DRYDEN
AN ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY
ARNOLD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY
HUMPHREY MILFORD
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY
9
DRYDEN
AN ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY
EDITED WITH NOTES
BY
THOMAS ARNOLD, M.A.
LATE OF UNIV. COLL., OXFORD
AND FELLOW OF THE ROYAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND
THIRD EDITION, REVISED
BY WILLIAM T. ARNOLD, M.A.
FORMERLY SCHOLAR OF UNIV. COLL. OXFORO
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1918
PR
/UA7
.1.31$
PREFACE.
IT is interesting to note that the same cause the
great plague of 1665 which drove Milton from London
to the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St. Giles,
and there gave him leisure to complete the Paradise
Lost, obliged Dryden also the theatres being closed
to pass eighteen months in the country, 'probably at
Charlton in Wiltshire,' says Malone, where he turned
his leisure to so good an account as, besides writing
the * Annus Mirabilis/ to compose in the following Essay
the first piece of good modern English prose on which
our literature can pride itself.
Charles II, having been much in Paris during his exile,
had been captivated by the French drama, then in the
powerful hands of Corneille and Moliere. In that drama,
when prose was not employed, the use of rhyme was an
essential feature.
Dryden and others were not slow to consult the taste
prevailing at Court. His first play, The Wild Gallant,
was in prose ; it is coarse and not much enlivened by
wit, and it was not well received. In his next efforts
Dryden took greater pains. He seems to have convinced
himself that the attraction of rhyme was necessary to
please the fastidious audiences for which he had to write;
vi PREFACE.
and after The Rival Ladies, of which a small part
is in rhyme, and The Indian Queen (1664), a play
entirely rhymed, in which he assisted his brother-in-law
Sir Robert Howard, he brought out, early in 1665,
his tragedy of The Indian Emperor, which, like The
Indian Queen, is carefully rhymed throughout. In the
enforced leisure which his residence at Charlton during
the plague brought him, he thought over the whole sub
ject, and this Essay of Dramatic Poesy was the result.
In the course of time Dryden modified more or less
the judgment in favour of rhyme which he had given in
the Essay. In the prologue to the tragedy of Aurung-
zebe, or the Great Mogul (\6*i^, he says that he finds it
more difficult to please himself than his audience, and is
inclined to damn his own play :
Not that it's worse than what before he writ,
But he has now another taste of wit ;
And, to confess a truth, though out of time,
Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme.
Passion, he proceeds, is too fierce to be bound in fetters;
and the sense of Shakespeare's unapproachable superiority,
Shakespeare, whose masterpieces dispense with rhyme,
inclines him to quit the stage altogether. Nevertheless
his original contention, however under the pressure of
dejection, and the sense perhaps of flagging powers, he
may afterwards have been willing to abandon it, cannot
be lightly set aside as either weak or unimportant; a
point on which I shall have something to say presently.
Five critical questions are handled in the Essay, viz.
i. The relative merits of ancient and modern poets.
PREFACE. vii
2. Whether the existing French school of drama is
superior or inferior to the English.
3. Whether the Elizabethan dramatists were in all
points superior to those of Dry den's own time.
4. Whether plays arc more perfect in proportion as
they conform to the dramatic rules laid down by the
ancients.
5. Whether the substitution of rhyme for blank verse
in serious plays is an improvement.
The first point is considered in the remarks ofj Crites
(Sir Robert Howard), with which the discussion opens. In
connexion with it the speaker deals with the fourth point,
assuming without proof that regard to the unities of Time
andJPlace, inasmuch as it tends to heighten tjip illusion
of reality, must placejthe authors who pay it above those
wEo~negkct it. \EugeniusJ(Lord Buckhurst) answers
him, pointing out the narrow range of the Greek drama,
and several defects which its greatest admirers cannot
deny. Crites makes a brief reply, and then^Lisideius j
(Sir Charles Sedley) plunges into the second question,
and ardently maintains that the French theatre, which
was formerly inferior to ours, now, since it had been
ennobled by the rise of Corneille and his fellow-workers,
surpasses it and the rest of Europe. This commenda
tion he grounds partly on their exact observance of the
dramatic rules, partly on their exclusion of undue com
plication from their plots and general regard to the
' decorum of the stage,' partly also on the beauty of their
rhyme. [Neanderjpryden) takes up the Defence of the
English stage, and tries to 'show that it is superior to the
vni PREFACE.
French at every point. * For the verse .itself,' he says,
' we have English precedents of older date than any of
Corneille's plays.' By ' verse ' he means, rhyme/' He
is not rash enough to quote Gammer Gurtorfs Needle
and similar plays, with their hobbling twelve-syllable
couplets, as ' precedents ' earlier than the graceful French
Alexandrines, but he urges that Shakespeare in his early
plays has long rhyming passages, and that Jonson is not
without them. At this point Eugenius breaks in with
the question, Whether Ben Jonson ought not to rank
before all other writers, both French and English. Before
undertaking to decide this point,\ Neander says that he will
attempt to estimate the dramatic genius of Shakespeare,
and of Beaumont and Fletcher. This he does, in an
interesting and well-known passage (p. 67). He then
examines the genius of Jonson with reference to many
special points, and gives an analysis of the plot of his
comedy, Epicoene, or the Silent Woman ; but he gives no
direct answer to the question put by Eugenius. To the
English stage as a whole he will not allow a position of
inferiority ; for * our nation can never want in any age
such who are able to dispute the empire of wit with any
people in the universe' (p. 77).
Crites now introduces the subject of rhyme, which he
maintains to be unsuitable for serious plays. His argu
ment, and Neander's answer, take up the rest of the Essay.
The personages who conduct the discussion are all of
a social rank higher than that to which Dryden belonged.
Sir Robert Howard, the son of the Earl of Berkshire,
assumed the poet's lyre or the critic's stylus with an air
PREFACE. x Ix
of superiority which showed that he thought it a con
descension in himself, a man of fashion, to associate with
the poverty-stricken tribe of authors". This tone is very
noticeable in the Preface to The Duke of Lerma, which
Dryden answered in his Defence of the Essay. Sir Charles
Sedley n was a well-known Kentish baronet, and Lord
Buckhurst, soon to be the Earl of Dorset, was heir to the
illustrious house, of Sackville. It is unlikely however that
Dryden called himself ' Neander ' n in the sense of ' novus
homo,' a man of the people, desiring to rise above his
station. Dryden was too proud of his own good birth
for that, and the term appears to be a rough anagram on
his own name, just as Lisideius was on that of Sedley.
This question as to the value of rhyme in dramatic
poetry is by no means an obsolete or unprofitable
inquiry ; it still exercises our minds in the nineteenth
century ; it has received no permanent, no authoritative
solution. It is usually assumed that Dryden was alto
gether wrong in preferring the heroic couplet to blank
verse as the metre of serious dramas ; and his own sub
sequent abandonment of rhyme foreshadowed, as we
have seen, in the prologue to Aurung-zebe is regarded
as an admission that his argument in favour of it was un
sound. And yet much of what he says in defence of
rhyme appears to be plain common sense and incontro
vertible, and to deserve, whatever his later practice may
have been, a careful consideration. After all, if the
heroic rhyming plays of Dryden and Lee have found
no successors, has not blank verse also notoriously
failed, however able the hands which wielded it, to be-
x PREFACE.
come the vehicle and instrument of an English dramatic
school, worthy to be ranked alongside of the great
Elizabethans ? Since Dryden's, almost the only supremely
excellent plays which English literature has produced
are Sheridan's; and these are comedies, and in prose.
Coleridge, Young, Addison, Byron, Shelley, Lytton-
Bulwer, all attempted tragedy in blank verse ; and none
of their tragedies can be said to live. The fact is, that
the amazing superiority of Shakespeare, lying much more
in the matter than in the form of his tragedies, makes us
ready to admit at once that blank verse is the proper
metre for an English tragedy because he used it. We do
not see that the ensemble of the facts of the case, viz.
that no Elizabethan blank verse tragedy, besides those of
Shakespeare, can be endured on the stage now, and that
those of later dramatists have not been successful, might
lead us to the conclusion that Shakespeare triumphed
rather in spite of blank verse than because of\i.
Rhyme is merely one of the devices to which the
poetic artist has recourse, for the purpose of making his
work attractive and successful. Whether we take style,
or metre, or quantity, or rhyme, the source of the pleasure
seems to be always the same, it lies in the victory of
that which is formed over the formless, of the orderly
over the anarchic, in the substitution of Cosmos for
Chaos, in the felt contrast between the flat and bald
converse of common life, and the measured and coloured .
speech of the orator or poet. Style belongs to prose ;
metre, quantity, and rhyme to poetry. Metre is the
arrangement of the words and syllables of a composi-
PREFACE. xi
tion into equal or equivalent lengths, the regularand
expected recurrence of which is the source of a peculiar
pleasure. .Quantity is an improvement which can only
have sprung up among those whose ears had long been
trained in the strict observance of metre. By Quantity
is meant the volume, or time, or weight of a "syllable.
A 'false quantity' consists in giving to a syllable a
sound larger, longer, and heavier, or on the other hand
smaller, shorter, and lighter, than that which the ear
expects. It is obvious that constant study and observa
tion would tend to determine the quantity of all syllables
which it was possible to use in poetry; and not their
natural "quantity only, i. e. the weight which they had
when standing alone, but also the quantity given them
by their position before other syllables. This work of
quantifying as it may be called after being carried to
great perfection among the Greeks, was by them imparted
to the Romans. Then it was that, ' horridus ille Defluxit
numerus Saturnius/ the rough stumbling measure of
Naevius and earlier poets went into disuse, and metre
perfected by quantity, in the various moulds, hexameter,
"elegiac, alcaic, &c., which Greek invention had created,
took its place.
/ Crites rightly extols the metre and quantity of the
ancients; his mistake is in inferring, because the
ancients did not use rhyme, that therefore it should"
be eschewed by the moderns. Neander, or Dryden,
states correctly enough that when- Roman society was
broken up, and the Latin tongue, unibn the invasions
of the Barbarians, had become corrupted into several \i/
xii PREFACE.
vernacular dialects, whence gradually emerged the new
/ languages of southern Europe, the niceties of quantity
were obscured or forgotten, and some new attraction was
felt to be necessary by the poetic artist in order to supply
its place. This attraction was found in rhyme.
Attraction may however be studied too exclusively;
there may be too much ornament as well as too little.
Poetry, by presenting ideas in a beautiful dress, aims at
making them loved. But the ideas themselves are the
main consideration, and if the dress is too much ob
truded, if it attract attention for its own sake and not
for the sake of what it clothes, a fault is committed, and
a failure incurred. As Aristotle considered (Poet. IV)
that the elaborate Greek metres were unsuited for tra
gedy, and that the iambic trimeter, as 'nearer to com
mon discourse,' was its proper instrument, so it is quite
possible that in modern dramatic verse rhyme may fix
the attention too much upon the manner si saying a
thing, when the thing itself ought to concentrate upon it
the thoughts and feelings of the spectators. But this
extreme, owing to the difficulty and toil which finding
rhymes imposes on the author, is less often met than its
opposite. For one rhyming play which errs by excess
of ornament, there are ten plays in blank verse which
err by being flat and dull. Shakespeare in his best plays
observes the true mean, making his blank verse so
rhythmic and beautiful that the hearer requires no
other ornament; while by rejecting rhyme he avoids
the danger of weakening that interest which should be
excited by the plot and the characters. When such
PREFACE. xiii
blank verse as the following can be had, no one will
ever ask for rhyme :
Forbear to sleep the night, and fast the day,
Compare dead happiness with living woe;
Think that thy babes were fairer than they were,
And him that slew them fouler than he is ;
Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse ;
Revolving this will teach thee how to curse.
But when long passages are given us such as
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts :
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upop their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk;
And these assume but valour's excrement
To render them redoubted, &c., &c.
then, since the thoughts are neither supremely interesting
in themselves, nor presented with supreme force or skill
the hearer is apt to grow weary, and to ask from the
form of the verse that entertainment which he does not
derive from the substance. In other words, he would, con
sciously or not, be glad of rhyme if he could get it.
There seems good reason to think that the French
masterpieces of the seventeenth century would not, if
they were not rhymed, hold their ground on the modern
stage. With us, Shakespeare's genius enables us, even
without the aid of rhyme, still to enjoy the acting of his
plays ; but this is true of no other dramatist of that age 1 .
In* his work on the Elizabethan dramatists, Charles Lamb
produced passages from some of the best plays of all the
1 Massinger's New Way to pay Old Debts is perhaps the only
exception to the statement in the text, ,
xiv PREFACE.
principal authors ; but it must be owned that they make
no great impression. For this there are indeed other
causes; the wit is not such as amuses at the present
day; the passion is rather Italian or Spanish than
English; but it is also true that the story is seldom
sufficiently interesting, or the thoughts sufficiently strik
ing, to enchain our attention for their own sakes, apart
from the pleasure given by rhyme. On the other hand,
in reading such a collection as Mr. Palgrave's Golden
Treasury, all of us are conscious of the continued
presence of pleasurable feeling. What reason can be
found for this difference of impression, except that
rhyme, and often exquisitely managed rhyme, is
present throughout Mr. Palgrave's collection, and absent
throughout Lamb's collection ? If the English serious
drama, expressed in blank verse, had continued to make
progress from the beginning of the seventeenth century,
and were in a flourishing condition at the present time,
Dryden's plea for rhyme, since it might seem to have
been disproved by the event, might well be rejected.
But the English serious drama 1 at this moment is in
such a low condition as to be almost non-existent. It
seems therefore to be a question open to argument
whether, in spite of the success, due to exceptional
power, of Hamlet or King Lear, Dryden was not right
in holding that the average dramatist could not safely
dispense, if he wished permanently ' to please English
audiences, with the music and the charm of rhyme.
1 Of course I am not speaking of chamber pieces, but of plays in
tended for the stage. [Signs of revival are happily now visible 1901.]
PREFACE. xv
x
The Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy appeared
later in the same year, 1668. After the publication of
the Essay, Sir Robert Howard printed his tragedy of
The Duke of Lerma, in the preface to which (printed by
Malone in his collected edition of Dryden's prose works)
he attacked with blundering vehemence the poet's argu
ment on behalf of rhyme. Dryden seems to have been
much nettled, and in this sharp and masterly reply he
exposes the blunders, and makes short work of the argu
ments, of his brother-in-law. This Defence was prefixed
to the second edition, just at that time called for, of The
Indian Emperor. But Dryden must have been unwilling
for 'many reasons to let this passage of arms ripen into
a formal quarrel. From later editions of The Indian
Emperor he suppressed the preface, and forbore ever to
publish it in a separate form. It was not again printed
till after his death.
Three editions of the Essay of Drtfmatic Poesy were
published in the author's lifetime; see page i. Since
1700 it has been four times reprinted; first by Robert
Urie in his Select Essays on the Belles Lettres, Glasgow,
1750; secondly, by Malone in his edition of Dryden's
prose works (1800); thirdly, by Sir Walter Scott in his
general edition of all Dryden's works, published in
1808 *; and lastly, by Prof. W. P. Ker in his Essays of
John Dryden (2 vols., 1900).
1 Now republished under the superintendence of Mr. Saintsbury.
NOTE ON THE RHYMING PLAY.
As the question is interesting and important, I subjoin
to my father's views a catena of modern opinions on the
subject.
W. T. A.
Rhyme has been so long banished from the theatre, that we know
not its effects upon the passions of an audience; but it has this
convenience, that sentences stand more independent on each other
and striking passages are therefore easily selected and retained.
Thus the description of Night in the Indian Emperor, and the rise
and fall of empire in the Conquest of Granada, are more frequently
repeated than any lines in All for Love or Don Sebastian.
JOHNSON, Life of Dryden.
The whole question of the use of rhyme in English drama has
been persistently misunderstood, and its history misstated. . . . The
fashion of rhyme in the drama, then, to be exact x flourished from
1664 until Lee and Dryden returned to blank verse in 1678. Upon
this it suddenly languished, and after being occasionally revived
until the end of the century, found its last example in Sedley's
Beauty of the Conqueror, published in 1702. . . . During the first
years of the Restoration, the principal playwrights were Porter,
a sort of third-rate Brome ; Killegrew, an imitator of Shirley ;
Stapylton, an apparently lunatic person ; and Sir William Lower. . . .
Whenever these poetasters ventured into verse, they displayed such
an incompetence as has never before or since disgraced any coterie
of considerable writers. Their blank verse was simply inorganic,
their serious dialogue a sort of insanity, their comedy a string of
pot-house buffooneries and preposterous * humours.' Dryden, in his
Wild Gallant, and a very clever dramatist, Wilson, who never
fulfilled his extraordinary promise, tried, in 1663, to revive the
moribund body of comedy, but always in the style of Ben Jonson,
ON THE RHYMING PLAY. xvii
and finally, in 1664, came the introduction of rhymed dramatic
verse. For my own part, I frankly confess that I think it was the
only course that it was possible to take. The blank iambics of
the romantic dramatists had become so execrably weak and dis
tended, the whole movement of dramatic verse had grown so flaccid,
that a little restraint in the severe limits of rhyme was absolutely
necessary.
E. GOSSE, Seventeenth Century Studies, p. 236.
The intonation of English is not, like the intonation of French,
such that rhyme is an absolute necessity to distinguish verse from
prose ; and where this necessity does not exist, rhyme must always
appear to an intelligent critic a more or less impertinent intrusion in
dramatic poetry. Indeed, the main thing which had for a time
converted Dryden and others to the use of the couplet in drama
was a curious notion that blank verse was too easy for long and
dignified compositions. It was thought by others that the secret of
it had been lost, and that the choice was practically between bad
blank verse and good rhyme. In All for Love, Dryden very shortly
showed ambulando that this notion was wholly groundless. From
this time forward he was faithful to the model he had now adopted,
and which was of the greatest importance he induced others to
be faithful too. Had it not been for this, it is almost certain that
Venice Preserved would have been in rhyme', that is to say that it
would have been spoilt.
GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Dryden (English Men of Letters), p. 57.
Le roi, qui avait vu notre tragedie fran9aise dans tout son eclat
avec Corneille, avait rapporte en Angleterre la passion des idees
fran9aises, et une grande difnculte a comprendre le theatre different
de ce qu'il Tavait vu pendant ses annees d'exil. ' Je viens,' ecrivait
le comte d'Orrery a un ami, ' de terminer une piece dans le gout
fran9ais, parce que j'ai entendu le roi declarer qu'il aimait mieux
leur maniere que la notre.' Ce qui 1'avait surtout frappe dans notre
tragedie, c'etaient les choses exterieures, comme I'unit6 de lieu, la
dignite constante des personnages, et la rime. Le monarque, comme
il est naturel, fit vite des adeptes, et son gout prevalut sans conteste,
au grand prejudice du theatre anglais. De 1' unite* de lieu il ne fut
b
xviii NOTE TO PREFACE
question que pour la forme, car elle ne pouvait guere s'accorder
avec la nouvelle mise-en-scene ; mais on adopta la rime qtii, si elle
est necessaire au rythme de nos vers fran9ais, fait des vers anglais
un chant lyrique insupportable dans un oeuvre de longue haleine, et
qui est si manifestement contraire au genie dramatique de nos
voisins, qu'elle n'avait jamais auparavant etc employee sur leur
theatre et ne le fut jamais apres.
BELJAME, Le Public et les Hommes de lettres en Angleterre au
XVIII Siecle, p. 40.
On peut porter un jngement analogue sur la versification lyrique
de la 'comedia nueva.' C'est la une forme limitation qui nous
parait aujourd'hui fort Strange. Ce n'est pas que nous ayons la
superstition de 1'alexandrin. Mais il nous parait invraisemblable
qu'un monologue tragique accepte les contraintes d'un sonnet, et
nous nous demandons si ce sont des heros de drame ou d'ope"ra
qui e'changent ainsi des dialogues de redondilles. . Prenons garde
pourtant de n'etre pas dupes d'une impression trop personnelle.
Nous admettons sans peine que des personnages peints d'apres nature
s'expriment en vers. Cette extraordinaire convention en peut entralner
d'autres. Quand nous sommes familiarises avec le lyrisme de Lope,
nous trouvons de la grace dans les effusions en metres divers du
' galan ' et de sa ' dama,' et nous ne nous plaignons pas que parfois
des chants populaires retardent la marche de 1'action. Si nous
etions Espagnoles, peut-etre penserions-nous comme 1'auteur de
VArte Nuevo qu'il faut des dizains pour exprimer des plaintes,
que la romance ou les octaves conviennent seuls aux recits et que
les amours demandent des quatrains, comme les graves reflexions
des tercets. La variete des combinaisons rythmiques nous ap-
paraitrait comme une musique tour a tour passionnee et caressante,
assez souple pour se renouveler avec les situations et les personnages.
Mais nous ne sommes pas Espagnoles, et nous sommes assez des-
agreablement surpris par des strophes lyriques, au moment meme
ou 1'^motion allait etre franchement tragique. Cette versification
est peut-etre utile a la comedia, mais elle est trop speciale pour
ne pas lui faire tort en pays Stranger.
MARTINENCHE, La Comedia Espagnole en France, p. 120.
ON THE RHYMING PLAY. xix
The dispute about rhyming plays was decided as time went on,
when Dryden came to discover that what had really attracted him in
rhyme was something different from its suitability for dramatic
purposes. The Defence contains one of his rather sad confessions
of the uncongenial nature of some of the dramatic work he had
to do. Comedy is not for him: 'I want that gaiety of humour
which is required to it; my conversation is slow and dull, my
humour saturnine and reserved.' For the other kind, for heroic
drama in rhyme, he seemed to find more affinity in his genius. It is
easy to see now, after Absalom and Achitophel, that it was the rhyme
itself to which he felt himself drawn, rather than the heroic play.
W. P. KER, Essays of John Dryden, vol. i, Introduction, p. 1.
The heroic play can be duly studied in the four independent
works of Dryden : The Indian Emperor, Tyrannic Love, or the
Royal Martyr, The Conquest of Granada (published 1676), and
Aureng-zebe (1676) ; in the State of Innocence, his version of Milton's
version of the Fall ; in the close of Otway's Don Carlos ; and in the
handling of the tale of Antony by Sir Charles Sedley (Beauty the
Conqueror, 1677). . . . The polite public was prepared by its
favourite reading to salute the heroic play. The grandiosity of
Corneille's drama went for something, and the success of the
Alexandrine may have helped to bribe the English poets into using
the couplet. . . . The couplet was, after all, a certain controlling
force : it encouraged point. The blank verse that by degrees pre
vailed in our drama failed in control, and was prone to be ex
travagant, or weak, or both.
O. ELTON, Augtistan Ages, pp. 243-5.
In form French tragedy suggested the substitution of rime for
blank- verse to Lord Orrery, 'the matchless Orinda,' and others,
above all to Dryden, whose master-hand alone could have ensured
even temporary success to so hopeless an experiment. For a time,
with the support of the personal taste of King Charles II, the
innovation maintained itself; when Dryden announced his intention
to abandon it, the practice was doomed, and even before this we find
XX NOTE TO PREFACE
it treated with undisguised ridicule by a leading comic dramatist 1 .
There is no necessity in this place to refer to the arguments urged
for and against it, which will be briefly noticed below. It proved
impossible permanently to domesticate in English tragedy a form
differing from that which had become proper to it, which it had
adopted as its own, and the attempt to introduce rimed couplets
into English comedy was even more transitory. But in truth these
couplets, in the hands of Dryden and his followers, are something
very different from the Alexandrines of Corneille, Racine, and
Moliere. The latter merely dignify and refine the style of polite
conversation and courtly speech; the former not only modify ex
pression, but may without exaggeration be said to change the tone
of thought. It would not be easy to find any satisfactory reason for
this difference in the nature of 'heroic' verse itself; for it was, of
course, not antecedently necessary that this English metre should
stereotype itself into the form elaborated in succession by Waller,
Dryden, and Pope. But a poetic form, like a poetic species, cannot
do violence to its history ; and the English heroic couplet, when it
came to be used by Dryden for the drama, had already grown
radically unsuitable for such an application.
A. W. WARD, History of Dramatic Literature, iii, pp. 316, 317.
. . . Dryden's defence of rime as an appropriate and desirable part
of English tragic form has been definitively rejected in theory as well
as abandoned in practice. As a matter of fact, already in Dryden's
day rimed couplets had for English ears acquired a different sound
from that which they possessed and possess for French, partly
beeause of the peculiar uses to which the practice of our dramatists
(with variations indeed, but with a general steady tendency in the
same direction) come to restrict them, partly from their constant
employment in branches of poetry in which their effect was adverse
to the semblance of continuity which is indispensable in dramatic
dialogue. In the ears of English audiences, however much a passing
fashion might endeavour to conceal the fact, they could not but
constitute an impediment, instead of an aid, to dramatic illusion.
1 Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, Act ii, Sc. i (1674).
ON THE RHYMING PLA Y. xxi
The use of rime was therefore at variance with that definition of
a play which Lisideius, with the approval of his interlocutors, gives
in the Essay, and which requires it to be ' a just and lively image of *"
human nature.' Ibid., p. 357.
When he (Milton) began to write blank verse, the blank verse of
the dramatists, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into more
or less rhythmical prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows
not only used the titmost licence of redundant syllables at the
end of the line, but hustled and slurred the syllables in the middle
till the line was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so
plentifully that it became impossible even for the most attentive
ear to follow the metre. . . . The history of blank verse reflects
with curious exactness the phases of the history of the diama.
When the metre was first set on the stage, in the Senecan drama,
it was stiff and slow-moving ; each line was monotonously accented,
and divided from the next by so heavy a stress that the absence of
rhyme seemed a wilful injury done to the ear. Such as it was, it
suited the solemn moral platitudes that it was called upon to utter.
Peele, Marlowe, and Shakespeare made the drama lyrical in theme
and treatment ; the measure, adapting itself to the change, became
lyrical in their hands. As the drama grew in scope and power,
addressing itself to a greater diversity of matter, and coming to
closer grips with the realities of life, the lyrical strain was lost, and
blank verse was stretched and loosened and made elastic. During
the twenty years of Shakespeare's dramatic activity, from being
lyrical it tended more and more to become conversational in Comedy,
and in Tragedy to depend for its effects rather on the rhetorical
rise and fall of the period than on the unit of the line. From the
drama of Charles the First's time, when inferior workmen had
carried these licences to the verge of confusion, it is a perfectly
natural transition to the heroic couplet for Tragedy and the well-
bred prose of Etherege for Comedy. Blank verse had lost its
character; it had to be made vertebrate to support the modish
extravagances of the heroic plays ; and this was done by the addition
of rhyme. Comedy, on the other hand, was tending already, long
before the civil .troubles, to social satire, and the life-like repre-
xxii NOTE TO PREFACE
sentation of contemporary characters and manners, so that prose was
its only effective instrument.
WALTER RALEIGH, Milton, p. 190.
To the above conspectus of modern views on the general
subject should be added Mr. Swinburne's Study of Shakespeare,
pp. 32-48. The whole of the passage should be read, but
the following only can here be quoted :
Shakespeare was naturally addicted to rhyme, though, if we put
aside the Sonnets, we must admit that in rhyme he never did any
thing worth Marlow's Hero and Leander: he did not, like Marlow,
see at once that it must be reserved for less active forms of poetry
than the tragic drama. . . . But in his very first plays, comic or
tragic or historic, we can see the collision and conflict of the two
influences ; his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step and note by
note to the strong advance of that better genius who came to lead
him into the loftier path of Marlow. There is not a single passage
in Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean than the magnificent
quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little birds ; but the rest
of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole scene
preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we
find in the baser parts of the play ; and these, if any scenes, we may
surely attribute to Shakespeare. ... In this play then (First Part
of Henry VI], more decisively than in Titus Andronicus, we find
Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands with his left
hand at rhyme and his right hand at blank verse. The left is loth
to forego the practice of its peculiar music ; yet, as the action of the
right grows freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and
more certain that the other must cease playing, under pain of pro
ducing mere discord and disturbance in the scheme of tragic
harmony. . . . The example afforded by the Comedy of Errors would
suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by
v no means a bad instrument for romantic comedy. . . . What was
highest as poetry in the Comedy of Errors was mainly in rhyme ;
all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by ^Egeon
ON THE RHYMING PLAY. xxiii
and the appearance, in the last scene, of his wife : in Love's Labour's
Lost, what was highest was couched wholly in blank verse ; in the
Two Gentlemen of Verona, rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance
It is perhaps not so certain as is generally assumed that
the rhyming play is dead beyond recall. It is probably
not wholly without significance that the two most popular
(though debased) of English stage-forms the pantomime
and the burlesque are both in rhyme. A man of genius
may yet show what can be done with rhyme, and he is most
likely to show it in the field suggested by Mr. Swinburne.
When, in the prologue to the last of his rhyming tragedies
(Aureng-zebe) , Dryden confessed to weariness of rhyme, his
reason was that ' Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,'
and he was clearly thinking of tragedy. But in certain kinds
of romantic comedy, the artificiality of effect produced by
those fetters might conceivably be only a grace the more.
W.T.A.
PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.
MY father was actually engaged upon the revision of
this book at the time of his death (November, 1900),
and his working-copy contains a number of * n's ' in the
margin, over against the passages on which he intended
to write new notes. Some, at all events, of those notes
were actually written, but they have unfortunately not
been found. In these circumstances I have done my
best to carry out his intentions so far as I could divine
them. My task has been a good deal facilitated by the
appearance of Prof. W. P. Ker's scholarly edition of the
Essays of John Dryden (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1900),
and I have also to acknowledge obligations to Dr. A. W.
Ward, whose History of English Dramatic Literature
has been constantly at my elbow, and who has moreover
rendered to his late friend and kinsman the service of piety
involved in his allowing me to consult him upon special
points. Perhaps the most prominent feature of my
revision is the copiousness of quotation from Corneille.
In no other way did it seem possible to bring home
to the reader the greatness of Dryden's debt extending
not only to ideas and arguments, but even phrases to
his French contemporary. It should be added that the
New English Dictionary, which is now far advanced,
and which, it is already evident, will considerably lighten
the labours of future amaotators on English classics, has
been freely drawn upon. The longer of my own notes
are printed in square brackets.
WILLIAM T. ARNOLD.
May, 1901.
EPISTLE DEDICATORY
TO THE ESSAY OF
DRAMATIC POESY 1 . ;
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
CHARLES, LORD BUCKHURST 2 .*
MY LORD,
As I was lately reviewing my loose papers,
amongst the rest I found this Essay, the writing of
which, in this rude and indigested manner wherein
your lordship now sees it, served as an amusement 5
to me in the country, when the violence of the last
plague * had driven me from the town. Seeing then
our theatres shut up, I was engaged in these kind
of thoughts with the same delight with which men
think upon their absent mistresses. I confess I find 10
many things in this Discourse which I do not now
approve; my judgment being not a little altered 4
1 A = edition of 1668. B = edition of 1684 (here, in the main,
reprinted). C = edition of 1693.
a C has, 'Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain
of their Majesties Houshold, Knight of the Most Noble Order of
the Garter, &c.* Lord Buckhurst had become Earl of Dorset in 1677.
It is hard to say why Dryden did not give him his proper title in the
edition of 1684.
8 The great plague of 1665 (Malone), ^ * a Httle altered, A.
B
2 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
since the writing of it ; but whether l for the better
or the worse, I know not : neither indeed is it much
material, in an essay, where all I have said is pro
blematical. For the way of writing plays in verse,
5 which I have seemed to favour, I have, since that time,
laid the practice of it aside, till I have more leisure,
because I find it troublesome and slow. But I am
no way altered from my opinion of it, at least with
any reasons which have opposed it. For your lord-
10 ship may easily observe, that none are very violent
against it, but those who either have not attempted
it, or who have succeeded ill in their attempt. It
is enough for me to have your lordship's example
for my excuse in that little which I have done in it ;
15 and I am sure my adversaries can bring no such
arguments against verse, as those with which n the
fourth act of Pompey* will furnish me 2 in its defence.
Yet, my lord, you must suffer me a little to complain
of you, that you too soon withdraw from us a con-
20 tentment, of which we expected the continuance,
because you gave it us so early. It is a revolt,
without occasion, from your party, where your merits
had already raised you to the highest commands, and
where you have not the excuse of other men, that
25 you have been ill used, and therefore laid down
arms 3 . I know no other quarrel you can have to
verse, than that * which Spurina n had to his beauty,
when he tore and mangled the features of his face,
only 5 because they pleased too well the sight 6 . It
1 whither, A.
a as the fourth Act of Pompey will furnish me with, A.
* Armes, A. * then that, A* 5 onely, A. the lookers on. A,
DEDICATION TO THE ESSAY. 3
was an honour which seemed to wait for you, to lead
out a new colony of writers from the mother nation :
and upon the first spreading of your ensigns, there
had been many in a readiness to have followed so
fortunate a leader ; if not all, yet the better part of 5
poets l :
pars, indocili melior grege ; mollis et cxspcs*
Inominata perprimat cubilia. n
I am almost of opinion, that we should force you to
accept of the command, as sometimes the Praetorian TO
bands have compelled their captains to receive the
empire. The court, which is the best and surest
judge of writing n , has generally allowed n of verse ;
and in the town it has found favourers of wit and
quality. As for your own particular, my lord, you *5
have yet youth and time enough to give part of
them 3 to the divertisement of the public, before you
enter into the serious and more unpleasant business
of the world. That which the French poet said of
the temple of Love, may be as well applied to the 20
temple of the Muses. The words, as near as I can
remember them, were these :
Le jeune homme a mauvaise grace,
N* ay ant pas ador& dans le Temple d' Amour ;
II faut qtfil entre ; et pour le sage, 75
Si ce tiest pas son vrai* sejour,
Cest un gite* sur son passage.*
I leave the words to work their effect upon your
lordship in their own language, because no other can
so well express the nobleness of the thought ; and 3
wish you may be soon called to bear a part in the
1 Writers, A. expts, A. 3 of it, A.
Si ce nest son vray, A. ' Ce'st wn giste, A,
B 2
4 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
affairs of the nation, where I know the world expects
you, and wonders why you have been so long for
gotten; there being no person amongst our young
nobility, on whom the eyes of all men are so much
5 bent. But in the mean time, your lordship may
imitate the course of Nature, who gives us the flower
before the fruit : that I may speak to you in the
language of the muses, which I have taken from an
excellent poem to the king :
to As Nature, when she fruit designs 1 , thinks fit
By beauteous blossoms to proceed to it ;
And while she does accomplish all the spring,
Birds to her secret operations sing.
I confess I have no greater reason, in addressing
15 this Essay to your lordship, than that it might
awaken in you the desire of writing something, in
whatever kind it be, which might be an honour to
our age and country. And methinks it might have
the same effect on you, which Homer tells us the
20 fight of the Greeks and Trojans before the fleet, had
on the spirit of Achilles ; who, though he had re
solved not to engage 2 , yet found a martial warmth
to steal upon him at the sight of blows, the sound of
trumpets, and the cries of fighting men.
*5 For my own part, if, in treating of this subject,
I sometimes dissent from the opinion of better wits, I
declare it is not so much to combat their opinions, as
to defend my own, which were first made publick. n
Sometimes, like a scholar in a fencing-school, I put
30 forth myself, and shew my own ill play, on purpose to
be better taught. Sometimes I stand desperately to
1 desigucs, A. 9 ingage, A.
DEDICATION TO THE ESSAY. 5
my arms, like the foot when deserted by their horse ;
not in hope to overcome, but only to yield on more
honourable terms. And yet, my lord, this war of
opinions, you well know, has fallen out among the
writers of all ages, and sometimes betwixt friends. 5
Only it has been prosecuted by some, like pedants,
with violence of words, and managed by others like
gentlemen, with candour and civility. Even Tully
had a controversy with his dear Atticus ; and in one
of his Dialogues, makes him sustain the part of an 10
enemy in philosophy, who, in his letters, is his con
fident n of state, and made privy to the most weighty
affairs of the Roman senate. And the same respect
which was paid by Tully to Atticus, we find returned
to him afterwards by Caesar on a like occasion, who J5
answering his book in praise of Cato, made it not so
much his business to condemn Cato, as to praise
Cicero. n
But that I may decline some part of the encounter
with my adversaries, whom I am neither willing to ao
combat, nor well able to resist; I will give your
lordship the relation of a dispute betwixt some of our
wits on the same subject 1 , in which they did not only
speak of plays in verse, but mingled, in the freedom
of discourse, some things of the ancient, many of the 25
modern, ways of writing ; comparing those with these,
and the wits of our nation with those of others : it is
true 2 , they differed in their opinions, as it is probable 3
they would : neither do I take upon me to reconcile,
but to relate them; and that as Tacitus professes of 30
1 upon this subject, A. * 'tis true, A.
3 'tis probable, A.
6 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
himself, sine studio partium, out ir&\ without passion
or interest ; leaving your lordship to decide it in
favour of which part you shall judge most reasonable,
and withal, to pardon the many errors of
Your Lordship's
Most obedient humble servant,
JOHN DRYDEN.
1 Tac. Ann. 1. 1 ; sine ira aut studio, quorum causas procul habeo
TO THE READER.
