Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/455

435 ENGLISH. J D R A M A 435 and successors were fond of proclaiming their adherence to this or that principle of dramatic construction or form, aud of upholding, with much show of dialectical acumen, maxims derived by them from French or other sources, or elaborated with modifications and variations of their own, but usually amounting to little more than what Scott calls certain romantic whimsical imitations of the dramatic art.&quot; The student of the drama will find much both to entertain aud to instruct him in these prefaces, apologies, dialogues, aud treatises ; he will acknowledge that Dryden s incom parable vigour does not desert him either in the exposing 01- in the upholding of fallacies; and that even Rymer, 1 usually regarded as having touched the nadir of dramatic criticism, is not wholly without grains of salt. But Restoration tragedy itself must not be studied by the light of Restoration criticism. So long as any dramatic power remained in our tragic poets and it is absent from none of the chief among them from Dryden to Rowe the struggle between fashion (disguised as theory) and instinct (tending iu the direction of the Elizabethan traditions) could never wholly determine itself in favour of the former. Lord Orrery (1621-1679), in deference, as he declarer?, to the expressed tastes of his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the standard of heroic plays. This new species of tragedy (for such it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a large extent supplied by recent French romance the romans de longue haleine of the Scuderys and their contemporaries and by French plays treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences ; and the form, in the ap plication it was sought to enforce for it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his brother-in-law Sir R. Howard (1 626-1 698), 2 and afterwards more con fidently by himself, 3 Dryden (1631-1699) threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his genius into the . cale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign acquisitions. 4 Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of The Rehearsal (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between them and such other materials for ridicule as the contem porary drama supplied to its facetious authors, but returned to the defence of a species 5 which he was himself in the ?nd to abandon. The desire for change proved stronger than the love of consistency which in Dryden was never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera, lie came to recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of the Elizabethan drama, and, after auda ciously but not altogether unhappily essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own ground, 7 produced under the influ ence of the same views at least one work of striking merit. 8 But he was already growing weary of the stage itself as well as of the rhymed heroic drama ; and though he put an end to the species to which he had given temporary vitality, he failed effectively to point the way to a more legitimate development of English tragedy. Among the 1 A Short View of Tragedy (1693). - The Indian Queen. 2 Thti Indian Emperor; Tyrannic Love; The Conquest of Granada. 4 Essay of Dramatic Poesy. 6 Essay of Heroic Plays. 6 The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy. 7 All for Love (Antony and Cleopatra}. 8 Don Sebastian, other tragic poets of this period, N. Lee (1G50-1690), in the outward form of his dramas, accommodated his practice to that of Dryden, with whom he occasionally co-operated as a dramatist, and like whom be allowed political partisanship to intrude upon the stage. His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway (1651-1695), the most gifted tragic poet of the younger generation contemporary with Dryden, inherited some thing of the spirit of the Elizabethan drama ; he possessed a real gift of tragic pathos and of expressive tenderness ; but his genius had an alloy of impurity, and though he was often happy in his novel choice of themes, his efforts were as incomplete as his end was pre mature. T. Southerns (1660-1746) was likewise possessed of pathetic power ; but his success was primarily due to his skill in the choice of &quot; sensational &quot; plots ; 9 J. Crowne (d. c. 1703), Lord Lansdowue (&quot; Granville the polite&quot;) (c. 1667-1735), Congreve, by virtue of a single long cele brated but not reallyremarkable tragedy, 10 and N. Rowe (1673-1718) may be further singled out from the list of the tragic dramatists of this period, many of whom were, like their comic contemporaries, mere translators or adapters from the French. The tragedies of Rowe, whose direct services to the study of Shakespeare are not to be forgotten, indicate with singular distinctness the transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and thinner manner of Addison. In tragedy (as to a more marked degree in comedy) the excesses (both of style and subject) of the past period of the English drama had pro duced an inevitable reaction; decorum was asserting its claims on the stage as in society ; and French tragedy had set the example of sacrificing what passion and what vigour it retained in favour of qualities more acceptable to the &quot; reformed &quot; court of Louis XIV. Addison (1672-1719), in allowing his Goto to take its chance upon the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds, except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar quotations, sealed the doom of English national tragedy. The &quot;first reasonable English tragedy,&quot; as Voltaire called it, had been produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration were at an end. English comedy in this period displayed no similar Comedy desire to cut itself off from the native soil, though it freely borrowed the materials for its plots and many of its figures from Spanish, and afterwards more generally from French, originals. The spirit of the old romantic comedy had long since fled ; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama, even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera aud the ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English farce. Political and religious partisanship, generally in accordance with the dominant reaction against Puritanism, were allowed to find expression in the directest and coarsest forms upon the stage, and to hasten the necessity for a more systematic control than even the times before the Revolution had found requisite. At the same time the unblushing inde cency which the Restoration had spread through court and capital had established its dominion over the comic stage, corrupting the manners, and with them the morals, of its dramatists, aud forbidding them, at the risk of seeming 9 Oroonoko ; The Fatal Marriage. 10 The Mourning Bride.