His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest; His name a great example stands, to show (Page 7, lines 145-148.) At the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, Dryden joined the Royalist party, and expressed his loyalty to the new government in three poems, Astræa Redux, and addresses, To his Sacred Majesty, and To my Lord Chancellor, written in the heroic couplet, and published in the years 1660, 1661, and 1662. The contrast between his earlier praise of Cromwell and the adulation of royalty in these poems is certainly offensive to a modern reader. But Dryden's change of heart, though emphasized by his ability to clothe his opinions with rhetorical, hyperbolic flourishes that pleased his contemporaries, and with a vigorous verse that still has a certain charm, merely reflected that of the majority of people about him. Nobody thinks of drawing up an indictment against the English nation for its inconstancy, and only Dryden's later eminence has caused him to be singled out for special censure. Henceforth Dryden will be, with the possible exception of a few months in 1680–81, a consistent member of the Tory party. Dryden's change of politics had been accompanied by his forming new associations. He became intimate with the family of Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, a loyalist noble, at least three of whose sons, Edward, Robert, and James, were dabblers in literature. With Sir Robert Howard, the sixth son, he began a friendship that lasted, despite an interruption caused by a quarrel on literary questions, until Sir Robert's death in 1698.1 This alliance with a loyalist family was cemented by Dryden's marriage, on December 1, 1663, with the Lady Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of the house. Scandal, unsupported by any conclusive evidence, reports that Dryden's wife was no better than she should be, and even that the poet was forced into marriage with her by her "brawny brothers." Though it is needless to enter into the details of this somewhat unsavory subject, a few general remarks may throw light on the situation. The numberless sneers at marriage in Dryden's writings are merely a reflection of the literary fashion of the time, and prove nothing as to his own experience. More important is the fact that in the numerous letters which have been preserved from his later years, Dryden refers only casually to his wife, and never with any expressions of affection. His own character, at least in his earlier life, was probably not very different from that of the licentious young noblemen whose associate he was proud to proclaim himself. His intrigue with the actress Anne Reeve was a never-failing subject for jest from his opponents. On the other hand, both Dryden and his wife show in their letters a charming parental tenderness for their three sons. Perhaps Dryden's marriage may be dismissed as one of convenience, good or bad, which had at all events no disastrous results. It seems to have brought Dryden some addition to his income, in the form of a small estate in Wiltshire. At about this time Dryden gained the favor of the Duke of Monmouth (an illegitimate son of Charles II) and of his duchess, to whom in 1667 he dedicated The Indian Emperor, and to whom he gives the title, in Absalom and Achitophel (line 34), of "the charming Annabel." Meanwhile Dryden had been doing literary hack work, writing prefaces and the like, 1 Some complimentary verses, prefixed to an edition of Howard's poems published in 1660, are the first token of this friendship. The chief attack on the character of Dryden's wife is contained in a scurrilous tract, Satyr to his Muse, by the author of Absalom and Achitophel, published in 1682, nineteen years after the date of the marriage. On the whole subject, see Scott's Life of Dryden, and the notes to it by Saintsbury, in Scott-Saintsbury edition, i. 74-78. for the bookseller Herringman, who issued his Astræa Redux in 1660 and remained his publisher until 1679. Of these minor labors no record remains.1 Dryden was not a man with a mission; he had no new thoughts to give to the world, and no intense emotions that clamored for utterance. He merely desired, like thousands of young men of our own day, to make his way in the world by writing, for which he felt a natural inclination, and he was ready to adopt whatever literary form seemed likely to be profitable, financially and socially. Had he lived now, he would have become a journalist. In the years following the Restoration, the only branch of literature that promised steady and adequate remuneration was the drama; and to this, notwithstanding that he felt little inborn talent for it, he soon turned his almost undivided attention. Dryden's work for the stage falls into three fairly distinct divisions. After a period of apprenticeship and experiment, he won immense success as the chief writer of a new type of drama, the "heroic play;" his most famous work of this class is The Conquest of Granada, acted in 1670 (1671?). Next, dissatisfied with