THE RESTORATION
The drama of the Restoration was separated from the earlier periods by
sixteen years of closed theatres and a virtual cessation of all dramatic
composition. To the drama, as to other forms of literature, the Restoration
brought not only a revival but also a revolution--new fashions, new models,
new foreign influence, a new age, and a changed society. No such break in
theatrical conditions has occurred since then, and nothing so nearly
revolutionary in the history of the drama. Since then the theatres have
been always open, the dramatists always writing. Changes have been gradual,
the history continuous. Due recognition must, therefore, be given to the
last years before the closing of the theatres and the first years after
their reopening as marking an end and a beginning. Really, however, the new
was a continuation of the old; the pause was by no means a severing of
traditions; and the Restoration drama inherited far more from the
Elizabethan than it imported from France or originated under the
inspiration of that illustrious patron of poetry, Charles II.
Signs of continued interest in the theatre had not been wanting during the
Commonwealth. The theatres were reopened in 1648 but promptly suppressed
and dismantled. Drolls or short farces derived from popular plays were
performed here and there in London or in the country, and the continued
publication of old plays revealed a considerable demand from the reading
public. In 1656 Davenant obtained permission for the performance of his
"Siege of Rhodes" "made a Representation by the Art of Perspective Scenes,
and the story sung in Recitative Music." Thus, even before the revival of
the regular drama, came its rival the opera, and the important innovation
of movable scenes. Two years later Davenant produced another entertainment,
and was performing regular plays before Monk had entered London. Two
companies, the King's and the Duke of York's, were presently licensed;
these, united from 1682 to 1695, sufficed for sixty years to supply the
needs of the London public, and maintained their monopoly until well into
the nineteenth century. Before 1642 the open public theatres had largely
given place to the "private" theatres in inclosed rooms. These and the
contemporary French theatres served as models for the Restoration
buildings. The stage still protruded into the auditorium and was frequently
crowded with gallants as in the Elizabethan days, but the use of scenery, a
drop curtain shutting off all the stage but the proscenium, the
performances by artificial light, together with the women actors, who now
for the first time interpreted Shakespeare's heroines, brought the
Restoration stage closer to that of our own day than to that of the
preceding generation. This transformation from a half-medieval to a nearly
modern stage resulted in far-reaching changes in the drama; among others,
in a new importance to female parts and in alterations in structure due to
the use of scenery and curtain. Few of the old actors were still alive,
though enough had been gathered to make up the nucleus of the companies and
to transmit the traditions of the Globe and the Blackfriars. The acting of
the Restoration probably soon surpassed that of the earlier period, and the
great triumphs of Betterton and Mrs. Barry set new and long influential
traditions in English tragedy. The changes which most fundamentally
affected the drama were those in the stage and the actors.
The influence exerted upon the drama by the new opera may also be described
as largely theatrical. The opera of the Restoration is to be distinguished
from the form as it has prevailed since the introduction of Italian opera
into England at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The term was
loosely used to describe a variety of entertainments, in which the dialogue
might be altogether sung, or in part spoken, and in which the dancing and
decoration were regarded as not less essential than the music. Derived from
France, where the opera gained great favor and attracted the services of
Corneille and Quinault, the English species was closely related to two
national forms of drama, the masque and the tragedy. In music, dancing, and
machinery it resembled the former; in theme, plot, and persons, often the
latter. A resemblance between the opera and the heroic tragedy is also
observable in the prominence given by each to heroic love. Tragedies were
readily transformed into operas as in the case of Lee's "Theodosius" and
Tate's "Brutus of Alba," and of Fletcher's "Island Princess" and
"Prophetess." Throughout the period the relations between the two remain
close. They were presented in the same theatre; the same actors often
played in one and sang in the other; an orchestral band was provided to
play between the acts in tragedy; and tragedy availed itself of songs,
scenery, and machines. Entirely apart from its place in the history of
English music, English opera is of some importance in the development of
tragedy, partly as a rival and partly because it promoted operatic elements
in tragedy itself. Tragedy came in the Restoration period to rely more than
ever before upon the externals of its stage presentation, and on elements
then considered distinctively operatic,--scenery, spectacle, and music.
From changes in theatrical conditions, friends of the drama doubtless found
hope for its higher development; but the main source of promise seemed to
lie in the patronage of the court. The court of Charles II indeed exerted a
greater influence on the drama than any court since or, perhaps, before,
but the influence was mainly toward social and political immorality.
Patronage rather than public support was relied upon by both dramatists and
actors. In consequence, the theatres became servile purveyors to the
amusement and taste of the king and his favorites, and blindly partisan
adherents of the royal politics. The failure to represent the nation and
the consequent loss both in range of artistic impulse and in soundness of
moral standards that had characterized the drama in the reigns of the two
earlier Stuarts were now greatly intensified. In tragedy, grossness of
language and manners had less opportunity than in comedy, but political
subserviency had freer play. Political allegory combined with tragedy in
plays contemptible as specimens of either species. This unworthy
partisanship and this catering to a society mean and corrupt necessarily
maimed that branch of the drama supposed to devote itself to heroic and
lofty themes.
The influences making most for innovation in the poetry and art of the
drama came from France, partly owing to the instigation of the court. The
character of this French influence, like its sources, differed from time to
time, but from 1660 until after the death of Voltaire it was continuous and
powerful. In tragedy, shortly after the Restoration, the heroic romances of
Calprenede, Scudery, and others, and the French plays which they had
fostered, were the sources and models of much in the English heroic plays.
There was constant borrowing and adapting from French romances and
tragedies, as from French comedies. The "Cid" had been translated and acted
in the reign of Charles I; several other of Corneille's plays were
translated before 1670, his subjects and style were often imitated, and
toward the end of the century the influence of Racine was marked upon
English drama. The French influence on tragedy, however, was less a matter
of models than of rules and theory. The English dramatists never in this
period got very close to Corneille or Racine, but they were greatly
impressed by French criticism and precept. In an age of reason and
modernity, English tragedy, like other forms of literature, found its
reaction from the crudities of an earlier age and its reform of the
excesses of an untrained art in the pseudo-classicism of France.
An effort was made, which proved far more portentous than preceding ones,
to wrest tragedy back into conformity with the supposed rules of Aristotle.