THE drift of the ensuing discourse was chiefly to
vindicate the honour of our English writers, from the
censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before
them. This I intimate, lest any should think me so
exceeding vain, n as to teach others an art which they
understand much better than myself. But if this incor
rect Essay, written in the country without the help of
books or advice of friends, shall find any acceptance
in the world, I promise to myself a better success of
the Second Part, wherein I shall more fully treat of 1
the virtues and faults of the English poets, who have
written either in this, the epick 2 , or the lyrick 3 way 4 .
1 A oni. I shall more fully treat of. * Epique, A.
8 Lyrique, A.
* A has, ' will be more fully treated of, and their several stylei
impartially imitated.'
AN ESSAY
OF
DRAMATIC POESY 1 .
IT was that memorable day 2 , in the first summer of
5 the late war, when our navy engaged 3 the Dutch ; a
day wherein the two most mighty and best appointed
fleets which any age had ever seen, disputed the com
mand of the greater half of the globe, the commerce
of nations, and the riches of the universe: while 4
10 these vast floating bodies, on either side, moved
against each other in parallel lines, and our country
men, under the happy conduct of his royal high
ness 5 , went breaking, by little and little, into the
line of the enemies; the noise of the cannon
15 from both navies reached our ears about the city, n
so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dread
ful suspense of the event, which they knew 6 was then
deciding, every one went following the sound as his
fancy led him ; and leaving the town almost empty,
1 Dramatick Poesie, A. a June 3, 1665 (Malone).
8 ingag'd, A. * Universe. While, A.
6 James, duke of York, afterwards James II (Malone). -
6 we knew, A.
THE OPENING. 9
some took towards the park, some cross the river,
others down it ; all seeking the noise in the depth of
silence.
Among the rest, it was the fortune of Eugenius,
Crites, Lisideius, and Neander, to be in company 5
together ; three of them persons whom their wit and
quality have made known to all the town ; and whom
I have chose to hide under these borrowed names,
that they may not suffer by so ill a relation as I am
going to make of their discourse. 10
2. Taking then a barge, which a servant of Lisideius
had provided for them, they made haste to shoot the
bridge, and left behind them that great fall of waters
which hindered them from hearing what they desired :
after which, having disengaged 1 themselves from many 15
vessels which rode at anchor in the Thames, and al
most blocked 2 up the passage towards Greenwich, they
ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently;
and then, every one favouring his own curiosity with a
strict silence, it was not long ere they perceived the air 20
to break 3 about them like the noise of distant thunder,
or of swallows in a cmmney : those little undulations
of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached
them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their
first horrour, which they had betwixt the fleets. 25
After 4 they had attentively listened till such time as
the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius,
lifting up his head, and taking notice of it, was the
first who congratulated to n the rest that happy omen
of our nation's victory : adding, that 5 we had but 30
1 disingag'd, A. " blockt, A. The Air to break, A.
* Fleets : after. 6 A om.
10 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
this to desire in confirmation of it, that we might
hear no more of that noise, which was now leaving
the English coast. When the rest had concurred in
the same opinion, Crites, a person of a sharp judg-
5 ment, and somewhat too delicate a taste in wit, which
the world have mistaken in him for ill-nature, said,
smiling to us, that if the concernment of this battle 1
had not been so exceeding great, he could scarce
have wished the victory at the price he knew he
10 must pay for it, in being subject to the reading and
hearing of so many ill verses as he was sure would
be made on that subject. Adding 2 , that no argument
could scape some of those eternal rhymers, who
watch a battle with more diligence than l;he ravens
15 and birds of prey ; and the worst of them surest to
be first in upon the quarry: while the better able,
either out of modesty writ not at all, or set that due
value upon their poems, as to let them be often
desired 3 and long expected. 'There 4 are some of
30 those impertinent people of whom you speak V an
swered Lisideius, 'who to my knowledge are already
so provided, either way, that they can produce not
only a panegyrick upon the victory, but, if need be, a
funeral elegy on the duke ; wherein, after 6 they have
35 crowned his valour with many laurels, they will 7 at
last deplore the odds under which he fell, concluding
that his coiyage deserved a better destiny.' All the
company smiled at the conceipt of Lisideius ; but
Crites, more eager than before, began to make par-
1 battel, A. 2 upon it ; adding, A. 8 call'd for.
4 expected ! there, A. 5 people you speak of, A.
6 and after, A. T A om. they will.
THE OPENING. II
ticular exceptions against some writers, and said, the
publick magistrate ought to send betimes to forbid
them ; and that it concerned the peace and quiet of
all honest people, that ill poets should be as well
silenced as seditious preachers. 11 'In my opinion/ 5
replied Eugenius, 'you pursue your point too far;
for as to my own particular, I am so great a lover
of poesy, that I could wish them all rewarded,
who attempt but to do well; at least, I would not
have them worse used than one of their brethren 10
was by Sylla the Dictator 1 : Quern in condone vidi
mus (says Tully,) cum ei libellum malus poeta depopulo
subjecisset, quod epigramma in eum fecisset tantum-
modo alternis versibus longtuscutis, statim ex Us rebus
quas tune* vendebat jubere ei praemium tribui, sub 15
ea conditione ne quid postea scriberet? n ' I could wish
with all my heart,' replied Crites, 'that many whom
we know were as bountifully thanked upon the same
condition, that they would never trouble us again.
For amongst others, I have a mortal apprehension 20
of two poets n , whom this victory, with the help
of both her wings, will never be able to escape.'
4 'Tis easy 3 to guess whom you intend,' said Lisi-
deius ; ' and without naming them, I ask you, if
one of them does not perpetually pay us with 25
clenches upon words, and a certain clownish kind
of raillery ? if now and then he does not offer at a
catachresis 4 n or Clevelandism 5n , wresting and tor-
1 then [than] Sylla the Dictator did one of their brethren here
tofore, A.
8 quae tune, A. ' escape ; 'tis easie, A.
4 Catecresis, A. * so A ; Cleivelanclism B, and edd.
12 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
turing a word into another meaning : in fine, if he
be not one of those whom the French would call
un mauvais buffon ; one who is so much a well-wilier
to the satire, that he intends at least to spare 1 no
5 man ; and though he cannot strike a blow to hurt
any, yet he ought 2 to be punished for the malice
of the action, as our witches are justly hanged,
because they think themselves to be such 3 ; and
suffer deservedly for believing they did mischief,
ro because they meant it.' 'You have described him,'
said Crites, ' so exactly, that I am afraid to come
after you with my other extremity of poetry. He is
one of those who, having had some advantage of
education and converse, knows better than the other
15 what a poet should be, but puts it into practice more
unluckily than any man; his style and matter are
every where alike : he is the most calm, peaceable
writer you ever read: he never disquiets your pas
sions with the least concernment, but still leaves you
ao in as even a temper as he found you ; he is a very
leveller in poetry: he creeps along with ten little
words in every line 4 , and helps out his numbers with
For to, and Unto, and all the pretty expletives he can
find, till he drags them to the end of another line ;
35 while the sense is left tired half way behind it : he
doubly starves all his verses, first for want of thought,
1 he spares, A. * yet ought, A.
1 think themselves so, A.
* This passage evidently furnished Pope with his well-known
couplet in the ESSAY ON CRITICISM ;
* While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.*
(Malone.)
THE OPENING. 13
and then of expression ; his poetry neither has wit in
it, nor seems to have it; like him in Martial : n
Pauper videri Cinna vult t et est pauper.
1 He affects plainness, to cover his want of imagina
tion : when he writes the serious way, the highest &
flight of his fancy is some miserable antithesis, or
seeming contradiction; and in the comic he is still
reaching at some thin conceit, the ghost of a jest, and
that too flies before him, never to be caught ; these
swallows which we see before us on the Thames are 10
the just resemblance of his wit: you may observe
how near the water they stoop, how many proffers
they make to dip, and yet how seldom they touch it ;
and when they do, it is but the surface : they skim
over it but to catch a gnat, and then mount into the 15
air and leave it.'
3. 'Well, gentlemen/ said Eugenius, 'you may
speak your pleasure of these authors ; but though I
and some few more about the town may give you a
peaceable hearing, yet assure yourselves, there are *o
multitudes who would think you malicious and them
injured : especially him whom you first described ;
he is the very Withers 11 of the city: they have
bought more editions of his works than would serve
to lay under all their pies at the lord mayor's 25
Christmas. When his famous poem first came out
in the year 1660, I have seen them reading it in
the midst of 'Change time ; nay so vehement they
were at it, that they lost their bargain by the candles'
ends n ; but what will you say, if he has been re- 30
ceived amongst great persons 1 ? I can assure you
1 the great Ones,. A.
14 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
he is, this day, the envy of one * who is lord in the
art of quibbling ; and who does not take it well, that
any man should intrude so far into his province.'
'All I would wish/ replied Crites, 'is, that they who
5 love his writings, may still admire him, and his
fellow poet: Qui Bavium non odit n , $c., is curse
sufficient.' 'And farther/ added Lisideius, ' I believe
there is no man who writes well, but would think he
had hard measure 2 , if their admirers should praise
10 anything of his : Nam quos contemnimus, eorum quo-
que laudes contemnimus' 'There are so few who
write well in this age/ says Crites, 'that methinks any
praises should be welcome ; they neither rise to the
dignity of the last age, nor to any of the ancients :
15 and we may cry out of the writers of this tune, with
more reason than Petronius of his, Pace vestrd liceat
dixisse, primi omnium eloquentiam perdidistis: n you
have debauched the true old poetry so far, that
Nature, which is the soul of it, is not in any of your
ao writings.'
4. 'If your quarrel/ said Eugenius, 'to those who
now write, be grounded only on your reverence to
antiquity, there is no man more ready to adore those
great Greeks and Romans than I am: but on the
25 other side, I cannot think so contemptibly of the age
in which I live 3 , or so dishonourably of my own
country, as not to judge we equal the arifcients in
most kinds of poesy, and in some surpass them ;
neither know I any reason why I may not be as
1 of a great person, A.
8 think himself very hardly dealt with, A,
' the Age I live in, A.
THE OPENING. 15
zealous for the reputation of our age, as we find the
ancients themselves were in reference to those who
lived before them. For you hear your Horace
saying,
Indignor quidquam reprehendi, non quia crassf
Compositum, ilhpidtvc putetur, sed quia nufer.*
And after :
Si meliora dies, ut vina, potmata reddit,
Scirt velim, pretium chartis quotus arroget annus?*
' But I see I am engaging in a wide dispute, where id
the arguments are not like to reach close on either
side ; for poesy is of so large an extent, and so many
both of tli? ancients and moderns have done well in
all kinds of it, that in citing one against the other,
we shall take up more time this evening than each 15
man's occasions * will allow him : therefore I would
ask Crites to what part of poesy he would confine
his arguments, and whether he would defend the
general cause of the ancients against the moderns,
or oppose any age of the moderns against this of 20
ours ? y
5. Crites, a little while considering upon this de
mand, told Eugenius, that if 2 he pleased, he would
limit their dispute to Dramatique Poesie 3 ; in which
he thought it not difficult to prove, either that the 25
ancients were superior to the moderns, or the last
age to this of ours.
Eugenius was somewhat surprised, when he heard
Crites make choice of that subject. ' For ought I
1 so C ; mans occasions, A, B.
3 that he approved his Proposals, and if, A,
so A and B ; Dramatick Poesie, C,
see, 1 said he, 'I have undertaken a harder province
than I imagined ; for though I never judged the
plays of the Greek or Roman poets comparable to
ours, yet, on the other side, those we now see acted
5 come short of many which were written in the last
age : but my comfort is, if we are overcome, it will
be only by our own countrymen : and if we yield to
them in this one part of poesy, we more surpass
them in all the other : for in the epic or lyric way, it
10 will be hard for them to shew us one such amongst
them, as we have many now living, or who lately
were l : they can produce nothing so courtly writ, or
which expresses so much the conversation of a
gentleman, as Sir John Suckling; nothing so even,
15 sweet, and flowing, as Mr. Waller; nothing so majestic,
so correct, as Sir John Denham ; nothing so elevated,
so copious, and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley; as
for the Italian, French, and Spanish plays, I can
make it evident, that those who now write surpass
ao them ; and that the drama is wholly ours/ n
All of them were thus far of Eugenius his n opinion,
that the sweetness of English verse was never under
stood or practised by our fathers ; even Crites him
self did not much oppose it : and every one was
35 willing to acknowledge how much our poesy is im
proved by the happiness of some writers yet living ;
who first; taught us to mould our thoughts into easy
and significant words, to retrench the superfluities
of expression, and to make our rime 2 so properly a
30 part of the verse, that it should never mislead the
sense, but itself be led and governed by it.
1 were so, A. a so A and B ; rhyme, C.
DEFINITION OF A PLA Y. j 7
6. Eugenius was going to continue this discourse,
when Lisideius told him that 1 it was necessary, be
fore they proceeded further, to take a standing mea
sure of their controversy ; for how was it possible to
be decided who writ the best plays, before we know 5
what a play should be ? But, this once agreed on
by both parties, each might have recourse to it, either
to prove his own advantages, or to discover the
failings of his adversary.
He had no sooner said this, but all desired the 10
favour of him to give the definition of a play ; and
they were the more importunate, because neither
Aristotle, nor Horace, nor any other, who had writ 2
of that subject, had ever done it.
Lisideius, after some modest denials, at last con- 15
fessed he had a rude notion of it ; indeed, rather a
description than a definition; but which served to
guide him in his private thoughts, when he was to
make a judgment of what others writ : that he con
ceived a play ought to be, A 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.
This definition, though Crites raised a logical ob-,
jection against it that it was only a genere et fine t \ 25
and so not altogether perfect n , was yet well received
by the rest : and after they had given order to the
watermen to turn their barge, and row softly, that
they might take the cool of the evening in their re
turn, Crites, being desired by the company to begin, 30
spoke on behalf of the ancients, in this manner :
1 A om. 8 who writ, A.
C
1 8 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
' If confidence presage a victory, Eugenius, in his
own opinion, has already triumphed over the an
cients : nothing seems more easy to him, than to
overcome those whom it is our greatest praise to
5 have imitated well ; for we do not only build upon
their foundations 1 , but by their models. Dramatic
Poesy had time enough, reckoning from Thespis
(who first invented it) to Aristophanes, to be born,
to grow up, and to flourish in maturity. It has been
10 observed of arts and sciences, that in one and the
same century they have arrived to great 2 perfection ; n
and no wonder, since every age has a kind of uni
versal genius, which inclines those that live in it
to some particular studies : the work then, being
15 pushed on by many hands, must of necessity go
forward.
'Is it not evident, in these last hundred years,
when the study of philosophy 11 has been the business
of all the Virtuosi 11 in Christendom, that almost a
ao new nature has been revealed to us ? That more
errors of the School n have been detected, more useful
experiments in philosophy have been made, more
noble secrets in optics, medicine, anatomy, astro-
Inomy, discovered, than in all those credulous and
doting ages from Aristotle to us ? so true it is, that
nothing spreads more fast than science, when rightly
and generally cultivated.
' Add to this, the more than common emulation
that was in those times of writing well ; which
30 though it be found in all ages and all persons that
pretend to the same reputation, yet poesy, being
1 foundation, A. 2 a great, A.
C RITE'S PRAISES THE ANCIENTS. 19
then in more esteem than now it is, had greater
honours decreed to the professors of it, and conse
quently the rivalship was more high between them ;
they had judges ordained to decide their merit, and
prizes to reward it ; and historians have been dili- 5
gent to record of Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles,
Lycophron, and the rest of them, both who they
were that vanquished in these wars of the theatre,
and how often they were crowned : while the Asian
kings and Grecian commonwealths scarce afforded 10
them a nobler subject than the unmanly luxuries of
a debauched court, or giddy intrigues of a factious
city: Alit cemulatio mgem'a, (says Paterculus,) et
nunc invidia, nunc admiratio incitationem accendit:^
Emulation is the spur of wit ; and sometimes envy, 15
sometimes admiration, quickens our endeavours.
' But now, since the rewards of honour are taken
away, that virtuous emulation is turned into direct
malice ; yet so slothful, that it contents itself to con
demn and cry down others, without attempting to do 20
better : it is * a reputation too unprofitable, to take
the necessary pains for it ; yet, wishing they had it,
that desire 2 is incitement enough to hinder others
from it. And this, in short, Eugenius, is the reason
why you have now so few good poets, and so many 25
severe judges. Certainly, to imitate the ancients
well, much labour and long study is required ; which
pains, I have already shewn, our poets would want
encouragement to take, if yet they had ability to go
through the work 3 . Those ancients have been faithful 3
imitators and wise observers of that nature which is
1 'tis, A. a A om. that desire. s through with it, A.
C 2
20 OF DRAMATIC POESY*.
so torn and ill represented in our plays ; they have
handed down to us a perfect resemblance of her ;
which we, like ill copiers, neglecting to look on, have
rendered monstrous, and disfigured. But, that you
5 may know how much you are indebted to those your
masters, and be ashamed to have so ill requited
them, I must remember you n , that jtll the rules by
which we practise the drama at this day, (either such
as relate to the justness and symmetry of the plot, or
10 the episodical ornaments, such as descriptions, nar
rations, and other beauties, which are not essential
to the play 1 ,) were delivered to us from the observa
tions which Aristotle made, of those poets, who
either lived before him, or were his contemporaries :
15 we have added nothing of our own, except we have
the confidence to say our wit is better ; of which,
none boast in this our age, but such as understand
not theirs. Of that book which Aristotle lias left us,
n(p\ TTJS Hoirj-iKTjs, Horace his Art of Poetry is an ex-
20 cellent comment, and, I believe, restores to us that
Second Book of his concerning Comedy, which is
wanting in him. n
' Out of these two have 2 been extracted the famous
Rules, which the French call Des Trots Unites, or,
35 The Three Unities n , which ought to be observed in
every regular play; namely, of Time, Place, and
Action.
' The unity of time they comprehend in twenty-four
hours, the compass of a natural day, or as near as it
30 can be contrived ; and the reason of it is obvious to
every one, that the time of the feigned action, or
1 no brackets in A. 2 has, A.
CR1TES PRAISES THE ANCIENTS. 21
fable of the play, should be proportioned as near as
can be to the duration of that time in which it is
represented : since therefore, all plays are acted on the
theatre in the space of time much within the compass
of twenty-four hours, that play is to be thought the 5
nearest imitation of nature, whose plot or action is
confined within that time ; and, by the same rule
which concludes this general proportion of time, it
follows, that all the parts of it are (as near as may
be 1 ) to be equally subdivided; namely-, that one act 10
take not up the supposed time of half a day, which is
out of proportion to the rest ; since the other four are
then to be straitened within the compass of the re
maining half: for it is unnatural that one act, which
being spoke or written is not longer than the rest, 15
should be supposed longer by the audience ; it is
therefore the poet's duty, to take care that no act
should be imagined to exceed the time in which it is
represented on the stage ; and that the intervals and
inequalities of time be supposed to fall out between 20
the acts.
' This rule of time, how well it has been observed
by the ancients, most of their plays will witness ; you
see them in their tragedies, (wherein to follow this
rule, is certainly most difficult,) from the very be- 25
ginning of their plays, falling close into that part of
the story which they intend for the action or principal
object of it, leaving the former part to be delivered by
narration : so that they set the audience, as it were, at
the post where the race is to be concluded ; and, saving 30
them the tedious expectation of seeing the poet set out
1 A om. as near as may be. 8 as namely, A.
22 OF 'DRAMATIC POESY.
and ride the beginning of the course, they suffer you
not to behold him 1 , till he is in sight of the goal, and
just upon you.
' For the second unity, which is that of Place, the
5 ancients meant by it, that the scene ought to be con
tinued through the play, in the same place where it
was laid in the beginning : for, the stage on which it
is represented being but one and the same place, it is
unnatural to conceive it many, and those far distant
10 from one another. I will not deny but, by the vari
ation of painted scenes, the fancy, which in these
cases will contribute to its own deceit, may sometimes
imagine it several places, with some appearance of
probability ; yet it still carries the greater likelihood
15 of truth, if those places be supposed so near each
other, as in the same town or city; which may all be
comprehended under the larger denomination of one
place ; for a greater distance will bear no proportion
to the shortness of time which is allotted, in the
ao acting, to pass from one of them to another ; for the
observation of this, next to the ancients, the French
are to be most commended. They tie themselves so
strictly to the unity of place, that you never see in
any of their plays, a scene changed in the middle of
35 an act : if the act begins in a garden, a street, or
chamber, 'tis ended in the same place ; and that you
may know it to be the same, the stage is so supplied
with persons, that it is never empty all the time : he
who enters second 2 , has business with him who was
30 on before ; and before the second quits the stage,
a third appears who has business with him. This
1 you behold him not, A. a that enters the second, A.
CRITES PRAISES THE ANCIENTS. 33
Corneille ' calls la liaison des scenes n , the continuity or
joining of the scenes ; and 'tis a good mark of a well-
contrived play, when all the persons are known to
each other, and every one of them has some affairs
with all the rest. 5
' As for the third unity, which is that of Action, the
ancients meant no other by it than what the logicians
do by their finis, the end or scope of any action ; that
which is the first in intention, and last in execution :
now the poet is to aim at one great and complete 10
action, to the carrying on of which all things in his
play, even the very obstacles, are to be subservient ;
and the reason of this is as evident as any of the
former. For two actions, equally laboured and driven
on by the writer, would destroy the unity of the poem; 15
it would be no longer one play, but two : not but that
there may be many actions in a play, as Ben Johnson
has observed in his Discoveries* ; but they must be
all subservient to the great one, which our language
happily expresses in the name of under-plois : such as 20
in Terence's Eunuch is the difference and reconcile
ment of Thais and Phaedria, which is not the chief
business of the play, but promotes the marriage of
Chaerea and Chremes's sister, principally intended
by the poet. There ought to be but one action, says 25
Corneille n , that is, one complete action, which leaves
the mind of the audience in a full repose ; but this
cannot be brought to pass but by many other im
perfect actions, which conduce to it, and hold the
audience in a delightful suspence of what will be. 30
' If by these rules (to omit many other drawn from
1 Cornell, A
24 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
the precepts and practice of the ancients) we should
judge our modern plays, 'tis probable that few of them
would endure the trial: that which should be the
business of a day, takes up in some of them an age ;
5 instead of one action, they are the epitomes of a man's
life ; and for one spot of ground, which the stage
should represent, we are sometimes in more countries
than the map can shew us.
' But if we allow the Ancients to have contrived
10 well, we must acknowledge them to have written l
better. Questionless we are deprived of a great stock
of wit in the loss of Menander among the Greek
poets, and of Caecilius, Afranius, and Varius, among
the Romans ; we may guess at Menander's excellency
15 by the plays of Terence, who translated some of his 2 ;
and yet wanted so much of him, that he Was called by
C. Caesar the half-Menander u ; and may judge 3 of
Varius", by the testimonies of Horace, Martial, and
Velleius Paterculus. 'Tis probable that these, could
ao they be recovered, would decide the controversy ; but
so long as Aristophanes and Plautus 4 are extant,
while the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles, and
Seneca, are in our hands 5 , I can never see one of
those plays which are now written, but it increases
35 my admiration of the ancients. And yet I must
acknowledge further, that to admire them as we ought,
we should understand them better than we do. Doubt
less many things appear flat to us, the wit of which 6
depended on some custom or story, which never came
1 writ, A. 2 so A ; B has 'them.' * A om. may judge.
4 Aristophanes in the old Comedy and Plautus in the new, A.
5 are to be had, A. * whose wit, A.
C RITES PRAISES THE ANCIENTS. 2$
to our knowledge; or perhaps on some criticism in
their language, which being so long dead, and only
remaining in their books, 'tis not possible they should
make us understand * perfectly. To read Macrobius,"
explaining the propriety and elegancy of many words 5
in Virgil, which I had before passed over without
consideration as common things, is enough to assure
me that I ought to think the same of Terence ; and
that in the purity of his style (which Tully so much
valued that he ever carried his works about him) there 10
is yet left in him great room for admiration, if I knew
but where to place it. In the mean time I must desire
you to take notice, that the greatest man of the last
age, Ben Johnson, was willing to give place to them in
all things: he was not only a professed imitator of 15
Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others; you
track him every where in their snow : if Horace, Lucan,
Petronius Arbiter, Seneca, and Juvenal, had their
own from him, there are few serious thoughts which
are new in him : you will pardon me, therefore, if I 20
presume he loved their fashion, when he wore their
cloaths. But since I have otherwise a great venera
tion for him, and you, Eugenius, prefer him above all
other poets,* I will use no farther argument to you
than his example : I will produce before you Father 25
Ben 2 , dressed in all the ornaments and colours of the
ancients ; you will need no other guide to our party,
if you follow him ; and whether you consider the bad
1 know it, A. a Father Ben to you, A.
* See a high eulogy on Ben Jonson, by Lord Buckhurst (the
Eugenius of thi? piece), written about the year 1668. Dryden's
MISCEL. v. 123, edit. 1716 (MaloneV
26 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
f the
plays of our age, or regard the good plays 1 of
last, both the best and worst of the modern poets will
equally instruct you to admire 2 the ancients/
Crites had no sooner left speaking, but Eugenius,
5 who had 3 waited with some impatience for it, thus
began :
' I have observed in your speech, that the former
part of it is convincing as to what the moderns have
profited by the rules of the ancients ; but in the latter
10 you are careful to conceal how much they have ex
celled them ; we own all the helps we have from them,
and want neither veneration nor gratitude, while we
acknowledge that, to overcome them, we must make
use of the advantages we have received from them :
15 but to these assistances we have joined our own in
dustry ; for, had we sat down with a dull imitation of
them, we might then have lost somewhat of the old
perfection, but never acquired any that was new. We
draw not therefore after their lines, but those of nature ;
20 and having the life before us, besides the experience
of all they knew, it is no wonder if we hit some airs
and features which they have missed. I deny not
what you urge of arts and sciences, that they have
flourished in some ages more than others ; but your
25 instance in philosophy makes for me : for if natural
causes be more known now than in the time of
Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy
and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still
nearer to perfection ; and, that granted, it will rest
30 for you to prove that they wrought more perfect
images of human life than we ; which seeing in
1 good ones, A. a esteem. A. s A om. had.
EUGENIUS VINDICATES THE MODERNS, a;
your discourse you have avoided to make good, it
shall now be my task to show you some part of their
defects, and some few excellencies of the moderns.
And I think there is none among us can imagine
I do it enviously, or with purpose to detract from 5
them ; for what interest of fame or profit can the
living lose by the reputation of the dead ? On the
other side, it is a great truth which Velleius Pater-
culus affirms n : Audita visis libentius laudamus ; et
prcesentia tnvidia, prceterita admiratione prosequimur ; 10
et his nos obrui, Hits instrui credimus : that praise or
censure is certainly the most sincere, which unbribed
posterity shall give us.
' Be pleased then in the first place to take notice,
that the Greek poesy, which Crites has affirmed to 15
have arrived to perfection in the reign of the old
comedy, was so far from it, that the distinction of j^
it into acts was not known to them ; or if it were,
it is yet so darkly delivered to us that we cannot
make it out. ao
'All we know of it is, from the singing of their
Chorus; and that too is so uncertain, that in some
of their plays we have reason to conjecture they sung
more than five times. Aristotle indeed divides the in
tegral parts of a play into four. First, the Protasis n , 25
or entrance, which gives light only to the characters
of the persons, and proceeds very little into any part
of the action. Secondly, the Epitasis, or working up
of the plot ; where the play grows warmer, the design
or action of it is drawing on, and you see something 3
promising that it will come to pass. Thirdly, the
Catastasis, called by the Romans, Status, the height
28 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
and full growth of the play : we may call it properly
the counter-turn J n , which destroys that expectation,
imbroils the action in new difficulties, and leaves you
far distant from that hope in which it found you ; as
5 you may have observed in a violent stream resisted
by a narrow passage, it runs round to an eddy, and
carries back the waters with more swiftness than it
brought them on. Lastly, the Catastrophe n , which the
Grecians called Aiwr, the French le denouement, and
10 we the discovery, or unravelling of the plot : there
you see all things settling again upon their first foun
dations ; and, the obstacles which hindered the design
or action of the play once removed, it ends with that
resemblance of truth and nature, that the audience
15 are satisfied with the conduct of it. Thus this great
man delivered to us the image of a play ; and I must
confess it is so lively, that from thence much light has
been derived to the forming it more perfectly into acts
and scenes : but what poet first limited to five the
20 number of the acts, I know not ; only we see it so
firmly established in the time of Horace, that he gives
it for a rule in comedy, Neu brevior quinto, neu sit
productior actu* So that you see the Grecians cannot
be said to have consummated this art ; writing rather
5 by entrances, than by acts, and having rather a general
indigested notion of a play, than knowing how and
where to bestow the particular graces of it
' But since the Spaniards at this day allow but three
acts, which they call Jornadas*, to a play, and the
3 Italians in many of theirs follow them, when I con
demn the ancients, I declare it is not altogether
1 A has, ' Thirdly the Catastasis or Counterturn ' : the rest om.
EUGEN1US VINDICATES THE MODERNS. 29
because they have not five acts to every play, but
because they have not confined themselves to one
certain number: it is building an house without a
model ; and when they succeeded in such undertakings,
they ought to have sacrificed to Fortune, not to 5
the Muses.
' Next, for the plot, which Aristotle called TO pvBos n,
and often T&V npay^irotv <rvv6ns f and from him the
Romans Fabula ; it has already been judiciously ob
served by a late writer, that in their tragedies it was 10
only some tale derived from Thebes or Troy, or at
least something that happened in those two ages;
which was worn so threadbare by the pens of all the
epic poets, and even by tradition itself of the talka
tive Greeklings n , (as Ben Johnson calls them,) that 1 5
before it came upon the stage, it was already known 1
to all the audience : and the people, so soon as ever
they heard the name of Oedipus, knew as well as the
poet, that he had killed his father by a mistake, and
committed incest with his mother, before the play ;
that they were now to hear of a great plague, an
oracle, and the ghost of Laius : so that they sat with
a yawning kind of expectation, till he was to come
with his eyes pulled out, and speak a hundred or
more * verses in a tragic tone, in complaint of his 35
misfortunes. But one Oedipus, Hercules, or Medea,
had been tolerable : poor people, they escaped not so
good cheap n ; they had still the chapon bouille set
before them, till their appetites were cloyed with the
same dish, and, the novelty being gone, the pleasure 30
vanished ; so that one main end of Dramatic Poesy
1 hundred or two of, A.
30 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
in its definition, which was to cause delight, was of
consequence destroyed.
' In their comedies, the Romans generally borrowed
their plots from the Greek poets ; and theirs was
5 commonly a little girl stolen or wandered from her
parents, brought back unknown to the city 1 , there
[falling into the hands of] some young fellow, who,
by the help of his servant, cheats his father; and
when her time comes, to cry n , Juno Lucina, fer
10 opem, one or other sees a little box or cabinet which
was carried away with her, and so discovers her to
her friends, if some god do not prevent it, by coming
down in a machine", and taking 2 the thanks of it to
himself.
15 'By the plot you may guess much of the characters
of the persons. An old father, who would willingly,
before he dies, see his son well married; his de
bauched son, kind in his nature to his mistress 3 , but
miserably in want of money ; a servant or slave, who
ao has so much wit to strike in with him, and help to
dupe his father; a braggadocio captain, a parasite,
and a lady of pleasure.
' As for the poor honest maid, on whom the story
is built, and who ought to be one of the principal
35 actors in the play, she is commonly a mute in it : she
has the breeding of the old Elizabeth way, which
was 4 for maids to be seen and not to be heard ; and
it is enough you know she is willing to be married,
when the fifth act requires it.
30 'These are plots built after the Italian mode of
1 the same city, A. 3 take, A.
8 so C ; Mistres, B ; Wench, A. * A om. which was.
EUGENIUS VINDICATES THE MODERNS. 31
houses, you see through them all at once: the
characters are indeed the imitation of nature, but
so narrow, as if they had imitated only an eye or an
hand, and did not dare to venture on the lines of
a face, or the proportion of a body. 5
' But in how strait a compass soever they have
bounded their plots ( and characters, we will pass
it by, if they have regularly pursued them, and per
fectly observed those three unities of time, place, and
action ; the knowledge of which you say is derived 10
to us from them. But in the first place give me leave
to tell you, that the unity of place, however it might
be practised by them, was never any of their rules :
we neither find it in Aristotle, Horace, or any who
have written of it, till in our age the French poets 15
first made it a precept of the stage. The unity of
time, even Terence himself, who was the best and
most regular of them, has neglected : his Heauton-
timorumenos, or Self-Punisher, takes up visibly two
days, says Scaliger n ; the two first acts concluding 20
the first day, the three last the day ensuing 1 ; and
Euripides, in tying himself to one day, has committed
an absurdity never to be forgiven him; for in one
of his tragedies 11 he has made Theseus go from
Athens to Thebes, which was about forty English 35
miles, under the walls of it to give battle, and appear
victorious in the next act ; and yet, from the time
of his departure to the return of the Nuntius, who
gives the relation of his victory, JEthra. and the
1 A has, ' therefore, sayes Scaliger, the two first acts concluding
the first day were acted overnight ; the three last on the ensuing
day.'
32 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
Chorus have but thirty-six verses ; which 1 is not
for every mile a verse.
' The like error is as evident in Terence his Eunuch,
when Laches, the old man, enters by mistake into
5 the house 2 of Thais ; where, betwixt his exit and
the entrance of Pythias, who comes to give ample
relation of the disorders 3 he has raised within, Par-
meno, who was left upon the stage, has not above
five lines to speak. Cest bien employer 4 un temps si
10 court, says the French poet ", who furnished me with
one of the observations : and almost all their tragedies
will afford us examples of the like nature.
' It is true 5 , they have kept the continuity, or, as
you called it, liaison des scenes, somewhat better:
15 two do not perpetually come in together, talk, and
go out together; and other two succeed them, and
do the same throughout the act, which the English
call by the name of single scenes ; but the reason
is, because they have seldom above two or three
ao scenes, properly so called, in every act ; for it is to
be accounted a new scene, not only every time 6 the
stage is empty ; but every person who enters, though
to others, makes it so ; because he introduces a new
business. Now the plots of their plays being narrow,
25 and the persons few, one of their acts was written
in a less compass than one of our well-wrought
scenes; and yet they are often deficient even in
this. To go no further than Terence; you find in
the Eunuch, Antipho entering single in the midst
1 that, A. a in a mistake the house, A.
* Garboyles, A. 4 employe", A.
'Tis true, A. not cTery time, A.
EUGENIUS VINDICATES THE MODERNS. 33
of the third act, after Chremes and Pythias were
gone off" ; in the same play you have likewise Dorias
beginning the fourth act alone; and after she had
made a relation of what was done at the Soldier's l
entertainment, (which by the way was very inarti- 5
ficial, because she was presumed to speak directly
to the audience, and to acquaint them with what was
necessary to be known, but yet should have been so
contrived by the poet as to have been told by persons
of the drama to one another, and so by them to have 10
come to the knowledge of the people,) she quits the
stage, and Phsedria enters next, alone likewise : he
also gives you an account of himself, and of his
returning from the country, in monologue ; to which
unnatural way of narration Terence is subject in 15
all his plays. In his Adelphi, or Brothers, Syrus
and Demea enter after the scene was broken by
the departure of Sostrata, Geta, and Canthara ; and
indeed you can scarce look into any of his comedies,
where you will not presently discover the same in- 20
terruption.
'But as they have failed both in laying of their
plots, and in the management 2 , swerving from the
rules of their own art by misrepresenting nature to
us, in which they have ill satisfied one intention of 25
a play, which was delight ; so in the instructive part
they have erred worse: instead of punishing vice
and rewarding virtue, they have often shewn a pros
perous wickedness, and an unhappy piety : they have
set before us a bloody image of revenge in Medea, 3
and given her dragons to convey her safe from punish-
1 Souldiers, A. 2 managing of 'em, A.
D
34 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
ment; a Priam and Astyanax murdered, and Cas
sandra ravished, and the lust and murder ending
in the victory of him who acted them : in short,
there is no indecorum in any of our modern plays,
5 which if I would excuse, I could not shadow with
some authority from the ancients.
' And one farther note of them let me leave you :
tragedies and comedies were not writ then as they
are now, promiscuously, by the same person ; but
10 he who found his genius bending to the one, never
attempted the other way. This is so plain, that I
need not instance to you, that Aristophanes, Plautus,
Terence, never any of them writ a tragedy; ^Eschylus,
Euripides", Sophocles, and Seneca, never meddled
15 with comedy : the sock and buskin were not worn
by the same poet. Having then so much care to
excel in one kind, very little is to be pardoned them,
if they miscarried in it ; and this would lead me to
the consideration of their wit, had not Crites given
20 me sufficient warning not to be too bold in my judg
ment of it ; because, the languages being dead, and
many of the customs and little accidents on which
it depended lost to us, we are not competent judges
of it. But though I grant that here and there we
25 may miss the application of a proverb or a custom,
yet a thing well said will be wit in all languages;
and though it may lose something in the translation,
yet to him who reads it in the original, 'tis still the
same: he has an idea of its excellency, though it
30 cannot pass from his mind into any other expression
or words than those in which he finds it. When
Phsedria, in the Eunuch, had a command from his
EUGENIUS VINDICATES THE MODERNS. 35
mistress to be absent two days, and, encouraging
himself to go through with it, said, Tandem ego non
ilia caream, si sit opus 1 , vel totum triduum? Par-
meno, to mock the softness of his master, lifting up
his hands and eyes, cries out, as it were in admira- 5
tion, Hut! universum triduum I n the elegancy of
which universum, though it cannot be rendered in
our language, yet leaves an impression on our souls :
but this happens seldom in him ; in Plautus oftener,
who is infinitely too bold in his metaphors and coin- 10
ing words, out of which many times his wit is no
thing ; which questionless was one reason why Horace
falls upon him so severely in those verses :
Sed proavi nostri Plautinos et nwneros et
Laudavere sales, nimiwn patienter utrwnque, Ig
JVie dicam stolide n .