the plays that had brought him popularity, he developed, after a new series of experiments, a type of tragedy that imitated the methods of dramatic construction used by Corneille and Racine, but the style and character-drawing of Shakespeare. His finest production of this sort is All for Love, acted in 1677. After All for Love Dryden adopted no new dramatic methods; he merely used anew devices of which he had already tried the effect. In 1660 there was an immediate revival of the theater, which had ceased to exist in England on the suppression of stage-plays by Parliament in 1642 The traditions of the old drama survived, and one prominent writer, Sir William Davenant, connected the old time with the new. On the other hand, upon the return of the king and his followers from their exile in France, French fashions, and to a less extent French ideas, became a potent influence in the new English drama, which, even more than that of the time of Charles I, depended on the court for support. Without attempting an elaborate analysis of the drama at the time Dryden began his career, we may distinguish in it at least five different types. (1) The English comedy of humor, descended from Ben Jonson. This deals primarily with the lower orders of society; it presents men and women marked by one predominant trait, or humor. (2) Comedy of manners, represented in the old drama, for example, by several plays of Shirley. This deals primarily with the higher ranks of society, and depends for its effect largely on the reproduction of the superficial manners of cultivated circles. This type was soon strongly affected by French models, notably the works of Molière. (3) Comedy of intrigue, depending for its effect on an involved plot, full of unexpected turns of fortune. Some comedies of Shakespeare and of Beaumont and Fletcher, such for instance as Twelfth Night, approach this type. In the Restoration period, however, the type owed much to Spanish influence, both directly and through the French drama: hence such comedies came to be known as "Spanish plots." (4) Romantic tragedy, derived from the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. (5) Tragedy of the "classic" type, obedient to the rules of the Renaissance dramatic critics. This form of drama, though it was well known to the Elizabethan dramatists, had never become really popular on the English stage before the closing of the theaters. In France, however, after the appearance of Corneille's Cid in 1636, it won a decisive victory, and through the masterpieces of Corneille and Racine it powerfully affected the practice of the Restoration playwrights. Fully as important as the direct influence of the French drama on the English was the influence of the dramatic rules just mentioned, which had been developed by a succession 1 The statement that he engaged in them rests only on the authority of Shadwell. of Italian and French critics, and had been adopted as guiding principles by French dramatists. Of them the most important were the famous three unities, of time, place, and action. The first prescribes that the time of action of a play shall not exceed one day; the second, that the scene of action shall remain unchanged, or at least not depart from the limits of a single city; the third, that each drama must have one central plot, to which all subordinate intrigues, if they exist, must directly contribute. French literature made its influence felt on the drama in two more ways. In the first place, French tragedy was invariably written in rhymed verse. English dramatists, when they came to imitate this practice, could fortify themselves by occasional precedents in their own predecessors of "the former age." Again, the favorite prose fiction of the time was the French chivalrous romances of Calprenède and Mlle. de Scudéry. These vast works, extending through some dozen volumes apiece, treat of the adventures of gallant knights and faithful ladies; their scene may be in ancient Greece or Persia, or in barbarian Turkey, but the sentiments expressed in them are those of elaborate, ceremonial gallantry, akin to the artificial etiquette of the French court. Love and honor are the foundation of every plot, - in fact, the only emotions recognized by the heroes and heroines. Evidently, when such fictions were the favorite reading of English ladies and gentlemen, their spirit would soon make itself felt upon the stage. Finally, Dryden's dramatic work will be greatly affected by the "heroic poem," or artificial epic, of which Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered is the best example. This literary form was a favorite subject of discussion in Dryden's time, and was regarded as “the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform." 1 The romances that have just been mentioned are, in large measure, heroic poems told in prose, so that their influence coöperates with that of the heroic poem in the strict sense. Dryden's work as a dramatist was essentially eclectic. He himself was by temper, as we have seen, a