antonio in Venice Preserved, though personal rather than political, is another instance. Even more frequently than the play itself the prologue and epilogue rere used as political weapons. The curious custom by which the playright spoke personally to the public through the mouth of an actor or ctress was at its height during this period. The result was almost lways inartistic, in some cases disgusting, as in the famous epilogue to Tyrannic Love or in the first version of that to The Duke of Guise; the anguage was often indelicate, and the sentiments highly objectionable. At the same time, in the hands of Dryden the prologue and epilogue eached a very high level of epigrammatic point, and were admirably dapted in their freedom to inflame political passions by sneers, nuendos, or open attack or defence.