For Horace himself was cautious to obtrude a new
word on his readers, and makes custom and com
mon use the best measure of receiving it into our
writings : 20
Multa renaseentur qua nunc [jam] cecidere, cadentque
Qua nunc sunt in honorc vocabula, si volet usus,
Quern penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi n .
The not observing this rule is that which the
world has blamed in our satyrist, Cleveland 2 n : to 25
express a thing hard and unnaturally, is his new
way of elocution. 'Tis true, no poet but may some
times use a catachresis n : Virgil does it
Mistaque ridenti colocasia fundet acantho n
1 si opus sit, A. * so A ; Cleiveland, 15.
D 2
36 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
in his eclogue of Pollio ; and in his seventh ^Eneid,
miranlur et und(Z,
Miratur nemus insuetum fulgentia longe
Scuta virum fluvio pictasque innare carinas*.
5 And Ovid once so modestly, that he asks leave to
do it:
quern, si verbo audacia detur,
Haud metuam summi dixisse Palatia call.
calling the court of Jupiter by the name of Augustus
10 his palace ; though in another place he is more bold,
where he says, et longas visent Capitolia pampas.
But to do this always, and never be able to write
a line without it, though it may be admired by some
few pedants, will not pass upon those who know that
wit is best conveyed to us in the most easy language ;
and is most to be admired when a great thought
comes dressed in words so commonly received, that
it is understood by the meanest apprehensions, as
the best meat is the most easily digested : but we
ao cannot read a verse of Cleveland's without making
a face at it, as if every word were a pill to
swallow: he gives us many times a hard nut to
break our teeth, without a kernel for our pains. So
that there is this difference betwixt his Satires and
25 doctor Donne's ; that the one gives us deep thoughts
in common language, though rough cadence; the
other gives us common thoughts in abstruse words :
'tis true, in some places his wit is independent of his
words, as in that of the Rebel Scot :
30 Had Cain been Scot, God would have chang'd his doom;
Not forc'd him wander, but confin'd him home".
EUGEN1US VINDICATES THE MODERNS. 37
Si sic otnnia dixisset! n This is wit in all languages :
it is like Mercury, never to be lost or killed : and
so that other
For beauty, like white powder, makes no noise,
And yet the silent hypocrite destroys". 5
You see, the last line is highly metaphorical, but
it is so soft and gentle, that it does not shock us as
we read it.
' But, to return from whence I have digressed, to
the consideration of the ancients' writing, and their 10
wit; (of which by this time you will grant us in
some measure to be fit judges.) Though I see many
excellent thoughts in Seneca, yet he of them who
had a genius most proper for the stage, was Ovid ;
he had a way of writing so fit to stir up a pleasing 15 \
admiration and concernment, which are the objects
of a tragedy, and to shew the various movements of
a soul combating betwixt two different passions, that, V
had he lived in our age, or in his own could have
writ with our advantages, no man but must have 20
yielded to him ; and therefore I am confident the
Medea is none of his : for, though I esteem it for
the gravity and sententiousness of it, which he him
self concludes to be suitable to a tragedy, Omne
genus scripti gravitate tragcedia vincit^, yet it moves 25
not .my soul enough to judge that he, who in the
epick way wrote things so near the drama as the
story of Myrrha, of Caunus and Biblis, and the rest,
should stir up no more concernment where he most
endeavoured it n . The master-piece of Seneca I hold 30
to be that scene in the Troades, where Ulysses is
seeking for Astyanax to kill him : there you see the
38 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
tenderness of a mother so represented in Andromache
that it raises compassion to a high degree in the
reader, and bears the nearest resemblance of any
thing in the tragedies of the ancients l to the excellent
5 jscenes of passion in Shakspeare, or in Fletcher : for
\ love-scenes, you will find few among them ; their
I tragick poets dealt not with that soft passion, but
with lust, cruelty, revenge, ambition, and those bloody
< actions they produced; which were more capable
10 of raising horrour than compassion in an audience :
leaving love untouched, whose gentleness would have
tempered them ; which is the most frequent of all the
passions, and which, being the private concernment
of every person, is soothed by viewing its own image
15 in a publick entertainment.
' Among their comedies, we find a scene or two of '
tenderness, and that where you would least expect it,
in Plautus ; but to speak generally, their 16vers say
little, when they see each other, but am'ma mea, vita
20 mea ; z<*>rj Kal ty\>xn n , as the women in Juvenal's time
used to cry out in the fury of their kindness 2 . Any
sudden gust of passion (as an extasy of love in an
unexpected meeting) cannot better be expressed than
\in a word and a sigh, breaking one another. Nature
25\is dumb on such occasions ; and to make her speak,
'would be to represent her unlike herself. But there
are a thousand other concernments of lovers, as
jealousies, complaints, contrivances, and the like,
where not to open their minds at large to each other,
3 were to be wanting to their own love, and to the ex-
1 their tragedies, A.
2 kindness : then indeed to speak sense were an offence, A.
REPLY OF CRITES. 39
pectation of the audience ; who watch the movements
of their minds, as much as the changes of their for
tunes. For the imaging of the first is properly the work
of a poet ; the latter he borrows from l the historian/
Eugenius was proceeding in that part of his dis- 5
course, when Crites interrupted him. 'I see/ said
he, ' Eugenius and I are never* like to have this
question decided betwixt us; for he maintains, the
moderns have acquired a new perfection in, writing;
I can only grant they have altered the mode of it. 10
Homer described his heroes men of great appetites,
lovers of beef broiled upon the coals, and good
fellows; contrary to the practice of the French
Romances, whose heroes neither eat, nor drink, nor
sleep, for love. Virgil makes ^Eneas a bold avower 15
of his own virtues :
Sum plus sEneas, fama super (zthera notus n ;
which, in the civility of our po.ets is the character of
a fanfaron or Hector : for with us the knight takes
occasion to walk out, or sleep, to avoid the vanity of 20
telling his own story, which the trusty 'squire is ever
to perform for him. So in their love-scenes, of
which Eugenius spoke last, the ancients were more
hearty, we more talkative : they writ love as it was
then the mode to make it; and I will grant thus much 25
to Eugenius, that perhaps one of their poets, had he
lived in our age, si foret hoc nostrum fato delapsus in
cevum n , (as Horace says of Lucilius,) he had altered \ >>
many things; not that they were not natural 2 before,
but that he might accommodate himself to the age in 30
which he lived 3 . Yet in the mean time, we are not to
1 of, A. a as natural, A. 8 age he liv'd in, A.
40 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
conclude any thing rashly against those great men,
but preserve to them the dignity of masters, and give
that honour to their memories, quos Libitina sacravit",
part of which we expect may be paid to us in future
5 times/
This moderation of Crites, as it was pleasing to all
the company, so it ft ut an end to that dispute ; which
Eugenius, who seemed to have the better of the argu
ment, would urge no farther : but Lisideius, after he
10 had acknowledged himself of Eugenius his opinion
concerning the ancients, yet told him, he had for
borne, till his discourse were ended, to ask him why
he preferred the English plays above those of other
nations ? and whether we ought not to submit our
15 stage to the exactness of our next neighbours ?
' Though/ said Eugenius, ' I am at all times ready
to defend the honour of my country against the
French, and to maintain, we are as well able to van
quish them with our pens, as our ancestors have been
20 with their swords ; yet, if you please/ added he,
looking upon Neander, ' I will commit this cause to
my friend's management ; his opinion of our plays is
the same with mine : and besides, there is no reason,
that Crites and I, who have now left the stage, should
25 re-enter so suddenly upon it ; which is against the
laws of comedy/
' If the question had been stated/ replied Lisideius,
'who had writ best, the French or English, forty
years ago, I should have been of your opinion, and
30 adjudged the honour to our own nation ; but since
that time/ (said he, turning towards Neander,) 'we
have been so long together bad Englishmen, that we
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 41
had not leisure to be good poets. Beaumont, Fletcher,
and Johnson, (who were only capable of bringing us
to that degree of perfection which we have,) were just
then leaving the world ; as if in an age of so much
horrour, wit, and those milder studies of humanity, 5
had no farther business among us. But the Muses,
who ever follow peace, went to plant in another
country : it was then, that the great Cardinal of
Richelieu began to take them into his protection ;
and that, by his encouragement, Corneille 11 , and some 10
other Frenchmen, reformed their theatre, (which
before was as much below ours, as it now surpasses
it and the rest of Europe). But because Crites in his
discourse for the ancients has prevented me, by ob
serving 1 many rules of the stage which the moderns 15
have borrowed from them, I shall only, in short,
demand of you, whether you are not convinced that
of all nations the French have best observed them ?
In the unity of time you find them so scrupulous,
that it yet remains a dispute among their poets, 20
whether the artificial day of twelve hours, more or less,
be not meant by Aristotle 11 , rather than the natural
one of twenty-four ; and consequently, whether all
plays ought not to be reduced into that compass.
This I can testify, that in all their dramas writ within 25
these last twenty years and upwards, I have not ob
served any that have extended the time to thirty
hours : in the unity of place they are full as scrupul
ous ; for many of their criticks limit it to that very
spot of ground where the play is supposed to begin ; 30
none of them exceed the compass of the same town
1 touching upon, A.
43 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
or city. The unity of action in all plays is yet more
conspicuous ; for they do not burden them with under
plots, as the English do : which is the reason why
many scenes of our tragi-comedies carry on a design
5 that is nothing of kin to the main plot ; and that we
see two distinct webs in a play, like those in ill-
wrought stuffs ; and two actions, that is, two plays,
carried on together, to the confounding of the
audience ; who, before 'they are warm in their con-
10 cernments for one part, are diverted to another ; and
by that means espouse the interest of neither. From
hence likewise it arises, that the one half of our actors
are not known to the other. They keep their dis
tances, as if they were Mountagues and Capulets, and
4 15 seldom begin an acquaintance till the last scene of the
l^ fifth act, when they are all to meet upon the stage.
There is no theatre in the world has any thing so
* absurd as the English tragi-comedy ; 'tis a drama of
our own invention n , and the fashion of it is enough to
20 proclaim it so ; here a course of mirth, there another
of sadness and passion, and a third of honour and a
duel l : thus, in two hours and a half, we run through
all the fits of Bedlam. The French affords you as
much variety on the same day, but they do it not so
25 unseasonably, or ma! a propos, as we : our poets pre
sent you the play and the farce together ; and our
stages still retain somewhat of the original civility of
the Red Bull :
Atque ursum et pugihs media inter carmina poscunt*.
30 The end of tragedies or serious plays, says Aristotle,
is to beget admiration, compassion or concernment 11 ;
1 a third of Honour, and fourth a Duel, A.
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 43
but are not mirth and compassion things incompatible?
and is it not evident that the poet must of necessity
destroy the former by intermingling of the latter?
that is, he must ruin the sole end and object of his
tragedy, to introduce somewhat that is forced into it 1 , 5
and is not of the body of it. Would you not think
that physician mad, who, having prescribed a purge,
should immediately order you to take restringents 2 ?
' But to leave our plays, and return to theirs. I
have noted one great advantage they have had in the 10
plotting of their tragedies ; that is, they are always
grounded upon some known history: according to
that of Horace, Ex noto fictum carmen sequar n ; and
in that they have so imitated the ancients, that they
have surpassed them. For the ancients, as was ob- 15
served before, took for the foundation of their plays
some poetical fiction, such as under that consideration
could move but little concernment in the audience,
because they already knew the event of it. But the
French goes farther : 20
Atque if a mentitur, sic veris falsa remiscet,
Primo nt medium, media ne discrepet imum v .
He so interweaves truth with probable fiction, that "
he puts a pleasing fallacy upon us; mends the in-j
trigues of fate, and dispenses with the severity ofps
history, to reward that virtue which has been ren
dered to us there unfortunate. Sometimes the story *
has left the success n so doubtful, that the writer is
free, by the privilege of a poet, to take that which of
two or more relations will best suit with his design : 30
as for example, in 8 the death of Cyrus, whom Justin r
1 forced in, A. 3 restringents upon it, A. 3 A om.
44 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
and some others report to have perished in the Scy
thian war, but Xenophon affirms to have died in his
bed of extreme old age n . Nay more, when the event
is past dispute, even then we are willing to be de-
5 ceived, and the poet, if he contrives it with appear
ance of truth, has all the audience of his party ; at
least during the time his play is acting : so naturally we
are kind to virtue, when our own interest is not in ques
tion, that we take it up as the general concernment
10 of mankind. On the other side, if you consider the
\ historical plays of Shakspeare, they are rather so
many chronicles of kings, or the business many times
of thirty or forty years, cramped into a representation
of two hours and an half; which is not to imitate or
15 paint nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to
take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong
end of a perspective, and receive her images not only
much less, but infinitely more imperfect than the life:
this, instead of making a play delightful, renders it
20 ridiculous :
Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic, incredulus odi ".
For the spirit of man cannot be satisfied but with
truth, or at least verisimility ; and a poem is to con
tain, if not TO. eTvpa, yet eTvpoia-iv 6/xoIa ; as one of the
25 Greek poets has expressed it n .
' Another thing in which the French differ from us
and from the Spaniards, is, that they do not embarrass,
or cumber themselves with too much plot ; they only
represent so much of a story as will constitute one
30 whole and great action sufficient for a play ; we, who
undertake more, do but multiply adventures ; which,
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 45
not being produced from one another, as effects from
causes, but barely following, constitute many actions
in the drama, and consequently make it many plays.
'But by pursuing closely 1 one argument, which is
not cloyed with many turns, the French have gained 5
more liberty for verse, in which they write ; they have
leisure to dwell on a subject which deserves it ; and
to represent the passions, (which we have acknow
ledged to be the poet's work,) without being hurried
from one thing to another, as we are in the plays ic
of Calderon, which we have seen lately upon our
theatres, under the name of Spanish plots n . I have
taken notice but of one tragedy of ours, whose plot
has that uniformity and unity of design in it, which
I have commended in the French ; and that is Rollo n , it
or rather, under the name of Rollo. the Story of
Bassianus and Geta in Herodian : there indeed the
plot is neither large nor intricate, but just enough
to fill the minds of the audience, not to cloy them.
Besides, you see it founded upon the truth of history, ao
only the time of the action is not reduceable to the
strictness of the rules ; and you see in some places a
little farce mingled, which is below the dignity of the
other parts ; and in this all our poets are extremely
peccant : even Ben Johnson himself, in Sejanus and 25
Catiline, has given us this oleo 11 of a play, this un
natural mixture of comedy and tragedy ; which to me
sounds just as ridiculously as the history of David
with the merry 'humours of Golia's 2 . In Sejanus you
may take notice of the scene betwixt Livia and the 3
physician, which is a pleasant satire upon the artificial
1 close, A. a Goliah's, C.
46 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
helps of beauty : in Catiline you may see the parlia
ment of women ; the little envies of them to one
another; and all that passes betwixt Curio and Fulvia:
scenes admirable in their kind, but of an ill mingle
5 with the rest.
' But I return again to the French writers, who, as
I have said, do not burden themselves too much with
plot, which has been reproached to them by an in
genious person of our nation as a fault ; for, he says,
10 they commonly make but one person considerable in
a play; they dwell on him, and his concernments,
while the rest of the persons are only subservient to
set him off. If he intends this by it, that there is
one person in the play who is of greater dignity than
15 the rest, he must tax, not only theirs, but those of the
ancients, and which he would be loth to do, the best
of ours ; for it is impossible but that one person must
be more conspicuous in it than any other, and conse
quently the greatest share in the action must devolve
20 on him. We see it so in the management of all
affairs; even in the most equal aristocracy, the balance
cannot be so justly poised, but some one will be
superiour to the rest, either in parts, fortune, interest,
or the consideration of some glorious exploit ; which
25 will reduce the greatest part of business into his
hands.
'But, if he would have us to imagine, that in
exalting one character the rest of them are neglected,
and that all of them have not some share or other in
30 the action of the play, I desire him to produce any of
Corneille's tragedies, wherein every person, like so
many servants in a well-governed family, has not some
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 47
employment, and who is not necessary to the carrying
on of the plot, or at least to your understanding it.
' There are indeed some protatick n persons in the
ancients, whom they make use of in their plays, either
to hear or give the relation : but the French avoid 5
this with great address, making their narrations only
to, or by such, who are some way interessed n in the
main design. And now I am speaking of relations, I
cannot take a fitter opportunity to add this in favour
of the French, that they often use them with better 10
judgment and more a propos than the English do.
Not that I commend narrations in general, but there
are two sorts of them. One, of those things which
are antecedent to the play, and are related to make
the conduct of it more clear to us. But 'tis a fault to 15
choose such subjects for the stage as will force us on
that rock, because we see they are seldom listened to
by the audience, and that is many times the ruin of
the play; for, being once let pass without attention,
the audience can never recover themselves to under- 20
stand the plot : and indeed it is somewhat unreasonable
that they should be put to so much trouble, as that, to
comprehend what passes in their sight, they must
have recourse to what was done, perhaps, ten or
twenty years ago n . 25
' But there is another sort of relations, that is, of
things happening in the action of the play, and sup
posed to be done behind the scenes'; and this is many
times both convenient and beautiful ; for by it the
French avoid the tumult to which we are subject l 3
in England, by representing duels, battles, and the
1 which we are subject to, A.
48 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
like; which renders our stage too like the theatres
j where they fight prizes". For what is more ridiculous
[than to represent an army with a drum and five men
Behind it n ; all which the hero of the other side is
5 to drive in before him ; or to see a duel fought, and
one slain with two or three thrusts of the foils, which
we know are so blunted, that we might give a man an
hour to kill another in good earnest with them.
. 'I have observed that in all our tragedies, the
id audience cannot forbear laughing when the actors are
[to die ; it is the most comick part of the whole play.
All passions may be lively represented on the stage,
if to the well-writing of them the actor supplies a good
commanded voice, and limbs that move easily, and
15 without stiffness ; but there are many actions which
can never be imitated to a just height : dying espe
cially is a thing which none but a Roman gladiator
could naturally perform on the stage, when he did not
imitate or represent, but do it 1 ; and therefore it is
20 better to omit the representation of it.
'The words of a good writer, which describe it
lively, will make a deeper impression of belief in us
than all the actor can insinuate into us 2 n , when he
seems to fall dead before us ; as a poet in the descrip-
25 tion of a beautiful garden, or a meadow, will please our
imagination more than the place itself can please our
A j sight. When we see death represented, we are con-
I vinced it is but fiction ; but when we hear it related,
our eyes, the strongest witnesses, are wanting, which
30 might have undeceived us ; and we are all willing to
favour the sleight, when the poet does not too grossly
1 naturally do it, A. 2 perswade us to, A.
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 49
impose on us. They therefore who imagine these
relations would make no concernment in the audience,
are deceived, by confounding them with the other,
which are of things antecedent to the play : those are
made often in cold blood, as I may say, to the audience ; 5
but these are warmed with our concernments, which
were before awakened in the play. What the philo
sophers say of motion, that, when it is once begun, it
continues of itself, and will do so to eternity, without
some stop put to it, is clearly true on this occasion : 10
the soul, being already moved with the characters and
fortunes of those imaginary persons, continues going
of its own apcord ; and we are no more weary to hear
what becomes of them when they are not on the stage,
than we are- to listen to the news of an absent mistress. 15
But it is objected, that if one part of the play may be
related, then why not all ? I answer, some parts of
the action are more fit to be represented, some to be
related. Corneille says judiciously n , that the poet is
not obliged to expose to view all particular actions 20
which conduce to the principal : he ought to select
such of them to be seen, which will appear with the
greatest beauty, either by the magnificence of the
show, or the vehemence of passions which they pro
duce, or some other charm which they have in them ; 25
and let the rest arrive to the audience by narration.
'Tis a great mistake in us to believe the French
present no part of the action on the stage; every
alteration or crossing of a design, every new-sprung
passion, and turn of it, is a part of the action, and 30
much the noblest, except we conceive nothing to be
action till the players come 1 to blows ; as if the painting
1 they come, A
E
50 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
' of the hero's mind were not more properly the poet's
work than the strength of his body. Nor does this
anything contradict the opinion of Horace, where he
tells us,
5 Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem,
Quam qua stint oculis subjecta fide[ibus.
For he says immediately after,
Non tamen intus
Digna geri promes in scenam ; multaq ; tolles
IO Ex ocTtlis, qua: mox narret facundia prasens.
Among which many he recounts some :
Nee pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,
Aut in avem Progne mutetur, Cadmus in angtiem* ; &V.
That is, those actions which by reason of their cruelty
15 will cause aversion in us, or by reason of their im
possibility, unbelief, ought either wholly to be avoided
by a poet, or only delivered by narration. To which
we may have leave to add, such as, to avoid tumult,
(as was before hinted,) or to reduce the plot into
20 a more reasonable compass of time, or for defect of
beauty in them, are rather to be related than presented
to the eye. Examples of all these kinds are frequent,
not only among all the ancients, but in the best re
ceived of our English poets. We find Ben Johnson
25 using them in his Magnetick Lady", where one comes
out from dinner, and relates the quarrels and dis
orders of it, to save the undecent appearance of them
on the stage, and to abbreviate the story; and this
in express imitation of Terence, who had done the
LISIDEIUS PRAISES THE FRENCH STAGE. 51
same before him in his Eunuch, where Pythias makes
the like relation of what had happened within at the
Soldiers ' entertainment. The relations likewise of
Sej anus's death, and the prodigies before it, are
remarkable ; the one of which was hid from sight, 5
to avoid the horrour and tumult of the representa
tion; the other, to shun the introducing of things
impossible to be believed. In that excellent play,
The King and no King*, Fletcher goes yet farther;
for the whole unravelling of the plot is done by 10
narration in the fifth act, after the manner of the
ancients; and it moves great concernment in the
audience, though it be only a relation of what was
done many years before the play. I could multiply
other instances, but these are sufficient to prove that 15
there is no errour in choosing a subject which re
quires this sonfc of narrations ; in the ill management 2
of them, there may.
' But I find I have been too long in this discourse,
since the French have many other excellencies not 20
common to us ; as that you never see any of their
plays end with a conversion, or simple change of
will n , which is the ordinary way which our poets
use to end theirs. It shews little art in the con
clusion of a dramatick poem, when they who have 25
hindered the felicity during the four acts, desist from
it in the fifth, without some powerful cause to take
them off their design 3 ; and though I deny not but
'such reasons may be found, yet it is a path that is
cautiously to be trod, and the poet is to be sure he 30
convinces the audience that the motive is strong
1 Souldiers, A 2 managing, A 3 A om. their design.
2
52 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
enough. As for example, the conversion of the
Usurer in The Scornful Lady, seems to me a little
forced ; for, being an Usurer, which implies a lover
of money to the highest degree of covetousness,
5 and such the poet has represented him, the account
he gives for the sudden change is, that he has been
duped by the wild young fellow; which in reason
might render him more wary another time, and make
him punish himself with harder fare and coarser
10 clothes, to get up again what he had lost a : but that
he should look on it as a judgment, and so repent, we
may expect to hear 2 in a sermon, but I should never
endure it in a play.
'I pass by this; neither will I insist on the care
15 they take, that no person after his first entrance shall
ever appear, but the business which brings him upon
the stage shall be evident ; which rule 3 , if observed,
must needs render all the events in the play more
natural ; for there you see the probability of every
20 accident, in the cause that produced it ; and that
which appears chance in the play, will seem so
reasonable to you, that you will there find it almost
necessary : so that in the exit of the actor 4 you have
a clear account of his 5 purpose and design in the next
25 entrance ; (though, if the scene be well wrought, the
event will commonly deceive you ;) for there is no
thing so absurd, says Corneille, as for an actor to
leave the stage, only because he has no more to say n .
' I should now speak of the beauty of their rhyme,
30 and the just reason I have to prefer that way of
1 to get it up again, A. 2 hear of, A. 3 A om. rule,
4 exits of the Actors, A. 5 their, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 53
writing in tragedies before ours in blank verse ; but
because it is partly received by us, and therefore not
altogether peculiar to them, I will say no more of it
in relation to their plays. For our own, I doubt not
but it will exceedingly beautify them ; and I can see 5
but one reason why it should not generally obtain,
that is, because our poets write so ill in it. This
indeed may prove a more prevailing argument than
all others which are used to destroy it, and therefore
I am only troubled when great and judicious poets, 10
and those who are acknowledged such, have writ
or spoke against it : as for others, they are to be an
swered by that one sentence of an ancient author :
Sed ut primo ad consequendos eos quos priores ducimus,
accendimur, ita ubi aut prceteriri, aut cequari eos posse 15
desperavimus, studium cum spe senescit : quod, scilicet,
assequi non potest, sequi desinit ; . . . prceteritoque eo in
quo eminere non possumus, aliquid in quo nitamur,
conquirimus V
Lisideius concluded in this manner ; and Neander,
after a little pause, thus answered him :
'I shall grant Lisideius, without much dispute,
a great part of what he has urged against us ; for
I acknowledge that the French contrive their plots
more regularly, and observe the laws of comedy, and 25
decorum of the stage, (to speak generally,) with more
exactness than the English. Farther, I deny not
but he has taxed us justly in some irregularities of
'ours, which he has mentioned; yet, after all, I am
of opinion that neither our faults nor their virtues 3
are considerable enough to place them above us.
1 For the lively imitation of nature being in the
54 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
definition of a play, those which best fulfil that law
ought to be esteemed superior to the others. J Tis
true, those beauties of the French _ poesy are such
as will raise perfection higher where it is, but are
5 not sufficient to give it where it is not : they are
indeed the beauties of a statue, but not of a man,
because not animated with the soul of poesy, which
is imitation of humour and passions : and this Lisi-
deius himself, or any other, however biassed to their
10 party, cannot but acknowledge, if he will either com
pare the humours of our comedies, or the characters
of our serious plays, with theirs. He who l will look
upon theirs which have been written till these last
ten years, or thereabouts, will find it an hard matter
15 to pick out two or three passable humours amongst
them. Corneille himself, their arch-poet, what has
he produced except The Liar li , and you know how
it was cried up in France; but when it came upon
the English stage, though well translated, and that
20 part of Dorant acted to so much advantage 2 as I am
confident it never received in its own country, the
most favourable to it would not put it 3 in competition
with many of Fletcher's or Ben Johnson's n . In the
rest of Corneille's comedies you have little humour ;
25 he tells you himself, his way is, first to shew two
lovers in good intelligence with each other; in the
working up of the play to embroil them by some
mistake, and in the latter end to clear it, and reconcile
them 4 .
30 ' But of late years Moliere 5 , the younger Corneille,
1 He that, A. 2 A adds>by Mr. Hart.' 3 A om. it.
* to clear it up, A. 5 de Moliere, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 55
Quinault, and some others, have been imitating afar
off 1 the quick turns and graces of the English stage.
They have mixed their serious plays with mirth,
like our tragicomedies, since the death of Cardinal
Richelieu n ; which Lisideius and many others not 5
observing, have commended that in them for a virtue
which they themselves no longer practise. Most of
their new plays are, like some of ours, derived from
the Spanish novels n . There is scarce one of them
without a veil, and a trusty Diego, who drolls much 10
after the rate of The Adventures n . But their humours,
if I may grace them with that name, are so thin-sown,
that never above one of them comes up in any play.
I dare take upon me to find more variety of them
in some one play of Ben Johnson's, than in all theirs 15
together; as he who has seen The Alchemist, The
Silent Woman, or Bartholomew -Fair, cannot but ac-
'knowledge with me.
> ' I grant the French have performed what was
possible on the ground-work of the Spanish plays ; 20
what was pleasant before, they have made regular :
but there is not above one good play to be writ on
all those plots ; they are too much alike to please
often ; which we need not the experience of our own
stage to justify. As for their new way of mingling 25
mirth with serious plot, I do not, with Lisideius, con
demn the thing, though I cannot approve their manner
of doing it. He tells us, we cannot so speedily re-
collect ourselves after a scene of great passion and
concernment, as to pass to another of mirth and 30
humour, and to enjoy it with any relish : but why
1 of afar off, A.
56 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
should he imagine the soul of man more heavy than
his senses ? Does not the eye pass from an unplea
sant object to a pleasant in a much shorter time than
is required to this ? and does not the unpleasantness
5 of the first commend the beauty of the latter ? The
old rule of logick n might have convinced him, that
contraries, when placed near, set off each other. A
continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent ; we
must refresh it sometimes, as we bait in a journey,
10 that we may go on with greater ease. A scene of
mirth, mixed with tragedy, has the same effect upon
us which our musick has betwixt the acts ; which we
find l a relief to us from the best plots and language
of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I
15 must therefoe_have stronger arguments, ere I am
convinced" that compassion and mirth in the same
subject destroy each other; and in the mean time
cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that
we have invented, increased, and perfected a more
pleasant way of writing for the stage, than was ever
known to the ancients or moderns of any nation,
which is tragi-comedy.
' And this leads me to wonder why Lisideius and
many others should cry up the barrenness of the
25 French plots, above the variety and copiousness of
the English. Their plots are single ; they carry on
one design, which is pushed forward by all the actors,
every scene in the play contributing and moving to
wards it. Our plays 2 , besides the main design, have
30 under-plots or by-concernments, of less considerable
persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the
1 and that we find, A. * Ours, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 57
motion of the main plot : as l they say the orb of the
fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have
motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion
of the primum mobile, in which they are contained n .
That similitude expresses much of the English stage; 5
for if contrary motions may be found in nature to
agree ; if a planet can go east and west at the same
time ; one way by virtue of his own motion, the
other by the force of the first mover ; it will not be
difficult to imagine how the under-plot, which is only 10
different, not contrary to the great design, may natur
ally be conducted along with it.
' Eugenius has already shewn us, from the confes
sion of the French poets, that the unity of action is
sufficiently preserved, if all the imperfect actions of 15
the play are conducing to the main design ; but when
those petty intrigues of a play are so ill ordered,
that they have no coherence with the other, I must
grant that Lisideius has reason to tax that want of
due connexion ; for co-ordination in a play is as dan- 20
gerous and unnatural as in a state. In the mean time
he must acknowledge, our variety, if well ordered,
will afford a greater pleasure to the audience.
'As for his other argument, that by pursuing one
single theme they gain an advantage to express and 25
work up the passions, I wish any example he could
bring from them would make it good ; for I confess
their verses are to me the coldest I have ever read.
Neither, indeed, is it possible for them, in the way
they take, so to express passion, as that the effects 3
of it should appear in the concernment of an audience,
1 just as, A.
58 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
their speeches being so many declamations, which
tire us with the length ; so that instead of persuading
us to grieve for their imaginary heroes, we are con
cerned for our own trouble, as we are in tedious 1
5 visits of bad company ; we are in pain till they are
gone. When the French stage came to be reformed
by Cardinal Richelieu, those long harangues were
introduced to comply with the gravity of a churchman.
Look upon the Cinna and the Pompey; they are not
10 so properly to be called plays, as long discourses of
reason of state ; and Polyeucte in matters of religion
is as solemn as the long stops upon our organs".
Since that time it is grown into a custom, and their
actors speak by the hour-glass, like our parsons 2 ;*
15 nay, they account it the grace of their parts, and
think themselves disparaged by the poet, if they may
not twice or thrice in a play entertain the audience
with a speech of an hundred lines 3 . I deny not but
this may suit well enough with the French ; for as
20 we, who are a more sullen people, come to be
) diverted at our plays, so they, who are of an airy
^ and gay temper, come thither to make themselves
L more serious : and this I conceive to be one reason
why comedies are 4 more pleasing to us, and tragedies
25 to them. But to speak generally : it cannot be denied
that short speeches and replies are more apt to move
the passions and beget concernment in us, than the
* Formerly an hour-glass ' was fixed on the pulpit in all our
churches. (Malone.)
1 the tedious, A. 2 as our Parsons do, A.
8 an hundred or two hundred lines, A.
* so C ; Comedy's are, B ; Comedy is, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 59
other; for it is unnatural for any one in a gust of
passion to speak long together, or for another in the
same condition to suffer him, without interruption.
Grief and passion are like floods raised in little
brooks by a sudden rain ; they are quickly up ; and 5
if the concernment be poured unexpectedly in upon
us, it overflows us : but a long sober shower gives
them leisure to run out as they came in, without
troubling the ordinary current. As for comedy, re
partee is one of its cjiiefest graces ; the greatest 10
pleasure of the audience .is* a chace of wit n , kept up
on both sides, and swiftly managed. And this our
forefathers, i*w>t we, have had in Fletcher's plays,
to a much higher degree of perfection than the
French poets can reasonably hope to reach *. 15
' There is another part of Lisideius his discourse,
in which he has rather excused our neighbours, than
commended them ; that is, for aiming only to make
one person considerable in their plays. 'Tis very
true what he has urged, that one character in all 20
plays, even without the poet's care, will have ad
vantage of all the others ; and that the design of the
whole drama will chiefly depend on it. But this
hinders not that there may be more shining characters
in the play : many persons of a second magnitude, 25
nay, some so very near, so almost equal to the first,
that greatness may be opposed to greatness, and all
the persons be made considerable, not only by their
quality, but their action. Tis evident that the more
the persons are, the greater will be the variety of the 30
plot. If then the parts are managed so regularly,
1 can arrive at, A.
60 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that
the variety become not a perplexed and confused
mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing
to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see
Csome of your way before you, yet discern not the
end till you arrive at it. And that all this is prac
ticable, I can produce for examples many of our
English plays : as The Maid's Tragedy, The Alchemist,
The Silent Woman : I was going to have named The
i Fox n , but that the unity of design seems not exactly
observed in it; for there appear 1 two actions in the
play; the first naturally ending with the fourth act;
the second forced from it in the fifth : which yet is
the less to be condemned in him, because the dis-
15 guise of Volpone, though it suited not with his
character as a crafty or covetous person, agreed well
enough with that of a voluptuary ; and by it the poet
gained the end at which he aym'd 2 , the punishment
of vice, and the reward of virtue, both 3 which that
20 disguise produced. So that to judge equally of it,
it was an excellent fifth actTHBut not so naturally
proceeding from the former.
But to leave this, and pass to the latter part of
Lisideius his discourse, which concerns relations:
25 I must acknowledge with him, that the French have
reason to hide 4 that j)art of the^ action which, would
occasion too much tumult on the stage, and to choose 5
rather to have it made known by narration to the
audience. Farther, I think it very convenient, for
30 the reasons he has given, that all incredible actions
1 appears, A. 2 the end lie aym'd at, A. 3 A om. both.
* when they hide, A. 5 and choose, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 6 1
were removed; but, whether custom has so insinu
ated itself into our countrymen, or nature has so
formed them to fierceness, I know not ; but they will
scarcely suffer combats and other objects of horrour
to be taken from them. And indeed, the indecency 5
of tumults is all which can be objected against
fighting : for why may not our imagination as well i rf
suffer itself to be deluded with the probability of it, I /
as with any other thing in the play ? For my part,
I can with as great ease persuade myself that the i
blows 1 arc given in good earnest, as I can, that they
who strike them are kings or princes, or those persons
which they represent. For objects of incredibility,
I would be satisfied' from Lisideius, whether we have
any so removed from all appearance of truth, as are 15
those of Corneille's Andromede^\ a play which has
been frequented the most of any he has writ. If
the Perseus, or the son of an heathen god, the
Pegasus, and the Monster, were not capable to choke
a strong belief, let him blame any representation of 20
ours hereafter. Those indeed were objects of de
light ; yet the reason is the same as to the probability:
for he makes it not a Ballette 2 $
which is to resemble truth. But for-uieatk^that it
ought not to be represented, I have,, besides the 25
arguments alledged by Lisideius, the authority of
Ben Johnson, who has forborn it in his tragedies;
for both the death of Sejanus and Catiline are re
lated : though in the latter I cannot but observe one
irregularity of that great poet ; he has removed the 30
scene in the same act from Rome to Catiline's army,
1 the blowes which are struck, A. 2 Balette, C.
and from thence again to Rome; and besides, has
allowed a very inconsiderable time, after Catiline's
speech, for the striking of the battle, and the return
of Petreius, who is to relate the event of it to the
5 senate : which I should not animadvert on him, who
was otherwise a painful observer of irpenov, or the
decorum of the stage, if he had not used extreme
severity in his judgment on the incomparable
Shakspeare for the same fault n . To conclude on
10 this subject of relations ; if we are to be blamed for
shewing too much of the action, the~"Frencli are as
faulty for discovering too little of it : a mean betwixt
both should be observed by every judicious; "writer,
so as the audience may neither be left unsatisfied by
i5~hot seeing what is beautiful, or shocked by beholding
what is either incredible or undecent.
''I hope I have already proved in this discourse,
that though we are not altogether so punctual as the
French, in observing the laws of comedy, yet our
20 errours are so few, and little, and those things
wherein we excel them so considerable, that we
ought of right to be preferred before them. But
what will Lisideius say, if they themselves acknow
ledge they are too strictly bounded 1 by those laws,
25 for breaking which he has blamed the English ?
