Imperial rivalry and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

The political and economic processes that generated England's first era of imperial expansion might seem distant from the literary culture of Dryden's age, in which we often think of aesthetic questions such as the status of classical literature or the problem of the imitation of “Nature” as more prominent in contemporary debate. But even Dryden's most influential work on aesthetics, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), often considered the pioneering instance of modern literary criticism, gives us a clear signal of the intersection of historical events with Dryden's literary production. Written in the form of an extended debate on contemporary literature among a group of friends - Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander - the essay Of Dramatic Poesy compares classical and modern drama, and contemporary French and English drama, exploring topics like the effects of formal rules, the qualities of plot and character, the relative importance of aesthetic pleasure and moral instruction, the nature of tragedy and comedy, and the roles of passion, taste, and prosody. But Dryden gives his literary essay a specific historical setting. According to the opening story that explains the occasion for the debate, the group of friends assembles on a barge on the Thames, on 3 June 1665, where they have gone in order to hear more clearly the “distant thunder” of the cannon from the encounter of the English and Dutch fleets in the English Channel, engaged in the battle of Lowestoft, which ultimately saw an English victory under the Duke of York.