NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY

Montezeuma and Cortez are the historical heroes; Almeria, daughter of the Indian Queen, is the vengeful passionate heroine; Cydaria, daughter of Montezeuma, is the angelic heroine. Montezeuma's sons, Odmar and Guyomar, Almeria's sister, Alibech, and her brother, Orbellan, all in love with some one, add to the criss-crossing of affections. Almeria is loved by Montezeuma, but loves Cortez, who does not love her. Cydaria is loved by Cortez and also by Orbellan. The two heroines, as well as the two heroes, are thus rivals, and the vengeful one directs the intrigue. The brothers Odmar and Guyomar, to say nothing of a Spanish captain, both love Alibech, and provide the usual story of fraternal rivalry. After duels, captures, imprisonments, conflicts of honor, renunciations, and jealousies, finally the vengeful heroine succumbs. One of the brothers is preserved for Alibech; Cortez weds the angelic heroine; the rest, including six of the leading actors and several supernumeraries, are killed or commit suicide.

Dryden's dedication of "The Rival Ladies" to the Earl of Orrery gives some support to the latter's claim to have been the introducer of the rhymed heroic species, though his first play acted was probably "Henry V," in 1664. Whoever the originators, their example was soon followed by Crowne, Lee, Settle, Otway, and mostof the dramatists of the day; and for fifteen years or so English efforts in tragedy were confined to the heroic model.

The use of the heroic couplet was its distinguishing mark; of course, an imitation of French practice. The plots, too, were direct borrowings, or close imitations, of contemporary French romances or dramas. Moreover, the themes and their treatment, the conception of honor, the importance given to love, and the pseudo-history, all followed French ideas. The unities were attended to, if not strictly observed; incidents, persons, and scenes greatly reduced in number in comparison with Elizabethan practice; and fixed rules of propriety in characterization and language observed, all in French fashion.

The English plays, however, formed a type unknown in France or anywhere else on sea or land. The plots of all the "Sieges," "Rivals," and "Conquests" are mainly concerned with love, which inspires heroic sentiment and valor, encounters much jealousy and intrigue, runs counter to friendship and honor, and works its sorrows and joys among persons illustrious in history. In the end, the hero, a man of prodigious valor and most exemplary honor, weds the heroine, who is equally skilled in the artificial code of honor, while the deaths of the ambitious villain and the evil princess, in love with the hero and seeking revenge on the heroine, provide a tragic catastrophe. The persons are usually historical, English, Classical, or Eastern, and a littlehistorical fact was intended to give a kind of grandeur to the story. The Alexanders and Montezumas, however, have manners and sentiments drawn partly from the courts of Louis and Charles and partly from the world of romance. The curious conception of honor as superhuman valor and magnanimity combined with formal propriety leads to impossibilities like those in a child's book of wonders. Duels and rescues take the place of pitched fields; the valorous champion puts to rout an army, exchanges compliments and courtesies with the grace of a fashion-plate, boasts and rants in Cambyses' vein, and is near to expire in an ecstasy of declamation when the heroine extends her hand for him to kiss. The two rival lovers and the two rival ladies generally play their game of jealousy, ambition, and wounded honor during a conquest or a siege; but world and empire count for naught.Amor vincit omnia.

A mere summary of their leading traits may suggest, what a careful examination of the various representatives of the class will confirm, that the heroic plays were by no means a fresh importation from France, but rather a result of tendencies distinctly manifest in the English drama, at least since the Beaumont-Fletcher romances.[26]Thegenreof heroic romances begun by Beaumont and Fletcher, continued in tragedy and especially in tragicomedy by Fletcher, Massinger, and Shirley, here takes a further but not very diverse development under thespell of French romance and drama. The conflicts of honor, the rivalries in love, the few types of character constantly recurring, the extraordinary surprises and discoveries, the women, sentimental and sensational, offered nothing new in English drama. The avoidance of bloodshed, the observance of poetic justice, the exaltation of love as the whole theme, the preference for the sensational and astounding rather than the natural or inevitable, have all been found distinguishing drama since Fletcher. On the other hand, the hateful intrigue and abnormal lust, the horrors and gloom of Webster and Ford found little place in the heroic plays. One survival from the revenge plays, however, took on new life. Ghosts became as numerous and voluble as in the days of Kyd. But in the main the heroic plays represent the continuance of the heroic romance and tragicomedy corrected in accord with French standards of dramatic art and French conceptions of gallantry and heroism.

