II DRYDEN 4I it was at least professional. Composition for the stage was the most lucrative and the most fashionable of all modes of writing, and it was not an unimportant circumstance that the greatest man of letters of the age was also, without exception, its most persistent playwright. Schools of drama were founded, and others took their place. One dramatist only, Dryden, kept the stage all the while, down to 1700. The career of Dryden as a dramatist includes the careers of all his stage companions, only Farquhar being a little later in his main successes. There were several writers who excelled Dryden in single departments of dramatic talent, but on the whole he is the greatest figure here as elsewhere in the literature of the epoch; and it may be well to glance at the character of his work, to its close, before examining that of any of the subsidiary men who were his fellows. Dryden had no spontaneous attraction to the stage. He set to work to write plays, after he was thirty, because he was poor, and because this was a ready way to a competence. He took a Spanish plot from a French source, and he produced, in 1663 (not printed till 1669), his comedy of The Wild Gallant, a vulgar and unfortunate composition. This was followed in 1664 by The Rival-Ladies, a dull tragi-comedy in blank verse, solely remarkable for the preface, in which, among other things, Dryden recommends the use of rhyme in heroic plays. Etheredge, as we shall see later on, immediately acted on this suggestion, and Dryden's third and fourth plays, The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor, were examples, bolder than Etheredge's, of the adoption of a new form in English literature-the rhymed serious drama. Dryden's argument in favour of a fashion which he imported from France is worth noting. He said that rhyme, as "that which most regulates the fancy, and gives the judgment its busiest employment, is like to bring forth the richest and clearest thoughts." The English plays written since the reign of Charles I. had been turbid and irregular; Dryden thought the buskin of dramatic rhyme might give dignity and propriety to the licentious step of the tragedian. The experiment was almost universally accepted for fourteen years, until, in 1678, Dryden himself led the fashion in a return to blank verse, upon which dramatic rhyme suddenly languished. There can be no doubt that the temporary fashion, artificial as it was, had a favourable influence upon versification. The two Mexican tragedies in the first of which Sir Robert Howard (1626-1698) had a share, were eminently successful, and The Indian Emperor, in its stilted kind, has a genuine merit. It is true that in such plays as these Dryden laid himself open to the taunt of the Duke of Buckingham, that he looked at his own fancy for inspiration, while Jonson and Fletcher had looked at nature; but in the best examples there was introduced into English literature something of the stately grace of Corneille. In 1667 Dryden achieved an eminent success with The Maiden Queen, the only play of his which has been revived in recent times. The comic scenes, which are as sprightly as a galop, were interpreted by a new actress, an orange-girl named Nell Gwyn, who brought down the house, and the king's box with it. This earliest period of Dryden's dramatic activity, not all the productions of which can even be named here, closed with a loose and dull comedy, called An Evening's Love, travestied from the French in 1668. The poet was arrested by the complete failure of this piece, which even contemporary critics allowed had "a foolish plot, and was very profane." Eager to restore his reputation, he took great pains in writing his next drama, the tragedy of Tyrannic Love. This play has the fault of almost all Restoration tragedy, namely, that in its scenes "" Declamation roars while Passion sleeps"; but it is a particularly careful piece of poetical composition, full of those nervous verses and those affecting apophthegms in which Dryden excels. Although it is, perhaps, his best heroic play, it errs on the side of rant and bombast to such a degree that the poet felt obliged to apologise for this in the prologue, and to pretend that "Poets, like lovers, should be bold and dare, Nor spoil their business with an over-care." In the double tragedy of Almanzor and Almahide, commonly II THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA " 43 called The Conquest of Granada (1672), these tendencies were pushed to a still greater excess, and common sense sank confounded at Dryden's brazen rant. The ringing hyperboles in which the unconquerable Almanzor vaunts his own prowess were very popular at first, but this absurdity did not escape the satire of the Duke of Buckingham, whose Drawcansir is now better remembered than his prototype. Dryden's huge play, with its endless clang of hurtling rhymes, has supplied the language with more proverbial expressions than any other drama