The conflict between English and French models, between Shakespeare and
Corneille, between romantic license and classical proprieties had begun, a
conflict to be continued in criticism as well as practice for over a
century. Dryden's "Essay on Dramatic Poetry" introduces us at once to the
questions at issue and the state of the debate. The main questions were:
first, the unities, recognized in French drama as necessities and
supposedly derived from Aristotle; second, the mixture of tragedy and
comedy, or, more especially, the introduction of low comedy into tragedy;
and third, the use of rhyme as in French tragedy or of blank verse as in
English, prose by general consent being restricted to comedy. In these the
English tradition was directly opposed by French practice and theory, and
in many minor matters as well: in the _liaison_ of scenes, favored, as was
the unity of place, by the use of scenery; in certain proprieties in the
conduct of kings and of subjects to kings; in the restriction of tragedy
to historical, classical, or at least heroical persons and themes; and,
notably, in the avoidance of violence and bloodshed in the action. Dryden's
discussion reveals French practice and classical practice, not clearly
differentiated, set up against the English tradition, and recognizes much
in the former that seems reasonable and authoritative. But, on the other
hand, it insists on the excellence and impressiveness of the English
achievement. Such was the state of opinion shortly after the Restoration,
and such, with varying emphasis and refinement, remained the consensus of
opinion of dramatists and critics for a century. The laws of the
pseudo-classicists were held to be measurably good, but Shakespeare without
those laws had been undeniably great.
Throughout the Restoration the main influence on the theatre was that of
the earlier English drama. When the theatres were opened the old plays were
acted. Literally hundreds were revived, many of which long held the stage.
After a time changes in taste and theatrical conditions led to revisions
and alterations; but the alterations of Shakespeare and others not only
illustrate this perversion of taste, but also testify to the continuance of
the English tradition. Not merely revisions and adaptations, but the whole
drama bears witness to its descent. The characteristics of the tragedy of
1630 are those of the tragedy of 1670. The influence of the
Beaumont-Fletcher romances and of the tragedy of revenge are hardly less
marked after 1660 than before. The comic scenes, blank verse, complicated
plots, physical horrors, and supernatural agents, the mixture of
idealization and realism that characterize Elizabethan tragedy, persist
throughout the Restoration period.
The conflict between the contending theories of tragedy may be studied in
criticism. Dryden's various essays recur again and again to the main issues
of the war, and define with changing emphasis his attempted reconciliation
of the two opposites. Rymer came forward as a thoroughgoing exponent of
classicism, and at the beginning of the next century Dennis, Gildon, and
Addison carried on the discussion. The conflict is also represented in the
work of nearly every dramatist. There are tragedies in blank verse and
tragedies in rhyme, tragicomedies, tragedies with comic scenes, tragedies
without deaths and with happy endings, tragedies translated from the
French, others based on Greek originals, and still others in their medleys
of farce, horror, and rant as Elizabethan as "The Jew of Malta" itself.
Many of these varieties are represented in the work of a single writer, as
Crowne, or Lee, or Otway. The career of Dryden sums up and reflects nearly
all the changes in opinion or practice. His plays, and with them the whole
course of tragedy from 1660 to 1700, fall roughly into certain divisions.
For a few years after the Restoration, ending at about the time of the
"Essay," is the period of the dominance of the earlier drama, a period of
which Davenant is the leading figure. About 1664 began the heroic tragedies
in rhyme which for a time carried all before them. In a dozen years,
however, the fashion wore out, and Dryden's "All for Love" in 1678 marked
the abandonment of rhyme and led the return to Shakespeare. From 1678 on,
the course of tragedy again takes to varied streams. To this period belong
the most notable alterations of Shakespeare, the most permanent of
Restoration tragedies in the plays of Dryden, Lee, and Otway, and also the
growth of French methods and of the influence of Racine, culminating in the
pseudo-classical triumph at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
At the opening of the theatres, tragedy and tragicomedy took up their
courses about where they had left off. The plays of Davenant, the main
connecting link between the two periods, might be treated in connection
with either, without seeming in the least out of place. Tragicomedy of the
type current in the thirties continued in the sixties; tragedy oscillated
between honor and horror, fine writing and perverted lust, as in Massinger,
Shirley, and Glapthorne. Spanish stories, long influential in the drama,
promised for a time to prove still more important. Dryden's first two
plays, "The Wild Gallant" (1663)[25] and "The Rival Ladies" (1664), were
based, like many other contemporary plays, on Spanish originals; but the
second introduced rhyme and some of the elements of the plots of the heroic
plays. It was, however, the Elizabethan plays that the audiences went to
see, and that the dramatists had constantly before them. The plays of the
Marlowean period were regarded as out of date, and very few were revived,
practically none of the tragedies except the early ones of Shakespeare. Of
the later Elizabethans, Beaumont and Fletcher were the most popular, for a
time surpassing Shakespeare. Over thirty of their plays were revived, and
many of these were constantly acted. Of tragedies and tragicomedies, "The
Maid's Tragedy," "Philaster," "Bonduca," "A King and No King,"
"Valentinian," and "Rollo" held the stage till the end of the century, the
first three much longer. Jonson's tragedies, as well as his comedies, were
revived; and Massinger's "Virgin Martyr," Webster's "White Devil,"
Chapman's "Bussy D'Ambois," Shirley's "Cardinal" and "Traitor" were among
the plays that carried on the traditions of the tragedy of blood.
Shakespeare's comedies fell into disfavor, but his tragedies were popular
from the start. This was due in part to the genius of Betterton, who found
his best opportunities in depicting their protagonists, in part to their
merits as stage plays for both actors and audiences; but, whatever the
causes of their success, they soon exercised a large and increasing
influence upon the theory and practice of tragedy.
The Elizabethan plays, however, had almost from the first to encounter a
rivalry with a new fashion. Davenant, their reviver, was also the first
with the new. His "Siege of Rhodes" (1656), with its scenery, machines,
music, rhyme, and heroics, may be said to inaugurate both the opera and the
heroic play. Howard's "Indian Queen" (1664), in which Dryden had a hand,
was followed by Dryden's "Indian Emperor" (1665), in rhyme and displaying
the full-fledged heroic formula. The love-complications of its plot are of
a kind constantly reappearing not only in the heroic plays but in later
tragedy as well.
Montezeuma and Cortez are the historical heroes;
Almeria, daughter of the Indian Queen, is the vengeful
passionate heroine; Cydaria, daughter of Montezeuma, is
the angelic heroine. Montezeuma's sons, Odmar and
Guyomar, Almeria's sister, Alibech, and her brother,
Orbellan, all in love with some one, add to the
criss-crossing of affections. Almeria is loved by
Montezeuma, but loves Cortez, who does not love her.
