Dryden’s views on English theatre/ drama

Name- Urvi Dave

Class- M.A.

Sem- 1

Paper no.- 3

Topic- Dryden’s views on English theatre/ drama

Submitted to- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English &

M.K. Bhavnagar University

Batch Year-2014-16

email id- dave.urvi71@gmail.com

Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northampton shire in 1631. His family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict puritan faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to Cambridge. He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly, becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the classics. Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the restoration, and in his works we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the evil tendencies of the age in which he lived. If we can think for a moment of literature as a canal of water, we may appreciate the figure that Dryden is the “lock by which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of pope”; that is, he stands between the two very different ages, and serves as a transition form one to the other. Dryden’s life contains many conflicting elements of greatness and littleness that the biographer is continually taken away from the facts, which are his chief concern, to judge motives, which are manifestly outside his knowledge and business. Judged by his own opinion of himself, as expressed in his own opinion of himself, as expressed in the numerous prefaces to his works, Dryden was the soul of candor, writing with no other master than literature, and with no other object than to advance the welfare of his age and nation. Judged by his acts, he was apparently a timeserver, catering to a depraved audience in his dramas, and dedicating his work with much flattery to those who were easily cajoled and patronage. In this, however, he only followed the general custom of the time, and is above many of his contemporaries. In 1667, he became more widely known and popular by his “Annus Mirabilis”, a narrative poem describing the terrors of the great fire in London and some events of the disgraceful war with Holland; but with the theatres reopened and nightly filled, the drama offered the most attractive field to one who made his living by literature, so Dryden turned to the stage and agreed to furnish three plays yearly for the actors of the king’s theatre. For nearly twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this unfortunate work. Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays and Dryden followed his audience. At fifty years of age and before Jeremy Collier has driven his dramas from the stage. Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose and poetical treaties. The numerous dramatic works of Dryden are best left in that obscurity into which they have fallen. Now and then they contain a bit of excellent lyric poetry, and in All for Love, another version of Antony and Cleopatra, where he leaves his cherished heroic couplet for the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he shows what he might have done had he not sold his talents to a depraved audience. On the whole, reading his plays is like nibbling at a rotting apple; even the good spots are affected by the decay, and one ends by throwing the whole thing into the garbage can, where most of the dramatic works of this period belong. He was one of the most highly educated men of his times. He was appointed poet Laureate in 1668. He wrote “heroic stanzas”(1658) on the death of Cromwell. Dryden played the role of an opportunist as he wrote “Astraea Redux” (1660) to welcome Charles II. The poem through which Dryden’s genius was most elaborately expressed is the immortal ode “Alexander’s feast”. The term “heroic drama” was invented by Dryden for his play, the conquest of Granada (1670).  Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the restoration era in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject matter. The sub-genre of heroic drama evolved through several works of the middle to later 1660’s; john Dryden’s ‘the Indian Emperouor’ (1665) and Roger Boyle’s The Black Prince (1667) were key developments. Dryden argued that the drama was a species of epic poetry for the stage that, as the epic was to other poetry. Consequently, Dryden derived a series of rules for this type of play. First the play should be composed in heroic verse (closed couplets in iambic pentameter). Second, the play must focus on a subject that pertains to national foundations, mythological events, or important and grand matters. Third, the hero of the heroic drama must be powerful, decisive and like Achilles, dominating even when wrong. The Conquest of Granada followed all of these rules. The story was that of the national foundation of Spain (and King Charles II was known to be fond of Spanish plays), and the hero Almanzor, was a man of great and martial prowess and temperament. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada is one of the better heroic tragedies, but his highest achievement in his adaption (which he called All for Love, 1678) of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to the heroic dramatists were Nathaniel Lee ( The Rival Queens) and Thomas Otway, whose Venice preserved is a fine tragedy that transcends the usual limitations of the form. We also owe indirectly to heroic tragedy two very amusing parodies of the type: The Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal and Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great. Dryden worked from classical critics. There was little dramatic critical theory for him to appeal to, and the new rules brought over from France did not match English theatrical history or practice with an ancient framework for literature. He was attempting his own neo-classicism. Throughout The Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden treats drama as a form of imaginative literature and hence his remarks on drama apply to poetry as well. Drama is defined as “just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” According to this definition, drama is an ‘image’ of human nature and that the image is ‘just’ as well as ‘lively’. By using the word ‘just’ Dryden seems to imply that literature imitates human actions. According to Dryden, drama is an ‘image’ of ‘human nature’ and that the image is ‘just’ as well as ‘lively’. By using the word ‘just’ Dryden seems to imply that literature imitates (and not reproduces) human actions. For Dryden, ‘poetic imitation’ is different from an exact, servile copy of reality, for the imitation is not only ‘just’; it is also ‘lively’.

Four critics:

1.     Eugenius (Charles Sackville) favours the moderns over the ancients, arguing that the moderns exceed the ancients because of having learned and profited from their example.

2.     Crites (Sir Robert Howard) argues in favour of the ancients- they established the unities dramatic rules were spelled out by Aristotle which the current and esteemed French playwrights follow; and Ben Jonson – the greatest English Playwright, according to Crites- followed the ancients example by adhering to the unities.

3.     Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley) argues that French drama is superior to English drama, basing this opinion of the French writer’s close adherence to the classical separation of comedy and the tragedy. For Lisideius “no theatre in the world has anything so absurd as the English tragicomedy... in two hours and a half, we run through all the fits of Bedlam”.

4.     Neander (thought to represent Dryden) favours the modern- English plays, but does not disparage the ancients. He also favours English drama- and has some critical things to say of French drama: “those beauties of the French poesy are such as will raise perfection higher where it is, but are not sufficient to give it where it is not: they are indeed the beauties of a statue, but not of a man”.

              Dryden wrote this essay as a dramatist dialogue with four characters representing four critical positions. These four critical positions deal with five issues. Eugenius (whose name may mean “well born”) favors the moderns over the ancients, Crites argues in favour of the ancients. Neander critics French drama essentially for its smallness: its pursuit of only one plot without subplots; its tendency to show too little action; its “servile observations of the unities… dearth of plot, and narrowness of imagination” are all qualities which render it inferior to English drama. David Daiches examines the implication of these words in detail. In his view, the image of human nature implies that drama, or imaginative literature in general, ‘shows people acting in such a way as to reveal what they are like’. Dryden seems to be emphasizing, the ‘appearance of human actions’, quite untroubled by Plato’s notion that to do so is simply to imitate an imitation. Dryden makes no distinctions infact, between an image or appearance of human nature, the former if it is ‘just’ gives truth about human nature. After defending English tragedy, Neander (Dryden) proceeds to demonstrate the superiority of the English plots. In English plays, on the other hand, there are a number of sub-plots in addition to the main plot, and are carried forward along with the main action with great spirit. It is wrong to suppose that sub-plot hinders the main action. Further, it would have to been admitted, as even the French have acknowledged, that in English plays all the actions are closely and coherently knit together to form one organic whole. Had this unity and coherence been wanting, there would have been sufficient reason for condemning the English. But at present we must admire them for their copiousness and variety which is a source of great pleasure for the audience. Dryden sums up this discussion by saying that, “I dare boldly affirm that these two things of the English drama: first, that we have more plays of our as regular as any of theirs (French); and which besides, have more variety of plot and character. And second, that in most of the irregular plays of Shakespeare and Fletcher there is a more masculine fancy and Great Spirit in all the writing, than there is in any of the French”.