critic rather than a creative artist, and in his criticism two currents may be distinguished. Keenly sensible to literary merit wherever he found it, he was a devoted admirer of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson. On the other hand, through his logical, analytic, somewhat scholastic temperament, he recognized the power of the new French criticism, with its hard and fast rules of dramatic construction. Hence in his own dramatic work he constantly tried to combine elements which he had found effective in other dramatists, in a form which should not too far diverge from the dictates of the current dramatic criticism. In The Wild Gallant (1663), his first comedy, written in prose, Dryden attempted to unite humor studies, imitated from Jonson, and wit combats, probably suggested by Fletcher, in a Spanish plot, constructed with some regard to the three unities. His next work, The Rival Ladies (1663 or 1664), he wrote mainly in blank verse, and again constructed a Spanish plot, which he decorated with a few scenes in the "new way" of the heroic couplet, introduced into the English drama principally by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. He also assisted his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, in the composition of The Indian Queen, a tragedy, or more strictly an "heroic play," written entirely in the rhymed couplet. Encouraged by the success of this piece, he composed independently a sequel to it, The Indian Emperor (1664 or 1665), a drama of the same species. These "heroic plays" are the one type of English drama in which Dryden excels all other writers; his succeeding works of the same sort are Tyrannic Love (1669), The Conquest of Granada (1670 or 1671), and Aureng-Zebe (1675). Briefly, they aim to reproduce on the stage the effect of an heroic poem. They are all, like The Indian Emperor, written 1 See Dedication of the Eneis, page 487. wholly in the rhymed couplet, which was then regarded as the appropriate form for English epic poetry. Unlike other English tragedies of the time, they contain no comic underplot, and they usually have a happy ending. Their plots are frequently taken from the French romances. In character-drawing and diction they are powerfully affected both by the romances and by epic poetry. Love and chivalric honor are practically the only passions that animate their characters. Their diction, high-flown, often bombastic, makes no pretense at realism; the spectators, like those at an opera in our own day, were expected to leave their common sense at home. Indeed, the plays as a whole, besprinkled with dances and songs, and decorated with scenery more elaborate than had hitherto been used for the regular drama in England, were themselves half operatic in their effect. By their tumult and bustle these plays continue the traditions of the English stage, with no regard for French decorum; in this respect they remind us of Marlowe's Tamburlaine. Their plots, however, are constructed with some outward regard for the rules of French dramatic criticism: in the two parts of The Conquest of Granada a whole series of battles is compressed within the space of two days. The heroic plays offend our twentieth-century taste by their bombast and artificiality; in their own time they pleased audiences French enough to relish artificial gallantry, English enough to love sound and fury. By the success of The Indian Emperor Dryden became the most prominent living English dramatist, with the possible exception of the veteran Davenant, who died soon after, in 1668. Between The Indian Emperor and Tyrannic Love, he produced a tragi-comedy, Secret Love (1667), and two comedies, Sir Martin Mar-All (1667) and An Evening's Love (1668), (the former a mere adaptation of Molière's L'Étourdi), and collaborated with Davenant on a debased version of Shakespeare's Tempest (1667). Secret Love, by its mingling of a comic intrigue with a serious plot taken from Le Grand Cyrus, a famous romance, by Mlle. de Scudéry, reminds us at once of the heroic plays and of the romantic tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher. In this play and in An Evening's Love Dryden made his first essay at the comedy of manners, attempting to depict on the stage the life of court society. About 1668 he became a shareholder in the King's Company, one of the two licensed companies of players in London, contracting in return to write three plays a year for his associates. This arrangement gave him an income of three or four hundred pounds a year until 1672, when the profits of the company were much diminished by the burning of their playhouse. Though he did not fulfil his part of the contract, apparently writing less than one play a year, he seems to have enjoyed the benefits of it until 1678, when he deserted his partners, whose fortunes had been gradually waning, and gave his plays to their rivals, the Duke's Company. The great success of his best heroic play, The Conquest of Granada, probably reconciled the King's Company to his neglect of the