Cydaria is loved by Cortez and also by Orbellan. The
two heroines, as well as the two heroes, are thus
rivals, and the vengeful one directs the intrigue. The
brothers Odmar and Guyomar, to say nothing of a Spanish
captain, both love Alibech, and provide the usual story
of fraternal rivalry. After duels, captures,
imprisonments, conflicts of honor, renunciations, and
jealousies, finally the vengeful heroine succumbs. One
of the brothers is preserved for Alibech; Cortez weds
the angelic heroine; the rest, including six of the
leading actors and several supernumeraries, are killed
or commit suicide.
Dryden's dedication of "The Rival Ladies" to the Earl of Orrery gives some
support to the latter's claim to have been the introducer of the rhymed
heroic species, though his first play acted was probably "Henry V," in
1664. Whoever the originators, their example was soon followed by Crowne,
Lee, Settle, Otway, and most of the dramatists of the day; and for fifteen
years or so English efforts in tragedy were confined to the heroic model.
The use of the heroic couplet was its distinguishing mark; of course, an
imitation of French practice. The plots, too, were direct borrowings, or
close imitations, of contemporary French romances or dramas. Moreover, the
themes and their treatment, the conception of honor, the importance given
to love, and the pseudo-history, all followed French ideas. The unities
were attended to, if not strictly observed; incidents, persons, and scenes
greatly reduced in number in comparison with Elizabethan practice; and
fixed rules of propriety in characterization and language observed, all in
French fashion.
The English plays, however, formed a type unknown in France or anywhere
else on sea or land. The plots of all the "Sieges," "Rivals," and
"Conquests" are mainly concerned with love, which inspires heroic sentiment
and valor, encounters much jealousy and intrigue, runs counter to
friendship and honor, and works its sorrows and joys among persons
illustrious in history. In the end, the hero, a man of prodigious valor and
most exemplary honor, weds the heroine, who is equally skilled in the
artificial code of honor, while the deaths of the ambitious villain and the
evil princess, in love with the hero and seeking revenge on the heroine,
provide a tragic catastrophe. The persons are usually historical, English,
Classical, or Eastern, and a little historical fact was intended to give a
kind of grandeur to the story. The Alexanders and Montezumas, however, have
manners and sentiments drawn partly from the courts of Louis and Charles
and partly from the world of romance. The curious conception of honor as
superhuman valor and magnanimity combined with formal propriety leads to
impossibilities like those in a child's book of wonders. Duels and rescues
take the place of pitched fields; the valorous champion puts to rout an
army, exchanges compliments and courtesies with the grace of a
fashion-plate, boasts and rants in Cambyses' vein, and is near to expire in
an ecstasy of declamation when the heroine extends her hand for him to
kiss. The two rival lovers and the two rival ladies generally play their
game of jealousy, ambition, and wounded honor during a conquest or a siege;
but world and empire count for naught. _Amor vincit omnia._
A mere summary of their leading traits may suggest, what a careful
examination of the various representatives of the class will confirm, that
the heroic plays were by no means a fresh importation from France, but
rather a result of tendencies distinctly manifest in the English drama, at
least since the Beaumont-Fletcher romances.[26] The _genre_ of heroic
romances begun by Beaumont and Fletcher, continued in tragedy and
especially in tragicomedy by Fletcher, Massinger, and Shirley, here takes a
further but not very diverse development under the spell of French romance
and drama. The conflicts of honor, the rivalries in love, the few types of
character constantly recurring, the extraordinary surprises and
discoveries, the women, sentimental and sensational, offered nothing new in
English drama. The avoidance of bloodshed, the observance of poetic
justice, the exaltation of love as the whole theme, the preference for the
sensational and astounding rather than the natural or inevitable, have all
been found distinguishing drama since Fletcher. On the other hand, the
hateful intrigue and abnormal lust, the horrors and gloom of Webster and
Ford found little place in the heroic plays. One survival from the revenge
plays, however, took on new life. Ghosts became as numerous and voluble as
in the days of Kyd. But in the main the heroic plays represent the
continuance of the heroic romance and tragicomedy corrected in accord with
French standards of dramatic art and French conceptions of gallantry and
heroism.
It is in this aspect that they are of the most interest in the history of
English tragedy. They are not a freak variation but a species lineally
related to those which precede and follow. They carry the restriction and
conventionalization of the material of tragedy much farther than did the
plays of Shirley and his contemporaries; and, somewhat before Racine, they
confine the main course of tragedy to sentimental love. Though their main
innovation, the employment of rhyme, did not prevail, and though their
changes in technic were rejected by many later Restoration dramatists, yet
they were a powerful force in habituating the theatre to the structure and
methods of French tragedy and in promoting the triumph of these methods in
the next century. They also mark a further change in the conception of the
field and functions of tragedy. The result of developments from tragicomedy
rather than from tragedy, they exhibit a blending of the two forms and a
redivision along new lines. Before the Restoration, nearly all tragedies
had presented a mixture of comedy or of farce. Tragicomedy had been
distinguished from tragedy not by the presence of comedy but by the fact
that its leading persons were brought near to death yet saved for a happy
ending. Moreover, tragicomedies as a class developed along the lines of the
Beaumont-Fletcher romances. The heroic plays inherited the traits of this
class and also to some extent the happy endings. In some, as Orrery's
"Henry V," there is no suffering and everything turns out well; in others,
as Orrery's later plays, there is bloodshed enough; but in nearly all death
is visited only on the evil; the heroic are married. All plays with heroic
themes, however, were called tragedies. There was no hint of heroic comedy
as in France. The distinction between tragedy and comedy, which the
Restoration drama drew much more closely than the Elizabethan, came to
depend less on the presence of deaths or of an unhappy ending, and more on
the nature of the material and form. After the decline of the heroic plays,
tragedy returned, as we shall see, to bloodshed, deaths, and horrors, but
meantime the heroic plays had emphasized as essential certain elements
that long continued their ascendency in both critical and popular views of
tragedy. Henceforth every one associated with tragedy heroic actions,
illustrious persons, verse, whether rhymed or blank, a love story, and an
inflated diction. The curious heroic rant, indeed, supplied a vocabulary
and a manner that lasted long after the jingle of the rhyming couplets had
been abandoned. Its "furies," "vows," "chains," "transports," "ecstasies,"
and "Etnas burning within the breast" remained the language of despairing
innocence and palpitating passion. Tragic became almost synonymous with
artificial and inflated.