\i I will alledge Corneille's words, as I find them in
the end of his Discourse of the three Unities : II
est facile aux speculatifs d'estre sever es &c. "'Tis
easy for speculative persons to judge severely; but
jo if they would produce to publick view ten or twelve
pieces of this nature, they would perhaps give more
1 ti'd up, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 63
latitude to the rules than I have done, when, by ex ^
perience, they had known how much we are limited 1 /
and constrained by them, and how many beauties
of the stage they banished from it." To illustrate a '
little what he has said : Bytheir servile observation"; j
o~ the. iiniiiea of time and place, and- in-tegrity of
scenes, they have brought on themselves that dearth
j)fj3lot, and narrowness of imagination, which may
be observed in all their plays. How many beautiful
accidents might naturally happen in two or three 10
days, which cannot arrive with any probability in
the compass of twenty-four hours? There is time
to be allowed also for maturity of design, which,
amongst great and prudent persons, such as are
often represented in tragedy, cannot, with any likeli- 15
hood of truth, be brought to pass at so short a warn
ing. Fajther; bjL-ty4ft^-4hemselves strictly to the
unity of place, and unbroken scenes, they are forced
malhy times to omit some beauties which cannot be.
sITewn where the act began ; but might, if the scene 20
were interrupted, and the stage cleared for the persons
to enter in another place ; and therefore the French
poets are often forced upon absurdities ; for if the
act begins in a chamber, all the persons in the play
must have some business or other to come thither, 25
or else they are not to be shewn that act ; and some
times their characters are very unfitting to appear
there : as, 'suppose it were the king's bed-chamber ;
yet the meanest man in the tragedy must come and
dispatch his business there, rather than in the lobby 30
or courtyard, (which is fitter for him,) for fear the
1 bound up, A.
64 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
stage should be cleared, and the scenes broken.
Many times they fall by it in a greater inconvenience ;
for they keep their scenes unbroken, and yet change
the place ; as in one of their newest plays n , where
5 the act begins in the street. There a gentleman is to
meet his friend ; he sees him with his man, coming
out from his father's house ; they talk together, and
the first goes out : the second, who is a lover, has
made an appointment with his mistress ; she appears
10 at the window, and then we are to imagine the scene
lies under it. This gentleman is called away, and
leaves his servant with his mistress; presently her
J father is heard from within ; the young lady is afraid
the servingman should be discovered, and thrusts him
15 into a place of safety 1 , which is supposed to be her
closet. After this, the father enters to the daughter,
and now the scene is in a house ; for he is seeking
from one room to another for this poor Philipin, or
French Diego n , who is heard from within, drolling
20 and breaking many a miserable conceit on the subject
of his sad 2 condition. In this ridiculous manner the
play goes forward 3 , the stage being never empty all
the while : so that the street, the window, the houses,
and the closet, are made to walk about, and the per-
25 sons to stand still. Now what, I beseech you, is more
easy than to write a regular French play, or more
difficult than to write an irregular English one, like
those of Fletcher, or of Shakspeare ?
' If they content themselves, as Corneille did, with
30 some flat design, which, like an ill riddle, is found
1 for ' into a place of safety,' A has ' in through a door.'
2 upon his sad, A. 3 goes on, A.
REPLY OF NEANDER. 65
out ere it be half proposed, such plots we can make
every way regular, as easily as they ; but whenever
they endeavour to rise to any quick turns and coun-
terturns of plot, as some of them have attempted,
since Corneille's plays have been less in vogue, you 5
see they write as irregularly as we, though they cover
it more speciously. Hence the reason is perspicuous,
why no French plays, when translated, have, or ever
can succeed on the English stage. For, if you con
sider the plots, our own are fuller of varietyjir the 10
writing, ours are more quick and fuller of spirit ; and
therefore 'tis a strange mistake in those who decry
the way of writing plays in verse, as if the English
therein imitated the French. We have borrowed
nothing from them ; our plots are weaved in English 15
looms: we endeavour therein to follow the variety
and greatness of characters which are derived to us
from Shakspeare and Fletcher ; the copiousness and
well-knitting of the intrigues we have from Johnson ;
and for the verse itself we have English precedents 20
of elder date than any of Corneille's plays. Not to
name our old comedies before Shakspeare, which
were all writ in verse of six feet, or Alexandrines n ,
such as the French now use, I can shew in Shak
speare, many scenes of rhyme together, and the like 25
in Ben Johnson's tragedies : in Catiline and Sejanus
sometimes thirty or forty lines, I mean besides the
Chorus, or the monologues; which, by the way,
shewed Ben no enemy to this way of writing, espe
cially if you read L his Sad Shepherd n , which goes 30
sometimes on rhyme, sometimes on blank v^erse, like
1 look upon, A.
F
66 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
an horse who eases himself on trot and amble. You
find him likewise commending Fletcher's pastoral of
The Faithful Shepherdess n , which is for the most part
rhyme, though not refined to that purity to which it hath
5 since been brought. And these examples are enough
to clear us from a servile imitation of the French.
' But to return whence ' n I have digressed : I dare
boldly affirm these two things of the English drama ;
First, that we have many plays of ours as regular
10 as any of theirs, and which, besides, have more
variety of plot and characters ; and secondly, that in
most of the irregular plays of Shakspeare or Fletcher,
(for Ben Johnson's are for the most part regular,)
there is a more masculine fancy and greater spirit in
'5 the writing, than there is in any of the French. I
could produce, even in Shakspeare's and Fletcher's
works, some plays which are almost exactly formed ;
as The Merry Wives of Windsor^, and The Scornful
Lady : but because (generally speaking) Shakspeare,
20 who writ first, did not perfectly observe the laws of
comedy, and Fletcher, who came nearer to perfection,
yet through carelessness made many faults; I will
take the pattern of a perfect play from Ben Johnson,
who was a careful and learned observer of the dra-
25 matick laws, and from all his comedies I shall select
The Silent Woman ; of which I will make a short
examen, according to those rules which the French
observe.'
As Neander was beginning to examine The Silent
30 Woman, Eugenius, earnestly regarding him 2 ; 'I
beseech you, Neander/ said he, 'gratify the company,
1 from whence, A. 2 looking earnestly upon him, A.
SHAKSPEARE. 67
and me in particular, so far, as before you speak of
the play, to give us a character of the author; and"
tell us frankly your opinion, whether you do not
think all writers, both French and English, ought to
give place to him.' 5
'I fear/ replied Neander, 'that in obeying your
commands I shall draw some envy 1 on myself.
Besides, in performing them, it will be first necessary
to speak somewhat of Shakspeare and Fletcher, his
rivals in poesy; and one of them, in my opinion, 10
at least his equal, perhaps his superior.
'To begin, then, with Shakspeare. He was the
man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets,
Had the largesj and mo^t rnmpr^Ti^ngiYe souL ATT"
thejmages of nature were still present to him, and 15
he drew them, not laboriously, but luckily ; when
he describes any thing, you more than see it, you
feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted
learning, give him the greater commendation : he
was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles 20
of books to read nature ; he looked inwards, and
found her there. I cannot say he is every where
alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare
him with the greatest of mankind. He is many
times flat, insipid ; his comick wit degenerating into 25
clenches, his seriftpg gw^lling intn hnmfrast- But
he is always great, when some great occasion is
presented to him ; no man can say he ever had a fit
subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself
as high above the rest of poets, 3
Quantum lenta solent inter viburna
1 a little envy, A.
F 3
68 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
The consideration of this made Mr. Hales 11 of Eaton
say, that there was no subject of which any poet ever
writ, but he would produce it much better done 1 in
Shakspeare; and however others are now generally
5 preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived,
which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and
Johnson, never equalled them to him in their esteem :
and in the last king's court, when Ben's reputation
was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the
10 greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakspeare far
above him.
'Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to
speak, had, with the advantage of Shakspearg's wit,
which was their precedent, great natural gift, im-
15 proved by study: Beaumont especially being so accu
rate a judge of plays, that Ben Johnson, while he
lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and,
'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting, if not
contriving, all his plots. What value he had for him,
20 appears by the verses he writ to him n ; and therefore
I need speak no farther of it. The first play that
brought Fletcher and him in esteem was their Phi-
taster* : for before that, they had written two or three
very unsuccessfully, as the like is reported of Ben
5 Johnson, before he writ Every Man in his Humour.
Their plots were generally more regular than Shak-
speare's, especially those which were made before
Beaumont's death*; and they understood and imitated
1 treated of, A.
* Sir Aston Cokain long since complained, that the booksellers
who, in 1647, published thirty- four plays under the names of
Beaumont and Fletcher, had not ascertained how many of them
were written solely by Fletcher :
&EAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 69
the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose
wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in reparties,
no poet before them could paint * as they have done.
Humour, which 2 Ben Johnson derived from particular
persons, they made it not their business to describe : 5
they represented all the passions very lively, but above
all, love. I am apt to believe the English language
in them arrived to its highest perfection : what words
have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than
ornamental 3 . Their plays n are now the most pleasant 10
and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of
theirs being acted through the year for one of Shak-
speare's or Johnson's: the reason is, because there is
a certain gaiety in their comedies, and pathos in their
more serious plays, which suits generally with all 15
men's humours. Shakspeare's language is likewise
a little obsolete, and Ben Johnson's wit comes short
of theirs.
'As for Johnson, to whose character I am now
arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself, 20
(for his last plays were but his dotages n ,) I think him
the most learned and Judicious writer which any
theatre-ever had. He was a most severe jud^e of
himself, as well as others,. One cannot say he wanted
wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works 25
'In the large book of plays you late did print,
In Beaumont's and in Fletcher's name, why in't
Did you not justice ? give to each his due ?
For Beaumont of those many writ in few ;
And Massinger in other few : the main
Being sole issues of sweet Fletcher's brain.' (MaTone.)
1 for ' before them could paint ' A has ' can ever paint.'
3 This Humour of which, A. 3 necessary, A.
70 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
you find little to retrench or alter. Wi^andjari^uage,
and humour also in some measure, we had before
him; but something of art was wanting to the drama,
till he came. He managed his strength to more
5 advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom
find him making love in any of his scenes, or en
deavouring to move the passions ; his genius was too
sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially
when he knew he came after those who had per-
10 formed both to such an height. JIumour was big-
proper sphere: ,and in that h*> flighted mr^t tn
represent mechanick people. He was deeply con-
versant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and
he borrowed boldly from them : there is scarce a poet
15 or historian among the Roman authors of those times
whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline.
But he has done his robberies so openly, that one
may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He
invades authors like a monarchj and what would be
zojheft in other poets, is only vicfnry in him. With the
spoils of these writers he so represents old Rome to
us, in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of
their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had
seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in
25 his language, 'twas that he weaved it too closely and
laboriously, in his comedies especially, 1 : perhaps too,
he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving
the words which he translated almost as much Latin
as he found them : wherein, though he learnedly fol-
30 lowed their 2 language, he did not enough comply with
1 for ' comedies especially ' A has ' serious Playes.'
2 the idiom of their, A.
BEN JONS ON. 71
the idiom of ours. If I would compare him with
Shakspeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct
poet, but Shakspeare the greater wit. Shakspeare
was the Homer, or father of bur dramatick poets;
Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate 5
writing; I admire him, but I love Shakspeare. To
conclude of him ; as he has given us the most correct
plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in
his Discoveries*, we have as many and profitable rules
for perfecting the stage, as any wherewith the French 10
can furnish us.
' Having thus spoken of the author, I proceed to
the examination of his comedy, The Silent Woman*.
EXAMEN OF THE SILENT WOMAN.
'To begin first with the Jength of the action; it 15
is so far from exceeding the compass of a natural
day, that it takes not up an artificial one. 'Tis all
included in the limits of three hours and an half,
which is no more than is required for the presentment
on the stage : a beauty perhaps not much observed ; 20
if it had, we should not have looked on the Spanish
translation of Five Hours* with so much wonder.
The scene of it is laid in London; the latitude of
place is almost as little as you can imagine; for it
lies all within the compass of two houses, and after 25
the first act, in one. The continuity of scenes is
observed more than in any of our plays, except his
own Fox and Alchemist. They are not broken above
twice or thrice at most in the whole comedy ; and in
the two best of Corneille's plays, the Cid and Cmna, 3
* See p. 5,5.
73 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
they are interrupted once 1 . The action of the play
is entirely one ; the end or aim of which is the settling
Morose's estate on Dauphine. The intrigue of it is
the greatest and most noble of any pure unmixed
5 comedy in any language ; you see in it many persons
of various characters and humours, and all delightful.
As first, Morose, or an old man, to whom all noise
but his own talking is offensive. Some who would
be thought criticks, say this humour of his is forced :
10 but to remove that objection, we may consider him
first to be naturally of a delicate hearing, as many
are, to whom all sharp sounds are unpleasant ; and
secondly, we may attribute much of it to the peevish
ness of his age, or the wayward authority of an old
15 man in his own house, where he may make himself
obeyed; and to this the poet seems to allude 2 in his
name Morose. Besides this, I am assured from divers
persons, that Ben Johnson was actually acquainted
with such a man, one altogether as ridiculous as he is
20 here represented. Others say, it is not enough to
find one man of such an humour; it must be common
to more, and the more common the more natural.
To prove this, they instance 11 in the best of, comical
characters, Falstaff. There are many men resembling
25 him; old, fat, merry, cowardly, drunken, amorous,
vain, and lying. But to convince these people, I
need but tell them, that humour is the ridiculous
extravagance of conversation, wherein one man differs
from all others. If then it be common, or communi-
30 cated to many, how differs it from other men's ? or
what indeed causes it to be ridiculous so much as the
1 once apiece, A. a this . . . seems to allude to, A.
BEN JONSON. 73
singularity of it ? As for Falstaff, he is not properly
one humour, but a miscellany of humours or images,
drawn from so many several men : that wherein he is
singular is his wit 1 , or those things he says prceter
exp'ectatum, unexpected by the audience ; his quick 5
evasions, when, you imagine him surprised, which,
as they are extremely diverting of themselves, so
receive a great addition from his person; for the
very sight of such an unwieldy old debauched fellow
is a comedy alone. And here, having a place so 10
proper for it, I cannot but enlarge somewhat upon this
subject of humour into which I am fallen. The
ancients had little of it in their comedies ; for the
TO yeXoIoi^ of the old comedy, of which Aristophanes
was chief, was not so much to imitate a man, as to 15
make the people laugh at some odd conceit, which
had commonly somewhat of unnatural or obscene in
it. Thus, when you see Socrates brought upon the
stage, you are not to imagine him made ridiculous
by the imitation of his actions, but rather by making 20
him perform something very unlike himself; some
thing so childish and absurd, as by comparing it with
the gravity of the true Socrates, makes a ridiculous
object for the spectators. In their new comedy which
succeeded, the poets sought indeed to express the 25
?]6os, as in their tragedies the wOos of mankind n . But
this rjdos contained only the general characters of men
and manners ; as old men, lovers, serving-men, cour-
tezans, parasites, and such other persons as we see
in. their comedies-; all which they made alike : that is, 30
one old man or father, one lover, one courtezan, so
1 in his wit, A.
74 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
like another, as if the first of them had begot the
of every sort : Ex honiine hunc natum dicas n . The
same custom they observed likewise in their tragedies.
As for the French, though they have the word humeur
5 among them, yet they have small use of it in their
comedies or farces ; they being but^ ill imitations of
the ridiculum, or that which stirred up laughter in the
old comedy. But among the English 'tis otherwise :
where by humour is meant some extravagant _habit,
10 passion, or affection, particular (as I said before) to
some one person, by the oddness of which, he is
immediately distinguished from the rest of men ;
which being lively and naturally represented, most
frequently begets that malicious pleasure in the
15 audience which is testified by laughter; as all things
which are deviations from customs 1 are ever the aptest
to produce it : though by the way this laughter is only
accidental, as the person represented is fantastick or
bizarre ; but pleasure is essential to it, as the imitation
20 of what is natural. The description of these humours,
drawn from the knowledge and observation of par
ticular persons, was the peculiar genius and talent of
Ben Johnson; to whose play I now return.
' Besides Morose, there are at least nine or ten dif-
25 ferent characters and humours in The Silent Woman ;
all which persons have several concernments of their
own, yet are all used by the poet, to the conducting
of the main design to perfection. I shall not waste
time in commending the writing of this play ; but I
30 will give you my opinion, that there is more wit and
acuteness of fancy in it than in any of Ben Johnson's.
1 common customes, A.
SEN JONSON. 75
Besides "that he has here described the conversation
of gentlemen in the persons of True- Wit, aji j, his
friends, with more gaiety, air, and freedom, than in
the rest of his comedies. For the contrivance of the
plot, 'tis extreme ' elaborate, and yet withal easy ; for 5
the AiW 2 , or untying of it, 'tis so admirable, that when
it is done, no one of the audience would think the
poet could have missed it ; and yet it was concealed
so much before the last scene, that any other way
would sooner have entered into your thoughts. But 10
I dare not take upon me to commend the fabrick of it,
because it is altogether so full of art, that I must un
ravel every scene in it to commend it as I ought.
And this excellent contrivance is still the more to be
admired, because 'tis comedy, where the persons are 15
only of common rank, and their business private, not
elevated by passions or high concernments, as in
serious plays. Here every one is a proper judge of
all he sees, nothing is represented but that with which
he daily converses : so that by consequence all faults 20
lie open to discovery, and few are pardonable. 'Tis
this which Horace has judiciously observed :
Creditur, ex media quid res arcessit, haber&
Sudoris minimum; sed habet Comedia tanto
Plus oneris, quanta venttz minus. n 25
But our poet who was not ignorant of these difficulties,
has made use 3 of all advantages ; as he who designs
a large leap takes his rise from the highest ground.
'One of these advantages is that which Corneille n has
laid down as the greatest which can arrive to any 30
1 so C j extream, A and B. 2 Seo-ts, A.
3 had prevailed himself, A.
7 6" OF DRAMATIC POESY.
poem, and which he himself could never compass
above thrice in all his plays ; viz. the making choice
of some signal and long-expected day, whereon the
action of the play is to depend. This day was that
5 designed by Dauphine for the settling of his uncle's
estate upon him ; which to compass, he contrives to
marry him. That the marriage had been plotted by
him long beforehand, is made evident by what he
tells True-wit in the second act, that in one moment
10 he had destroyed what he had been raising many
months.
1 There is another artifice of the poet, which I
cannot here omit, because by the frequent practice
of it in his comedies he has left it to us almost as a
15 rule ; that is, when he has any character or humour
wherein he would shew a coup de Maistre, of his
highest skill, he recommends it to your observation
by a pleasant description of it before the person first
appears. Thus, in Bartholomew- Fair ' n he gives you
20 the pictures of Numps and Cokes, and in this those
of Daw, Lafoole, Morose, and the Collegiate Ladies ;
all which you hear described before you see them.
So that before they come upon the stage, you have
a longing expectation of them, which prepares you
25 to receive them favourably ; and when they are there,
even from their first appearance you are so far ac
quainted with them, that nothing of their humour is
lost to you.
' I will observe yet one thing further of this admir-
30 able plot ; the business of it rises in every act. The
second is greater than the first ; the third than the
second ; and so forward to the fifth. There too you
ENGLISH STAGE EQUAL TO ANY OTHER. 77
see, till the very last scene, new difficulties arising to v
obstruct the action of the play; and when the audience /
is brought into despair that the business can naturally /
be effected, then, and not before, the discovery is
made. But that the poet might entertain you with 5
more variety all this while, he reserves some- new
characters to shew you, which he opens not till the
second and third act ; in the second Morose, Daw,
the Barber, and Otter; in the third the Collegiate
Ladies : all which he moves afterwards in by- walks, J0
or under-plots, as diversions to the main design, lest
it should grow tedious, though they are still naturally
joined with it, and somewhere or other subservient to
it. Thus, like a skilful chess-player 1 , by little and
little he draws out his men, and makes his pawns 15
of use to his greater persons.
'If this comedy n and some others of his, were
translated into French prose, (which would now be
no wonder to them, since Moliere has lately given
them plays out of verse, which have not displeased ao
them,) I believe the controversy would soon be de
cided betwixt the two nations, even making them
the judges. But we need not call our heroes 2 to
our aid. Be it spoken to the honour of the English,
our nation can never want in any age such who are 25
able to dispute the empire of wit with any people
in the universe. And though the fury of a civil
war, and power for twenty years together aban-
'doned to a barbarous race of men, enemies of all
good learning, had buried the muses under the 30
1 so C ; Chest-player, A and B.
9 so C ; Hero's, A and B-
ruins of monarchy; yet, with the restoration of
our happiness, we see revived poesy lifting up its
head, and already shaking off the rubbish which
lay so heavy on it. We have seen since his majesty's
5 return, many dramatick poems which yield not to
those of any foreign nation, and which deserve all
laurels but the English. I will set aside flattery and
envy: it cannot be denied but we have had some
little blemish either in the plot or writing of all those
10 plays which have been made within these seven years;
(and perhaps there is no nation in the world so quick
to discern them, or so difficult to pardon them, as
ours :) yet if we can persuade ourselves to use the
candour of that poet, who, though the most severe
5 of criticks, has left us this caution by which to
moderate our censures
ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego pauds
Offendar maculis ; n
if, in consideration of their many and great beauties,
ao we can wink at some slight and little imperfections,
if we, I say, can be thus equal to ourselves, I ask no
favour from the French. And if I do not venture
upon any particular judgment of our late plays, 'tis
out of the consideration which an ancient writer gives
25 me: vivorum, utmagna admiratio, ita censura difficilis:
betwixt the extremes of admiration and malice, 'tis
hard to judge uprightly of the living. Only I think
it may be permitted me to say, that as it is no lessen
ing to us to yield to some plays, and those not many,
30 of our own nation in the last age, so can it be no ad
dition to pronounce of our present poets, that they
CRITES ATTACKS RHYME. 79
have far surpassed all the ancients, and the modern
writers of other countries V
This was 2 the substance of what was then spoke
on that occasion ; and Lisideius, I think, was going
to reply, when he was prevented thus by Crites : ' I 5
am confident/ said he, ' that the most material things
that can be said have been already urged on either
side ; if they have not, I must beg of Lisideius that
he will defer his answer till another time : for I con
fess I have a joint quarrel to you both, because you 10
have concluded, without any reason given for it, that
rhyme is proper for the stage. I will not dispute how
ancient it hath been among us to write this way ; per
haps our ancestors knew no better till Shakspeare's
time. I will grant it was not altogether left by him, 15
and that Fletcher and Ben Johnson used it frequently
in their Pastorals, and sometimes in other plays.
Farther, I will not argue whether we received it
originally from our own countrymen, or from the
French ; for that is an inquiry of as little benefit, 20
as theirs who, in the midst of the late plague 3 , were
not so solicitous to provide against it, as to know
whether we had it from the malignity of our own
air, or by transportation from Holland. I have
therefore only to affirm, that it is not allowable in 25
serious plays ; for comedies, I find you already con
cluding with me. To prove this, I might satisfy my
self to tell you, how much in vain it is for you to
' strive against the stream of the people's inclination ;
the greatest part of which are prepossessed so much 3
1 so C ; Countreys, A and B. 2 This, my Lord, was, A.
8 the great plague, A.
80 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
with those excellent plays of Shakspeare, Fletcher,
and Ben Johnson, which have been written out of
rhyme, that except you could bring them such as
were written better in it, and those too by persons
5 of equal reputation with them, it will be impossible
for you to gain your cause with them, who will still
be judges. This it is to which, in fine, all your
reasons must submit. The unanimous consent of an
audience is so powerful, that even Julius Caesar, (as
10 Macrobius reports of him,) when he was perpetual
dictator, was not able to balance it on the other side ;
but when Laberius, a Roman Knight, at his request
contended in the Mime with another poet n , he was
forced to cry out, Etiamfavente me victus es, Laberi 1 .
15 But I will not on this occasion take the advantage of
the greater number, but only urge such reasons against
rhyme, as I find in the writings of those who have ar
gued for the other way. First then, I am of opinion,
that rhyme is unnatural in a play, because dialogue
ao there is presented as the effect of sudden thought :
for a play is the imitation of nature ; and since no
man, without premeditation speaks in rhyme, neither
ought he to do it on the stage. This hinders not but
the fancy may be there elevated to an higher" pitch of
25 thought than it is in ordinary discourse ; for there is
a probability that men of excellent and quick parts
may speak noble things extempore : but those thoughts
are never fettered with the numbers or sound of verse
without study, and therefore it cannot be but unnatural
30 to present the most free way of speaking in that which
is the most constrained. For this reason, says
1 Liberi, A.
C RITES ATTACKS RHYME. 8 1
totle n , 'tis best to write tragedy in that kind of verse
Which is the least such, or which is nearest prose :
and this amongst the ancients was the Iambick ; and
with us is blank verse, or the measure of verse kept
exactly without rhyme. These numbers therefore are 5
fittest for a play ; the others for a paper of verses, or
a poem ; blank verse being as much below them, as
rhyme is improper for the drama. And if it be ob
jected that neither are blank verse's made extempore,
yet, as nearest nature, they are still to be preferred. 10
But there are two particular exceptions, which many
besides myself have had to verse ; by which it will
appear yet more plainly how improper it is in plays.
And the first of them is grounded on that very reason
for which some have commended rhyme ; they say, 15
the quickness of repartees in argumentative scenes
receives an ornament from verse. Now what is more
unreasonable than to imagine that a man should not
only light upon the wit \ but the rhyme too, upon the
sudden? This nicking n of him who spoke before both 20
in sound and measure, is so great an happiness, that
you must at least suppose the persons of your play to
be born poets : Arcades omnes, et cantare pares, et re-
spondereparati^: they must have arrived to the degree
of quicquid conabar dicere^\ to make verses almost 25
whether they will or no. If they are any thing below
this, it will look rather like the design of two, than
the answer of one : it will appear that your actors
hold intelligence together; that they perform their
tricks like fortune-tellers, by confederacy. The hand 30
of art will be too visible in it, against that maxim
1 so A ; not only imagine the Wit, B.
G
82 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
of all professions Ars est celare artem ; that itjs the
greatest perfection of art to keep itself undiscovered.
Nor will it serve you to object, that however you
manage it, 'tis still known to be a play ; and, conse-
5 quently, the dialogue of two persons understood to
be the labour of one poet. For a play is still an
, imitation of nature; we know we are to be deceived,
and we desire to be so ; but no man ever was deceived
but with a probability of truth ; for who will suffer a
gross lie to be fastened on him ? Thus we sufficiently
understand, that the scenes which represent cities and
countries to us are not really such, but only painted
on boards and canvas; but shall that excuse the ill
painture n or designment n of them ? Nay, rather ought
15 they not to be laboured with so much the more dili
gence and exactness, to help the imagination ? since
the mind of man does naturally tend to * truth ; and
therefore the nearer any thing comes to the imitation
of it, the more it pleases.
20 ' Thus, you see, your rhyme is uncapable of ex
pressing the greatest thoughts naturally, and the
lowest it cannot with any grace : for what is more
unbefitting the majesty of verse, than to call a
servant, or bid a door be shut in rhyme? and yet
25 you are often forced on this miserable necessity 2 . But
verse, you say, circumscribes a quick and. luxuriant
fancy, which would extend itself too far on every
subject, did not the labour which is required to well-
turned and polished rhyme, set bounds to it. Yet
30 this argument, if granted, would only prove that we
1 tend to and seek after, A.
2 this nils. nee. you are forc'd upon, A.
CRITES ATTACKS RHYME. 83
may write better in verse, but not more naturally.
Neither is it able to evince that; for he who wants
judgment to confine his fancy in blank verse, may
want it as much in rhyme : and he who has it will
avoid errors in both kinds. Latin verse was as great 5
a confinement to the imagination of those poets, as
rhyme to ours; and yet you find Ovid saying too
much on every subject. Nescivit (says Seneca) quod
bene cessit relinquere n : of which he gives you one
famous instance in his description of the deluge : 10
Omnia pontus erat, deerant quoqtie litora ponto D .
Now all was sea, nor had that sea a shore.
Thus Ovid's fancy was not limited by verse, and
Virgil needed not verse to have bounded his.
' In our own language we see Ben Johnson con- 15
fining himself to what ought to be said, even in the
liberty of blank verse ; and yet Corneille, the most .
judicious of the French poets, is still varying the
same sense an hundred ways, and dwelling eternally
on the same subject, though confined by rhyme. 20
Some other exceptions I have to verse; but since
these * I have named are for the most part already
publick, I conceive it reasonable they should first be
answered/
1 It concerns me less than any/ said Neander, 25
(seeing he had ended,) 'to reply to this discourse;
because when I should have proved that verse may
be natural in plays, yet I should always be ready to
confess, that those which I have written in this kind n
come short of that perfection which is required. Yet 30
1 but being these, A.
G 2
84 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
since you are pleased I should undertake this pro
vince, I will do it, though with all imaginable respect
and deference, both to that person n from whom you
have borrowed your strongest arguments, and to
5 whose judgment, when I have said all, I finally
submit. But before I proceed to answer your ob
jections, I must first remember you, that I exclude
all comedy from my defence ; and next that I deny
not but blank verse may be also used ; and content
10 myself only to assert, that in serious plays, where the
subject and characters are great, and the plot un
mixed with mirth, which might allay or divert these
concernments which are produced, rhyme is there as
natural and more effectual than blank verse.
15 'And now having laid down this as a foundation,
to begin with Crites, I must crave leave to tell
him, that some of his arguments against rhyme reach
no farther than, from the faults or defects of ill rhyme,
to conclude against the use of it in general. May not
20 I conclude against blank verse by the same reason ?
If the words of some poets who write in it, are-either
ill chosen, or ill placed, which makes not only rhyme,
but all kind of verse in any language unnatural, shall
I, for their vicious affectation, condemn those excellent
25 lines of Fletcher, which are written in that kind? Is
there any thing in rhyme more constrained than this
line in blank verse? / heaven invoke, and strong
resistance make ; where you see both the clauses are
placed unnaturally, that is, contrary to the common
30 way of speaking, and that without the excuse of a
rhyme to cause it : yet you would think me very
ridiculous, if I should accuse the stubbornness of
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 85
blank verse for this, and not rather the stiffness of
the poet. Therefore, Crites, you must either prove
that words, though well chosen, and duly placed, yet
render not rhyme natural in itself; or that, however
natural and easy the rhyme may be, yet it is not 5
proper for a play. If you insist on the former part, I
would ask you, what other conditions are required to
make rhyme natural in itself, besides an election of
apt words, and a right disposition l of them ? For
the due choice of your words expresses your sense 10
naturally, and the due placing them adapts the rhyme
to it. If you object that one verse may be made for
the sake of another, though both the words and rhyme
be apt, I answer, it cannot possibly so fall out ; for
either there is a dependance of sense betwixt the first *5
line and the second, or there is none : if there be
that connection, then in the natural position of the
words the latter line must of necessity flow from the
former ; if there be no dependance, yet still the due
ordering of words makes the last line as natural in 20
itself as the other : so that the necessity of a rhyme
never forces any but bad or lazy writers to say what
they would not otherwise. Tis true, there is both
care and art required to write in verse. A good poet
never establishes 2 the first line, till he has sought out 25
such a rhyme as may fit the sense, already prepared
to heighten the second : many times the close of the
sense falls into the middle of the next verse, or farther
off, and he may often prevail himself n of the same
advantages in English which Virgil had in Latin, he 30
may break off in the hemystich, and begin another
1 disposing, A. a concludes upon, A.
86 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
line. Indeed, the not observing these two last things,
makes plays which are writ in verse, so tedious : for
though, most commonly, the sense is to be confined
to the couplet, yet nothing that does perpetuo tenore
sfluere, run in the same channel, can please always.
J Tis like the murmuring of a stream, which not
varying in the fall, causes at first attention, at last
drowsiness. Variety of cadences -is the best rule;
the greatest help to the actors, and refreshment to
10 the audience.
' If then verse may be made natural in itself, how
becomes it unnatural in 1 a play? You say the stage
is the representation of nature, and no man in ordi
nary conversation speaks in rhyme. But you foresaw
15 when you said this, that it might be answered neither
does any man speak in blank verse, or in measure
without rhyme. Therefore you concluded, that which
is nearest nature is still to be preferred. But you
took no notice that rhyme might be made as natural
20 as blank verse, by the well placing of the words, &c.
All the difference between them, when they are both
correct, is, the sound in one, which the other wants ;
and if so, the sweetness of it, and all the advantage
resulting from it, which are handled in the Preface to
2 5 The Rival Ladies, will yet stand good. As. for that
place of Aristotle, where he says, plays should be
writ in that kind of verse which is nearest prose, it
makes little for you ; blank verse being properly but
measured prose. Now measure alone, in any modern
30 language, does not constitute verse ; those of the
ancients in Greek and Latin consisted in quantity of
* improper to, A.
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 87
words, and a determinate number of feet. But when,
by the inundation of the Goths and Vandals into
Italy, new languages were introduced 1 , and barba
rously mingled with the Latin, of which the Italian,
Spanish, French, and ours, (made out of them and 5
the Teutonick,) are dialects, a new way of poesy was
practised; new, I say, in those countries, for in all
probability it was that of the conquerors in their own
nations : at least we are able to prove, that the eastern
people have used it from all antiquity 2 ". This new 10
way consisted in measure or number of feet, and
rhyme ; the sweetness of rhyme, and observation of
accent, supplying the place of quantity in words,
which could neither exactly be observed by those
barbarians, who knew not the rules of it, neither was 15
it suitable to their tongues, as it had been to the
Greek and Latin. No man is tied in modern poesy
to observe any farther rule in the feet ofHis verse,
but that they be dissyllables; whether Spondee,
Trochee, or lambick, it matters not ; only he is 20
obliged to rhyme: neither do the Spanish, French,
Italian, or Germans, acknowledge at all, or very rarely,
any such kind of poesy as blank verse amongst them.
Therefore, at most 'tis but a poetick prose, a sermo
pedestris ; and a*s such, most fit for comedies, where *5
I acknowledge rhyme to be improper. Farther; as
to that quotation of Aristotle, our couplet verses may
be rendered as near prose as blank' verse itself, by
using those advantages I lately named, as breaks in
an hemistich, or running the sense into another line, 30
1 brought in, A.
8 A om. at least . . . antiquity, and the note.
88 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
thereby making art and order appear as loose and free
as nature : or not tying ourselves to couplets strictly,
we may use the benefitjof tJ^JPimiaTick way, practised
in The Siege of Rhodes 11 ] where the numbers vary, and
5 the rhyme is disposed carelessly, and far from often
chyming. Neither is that' other advantage of the
ancients to be despised, of changing the kind of verse
when they please, with the change of the scene, or
some new entrance ; for they confine not themselves
10 always to iambicks, but extend their liberty to all
lyrick numbers, and sometimes even to hexameter n .
But I need not go so far to prove that rhyme, as it
succeeds to all other offices of Greek and Latin verse,
so especially to this of plays, since the custom of
15 nations 1 at this day confirms it; the French 2 , Italian, 11
and Spanish tragedies are generally writ in it ; and
sure the universal consent of the most civilized parts
of the world, ought in this, as it doth in other customs,
to 3 include the rest.
30 ' But perhaps you may tell me, I have proposed
such a way to make rhyme natural, and consequently
proper to plays, as is unpracticable ; and that I shall
scarce find six or eight lines together in any play,
where the words are so placed and chosen as is re-
25 quired to make it natural. I answer, no poet need
constrain himself at all times to it. It is enough he
makes it his general rule ; for I deny not but some
times there may be a greatness in placing the words
otherwise; and sometimes they may sound better;
30 sometimes also the variety itself is excuse enough.
But if, for the most part, the words be placed as they
1 all Nations, A. 2 all the French, &c., A. 3 A om. to.
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 89
are in the negligence of prose, it is sufficient to de
nominate the way practicable ; for we esteem that to
be such, which in the trial oftner succeeds than misses.
And thus far you may find the practice made good
in many plays : where you do not, remember still, that 5
if you cannot find six natural rhymes together, it
will be as hard for you to produce as many lines in
blank verse, even among the greatest of our poets,
against which I cannot make some reasonable ex
ception. 10
'And this, Sir, calls to my remembrance the be
ginning of your discourse, where you told us we
should never find the audience favourable to this
kind of writing, till we could produce as good plays
in rhyme, a*s Ben Johnson, Fletcher, and Shakspeare, 15
had writ out of it. But it is to raise envy to the
living, to compare them with the dead. They are
honoured, and almost adored by us, as they deserve ;
neither do I know any so presumptuous of themselves
as to contend with them. Yet give me leave to say 20
thus much, without injury to their ashs; that not
only we shall never equal them, but they could never
equal themselves, were they to rise and write again.
We acknowledge them our fathers in wit; but they
have ruined their estates themselves, before they came 25
to their children's hands. There is scarce an humour,
a character, or any kind of plot, which they have not
used l . All conies sullied or wasted to us : and were
they to entertain this age, they could not now 2 make
so plenteous treatments out of such decayed fortunes. 30
This therefore will be a good argument to us, either
1 blown upon, A- 2 A om.
90 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
not to write at all, or to attempt some other way.
There is no bays to be expected in their walks : ten-
tanda via est, qua me quoque possum tollere humo n .
