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The Appeal of Dryden's Heroic Plays

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas H. Fujimura
Thomas H. Fujimura*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Honolulu 14
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Extract

The restoration theatrical audience was dominantly skeptical and naturalistic in temper. Yet for over ten years this audience patronized the heroic plays of Dryden and contributed to their popularity. This anomaly has long puzzled scholars; and typically, Allardyce Nicoll remarks: “This heroic tragedy is obviously a thing entirely apart from the comedy of gay licentious manners. With its flaunting honour and its impossibly idealistic love passions it seems indeed so far away both from that comedy and from social life as we have seen it displayed in the theatre that it would appear impossible to find any link between them.” Like most other critics, Nicoll offers an unsatisfactory explanation of this anomaly:

The audiences were no longer noble in temper, and consequently the heroic tragedy, removed a further stage from the actual, may be regarded as the true child of the enervation that had come over England. The age was debilitated: it was distinctly unheroic: and yet it was not so cynical as to throw over entirely the inculcation of heroism. To present, however, heroism in real-life plays would have raised too sharp a distinction between what was and what might have been, and accordingly in the heroic tragedy heroism is cast out of the world altogether and carried to an Eastern or an antique realm of exaggerated emotions, mythical and hopelessly ideal. The heroic play is like a Tale of a Land of No-where. (p. 88)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 75 , Issue 1 , March 1960 , pp. 37 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960

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References

1 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1690 (Cambridge, 1952), p. 84.

2 Bonamy Dobrée, Restoration Tragedy 1660–1720 (Oxford, 1929), pp. 16,19-20.

3 Cecil V. Deane, Dramatic Theory and the Rhymed Heroic Play (London, 1931), pp. 221, 222, 62; Trusten Wheeler Russell, Voltaire, Dryden and Heroic Tragedy (New York, 1946), p. 41; Lewis N. Chase, The English Heroic Play (New York, 1903), pp. 193–194; B. J. Pendlebury, Dryden's Heroic Plays (London, 1923), p. 6.

4 Mildred E. Hartsock, “Dryden's Plays: A Study in Ideas,” in Seventeenth Century Studies, Second Series, ed. Robert Shafer (Princeton, 1937), p. 89.

5 Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New York, 1926), pp. 122–123; “Conventions of Platonic Drama in the Heroic Plays of Orrery and Dryden,” PMLA, xxiv (June 1929), 456–471. Miss Hartsock, in her study of Dryden (p. 117), challenges Miss Lynch's conclusions.

6 Of course, the Machiavellian figure is also naturalistically conceived, and Dryden might have been as much influenced by this dramatic type as by Hobbes's views. This possibility would weaken Miss Hartsock's thesis, that Hobbes was the determining influence on Dryden's characterization.

7 The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882–83), iii, 411—hereafter referred to in the text by volume and page.

8 Allardyce Nicoll, An Introduction to Dramatic Theory (London, 1923), p. 103; Nicoll, History, p. 126.

9 Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden City, N. Y., 1955), Chap. 2.

10 Works, ii, 285. For an entirely opposite—and conventional—point of view, see Scott C. Osborn, “Heroical Love in Dryden's Heroic Drama,” PMLA, LXXIII (Dec. 1958), 480–490. His theory is that love in Dryden's plays is a malady and must be cured by reason.

11 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950), p. 597.

12 Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, iv (London, 1840), 37–39; Leviathan, Chap, x, Works, iii (1839), 74–84.

13 Works, iv, 80. I have quoted part of this in another context; the complete passage reads, “Honour is what myself, and friends, I owe.” In separating two different notions, I have tried to untangle some of the confused jumblings of varied conceptions of honor.

14 Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), p. 8.

15 Hoxie N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, 1928), p. 33.