It is in this aspect that they are of the most interest in the history of English tragedy. They are not a freak variation but a species lineally related to those which precede and follow. They carry the restriction and conventionalization of the material of tragedy much farther than did the plays of Shirley and his contemporaries; and, somewhat before Racine, they confine the main course of tragedy to sentimental love. Though their main innovation, the employment of rhyme, did not prevail, and though their changes in technic were rejected by many later Restoration dramatists, yet theywere a powerful force in habituating the theatre to the structure and methods of French tragedy and in promoting the triumph of these methods in the next century. They also mark a further change in the conception of the field and functions of tragedy. The result of developments from tragicomedy rather than from tragedy, they exhibit a blending of the two forms and a redivision along new lines. Before the Restoration, nearly all tragedies had presented a mixture of comedy or of farce. Tragicomedy had been distinguished from tragedy not by the presence of comedy but by the fact that its leading persons were brought near to death yet saved for a happy ending. Moreover, tragicomedies as a class developed along the lines of the Beaumont-Fletcher romances. The heroic plays inherited the traits of this class and also to some extent the happy endings. In some, as Orrery's "Henry V," there is no suffering and everything turns out well; in others, as Orrery's later plays, there is bloodshed enough; but in nearly all death is visited only on the evil; the heroic are married. All plays with heroic themes, however, were called tragedies. There was no hint of heroic comedy as in France. The distinction between tragedy and comedy, which the Restoration drama drew much more closely than the Elizabethan, came to depend less on the presence of deaths or of an unhappy ending, and more on the nature of the material and form. After the decline of the heroic plays, tragedy returned, as we shall see, to bloodshed, deaths, and horrors, but meantime the heroic plays had emphasized as essentialcertain elements that long continued their ascendency in both critical and popular views of tragedy. Henceforth every one associated with tragedy heroic actions, illustrious persons, verse, whether rhymed or blank, a love story, and an inflated diction. The curious heroic rant, indeed, supplied a vocabulary and a manner that lasted long after the jingle of the rhyming couplets had been abandoned. Its "furies," "vows," "chains," "transports," "ecstasies," and "Etnas burning within the breast" remained the language of despairing innocence and palpitating passion. Tragic became almost synonymous with artificial and inflated.

A worthier achievement must also be credited to the heroic plays. The spacious realms of romance which the Elizabethans had loved were closing their gates to the imagination of the later seventeenth century. Even Shakespeare's isles of the blest that so delighted Elizabeth and James were strangely inaccessible to Restoration fancy, which took pleasure in only the "Merry Wives of Windsor" among his comedies. The narrowing of romance had been manifest in the drama since 1600, and it was a theatrical and artificial domain of thrills, sentiments, and honor that the Restoration received for its heritage. Poor enough as is this kingdom, absurd its inhabitants, it is still the land of the wonderful and impossible, and its monarchs now and then remind us of Tamburlaine and Hotspur. At the time of Wycherley's comedies and Rochester's patronage of literature, men and women sighed and thrilled with Albumazor, dreamedof love, and fancied themselves kings and queens in China and Peru. When Romance was banished from other forms of literature,—unless in pastoral or opera,—tragedy still remained dedicated to the banished goddess, and in its precincts scanty flames still burned on the altars of heroism, enthusiasm, romantic aspiration, and extravagant love.

The rise and wane of the heroic plays is sufficiently illustrated in the career of their chief exponent. After his "Indian Emperor" (1665), Dryden turned in "Secret Love" (1667) to tragicomedy with a mixture of verse, rhyme, and prose and a mixture of heroic and lively comedy. After various comedies and the adaptation of "The Tempest," "Tyrannic Love" (1669) and "The Conquest of Granada" (1669) accomplished the full triumph of rhymed verse and "the grand scale." At times Dryden's rapidity and vigor almost justify the rhymed couplets and redeem the absurdities of the conventions. It was in the Epilogue to "The Conquest" that he attacked the Elizabethans, vaunting the superiority of an age when

"Our ladies and our men now speak more witIn conversation, than those poets writ."