This way. of writing in verse they have only left
5 free to us ; our age is arrived to a perfectlojOn it,
which they never knew ; and which (if we may guess
by what of theirs we have seen in verse, as The Faith
ful Shepherdess, and Sad Shepherd) 'tis probable they
never could have reached. For the genius of every
:o age is different ; and though ours excel in this,~T"deny
not but to imitate nature in that perfection which they
did in prose, is a greater commendation than to write
in verse exactly. As for what you have added that
the people are not generally inclined to like this way,
15 if it were true, it would be no wonder, that betwixt
the shaking off an old habit, and the introducing of a
new, there should be difficulty. Do we not see them
stick to Hopkins' and Sternhold's psalms, and forsake
those of David, I mean Sandys his translation of
20 them ? If by the people you understand the multi
tude, the ol TroXXoi, 'tis no matter what they think ; they
are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong :
their judgment is a mere lottery. Est ubi plebs recte
putat, est ubi peccat n . Horace says it of the vulgar,
25 judging poesy. But if you mean the mixed audience
of the populace and the noblesse, I dare confidently
affirm that a great part of the latter sort are already
favourable to verse ; and that no serious plays written
since the king's return have been more kindly received
30 by them, than The Siege of Rhodes, the Mustapha u ,
The Indian Queen, and Indian Emperor.
1 But I come now to the inference of your first
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 91
argument. You said that 1 the dialogue of plays is
presented as the effect of sudden thought, but no man
speaks suddenly, or extempore, in rhyme ; and you in
ferred from thence, that rhyme, which you acknowledge
to be proper to epick poesy, cannot equally be proper g
to dramatick, unless we could suppose all men born
so much more than poets, that verses should be made
in them, not by them.
t It has been formerly urged by you, and confessed
by me, that since no man spoke any kind of verse 10
extempore, that which was nearest nature was to be
preferred. I answer you, therefore, by distinguishing
betwixt what is nearest to the nature of comedy, which
is the imitation of common persons and ordinary
speaking, and what is nearest the nature of a serious 15
play : this last is indeed the representation of nature,
but 'tis nature wrought up to an higher pitch. The
plot, the characters, the wit, the passions, the de
scriptions, are all exalted above the level of common
converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can 20
carry them, with proportion to verisimility. Tragedy,
we know, is wont to image to us the minds and for
tunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly ;
heroick rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest
kind of modern verse. 3 5
Indignatur enim privatis et prope socco
, Dignis car minibus narrari coena Thyestce*
'says Horace : and in another place,
Effutire leves indigna tragccdia versus n .
Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a 30
1 A om.
92 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
poem, nay more, for a paper of verses ; but if too low
for an ordinary sonnet", how much more for tragedy,
which is by Aristotle, in the dispute betwixt the epick
poesy and the dramatick, for many reasons he there
5 alledges, ranked above it ? n
'But setting this defence aside, your argument is
almost as strong against the use of rhyme in poems
as in plays ; for the epick way is every where inter
laced with dialogue, or discoursive scenes; and
10 therefore you must either grant rhyme to be im
proper there, which is contrary to your assertion, or
admit it into plays by the same title which you have
given it to poems. For though tragedy be justly
preferred above the other, yet there is a great affinity
15 between them, as may easily be discovered in that
definition of a play which Lisideius gave us. The
genus of them is the same, a just and lively image
of human nature, in its actions, passions, and tra
verses of fortune : so is the end, namely, for the
20 delight and benefit of mankind. The characters and
persons are still the same, viz. the greatest of both
sorts ; only the manner of acquainting us with those
actions, passions, and fortunes, is different. Tragedy
performs it viva voce, or by action, in dialogue ;
25 wherein it excels the epick poem, which does it
chiefly by narration, and therefore is not so lively
an image of human nature. However, the agree
ment betwixt them is such, that if rhyme be proper
for one, it must be for the other. Verse, 'tis true,
30 is not the effect of sudden thought ; but this hinders
not that sudden thought may be represented in verse,
since those thoughts are such as must be higher
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 93
than nature can raise them without premeditation,
especially to a continuance of them, even out of verse ;
and consequently you cannot imagine them to have
been sudden either in the poet or in the actors. A
play, as I have said, to be like nature, is to be set 5
above it; as statues which are placed on high are
made greater than the life, that they may descend to
the sight in their just proportion.
^Perhaps I have insisted too long on this objection;
but the clearing of it will make my stay shorter on 10
the rest. You tell us, Crites, that rhyme appears
most unnatural in repartees7 or short replies : when
he who answers, (it being presumed he knew not
what the other would say, yet) makes up that part
of the verse which was left incomplete, and supplies 15
both the sound and measure of it. This, you say,
looks rather like the confederacy of two, than the
answer of one.
' This, I confess, is an objection which is in every
man's * mouth, who loves not rhyme : but suppose, 20
I beseech you, the repartee were made only in blank
verse, might not part of the same argument be turned
against you? for the measure is as often supplied
there, asJJLijjrijrhyjne ; the latter half of the hemi
stich as commonly made up, or a second line sub- 25
joined as a reply to the former; which any one leaf
in Johnson's plays will sufficiently clear to you. You
will often find in the Greek tragedians, and in
Seneca, that when a scene grows up into the warmth
of repartees, which is the close fighting of it, the 30
latter part of the trimeter is supplied by him who
1 ones, A.
94 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
answers ; and yet it was never observed as a fault:
in them by any of the ancient or modern criticks.
"the case is the same in our verse, as it was in
theirs ; rhyme to us being in lieu of quantity to
5 them. But if no latitude is to be allowed a poet,
you take from him not only his licence of quidlibet,
audendi*, but you tie him up in a straiter compass
than you would a philosopher. This is indeed
Musas colere severiores n . You would have him follow
10 nature, but he must follow her on foot : you have dis
mounted him from his Pegasus. But you tell us, this
supplying the last half of a verse, or adjoining a whole
second to the former, looks more like the design of
two, than the answer of one. Suppose we acknow-
15 ledge it : how comes this confederacy to be more
displeasing to you, than in a dance which is well
contrived? You see there the united design of
many persons to make up one figure : after they
have separated themselves in many petty divisions,
20 they rejoin one by one into a gross : the confederacy
is plain amongst them, for chance could never pro
duce any thing so beautiful ; and yet there is nothing
in it, that shocks your sight. I acknowledge the hand
of art appears in repartee, as of necessity it must in
25 all kind of verse. But there is also the quick and
poynant brevity of it (which is an high imitation of
nature in those sudden gusts of passion) to mingle
with it; and this, joined with the cadency and sweet
ness of the rhyme, leaves nothing in the soul of the
30 hearer to desire. J Tis an art which appears ; but it
appears only like the shadowings of painture, which
being to cause the rounding of it, cannot be absent;.
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 95
but while that is considered, they are lost : so while
we attend to the other beauties of the matter, the care
and labour of the rhyme is carried from us, or at least
drowned in its own sweetness, as bees are sometimes
buried in their honey. When a poet has found the 5
repartee, the last perfection he can add to it, is to put
it into verse. However good the thought may be,
however apt the words in which 'tis couched, yet he
finds himself at a little unrest, while rhyme is want
ing : he cannot leave it till that comes naturally, and 10
then is at ease, and sits dov/n contented.
' From replies, which are the most elevated thoughts
of verse, you pass to those which are most mean, and
which a are common with the lowest of houshold con
versation. In these, you say, the majesty of verse 15
suffers. You instance in the calling of a servant, or
commanding a door to be shut, in rhyme. This,
Crites, is a good observation of your's, but no argu
ment : for it proves no more but that such thoughts
should be waved, as often as may be, by the address 20
of the poet. But suppose they are necessary in the
places where he uses them, yet there is no need to
put them into rhyme. He may place them in the
beginning of a verse, and break it off, as unfit, when
so debased, for any other use ; or granting the worst, 25
that they require more room than the hemistich
will allow, yet still there is a choice to be made of
the best words, and least vulgar, (provided they be
apt,) to express such thoughts. Many have blamed
rhyme in general, for this fault, when the poet with 30
a little care might have redressed it. But they do it
1 to the most mean ones, those which, A.
96 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
with no more justice, than if English poesy should
be made ridiculous for the sake of the Water-poet's n
rhymes. Our language is noble, full, and significant ;
and I know not why he who is master of it may not
5 clothe ordinary things in it as decently as the Latin,
if he use the same diligence in his choice of words :
delectus verborum origo est eloquentice^. It was the
saying of Julius Caesar, one so curious in his, that
none of them can be changed but for a worse. One
10 would think, unlock the door, was a thing as vulgar as
could be spoken; and yet Seneca could make it sound
high and lofty in his Latin :
Reserate clusos regii posies laris^.
Set wide the palace gates.
15 'But I turn from this exception, both because it
happens not above twice or thrice in any play that
those vulgar thoughts are used ; and then too, (were
there no other apology to be made, yet,) the necessity
of them, which is alike in all kind of writing, may
20 excuse' them. For if they are little and mean in
rhyme, they are of consequence such in blank verse \
Besides that the great eagerness and precipitation
with which they are spoken, makes us rather mind
the substance than the dress ; that for which they are
25 spoken, rather than what is spoke. For they are
always the effect of some hasty concernment, and
something of consequence depends on them.
' Thus, Crites, I have endeavoured to answer your
objections; it remains only that I should vindicate
30 an argument for verse, which you have gone about to
1 A cm. For if they . . . blank verse.
NEANDER DEFENDS RHYME. 97
overthrow. It had formerly been said", that the easi
ness of blank verse renders the poet too luxuriant,
but that the labour of rhyme bounds and circumscribes
an over- fruitful fancy; the sense 1 there being com
monly confined to the couplet, and the words so 5
ordered that the rhyme naturally follows them, not
they the rhyme. To this you answered, that it was
no argument to the question in hand ; for the dispute
was not which way a man may write best, but which
is most proper for the subject on which he writes. 10
' First, give me leave, Sir, to remember you, that
the argument against which you raised this objection,
was only secondary : it was built on this hypothesis,
that to write in verse was proper for serious plays.
Which supposition being granted, (as it was briefly 15
made out in that discourse, by shewing how verse
might be made natural,) it asserted, that this way of
writing was an help to the poet's judgment, by put
ting bounds to a wild overflowing fancy. I think,
therefore, it will not be hard for me to make good 20
what it was to prove on that supposition 2 . But you
add, that were this let pass, yet he who wants judg
ment in the liberty of his fancy, may as well shew
the defect of it when he is confined to verse ; for he
who has judgment will avoid errors, and he who has 25
it not, will commit them in all kinds of writing.
This argument, as you have taken it from a most
acute person", so I confess it carries much weight in
it : but by using the word judgment here indefinitely,
you seem to have put a fallacy upon us. I grant, he 30
who has judgment, that is, so profound, so strong,
1 so A ; scene, B and C. 2 A om. on that supposition.
H
98 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
or rather 1 so infallible a judgment, that he needs no
helps to keep it always poised and upright, will com
mit no faults either in rhyme or out of it. And on
the other extreme, he who has a judgment so weak
5 and crazed that no helps can correct or amend it,
shall write scurvily out of rhyme, and worse in it.
But the first of these judgments is no where to be
found, and the latter is not fit to write at all. To
speak therefore of judgment as it is in the best poets;
10 they who have the greatest proportion of it, want
other helps than from it, within. As for example,
you would be loth to say, that he who is 2 endued
with a sound judgment has 3 no need of history,
geography, or moral philosophy, to write correctly.
15 Judgment is indeed the ma^^-^^kmanjn a play ;
but he requires many subordinate hands, many tools
to his assistance. And verse I affirm to be one of
these ; 'tis a rule and line by which he keeps his
building compact and even, which otherwise lawless
20 imagination would raise either irregularly or loosely;
at least, if the poet commits errors with this help, he
would make greater and more without it : 'tis, in
short, a slow and painful, but the surest kind of
working. Ovid, whom you accuse for luxuriancy
25 in verse, had perhaps been farther guilty of it, had
he writ in prose. And for your instance of Ben
Johnson, who, you say, writ exactly without the
help of rhyme ; you are to remember, 'tis only an
aid to a luxuriant fancy, which his was not : as he
30 did not want imagination, so none ever said he
had much to spare. Neither was verse then re*
1 A om. or rather. 2 was, A. 3 had, A.
END OF THE DISCUSSION. 99
fined so much, to be an help to that age, as it is to
ours. Thus then the segnnd thoughts fcn' n C usually
the best, as receiving the maturest digestion from
Judgment,' "arid Ihe last and most mature product of
those thoughts being Cartful and laboured verse, it 5
may well be inferred, that verse is a great help to
a luxuriant fancy; and this is what that argument
which you opposed was to evince.'
Neander was pursuing this discourse so eagerly,
that Eugenius had called to him twice or thrice, ere 10
he took notice that the barge stood still, and that they
were at the foot of Somerset-stairs, where they had
appointed it to land. The company were all sorry to
separate so soon, though a great part, of the evening
was already spent ; and stood a- while looking back on 15
the water, upon which the moon-beams played *, and
made it appear like floating quicksilver : at last they
went up through a crowd of French people, who were
merrily dancing in the open air, and nothing con
cerned for the noise of guns which had alarmed the 20
town that afternoon. Walking thence together to the
Piazze n , they parted there ; Eugenius and Lisideius
to some pleasant appointment they had made, and
Crites and Neander to their several lodgings.
1 which the moon beams played upon, A.
H 2
A DEFENCE 1
OF AN ESSAY
OF DRAMATIC POESY*.
THE former edition of The Indian Emperor being
full of faults, which had escaped the printer, I have
been willing to overlook this second with more care ;
and though I could not allow myself so much time as
was necessary, yet, by that little I have done, the press
is freed from some gross errors which it had to answer
1 The text of the ' Defence ' is reprinted from the original edition
of 1668 (the only one published in Dryden's life-time), a copy of
which is in the British Museum ; it is prefixed as a sort of Introduc
tion to the second edition of Dryden's Indian Emperor.
*Our author married, probably about the year 1664, Lady
Elizabeth Howard, sister of Sir Robert Howard knt., and daughter
of Thomas, the first Earl of Berkshire [ancestor of the present Earl
of Suffolk]. In 1660 he had addressed some complimentary verses
to Sir Robert, which were prefixed to his poems, published in 8vo.
in that year. In 1666 they appear to have been on good terms ;
Dryden having then addressed to him an encomiastick Epistle in
prose, which is dated from Charleton, in Wiltshire (the seat of the
Earl of Berkshire), and was prefixed to his Annus Mirabilis, pub
lished in 8vo. in 1667, by Sir Robert Howard, who revised the
sheets at the press for the author, who was then in the country ; and
in the Epistle he describes him as one whom he knew not to be of
the number of those, qui carpere amicos suos judicium vocant. In
the Essay on Dramatick Poesy, as we have already seen, he speaks
of Sir Robert Howard with great respect. That gentleman, how-
DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY. lot
for before. As for the more material faults of writing,
which are properly mine, though I see many of them,
I want leisure to amend them. 'Tis enough for those
who make one poem the business of their lives, to
leave that correct : yet, excepting Virgil, I never met 5
with any which was so in any language.
But while I was thus employed about this impres
sion, there came to my hands a new printed play,
called, The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma ;
the author of which, a noble and most ingenious 10
person, has done me the favour to make some ob
servations and animadversions upon my Dramalique
Essay. I must confess he might have better consulted
his reputation, than by matching himself with so weak
an adversary. But if his honour be diminished in the 15
choice of his antagonist, it is sufficiently recompensed
in the. election of his cause : which being the weaker,
in all appearance, as combating the received opinions
of the best ancient and modern authors, will add to
his glory, if he overcome, and to the opinion of his ao
ever, having in 1668 published [in the preface to his tragedy, The
Duke of Lerma] reflections on the Essay, our author retorted in the
following observations, which are found prefixed to the second
edition of The Indian Emperor, published in the same year. In
many copies, however, of that edition, they are wanting ; nor were
they reprinted in any other edition of that play which appeared in
the life-time of the author : so that it should seem he was induced
by good nature, or the interposition of friends, to suppress this witty
and severe replication. One of the lampoons of the time gives a
more invidious turn to this suppression, and insinuates that he was
compelled to retract. They lived afterwards probably in good
correspondence together; at least, it appears from an original
letter of our author now before me, that towards the close of his
life they were on friendly terms. (Malone.)
DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
generosity, if he be vanquished : since he ingages at.
so great odds, and, so like a cavalier, undertakes the
protection of the weaker party. I have only to fear
on my own behalf, that so good a cause as mine may
5 not suffer by my ill management, or weak defence ;
yet I cannot in honour but take the glove, when 'tis
offered me : though I am only a champion by suc
cession ; and no more able to defend the right of
Aristotle and Horace, than an infant Dimock n to
10 maintain the title of a King.
For my own concernment in the controversie, it is
so small, that I can easily be contented to be driven
from a few notions of Dramatique Poesie ; especially
by one, who has the reputation of understanding all
15 things : and I might justly make that excuse for my
yielding to him, which the Philosopher " made to the
Emperor, why should I offer to contend with him, who
is master of more than twenty legions of arts and
sciences ? But I am forced to fight, and therefore it
20 will be no shame to be overcome.
Yet I am so much his servant, as not to meddle
with any thing which does not concern me in his
Preface ; therefore, I leave the good sense and other
excellencies of the first twenty lines to be considered
2 5 by the critiques. As for the play of The Duke of
Lerma, having so much altered and beautified it, as
he has done, it can justly belong to none but him.
Indeed, they must be extream ignorant as well as
envious, who would rob him of that honour; for you see
30 him putting in his claim to it, even in the first two lines:
Repulse upon repulse, like waves thrown back,
That slide to hang upon obdurate rocks.
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 103
After this, let detraction do its worst ; for if this be
not his, it deserves to be. For my part, I declare for
distributive justice ; and from this and what follows,
he certainly deserves those advantages which he ac
knowledges to have received from the opinion of sober 5
men.
In the next place, I must beg leave to observe his
great address in courting the reader to his party.
For intending to assault all poets, both ancient and
modern, he discovers not his whole design at once, 10
but seems only to aim at me, and attacques me on my
weakest side, my defence of verse.
To begin with me, he gives me the compellation
of The Author of a Dramatique Essay, which is a little
discourse in dialogue, for the most part borrowed 15
from the observations of others : therefore, that I
may not be wanting to him in civility, I return his
compliment by calling him The Author of The Duke
of Lerma.
But (that I may pass over his salute) he takes 20
notice of my great pains to prove rhyme as natural
in a serious play, and more effectual than blanck
verse. Thus, indeed, I did state the question; but
he tells me, / pursue that which I call natural in a
wrong application : for 'tis not the question whether 25
rhyme or not rhyme be best or most natural for a
serious subject, but what is nearest the nature of that
it represents.
If I have formerly mistaken the question, I must
confess my ignorance so far, as to say I continue still 30
in my mistake : but he ought to have proved that I
mistook it ; for it is yet but gratis dictum : I still shall
104 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
think I have gained my point, if I can prove that
rhyme is best or most natural for a serious subject.
As for the question as he states it, whether rhyme be
nearest the nature of what it represents, I wonder he
5 should think me so ridiculous as to dispute whether
prose or verse be nearest to ordinary conversation.
It still remains for him to prove his inference,
that, since verse is granted to be more remote than
prose from ordinary conversation, therefore no serious
10 plays ought to be writ in verse : and when he clearly
makes that good, I will acknowledge his victory as
absolute as he can desire it.
The question now is, which of us two has mistaken
it ; and if it appear I have not, the world will suspect
15 what gentleman that was, who was allowed to speak
twice in parliament, because he had not yet spoken to
' the question ; and perhaps conclude it to be the same,
who, 'tis reported, maintained a contradiction in ter-
minis, in the face of three hundred persons.
20 But to return to verse ; whether it be natural or not
in plays, is a problem which is not demonstrable of
either side : 'tis enough for me that he acknowledges
he had rather read good verse than prose : for if all
the enemies of verse will confess as much, I shall not
25 need to prove that it is natural, I am satisfied, if it
'""cause delight : for delight is the chief, if not the only 11 ,
end of poesie : instruction can be admitted but in the
second place ; for poesie only instructs as it delights.
J Tis true, that to imitate well is a poet's work ; but to
30 affect the soul, and excite the passions, and above all
to move admiration, which is the delight of serious
plays, a bare imitation will not serve. The converse,
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 105
therefore, which a poet is to imitate, must be heightened
with all the arts and ornaments of poesie ; and must
be such, as, strictly considered, could never be sup
posed spoken by any without premeditation.
As for what he urges, that a play will still be sup- 5
posed to be a composition of several persons speaking ex
tempore ; and that good verses are the hardest things
which can be imagined to be so spoken ; I must crave
leave to dissent from his opinion, as to the former
part of it : for, if I am not deceived, a play is supposed 10
to be the work of the poet, imitating or representing
the conversation of several persons ; and this I think
to be as clear, as he thinks the contrary.
But I will be bolder, and do not doubt to make it
good, though a paradox, that one great reason why 15
prose is not to be used in serious plays, is, because it
is too near the nature of converse : there may be too
great a likeness ; as the most skilful painters affirm,
that there may be too near a resemblance in a picture :
to take every lineament and feature, is not to make an 20
excellent piece; but to take so much only as will
make a beautiful resemblance of the whole; and, with
an ingenious flattery of nature, to heighten the beauties
of some parts, and hide the deformities of the rest.
For so says Horace: 25
Ut pictura poesis erit
ffcec amat obscurum, vult h<zc sub luce videri,
Judicis argutum quce non formidat acumen*.
Desperat tractata nitescere posse, relinquit*. 30
In Bartholomew Fair, or the lowest kind of comedy,
that degree of heightning is used, which is proper to
106 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
set off that subject. 'Tis true the author was not
there to go out of prose, as he does in his higher
arguments of comedy, The Fox, and Aichymist', yet
he does so raise his matter in that prose, as to render
5 it delightful ; which he could never have performed,
had he only said or done those very things that are
daily spoken or practised in the Fair; for then the
Fair itself would be as full of pleasure to an ingenious
person as the play; which we manifestly see it is not.
10 But he hath made an excellent lazar n of it : the copy
is of price, though the original be vile. You see in
Catiline and Sejanus, where the argument is great, he
sometimes ascends to verse, which shews he thought
it not unnatural in serious plays : and had his genius
15 been as proper for rhyme, as it was for humour,
or had the age in which he lived attained to as much
knowledge in verse as ours, it is probable he would
have adorned those subjects with that kind of
writing.
20 Thus prose, though the rightful prince, yet is by
common consent deposed, as too weak for the govern
ment of serious plays ; and he failing, there now start
up two competitors ; one the nearer in blood, which
is blanck verse; the other more fit for the ends
25 of government, which is rhyme. Blanck verse is,
indeed, the nearer prose, but he is blemished with
the weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for I will
deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in him ;
but he is brave and generous, and his dominion
'30 pleasing. For this reason of delight, the Ancients
(whom I will still believe as wise as those who so
confidently correct them) wrote all their tragedies in
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 107
verse, though they knew it most remote from con
versation.
But I perceive I am falling into the danger of
another rebuke from my opponent ; for when I plead
that the Ancients used verse, I prove not that they 5
would have admitted rhyme, had it then been written :
all I can say is only this ; that it seems to have suc
ceeded verse by the general consent of poets in all
modern languages : for almost all their serious plays
are written in it : which, though it be no demonstra- 10
tion that therefore they ought to be so, yet at least
the practice first, and then the continuation of it,
shews that it attained the end, which was to please;
and if that cannot be compassed here, I will be the
first who shall lay it down. For I confess my chief 1 5
endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If
the humour of this be for low comedy, small acci
dents, 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 : 20
I want that gayety of humour which is required to it.
My conversation 11 is slow and dull, my humour satur
nine and reserved: in short, I am none of those who
endeavour to break jests in company, or make repar-
ties. So that those who decry my comedies do me no 25
injury, except it be in point of profit : reputation in
them is the last thing to which I shall pretend. I
beg pardon for entertaining the reader with so ill
a subject ; but before I quit that argument, which was
the cause of this digression, I cannot but take notice 30
how I am corrected for my quotation of Seneca, in my
defence of plays in verse. My words are these : ' Our
108 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
language is noble, full, and significant ; and I know
not why he who is master of it, may not cloath ordi
nary things in it as decently as the Latine, if he use
the same diligence in his choice of words. One would
5 think, unlock a door, was a thing as vulgar as could be
spoken; yet Seneca could make it sound high and
lofty in his Latin :
Reseratc clusos regii pastes laris?
But he says of me, That being filled with the prece-
10 dents of the Ancients, who writ their plays in verse,
I commend the thing ; declaring our language to be full,
noble, and significant, and charging all defects upon the
ill placing of words, which I prove by quoting Seneca
loftily expressing such an ordinary thing as shutting a
15 door.
Here he manifestly mistakes; for I spoke not
of the placing, but of the choice of words ; for
which I quoted that aphorism of Julius Caesar :
Delectus verborum est origo eloqtientia :
20 but delectus verborum is no more Latin for the placing
of words, than reserate is Latin for shut the door,
as he interprets it, which I ignorantly construed
unlock or open it.
He supposes I was highly affected with the sound
25 of those words ; and I suppose I may more justly
imagine it of him ; for if he had not been extreamly
satisfied with the sound, he would have minded the
sense a little better.
But these are now to be no faults ; for ten days
30 after his book is published, and that his mistakes are
grown so famous that they are come back to him, he
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 109
sends his Errata* to be printed, and annexed to his
play; and desires, that instead of shutting you would
read opening ; which, it seems, was the printer's fault.
I wonder at his modesty, that he did not rather say it
was Seneca's, or mine ; and that in some authors, 5
reserare was to shut as well as to open, as the word
barach n , say the learned, is both to bless and curse.
Well, since it was the printer, he was a naughty
man to commit the same mistake twice in six lines : I
warrant you delectus verborum for placing of words 10
was his mistake too, though the author forgot to tell
him of it : if it were my book, I assure you I should.
For those rascals ought to be the proxies of every
gentleman author, and to be chastised for him, when
he is not pleased to own an errour. Yet since he 15
has given the Errata, I wish he would have inlarged
them only a few sheets more, and then he would have
spared me the labour of an answer : for this cursed
printer is so given to mistakes, that there is scarce
a sentence in the Preface without some false grammar 20
or hard sense in it ; which will all be charged upon
the poet, because he is so good-natured as to lay but
three errours to the printer's account, and to take the
rest upon himself, who is better able to support them.
But he needs not apprehend that I should strictly 25
examine those little faults, except I am called upon to
do it: I shall return therefore to that quotation of
Seneca, and answer, not to what he writes, but to
what he means. I never intended it as an argument,
but only as an illustration of what I had said before 30
* This erratum has been suffered to remain in the edition of the
knight's plays now before us, published in 1692. (Scott.)
rto DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
concerning the election of words : and all he can
charge me with is only this, that if Seneca could
make an ordinary thing sound well in Latin by the
choice of words, the same, with the like care, might
5 be performed in English : if it cannot, I have com
mitted an errour on the right hand, by commending
too much the copiousness and well-sounding of our
language ; which I hope my countrymen will pardon
me. At least the words which follow in my Dramatique
10 Essay will plead somewhat in my behalf; for I say
there, that this objection happens but. seldom in a
play; and then too either the meanness of the expres
sion may be avoided, or shut out from the verse by
breaking it in the midst.
15 But I have said too much in the defence of verse ;
for after all, it is a very indifferent thing to me,
whether it obtain or not. I am content hereafter to
be ordered by his rule, that is, to write it sometimes,
because it pleases me; and so much the rather,
20 because he has declared that it pleases him. But
he has taken his last farewell of the Muses, and he
has done it civilly, by honouring them with the name
of his long acquaintances] which fe a complement 1
they have scarce deserved from him. For my own
25 part, I bear a share in the publick loss ; and how
emulous soever I may be of his fame and reputation,
I cannot but give this testimony of his style, that it
is extream poetical, even in oratory; his thoughts
elevated sometimes above common apprehension ; his
30 notions politick and grave, and tending to the in
struction of princes, and reformation of states ; that
1 sic.
OF DRAMATIC POESY. m
they are abundantly interlaced with variety of fancies,
tropes, and figures, which the criticks have enviously
branded with the name of obscurity and false grammar.
Well, he is now fettered in business of more un
pleasant nature : the Muses have lost him, but the 5
commonwealth gains by it ; the corruption of a poet
is the generation of a statesman.
He will not venture again into the civil wars of
censure ; ubi . . . nullos habitura triumphos n : if he
had not told us he had left the Muses, we might 10
have half suspected it by that word, ubi, which does
not any way belong to them in that place ; the rest
of the verse is indeed Lucan's ; but that ubi, I will
answer for it, is his own. Yet he has another
reason for this disgust of Poesie ; for he says imme- 15
diately after, that the manner of plays which are now
in most esteem, is beyond his power to perform : to
perform the manner of a thing, I confess is new
English to me. However, he condemns not the satis
faction of others ; but rather their unnecessary under- 20
standing, who, like Sancho Panda's doctor, prescribe too
strictly to our appetites ; for, says he, in the difference
of Tragedy and Comedy, and of Farce itself, there
can be no determination but by the taste, nor in the
manner of their composure. 25
We shall see him now as great a critick as he
was a poet; and the reason why he excelled so
much in poetry will be evident, for it will appear
to have proceeded from the exactness of his judg
ment. In the difference of Tragedy, Comedy, and 30
Farce itself, there can be no determination but by the
taste. I will not quarrel with the obscurity of his
112 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
phrase, though I justly might ; but beg his pardon
if I do not rightly understand him : if he means, that
there is no essential difference betwixt comedy,
tragedy, and farce, but what is only made by the
5 people's taste, which distinguishes one of them from
the other, that is so manifest an errour, that I need
not lose time to contradict it. Were there neither
judge, taste, nor opinion in the world, yet they would
differ in their natures; for the action, character,
10 and language of tragedy, would still be great and
high; that of comedy lower and more familiar;
admiration would be the delight of one, and satyr n
of the other.
I have but briefly touched upon these things,
15 because, whatever his words are, I can scarce imagine,
that he who is always concerned for the true honour
of reason, and would have no spurious issue fathered
upon her, should mean any thing so absurd as to
affirm, that there is no difference betwixt comedy and
ao tragedy, but what is made by the taste only : unless
he would have us understand the comedies of my
Lord L* n , where the first act should be pottages,
the second Fricassees, &c. . and the fifth a chere
enliere of women.
25 I rather giiess he means, that betwixt one comedy
or tragedy and another, there is no other difference
but what is made by the liking or disliking of the
audience. This is indeed a less errour than the
former, but yet it is a great one. The_J.iking_pr
30 disliking of the people gives the play the denomina-
* I suppose lord Lauderdale. He was not created a duke till
1472. (Malone.)
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 113
tion of good or bad ; but does not really make or
constitute it such. To please the people ought to
be the poet's aim, because plays are made for their
delight ; but it does not follow that they are always
pleased with good plays, or that the plays which 5
please them are always good. The humour of the
people is now for comedy ; therefore, in hope to
please them, I write comedies rather than serious ! ,
plays ; and so far their taste prescribes to me : but
it does not follow from that reason, that comedy is 10
to be preferred before tragedy in its own nature ; for
that which is so in its own nature cannot be other
wise ; as a man cannot but be a rational creature :
but the opinion of the people may alter, and in
another age, or perhaps in this, serious plays may 15
be set up above comedies.
This I think a sufficient answer : if it be not, he
has provided me of ah excuse; it seems, in his
wisdom, he foresaw my weakness, and has found
out this expedient for me, That it is not necessary for 20
poets to study strict reason ; since they are so used to
a greater latitude than is allowed by that severe in
quisition, that they must infringe their own jurisdiction^
to profess themselves obliged to argue well.
I am obliged to him for discovering to me this 25
back-door ; but I am not yet resolved on my retreat :
for I am of opinion that they cannot be good poets,
who are not accustomed to argue well. False
reasonings and colours of speech are the certain
marks of one who does not understand the stage ; 30
for moral truth is the mistress of the poet, as much
as of the philosopher. Poesie must resemble natural
114 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
truth, but it must be ethical. Indeed the poet dresses
truth, and adorns nature, but does not alter them :
fie fa voluptatis causb sint proximo, vcris^.
Therefore, that is not the best poesy, which re-
5 sembles notions of things that are not to things that
are : though the fancy may be great, and the words
flowing, yet the soul is but half satisfied when there
is not truth in the foundation. This is that which
makes Virgil be preferred before the rest of Poets :
ro in variety <5f fancy and sweetness of expression,
you see Ovid far above him ; for Virgil rejected
many of those things which Ovid wrote. A great
wifs great work is to refuse, as my worthy friend,
Sir John Berkenhead ", has ingeniously expressed it:
15 you rarely meet with any thing in Virgil but truth,
which therefore leaves the strongest impression of
pleasure in the soul. This I thought myself obliged
to say in behalf of Poesie ; and to declare, though it
be against myself, that when poets do not argue well,
20 the defect is in the workman, not in the art.
And now I come to the boldest part of his dis
course, wherein he attacques not me, but all the
ancients and moderns ; and undermines, as he thinks,
the very foundations on which Dramatique Poesie is
25 built. I could wish he would have declined that envy
which must of necessity follow such an undertaking,
and contented himself with triumphing over me in my
opinions of verse, which I will never hereafter dispute
with him ; but he must pardon me, if I have that
30 veneration for Aristotle, Horace, Ben Johnson, and
Corneille, that I dare not serve him in such a cause,
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 115
and against such heroes, but rather fight under their
protection, as Homer reports of little Teucer, who
shot the Trojans from under the large buckler of
Ajax Telamon :
STT; 8* ap' UTT' Atavros ffa.K(i Tf\ajucyj/ia8ao n , 5
He stood beneath his brother's ample shield,
And cover'd there, shot death through all the field,
The words of my noble adversary are these :
But if we examine the general rules laid down for
plays by strict reason, we shall find the err ours equally 10
gross ; for the great foundation which is laid to build
upon, is nothing, as it is generally stated, as will appear
upon the examination of the particulars.
These particulars, in due time, shall be examined :
in the mean while, let us consider what this great 15
foundation is, which he says is nothing, as it is
generally stated. I never heard of any other foun
dation of Dramatique Poesie than the imitation of
nature ; neither was there ever pretended any other
by the ancients, or moderns, or me, who endeavour 20
to follow them in that rule. This I have plainly
said in my definition of a play ; that it is a just and
lively image of human nature, &c. Thus the foun
dation, as it is generally stated, will stand sure, if
this definition of a play be true ; if it be not, he 25
ought to have made his exception against it, by
proving that a play is not an imitation of nature,
but somewhat else which he is pleased to think it.
But it is very plain, that he has mistaken the
foundation for that which is built upon it, though 30
1 2
ll 6 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
not immediately : for the direct and immediate con
sequence is this ; if nature be to be imitated, then
there is a rule for imitating nature rightly ; otherwise
there may be an end, and no means conducing to it.
5 Hitherto I have proceeded by demonstration; but
as our divines, when they have proved a Deity,
because there is order, and have inferred that this
Deity ought to be worshipped, differ afterwards
in the manner of the worship ; so, having laid
10 down that nature is to be imitated, and that propo
sition provirig the next, that then there are means
which conduce to the imitating of nature, I dare
proceed no farther positively; but have only laid
'down some opinions of the ancients and moderns,
15 and of my own, as means which they used, and
which I thought probable for the attaining of that
end. Those means are the same which my antagon
ist calls the foundations, how properly, the world
may judge ; and to prove that this is his meaning,
20 he clears it immediately to you, by enumerating those
rules or propositions against which he makes his
particular exceptions, as namely, those of time, and
place, in these words : First, we are told the plot
should not be so ridiculously contrived, as to crowd two
* 5 several countries into one stage ; secondly, to cramp the
accidents of many years or days into the representation
of two hours and an half; and lastly, a conclusion
drawn, that the only remaining dispute is, concerning
time, whether it should be contained in twelve or twenty-
r hours ; and the place to be limited to that spot
of ground where the play is supposed to begin : and
this is called nearest nature; for that is concluded most
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 117
natural, which is most probable, and nearest to that
which it presents.
Thus he has only made a small mistake of the
means conducing to the end, for the end itself; and
of the superstructure for the foundation : but he pro- 5
ceeds : To shew, therefore, upon what ill grounds they
dictate lavas for Dramatique Poesie, &c. He is here
pleased to charge me with being magisterial, as he
has done in many other places of his Preface. There
fore in vindication of myself, I must crave leave to 10
say, that my whole discourse was sceptical, according
to that way of reasoning which was used by Socrates,
Plato, and all the Academicques of ol-d, which Tully
and the best of the ancients followed, and which is
imitated by the modest inquisitions of the Royal 15
Society. That it is so, not only the name will shew,
which is, An Essay, but the frame and composition
of the work. You see, it is a dialogue sustained by
persons of several opinions, all of them left doubtful,
to be determined by the readers in general ; and ao
more particularly defer'd to the accurate judgment of
my lord Buckhurst, to whom I made a dedication
of my book. These are my words in my Epistle, /
speaking of the persons whom I introduced in my
dialogue : It is true, they differed in their opinions,
as it is probable they would ; neither do I take upon
me to reconcile, but to relate them, leaving your
lordship to decide it in favour of that part which you
shall judge most reasonable. And after that, in my
Advertisement to the Reader, I said this : The drift 3<
of the ensuing discourse is chiefly to vindicate the
honour of our English writers from the censure of
ll8 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
those who unjustly prefer the French before them.
