Obrázky stránek
PDF
ePub
[ocr errors]

self, before her own.' The heroic drama proper employed few characters, admitted no comic element, and excluded all classes of society except the nobility. It cultivated rhyme, which Dryden defended as "as natural and more effectual than blank verse" and as "the only way of writing in verse" that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher had left to him and his contemporaries. For a while the form was very popular, especially in Dryden's earlier years of work; but its extravagances at length invited ridicule and burlesque and led to its passing from the stage.

Reputed to be an ill. Son of Shakespeare. He encouraged the idea 51. William D'Avenant.-It is not to be supposed, however, that the spirit of the drama wholly died in 1642 and suddenly came to life again in 1660. In the earlier years of the interval at least professional performances of plays were sometimes attempted, and regularly puppet-shows and short comic pieces known as drolls were given without interruption. The theatre as an institution, however, was formally closed. It was really through printed works rather than those presented on the stage that the great Elizabethan tradition was passed on, various plays of Shirley and minor dramatists seeing publication under the Commonwealth. The real link between the old and the new was Sir William D'Avenant (1606-1668)." This

* Ibid., 35.

Note C. G. Child: "The Rise of the Heroic Play" (Modern Language Notes, June, 1904, 166-73); and J. W. Tupper: "The Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romances of Beaumont and Fletcher " (Publications of Modern Language Association of America, 1905, Vol. XX, 584-621).

7 Along with him may be remarked Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683), who wrote several tragicomedies and who also was a link between Elizabethan and Restoration drama.

author, a representative Cavalier, had succeeded Jonson as poet laureate, and his activities under the Commonwealth had brought upon him imprisonment and even the fear of death. In 1649 appeared in print Love and Honour, "his first noteworthy step towards the heroic play," and in 1656 was produced The Siege of Rhodes, usually regarded as the first English opera and sometimes as the first heroic play. Its lines contained from two to five poetic feet, and with its varied rhyme it was intended partly for song and partly for recitative. Obviously it owed much to the masque, and with its emphasis on scenery it was destined to mark an epoch in the history of the drama, while Dryden and others who cultivated the heroic drama acknowledged their indebtedness to it. In other works D'Avenant cultivated the new form of "dramatic opera," and his later pieces include various adaptations from Shakespeare.

52. John Dryder-Dryden (1631-1700) was eminently representative of his age as dramatist, satirist, and critic. A man of epic mold, had he written less, and not so much for his own generation, he might have produced a final masterpiece, though, as it is, in the field of English political satire in verse he has no rival. Connected by marriage with an aristocratic family, he wrote rapidly and he wrote much, in the desire to make his pen yield him as large a return as possible. With no strong predilection or talent for the drama, by sheer force of ability he became, on the basis of the twenty-eight plays that he wrote or adapted, the foremost playwright of his day. work for the stage falls into three periods. "In the first

His

J. W. Tupper: Introduction to Love and Honour and The Siege of Rhodes, xii.

period, from 1663 to 1670, after some dramatic experiments, Dryden found in the heroic play a congenial type of drama, and in 1670 won his greatest popular triumph with The Conquest of Granada. In the second period, from 1672 to 1678, [he] saw his favorite productions assailed with bitter ridicule in The Rehearsal, and his own supremacy in them shaken by the success of Elkanah Settle, an adversary whom he could not but despise. In the third period [he] was no longer primarily a dramatist; though he produced some plays, such as The Spanish Friar and Don Sebastian, equal in literary merit to those of his earlier life, he made no progress either in style or dramatic theory. In 1693, on the failure of Love Triumphant, he abandoned the stage in disgust." These periods call for consideration in somewhat greater detail.

[ocr errors]

In his first play, The Wild Gallant (1663), Dryden attempted to combine a complicated 'Spanish plot' with scenes from Jonson's comedy of humours, and wit combats suggested by Fletcher." He was thus a follower of English tradition, and he wrote in prose. The Rival Ladies (1664) was also a comedy with an involved Spanish plot, but in verse and filled with a romantic spirit. The Indian Queen (1664), on which the dramatist assisted his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard (1626-1698), was influenced to some extent by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1621-1679), to whom in the dedication of The Rival Ladies Dryden gave the credit of an earlier adoption of the new method of "writing scenes in verse," and who in 1664 produced The History of Henry the Fifth and in 1665 Mustapha, the Son of Solyman the Magnificent.

9

Noyes: Selected Dramas of John Dryden (Introduction, xix), to which source much of the following discussion of Dryden is indebted.

Encouraged by the success of his collaboration with Howard, Dryden now wrote alone The Indian Emperor (1665). This play definitely established his position. It cultivated the heroic couplet, used the love and honor conflict, and placed such heroic figures as Montezuma and Cortez amid scenes of stirring incident. In 1665 came the plague, and the London theatres were closed until late in 1666. Re tired for a while in the country, however, Dryden wrote his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, though this did not appear in print until 1668. Then appeared five plays or adaptations, among them being Tyrannic Love, or The Royal Martyr (1668), the story of St. Catherine, a princess who is forced to argue for her Christian faith and who is pursued by the tyrant Maximin. In 1670 appeared The Conquest of Granada (in two parts and ten acts), a brilliant success and the best example of the heroic drama by the foremost exponent of the form. Almanzor, the hero, is led through a complicated maze of "incredible love and impossible valor;" yet such is the genuine vigor of the action that the production is saved from becoming a mere medley of bombast and noise. The Conquest of Granada was so unusually successful as to lead Dryden into something of the extravagance of his own hero, for in the epilogue to the second part of the work he grew egotistic over the progress he had made in dramatic art beyond Jonson and other Elizabethans. At any rate the first period of his dramatic activity had closed triumphantly.

The second period of Dryden's writing for the stage was featured by some of his best work, but also by doubt and confusion. For some years George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, assisted by Martin Clifford and Thomas Sprat, seems to have been at work on a burlesque on the

heroic drama first popularized by D'Avenant. The famous play, The Rehearsal, enriched by a long accumulation of parody and ridicule of contemporary dramatists, was finally produced in 1671, and Dryden as Bayes received the post of poet laureate made vacant by the death of D'Avenant in the meantime. While he thus became the chief target of the jest, he had too much good sense and too clear an appreciation of clever work to attempt a reply. Instead, the next year, 1672, influenced largely by the French comedy of manners, with Marriage-à-laMode he made an excursion into the realms of high comedy. About this time, however, his career was marred by a coarse quarrel with Elkanah Settle (1648-1724), a young dramatist who in 1666 had impressed the public with a ranting tragedy, Cambyses, and whose The Empress of Morocco 10 received a sumptuous court production in 1673. In 1675 appeared Aureng-Zebe, his last rhymed tragedy. For this Racine was the model. The plot is simple, the characters plausible, the dialogue easily understood, and the general tone more restrained than was customary in the heroic drama. Dryden in fact was changing his methods of work; "accepting more fully than before the rules of the French drama, he attempted to combine with them a drawing of character modeled on that of the Elizabethan dramatists." " In All for Love (1678) he deliberately turned to blank verse, took a Shakespearean theme, that of Antony and Cleopatra, and while he was

11

10 "The Empress of Morocco has no literary pretensions; it is important in literary history for having so moved the wrath of Dryden, and in the history of the drama for having been issued with plates which contribute greatly to our knowledge of the internal arrangements of the Restoration Theater."-Garnett, 118.

11 Noyes, xliii.

« PředchozíPokračovat »