letter of his agreement. An 1668 Dryden published his most important critical work, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in which he attempted both to lay down the general principles of dramatic criticism and to defend his own dramatic methods. In this essay he dismisses in a few words the drama of the Greeks and Romans, with which he was but superficially acquainted, as being little adapted to delight modern audiences, or to instruct modern dramatists. The older English drama he regards as the greatest in the world. At the same time, the principles 1 In the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher signs of this conventional drawing of character had already begun to appear. Professor J. W. Tupper, however, in his article on The Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romance of Beaumont and Fletcher (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. xx), seems to over-estimate the kinship between the two types he discusses. of the French dramatists, he admits, are superior to those of the English, though their performance as a whole, owing to inadequate style and character-drawing, is inferior. In but one type of construction is the English theater manifestly superior to the French, in tragi-comedy, which Dryden boldly exalts as "a more pleasant way of writing for the stage than was ever known to the ancients or moderns of any nation." This daring statement is at once a defense of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, and a plea for Dryden's own practice in such plays as Secret Love. Further, in order to justify his beloved heroic plays, Dryden gives a long argument in favor of the use of rhyme in the drama, and of tumult on the stage, in contrast to the French theatrical decorum. At the present time An Essay of Dramatic Poesy is less interesting for its substance than for the style in which it is written. The critical dicta are for the most part borrowed from older authors, notably Scaliger, Ben Jonson, and, above all, Corneille. The style, easy, graceful, flowing, is a model of what good critical prose should be. In its combined dignity and simplicity, Dryden's prose his "other harmony," as he later terms it (page 741) — has never been surpassed. Though he writes only a few years after Milton and Browne, his essays are so modern in their diction that they might seem, except for an occasional quaint phrase, the work of a great artist of our own day. Dryden's eminence was now universally recognized. In 1662 he had been elected a member of the newly founded Royal Society. His early poems give evidence of a strong, though of course a dilettante interest in science. In his critical essays he insists that a poet must not only be skilful in the use of language, but must be conversant with all arts and sciences, and must acquire polish and a knowledge of men and manners by constant association with the best society. This ideal, of the cultivated man of letters, as distinguished from the Grub Street writer, he himself strove to attain. In Annus Mirabilis, the chief work of his first period, aside from his dramas, he parades, somewhat pedantically as yet, the learning derived from his special studies. In August, 1670, he received the posts of Poet Laureate (vacant since the death of Davenant in 1668) and Historiographer Royal (vacant since the death of Howell in 1666). These two positions yielded him a salary of two hundred pounds a year, to which a further pension of one hundred pounds was subsequently added. Dryden's reputation as a writer, and his worldly prosperity, now rested apparently on secure and lasting foundations. Soon after his triumph with The Conquest of Granada, however, Dryden's position was vigorously assailed. The high-flown style, the exaggerated character-drawing, and the complicated plots of the heroic plays made them an easy mark for ridicule. In an effort to bring contempt on the whole type, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, aided by some other wits of the time, wrote the stinging farce of The Rehearsal, which was first acted in December, 1671. In this play, Mr. Bayes, a fashionable poet, who represents Dryden, invites two gentlemen to attend a rehearsal of his new drama, which proves to be a mess of nonsense, concocted largely of parodies of Dryden's plays, especially The Conquest of Granada. Lacy, the actor who created the part of Mr. Bayes, was costumed to imitate Dryden, and was taught to mimic his tricks of speech and his halting manner of recitation. To modern readers the wit of this clever satire seems irresistible. It naturally raised a laugh at Dryden's expense, but it did him little serious harm. Just as we can now enjoy Calverley's parodies of Browning, while still admiring their originals, so "gentlemen of wit and sense "in Dryden's time could applaud both The Rehearsal and The Conquest of Granada. Perhaps Buckingham's attack deterred Dryden from immediately producing another heroic play. His succeeding works were Marriage à la Mode, The Assignation, and |