This I intimate, lest any should think me so exceeding
vain, as to teach others an art which they understand
much better than myself . But this is more than
5 necessary to clear my modesty in that point ; and I
am very confident that there is scarce any man who
has lost so much time as to read that trifle, but will
be my compurgator as to that arrogance whereof
I am accused. The truth is, if I had been naturally
10 guilty of so much vanity as to dictate my opinions,
yet I do not find that the character of a positive or
self-conceited person* is of such advantage to any in
this age, that I should labour to be publickly admitted
of that order.
15 But I am not now to defend my own cause, when
that of all the ancients and moderns is in question :
for this gentleman, who accuses me of arrogance, has
taken a course not to be taxed with the other extream
of modesty. Those propositions which are laid down
20 in my discourse, as helps to the better imitation of
nature, are not mine; (as I have said,) nor were ever
pretended so to be, but derived from the authority
of Aristotle and Horace, and from the rules and
examples of Ben Johnson and Corneille. These are
35 the men with whom properly he contends, and against
* Sir Robert Howard's own character. He is supposed to have
been ridiculed under the character of Sir Positive Atall, in Shad-
well's Sullen Lovers, represented and published in the same year in
which this piece was written. (Malone.) Sir Positive is, adds
Scott, ' a foolish knight that pretends to understand everything in
the world, and will suffer no man to understand anything in his
company ; so foolishly positive that he will never be convinced of
an error, though ever so gross.' Cf. p. 102, 1. 14.
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 119
whom he will endeavour to make it evident, that there is
no such thing as what they all pretend.
His argument against the unities of place and time,-
is this : That it is as impossible for one stage to present
two rooms or houses truly, as two countries or king- 5
doms ; and as impossible that Jive hours or twenty-four
hours should be two hours, as that a thousand hours or
years should be less than what they are, or the greatest
part of time to be comprehended in the less : for all of
them being impossible, they are none of them nearest the 10
truth or nature of what they present ; for impossibilities
are all equal, and admit of no degree.
This argument is so scattered into parts, that it can
scarce be united into a syllogism ; yet, in obedience
to him, / will abbreviate and comprehend as much of 15
it as I can in few words, that my answer to it may be
more perspicuous. I conceive his meaning to be what
follows, as to the unity of place : (if I mistake, I beg
his pardon, professing it is not out of any design
to play the Argumentative Poet.) If one stage cannot 20
properly present two rooms or houses, much less two
countries or kingdoms, then there can be no unity
of place ; but one stage cannot properly perform this :
therefore there can be no unity of place.
I plainly deny his minor proposition ; the force of 25
which, if I mistake not, depends on this; that the
stage being one place cannot be two. This, indeed,
is as great a secret, as that we are all mortal*; but
* There is here, I believe, a covert allusion to the character in
Shadwell's play already mentioned, who in the first scene, addressing
Sandford, says, ' betwixt you and I, let me tell you, we are all
mortal ; ' in which -wise remark the author probably had in view
Sir Robert Howard's poem ' Against the Fear of Death/ (Malone.)
120 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
to requite it with another, I must crave leave to tell
him, that though the stage cannot be two places, yet
it may properly represent them, successively, or at
several times. His argument is indeed no more than
5 a mere fallacy, which will evidently appear, when we
distinguish place, as it relates to plays, into real and
imaginary. The real place is that theatre, or piece
of ground, on which the play is acted. The imaginary,
that house, town, or country, where the action of the
10 Drama is supposed to be ; or more plainly, where
the scene of the play is laid. Let us now apply this to
that Herculean" argument, which if strictly and duly
weighed, is to make it evident, that there is no such
thing as ivhat they all pretend. It is impossible, he
15 says, for one stage to present two rooms or houses :
r-* I answer, itjjs neither impossible, nor improper, for
one real place to represent two or more imaginary
places, so it be done successively; which in other
words is no more than this ; That the imagination of
20 the audience, aided by the words of the poet, and
painted scenes, may suppose the stage to be some
times one place, sometimes another ; now a garden,
or wood, and immediately a camp : which, I appeal
V to every man's imagination, if it be not true. Neither
25 the ancients nor moderns, as much fools as he is
pleased to think them, ever asserted that they could
make one place two; but they might hope, by the
good leave of this author, that the change of a scene
might lead the imagination to suppose the place
30 altered : So that he cannot fasten those absurdities
upon this scene of a play, or imaginary place of
action, that it is one place, and yet two. And this
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 121
being so clearly proved, that it is past any shew of
a reasonable denial, it will not be hard to destroy
that other part of his argument which depends upon
it; namely, that it is as impossible for a stage to
represent two rooms or houses, as two countries or 5
kingdoms ; for his reason is already overthrown,
which was, because both were alike impossible. This
is manifestly otherwise ; for it is proved that a stage
may properly represent two rooms or houses ; for
the imagination being judge of what is represented, 10
will in reason be less chocqu'd l with the appearance
of two rooms in the same house, or two houses in
the same city, than with two distant cities in the
same country, or two remote countries in the same
universe. Imagination in a man or reasonable 15
creature is supposed to participate of reason ; and
when that governs, as it does in the belief of fiction,
reason is not destroyed, but misled, or blinded : that
can prescribe to the reason, during the time of the
representation, somewhat like a weak belief of what 20
it sees and hears ; and reason suffers itself to be so
hood-winked, that it may better enjoy the pleasures
of the fiction : but it is never so wholly made a cap
tive, as to be drawn headlong into a perswasion of
those things which are most remote from probability: 25
'tis in that case a free-born subject, not a slave ; it
will contribute willingly its assent, as far as it sees
convenient, but will not be forced. Now there is
a greater vicinity in nature betwixt two rooms than
betwixt two houses, betwixt two houses than betwixt 30
1 Malone and Scott read ' choked.'
122 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
two cities, and so of the rest ; Reason therefore can
sooner be led by Imagination to step from one room
into another, than to walk to two distant houses, and
yet rather to go thither, than to flye like a witch
5 through the air, and be hurried from one region to
another. Fancy and Reason go hand in hand ; the
first cannot leave the last behind ; and though Fancy,
when it sees the wide gulph, would venture over as
the nimbler, yet it is withheld by Reason, which will
10 refuse to take the leap, when the distance over it
appears too large. If Ben Johnson himself will re
move the scene from Rome into Tuscany in the same
act, and from thence return to Rome, in the scene
which immediately follows, Reason will consider
15 there is no proportionable allowance of time to per
form the journey, and therefore will chuse to stay at
home. So then, the less change of place there is,
the less time is taken up in transporting the persons
of the drama, with analogy to reason ; and in that
20 analogy, or resemblance of fiction to truth, consists
U4he excellency of the play.
For what else concerns the unity of place, I have
already given my opinion of it in my Essay] that
there is a latitude to be allowed to it, as several
25 places in the same town or city, or places adjacent
to each other in the same country, which may all be
comprehended under the larger denomination of one
place ; yet with .this restriction, that the nearer^and
fewer those imaginary places are, the greater re-
30 semblance they will have to truth ; and reason, which
cannot make them one, will be more easily led to
suppose them so.
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 123
What has been said of the unity of place, may
easily be applied to that of time : I grant it to be im
possible, that the greater part of time should be
comprehended in the less, that twenty-four hours
should be crowded into three : but there is no neces- 5
sity of that supposition. For as Place, so Time
relating to a play, is either imaginary or real : the
real is comprehended in those three hours, more or
less, in the space of which the play is represented ;
the imaginary is that which is supposed to be taken 10
up in the representation, as twenty-four hours more
or less. Now no man ever could suppose that
twenty-four real hours could be included in the
space of three : but where is the absurdity of
affirming that the feigned business of twenty-four 15
imagined hours may not more naturally be repre
sented in the compass of three real hours, than
the like feigned business of twenty-four years in
the same proportion of real time? For the pro
portions are always real, and much nearer, by his 20
permission, of twenty-four to three, than of four
thousand to it.
I am almost fearful of illustrating any thing by
similitude, lest he should confute it for an argu
ment; yet I think the comparison of a glass will 25
discover very aptly the fallacy of his argument, both
concerning time and place. The strength of his
reason depends on this, That the less cannot com
prehend the greater. I have already answered,
that we need not suppose it does : I say not that 3!
the less can comprehend the greater, but only that
it may represent it : as in a glass or Mirrour of half
124 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
a yard diameter, a whole room and many persons in
it may be seen at once ; not that it can comprehend
that room or those persons, but that it represents
them to the sight.
5 But the author of The Duke of Lerma is to be ex
cused for his declaring against the unity of time ; for,
if I be not much mistaken, he is an interested person ;
the time of that play taking up so many years as the
favour of the Duke of Lerma continued ; nay ; the
10 second and third act including all the time of his
prosperity, which was a great part of frhe reign of
Philip the Third : for in the beginning of the second
act he was not yet a favourite, and before the end of
the third was in disgrace. I say not this with the
15 least design of limiting the stage too servilely to
twenty-four hours, however he be pleased to tax me
with dogmatizing in that point. In my dialogue, as
I before hinted, several persons maintained their
several opinions : one of them, indeed, who sup-
20 ported the cause of the French poesie, said, how
strict they were in that particular ; but he who an
swered in behalf of our nation, was willing to give
more latitude to the rule ; and cites the words of
Corneille himself, complaining against the severity
25 of it, and observing what beauties it banished from
the Stage *. In few words, my own opinion is this,
(and I willingly submit it to my adversary, when he
will please impartially to consider it,) that the ima-
I r I ginary time of every play ought to be contrived into
- \ 3P as narrow a compass as the nature of the plot, the
' quality of the persons, and variety of accidents will
* See p. 62.
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 125
allow. In comedy I would not exceed twenty-four
or thirty hours : for the plot, accidents, and persons
of comedy are small, and may be naturally turned in
a little compass: But in tragedy the design is weighty,
and the persons great ; therefore there will naturally 5
be required a greater space of time in which to move
them. And this though Ben Johnson has not told
us, yet it is manifestly his opinion : for you see that
to his comedies he allows generally but twenty-four
hours ; to his two tragedies, Sejanus and Catih'ne, a 10
much larger time : though he draws both of them into
as narrow a compass as he can : For he shews you
only the latter end of Sejanus his favour, and the
conspiracy of Catiline already ripe, and just breaking
out into action. 15
But as it is an errour on the one side, to make too
great a disproportion betwixt the imaginary time of
the play, and the real time of its representation ; so
on the other side, it is an over-sight to compress the
accidents of a play into a narrower compass than that 20
in which they could naturally be produced. Of this
last errour the French are seldom guilty, because
the thinness of their plots prevents them from it;
but few Englishmen, except Ben Johnson, have ever
made a plot with variety of design in it, included in 25
twenty- four hours, which was altogether natural. For
this reason, I prefer The Silent Woman before all
other plays, I think justly; as I do its author, in judg
ment, above all other poets. Yet of the two, I think
that errour the most pardonable, which in too straight 30
a compass crowds together many accidents; since
it produces more variety, and consequently more
126 DEFENCE OF THE ESSAY
pleasure to the audience ; and because the nearness of
proportion betwixt the imaginary and real time, does
speciously cover the compression of the accidents.
Thus I have endeavoured to answer the meaning
5 of his argument ; for as he drew it, I humbly conceive
that it was none ; as will appear by his proposition,
and the proof of it. His proposition was this.
If strictly and duly weighed, it is as impossible for
one stage to present two rooms or houses, as two coun-
so tries or kingdoms, &c. And his proof this : For all
being impossible, they are none of them nearest the
truth or nature of what they present.
Here you see, instead of proof or reason, there is
only petitio principii : for in plain words, his sense is
15 this ; Two things are as impossible as one another,
because they are both equally impossible : but he
takes those two things to be granted as impossible
which he ought to have proved such, before he had
proceeded to prove them equally impossible: he should
20 have made out first, that it was impossible for one
stage to represent two houses, and then have gone
forward to prove that it was as equally impossible
for a stage to present two houses, as two countries.
After all this, the very absurdity to which he would
25 reduce me is none at all : for he only drives at this,
That if his argument be true, I must then acknow
ledge that there are degrees in impossibilities, which
I easily grant him without dispute : and if I mistake
not, Aristotle and the School are of my opinion. For
30 there are some things which are absolutely impossible,
and others which are only so ex parte ; as it is ab
solutely impossible for a thing to be, and not be, at
OF DRAMATIC POESY. 127
the same time ; but for a stone to move naturally up
ward, is only impossible exparte materice ; but it is not
impossible for the first mover to alter the nature of it.
His last assault, like that of a Frenchman, is most
feeble : for whereas I have observed, that none have 5
been violent against verse, but such only as have not
attempted it, or have succeeded ill in their attempt,
he will needs, according to his usual custom, improve
my observation to an argument, that he might have
the glory to confute it. But I lay my observation at 10
his feet, as I do my pen, which I have often employed
willingly in his deserved commendations, and now
most unwillingly against his judgment. For his
person and parts, I honour them as much as any
man living, and have had so many particular obliga- 15
tions to him, that I should be very ungrateful, if I did
not acknowledge them to the world. But I gave not
the first occasion of this difference in opinions. In
my Epistle Dedicatory before my Rival Ladies, I had
said somewhat in behalf of verse, which he was pleased 20
to answer in his Preface to his plays : that occasioned
my reply in my Essay ; and that reply begot this re-
joynder of his in his Preface to The Duke of Lerma.
But as I was the last who took up arms, I will be the
first to lay them down. For what I have here written, 25
I submit it wholly to him ; and if I do not hereafter
answer what may be objected against this paper, I
hope the world will not impute it to any other reason,
than only the due respect which I have for so noble
an opponent. 3
NOTES.
Preface, ix, 3. Sir Robert Howard (1626-98) was Dryden's
brother-in-law. His Poems were putyished in 1660, with
verses from Dryden prefixed. In 1665 Four New Plays of
Howard's were published in folio ; viz. Surprisal and Com
mittee (comedies), and Vestal Virgin and Indian Queen
(tragedies). The preface of this volume led to Dryden's
Essay (Ker).
6. [Sir Charles Sedley or Sidley (c. 1639-1701) was
about the same age as Dryden. His plays are Antony and
Cleopatra (1677), a rhyming tragedy, and four others, of
which three were comedies. To Sedley is also due one
of the most famous and beautiful 'openings' in English
poetry :
Xove still has something of the sea
From which his mother rose.
He is less favourably known by the story of his wild and
dissolute youth which Johnson has recorded in the Lives of
the Poets.}
9. [The Greeks themselves appear to have had no
association of novus homo with the name, which conveyed
simply the notion of youth and courage. The Etymologicum
Magnum has sub voc.: "Qvopa Kvpiov, eVei vtos avdpeixraro *?
Vos &v avdpelos rjvJ\
1. Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of
p Dorset, author of the well-known song 'To all you ladies
now on land,' and Lord Chamberlain to William III after
the Revolution, was always a kind friend and patron to
Dryden, and liberally assisted him when the loss of his
K
130 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
office as poet-laureate, through his refusal to take the oaths
to William, brought the poet to great distress. See the long
dedication to Dfyden's Discourse concerning the Original
and Progress of Satire (ii. is) 1 .
2. 17. The Tragedy of Pompey the Great, * translated
out of French by certain persons of honour': 4to 1664.
From Dryden's eulogium it appears that the fourth act was
translated by Lord Buckhurst ; the first was done by Waller
(Malone). Sir Charles Sedley, Malone says in another
place, had also a hand in this translation, which was from
the Pompee of Corneille. The act translated by Waller is
published among his works.
[Ibid. In the second edition of the Essay (which is the
one here reprinted), Dryden has deliberately eliminated the
detached (Sweet, p. 138), postponed (Matzner, ii. 482),
or pendent preposition. Instead of 'such arguments as
the fourth act of Pompey will furnish me with,' he now
writes, * such arguments as those with which the fourth act of
Pompey will furnish me.' That this change was deliberate
appears from Dryden's theory as well as from his practice.
In his Defence of the Epilogiie he enumerates among the
weaknesses of Ben Jonson's diction, * the preposition in the
end of the sentence ; a common fault with him, and which
I have but lately observed in my own writings' (ii. 168).
Professor Ker's view is that ' in his revision of the Essay of
Dramatic Poesy Dryden came to believe that he ought to
put some restraint on his tendency to leave hanging phrases
at the end of his sentences. As he tells us himself, he noted as
a fault the preposition left at the end of a clause and belong
ing to a relative understood' (I. p. xxvii). The most common
form of this colloquial use is, of course, that in which there is
ellipse of the relative, with the preposition which really
governs that relative thrown to the end; but Dryden in
revising the Essay has also shown himself hostile to the
1 The references to other prose works of Dryden are to Prof. W. P.
Ker's edition of the Essays of John Dryden, in 2 vols. (Clarendon
Press, 1900).
NOTES. 131
ordinary use of suffixed prepositions, which in words like
4 allude to,' 'deal with,' 'give up," reckon in, "sum up,' 'tamper
with,' form an integral part of the verbal phrase. The matter
is important, as few among the formal points of style more
affect the general character of a writer's prose than his
fondness for, or avoidance of, these pendent prepositions.
In conversation everybody uses them ; everybody says ' the
place he lived in,' no one says ' the place in which he lived.'
But to use' these pendent prepositions in writing as freely as
they are used in speech is to leave an over-colloquial and
unbraced effect. We all feel, for instance, that that consider
able though careless writer, Mrs. Oliphant, was ill advised
when she penned such a phrase as, ' ... an offensive hos
pitality which often annoyed her, and which the Marchioness,
for example, scarcely hesitated to show her contempt of
(At His Gates^ chap, xxvii). On the other hand, to avoid
them altogether is perhaps to be over-formal, and to make
the gap too wide between the spoken and the written word.
In any case, it is interesting to watch the deliberate practice
of such a master as Dryden in the following cases, all taken
from the Essay :
First Edition.
P. 14, 1. 25, The age I live in.'
P. 30, 1. 23, ' whom all the story
is built upon.'
P 47> ! 3> 'tumult which we
are subject to.'
P. 60, 1. 1 8, ' end he aimed at.'
P. 99, 1. 1 6, 'water which the
moonbeams played upon.'
Second Edition.
' The age in which I live.'
1 on whom the story is built.'
1 tumult to which we are sub
ject.'
end at which he aimed.'
water upon which the moon
beams played.'
Apart from these relatival clauses Dryden got rid of the
pendent preposition in p. 14, 1. 9, where 'hardly dealt with'
gives way in the second edition to * had hard measure ' ;
'p. 48, 1. 23, where 'all the actor can persuade us to,' becomes
'all the actor can insinuate into us' ; p. 52, 1. 12, where the
second edition eliminates the superfluous 'of in 'expect to
hear of in a sermon'; p. 64, 1. 15, where 'thrusts him in
K 2
132 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
through a door,' becomes ' thrusts him into a place of safety '
(the juxtaposition of the pendent and the normal preposition
was here no doubt felt particularly awkward) ; p. 72, 1. 16,
where, ' this the poet seems to allude to,' of the first edition,
becomes ' to this the poet seems to allude ' in the second ;
and p. 83, 1. 25, where 'this miserable necessity you are
forced upon,' becomes ' you are often forced on this miserable
necessity.' We can now see how far Johnson was justified
in the assertion (Life of Dryden} that ' what he had once
written, he dismissed from his thoughts ; and I believe there
is no example to be found of any correction or improvement
made by him after publication. The hastiness of his pro
ductions might be the effect of necessity ; but his subsequent
neglect could hardly have any other cause than impatience
of study.' For the whole subject, in addition to Sweet and
Matzner, already cited, see Abbott's Shakesperian Grammar,
204 and 424, and Kellner's Historical Outlines of English
Syntax, pp. 278, 298.]
27. See Valerius Maximus, iv. 5 (De Verecundid) :
' Excellentis in ea regione (Etruria) pulchritudinis adulescens
nomine Spurinna, cum mira specie conplurium feminarum
inlustrium sollicitaret oculos ideoque viris ac parentibus
earum se suspectum esse sentiret, oris decorem vulneribus
confudit deformitatemque sanctitatis suae fidem quam formam
inritamentum alienae libidinis esse maluit.'
3. 8. Hor. Epod. xvi. 37.
12. [This encomium of Charles IPs court is probably true
as far as dramatic writing is concerned. The critical confer
ences of St. Evremond, Buckingham, and d'Aubigny early in
Charles' reign were probably the beginnings of post-Restora
tion dramatic criticism. Sea the first volume of D es Maizeaux'
edition of St. Evremond. The king, says Burnet, 'had no
literature, but a true and good sense, and had got a right
notion of style ' (Elton, Augustan Ages, p. 201). Cf. Sidney's
Apologie (Arber, p. 69) : ' Undoubtedly I have found in
divers smally learned Courtiers a more sound style than in
some professors of learning, of which I can guess no other
NOTES. 133
cause but that the Courtier, following that which by practice
he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not)
doth according to Art, though not by Art ; where the other,
using Art to show Art and not to hide Art (as in these cases
he should do) flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth Art.'
In the same vein Dryden writes in the Epistle Dedicatory
of the Rival Ladies (i. 5) : ( I have endeavoured to write
English, as near as I could distinguish it from the tongue of
pedants.' See also this Essay, p. 5 : ' Only it [this war
of opinions] has been prosecuted by some like pedants, with
violence of words, and managed by others like gentlemen,
with candour and civility ' ; and p. 16 : ' They [the Ancients]
can produce nothing so courtly writ, or which expresses so
much the conversation of a gentleman, as Sir John Suckling.'
That there was another, and a very serious side, to this
Court patronage and to the efforts of writers to obtain it,
may be gathered from these lines of Scott (Introduction to
Marjnion] :
And Dryden in immortal strain
Had raised the Table Round again,
But that a ribald King and Court
Bade him toil on, to make them sport
Demanded for theii' niggard pay,
Fit for their souls, a looser lay,
Licentious satire, song, and play ;
The world defrauded of the high design,
Profaned the God-given strength, and marred the lofty line.]
13. To allow in the last age signified to approve
(Malone). [The New English Dictionary explains that the
word has two sources, allaudare to praise, and allocare to
bestow, assign. 'The two were apparently completely
identified in Old French and viewed as senses of one word,
which was adopted with both senses in English before 1300.
Between the two primary significations there naturally arose
a variety of uses blending them in the general idea of assign
with approval? For the verb with 'of,' in the sense of to
receive with approval^ the Dictionary quotes Richardson
134 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
(Clarissa Harlowe, 1748). Florio's Montaigne (1603) may
also be cited (Bk. ii. chap. 12, imf.) : ' Undertaking thence
forward to allow of nothing, except they have first given
their voice and particular consent to the same. 3 ]
27. I have not, any more than former editors, succeeded
in discovering from what French poet these lines are taken.
[At my request a French friend has submitted the lines to
M. Beljame, whose intimate knowledge alike of the French
and of the English literature of the period makes him a good
authority. M. Beljame replies that this is not the first time
that the lines have been submitted to him. He cannot
identify them, and colleagues of his in the University, famous
for their knowledge of French seventeenth-century poetry,
have been equally unsuccessful. It has been suggested to
me from two different French sources (i) that the lines were
i>ers de socie'te', handed from salon to salon, but never printed ;
(2) that Dryden (whose French was probably not equal to
such a feat) wrote them himself by way of mystification.)
4. 13. These lines are found in a poem by Sir William
Davenant, printed in 4to in 1663, and republished in his
works, fol. 1673, p. 268 (Malone).
28. In the Dedication to The Rival Ladies [1664] ;
where Dryden argues for the superiority of rhyme over
blank verse.
5. ii. ['Confident of state.' The instances of 'confident'
m the sense now reserved for ' confidant,' which are given by
the New English Dictionary -, range from 1647 to 1828.
Scott (Guy Mannering, chap, ii) wrote: 'As he had neither
friend nor confident ' ; but later editors or printers have
unfortunately obscured the matter by substituting 'con
fidant,' which is now the universal usage. In Dryden's own
prose 'confident' recurs in the Dedication to the Aeneis
(ii. 190)' Then she was forced to make a confident of her
whom she best might trust ' ; but ' confidant ' (unless here
also the printers have been at work) in his Preface to the
Translation of Ovid's Epistles (i. 232)' Ovid was either
the confidant of some other passion.']
NOTES. 135
1 8. See Cicero's Letters toAtticus, xii. 40, and Plutarch's
Life of Julius Caesar, chap. liv. ' One of his Dialogues,' De
Finibus, v. 2.
7. 5. Dryden often uses adjectives as adverbs. In this
particular instance he had Shakespeare's example before him.
See Henry VIII, iv. 2. 52 :
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading.
['Very common in I7~i8th cent. ; now somewhat archaic'
(New English Dictionary, which quotes Milton and Words
worth). See p. 102, 'extream ignorant'; p. 75, 'extreme
elaborate.']
8. 15. The engagement between the English and Dutch
fleets on June 3, 1665, took place off Harwich. In this
memorable battle eighteen large Dutch ships were taken,
and fourteen others were destroyed ; Opdam, the Dutch
admiral, who engaged the Duke of York, was blown up
beside him, and he and all his crew perished (M alone). See
Annus Mirabilis, stanza 22, and Pepys' Diary for June 3,
1665: '3 rd . 'All this day by all people upon the river, and
almost everywhere else hereabout, were heard the guns, our
two fleets for certain being engaged ; which was confirmed
by letters from Harwich.' Considering the distance of
Harwich from London (70 miles by train, of course less as
the crow flies), this is an interesting statement.
[9. 29. 'Who congratulated to the rest.' The instances
given by the New English Dictionary of this obsolete con
struction of the verb range from 1607 to 1710. They include
the following from Dryden's dedication to his play of Aureng-
zefe:'The subjects of England may justly congratulate to
themselves . . . that both our Government and our King
secure us from any such Complaint.']
ll. 5. This is probably a reference to the Act of 1664,
commonly called the Conventicle Act, ' to prevent and sup
press seditious and unlawful conventicles.'
1 6. Cic. pro Archia, c. 10.
21. Perhaps the writer first alluded to was Dr. Robert
136 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
Wild, author of Iter Boreale, a panegyric on General Monk,
published in April, 1660, and often reprinted ; which may be
the 'famous poem' alluded to in p. 13. His works were
collected and published in a small volume in 1668. The
other poet may have been Richard Flecknoe. Both these
poets celebrated the Dutch defeat (Malone).
28. ' Catachresis ' is the improper or abusive use of
a word. Cleveland (1613-1658), a ' metaphysical' poet, who
abounded in far-fetched images and metaphors, was also the
most vigorous satirist on the Cavalier side. Cf. pp. 35, 36,
and the following from Cleveland's lines to the Lycidas of
Milton (Mr. Edward King) :
I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief, who scans his eyes.
13. 2. Martial, Epigr. viii. 19.
23. George Wither, probably because he was a Puritan
and had risen to be major under Cromwell, was the mark fbr
much malicious satire on the part of Tory and Royalist
poets. They give him no credit for the lovely lyrical
pieces which are for ever associated with his name. Butler
(Hudibras, Part I, canto i), addressing the Puritanic muse,
says :
Thou that with ale, or viler liquors,
Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vickars.
Dryden speaks contemptuously of him in the passage before
us, and Pope in the Dunciad (i. 296) numbers 'wretched
Withers ' among ' the dull of ancient days.'
30. 'Auction by inch of Candle, is when, a piece of
candle being lighted, people are allowed to bid while it
burns, but as soon as extinct, the commodity is adjudged to
the last bidder ' (Chambers' Dictionary). At land sales in
France this practice is still in force.
14. 6. Virgil, Eel. iii. 90.
17. Petronius Arbiter, Satirae, cap. ii.
15. 6. Hor. Epist. ii. I. 76.
9. Ibid. 34.
16. 9. 'Epic . . . way.' Whether Dryden meant to include
NOTES.
137
Milton or to ignore him, it is in any case to be borne in
mind that Paradise Lost was published in 1667, the year
before the appearance of Dryden's Essay.
20. * The drama is wholly ours.' Imitated from the
phrase of Ouintilian, x. 93 : ' Satira quidem tota nostra est,'
quoted by Dryden in his Original and Progress of Satire
("S3).
21. Malone rejects 'Eugenius his opinion* as 'un-
grammatical phraseology,' but says, supporting himself on
the authority of Bishop Lowth, that Dryden ought to have
written 'Eugeniusis opinion.' [Cf. ' Augustus his palace, 5
p. 36 ; ' Horace his art,' p. 20 ; and ' Sandys his translation,'
p. 90. On the other hand, p. 23, Dryden has ' Terence's
Eunuch,' and ' Chremes's sister'; evidently the usage was
still unfixed. Still more was this the case a generation
earlier, when in one and the same line (Discoveries, p. 133,
Dent) Ben Jonson has * Achilles' armour' and 'Sophocles
his Ajax? In the same way Ben Jonson has ' ass's hoof '
(Ode to Himself], and Milton has 'ass's jaw' (so in modern
editions, but Milton himself spelt ' asses,' as also did Sidney
at the end of his Apologie), but also ' Glaucus' spell.' ' In
Early Modern English the apostrophe was at first intended
only to show contraction of -es, and was accordingly used
freely in the plural as well as the genitive inflexion. . . .
The gradual restriction of the apostrophe to the genitive
apparently arose from the belief that such a genitive as
princes in the prince's book was a shortening of prince his,
as shown by such spellings as the prince his book. This
belief and this spelling arose very naturally from the fact
that princes and prince his had the same sound, weak his
having dropped its ' h ' in such collocations, even in the Old
English period ' (Sweet, New English Grammar, i. 321).
Matzner (English Grammar, English translation, i. 242-3)
discusses the inflected Old-English forms in es, is, and ys, and
on pp. 296-7 has the following about the 'his': * The con
nexion of the possessive pronoun of the third person (his)
with a substantive, especially a proper name, in the genitive,
138 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
in which the inflection is then usually wanting, is peculiar :
"In characters as red as Mars his heart" (Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida, v. 2), "For Jesus Christ his sake"
(English Liturgy). Strange to say, in the seventeenth
century, as some English grammarians do even now, the
s of the genitive was derived from this. . . . Although the
subjoined pronoun in this case makes the inflection of the
substantive superfluous, it is originally nothing else than
a pleonastic repetition of the substantive notion by the
pronoun, which is especially familiar to Old-English in the
personal pronoun: "And there Sir Gawaine he her wed"
(Percy Reliques). " The tanner he took his good cowhide "
17: 26. It is not perfect, because it does not include a
differentia, and is therefore too wide ; it is applicable to epic
and heroic poems, and to romances, equally with plays.
' It gives the general class (genere) to which a play belongs,
and the end (fine) which it serves' (Ker). [Cf. p. 92, 1. 16 :
'For though tragedy be justly preferred above the epic
poem, yet there is a great affinity between them, as may
easily be discovered in that definition of a play which
Lisideius gave us. The genus of them is the same a just
and lively image of human nature, in its actions, passions,
and traverses of fortune : so is the end namely, for the
delight and benefit of mankind.']
18. ii. See Veil. Paterc. i. 16: 'Una, neque multorum
annorum spatio divisa, aetas, per divini spiritus viros,
Aeschylum, Sophoclem, Euripidem, illustravit tragoedias :
una priscam illam et veterem sub Cratino Aristophane et
Eupolide comoediam.' For the construction of ' arrive ' with
'to,' cf. p. 49, 1. 26.
18, 19, 21. [* Philosophy '= natural science (cf. p. 26, 1. 25,
and Original and Progress of Satire (ii. 34) :' Some
thing new in philosophy and the mechanics is discovered
almost every year') ; ' Virtuosi '= savants (the singular of the
Italian word is used by Evelyn in his Diary, February 27,
1644) ; ' school ' = Schoolmen (cf. p. 126, 1. 29).]
NOTES. 139
19. 14. Historia Romany i. 17.
20. 7. [' Remember you.' This obsolete active use of
the verb recurs, p. 97, 1. n, and Dedication of the Aeneis
(ii. 1 88) : ' He does wisely to remember you that Virgil,' &c.]
22. Aristotle's treatise on Poetry 'is a fragment, and
while promising to treat of tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry,
it treats only of tragedy, adding a few brief remarks on epic
poetry, and omitting comedy altogether' (Encyc. Brit. 9th
ed., art. ' Aristotle '). Ilepl K&fupdias varepov cpoC/zcp, wrote
Aristotle (Poetics, vi. i), but the promise was not kept.
25. ' The Three Unities.' The best recent discussion of
the Unities is in Prof. Butcher's Aristotle's Theory of Poetry
and Fine Art (1895), chap. vii. See especially p. 267 :
' The only dramatic Unity enjoined by Aristotle is Unity of
Action. It is strange that this should still need to be
repeated. So inveterate, however, is a literary tradition,
once it has been established under the sanction of high
authority, that we still find the " Three Unities " spoken of
in popular writings as a rule of the Poetics. ... If Unity of
Action is preserved, the other unities will take care of them
selves. Unity of Action is indeed in danger of being im
paired by marked discontinuity of place or time. There are
Spanish dramas in which the hero is born in Act i, and
appears again on the scene as an old man at the close of the
play. The missing spaces are almost of necessity filled in
by the undramatic expedient of narrating what has occurred
in the intervals. Yet even here all depends on the art of
the dramatist. Years may elapse between successive acts
without the unity being destroyed, as we see from The
Winter's Tale (p. 276). ... French poets and writers on
aesthetics did not derive their dramatic rules directly from
the Greek models on which the Poetics of Aristotle are based.
The French, having learnt their three Unities from Roman
writers, then sought to discover for them Aristotelian authority.
They committed a further and graver error. Instead of
resting the minor Unities of Time and Place on Unity of
Action, they subordinated Unity of Action to the observance
of the other rules. The result not unfrequently was to com
press into a space of twelve or twenty-four hours a crowded
sequence of incidents and a series of mental conflicts, which
needed ;.a fuller development. The natural course of the
action was cut short, and the inner consistency of character
violated. A similar result followed from the scrupulous pre
cautions taken to avoid a change of scene. The characters,
instead of finding their way to the place where dramatic
motives would have taken them, were compelled to go else
where, lest they should violate the Unities. The external
rule was thus observed, but at the cost of that inward logic
of character and events, which is prescribed by the Poetics.
The failures and successes of the modern stage alike prove the
truth of the Aristotelian principle, that Unity of Action is the
higher and controlling law of the drama. The unities of Time
and Place, so far as they can claim any artistic importance,
are of secondary and purely derivative value' (pp. 278-9).
23. I. [' Corneille calls la liaison des scenes? Cf. Corneille's
Discours des Trois Unites'. ' La. liaison des scenes qui unit
toutes les actions particulieres de chaque acte 1'une avec
1'autre ' (p. 101 ' Grands Ecrivains ' edition). * Un acteur
occupant une fois le theatre, aucun n'y doit entrer qui n'ait
sujet de parler a lui. Surtout lorsqu'un acteur entre deux
fois dans un acte, il doit absolument ou faire juger qu'il
reviendra bientot quand il sort la premiere fois, ou donner
raison en rentrant pourquoi il revient sitot ' (p. 109). Corneille,
who bases himself upon Aristotle (raura de Set yi/eo-0ai e
avTijs rrjs trvoTCKreais TOU pvdoV) coore e/c ro>v irpoyeyevrjuevaiv
ffvpftauHtv 77 ( uvdyKTjs f) Kara TO ef/co? yiyvecrtiai raCra, Poetics
x. 3), and Dryden in the above passage, evidently mean
a good deal more than that mere avoidance of change of
scene within an act, which is all that Dryden means by
' continuity of scenes,' infra, p. 71 (cf. pp. 63-64).]
1 8. See Ben Jonson's Discoveries, chap. 135, p. 131 of
the 'Temple Classics' edition (Dent, 1898).
25. [' There ought to be but one action, says Corneille.'
* II n'y doit avoir qu'une action complete, qui laisse 1'esprit
NOTES. 141
de 1'auditeur dans le calme ; mais elle ne peut le devenir que
par plusieurs autres imparfaites, qui lui servent d'achemine-
ments, et tiennent cet auditeur dans une agre"able suspen
sion ' (Discours des Trois Unites, p. 99).]
24.17- ['Half-Menander.' In his<Lt/e of Terence, Suetonius,
after quoting Cicero on the poet, goes on :
Item C. Caesar :
Tu quoque, tu in summis, o dimidiate Menander,
Poneris, et merito, puri sermonis amator.
Lenibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret vis
Comica, ut aequato virtus polleret honore
Cum Graecis, neve in hac despectus parte iaceres.
Unum hoc maceror ac doleo tibi deesse, Terenti.
The * dimidiate ' is interpreted by Ritschl in the latest edition
of Suetonius' fragments (Reifferscheid) as meaning that,
while Menander was equally great as a delineator of fj6rj and
of -rrddrj (i.e. of character and of passion ; see infra, p. 164),
Terence had no command of passion and was a painter of
rjdi) only. There is an industrious modern study of Menander,
based on the fragments in Meineke's edition (there have
been important additions from Egyptian papyri since), by
Mr. J. Churton Collins in his Essays. What the Greeks
felt about him may be gathered from the phrase of Plutarch
that 'one could do better without wine than without
Menander.']
1 8. 'Varius.' See Horace, Od. i. 6; Sat. i. 9. 23; 10.
44; Ars Poetica, 55 ; Martial, viii. 18. 5. Nothing in Velleius.
