Dryden's Heroic play

The tragic authors of the Restoration  period and their tragedies occupy a position in the whole less important, though distinctly curious. With all their faults, there can be no doubt that comedies like Love for Love , The Confederacy, and the Beaux-Stratagem mark in certain directions an advance upon all English comic work before them, except that of Shakespeare .For poetry is not necessary to comedy , and   is absolutely necessary to tragedy.

The tragedy of the times divide itself, with the usual overlapping, into two parts- the Heroic Drama and the Blank verse tragedy . In both periods and in both kinds the mighty craftsmanship of Dryden led the way and despite the traditional repute of Venice Preserved, it is impossible here to admit that any examples surpassed The Conquest of Granada in the first kind, and All for Love in the second.

The Rival Ladies, which is Dryden's first serious play, and which followed The Wild Gallant at not great interval, is neither wholly tragic nor wholly comic, neither wholly rhymed nor wholly blank verse and prose. But The Indian Emperor (1665), following an Indian Queen, in which he helped his brother-in-law , Sir Robert Howard, was his first distinct and original venture wholly in the new style.

The Maiden Queen(1667) is a blend of  a tragic, or at least serious, heroics and comic prose. But Tyrannic Love , or  The Royal Martyr (1669), a dramatization of the legend of St.Catherine, first exhibited the heroic style in perfection.The splendid rhetoric of the best passages,the rattling single stick play of the rhyming dialogue, and the really noble sentiment of much of it, almost excuse the enthusiasm of audiences for a style full of most glaring faults. This is still more the case with the two parts of The Conquest of Granada (1670), which brought the kind of of its highest perfection.

The State of Innocence, which is half  an opera and more than half a  Heroic play, shows an undiminished popularity of the style. And in Aurangzeb, still heroic. When he turned from rhyme to blank verse, he actually took a play of  Shakespeare's for something more than the canvas of his new attempt.  

John Dryden-poetry

The group of Dryden's poems on the Restoration-Astrea Redux, a poem on the coronation, and one to Clarendon- is of singular interest. All three are written in the couplet, the metre  that to strengthen, to perfect, and to install in public  favor  for something like a country and a half. He is not yet at his best in it, or at anything near his, best. In his next, and for many years only , important poem he relapsed into the quatrain. Annus MIrabilis (1666)  is a poem which might be taken as a text or series of texts to show the difference between the old poetry and new .


Then for the fifteen years and more , Dryden did nothing of importance in pure poetry , and his Drama -verse and other will be handled two chapters hense. He broke out again with the marvellous group of satires above referred to -Absalom and Achitophel (part 1 ,November 1682) and second part of-Absalom and Achitophel  (with important contributions from Dryden , though the whole is not his) a month later, with Religio Laici almost at the same moment. In this poem Dryden showed himself in a light which though not perhaps surprising to careful students on of his plays, could hardly have been anticipated by anyone who knew his earlier poems only.

Dryden has been strongly called "Phlegmatic" from the cool superiority  which he observes in dealing with the most exciting themes. He is in reality no more phlegmatic than Shakespeare  himself, though he is a lesser poet with a lesser range. The phlegm of the great passage on life in Aurangzeb,of the "Wandering Fires" in The Hind and the Panther , to mention no others,is a very curious humour.

The controversial verse of Religio Laici , with its tell yearning for an infallible director, is less popular than the great satiric portraits of the Absalom pieces , The Medal, and Macflecknoe, but it is not less good. Perhaps the very best of all --magnificent as are the "Zimri", the "Og" , the "Doeg" and the whole of   Macflecknoe - is the" Shimei" of the first Absalom.

For some ten years after the revolution Dryden was too much occupied with hackwork of various kinds -the chief being the Virgil -to produce much original , or even semi original , poetry ,but his genius happily inspired him, just before he died, to give the most striking proof ever given by any poet that age and ill health and the unkindness of circumstances had not affected his absolute pre-eminence over all his fellows. The so called Fables were chiefly made up of some remarkable paraphrases-Dryden himself, with more modesty, called them "translations" from Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For  some other reason, it has been fashion for  a century to call him prosaic. "The most prosaic of our great poets" ,' a classic of our prose" . But Dryden was not a prosaic poet, but he was  the poet of  a prosaic time.

John Dryden

John Dryden was born in 1631 at Aldwinkle All Saints in Northamptonshire, of a family which certainly came from North. He was educated at Westminster,and at Trinity collage ,Cambridge.We know extremely little of his beginnings in literature; but in 1663, having succeeded to a small property, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard,eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. In 1670 he was made poet-Laureate and Historiographer- Royal in succession,to Davenant and Howell ,but for ten years more he wrote little plays. The ferments of the Popish  plot induced his great political satires. 

john Dryden

 Dryden did much poorly-paid work for the court, drudging translations and writing The Hind and the Panther (  the greatest poem ever written in the teeth of his subjects) , and when revolution came he was faithful to his cause, and lost everything but his small private fortune. He returned to play-writing, and after a time made inadequate but not inconsiderable  his gains by   translations of Virgil.

His last, and almost his best work contained in the volume of Fables, which was published (1699-1700). He had three sons, the youngest of whom succeeded to the to the baronetcy.  Dryden's change of faith, the questionable shape of a good deal of his dramatic writing.
His intellectual and his literary greatness have seldom been denied .He did not show his great powers very early , and indeed the amount of work that we have from him till after thirtieth year is extremely small.
 Dryden was greatest poet of his own day and style by such a distance that know second can be placed to him. He was the chief agent of in the shaping and the popularising of the new prose. And if one or two tragedies of others have been thought , and several comedies certainly are , better than any plays of his,yet no one did both so well, while he also exceeds all in the volume of his dramatic work and in the variety of its forms.