In 1671 came the burlesque "Rehearsal," which, if its attack did not centre on heroic plays, made Dryden and the popular "Conquest of Granada" the butts of its most telling fun. Then followed Dryden's "Essay of Heroic Plays," two comedies, his inexcusable tragedy of "Amboyna" (written in a month to support the warwith the Dutch, yet, in conformity to the fashion, tracing the Dutch atrocities to a heroic love), and the opera based on Milton's "Paradise Lost." In 1675 came "Aureng Zebe," the last of his heroic plays, without supernatural machinery, and somewhat tamed in style.

The vogue of the heroic play was about over. In 1678 came Rymer's attempt at a model heroic tragedy and his "Tragedies of the Last Age," a severe attack upon the Elizabethan drama from the point of view of extreme pseudo-classicism. But in the same year was acted Dryden's "All for Love," in blank verse, with a preface extolling Shakespeare, rejecting the models of the ancients as "too little for English tragedy," discarding "the nicety of manners of the French," yet claiming credit for an observance of the unities. This was the one play in which, as he declared, Dryden followed his own bent unheedful of stage fashions, and it seems to have set the fashion and led the way back to blank verse and to Shakespeare. Rhymed plays continued to appear occasionally, but blank verse was henceforth recognized as the proper medium for tragedy.

Even Dryden's praise of Shakespeare is modified by his respect for French rules, and by the prevailing opinion that Shakespeare's genius lacked the improvements readily secured by an application of the accepted formulas of art. That a certain improvement is accomplished cannot be denied. The incoherent profusion of scenes, the host of distracting incidents are reduced to order, the unities of time and place give a directness and rapidityto the action that "Antony and Cleopatra" greatly lacks. In characterization and poetry Dryden's play is, to be sure, not comparable with Shakespeare's, but in both respects it far surpasses the numerous other English dramas on the subject. This is faint praise. By following Shakespeare without imitating him, and by adapting a play to the stage requirements of the day without bowing to the absurdities of the heroic models, Dryden succeeded in producing a great and original poetical drama. Not in response to mere theatrical fashion or to French taste or theory, but in response to the inspiration of Shakespeare came the finest product of Restoration tragedy.

In this same year as "All for Love" appeared "Œdipus," written in collaboration with Lee, in which the authors brought to their classical model the methods of the Elizabethans. Eurydice and Adrastus furnish the necessary love story, and Creon becomes the hateful rival and intriguing villain. The declamation sometimes shows Dryden at his best, the bombast and horrors are in Lee's worst vein. In the next year appeared Dryden's improvement of "Troilus and Cressida" with his careful essay on "The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy," in which he criticises after the fashion set by Rymer the errors of Shakespeare and Fletcher, insists on the necessity of unity, order, and greatness in action, and praises the excellence of Fletcher and especially of Shakespeare in character and passion. Nowhere else, perhaps, has Dryden expressed so discriminatingly and so finally hisown views and, on the whole, the views of his age, on tragedy. Shakespeare's greatness is recognized as preëminent in the presentation of character and passion; his faults in coherence and unity of structure and his archaism in manners and proprieties are admitted.

From this time on Dryden's contributions to the drama were less frequent. In "The Spanish Fryar" (1681), he added the best Restoration example of tragicomedy, availing himself of Fletcher's example, a double plot, and a happy ending. "The Duke of Guise" (1682), a political allegory, written in collaboration with Lee, deserves little consideration as satire or drama. After two operas and an absence of several years from the stage, came "Don Sebastian" (1690), which Sir Walter Scott thought the best of his tragedies. It is heroic in its pairs of lovers and tangle of love and jealousy, and in the exploits, boasts, and love-making of the hero; French in its general structure; Elizabethan in its mixture of comedy, its use of horror and incest, and its imitation of Shakespeare. It recalls the tragedies before 1642, with their heroic love after the style of Beaumont and Fletcher, their horrors and incest following the Websterian school, and their emulation of famous passages in Shakespeare. "Cleomenes" (1692), which repeats the Potiphar's wife story, is still more Elizabethan, and "Love Triumphant," a tragicomedy (1693), deals with an incestuous passion proved innocent at last, a motive very popular since "A King and No King."

