DRYDEN identifies the “malicious pleasure” Jonsonian comedy affords its spectators in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in which he proclaims Epicoene “the pattern of a perfect Play.” Written in 1665, the examen of Epicoene is the first sustained formal criticism of a literary work in English. Dryden's admiration of Jonson's dramaturgy draws on his immersion in the Workes (he refers to half of Jonson's plays in the span of the Dramatick Poesie, discussing many—including the famously disparaged “dotages”—in fluent detail), confirming his professed ideal of emulating the dramatic practice of the principal Jacobean playwrights. It is an intense, riveted admiration that prompts Dryden's speaker Neander to engage with Epicoene's stagecraft in such novel detail and that draws from him the admission: “But I dare not take upon me to commend the Fabrick of it, because it is altogether so full of Art, that I must unravel every Scene in it to commend it as I ought” (17:61). His attentiveness to Jonson's dramaturgy is designed to be of immediate benefit to the Restoration playwrights learning their craft in the 1660s, when, after the long hiatus when the public theaters were closed during the civil wars, the theaters opened but relied largely in the early to mid-1660s on a prewar repertoire. Dryden studies Jonson's plays both from the perspective of a literary historian who is inventing modern literary criticism in his Essay and from the vantage point of a professional playwright “surveying the current theatrical scene” where, as Cedric Reverand has argued, the Jacobean “fathers” are very much of the moment, present as competitors and as models for dramatists just learning their craft.