Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/509

Rh that species of composition; and in the first year of the Restoration he wrote a tragedy on the fate of the duke of Guise. But some friends advised him that its construction was not suited to the requirements of the stage, so he put it aside, and used only one scene of the original play later on, when he again attempted the subject with a more practised hand. Having failed to write a suitable tragedy, he next turned his attention to comedy, although, as he admitted, he had little natural turn for it. He was very frank afterwards in explaining his reasons for writing comedy. "I confess," he said, in a short essay in his own defence, printed before The Indian Emperor, "my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy; I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it. My conversation is slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend." This, of course, was said by Dryden standing at bay; there was some bravado, but also a great deal of frank truth in it. He was really as well as ostentatiously a play wright; the age demanded comedies, and he endeavoured to supply the kind of comedy that the age demanded. His first attempt was unsuccessful. Bustle, intrigue, and coarsely humorous dialogue seemed to him to be part of the popular demand; and, looking about for a plot, he found something to suit him in a Spanish source, and wrote The Wild Gallant. The play was acted in February 1663, by Killigrew's company in Vere Street. It was not a success, although the most farcical incident received a certain interest and probability from a story which was current at the time. That a student, fresh from his library, trying to hit the taste of the groundlings with ribald farce, should make the ingredients too strong even for their palates, was but natural. Pepys showed good judgment in pronouncing the play "so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life." That such a play should be written by Dryden, and acted in by one of the daughters of Stephen Marshall, must have been a bitter thought for Puritanism at the time. Dryden never learned moderation in his humour; there is a student's clumsiness and extravagance in his indecency; the plays of Etherege, a man of the world, have not the uncouth riotousness of Dryden's. Of this he seems to have been conscious, for when the play was revived, in 1667, he complained in the epilogue of the difficulty of comic wit, and admitted the right of a common audience to judge of the wit's success. Dryden, indeed, took a lesson from the failure of The Wild Gallant; his next comedy, The Rival Ladies, also founded on a Spanish plot, produced before the end of 1663, was correctly described by Pepys as "a very innocent and most pretty witty play," though there was much in it which the taste of our time would consider indelicate. But he never quite conquered his tendency to extravagance. The Wild Gallant was not the only victim. The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, produced in 1673, shared the same fate; and even as late as 1680, when he had had twenty years experience to guide him, Limberham, or the Kind Keeper, was prohibited, after three representations, as being too indecent for the stage. Dislike to indecency we are apt to think a somewhat ludicrous pretext to be made by Restoration play goers, and probably there was some other reason for the sacrifice of Limberham; still there is a certain savageness in the spirit of Dryden's indecency which we do not find in his most licentious contemporaries. The undisciplined force of the man carried him to an excess from which more dexterous writers held back.

After the production of The Rival Ladies in 1663, Dryden assisted Sir Robert Howard in the composition of a tragedy in heroic verse, The Indian Queen, produced with great splendour in January 1664. It was probably through this collaboration that Dryden made the acquaintance of Lady Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert's sister, whom he married on the 1st of December 1663. Lady Elizabeth's reputation was somewhat compromised before this union, and, though she brought some small addition to the poet's income, she does not seem to have added to his happiness. The Indian Queen was a great success, one of the greatest since the reopening of the theatres. This was in all likelihood due much less to the heroic verse and the exclusion of comic scenes from the tragedy than to the magnificent scenic accessories the battles and sacrifices on the stage, the aerial demons singing in the air, and the god of dreams ascending through a trap. The novelty of these Indian spectacles, as well as of the Indian characters, with the splendid Queen Zempoalla, acted by Mrs Marshall in a real Indian dress of feathers presented to her by Mrs Aphra Behn, as the centre of the play, was the chief secret of the success of The Indian Queen. These melodramatic properties were so marked a novelty that they could not fail to draw the town. The heroic verse formed but a small ingredient in the play; still, being also a novelty which had just been introduced by Davenant in The Siege of Rhodes, it interested the scholarly part of the audience, and so helped to consolidate the success of the stage carpenter. Dryden was tempted to return to tragedy: he followed up The Indian Queen with The Indian Emperor, which was acted in 1665, and also proved a success.

But Dryden was not content with writing tragedies in rhymed verse. Taking it up with enthusiasm as the only thing which the Elizabethan dramatists had left for their successors to excel in, he propounded the propriety of rhyme in serious plays as a thesis for discussion, and made it the prominent question of the day among men of letters. He took up the question immediately after the success of The Indian Queen, in the preface to an edition of The Rival Ladies. In that first statement of his case, he considered the chief objection to the use of rhyme, and urged his chief argument in its favour. Rhyme was not natural, some people had said; to which he answers that it is as natural as blank verse, and that much of its unnaturalness is not the fault of the rhyme but of the writer, who has not sufficient command of language to rhyme easily. In favour of rhyme he has to say that it at once stimulates the imagination, and prevents it from being too discursive in its flights. During the Great Plague, when the theatres were closed, and Dryden was living in the country at the house of his father-in-law, the earl of Berkshire, he occupied a considerable part of his time in thinking over the principles of dramatic composition, and threw his meditations and conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an Essay of Dramatic Poetry, and published in 1668. One of the main topics of the essay was the admissibility of rhyme in serious plays, Dryden making Neander, the interlocutor who represents himself, repeat with fresh illustrations all that he had said in its favour. By this time, however, Sir R. Howard, his brother-in-law, whom he had joined in writing the rhymed Indian Queen, had changed his mind about the heroic couplet, and made some offensive comments on Dryden's essay in a hoity-toity preface to The Duke of Lerma. Dryden at once replied to his brother-in-law in a masterpiece of sarcastic retort and vigorous reasoning, publishing his reply as a preface to The Indian Emperor. It is the ablest and most complete statement of his views about the employment of rhymed couplets in tragedy. VII. — 62