CHAPTER XIV DRYDEN AND THE ROMANTIC DRAMA AFTER THE course and character of the romantic drama after the Restoration is summed up in the history of a single great poet. In the skill with which he divined the direction of the public taste; in the flexible invention with which he adapted the resources of his art to new conditions; in the splendour and harmony of his verse; and in the lucidity of his judgment, as displayed in his dialectical criticism, no dramatist of the time could for a moment compare with Dryden. Others, no doubt, attained success and distinction, but it was by working on designs of which Dryden had sketched the first example: most of his contemporaries stood to him in the relation of scholar or antagonist. I shall content myself, therefore, in this chapter with tracing the varieties of his experiments on the stage, noticing, as I go, the poets who were most intimately connected with his progress; and when I have finished the survey of his work, I shall examine the general causes of the decline of the Romantic drama. Dryden's plays fall into four groups: (i.) Heroic Plays; (ii.) Imitations of Shakespeare; (iii.) Political Dramas; (iv.) Comedies. Of his own practice in each class he has fortunately left us accounts which enable us to understand clearly the general movement of the public taste. (i.) In order to appreciate the character of the Heroic Play, it is necessary, in the first place, to form a clear conception of the change which had taken place in the temper and taste of the audience since the closing of the theatres by the Long Parliament. The influence of the popular element among the spectators, so potent in the reign of Elizabeth, had almost disappeared in the reign of Charles II., and with it had vanished those common ideas of action which had elevated the stage into a national institution. That sentiment of patriotism which bound all Englishmen together, and which, reflected in the drama, had, as Nash says, " new embalmed the bones of brave Talbot with the tears of ten thousand spectators," "1 had dwindled away in the atmosphere of political broils and dissensions, the fatal legacy of the great Civil War. I have traced the gradual process by which, through the reign of James I., the taste of the Court prevailed in the theatre over the taste of the people, while at the same time the influence of England sank in the councils of Europe. Yet, as we have seen in the dramas of Massinger, the feeling of what was due to national greatness ceased not to find expression on the stage. The triumph of the Puritan party, though in the policy of Cromwell it made the name of England respected through the civilised world, diverted the public imagination from the stage, where the idea of patriotism might have been presented in a concrete form. So that, when the theatres were reopened, the monarchical reaction, joined with the popular recollection of the tyranny of the Puritan régime, and with the loss of all the traditions of the stage, prepared the way for the representation in the theatre of ideas of action and passion which had nothing in common with the tastes of the audiences contemporary with the Spanish Armada. In the minds of the majority of the spectators, the dominant feeling was the desire of sensual pleasure and amusement. All who had shared in the exile and poverty of the restored King returned to the enjoyments of power with the zest alike of shipwrecked sailors, long cut off from the luxuries of life, and of a faction victorious over 1 Pierce Penilesse. Works, edited by Grosart, vol. ii. p. 89. enemies who had crushed the indulgence of every natural instinct. So long as they could enjoy the social pleasures of wit and imagination, and could indulge to the full their hatred and contempt of their old oppressors, it mattered little to men like these that their Sovereign should disgrace the name of England by sinking into the pensioner of the French King, or by selling Dunkirk for the fuller gratification of his own pleasures. Those spectators of the middle class who might have checked the riot of the Court by nobler ideas of action had either given way to the flowing tide of fashionable taste, or had merged themselves in the body of Puritanic sentiment, which was opposed to all theatrical representation. An effeminate recoil from the overstrained principles of the precisians enervated the conscience of society, and as a natural consequence the influence of women, all-powerful at Court, was no less dominant in the theatre. The ladies, who now flocked to the playhouses in masks, could be satisfied with nothing but the representation of the single passion whose working they thoroughly understood, and if they did not always applaud the portraits of their sex presented to them by Mrs. Behn, rigorously imposed on the masculine dramatists who sought to please them, their own views of romance. "Having employed," says Crowne -in one of those disdainful prefaces to plays which are characteristic of the period-"this and two heroes more in ten acts about nothing else but love, I thought I had given 'em enough for reasonable women, and might borrow this hero to entertain the men for a minute with a little reason, if it were but to give him some respite to breathe ; but I find 'tis harder to give ladies enough than I thought it was. Besides, these ladies may consider, if they please, Phraartes makes not love to them but Clarona, to whom a discourse of love was not so pleasing as to them who care for nothing else; she loved to talk of religion sometimes, which they never do, it seems."1 For an audience like this the stern traditions of the old Morality, which, as we have seen, had remained potent 1 Destruction of Jerusalem. Epistle to the Reader. on the English stage up to the time of Massinger, were obviously unfitted; new arts had to be introduced, new devices invented, to meet the change of popular taste: the result was the Heroic Play, the origin of which is thus described by Dryden : For heroic plays, in which only I have used rhyme without the mixture of prose, the first light we had of them on the English theatre was from the late Sir William Davenant. It being forbidden him in the rebellious times to act tragedies and comedies, because they contained matter of scandal to those good people who could more easily dispossess their lawful sovereign than endure a wanton jest, he was forced to turn his thoughts another way, and to introduce the examples of moral virtue writ in verse, and performed in recitative music. The original of this music, and of the scenes which adorned his work, he had from the Italian operas; but he heightened his characters, as I may probably imagine, from the example of Corneille and some French poets.1 In outline this is an accurate description of the origin of the Heroic Play; but it scarcely indicates with sufficient precision the nature of the revolution in dramatic art implied in Davenant's opera, The Siege of Rhodes, performed in 1658. Davenant was a vigorous and fertile poet, nearly of the same age as Shirley, whom he resembled in character and capacity. In the declining days of the old drama he had shown himself equally ready to supply the stage with a melodrama, a comedy, or a masque after the traditional English pattern; but when the theatres were closed and the royal cause was lost, he retired to France, where he studied the structure of the opera as it was practised by Lulli and Quinault, and also of the drama as it was handled by Corneille. On his return to England he turned his experience to practical account, and introduced to his audience many more of the arts of the French stage than Dryden, his disciple, seems disposed to allow. Not only did he, as the latter says, cast his ideas into the mould of the Italian opera, but he was the first (or nearly the first) to employ the device of scene 1 Works of John Dryden (Scott, 1821), vol. iv. pp. 17, 18. shifting, and to pay attention to perspective in scenepainting; he brought down the orchestra from a gallery into its present position immediately under the stage; and he established the practice of representing female parts by actresses instead of, as under the old régime, by boys and young men. Mechanically, these were improvements; but they implied a great decay of imagination in the spectators. Shakespeare had said confidently to his audience : Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: And make imaginary puissance. Think when we talk of horses that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.1 What Davenant in effect told the spectators was that they were to use their eyes and ears, and that, if their senses were skilfully cheated by the exact imitation of external things, the ideal truth of action and character was a matter of secondary importance. This lesson was conveyed to willing minds. Restricting the flight of their imagination to suit the more exact representation of the external scene, the spectators gradually approximated their ideas of what was dramatically probable to the French standard of unity in time and place, and began to censure the liberties claimed in this respect by the dramatists of the old romantic school. They criticised also the idea of romantic action, as it had been understood by Marlowe, and developed by Marston and Chapman in furious melodramas, representing the energetic working of the human will in situations giving full play to all the wild and irregular passions of the heart. Work of this kind had satisfied the conception of action proper to a period of popular exaltation, but had neither substance nor form sufficient to withstand the analysis of critical reason now brought to bear upon it. In a playhouse (says Dryden) everything contributes to impose upon the judgment; the lights, the scenes, the habits, 1 King Henry V., First Chorus. VOL. IV 2 D |