25. 4. Macrobius (c. end of fourth century A.D.) wrote
Saturnalia and two books of commentaries on Cicero's
Somnium Scipionis. Virgil is discussed in both at great
length in the former.
27. 9. Historia Romana, ii. 92.
25. [The division which Dryden ascribes to Aristotle is
not in Aristotle's Poetics, nor is it to be found in any extant
Greek grammarian. The first known instance of it is in the
tractate De tragoedia et comoedia, printed in Giles' Terence*
p. xvi, and probably by the Latin grammarian Euanthius.
142 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
It reappears in J. C. Scaliger's Poetice, i. 9, p. 36 of edition of
1586: '"Protasis est in qua proponitur et narratur summa
rei sine declaratione exitus . . . Epitasis in qua turbae aut
excitantur aut intenduntur. Catastasis est vigor ac status
fabulae, in qua res miscetur in ea fortunae tempestate in
quam subducta est. Catastrophe, conversio negotii exagitati
in tranquillitatem non expectatam.']
28. 2. [< The counter-turn.' Cf. p. 65. 3 : ' Any quick turns
and counterturns of plot,' and Dryden's Notes on Rapin (in
Johnson's Life of Dry den) : 'For the fable itself, 'tis in the
English more adorned with episodes, and larger than in
the Greek poets ; consequently more diverting. For if the
action be but one, and that plain, without any counterturn of
design or episode (i. e. underplot), how can it be so pleasing
as the English, which have both underplot and a turned
design, which keeps the audience in expectation of the
catastrophe ? whereas in the Greek poets we see through
the whole design at first.']
8. [In a brawling article on the first edition of this book
(Nov. 24, 1894), the Saturday Review, not content with the
discovery of a blunder in the editor's Englishing of Corneille's
Polyeucte (though Corneille's Pompee was also Englished in the
same line without evoking complaint, and though M. Beljame
has Gallicized the titles of Dryden's and other English plays
throughout his well-known book), has been bold enough to
accuse Dryden himself of an ' amazing blunder on p. 28, where
he identifies the \vans of a tragedy with the Catastrophe.'
The only blunder is the Reviewer's. The passage in Aristotle
(Poetics, xviii. i) runs thus in the best recent edition (By water)
of the Greek : 'Eon fie irdarjs rpaycofitas TO (JLCV fito-ir TO fie
\va-is, ra p.(v ea)$ej/ /cat eVia ra>v ecrudev iroXXaKis f) fie'cris, TO fie
Xowrof T) \vffis Xe'ya> fie deaiv p.fv fivat TTJV OTT' dpxrjs
TOVTOV rov /JLepovs 6 evxarov e'oriv e' ov peTafiaiveiv els
Xiav . . . } \vaiv fie rf)v dirb rfjs dpxrjs TTJS /ueTa/3a<rea>?
Te'Xou?, . . . TToXXoi fie 7rAearTff ev \vova-i /caKoos* SeZ fie a^i^xo
del Kpareladai. Butcher translates as follows : ' Every tragedy
falls into two parts Complication and Unravelling, or De*
NOTES. 143
nouement. Incidents extraneous to the action are frequently
combined with a portion of the action proper to form the
Complication ; the rest is the Unravelling. By the Compli
cation I mean all that comes between the beginning of the
action and the part which marks the turning-point from bad
fortune to good (or good fortune to bad). The Unravelling
is that which comes between the beginning of the change
and the end. . . . Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel
it ill. Both arts, however, should always be mastered.'
Corneille translates SeVts and \v<ns by ncsud and de"noue-
ment throughout. There can be no doubt in fact that \varis
means denouement. But can denouement mean Catastrophe ?
It would seem that the Reviewer denies that it can. He
must mean that if he means anything. Apparently he has
been misled by the geological connotation of the term, and
imagines that in the language of the stage also it can only
mean one overwhelming act the arrest of Cinna, for instance,
but not the whole denouement, including both the arrest and
the subsequent forgiveness. It is easy to show that it is not
so. Johnson defines Catastrophe as 'the change or revolu
tion which produces the conclusion and final event of
a dramatic piece.' ' The denouement,' adds the New English
Dictionary. ' The catastrophe or the denouement, writes
J. A. Symonds (Ben Jonson, p. 89). Scaliger's definition is
' Conversio negotii exagitati in tranquillitatem non ex-
pectatam' clearly not an act, but a process. Corneille
(Premier Discours) gives the title of 'Catastrophe' to Cly-
temnestra's murder of her husband with impunity. The
* impunement ' shows that it is the whole denouement he has
in view. Still more plainly does this appear from the in
junction to keep back ' all the catastrophe ' for the fifth act.
That phrase, 'toute la catastrophe,' is conclusive as to Cor-
neille's interpretation of the word. The usage of Ben Jonson
(Magnetic Lady, Interlude between first and second act) is
similar : ' Do you look, Master Damplay, for conclusions in
a protasis ? I thought the law of comedy had reserved them
to the catastrophe.']
ble to
144 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
23. Horace's line is :
'Neve minor, neu sit quinto productior actu.'
Ars Poet. 189. Horace lays it down as a rule applicable to
allplays, not comedies only.
29. The term 'Jornada' was introduced into Spain by
the dramatist Naharro early in the sixteenth century. It is
equivalent to day's work, or day's journey. * The old French
mysteries were divided into journees or portions, each of
which could conveniently be represented in the time given
by the Church to such entertainments on a single day. One
of the mysteries in this way required forty days for its
exhibition ' (Ticknor, Spanish Literature, i. 270, note). [The
term therefore did not originally mean Act ; but Naharro
divided his comedies into five jornadas, and with the
Spanish dramatists of the next generation the rule was
three. In his Troisttme Discours, Corneille says of the
number of acts: 'Aristote n'en prescrit point le nombre ;
Horace le borne a cinq ; et, bien qu'il defende d'y en mettre
moins, les Espagnols s'opiniatrent a 1'arreter a trois, et les
Italiens font souvent la meme chose.' In a note to this
passage Voltaire, who was bound to find a reason for every
thing, found a reason for five acts : ' Cinq actes nous
paraissent ne'cessaires : le premier expose le lieu de la scene,
la situation des heVos de la piece, leurs inte'rets, leurs mceurs,
leurs desseins ; le second commence 1'intrigue ; elle se noue
au troisieme : le quatrieme prepare le denoument, qui se fait
au cinquieme. Moins de temps pre'cipiterait trop Faction;
plus d'dtendue 1'enerverait.' As to three acts, in the Preface
to his Albion and Albanius (i. 279), Dryden says : ' It
is divided, according to the plain and natural method of
every nation, into three parts. For even Aristotle himself is
contented to say simply that in all actions there is a beginning,
a middle, and an end; after which model all the Spanish
plays are built.']
29. 7. TO p.vd6s. This is a singular slip; it should of
course be 6 pv0os.
15. ['Talkative Greeklings.' Juvenal, iii. 78:' Omnia
NOTES. 145
novit Graeculus esuriens ; in caelum, iusseris, ibit.' Cicero,
de Orat. i. 22, 102: ' Tanquam alicui Graeculo otioso loquaci.'
Ben Jonson, Discoveries, p. 123 (Temple Classics): 'I am
not of that opinion to conclude a poet's liberty within the
narrow limits of laws which either the grammarians or
philosophers prescribe. . . . Which of the Greeklings durst
ever give precepts to Demosthenes ? ']
28. * Good cheap ' is meant for a literal translation of
bon marche 1 . Cp. Florio's Montaigne, bk. ii, chap. 12:
* The men that serve us do it better cheap. 3
30. 9. Terence, Andria, iii. i. 1 5.
13. l Machine.' [The dens ex machind, who was let down
upon the stage in a chariot or some such contrivance, in
order to save the situation at the critical moment. Frequent
in Euripides. See the last line of the passage from the
Prologue to Jonson's Every Man in his Humour, quoted in
the note to p. 62, 1. 9 :
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please.
' Ces de'nouments par des dieux de machine sont fort fr-
quents chez les Grecs,' writes Corneille (Second Discours).
And again : * Dans le denoument, je trouve deux choses
a eViter, le simple changement de volonte', et la machine. . . .
La machine n'a pas plus d'adresse quand elle ne sert qu'a
faire descendre un dieu pour accommoder toutes choses, sur
le point que les acteurs ne savent plus comment les terminer '
(Troisieme Discours). 'Oh, how convenient,' says Dryden
(Dedication of the Aeneis, ii. 189), 'is a machine some
times in a heroic poem. This of Mercury is plainly one.'
Again (ibid. 190) : 'Of Venus and Juno, Jupiter and Mercury,
I say nothing ; for they were all machining work.' Once more
(ibid. 211): 'As for the death of Aruns, who was shot by
a goddess, the machine was not altogether so outrageous as
the wounding Mars and Venus by the sword of Diomede.']
31. 20. Scaliger, Poet. vi. 3, p. 768 (ed. 1586): 'Hoc
primum obiiciebant : alterum hoc. Vasta, inquiunt, et hians,
atque inanis Comoedia est ; tota namque intercedit nox.
146 OF DRAMATIC POESY."
Nam per initia cenam curant ; postea Chremes ait, lucestit.
Sane igitur abiit nox. Haec est illorum obiectio : quam sic
diluimus Datam actamque fabulam ludis Megalensibus.
Itaque dimidium fabulae actum vesperi ; noctem transactam
ludis : alterum dimidium reliquum sub lucem : unam igitur
quasi duas.' Sidney, Apologie, p. 64 (Arber), repeats this
explanation, but in mistake substitutes the Eunuchus for the
Heautontimorumenos : * Yet will some bring in an example
of Eunuchus in Terence, that contained! matter of two days.
. . . True it is, and so was it to be played in two days, and so
fitted to the time it set forth.']
24. The Supplices. * This is all from Corneille, Troisieme
Discours* (Ker). [For the occasion and the subject-matter
of these famous Discourses, see Corneille's letter to the Abbe
de Pure Aug. 25, 1660 (x. 485 of the 'Grands Ecrivains'
edition) :
'Je suis a la fin d'un travail fort penible sur une matiere fort
delicate. J'ai traite en trois prefaces les principales questions de
Tart poetique sur mes trois volumes de comedies. J'y ai fait quel-
ques explications nouvelles d'Aristote, et avance quelques proposi
tions et quelques maximes inconnues a nos anciens. J'y refute celles
sur lesquelles 1' Academic a fonde la condamnation du .Cid, et ne
suis pas d'accord avec M. d'Aubignac de tout le bien meme qu'il
a dit de moi. Quand cela paraitra, je ne doute point qu'il ne donne
matiere aux critiques : prenez un peu ma protection. Ma premiere
preface examine si 1'utilite ou le plaisir est le but de la poesie
dramatique ; de quelles utllites elle est capable, et quelles en sont
les parties, tant integrates, comme le sujet et les mceurs, que de
quantite, comme le prologue, 1'episode et 1'exode. Dans la seconde,
je traite des conditions du sujet de la belle tragedie ; de quelle
qualite doivent etre les incidents qui la composent, et les personnes
qu'on y introduit, afin d' exciter la pitie et la crainte ; comment se
fait la purgation des passions par cette pitie et cette crainte, et des
moyens de traiter les choses selon le vraisemblable ou le necessaire.
Je parle, en la troisieme, des trois unites : d'action, de jour et de
lieu. Je crois qu'apres cela il n'y a plus guere de question d'im-
portance a remuer, et que ce qui reste ,n'est que la broderie qu'y
peuvent ajouter la rhetorique, la morale et la politique. . . . Vous n'y
trouverez pas grande elocution ni grande doctrine; mais, avec tout
NOTES. 147
cela, j'avoue que ces trois prefaces m'ont plus coute que n'auraient
fait trois pieces de theatre. J'oubliais de vous dire que je ne prends
d'exemples modernes que chez moi.'
All three Discourses were published for the first time in 1660,
and were consequently quite fresh in people's minds when
Dryden composed his Essay.]
32. 10. [Corneille in the Trois&me Discours. After the
reference to Euripides, which Dryden has almost literally
translated, Corneille goes on : ' C'est assez bien employe" un
temps si court.' Employ 6 is the reading of all the editions
published in Corneille's lifetime.]
33. 2. This reference to Terence comes from Corneille,
Discours des Trois Unites, p. 102.
34. 14. The satyr-drama of the Cyclops, by Euripides,
a kind of farce, is the only specimen remaining to us of
a form of theatrical entertainment to which all the Greek
tragedians had recourse in order to relieve the mental tension
consequent on witnessing the performance of a long tragedy.
There are elements of comic treatment in the Alcestis and
even in the Antigone. [In an interesting letter to Goethe
(ii. 98 of the English translation of their Correspondence)
Schiller complains of 'a kind of playfulness in the serious
dialogues of Sophocles.' In a defence of Tragi-comedy pub
lished in 1648, Ogier relied chiefly on the Cyclops, which he
described as * une tragi-come'die pleine de raillerie et de vin,
de satyres et de silenes d'un cote, de sang et de rage de Poly-
*pheme eborgne de 1'autre.']
35. 6. Ter. Eunuchus^ act ii. sc. I. 17, 18.
1 6. Our author has quoted from memory. The lines
are, At nostri proavz, etc., and afterwards, Ne dicam stulte
mirati (Malone). Hor. A. P. 270.
23. Hor. A. P. 70.
25. Cleveland. See pp. ii, 136.
28. Catachresis ; see above, p. II, 136.
29. Virg. Eel. iv. 20.
36. 4. Virg. Aen. viii. 91.
8. Ovid, Met. i. 175; and (below) ib. 561. Malone says
L 2
148 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
that the true reading is pompae, and this is adopted in
Burmann's edition ; but longas . . . pampas occurs in the
best MSS., and is printed by all recent editors. Malone
also points out that in the preceding quotation, for verbo
we should read verbis, and for metuam summt, timeam
magni.
31. From The Rebel Scot, by Cleveland, 1. 61.
37. i. Juv. Sat. x. 123.
5. From Cleveland's Rupertismus, 39-40. 'White
powder ' is arsenic.
25. Ovid, Tristia, ii. 381.
30. Our author (as Dr. Johnson has observed) might
have determined this question upon surer evidence, for it
(Medea) is quoted by Quintilian (ix. 2. 8) as Seneca's, and
the only line which remains of Ovid's play, for one line is
left us, is not found there (Malone). Ovid's line, cited by
Quintilian (viii. 5. 6), as stronger and more impressive than
the .adage Nocere facile est, prodesse difficile, is Servare
potui; perdere an passim rogas? [Elsewhere Quintilian
(x. i. 98) says of Ovid's play : ' Ovidii Medea videturmihi
ostendere quantum ille vir praestare potuerit, si ingenio suo
imperare quam indulgere maluisset.' For the dramatic
character of Ovid's genius see Dryden's Preface to Annus
Mirabilis (i. 15, 16).]
38. 20. Juv. Sat. vi. 195.
39. 17. Virg. Aen. i. 378 ; parts of two lines.
28. Hor. Sat. x. 68.
40. 3. Horace, Epist. ii. i. 49.
41. 10. Pierre Corneille was born at Rouen in 1606, and
produced his first play, M elite, a comedy, in 1625.
22. Aristotle, Poetics, v. 8.
42. 19. [' 'Tis a drama of our own invention.' The assertion
is, of course, incorrect. The Tragi-comedy was the specific
Spanish form. The most noted example was La Celestina,
a play of great length, extending to twenty-one acts, and
produced between 1480 and 1490. Fernando Rojas was the
author of all but the first act. France adopted the form from
NOTES. 149
Spain, and was rated by Voltaire in the following terms for
doing so :
' Lorsque Corneille donna Le CM, les Espagnols avaient, sur tons
les theatres de 1'Europe, la meme influence que dans les affaires
publiques. ... II est vrai que, dans presque toutes ces tragedies
espagnoles, il y avait toujours quelques scenes de bouffonneries. Get
usage infecta 1'Angleterre. II n'y a guere de tragedies de Shake
speare ou Ton ne trouve des plaisanteries d'hommes grossiers a cote
du sublime des heros. A quoi attribuer une mode si extravagante
et si honteuse pour 1'esprit humain qu'a la coutume des princes
memes qui entretenaient toujours des bouffons aupres d'eux ; coutume
digne des barbares, qui sentaient le besoin des plaisirs de 1'esprit, et
qui etaient incapables d'en avoir ; coutume meme qui a dure jusqu'a
nos temps, lorsqu'on en reconnaissait la turpitude ? Jamais ce vice
n'avilit la scene fran9aise ; il se glissa seulement dans nos premiers
operas, qui, n'etant pas des ouvrages reguliers, semblaient permettre
cette indecence ; mais bientot 1'elegant Quinault purgea 1'opera de
cette bassesse. Quoi qu'il en soit, on se piquait alors de savoir
1'espagnol, comme on se fait honneur aujourd'hui de parler fran9ais.
C'etait la langue des cours de Vienne, de Baviere, de Bruxelles, de
Naples et de Milan : la Ligue 1'avait introduite en France, et le
mariage de Louis XIII avec la fille de Philippe III avait tellement
mis 1'espagnol a la mode qu'il etait alors presque honteux aux gens
de lettres de 1'ignorer. La plupart de nos comedies etaient imitees
du theatre de Madrid.' (Preface Historique dc Voltaire sur le Cid,
init.}
Martinenche (La Comedie espagnole en France, 1900)
quotes several Spanish pleas in favour of the Tragi-comedy,
and even suggests that it paved the way in France for the
genius of Moliere, 'qui n'est peut-etre si grand que parce qu'il
a tire' son plus haut comique de la plus tragique des matieres';
but he also admits the really vital objection to the Tragi
comedy, or rather to its abuse.
'Nous pouvons admettre (p. 123), si special soit-il, le role du
gracioso, mais comment supporter qu'au beau milieu de la plus
tragique situation il lance une grossiere plaisanterie ? Argensola
(1634) le remarquait avec raison, c'est le meilleur moyen de gater
une noble emotion. On a le droit, dans une meme ceuvre, de faire
appel a des tonalites differentes, mais si on ne les fait point hurler
150 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
ensemble, si on les fond par des transitions insensibles en une savante
harmonic.'
In the same strain Dryden writes at a later period (Parallel
of Poetry and Painting, ii. 146) :
' The Gothic manner, and the barbarous ornaments, which are to
be avoided in a picture, are just the same with those in an ill-ordered
play. For example, our English tragi -comedy must be confessed to
be wholly Gothic, notwithstanding the success which it has found
upon our theatre, and in the Pastor Fido of Guarini ; even though
Corisca and the Satyr contribute somewhat to the main action.
Neither can I defend my Spanish Friar, as fond as otherwise I am
of it, from this imputation : for though the comical parts are
diverting, and the serious moving, yet they are of an unnatural
mingle : for mirth and gravity destroy each other, and are no more
to be allowed for decent than a gay widow laughing in a mourning
habit.'
Addison does little but repeat this passage in the 4oth
Spectator^
28. The Red Bull, in St. John's Street, was one of the
meanest of our ancient theatres, and was famous for enter
tainments adapted to the taste of the lower orders of the
people (Malone). In Strype's edition of Stow's London
there is a plan of the parish of St. James, Clerkenwell, on
which is marked ' Red Bull Yard,' between St. John's Street
and Clerkenwell Green. This must have been the site of the
theatre. The ground formerly belonged to the priory of St.
John at Jerusalem; and it is not unlikely that, as Shakespeare
and his company turned the ruinous buildings of the Black-
friars, near St. Paul's, to account for a theatre, the patrons of
the Red Bull made a similar use of the monastic ruins at
Clerkenwell. In his Annals of the Stage (iii. 324) Mr.
Collier collects a number of notices, more or less interesting,
of the Red Bull Theatre. Wither, in his Satires, Randolph in
his Muses' Looking Glass, and Prynne in the Histriomastix,
all make mention of it. It was pulled down not long after
the Restoration, and Drury Lane was regarded as having
taken its place.
NOTES. 151
29. Hor. Epist. ii. I. 185. Horace wrote:
Si discordet eques, media inter carmina poscunt
Aut ursum aut pugiles.
31. ['Admiration.' Aristotle says nothing of admiration.
The famous words are (Poetics, 6. 2) : 6Y e'Aeou KCU <ooi/
irepaivovo-a TTJV T>V TOIOVTCOV -rradrjfMTOtv Kadap(riv, ' through pity
and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions '
(Butcher, after Bernays and Weil). In his Notes on Rapin,
Dryden argues that 'it may admit of doubt whether pity and
terror are either the prime, or at least the only ends cf
tragedy. 'Tis not enough that Aristotle had said so ; for
Aristotle drew his models from Sophocles 1 and Euripides ;
and if he had seen ours might have changed his mind. . . .
If then the encouragement of virtue and discouragement of
vice be the proper ends of poetry in tragedy, pity and terror,
though good means, are not the only. For all the passions,
in their turns, are to be set in a ferment ; as joy, anger, love,
fear are to be used as the poet's commonplaces ; and
a general concernment for the principal actors is to be
raised, by making them appear such in the characters, their
words and actions, as will interest the audience in their
fortunes.' It is remarkable that Dryden anticipated the
pathological explanation of Catharsis, which, since Bernays,
has been accepted by almost all good authorities; and it
would be still more remarkable if Dryden had not been
himself anticipated by Milton 1 (in the Preface to Samson
Agonistes], who was himself anticipated by at least one
seventeenth-century Italian, and by Corneille (see the letter
to the Abbe de Pure quoted on p. 145). In the Dedication
to the Aeneis (ii. 258) he writes: 'To raise, and after
wards to calm the passions to purge the soul from pride by
the examples of human miseries, which befall the greatest
in few words, to expel arrogance and introduce compassion
1 See Prof. Bywater's interesting article on Milton and the Aristo
telian Definition of Tragedy' in the Journal of Philology for 1901,
xxvii. 267.
152 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
(to "remove pride and hard-heartedness," ibid. 166), are the
great effects of tragedy.' As for ' admiration,' Dryden else
where seems to regard it as the peculiar effect and object of
the epic. In the Dedication of Examen Poeticnm (ii. 12)
he writes : ' Yet I must needs say this in reference to
Homer, that he is much more capable of exciting the manly
passions than those of grief and pity. To cause admiration
is indeed the proper and adequate design of an Epic Poem ;
and in that he has excelled even Virgil.' And in A Parallel
of Poetry and Painting (ii. 243) : ' The hero ... is the
chief object of pity in the drama, and of admiration in the
epic poem.' Sidney, however, whose Apologie Dryden often
had in mind, had written (Arber, p. 65) : ' A Comedy should
be full of delight, as the Tragedy should be still maintained
in a well-raised admiration.']
43. 13. Hor. Ars Poet. 240.
22. Ibid. 151.
28. Dryden here used * success' in the sense of the
Spanish suceso, which means * event,' or ' issue.' [See his
Original and Progress of Satire (ii. 51): 'This was the
subject of the tragedy ; which, being one of those that end
with a happy event, is therefore, by Aristotle, judged below
the other sort, whose success is unfortunate.']
31. Justin, who probably lived in the age of the Antonines,
abridged the Universal History of Pompeius Trogus, a
contemporary of Livy. The reference here is to Justin, i. 8
(* the true Cyrus in Justin,' Sidney, Apologie (Arber, p. 36).
44. 3. The writers from whom we learn the story of Cyrus
are (besides Justin) Herodotus, Ctesias, and Xenophon. Of
these Herodotus, as living nearest to the time, is the most
trustworthy. The Cyropaedia of Xenophon ('the feigned
Cyrus of Xenophon,' Sidney, ibid.) is an historical romance,
nor does the writer himself pretend that it is anything more.
Herodotus makes Cyrus, when advanced in years, invade the
country of the Massagetae, whose queen was Tomyris, and
lose his life in battle.
21. Hor. Ars Poet. 188.
NOTES. 153
25. Hesiod, Theog. 27 ; Homer, Od. xix. 203.
45. 12. 'Spanish plots.' The chief adaptations from the
Spanish drama were Elvira, or the worst not always True, by
a Person of Quality (the Earl of Bristol), 1667, from Calderon,
No siempre lo Peor es cierto ; and the Adventures of Five
Hours, 1663, by Sir Samuel Tuke, from Los Empenos de
seis Horas, attributed to Calderon. Lord Bristol made two
other versions from Calderon, which are not extant (Ker).
[The plot of Calderon's Mock Astrologer (El A sir 6 logo Fin-
gido] was borrowed by Thomas Corneille, and from him by
Dryden for his play of that name. But the debt of England,
and of Europe generally, to the Spanish stage chiefly
through the medium of France is by no means limited to
these instances. Martinenche quotes Chappuzeau (1674) as
saying : * Les Frangais ont su tenir le milieu entre les
Italiens et les Espagnols, et par un heureux temperament se
former un caractere universel qui s'eloigne dgalement des
deux exces. Mais au fond nous sommes plus obliges aux
Espagnols'; and then goes on (p. 425) :
' Les Italiens ne nous ont enseigne que leurs lazzi superficiels et la
fantaisie licencieuse de leurs intrigues. Les Espagnols ne se sont
pas contentes de fournir de sujets et de scenes 1'imagination creatrice
de nos grands poetes dramatiques. Us nous ont veritablement ouvert
le chemin du theatre moderne en nous tevelant les kernels ressorts
de la tragedie et de la comedie. Certes leur conception de 1'amour
et de 1'honneur tenait trop a la mode de leur pays et participait a la
cruaute et a 1'ardeur speciales de leurs moeurs. Mais Corneille
n'aurait peut-etre pas confu sans eux son superbe drame de la
volonte, et Moliere n'a pas eu a se repentir d' avoir cherche apres
eux le rire a la meme source que les pleurs.' See note to 55. 9.]
15. The Bloody Brother, also called The Tragedy of
Rollo Duke of Normandy, by John Fletcher, was first
printed in 1639. The plot is taken from the fourth book of
Herodian ; it is Roman imperial history transferred to new
. times, places, and persons ; Caracalla and Geta become
Rollo and Otto. See A. W. Ward's Dramatic Literature,
734-5-
26. ' Oleo,' or ' oglio,' is a corruption of olla in olla
T54 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
podrida, a Spanish dish consisting of a stew of several kinds
of meat and vegetables. Oleo, therefore, means a mess or
mixture. Cf. Original and Progress of Satire (ii. 104) :
' That olla, or hotch-potch, which is properly a satire.'
47. 3. Dryden appears to have borrowed this word from
Corneille, who speaks (Rodog. Exam.) of a ' personnage
protatique,' i. e. an introductory character ; it stands for the
Greek nporaTiKov irpoawTrov, which Donatus in his preface to
the Andria of Terence represents in Latin by ' protatica
persona.' [' Pour ouvrir son sujet Terence a introduit une
nouvelle sorte de personnages qu'on a appele"s protatiques,
parce qu'ils ne paraissent que dans la protase, ou se doit faire
la proposition et 1'ouverture du sujet ' (Corneille, Discours
du Poeme Dramatique, p. 46). See note to 27. 25.]
7. [' Interessed.' Cf. Original and Progress of Satire
(ii. 33) : * Without interessing Heaven in the quarrel.'
Parallel of Poesy and Painting (ii. 130) : 'By which he
gained the hearts of a great nation to interess themselves
for Rome against Carthage.' The same French spelling
(showing that the word was still comparatively novel) recurs
in Dryden's text in the Preface to Albion and Albanius
(i.279) and the Dedication of the Aeneis (ii. 191). There
is an earlier use of the form in Daniel's Defence of Rhyme
fGrosart's edition of Daniel's complete works, iii. 34, 37).
Dryden uses the ordinary modern spelling, p. 124, 1. 7,
unless indeed the editors have been at work, as they have
in the Preface to Dryden's Religio Laid, where 'nothing
interessed in that dispute ' was regularly printed ' interested '
till the arrival on the scene of Mr. Christie. In Religio
'Laid itself, 1. 333
When general, old, disinteressed, and clear,
the editors, including even Scott, have destroyed the metre
by printing ' disinterested ' for ' disinteressed.']
25. ['Ten or twenty years ago.' See Corneille, Discours
des Trois Unite's, pp. 104-105 : 'J'ajoute un conseil, de
s'embarrasser le moins qu'il lui est possible de choses
NOTES. 155
arrivees avant 1'action qui se repre'sente. Ces narrations'
(observe this word Englished above, 1. 6) ' importunent
d'ordinaire, parce qu'elles ne sont pas attendues, et qu'elles
genent 1'esprit de 1'auditeur, qui est oblige* de charger sa
me'moire de ce qui s'est fait dix ou douze ans auparavant,
pour comprendre ce qu'il voit representer ; mais celles qui
se font des choses qui arrivent et se passent derriere le
theatre, depuis 1'action commence'e, font toujours un meilleur
effet, parce qu'elles sont attendues avec quelque curiosite, et
font partie de cette action qui se represented]
48. 2. [' Fight prizes.' In Scott's Woodstock, chap, xiv,
General Harrison is made to say : ' I have been accounted
a master of fence, and have fought prizes when I was un-
regenerated.' The New English Dictionary also quotes
Browning, Paracelsus, iv. 119, * while we fight the prize.']
4. [Cf. Sidney's Apologie (Arber, p. 63) in an argument
for Unity of Place : ' Now ye shall have three Ladies walk
to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be
a Garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the
same place, and then we are to blame if we accept it not
for a Rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous
Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable
beholders are bound to take it for a Cave. While in the
meantime two Armies fly in, represented with four swords
and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for
a pitched field ? ']
23. ['Than all the actor can insinuate into us.' Cf.
p. 61: 'Whether custom has so insinuated itself into our
countrymen.' Charles Lamb, who knew his Dryden well,
has taken over this verb from our author in a well-known
passage: 'The actor must pronounce [these profound
sorrows, &c.] ore rotunda, he must accompany them with
his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by some
trick of eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails' (On the Tragedies
of Shakspere, p. 256).]
49. 19. [' Corneille says judiciously.' ' Le poete n'est pas
tenu d'exposer a la vue toutes les actions particulieres qui
156 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
amenent a la principale : il doit choisir celles qui lui sont les
plus avantageuses a faire voir, soit par la beaut du spectacle,
soit par 1'eclat et la vehemence des passions qu'elles pro-
duisent, soit par quelque autre agrement qui leur soit
attache', et cacher les autres derriere la scene, pour les
faire connaitre au spectateur, ou par une narration, ou par
quelque autre adresse de 1'art ' (Discours des Trots Unites,
p. 100).]
50. 13. Hor. A. P. 180-7. Horace writes ' Ne pueros':
a line is omitted after ' trucidet.'
25. The reference is to act iii. sc. i. 2, of Jonson's
comedy of The Magnetic Lady.
51. 9. The title of this play, the joint work of Beaumont
and Fletcher, and first acted in 1611, was A King and no
King. In the last act, Gobryas, a noble, reveals to Arbaces,
king of Illyria, that he is really his son, and not the son of
Arane, the queen mother; Arbaces, thus become a subject
and ' no King,' marries Panthea, the true heir to the throne,
and all ends happily.
22. 'Simple change of will.' See the passage from
Corneille's Third Discourse, quoted on p. 145, note to 30.
13, and the following from the First Discourse, pp. 27-28 :
' Nous devons toutefois prendre garde que ce consentement '
(of parents to the marriage of lovers) ' ne vienne pas par un
simple changement de volonte, mais par un evenement qui
en fournisse 1'occasion. Autrement il n'y aurait pas grand
artifice au denouement d'une piece, si, apres 1'avoir soutenue
durant quatre actes sur 1'autorite d'un pere qui n'approuve
point les inclinations amoureuses de son fils ou de sa fille, il
y consentait tout d'un coup au cinquieme, par cette seule
raison que c'est le cinquieme, et que 1'auteur n'oserait en
faire six. II faut un effort considerable qui 1'y oblige,
comme si 1'amant de sa fille lui sauvait la vie en quelque
rencontre ou il fut pret d'etre assassine par ses ennemis,
ou que par quelque accident inespere' il fut reconnu pour
etre de plus grande condition et mieux dans la fortune qu'il
ne paraissait.']
NOTES. 157
52. 2. The Scornful Lady, a joint play of Beaumont and
Fletcher, was produced some time before 1609. 'The sudden
conversion of the usurer Morecraft is imitated from the
Adelphi of Terence, where the same change takes place in
the character of Demea* (Dyce). See Ward's Dramatic
Literature, ii. 668.
28. [' II faut, s'il se peut, y rendre raison de I'entre'e et
de la sortie de chaque acteur ; surtout pour la sortie je tiens
cette regie indispensable, et il n'y a rien de si mauvaise grace
qu'un acteur qui se retire du theatre seulement parce qu'il
n'a plus de vers a dire.' Corneille, Discours des Trois
Unites^
53. 19. Velleius Paterculus, i. 17.
54. 17. The Menteur of Corneille (see Geruzez, Lit.
Franqaise, ii. 90) was founded on one of the chefs-d'oeuvre
of the Spanish stage, the Truth itself Suspected (La Verdad
Suspechosd] of Ruiz de Alarcon. It appeared in 1642.
Corneille himself wrote of it : * Ce n'est ici qu'une copie
d'un excellent original.'
55. 5. Cardinal Richelieu died in 1642.
9. The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Double
Marriage of Beaumont and Fletcher, which are founded on
two of Cervantes' novels, are cases in point. Middleton's
Spanish Gipsy is from Cervantes (Ker).
II. The Adventures of Five Hours, written by Sir
Samuel Tuke, and printed in 1663. Diego is a character in
it (Malone). See note to 45. 12.
56. 6. ' Contraries are the two most opposite qualities
of the same class of subjects, e. g. black and white, as colours
of bodies ; virtue and vice, as habits of the soul' (Mansel's
Artis Logicae Rudimenta, 19).
57. 4. The doctrine of the primum mobile belongs to the
Ptolemaic astronomy, which made the sun and stars revolve
round the earth. ' In the old astronomy the sphere beyond
the sphere of the Fixed Stars, which gives to the eight lower
spheres their diurnal motion from east to west ' (Ker).
58. 12. Cinna, or the Clemency of Augustus, produced
158 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
in 1639, is generally allowed to be Corneille's finest tragedy.
[Corneille himself wrote of it in his Troisieme Discours\
' Une des raisons qui donne tant d'illustres suffrages a Cinna
pour le mettre au-dessus de ce que j'ai fait, c'est qu'il n'y
a aucnne narration du passe,' &c. ; and in a note to the
same Discours Voltaire says : ' II y a quelques defauts de
style dans Cinna ; on y a decouvert aussi quelques fautes
dans la conduite et dans les sentiments : mais en general
il y regne une si noble simplicity, tant de naturel, tant de
clarte, le style a tant de beaut^s, qu'on lira toujours cette
piece avec interet et avec admiration.'] On the Pompee,
see the note on p. 130. The Polyeucte,-*. story of Christian
martyrdom referring to the persecution of the Emperor
Decius, appeared in 1640. The author's ' Examen ' on this
play is of great interest.
59. II. ['Chace, of wit.' Apparently from the quick
volleys and returns of the game of tennis, in which ' chase '
is a familiar technical term ; see the New English
Dictionary.'}
60. 10. The Maid's Tragedy is by Beaumont and Fletcher;
the other plays here mentioned are by Ben Jonson.
61. 1 6. The Andromede, from the gorgeousness of its
mythological mise-en-scene, bore some resemblance to the
masque, while from the use of recitative and the intro
duction of many songs it approached the modern opera.
Among the ' dramatis personae ' there were only ten human
beings against twelve gods and goddesses. The opening
scene showed a huge mountain, pierced by a grotto, through
which appeared the sea; Melpomene entered on one side,
and the Sun on the other, in a ' char tout lumineux,' drawn
by four horses.
31. In the north of Etruria, about 180 miles from Rome.
See p. 122, 1. 12.
62. 9. There is no passage in Ben Jonson's works in
which he directly censures Shakespeare for the non-
observance of the unities of Time and Place. Dryden can
only refer to the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour.
NOTES. 159
This Prologue first appeared in 1616, and its intended
application to Shakespeare may well have been traditionally
known in the theatrical world fifty years later. In it Jonson,
among the ' ill customs of the age ' which he will not imitate,
enumerates
To make a child now swaddled to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.
He rather prays you will be pleased to see
One such to-day, as other plays should be ;
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please, &c.
Other dramatists may have been included in the censure ;
but it seems clear that Shakespeare was principally intended,
the three parts of whose Henry VI (assuming Shakespeare's
responsibility for all of them) extend over the events of
nearly fifty years, including the whole of l York and Lan
caster's long jars,' whose Perdita is born and grows up to
be a woman between the first and fifth acts, and who makes
the Chorus in The Winters Tale say the play having begun
in Sicily
imagine me,
Gentle spectators, that I now may be
In fair Bohemia.
64. 4. Thomas Corneille's (the younger) L' Amour d la
Mode (1651), Englished in 1675 as The Amorous Gallant, or
Love in Fashion (Ker).
19. A servant in Sir Samuel Tuke's Adventures of
Five Hours, who is described by the author as 'a great
coward, and a pleasant droll.' [Philipin is a common name
for the comic servant in French imitations from the Spanish.