A worthier achievement must also be credited to the heroic plays. The
spacious realms of romance which the Elizabethans had loved were closing
their gates to the imagination of the later seventeenth century. Even
Shakespeare's isles of the blest that so delighted Elizabeth and James were
strangely inaccessible to Restoration fancy, which took pleasure in only
the "Merry Wives of Windsor" among his comedies. The narrowing of romance
had been manifest in the drama since 1600, and it was a theatrical and
artificial domain of thrills, sentiments, and honor that the Restoration
received for its heritage. Poor enough as is this kingdom, absurd its
inhabitants, it is still the land of the wonderful and impossible, and its
monarchs now and then remind us of Tamburlaine and Hotspur. At the time of
Wycherley's comedies and Rochester's patronage of literature, men and women
sighed and thrilled with Albumazor, dreamed of love, and fancied
themselves kings and queens in China and Peru. When Romance was banished
from other forms of literature,--unless in pastoral or opera,--tragedy
still remained dedicated to the banished goddess, and in its precincts
scanty flames still burned on the altars of heroism, enthusiasm, romantic
aspiration, and extravagant love.
The rise and wane of the heroic plays is sufficiently illustrated in the
career of their chief exponent. After his "Indian Emperor" (1665), Dryden
turned in "Secret Love" (1667) to tragicomedy with a mixture of verse,
rhyme, and prose and a mixture of heroic and lively comedy. After various
comedies and the adaptation of "The Tempest," "Tyrannic Love" (1669) and
"The Conquest of Granada" (1669) accomplished the full triumph of rhymed
verse and "the grand scale." At times Dryden's rapidity and vigor almost
justify the rhymed couplets and redeem the absurdities of the conventions.
It was in the Epilogue to "The Conquest" that he attacked the Elizabethans,
vaunting the superiority of an age when
"Our ladies and our men now speak more wit
In conversation, than those poets writ."
In 1671 came the burlesque "Rehearsal," which, if its attack did not centre
on heroic plays, made Dryden and the popular "Conquest of Granada" the
butts of its most telling fun. Then followed Dryden's "Essay of Heroic
Plays," two comedies, his inexcusable tragedy of "Amboyna" (written in a
month to support the war with the Dutch, yet, in conformity to the
fashion, tracing the Dutch atrocities to a heroic love), and the opera
based on Milton's "Paradise Lost." In 1675 came "Aureng Zebe," the last of
his heroic plays, without supernatural machinery, and somewhat tamed in
style.
The vogue of the heroic play was about over. In 1678 came Rymer's attempt
at a model heroic tragedy and his "Tragedies of the Last Age," a severe
attack upon the Elizabethan drama from the point of view of extreme
pseudo-classicism. But in the same year was acted Dryden's "All for Love,"
in blank verse, with a preface extolling Shakespeare, rejecting the models
of the ancients as "too little for English tragedy," discarding "the nicety
of manners of the French," yet claiming credit for an observance of the
unities. This was the one play in which, as he declared, Dryden followed
his own bent unheedful of stage fashions, and it seems to have set the
fashion and led the way back to blank verse and to Shakespeare. Rhymed
plays continued to appear occasionally, but blank verse was henceforth
recognized as the proper medium for tragedy.
Even Dryden's praise of Shakespeare is modified by his respect for French
rules, and by the prevailing opinion that Shakespeare's genius lacked the
improvements readily secured by an application of the accepted formulas of
art. That a certain improvement is accomplished cannot be denied. The
incoherent profusion of scenes, the host of distracting incidents are
reduced to order, the unities of time and place give a directness and
rapidity to the action that "Antony and Cleopatra" greatly lacks. In
characterization and poetry Dryden's play is, to be sure, not comparable
with Shakespeare's, but in both respects it far surpasses the numerous
other English dramas on the subject. This is faint praise. By following
Shakespeare without imitating him, and by adapting a play to the stage
requirements of the day without bowing to the absurdities of the heroic
models, Dryden succeeded in producing a great and original poetical drama.
Not in response to mere theatrical fashion or to French taste or theory,
but in response to the inspiration of Shakespeare came the finest product
of Restoration tragedy.
In this same year as "All for Love" appeared "Oedipus," written in
collaboration with Lee, in which the authors brought to their classical
model the methods of the Elizabethans. Eurydice and Adrastus furnish the
necessary love story, and Creon becomes the hateful rival and intriguing
villain. The declamation sometimes shows Dryden at his best, the bombast
and horrors are in Lee's worst vein. In the next year appeared Dryden's
improvement of "Troilus and Cressida" with his careful essay on "The
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy," in which he criticises after the fashion
set by Rymer the errors of Shakespeare and Fletcher, insists on the
necessity of unity, order, and greatness in action, and praises the
excellence of Fletcher and especially of Shakespeare in character and
passion. Nowhere else, perhaps, has Dryden expressed so discriminatingly
and so finally his own views and, on the whole, the views of his age, on
tragedy. Shakespeare's greatness is recognized as preeminent in the
presentation of character and passion; his faults in coherence and unity of
structure and his archaism in manners and proprieties are admitted.
From this time on Dryden's contributions to the drama were less frequent.
In "The Spanish Fryar" (1681), he added the best Restoration example of
tragicomedy, availing himself of Fletcher's example, a double plot, and a
happy ending. "The Duke of Guise" (1682), a political allegory, written in
collaboration with Lee, deserves little consideration as satire or drama.
After two operas and an absence of several years from the stage, came "Don
Sebastian" (1690), which Sir Walter Scott thought the best of his
tragedies. It is heroic in its pairs of lovers and tangle of love and
jealousy, and in the exploits, boasts, and love-making of the hero; French
in its general structure; Elizabethan in its mixture of comedy, its use of
horror and incest, and its imitation of Shakespeare. It recalls the
tragedies before 1642, with their heroic love after the style of Beaumont
and Fletcher, their horrors and incest following the Websterian school, and
their emulation of famous passages in Shakespeare. "Cleomenes" (1692),
which repeats the Potiphar's wife story, is still more Elizabethan, and
"Love Triumphant," a tragicomedy (1693), deals with an incestuous passion
proved innocent at last, a motive very popular since "A King and No King."
Dryden never gave the theatre a whole-hearted service. Responding readily
to its conditions, he wrote with facility and vigor comedies, tragedies,
operas, and political allegories of the kind that changing fashion or
patrons demanded. When, after a long slavery, he had acquired mastery of
his art and confidence to lead rather than to follow, circumstances arose
to call him away from the theatre. We may wish that he had earlier and
oftener tried to do his best, as in "All for Love," "The Spanish Friar,"
and "Don Sebastian"; but his genius was not essentially dramatic, and we
may not regret the time taken from the theatre for the Satires and Fables.