Dryden never gave the theatre a whole-hearted service.Responding readily to its conditions, he wrote with facility and vigor comedies, tragedies, operas, and political allegories of the kind that changing fashion or patrons demanded. When, after a long slavery, he had acquired mastery of his art and confidence to lead rather than to follow, circumstances arose to call him away from the theatre. We may wish that he had earlier and oftener tried to do his best, as in "All for Love," "The Spanish Friar," and "Don Sebastian"; but his genius was not essentially dramatic, and we may not regret the time taken from the theatre for the Satires and Fables. His greatness can be best seen by comparison with the work of his contemporaries. Whatever he tried, he did on the whole better than they, and in comprehensiveness and adaptability as well as in sheer poetic faculty he was their master.

Up to "Aureng Zebe" Dryden's tragedies reflected the prevailing fashion; his "All for Love" marked a turning-point in the course of tragedy; and his criticism reviewed, summed up, and discriminated the current views of Shakespeare and the French. His later work was less representative of the general course of the drama, yet the various species exhibited in his work recur in that of his contemporaries, and the partial return to Elizabethan methods that marks his latest plays is perhaps the leading characteristic of the last twenty years of the century.

Crowne's "Thyestes" is the only attempt besides Dryden's "Orestes" to adapt a classical play to the popular stage, and neither returns much nearer to the Greekthan Seneca. The only play closely modeled on the Greek is Milton's "Samson Agonistes." The preface renounces the stage with a scorn that includes not only the Restoration tragedies but apparently those of Shakespeare as well. Though the play stands by itself, it may be said to represent a tendency to turn to Greek rather than to French models, a tendency boasted of by Dryden and Crowne, and fully manifest in the next century. And it takes its place at the head of the numerous, if sporadic, tragedies on Greek models that extend from the Restoration to the present day.

In the return to Shakespeare, Dryden's influence was more potent, though here, as in the case of the Greeks, an increased appreciation was shown partly through alterations and adaptations. Before "All for Love," only "Measure for Measure," "Macbeth," and "The Tempest" of Shakespeare's plays had suffered alterations, and in two of these Dryden had a share. In the four years after 1678, no less than ten alterations were produced, the majority of which long usurped the stage. The restorers, sincere enough in their admiration for Shakespeare, were following Dryden's precept and example, correcting Shakespeare's faults in diction or structure, and preserving his poetry and characters. While their entire readiness to cut or to add resulted in part from ignorant vanity, it depended far more on their confidence in the panacea afforded by Art for all diseases of genius. Art, according to their prescription, was compounded of closeness of structure in the Frenchstyle and a declamatory vocabulary in accord with the latest pseudo-classic conventions. The alterations are so various in their audacities that a brief general description is hardly possible. The main purpose in each case was the remaking of Shakespeare's disordered beauties into "a play," and, beyond the formulas of Art, the most usual improvement was the addition of a love story. Thus, Alcibiades marries the daughter of Timon, and Cordelia's loyalty is rewarded by the hand of Edgar. Perhaps the most that can be said for the restorers is, first, that they rescued for the stage some of the less dramatic plays, as "Troilus and Cressida," "Timon," "Henry IV," "Coriolanus," and "Cymbeline," and thereby greatly extended the knowledge and appreciation of Shakespeare; and, second, that they left "Hamlet" and "Othello" untouched. Adaptations were made of practically all Elizabethan authors, and Shakespeare fared as his fellows. A more elaborate history of the drama than the present one might trace the changes in the conception of tragedy and in the taste of the theatres as indicated by these alterations. The main consideration here is that, however mutilated or embellished, a half dozen of his tragedies were among the favorite plays of the Restoration. Before the end of the century they had outclassed the other Elizabethan plays, even those of Beaumont and Fletcher, in popular regard. The Restoration did what his own age had not done; it recognized Shakespeare's supremacy in English tragedy.

It would be tedious to trace the infatuation for theheroic plays and the partial return to the Elizabethans in the work of the various dramatists whose careers paralleled Dryden's. His rival, Settle, wrote heroic plays, a sensational political play on the Whig side, "Pope Joan, or the Female Prelate," and a long series of tragedies and comedies extending well into the next century. John Crowne, another contemporary, began with tragic comedies and heroic rhymed plays, proceeded to Shakespearean alterations, "Thyestes," and blank verse plays in the Elizabethan tradition, and ended his career with a rhymed "Caligula." Among those who in tragedy confined themselves mainly to adaptations or borrowings from the Elizabethans were Tate, Ravenscroft, and D'Urfey; and a group of women should be mentioned,—Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Pix, and Mrs. Centlivre,—who in the later half of the period devoted considerable attention to tragedy without creating any marked departure from the commonplace. We must confine ourselves to the authors whose tragedies had a more extended interest.