of its author's. The peculiar effect of the dramatic record of stupendous passions in regular ringing couplets, the effect which, when heightened by the figure and voice of Betterton, was apt to overwhelm an audience with admiration and pity, may be better understood through an example than through pages of descriptive criticism. The genre was bad, and it was to prove ephemeral; but in the hands of such a master as Dryden it was not possible that it should produce no happy results, if only by accident: "Almanzor. Love is that madness which all lovers have ; But yet 'tis sweet and pleasing so to rave: 'Tis an enchantment, where the reason's bound; A palace, void of envy, cares and strife, Where gentle hours delude so much of life. And prudence, of whose cure so much you boast, Lyndaraxa. I would not, like philosophers, remove, But show you a more pleasing shape of love. You a sad, sullen, froward love did see; I'll show him kind, and full of gaiety. In short, Almanzor, it shall be my care To show you love; for you but saw despair. Almanzor. I, in the shape of love, despair did see; You, in his shape, would show inconstancy. Lyndaraxa. There's no such thing as constancy you call ; Faith ties not hearts; 'tis inclination all, Some wit deformed, or beauty much decayed, First constancy in love a virtue made. From friendship they that landmark did remove, For I, perhaps, should not receive your heart. As summer mornings, and your eyes more bright 'Tis that unchanged and deathless part of me. Lyndaraxa. The fate of constancy your love persue, Still to be faithful to what's false to you. [Turns from him, and goes off angrily. Almanzor. Ye gods, why are not hearts first paired above, But some still interfere in others' love? Ere each for each by certain marks are known, You mould them up in haste, and drop them down; And, while we seek what carelessly you sort, You sit in state, and make our pains your sport." The success of The Rehearsal, however, whose poisoned arrows found out every crack in the harness of the heroic plays, seems to have checked for the moment Dryden's production of tragedies. His next dramas were his now no longer readable comedies of Marriage à la Mode (1672), and the still worse Assignation, in 1673. It is needless, in this place, to follow him to still lower depths. In 1676 he returned to more serious writing, and composed an interesting tragedy in rhyme on a living Indian potentate, the Sultan Aureng-Zebe. Mr. Saintsbury has noticed that in this play there is "a great tendency towards enjambement; and as soon as this tendency gets the upper hand, a recurrence to blank verse is, in English dramatic writing, tolerably certain." Accordingly the poet admits in the prologue that he "Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme"; II DRYDEN'S LATEST PLAYS 45 and in his next play, All for Love, or the World well Lost (1678), he returns to blank verse. This tragedy is not merely an avowed imitation of the style of Shakespeare—it is almost an adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra. For this reason it may be recommended to the student as offering a good opportunity for comparing the tragical manner of the Restoration with that of Elizabeth. This may be done with no injustice to Dryden, since All for Love abounds in passages of high poetic beauty. Omitting various efforts of minor importance, we reach the latest play of Dryden's central period, the comedy of The Spanish Friar (1681), an amusing story of popular prejudice. This merry attack on the Papists continued to be overrated for at least a century. It can now scarcely be admitted that it ranks as the best of Dryden's comedies. Occupied with other work, and work that he performed better, Dryden did not return to the stage until he was an old man. Yet his latest plays are far from being his worst. There are passages in his tragedy of Don Sebastian which are at least as good as anything of the kind which he ever wrote. In Amphitryon he had to compete with rivals no less eminent than Plautus and Molière, yet his version of the ancient story is not immeasurably below theirs. Cleomenes, the tragedy of the last of the Spartans, bears the mark upon it of an old man's weakness and weariness, yet contains some noble passages. It is only in his last play, the tragi-comedy of Love Triumphant, that we are forced to admit. that the natural force of the playwright is wholly abated. When he died, in 1700, Dryden had just been helping Vanbrugh to recast Beaumont and Fletcher's Pilgrim. The piece was acted for his benefit; but before it could be printed he was dead. Dryden was engaged, wholly or in part, on twenty-eight (or possibly on thirty) distinct dramatic pieces. Nothing but need would have spurred Dryden on to the composition of plays—at all events, to that of comic plays. But he had immense literary skill and adroitness, and he concentrated these qualities on the production of comedies on the Spanish plan, |