His greatness can be best seen by comparison with the work of his
contemporaries. Whatever he tried, he did on the whole better than they,
and in comprehensiveness and adaptability as well as in sheer poetic
faculty he was their master.
Up to "Aureng Zebe" Dryden's tragedies reflected the prevailing fashion;
his "All for Love" marked a turning-point in the course of tragedy; and his
criticism reviewed, summed up, and discriminated the current views of
Shakespeare and the French. His later work was less representative of the
general course of the drama, yet the various species exhibited in his work
recur in that of his contemporaries, and the partial return to Elizabethan
methods that marks his latest plays is perhaps the leading characteristic
of the last twenty years of the century.
Crowne's "Thyestes" is the only attempt besides Dryden's "Orestes" to adapt
a classical play to the popular stage, and neither returns much nearer to
the Greek than Seneca. The only play closely modeled on the Greek is
Milton's "Samson Agonistes." The preface renounces the stage with a scorn
that includes not only the Restoration tragedies but apparently those of
Shakespeare as well. Though the play stands by itself, it may be said to
represent a tendency to turn to Greek rather than to French models, a
tendency boasted of by Dryden and Crowne, and fully manifest in the next
century. And it takes its place at the head of the numerous, if sporadic,
tragedies on Greek models that extend from the Restoration to the present
day.
In the return to Shakespeare, Dryden's influence was more potent, though
here, as in the case of the Greeks, an increased appreciation was shown
partly through alterations and adaptations. Before "All for Love," only
"Measure for Measure," "Macbeth," and "The Tempest" of Shakespeare's plays
had suffered alterations, and in two of these Dryden had a share. In the
four years after 1678, no less than ten alterations were produced, the
majority of which long usurped the stage. The restorers, sincere enough in
their admiration for Shakespeare, were following Dryden's precept and
example, correcting Shakespeare's faults in diction or structure, and
preserving his poetry and characters. While their entire readiness to cut
or to add resulted in part from ignorant vanity, it depended far more on
their confidence in the panacea afforded by Art for all diseases of genius.
Art, according to their prescription, was compounded of closeness of
structure in the French style and a declamatory vocabulary in accord with
the latest pseudo-classic conventions. The alterations are so various in
their audacities that a brief general description is hardly possible. The
main purpose in each case was the remaking of Shakespeare's disordered
beauties into "a play," and, beyond the formulas of Art, the most usual
improvement was the addition of a love story. Thus, Alcibiades marries the
daughter of Timon, and Cordelia's loyalty is rewarded by the hand of Edgar.
Perhaps the most that can be said for the restorers is, first, that they
rescued for the stage some of the less dramatic plays, as "Troilus and
Cressida," "Timon," "Henry IV," "Coriolanus," and "Cymbeline," and thereby
greatly extended the knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare; and,
second, that they left "Hamlet" and "Othello" untouched. Adaptations were
made of practically all Elizabethan authors, and Shakespeare fared as his
fellows. A more elaborate history of the drama than the present one might
trace the changes in the conception of tragedy and in the taste of the
theatres as indicated by these alterations. The main consideration here is
that, however mutilated or embellished, a half dozen of his tragedies were
among the favorite plays of the Restoration. Before the end of the century
they had outclassed the other Elizabethan plays, even those of Beaumont and
Fletcher, in popular regard. The Restoration did what his own age had not
done; it recognized Shakespeare's supremacy in English tragedy.
It would be tedious to trace the infatuation for the heroic plays and the
partial return to the Elizabethans in the work of the various dramatists
whose careers paralleled Dryden's. His rival, Settle, wrote heroic plays, a
sensational political play on the Whig side, "Pope Joan, or the Female
Prelate," and a long series of tragedies and comedies extending well into
the next century. John Crowne, another contemporary, began with tragic
comedies and heroic rhymed plays, proceeded to Shakespearean alterations,
"Thyestes," and blank verse plays in the Elizabethan tradition, and ended
his career with a rhymed "Caligula." Among those who in tragedy confined
themselves mainly to adaptations or borrowings from the Elizabethans were
Tate, Ravenscroft, and D'Urfey; and a group of women should be
mentioned,--Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Pix, and Mrs. Centlivre,--who in
the later half of the period devoted considerable attention to tragedy
without creating any marked departure from the commonplace. We must confine
ourselves to the authors whose tragedies had a more extended interest.
Nathaniel Lee wrote his first play in 1675, when he was eighteen years old,
and produced ten tragedies, in addition to the two in which he collaborated
with Dryden, before the close of 1684, when he became insane. The first
three, "Nero," "Sophonisba," and "Gloriana," were rhymed, but the fourth,
"The Rival Queens" (1677), preceded Dryden in its return to blank verse and
won an enormous success, maintaining itself on the stage long after the
death of Betterton. His remaining tragedies were in blank verse,
"Mithridates," "Oedipus," "Theodosius," "Caesar Borgia," "Lucius Junius
Brutus," "Duke of Guise," "Constantine," and "The Massacre of Paris," which
with the tragicomedy "The Princess of Cleve" was acted after his release
from the madhouse.
All his plays are pretty much of a kind. The juvenile and worthless "Nero"
unites the conventions of heroic love with the ghosts, lust, bloodshed, and
madness of the later Elizabethan revenge plays. The later blank verse
plays, though to a large extent based on French romances, envelop the love
interest in a Tourneurian medley of depravity and horror. They revive the
late Elizabethan type of tragedy that united the sentimental and the
terrible and delighted to present loving and devoted womanhood in an
environment of undiluted villany, abnormal lust, and physical torture. They
add somewhat of the closeness of structure of French models, the spectacle
of an unproved stage that displays ballets and temples along with bloody
heavens, human sacrifice, and crucifixions, and a style that out-Herods the
Elizabethans in the extravagance and vehemence of its rant. "Theodosius"
tells of the fatal result of the rival love of brothers for the same woman;
"Brutus" of the judicial murder of a son by a father; "Caesar Borgia"
introduces Machiavelli again as a machinating villain in a story of
fraternal rivalry in love; "Constantine" and "Gloriana" deal with the rival
loves of son and father. This theme, a favorite with Lee, reappears in
"Mithridates," the contents of which are fairly typical of the revolting
intrigues to which Lee mainly confined himself.