Nathaniel Lee wrote his first play in 1675, when he was eighteen years old, and produced ten tragedies, in addition to the two in which he collaborated with Dryden, before the close of 1684, when he became insane. The first three, "Nero," "Sophonisba," and "Gloriana," were rhymed, but the fourth, "The Rival Queens" (1677), preceded Dryden in its return to blank verse and won an enormous success, maintaining itself on the stage long after the death of Betterton. His remaining tragedieswere in blank verse, "Mithridates," "Œdipus," "Theodosius," "Cæsar Borgia," "Lucius Junius Brutus," "Duke of Guise," "Constantine," and "The Massacre of Paris," which with the tragicomedy "The Princess of Cleve" was acted after his release from the madhouse.

All his plays are pretty much of a kind. The juvenile and worthless "Nero" unites the conventions of heroic love with the ghosts, lust, bloodshed, and madness of the later Elizabethan revenge plays. The later blank verse plays, though to a large extent based on French romances, envelop the love interest in a Tourneurian medley of depravity and horror. They revive the late Elizabethan type of tragedy that united the sentimental and the terrible and delighted to present loving and devoted womanhood in an environment of undiluted villany, abnormal lust, and physical torture. They add somewhat of the closeness of structure of French models, the spectacle of an unproved stage that displays ballets and temples along with bloody heavens, human sacrifice, and crucifixions, and a style that out-Herods the Elizabethans in the extravagance and vehemence of its rant. "Theodosius" tells of the fatal result of the rival love of brothers for the same woman; "Brutus" of the judicial murder of a son by a father; "Cæsar Borgia" introduces Machiavelli again as a machinating villain in a story of fraternal rivalry in love; "Constantine" and "Gloriana" deal with the rival loves of son and father. This theme, a favorite with Lee, reappears in"Mithridates," the contents of which are fairly typical of the revolting intrigues to which Lee mainly confined himself.

The leading persons are Mithridates, the lustful dotard; his two sons, Ziphares and Pharnaces; Monima, the gentle heroine, contracted to Mithridates; Semandra, the chief heroine, in love with and loved by Ziphares; her father, a noble soldier; and two conspiring villains. The Romans are at the gates of Synope, where the scene is placed. Pharnaces, at feud with his brother and desirous of Monima for himself, conspires with the villains to thwart the marriage of Mithridates to Monima and direct the passion of the king to Semandra. Mithridates condemns Ziphares to death and pursues Semandra, but is persuaded to relent in order that Ziphares may lead the army against the Romans. Semandra and Ziphares exchange parting vows of fidelity as he leaves for battle. The conspirators again incite Mithridates; and Semandra, in order to save the life of her lover, repulses him upon his return in triumph. In consequence he believes her false and leaves her in the power of his father. The fourth act opens with Mithridates, who has ravished Semandra, "encompassed with the ghosts of his sons, who set daggers to his breast and vanish." He is attacked by remorse; Pharnaces betrays the city to the Romans; Semandra and Ziphares have a last interview and commit suicide; Mithridates dies after condemning the captured conspirators and Pharnaces to execution.

It is interesting to compare this with Racine's play of the same title and dealing with the same historical incidents, acted four years earlier. Though neither play represents its author at his best, and Lee's was apparently written without any knowledge of Racine's, the two illustrate the differences between the two theatres,and may remind us how far Lee was from forsaking the English tradition for the French. In Racine, all the stage spectacles, temples, portents, and ghosts, all the horrors and frenzy are lacking; so, too, are the characters of Archilaus the noble soldier and Semandra the all-important person in Lee. In addition to Mithridates, Monima, and the two sons, the only persons are two confidants and a servant. The intrigue is of the simplest. Monima, contracted to Mithridates, is loved by both of his sons and returns the love of Xipharés. In the end Pharnaces forsakes his father, who dies, leaving Monima and Xipharés to face impending ruin. Mithridates is not the lustful tyrant traditional on the English stage, but a monarch who cherishes great projects and counts magnanimity a royal duty. Nor is Pharnaces the traditional English villain with accomplices, as in Lee, though he has a villain's part to play. The interest is psychological, centring on emotional crises in the lives of all, and without resort to sensationalism, horrors, or complication of incident.

