Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/510

490 Before his return to town at the end of 1666, when the theatres were reopened, Dryden wrote a poem on the Dutch war and the Great Fire, entitled Annus Mirabilis. The poem is in quatrains, the metre of his Heroic Stanzas in praise of, which Dryden chose, he tells us, "because he had ever judged it more noble and of greater dignity both for the sound and number than any other verse in use amongst us." The preface to the poem contains an interesting discussion of what he calls "wit-writing," introduced by the remark that "the composition of all poems is or ought to be of wit." His description of the Fire is a famous specimen of this wit-writing, much more careless and daring, and much more difficult to sympathize with, than the graver conceits in his panegyric of the Protector. In Annus Mirabilis the poet apostrophizes the newly founded Royal Society, of which he had been elected a member in 1662, more probably through personal connection than on the ground of scientific attainments.

From the reopening of the theatres in 1666, till November 1681, the date of his Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden produced nothing but plays. The stage was his chief source of income. Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, a tragi-comedy, produced in March 1667, does not come up to our expectations as the first-fruit of the author's rest from composition and prolonged study of dramatic art. The prologue claims that it is written with pains and thought, by the exactest rules, with strict observance of the unities, and "a mingled chime of Jonson's humour and of Corneille's rhyme;" but it owed its success chiefly to the charm of Nell Gwynne's acting in the part of Florimel. It is noticeable that only the more passionate parts of the dialogue are rhymed, Dryden's theory apparently being that rhyme is then demanded for the elevation of the style. His next play, Sir Martin Marall, an adaptation from Moliere's L'Etourdi, was produced at the Duke's Theatre, in the name of the duke of Newcastle. It was about this time that Dryden became a retained writer under contract for the King's Theatre, receiving from it £300 or £400 a year, till it was burnt down in 1672, and about £200 for six years more till the beginning of 1678. If Sir Martin Marall was written but not produced before this contract was entered into, one can understand why it was announced as the duke of Newcastle's. His co-operation with Davenant in a new version of Shakespeare's Tempest—for his share in which Dryden can hardly be pardoned on the ground that the chief alterations were happy thoughts of Davenant's, seeing that he affirms he never worked at anything with more delight—must also be supposed to be anterior to the completion of his contract with the Theatre Royal. The existence of the contract came to light from Dryden's non-fulfilment of its terms. He was engaged to write three plays a year, and he contributed only ten plays during the ten years of his engagement, finally exhausting the patience of his partners by joining in the composition of a play for the rival house. In adapting L'Etourdi, Dryden did not catch Moliere's lightness of touch; his alterations go towards making the comedy into a farce. Perhaps all the more on this account Sir Martin Marall had a great run at the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. As we have said, there is always a certain coarseness in Dryden's humour, apart from the coarseness of his age,—a certain forcible roughness of touch which belongs to the character of the man. His An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer, an adaptation from the younger Corneille, produced at the King's Theatre in 1668, seemed to Pepys "very smutty, and nothing so good as The Maiden Queen or The Indian Emperor of Dryden's making." Evelyn thought it foolish and profane, and was grieved "to see how the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times." Ladies à la Mode, another of Dryden's contract comedies, produced in 1668, was "so mean a thing," Pepys says, that it was only once acted, and Dryden never published it. Of his other comedies, Marriage à la Mode (produced 1672), Love in a Nunnery (1672), Limberham, or the Kind Keeper, only the first was moderately successful. The failure was not due to want of ribaldry.

While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he struck upon a really popular and profitable vein in heroic tragedy. Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a Roman play, in which St Catherine is introduced, and with her some striking supernatural machinery, was produced in 1669. It is in rhymed couplets, but the author again did not trust solely for success to them; for, besides the magic incantations, the singing angels, and the view of Paradise, he made Nell Gwynne, who had stabbed herself as Valeria, start to life again as she was being carried off the stage, and speak a riotously funny epilogue, in violent contrast to the serious character of the play. Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada, a tragedy in two parts, appeared in 1670. It seems to have given the crowning touch of provocation to the wits, who had never ceased to ridicule the popular taste for these extravagant heroic plays. Dryden almost invited burlesque in his epilogue to The Conquest of Granada, in which he charged the comedy of the Elizabethan age with coarseness and mechanical humour, and its conceptions of love and honour with meanness, and claimed for his own time and his own plays an advance in these respects. The Rehearsal, written by the duke of Buckingham, with the assistance, it was said, of Clifford, Sprat, and others, and produced in 1671, was a severe and just punishment for this boast. Dryden is here unmercifully ridiculed under the name of Bayes, he having obtained the laureateship from the king (with a pension of £300 a year and a butt of canary wine) in 1670. It is said that The Rehearsal was begun in 1663 and ready for representation before the Plague. But this probably only means that Buckingham and his friends were so tickled with the absurdities of Davenant's operatic heroes in The Siege of Rhodes, and the extravagant heroics of The Indian Queen, that they resolved to burlesque them. Materials accumulated upon them as the fashion continued, and by the time Dryden had produced his Tyrannic Love, and his Conquest of Granada, he had so established himself as the chief offender as to naturally become the centre of the burlesque. It is commonly said that Dryden passed over the attack on himself without reply, either because he admitted its justice or because he feared to offend the king's favourite. But this is not strictly so; his reply is contained in the dedication and preface to his Conquest of Granada; and his prose defence of the epilogue was published in 1672, in which, so far from laughing with his censors, he addresses them from the eminence of success, saying that "with the common good fortune of prosperous gamesters he can be content to sit quietly." Heroic verse, he assures them, is so established that few tragedies are likely henceforward to be written in any other metre, and he retorts upon their exposure of improbabilities in his plays, by criticizing the ridiculous incoherent stories and mean writing of Shakespeare and Jonson. Dignified reassertion of his positions was Dryden's way of meeting the ridicule of The Rehearsal. In the course of a year or two, The Conquest of Granada being attacked also by, a rival playwright who had obtained considerable success, he had an opportunity of taking revenge in a style more suited to his sharp temper and power of severe writing.

Dryden's reply to The Rehearsal was lofty and firm. But though he put a bold face on a practice which it is but fair to suppose that he adopted only to supply a popular