The leading persons are Mithridates, the lustful
dotard; his two sons, Ziphares and Pharnaces; Monima,
the gentle heroine, contracted to Mithridates;
Semandra, the chief heroine, in love with and loved by
Ziphares; her father, a noble soldier; and two
conspiring villains. The Romans are at the gates of
Synope, where the scene is placed. Pharnaces, at feud
with his brother and desirous of Monima for himself,
conspires with the villains to thwart the marriage of
Mithridates to Monima and direct the passion of the
king to Semandra. Mithridates condemns Ziphares to
death and pursues Semandra, but is persuaded to relent
in order that Ziphares may lead the army against the
Romans. Semandra and Ziphares exchange parting vows of
fidelity as he leaves for battle. The conspirators
again incite Mithridates; and Semandra, in order to
save the life of her lover, repulses him upon his
return in triumph. In consequence he believes her false
and leaves her in the power of his father. The fourth
act opens with Mithridates, who has ravished Semandra,
"encompassed with the ghosts of his sons, who set
daggers to his breast and vanish." He is attacked by
remorse; Pharnaces betrays the city to the Romans;
Semandra and Ziphares have a last interview and commit
suicide; Mithridates dies after condemning the captured
conspirators and Pharnaces to execution.
It is interesting to compare this with Racine's play of the same title and
dealing with the same historical incidents, acted four years earlier.
Though neither play represents its author at his best, and Lee's was
apparently written without any knowledge of Racine's, the two illustrate
the differences between the two theatres, and may remind us how far Lee
was from forsaking the English tradition for the French. In Racine, all the
stage spectacles, temples, portents, and ghosts, all the horrors and frenzy
are lacking; so, too, are the characters of Archilaus the noble soldier and
Semandra the all-important person in Lee. In addition to Mithridates,
Monima, and the two sons, the only persons are two confidants and a
servant. The intrigue is of the simplest. Monima, contracted to
Mithridates, is loved by both of his sons and returns the love of Xiphares.
In the end Pharnaces forsakes his father, who dies, leaving Monima and
Xiphares to face impending ruin. Mithridates is not the lustful tyrant
traditional on the English stage, but a monarch who cherishes great
projects and counts magnanimity a royal duty. Nor is Pharnaces the
traditional English villain with accomplices, as in Lee, though he has a
villain's part to play. The interest is psychological, centring on
emotional crises in the lives of all, and without resort to sensationalism,
horrors, or complication of incident.
Otway, like Lee, began with rhymed plays, "Alcibiades" (1675) and "Don
Carlos" (1676), the second winning an extraordinary and long-continued
success on the stage. The next year appeared his "Titus and Berenice," a
free and sympathetic translation of Racine's "Berenice" that was surpassed
in the favor of the theatre by Crowne's treatment of the same subject.
After several comedies he followed the fashion for Shakespearean
adaptations in his "History and Fall of Caius Marius" (1680).[27] This
monstrous play, about half of which, as Otway acknowledged in his prologue,
is from "Romeo and Juliet," provides a large mixture of comedy, and
presents Juliet (Lavinia) dressed as a page, the servant of her lover,
after the style of Beaumont and Fletcher's Bellario. For sixty years this
play superseded "Romeo and Juliet" upon the stage. Otway's two other
tragedies, "The Orphan" (1680) and "Venice Preserved" (1682), are his
masterpieces. They continued to be stage favorites for a century and a
half, and procured for Otway the place next to Shakespeare in the
admiration of the eighteenth century.
"Venice Preserved" may be classed with the many tragedies of the day that
maintain the Elizabethan traditions. These are manifest in the general
structure, the large number of actors, the changing scenes, the gross
comedy, the abundance of incidents, the terrors, ghosts, and madness. Not
only the frequent reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, but the whole
conception and treatment testify to an inspiration from the earlier and
better days of the drama.
The story, not long ago too well known to need
retelling, relates how Jaffier, in poverty and
desperation, is induced to join a conspiracy against
the state, and is then persuaded by his wife,
Belvidera, to save the state and her father by turning
informer. He seeks to sacrifice himself for the friend
whom he has betrayed, and in the end stabs both himself
and his friend upon the scaffold. A curiously
Elizabethan prolongation of the catastrophe follows in
the apparition of the ghosts of the friends, and the
madness and death of Belvidera.
The essentials of great tragedy, of Shakespearean tragedy, are here. The
opposition of character, the struggle of the generous but pliable Jaffier
under the conflicting influences of his wife and the steadfast 'Roman'
Pierre, the joy and tenderness and ruin that come with his love for
Belvidera, are all drawn with a truth of passion in conception and language
that reaches the heart. "Nature is there," wrote Dryden, "which is the
greatest beauty." Marred as a whole by buffoonery and excess, the play is
still among the two or three best tragedies of the Restoration. If it were
all equal to the tremendous fourth act, Otway would be sure of a place
among the immortals.
Marked by the same power of swaying the emotions of tenderness and pity,
"The Orphan" attains these effects by means of the situations rather than
through the study of motives. The plot deals with the rivalry of two
brothers in love with their father's ward. She is secretly married to one;
the other substitutes himself by trick on the marriage night. The
situation, which has parallels in preceding tragedy, is abhorrent enough to
kill all interest in the persons concerned; but Otway's power to depict
love and distress triumphs over one's repugnance. The play is remarkable in
many ways. Its few characters, its observance of the unities, its
confinement of the action, give it the simplicity and directness of French
tragedy. Its theme and its poetry recall Elizabethan rather than
Restoration examples. But it departs from the canons of either theatre in
presenting neither historical persons, nobles, kings, nor illustrious
actions. Based on a story, supposedly of fact, related in a contemporary
pamphlet, it merely transfers the scene to Bohemia, without adding the
usual accessories of tragedy. Though it keeps something of a court setting
and does not venture into middle-class society, it is like the Elizabethan
plays of crime in its presentation of contemporaneous fact, and like
Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" in telling a story of domestic
distress. It might by a little extension of the term be called a domestic
tragedy, and it still further departs from the canons in relating the
misery of an innocent sufferer who is the victim of a cruel mistake. Otway
should, therefore, be remembered as a dramatist who, in a time when tragedy
was largely artificial, imitative, and conventional, painted suffering and
tenderness with truth to nature, and who violated the accepted rules of his
art in order to reach the hearts of his audience. That he could not also
escape the moral perversion of taste that marked his time has brought its
punishment in the final neglect of his masterpieces; but it is a sign of
genius to turn away from heroic plays, Racine, and Shakespeare, to write
plays different from any written before, and to stir all men's hearts for
over a century.