The type of the gracioso was taken over by these imitators,
and Diego, his regular name in the Spanish originals, became
Philipin. 'Les "graciosos" et les "graciosas" sont des
types qu'on ne peut pas transporter tels quels sur la scene
160 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
trangere. Mais ils sont autrement modernes et complexes
que les esclaves antiques ou les serviteurs de la come'die
italienne, et quand on les depouillera de leur enveloppe
espagnole ils auront plus d'une legon a donner a nos valets
etanos "servantes." ... II en estdu "gracioso" comme du
chceur antique. II n'est point une partie eternelle du drame,
mais il est indispensable a la come'die particuliere ou il joue
un des principaux roles. II est le bon sens qui corrige les
folies et les enthousiasmes, il rappelle la verite' humaine en
presence des exces et des monstruosites. II est le lien
indispensable entre 1'Espagne chevaleresque et 1'Espagne
picaresque. . . . S'il faut reconnaitre a Scarron le merite
d'avoir acclimate en France le valet de comedie dont Moliere
nous donnera le type achieve", il ne faut pas oublier qu'il nous
vient de Rojas et de la comedie ironique, et qu'il est beau-
coup plus le fils du gracioso espagnol que du zanni italien.'
Martinenche, La Comedie Espagnole en France (1900) pp.
109, 119,389.]
65. 23. This subject had been imperfectly examined at the
time when Dryden wrote, and his statement is not quite
accurate. It is true that most of the old comedies before
Shakespeare, such as Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer
Gurtorfs Needle, were written in rude twelve- syllable lines ;
to class these with the elegant French Alexandrines of the
period is to pay them much too high a compliment. But
there were exceptions ; the Misogonus of Richards (about
1560) is in fourteen-syllable alternate rhymes; the Supposes
of Gascoigne (1566) is in prose; and the Taming of a Shrew
(1594) is in blank verse. See Collier, Annals of the Stage,
vol. iii. But the chief injustice of Dryden's obiter dictum lay in
his saying nothing of Lyly, who, as a writer of prose dialogue
interspersed with blank verse, is important for his purpose.
30. The unfinished pastoral drama of The Sad Shep
herd, or A Tale of Robin Hood, must have been written not
long before Jonson's death in 1637 ; the prologue opens with
the line
He that hath feasted you these forty years.
NOTES. 161
66. 3. The pastoral drama of The Faithful Shepherdess,
by Fletcher, was published by 1610.
1 8. Dryden truly says that The Merry Wives of Windsor
is ' almost exactly formed ' ; that is, that the unities of time
and place are nearly observed. The time of the action is
comprised within two days ; the place is, either some house
in Windsor, or a street in Windsor, or a field near the town,
or Windsor Park.
7. ['To return whence I have digressed.' The substi
tution, of 'whence' for the loose and pleonastic 'from whence'
of the first edition, is another proof of the injustice of John
son's charge against Dryden, that he took no pains to mend
his style. (See p. 132.) To the instances there given of
elimination of needless or pendent prepositions should be
added 63. 2, where the 'bound up' of the first edition
becomes simply ' limited ' in the second.]
67. II. 'It is curious to observe with what caution our author
speaks, when he ventures to place Shakespeare above Jonson ;
a caution which proves decisively the wretched taste of the
period when he wrote' (Malone).
31. Virg. EcL i. 26.
68. i. John Hales, Fellow of Eton, was a friend of Sir
Henry Wotton. The Golden Remains of the Ever Memorable
Mr. John Hales was published in 1659. There is a story
of his being present when Ben Jonson was speaking of
Shakespeare's want of learning (Ker).
[20. See Ben Jonson's fifty-fourth Epigram :
How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse,
That unto me dost such religion use !
How I do fear myself, that am not worth
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth!
At once thou mak'st me happy, and unmak'st,
And giving largely to me, more thou tak'st !
What fate is mine, that so itself bereaves?
What art is thine, that so thy friend deceives?
When even there, where most thou praisest me,
For writing better, I must envy thee.]
23. Chiefly on account of the woman-page Bellario, in
M
1 62 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
whose mouth are put a profusion of pretty and graceful things
which might often deserve to have been said by Shakespeare's
Viola. Lamb says (Eng. Dramatic Poets, p. 308), ' For
many years after the date of Philaster's first exhibition on
the stage [1608], scarce a play can be found without one of
those women pages in it, following in the train of some pre-
engaged lover.'
69. 10. Mr. Dyce, in his excellent edition of Beaumont and
Fletcher (1844), enumerates the following plays as certainly,
or almost certainly, the joint work of the two :
Philaster.
The Maid's Tragedy.
The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
King and no King.
Cupid's Revenge.
The Coxcomb.
Four Plays in One.
The Scornful Lady.
The Honest Man's Fortune.
The Little French Lawyer.
Wit at several Weapons.
The Laws of Candy.
Three others Wit without Money, The Custom of the
Country, and Bonduca he is disposed to add to the above
list, but with less confidence. The other plays, in number
about thirty-nine, published under their joint names, he
would assign either to Fletcher alone, or to Fletcher assisted
by some other dramatist, not Beaumont. [The work, con
siderable in amount, which has been done on Beaumont and
Fletcher since Dyce's day, and in which Mr. Fleay, with
his metrical tests, has taken an important part, is summarized
and critically sifted by Dr. A. W. Ward, in the important
and elaborate chapter on 'Beaumont and Fletcher' at the
end of the second volume (revised edition, 1899) of his
History of English Dramatic Literature, pp. 643-764.
Dyce's list, as given above, is still generally accepted, with
the exception that the Little French Lawyer is now usually
NOTES. 163
assigned to Fletcher and Massinger (Ward, 720) ; that Wit
without Money is to be ascribed to * Fletcher alone ' (Ward,
695) ; that the Custom of the Country is probably Fletcher's
only (Ward, 721); and that Bonduca is 'now generally
regarded as Fletcher's unassisted work ' (Ward, 696). The
reader may also be referred to Prof. Ashley M. Thorndike's
essay on 'The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on
Shakespeare' (Worcester, Mass., 1901), as well as to Mr.
Swinburne's essay on ' Beaumont and Fletcher ' in his
Studies in Prose and Poetry (pp. 53-83), the latter an attempt
to distinguish the two poets and to assign to each on purely
aesthetic grounds the share properly belonging to him.]
21. [Jonson's New Inn and Tale of a Tub. J. A.
Symonds (Ben Jonson, p. 167) adds Staple of News and
Magnetic Lady. Perhaps this is unjust to the last named,
which, according to Langbaine, was generally accounted an
excellent play ; and as to the Staple of News, Dr. Ward
writes to me that ' in conception at least it is one of Jonson's
most characteristic comedies, and much superior to the
Magnetic Lady?}
71. 9. The Discoveries, not published till after Jonson's
death, are like the contents of a commonplace book, and of
unequal merit ; here occurs the well-known criticism on
Shakespeare as having 'never blotted out a line.' The praise
which Dryden gives to the book is perhaps excessive, though
not warmer than that given by Mr. Swinburne (A Study of
Benjonson}.
13. Epicoene, or the Silent Woman, appeared in 1609.
72. 23. [The verb to 'instance' means to choose or adduce
an example. In his Dictionary Johnson quotes from
Tillotson : 'As to false citations ... I shall instance in two
or three about which he makes the loudest clamour ' ; and
from Dryden (A Discourse concerning the Original and
Progress of Satire, ii. 26): 'In Tragedy and Satire . . .
this age and the last have excelled the ancients in both
those kinds ; and I would instance in Shakespeare of the
former, in your Lordship (Dorset) of, the latter sort.' It is
M 2
1 64 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
curious that when Johnson came to write Dorset*^ Life he
should have forgotten his own quotation and changed the
construction of the verb : ' If such a man attempted poetry,
we cannot wonder that his works were praised. Dryden . . .
undertaking to produce authors of our own country superior
to those of antiquity, says, 7 would instance your lordship in
satire, and Shakespeare in tragedy? There is yet another
example of the word in Dryden's prose (Dedication of the
jEneis, ii. 161) : ' I forbear to instance in many things
which the stage cannot, or ought not to represent. 5 Reference
should also be made to this Essay, supra p. 34, 1. 12:
* This is so plain that I need not instance to you that,' &c.
The verb is generally followed by ' in/ and at first sight one
is tempted to construe the ' in ' as belonging to the verb, the
verbal phrase being thus comparable to * count in,' 'take in,'
'shut in,' and when Butler (Analogy, \. 6. 353) wrote, 'which
is the fallacy instanced in by the ancients,' he clearly did so.
But the other examples cited in the New English Dictionary,
ranging from 1601 to 1882, prove 'in' to be an ordinary
preposition. The verb can be, and has been, used without
the in.'
26. TJdos, disposition ; naQos, passion (ethos, pathos) ; cf.
p. 141.
74. 2. Ex ho^nine. ' Terence, Eun. iii. 2. 7. " The one is
the born image of the other" ; Parmeno's remark on Gnatho
the parasite and his patron Thraso ' (Ker).
75. 25. Hor. Epist. ii. I. 168.
29. [' One of these advantages is that which Corneille
has laid down as the greatest which can arrive to any poem,'
c. See Corneille's Discours des Trois Unites, p. 116 : ' Je
ne puis oublier que c'est un grand ornement pour un poeme
que le choix d'un jour illustre et attendu depuis quelque
temps. II ne s'en pre'sente pas toujours des occasions; et
dans tout ce que j'ai fait jusqu'ici, vous n'en trouverez de
cette nature que quatre : celui $ Horace, ou deux peuples
devaient decider de leur empire par une bataille, celui de
Rodogune, SAndromtde, et de Don Sanche . . . dans le reste
NOTES. 165
de mes ouvrages je n'ai pu choisir des jours remarquables
que par ce que le hasard y fait arriver, et non pas par
1'emploi ou 1'ordre public les ait destines de longue
main.']
76. 19. The prose comedy of Bartholomew Fair was pro
duced in 1614.
77. 17. Of the piece on which our author has given so high
an encomium, Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson's con
temporary and friend, has left the following anecdote :
'When his play of The Silent Woman was first acted,
there were found verses after on the stage against him,
concluding that the play was well named The Silent
Woman, because there was never one man to say plaudit 'e
to it' (Malone). [J. A. Symonds (Ben Jonson, 88) ranks the
play among Ben Jonson's ' masterpieces,' though he says that,
' like all of Jonson's works, The Silent Woman illustrates the
constructive ability of its author rather than the laws of
artistic growth from within. We can see how it has been
put together. We do not watch it expanding and spreading
fantastic boughs like a comedy of Aristophanes. Yet the
architecture is so flawless that the connection of each part
seems to be inevitable. . . . Though so artfully constructed,
Epicoene rather deserves the name of a Titanic farce than
of a just comedy. It does not, like Volpone, exhibit a ruling
vice, but exposes a ludicrous personal peculiarity in the main
actor. . . . But it stirs genial mirth in an ever-increasing
degree ; and the manners and conversation of the persons in
this play, especially of the young men, are both more natural
and more entertaining than is common with Jonson.' ' Its
merits,' writes Swinburne (A Study of Ben Jonson, 50), 'are
salient and superb .... this most imperial and elaborate of
all farces. His wit is wonderful admirable, laughable, laud
able it is not in the fullest and the deepest sense delightful,
, it is radically cruel, contemptuous, intolerant ; the sneer of
the superior person Dauphine or Clerimont is always
ready to pass into a snarl. . . . Perhaps the only play of
Jonson's which will keep the reader or spectator for whole
166 OF DRAMATIC POE^Y.
scenes together" in an inward riot or an open passion of
subdued or unrepressed laughter.']
78. 1 8. Hor. de Arte Poet. 90.
25. Veil. Paterc. ii. 36.
80. 13. Macrob. Saturnalia, ii. 7. The * other poet' was
Publilius Syrus. [There is a fine translation of Laberius 3
indignant Prologue by Goldsmith (Globe edition, p. 679).
The * mime' was a scurrilous, often indecent, representation
of low life, and it was an indignity for a Roman knight to
appear in such a piece. Of course Caesar's request was
a command. ' Laberium,' says Macrobius, ' asperae libertatis
equitem Romanum Caesar quingentis millibus invitavit, ut
prodiret in scaenam et ipse ageret mimos quos scriptitabat.
Sed potestas non solum si invitet, sed etiam si supplicet
cogit, unde se et Laberius a Caesare coactum in prologo
testatur his vocibus :
Ego bis tricenis annis actis sine nola
Eques Romanus e Lare egressus meo
Domum revertar mimus?
Offended by these and other liberties of speech, Caesar
turned his favour to the new star, Publilius Syrus. 'Nee
ullo recusante superavit omnes, in queis et Laberium. Unde
Caesar adridens hoc modo pronuntiavit :
Favente tibi me victus es, Laberi, a Syro?\
81. I. [Aristotle's Poetics > iv. 14, thus Englished by Pro
fessor Butcher : ' Once dialogue had come in, Nature
herself discovered the appropriate measure. For the iambic
is, of all measures, the most colloquial : we see it in
the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic form
more frequently than into any other kind of verse ; rarely
into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial
intonation.' What Aristotle says of the tendency of Greek
prose to run into iambics applies in English to blank verse,
' into which,' says Dry den (Epistle Dedicatory of The Rival
Ladies), 'the English tongue so naturally slides that, in
NOTES. 167
writing prose, it is hardly to be avoided' (i. 6).] There
is a curious instance in this Essay (p. 4, last four lines of
paragraph ending ' fighting men ').]
20. [* Nicking.' The Century Dictionary gives a number
of fairly apt quotations to illustrate the use of this obsolete
or obsolescent word; but it is now most frequently used
and in the precise sense of the text by the riders of tandem
cycles to express the very exact correspondence between the
two riders which makes the whole difference between success
and failure, ease and discomfort, in that kind of cycling.]
24. Virg. Eel. vii. 4.
25. Ovid, Trist. iv. 10. 25 :
Sponte sua carmen numeros veniebat ad aptos,
Et quod temptabam scribere versus erat.
82. 14. [' Painture or designment.' Cf. Dryden's Ode to
the Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigreiv, stanza 6 :
For Painture near adjoining lay.
In the lines To Sir Godfrey Kneller Dryden writes :
As man grew polished, picture was enhanced.
Evidently Dryden was feeling about for the word ' painting,'
without exactly hitting on it. As for 'designment,' see
stanza 24 of Dryden's Oliver Cromwell :
Yet still the fair designment was his own.]
83. 9. Seneca Rhetor, Controv. ix. 5, quoting from Ovid,
Met. xiii. 503-5.
II. Ovid, Met. i. 292. This line is quoted by Lucius
Seneca in Naturales Qitaest. iii. 27. 12. [The jumble of the
two Senecas, .the rhetorician Marcus (? in reality we do not
know his praenomen, and the M. does not appear before the
fifteenth century), and the philosopher Lucius is so confusing,
and the criticism, in theory and detail, so interesting, that
it is worth while to quote both passages in full. First
Seneca Rhetor writes (Controv. ix. 5. 17) :
' Habet hoc Montanus vitium : sententias suas repetendo corrum-
pit ; dum non est contentus unam rem semel bene dicere efficit ne
168 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
potest
bene dixerit. Et propter hoc et propter alia quibus orator
poetae similis videri solebat Scaurus Montanum inter oratores
Ovidium vocare ; nam et Ovidius nescit quod bene cessit relinquere.
Ne multa referam quae Montaniana Scaurus vocabat, uno hoc con-
tentus ero : cum Polyxene esset abducta, ut ad tumulum Achillis
immolaretur, Hecuba dicit :
cinis ipse sepulti
In genus hoc pugnat.
poterat hoc contentus esse ; adiecit :
tumulo qtioque sensimus hostem.
nee hoc contentus est ; adiecit :
Aeacidae fecunda fui.
Aiebat autem Scaurus rem veram : non minus magnam virtutem
esse scire dicere quam scire desinere.'
Secondly, Lucius Annaeus Seneca the philosopher, in a dis
course upon the Deluge (Nat. Quaest. iii. 27. 12), refers to
Ovid's verses on the subject, and, after quoting his monies et
sparsas Cydadas augent, goes on :
' Ut ait ille poetarum ingeniosissimus egregie, sicut illud pro
magnitudine rei dixit :
Ontnia pontus erant, deerant quoque litora ponto,
nisi tantum impetum ingenii et materiae ad pueriles ineptias re-
duxisset :
Nat lupus inter oves, fulvos vehit tmda leones.
Non est res satis sobria lascivire devorato orbe terrarum. * Dixit
ingentia et tantae confusionis imaginem cepit, cum dixit :
Exspatiata ruunt per apertos flumina campos
. . . pressaeque labant sub gurgite turres.
Magnifice haec, si non curaverit, quid oves et lupi faciant. Natari
autem in deluvio et in ilia rapina potest ? Aut non eodem impetu
pecus, quo raptum erat, mersum erat? Concepisti imaginem quantam
debebas, obrntis terris omnibus, coelo ipso in terram ruente : perfer.'
Dryden himself has said of Ovid elsewhere (Preface to the
Translation of Ovid's Epistles, \. 234) :
' But ... it must be acknowledged, in spite of his Dutch friends,
his commentators, even of Julius Scaliger himself, that Seneca's
censure will stand good against him; Nescivit quod bene cessit
NOTES. 169
relinquere-. he never knew how to give over when he had done
well ; but. continually varying the same sense an hundred ways, and
taking up in another place what he had more than enough inculcated
before, he sometimes cloys his readers instead of satisfying them.']
29. The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor were
the only plays, altogether in rhyme, which Dryden had pro
duced before this was written, and The Indian Queen was
written in part by Sir R. Howard. The Rival Ladies is
partly prose, partly rhyme.
84. 3. Sir Robert Howard (Malone) ; in the preface to his
plays, published in 1665.
85. 29. * prevail himself,' se prtvaloir, a Gallicism. See
'Dryden's Preface to Annus Mirabilis (i. 13) : * I could not
prevail myself of it in the English'; and supra, p. 75, 1. 27
(first edition). [Also Absalom and Achitophel, Part I,
1. 461 :
Prevail yourself of what occasion gives.
One of Dryden's few careful editors, Mr. W. D. Christie,
points out that in both passages 'all the later editors,
following Derrick, have printed avail instead of prevail.
Dryden also uses the French idiom to profit of'. "To profit
of the battles he had won" (Aureng-zebe, act ii. sc. i) ; and
again to provide oneself of, as " Provide yourself of some
more worthy heir" (Love Triumphant, act iv. sc. i).' Other
French words and idioms in Dryden are ' renounces to my
blood' (Hind and Panther, 143) ; 'if they will criticize, they
shall do it out of their own fond' (Preface to Albion and
Albanius, i. 277) ; 'scabrous verse ' (Original and Progress of
Satire, 11.70} ; and 'take the fraischeurof the purer air' (Poem
on the Coronation, 102). The last of these Gallicisms is
made the occasion of an attack upon Dryden's diction by
Macaulay. But in point of fact Dryden is by no means
a sinner in this respect. His theory is soundness itself.
' I cannot approve,' he writes (Defence of the Epilogue, i. 170),
' of their way of refining, who corrupt our English idiom by
mixing it too much with French : that is a sophistication of
language, not an improvement of it ; a turning English into
170 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
French, rather than a refining of English by French. We
meet daily with those fops who value themselves on their
travelling and pretend they cannot express their meaning in
English because they would put off to us some French phrase
of the last edition ; without considering that, for aught they
know, we have a better of our own. But these are not the
men who are to refine us ; their talent is to prescribe fashions,
not words.' Elsewhere (Dedication of the sEneis, ii. 234)
Dryden has a very interesting defence of himself against the
charge ' that I latinize too much.' ' When,' he says, ' I find
an English word significant and sounding, I neither borrow
from the Latin, nor any other language ; but when I want at
home, I must seek abroad. . . . We have enough in England
to supply our necessity; but, if we will have things of
magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce.
Poetry requires ornament ; and that is not to be had from
our old Teuton monosyllables * : therefore, if I find any
elegant word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized
by using it myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill
passes. . . . Upon the whole matter a poet must first be
certain that the word he would introduce is beautiful in the
Latin, and is to consider, in the next place, whether it will
agree with the English idiom : after this, he ought to take
the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned in both
languages ; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use
this licence very sparingly ; for if too many foreign words are
poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to
assist the natives, but to conquer them.' And, speaking
generally, Dryden's practice did not lag behind his theory.
1 From a German point of view the excess of monosyllables in
English is a British, not a Teutonic, peculiarity. Here is a charac
teristic fling from the England-hating Treitschke at the idea of an
English-speaking world : ' So soil denn die vielgestaltige Herrlich-
keit der Weltgeschichte, die einst mit dem Reiche der monosylla-
bischen Chinesen begann, nach einem trostlosen Kreislaufe mit dem
Reiche der monosyllabischen Briten endigen ! ' (Deutsche Kampfe,
ii- 350-]
NOTES. 171
Johnson is, in this respect as in others, unjust to Dryden
when he writes that ' he had a vanity unworthy of his abilities
to show, as may be suspected, the rank of the company with
whom he lived, by the use of French words which had then
crept into conversation ; such as fraicheur for coolness,
fougtie for turbulence, and a few more, none of which the
language has incorporated or retained.' But even Johnson
has said elsewhere of Dryden that ' to him we owe . . . the
refinement of our language.' Home Tooke said that
' Dryden's practical knowledge of English was beyond all
others, exquisite and wonderful ' ; and Charles James Fox told
Lord Holland that he would admit no word into his history,
for which he had not the authority of Dryden (Christie).]
87. 10. 'Vide Daniel, his Defence of Rhyme' (Dryden's
note). This admirable piece of English prose was written by
Daniel in 1603, in reply to Campion's Observations in the
Art of English Poesie. It is reprinted iri the third volume
of Grosart's Complete Works of Samuel Daniel (1896).
88. 4. The Siege of Rhodes (1656) was one of the plays
produced by Sir William Davenant under the Protectorate ;
1 a kind of nondescript entertainments, as they were called,
which were dramatic in everything but the names and form ;
and some of them were called operas' (Hazlitt). Dryden
elaborated it and added a second part in 1662.
II. ['Sometimes even to hexameter.' Speaking of the
odes in Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Prof. Jebb discerns in them
* an epic tone, Homeric in its nobleness, and accordant with
the hexameter rhythms which are so largely used ' (Classical
Greek Poetry, p. 194).]
15. 'Dryden seems not to have known any of the
regular Italian tragedies in blank verse (versi sciolti] ; it is
strange that he should have neglected the blank verse of
Tasso's Aminta' (Ker).
90. 3. Virg. Georg. iii. 9 ; for possum should be read
possim.
19. Geo. Sandys, son of an archbishop of York, pub
lished a metrical version of the Psalms in 1636. In his
172 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
Preface to the Fables (1700) Dryden calls him 'the ingeni
and learned Sandys, the best versifier of the former age ;
if I may properly call it by that name, which was the former
part of this concluding century' (ii. 247). His principal
achievement was his translation of the Metamorphoses,
a book much loved and read by the youthful Keats.
24. Our author here again has quoted from memory.
Horace's line is \Epist. ii. i. 63] :
Interdum vulgus rectum videt; est ubi peccat.
(Malone.)
30. Mustapha was a tragedy of the day (hissed off
the stage, according to Pepys) by Roger Boyle, Earl of
Orrery. There was an earlier play of the same name by
Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke.
91. 27. Hor. A. P. 90; and below, ib. 231.
92. 2. [' An ordinary sonnet.' For sonnet in the sense of
any short poem see Dryden, Dedication of the sEneis (ii.
219) : 'The genius of their (French) poets is more proper
for sonnets, madrigals, and elegies than heroic poetry ' ;
Sidney, Apologie (p. 53, Arber) : ' They say the Lyric is
larded with passionate sonnets ' ; and ibid. p. 67 : ' That
lyrical kind of songs and sonnets.']
5. [Aristotle (Poetics, xxvi. 4) argues that tragedy is
superior (Kpet'rrooi/) 'because it has all the epic elements it
may even use the epic metre with the music and scenic
effects as important accessories ; and these afford the most
vivid combination of pleasures. Further, it has vividness of
impression in reading as well as in representation. More
over, the art attains its end within narrower limits ; for the
concentrated effect is more pleasurable than one which is
spread over a long time and so diluted. . . . Once more, the
epic imitation has less unity; as is shown by this, that
any epic poem will furnish subjects for several tragedies'
(Butcher).]
94. 6. Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit aequa potestas.
NOTES. 173
9 [Nobis non licet esse tarn disertis,
Qui Musas colimus severiores. Martial, ix. u. 16.
Cf. Dryden's Author 's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic
Licence (i. 188-9) :
' Poetic Licence I take to be the liberty which poets have assumed
to themselves, in all ages, of speaking things in verse, which are
beyond the severity of prose. . . . How far these liberties are to
be extended, I will not presume to determine here, since Horace
does not. But it is certain that they are to be varied according to
the language and age in which an author writes. That which would
be allowed to a Grecian poet, Martial tells us, would not be
suffered in a Roman. And 'tis evident that the English does more
nearly follow the strictness of the latter than the freedom of the
former.'
In the Dedication to his Examen Poeticum (ii. il), Dryden,
arguing for what he calls synalsepha, that is, against hiatus,
in verse, writes :
' The French and the Italians have made it an inviolable precept
in their versification ; therein following the severe example of the
Latin poets. Our countrymen have not yet reformed their poetry so
far, but content themselves with following the licentious practice of
the Greeks ; who, though they sometimes use synalsephas, yet make
no difficulty, very often, to sound one vowel upon another ; as Homer
does in the very first line of the Iliad. . . . But it becomes us, for
the sake of euphony, rather Musas colere severiores, with the Romans,
than to give into the looseness of the Grecians.'
In his Dedication of the JEneis (ii. 217) Dryden once more
recurs to this favourite quotation :
' Virgil thinks it sometimes a beauty to imitate the licence of the
Greeks, and leave two vowels opening on each other, as in that verse
of the third Pastoral:
Et succus pecori, et lac subducitur agnis.
But nobis non licet esse tarn disertis, at least if we study to refine our
numbers.'
Finally, Rapin (of whom Dryden says in the same Apology
that he ' is alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach
anew the rules of writing'), in his Comparaison d^Homere et
174 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
de Virgile, i. 36-37, of the edition of 1684, has the follow
ing:
' Les transitions, qui doivent par leur caractere etre fort variees,
pour desennuyer la lecture, sont toutes semblables dans la plus
grande partie de son ouvrage. On n'en peut compter tout au plus
que de vingt ou trente sortes dans toute 1'etendue de pres de trente
mille vers ; et ainsi une meme liaison se presentant d'ordinaire est
fort sujette a donner du degout par une si frequente repetition ; ce
qui a donne meme sujet a Martial de railler un peu du TOV 8'
oLTra/j-ei^o^Lfvos, et de dire que les Muses latines ne sont pas tout
a fait si relachees ni si libres que les grecques : Qui Musas colimus
severiores?
The instances which Martial gives of the laxity of Greek
poets are (i) the way in which they make Earinos (the name
of a favourite of Domitian) possible for verse by spelling it
Eiarinos, and (2) the use of two successive words with a
different quantity for the initial syllable in each ('Ape? "Apes).
Of course there is a sense in which Ovid is a stricter versifier
than Propertius or even than Virgil (Lucian Miiller, Res
metrica.) p. 522, ed. of 1894), and Martial no doubt meant
that. But when he wrote ( severiores,' the man about town
may have had his tongue in his cheek, and perhaps a touch
of Trapa irpocrftoKiav was intended in the phrase. It is note
worthy, however, that even so serious a person as the elder
Seneca (Controv. x. 4. 33, p. 501 of Kiessling) puts in much
the same claim for Latin against Greek : ' Graecas sententias
in hoc refero ut possitis aestimare, primum quam facilis e
Graeca eloquentia in Latinam transilus sit et quam omne
quod bene dici potest commune omnibus gentibus sit, deinde
ut ingenia ingeniis conferatis et cogitetis Latinam linguam
factdtatis non minus habere, licentiae minus!}
96. 2. The Water-poet, John Taylor, was so called from
his having been long a waterman on jhe Thames. Wood
gives an account of him in the Atkenae, and Hazlitt devotes
rather a lengthy article to him in his edition of Johnson's
Lives. Taylor enjoyed a great popularity. ' If it were put
to the question,' says Ben Jonson (Discoveries, chap. 63,
p. 34 (Dent), 'of the Water-rhymer's works against Spenser's,
NOTES. 175
I doubt not but they would find more suffrages; because
the most favour common vices, out of a prerogative the
vulgar have to lose their judgements, and like that which
is naught.'
7. Cicero in his Brutus (cap. 73) quotes this as a maxim
laid down by Caesar in his work * on the method of speaking
in Latin,' to which the name * De Analogia ' was given.
13. Seneca's tragedy of Hippolytus, 1. 863.
97. i. The reference is to Dryden's preface to The Rival
Ladies'
28. Sir Robert Howard, in the Preface to his Plays,
before referred to.
99. 22. ' Somerset House,' says Strype in his edition
(1720) of Stow's History of London > 'hath been used as the
Palace or Court of the Queen Dowagers ; it belong'd of late
to Katharine Queen Dowager, the wife of King Charles the
Second. At the entrance into this Court out of the Strand is
a spacious square court garnished on all sides with rows of
freestone buildings, and at the Front is a Piazza, with stone
Pillars which support the buildings, and a pavement of
freestone.' He goes on to say that there were steps down to
the river, and a ' most pleasant garden which runs to the
water side.' This way from the river bank up into Somerset
House has long been closed, but in Knight's London there
is a view of the river side of the old building, which cannot
have been so near the river as the present Georgian one.
Among Cowley's Verses 'written on Several Occasions is a
poem in heroic couplets ' On the Queen's repairing Somerset
House,' in which the poet gives Catharine of Braganza great
credit for making good the ruin left by the Civil War.
102. 9. Dimock. The hereditary Champion of England,
as lord of the manor of Scrivelsby. [In a letter to the
Spectator (Feb. 23, 1901) advocating the retention or revival
of the ' Services of Grand Serjeantry,' Mr. L. W. Vernon
Harcourt writes:
' The service of King's Champion belongs to the Dynioke family,
the representative of the ancient house of Marmion, and it apper-
176 OF DRAMATIC POESY.
tains to the manor of Scrivelsby. Documentary evidence of this
service dates back to 20 Edward I; but tradition makes it a
Norman service. The earliest account of the ceremony is given by
a chronicler of Richard II's coronation. The great estates of the
Marmions had then become dispersed. Tanfield was in the hands
of the Fitz-Hughes, Tamworth belonged to Baldwin Freville, while
Scrivelsby had come to the Dymokes. Accordingly, several
claimants for the service presented themselves, but the Court of
Claims decided for Scrivelsby. The following is a typical descrip
tion of the ceremony ; the scene is laid at Henry VIII's coronation
feast :
" The second course being served, in at the hall door entered a
Knight armed at all points, his herald of arms before him, and
presented himself to the King. This was Sir Robert Dymoke,
champion to the King by tenure of his inheritance. Garter King of
Heralds accosts him : ' Sir Knight, from whence came you and
what is your pretence?' [After further preliminaries] his herald
cries, ' Oyes ' ; and then proclaims : ' If there be any person, of
what estate or degree soever he be, that will say or prove that
King Henry VIII is not the rightful inheritor and king of the
realm, I, Sir Robert Dymoke, here his champion, offer my glove to
fight in his quarrel to the outraunce.' "
The proceedings terminate by the King drinking to the Champion's
health out of a gold bowl, which the knight carries away with him.
At the coronation of George IV the service was performed by
deputy, the then lord of the manor being in Holy Orders.']
1 6. [See Spartianus, Vita Hadriani, 15 : * Et Favorinus
quidem, cum verbum eius quondam ab Hadriano repre-
hehsum esset atque ille cessisset, arguentibus amicis quod
idonei auctores usurpassent, risum iucundissimum niovit.
Ait enim, "Non recte suadetis, familiares, qui non patimini
me ilium doctiorem omnibus credere qui habet triginta
legiones." ']
104. 26. [' For delight is the chief, if not the only, end of
poesie.' Cf. supra, p. 33, 1. 26 : ' They have ill satisfied one
intention of a play, which was delight.' To quote Prof. Jebb
again (ibid. p. 258) : * The prevalent view of the Elizabethan
age, as given by Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry,
was that the end of poetry is 'delightful teaching.' Dryden
was something of a heretic when he ventured to say, ' I am
NOTES. 177
satisfied if verse cause delight ; for delight is the chief, if not
the only, end of poesy.' It may seem strange that the view
of poetry as primarily didactic, a view which might be deemed
prosaic, should have been that which was generally held by
the Greeks, the most artistic of all races, in the age when
their artistic faculties were at the best. But . . . what it
really signifies, in. its old Greek form, is that poetry was
interwoven with the whole texture of Greek life . . . when
the Greeks spoke of the poet as a teacher, and of poetry as
didactic, this did not imply any indifference to beauty and
form, or to the delights which such form gives ; it wassimply
a recognition of poetry as the highest influence, intellectual
and spiritual, which they knew/ To be just to Dryden, it
should be added that in his Defence of the Essay (p. 113,
1. 31) he insists that 'moral truth is the mistress of the poet,
as much as of the philosopher.']
105. 28. Hor. A. P. 362.
30. Ib. 50.
106. 10. 'lazar' sometimes = Mazar-house'; and the refer
ence seems to be to Bartholomew's Hospital, which is the
scene of the play of Bartholomew Fair.
107. 22. [' My conversation.' See Johnson's Life of
Dryden : ' Congreve represents him as ready to advise and
instruct ; but there is reason to believe that his communica
tion was rather useful than entertaining. He declares of
himself that he was saturnine, and not one of those whose
sprightly sayings diverted company; and one of his cen-
surers makes him say,
Nor wine nor love could ever see me gay;
To writing bred, I knew not what to say.
... Of Dryden's sluggishness in conversation it is vain to
search or to guess the cause. He certainly wanted neither
sentiments nor language : his intellectual treasures were
great, though they were locked up from his own use. " His
thoughts," when he wrote, " flowed in upon him so fast, that
his only care was which to choose, and which to reject."
Such rapidity of composition naturally promises a flow of
N
178 OF DRAMATIC POESY
talk ; yet we must be content to believe what an enemy
says of him, when he likewise says it of himself. 5 ]
109. 7. [' Barach ' in Hebrew means bless, with the anti
thetical meaning of c^^rse, the idea being that the blessing
was overdone, and so really a curse, as in vulgar English
as well as in the Semitic cognates. See Driver's Gesenius
(1893), with references to I Kings xxi. 10, 13 ; Job i. 5, ii,
and ii. 5, 9 ; and Psalm x. 3. See especially Psalm x. 3 and
Job ii. 9. In the former passage the Authorized Version
reads : ' For the wicked . . . blesseth the covetous whom
the Lof d abhorreth,' while the Revised Version has : ' And
the covetous renounceth, yea contemneth the Lord/ and
in the margin suggests as an alternative : * Or blesseth the
covetous, but contemneth' &c. In Job ii. 9 the famous 'curse
God and die,' becomes in the Revised Version ' Renounce
God and die.']
111. 9. Lucan, Phars. i. 12 :
Bella geri placuit, nullos habitura tfiumphos.
112. 12. [' Satyr.' So spelled here by Dryden, and even
throughout his Original and Progress of Satire (1693).
But a passage from the latter essay shows that he had
perceived his error: 'In the criticism of spelling, it ought
to be with *", and not with y, to distinguish its true derivation
from satura, not from satyrus. And if this be so, then it is
false spelled throughout this book, for here it is written
Satyr : which having not considered at the first, I thought it
not worth correcting afterwards.']
22. [Malone's suggestion of Lord Lauderdale (of the
Cabal) is no doubt correct ; but the precise interpretation of
the passage remains obscure. All we know is that about the
time these words were written (1668) Lauderdale was making
himself notorious for profligacy and gormandizing. At the
end of his preface to the second volume of the Lauderdale
Papers, edited by him for the Camden Society, Mr. Osmund
Airy thus sums up Lauderdale's six years of power from
1667 to 1673 :
'We leave him, no longer the "good Maitland," the "gracious
NOTES 179
youth" of Baillie's affection, bearing on his face, as we see it in a
picture by an unknown hand, a frank intelligence and the possibilities
of a noble life ; but rather such as he had become when there fell
upon him the solemn and sorrowful rebuke of his old friend Richard
Baxter, such as we see him in Lely's well-known portrait, the type
of all that was coarsest and most brutal among the men of Charles's
Court ; swollen with gluttony, and brutalized with vice, he bears on
lip and brow the secure and shameless arrogance which befits the
irresponsible proconsul of a distant province, and the privileged
comrade in the pleasures of a degraded king.'
Baxter's letter, which in substance charges Lauderdale with
drunkenness and vice, is given by Mr. Airy in an appendix
to this volume, p. 235.]
114. 3. Hor. de Art. Poet. 338.
14. Sir John Birkenhead (1616-1679) in a poem, In
Memory of Mr. Cartwright, wrote that his friend
Knew the right mark of things, saw how to choose,
(For the great Wit's great work is to Refuse}.
(Ker.)
115. 5. //. viii. 267.
118. 4. See above, p. 7.
120.12. [' Herculean ' = overwhelming, knock-down. 'You
have knocked him down with a kind of Herculean Club'
(Howell, 1645). * The first, which is the main and Herculean
Argument' (Power, 1664 both from New English Dic
tionary]. Seneca, Epist. 83. 23 ' ille Herculaneus ac fatalis
scyphus ' ; 87. 38 ' Bonum animum habe ; unrfs tibi nodus,
sed Herculaneus restat.']
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