And when at last, in pity, you will die, No extravagance seems to have been violent enough to disturb the gravity of an English audience in the years immediately following the Restoration. In The Indian Queen, Acacis, son of the usurping Queen Zempoalla, stabs himself; whereupon his mother exclaims : Some water, there! Not one stirs from his place : The climax of absurdity in the heroic style is reached in the closing scene of Aureng Zebe, in which Dryden, in all seriousness, as it appears, attempts to outdo Seneca, who, in the ravings of his Hercules Etaus, had shown himself equally ambitious of excelling the self-restrained exhibition of mortal agony represented in the Trachinia of Sophocles. Nourmahal, wife of the aged emperor, Shah Jehan, has poisoned herself : I burn, I more than burn; I am all fire. See how my mouth and nostrils flame expire ! I'll not come near myself Now I'm a burning lake, it rolls and flows; Ha, ha! how my old husband crackles there! See! see there's Aureng Zebe too takes his part, The exaggeration both of conception and expression, 1 Tyrannic Love, Act iii. Sc. I. 2 Indian Queen, Act v. Sc. I. 3 Aureng Zebe, Act v. Sc. I. characteristic of the English Heroic Play, is the effect of two causes which are always at work in art simultaneously the desire for novelty and the decay of invention. Romance on the stage ran through almost precisely the same course of development as romance in literature. As the taste for the histories of King Arthur and Charlemagne, which vividly reflect the ideas and manners of chivalry, was followed by a taste for the abstract and impossible adventures of Amadis de Gaul and his successors, and, afterwards, for the gallant allegories of Mlle. Scuderi, so the representation of lofty actions and characters in the English drama, founded on national history or legend, was exchanged for a reflection of the artificial manners of a modern Court, masquerading in the dress of antiquity. Yet, blind though the majority of the spectators were to the artificiality of sentiment in these plays, it would have been strange if passages like the dying speech of Nourmahal had been universally admired in a nation possessing so strong a sense of humour as the English; and that the more intellectual portion of society in the reign of Charles II. was alive to the artistic errors of the Heroic Drama is amply shown in The Rehearsal. This famous play, the work of George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, and others, was begun as early as 1665, with a view of ridiculing the operatic style of Sir William Davenant, who was introduced into the composition under the name of Bilbao. Davenant, however, died in 1668, and the authors in consequence turned their ridicule mainly upon Dryden, who, as the popular author of The Conquest of Granada, Tyrannic Love, and other heroic plays, had become the representative of the fashionable manner. Bilbao was replaced by Bayes. To a certain extent The Rehearsal is injured as a work of art by this fluctuation of motive. It lacks unity of design. The satire would have been more effective if it had been aimed entirely at a single person and a particular class of play: as it is, the authors direct their ridicule against such obscure authors as Edward Howard and Sir Robert Stapylton quite as often as against Dryden; they criticise not only the bombastic style of the heroic drama, but also the defects of comedies for which Bayes was not responsible, pointing out, moreover, the absurdities in Davenant's opera, The Siege of Rhodes, which Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy had excluded from the province of the legitimate drama. They largely rely on their parodies, and as, for the modern reader, nothing can be more comic than the original passages that were travestied, much of the satire has ceased to be amusing. Still the framework of the whole play, with its prosy dramatis personæ, Bayes, Smith, and Johnson, the prototypes of Puff, Sneer, Dangle, and Plagiary in The Critic, is admirable; and much of the dialogue is full of humour, particularly the delightful scene exhibiting the combat between Love and Honour in the mind of Prince Volscius, one of Bayes' "heroic" characters. The Prince has called for his boots, proclaiming his intention of going out of town : VOLSCIUS. Enter PARTHENOPE. Bless me! how frail are all my best resolves! PARTHENOPE. My mother, sir, sells ale by the Town-Walls, VOLSC. Can vulgar vestments high-born beauty shroud? "Thou bringst the morning pictured in a cloud.”1 BAYES. The morning pictured in a cloud! Ah, Gadsookers, what a conceit is there! PARTH. VOLSC. Give you good even, sir. O inauspicious stars! that I was born AMARYLLIS, CLORIS. HOW! Prince Volscius in love? ha, ha! Ha, SMITH. Sure, Mr. Bayes, we have lost some jest here that they laugh at so. 1 A parody of a line in The Siege of Rhodes. BAYES. Why, did you not observe? He first resolves to go out of town, and then, as he is pulling on his boots, falls in love. Ha, ha, ha! SMITH. O, I did not observe. That indeed is a very good jest. BAYES. Here now you shall see a combat betwixt Love and Honour. An ancient author has made a whole play on't; but I have despatched it all in this scene. VOLSCIUS How has my passion made me Cupid's scoff! And sullen lies, with amorous design To quit loud fame, and make that beauty mine. Disarmed, like this other leg does prove. JOHNSON. What pains Mr. Bayes takes to act this speech himself! SMITH. Ay, the fool, I see, is mightily transported with it. VOLSC. Shall I to Honour or to Love give way? Go on, cries Honour; tender Love says, nay: The argument of the fifth act is also an admirable burlesque on the point of Honour illustrated in such plays as Tyrannic Love : Cloris at length, being sensible of Prince Prettyman's passion, consents to marry him; but, just as they are going to church, Prince Prettyman, meeting by chance with old Joan, the chandler's widow, and remembering it was she that brought him acquainted with Cloris, out of a high point of honour breaks off his match with Cloris, and marries old Joan. Upon which Cloris, in despair, drowns herself: and Prince Prettyman discontentedly walks by the river-side. 1 Sir W. Davenant's Love and Honour, published in 1649. But the scene that follows is a parody of several passages from Sir R. Fanshawe's translation of Querer pro Solo Querer, and Francis Quarles' Virgin Widow. 2 Rehearsal, Act iii. Sc. 2. 416 (ii.) From the examples of the heroic style that have been cited, the reader will at once perceive that this satirical criticism was essentially sound and just, and though Dryden took no notice of the ridicule, it is probable that it produced an effect upon him, for in the Prologue to Aureng Zebe, the play which closes with the amazing rant of Nourmahal, he says, with the frank disdain which always makes his style delightful :— Our author by experience finds it true, 'Tis much more hard to please himself than you, And out of no feigned modesty this day Damns his laborious trifle of a play. Not that it's worse than what before he writ, But he has now another taste of wit; He would not match his verse with those who live : The first of this and hindmost of the last. He did not, however, retire, but rather chose to match In 1678 he produced All for himself with Shakespeare. Love, which is substantially a recast of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and in the following year he applied the same method to the Troilus and Cressida of the elder dramatist. None of his performances are more characteristic of the genius of Dryden, or more illustrative of the The two plays of revolution of taste in the theatre. Shakespeare were among the latest productions of that great poet, and were written at a time when his inclination to turn the drama into a vehicle for the expression of his per sonal sentiments was most powerful. His intense sympathy |