Of the many dramatists who wrote tragedies in the last decade of the
seventeenth century and bridged the way from the age of Dryden to the age
of Pope, only Banks, Southerne, and Congreve produced plays of continuing
popularity and influence through the eighteenth century. Banks ended a
prolific career with "Cyrus the Great, or the Tragedy of Love" in 1696, but
his popularity was mainly due to his three English historical tragedies,
"Virtue Betrayed, or Anne Bullen," "The Island Queens" (Elizabeth and Mary
Stuart), and "The Unhappy Favorite" (the Earl of Essex). These plays are
interesting as an illustration of the survival on the stage of a dramatic
species in a debased form. Though in blank verse, their material is that of
the heroic play; their formula, much love-making and a pretense of
portentous events; their persons, rivals in love,--two men with the same
woman or two women with the same man,--a wicked minister, a revengeful
woman, and the queen at the centre of the stage. There is no comedy, no
physical horrors, and even the portents are reduced to a peculiar
decorum:--
"Last night no sooner was I laid to rest
But just three drops of blood fell from my nose."
The construction is on French models with few actors, continuity of scenes,
and observance of the unities. Puerile in conception and more ridiculous in
their bombast than Fielding's burlesque, they have enough rapidity of
action, vivacity of claptrap, and extravagance of changing emotions to
account for their stage success.
Thomas Southerne finished "Cleomenes" for Dryden, with whom he was closely
associated, and his tragedies follow Dryden's later work in maintaining
the Elizabethan traditions of blank verse, comedy, double plots, shifting
scenes, horrors, and persons of varied ranks. His "Loyal Brother" (1682) is
wholly commonplace, and "The Spartan Dame" (1719) and "The Fate of Capua"
(1700) do not depart from usual themes and methods, though the latter is in
some respects Southerne's best play; but his two most successful plays,
"The Fatal Marriage" (1694) and "Oroonoko" (1696), both based on novels by
Mrs. Behn, present decided innovations in theme. "Oroonoko, or the Royal
Slave" contains much comedy, and has little merit besides the novelty of
the story, presenting the virtues of a negro slave. "The Fatal Marriage, or
the Innocent Adultery" introduces the Enoch Arden story, attached to an
outrageous comic underplot derived in part from Fletcher's "Nightwalker."
In the main plot, Biron, oldest son of Baldwin, has
been captured by pirates and is supposed to be dead,
his letters being kept secret and answered by his
villanous brother, Carlos, who urges his wife Isabella
to marry. After Baldwin, instigated by Carlos, has
thrust her out from his house, she accepts the devoted
Villeroy. Biron returns; she goes mad in a scene of
great imaginative power; Carlos and his assistants
endeavor to kill Biron, who is rescued by the returning
Villeroy. Biron, however, dies; and an accomplice of
Carlos, tortured upon the rack (on the stage),
confesses and exposes Carlos. Then "enter Isabella
distracted, her little son running in before, being
afraid of her." She stabs herself.
Like Otway's "Orphan," this is virtually a domestic tragedy, for there are
no interests of state or court, and our sympathy is centred solely on the
innocent distress of the heroine. Like Otway, again, Southerne gains his
greatest effects by an appeal to pity. The sentimentality that we attribute
to the days of Richardson's "Clarissa" earlier triumphed on the stage in
the heroines of Lee, Otway, and Southerne.
Not less successful on the stage than the plays of Banks and Southerne was
the single tragedy of Congreve. First acted in 1697, "The Mourning Bride"
continued without alteration through the next century, and furnished Mrs.
Siddons with one of her greatest parts. Congreve's remarkable dramatic
ingenuity was skillfully exercised in combining all the elements that the
average audience delighted in, and yet presenting these draped sufficiently
to avoid offending the judicious. Classical form and technic permit a
sensational and gruesome fifth act; dignified and facile verse gives way at
times to outrageous rant; the usual plot of the rival ladies and rival
lovers is ingeniously complicated to supply suspense, surprise, and a happy
ending.
It is the day after the death of King Anselmo, prisoner
of Manuel, King of Granada, whose daughter Almeira has
been secretly married to Alphonso, son of Anselmo, and
then separated from him by shipwreck. She confesses
this marriage to her confidant, mourns Anselmo, and
declares that she will never yield to her father and
marry Garcia, son of the premier Gonzales. King Manuel
returns from battle, having slain the Moorish king, and
brings the queen Zara and other prisoners, among them a
valiant warrior, Osmyn--Alphonso in disguise. At the
tomb of Anselmo, Osmyn-Alphonso and Almeira meet and
dissolve in grief.
The king is in love with Zara and Zara with Osmyn. She
offers to procure Osmyn's escape and to fly with him;
but later on, discovering him with Almeira, she betrays
them to the king. The king and Zara are now torn by
love and jealousy. She obtains permission to have Osmyn
strangled by one of her mutes, and the suspicious
Gonzales assumes the costume of the mute in order to
make sure of the execution. Meanwhile the king,
learning of Zara's passion for Osmyn, determines to
have him killed and then assume his clothing in order
to confront Zara. Osmyn makes his escape; Gonzales
kills the king, taking him for Osmyn; Zara, taking the
body to be Osmyn's, drinks poison; Almeira is about to
make the same mistake, when the soldiers enter with
Osmyn at their head.
Perhaps no other single play is so representative of the various features
of Restoration tragedy. It is not a tragedy, at all if one insists that
tragedy should be logical and psychological; but it was praised by Voltaire
and Dr. Johnson and approved by the London public for over a century.
Although the years from 1660 to 1700 offer little in tragedy that has
proved of permanent value, they mark the continuance of the _genre_ in a
full tide of popularity. Probably in no forty years since then have so many
original tragedies appeared in the London theatres; certainly in no forty
years since have so many Elizabethan tragedies been revived. Tragedies and
tragicomedies together are in numbers almost equal to the comedies which we
think of as especially distinguishing the Restoration stage. There was
hardly a writer for the theatre who did not try his hand at tragedy. In
spite of the rivalry of opera and comedy, it continued from Davenant to
Southerne to delight the age. Its literary as well as its theatrical
importance was maintained. Noble authors as well as the greatest wits, the
Earl of Orrery, Granville, Dryden, and Congreve, courted the tragic muse.
Tragedy written for the popular stage had, indeed, a literary eminence
hardly recognized before, even in the generation preceding the Civil War.
In comparison with their Elizabethan predecessors the tragedies of this
time are, in fact, literary rather than popular. They draw their themes
from French or English plays; they display little innovation and still less
study of life; they adopt rules and regulations; they are conventional and
artificial. They respond to literary traditions; they hardly express the
sentiments or ideas of their age. Some exceptions there are; but even plays
like those of Banks, which gained theatrical success without literary
distinction, resembled their more worthy brethren in their adherence to
convention rather than nature.
In the main Restoration tragedy must be regarded as a continuation and
development of Elizabethan. The influence of Beaumont and Fletcher
continued in the heroic plays and their after-effects. The wane of the
heroic plays brought a return to the Elizabethans, and, notably in Lee, to
some of the most characteristic features of the later revenge plays. The
increasing influence of Shakespeare was felt not only in the worthy
emulation of "All for Love" and in the various adaptations, but also in
the debates of the critics and through the whole warp and woof of tragedy.
But what were preeminent in many of Shakespeare's contemporaries as in
Shakespeare himself, poetry, passion, and characterization, were beyond the
reach of any of the playwrights except Dryden, Lee, and Otway at their
best. The worst excesses, the most undesirable conventions of the
Elizabethans, excited imitation as much as their excellences. The
Elizabethan bloom had gone to seed in unfavorable soil. It is not strange
that after the horrors, bloodshed, and supernaturalism of Lee and Otway,
and after the gross buffoonery that spoils tragedies otherwise so noble as
"Don Sebastian," "Venice Preserved," and "The Fatal Marriage," there should
have followed in the opening years of the next century a marked reaction to
the decencies of French tragedy. In the Restoration period, however, the
French influence, though manifest in the great vogue of the heroic plays
and in a wide adoption of French ideas of structure and propriety, won only
a partial triumph in checking and modifying the Elizabethan tradition. Its
effect in supplying fresh incentives for worthy endeavor was slight,
indeed, hardly discernible unless in the influence of Racine upon Otway.
Tragedy, then, as handed down to the eighteenth century, was not a fixed
and definite form, though measurably more so than a century before. It was
still a conglomerate of various forms and tendencies, mingling relics of
the medieval stage with reminiscences of Shakespeare and the manners of the
court of Louis XIV. The sentimental tragedies of Southerne and Otway,
telling stories of distressed womanhood and exciting pity without any
accessories of grandeur, were perhaps the most independent achievements of
Restoration tragedy; the preservation of Shakespearean influence was its
most important. But, in comparison with a century before, the changes in
tragedy that were most noticeable and permanent were the restriction of
themes, the narrowing of structure, and the conventionality and
artificiality that extended to character and language as well as to themes
and plots.
NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ward continues to supply the best history of the drama. Henceforth the
standard authority for the history of the stage is Genest's _Some Account
of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830_, 10 vols., Bath,
1832. This is an invaluable collection of facts in regard to plays and
actors, superseding preceding books on the subject and supplying material
for subsequent ones. Other histories of the theatre are: Chetwood's
_General History of the Stage_ (1749); _The Dramatic Mirror_ (1808); D. E.
Baker's _Biographica Dramatica_ (1764, continued by Isaac Reed and Stephen
Jones, 3d ed. 1812); Dibdin's _Complete History of the English Stage_
(1800). Lowe's _Bibliographical Account of English Dramatic Literature_
(1888) will guide in their use. More recent histories of the theatre are:
P. Fitzgerald's _New History of the Stage_ (1882); Lowe's new edition of
Doran's _Their Majesties' Servants_ (1888); and H. B. Baker's _The London
Stage_, 1576-1903 (1904).
Works of the Restoration period on the drama or theatre include a number of
Dryden's essays, notably, _The Essay of Dramatic Poesy_, _The Defence of
the Essay_, _The Defence of the Epilogue_, _Of Heroic Plays_, and _The
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_; Wright's _Historia Histrionica_ (1699,
reprinted in Dodsley and in Cibber's Life); Edward Phillips's _Theatrum
Poetarum_ (1675); Langbaine's _Account of the English Dramatic Poets_
(1691); Rymer's _Tragedies of the Last Age_ (1678) and _A Short View of
Tragedy_ (1693); Dennis's _The Impartial Critic_ (1693); and Jeremy
Collier's _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage_ (1698). Downes's _Roscius Anglicanus_ (1708, facsimile reprint,
1886) also contains interesting information on the period. Corneille,
Boileau, Saint Evremond, the Abbe D'Aubignac, and Rapin are the French
critics of most influence on the drama of this period, especially Rapin,
whose _Reflexions sur la poetique_ was translated by Rymer (1674). J. E.
Spingarn's _Seventeenth Century Critical Essays_ (now in press) will
contain all the critical work of the period of importance, with a valuable
discussion of its relation to French criticism.
There are collected editions of the works of most of the Restoration
dramatists, but none of Settle or Banks. The Scott-Saintsbury edition is
the standard for Dryden. Individual plays are to be found in many
collections: _The Modern British Drama_, 5 vols. (1811); Oxberry's _New
English Drama_ (1812-25); Mrs. Inchbald's _Modern Theatre_ (1811); Bell's
_British Theatre_ (1797) and supplement. _Dramatists of the Restoration_,
edited by Maidment and Logan, 14 vols., Edinburgh, 1872-79, includes the
plays of Crowne, Davenant, Tatham, and John Wilson. Ward and the _English
Drama_ (by K. L. Bates and L. B. Godfrey, _op. cit._) direct to editions
and monographs of the individual authors of this period.
J. J. Jusserand's _Shakespeare en France_ (1898), Professor Lounsbury's
_Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist_, and Miss Canfield's _Corneille and
Racine in England_ (1905) are important for certain phases of the drama.
Concerning the heroic plays there is a considerable literature; see,
especially, P. Holzhausen on Dryden's heroic plays, _Englische Studien_,
vols. xiii, xv, and xvi (1890-92); L. N. Chase, _The English Heroic Play_
(1903); J. W. Tupper, _The Relation of the Heroic Play to Beaumont and
Fletcher_, Mod. Lang. Assn. Publ. 1905. C. G. Child, _The Rise of the
Heroic Play_, Mod. Lang. Notes, 1904. Alex. Beljame's _Le Public et les
Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au xviii^{e} siecle_ (1881) deals fully
with Dryden and has an elaborate bibliography.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] In this and subsequent chapters the dates in brackets give the year of
the first presentation in the case of acted plays. The date of publication
usually coincides with the year of acting.
[26] _Cf._ James W. Tupper, _Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romances of
Beaumont and Fletcher_. Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1905.
[27] Ward (iii, 415) is in error in crediting public taste with
condemnation of this play. Lavinia seems to have been one of Mrs. Barry's
most successful parts.