Otway, like Lee, began with rhymed plays, "Alcibiades" (1675) and "Don Carlos" (1676), the second winning an extraordinary and long-continued success on the stage. The next year appeared his "Titus and Berenice," a free and sympathetic translation of Racine's "Berenice" that was surpassed in the favor of the theatre by Crowne's treatment of the same subject. After several comedies he followed the fashion for Shakespearean adaptations in his "History and Fall of CaiusMarius" (1680).[27]This monstrous play, about half of which, as Otway acknowledged in his prologue, is from "Romeo and Juliet," provides a large mixture of comedy, and presents Juliet (Lavinia) dressed as a page, the servant of her lover, after the style of Beaumont and Fletcher's Bellario. For sixty years this play superseded "Romeo and Juliet" upon the stage. Otway's two other tragedies, "The Orphan" (1680) and "Venice Preserved" (1682), are his masterpieces. They continued to be stage favorites for a century and a half, and procured for Otway the place next to Shakespeare in the admiration of the eighteenth century.

"Venice Preserved" may be classed with the many tragedies of the day that maintain the Elizabethan traditions. These are manifest in the general structure, the large number of actors, the changing scenes, the gross comedy, the abundance of incidents, the terrors, ghosts, and madness. Not only the frequent reminiscences of Shakespeare and Fletcher, but the whole conception and treatment testify to an inspiration from the earlier and better days of the drama.

The story, not long ago too well known to need retelling, relates how Jaffier, in poverty and desperation, is induced to join a conspiracy against the state, and is then persuaded by his wife, Belvidera, to save the state and her father by turning informer. He seeks to sacrifice himself for the friend whom he has betrayed, and in the end stabs both himself and his friendupon the scaffold. A curiously Elizabethan prolongation of the catastrophe follows in the apparition of the ghosts of the friends, and the madness and death of Belvidera.

The essentials of great tragedy, of Shakespearean tragedy, are here. The opposition of character, the struggle of the generous but pliable Jaffier under the conflicting influences of his wife and the steadfast 'Roman' Pierre, the joy and tenderness and ruin that come with his love for Belvidera, are all drawn with a truth of passion in conception and language that reaches the heart. "Nature is there," wrote Dryden, "which is the greatest beauty." Marred as a whole by buffoonery and excess, the play is still among the two or three best tragedies of the Restoration. If it were all equal to the tremendous fourth act, Otway would be sure of a place among the immortals.

Marked by the same power of swaying the emotions of tenderness and pity, "The Orphan" attains these effects by means of the situations rather than through the study of motives. The plot deals with the rivalry of two brothers in love with their father's ward. She is secretly married to one; the other substitutes himself by trick on the marriage night. The situation, which has parallels in preceding tragedy, is abhorrent enough to kill all interest in the persons concerned; but Otway's power to depict love and distress triumphs over one's repugnance. The play is remarkable in many ways. Its few characters, its observance of the unities, its confinement of the action, give it the simplicity and directnessof French tragedy. Its theme and its poetry recall Elizabethan rather than Restoration examples. But it departs from the canons of either theatre in presenting neither historical persons, nobles, kings, nor illustrious actions. Based on a story, supposedly of fact, related in a contemporary pamphlet, it merely transfers the scene to Bohemia, without adding the usual accessories of tragedy. Though it keeps something of a court setting and does not venture into middle-class society, it is like the Elizabethan plays of crime in its presentation of contemporaneous fact, and like Heywood's "A Woman Killed with Kindness" in telling a story of domestic distress. It might by a little extension of the term be called a domestic tragedy, and it still further departs from the canons in relating the misery of an innocent sufferer who is the victim of a cruel mistake. Otway should, therefore, be remembered as a dramatist who, in a time when tragedy was largely artificial, imitative, and conventional, painted suffering and tenderness with truth to nature, and who violated the accepted rules of his art in order to reach the hearts of his audience. That he could not also escape the moral perversion of taste that marked his time has brought its punishment in the final neglect of his masterpieces; but it is a sign of genius to turn away from heroic plays, Racine, and Shakespeare, to write plays different from any written before, and to stir all men's hearts for over a century.

Of the many dramatists who wrote tragedies in the last decade of the seventeenth century and bridged theway from the age of Dryden to the age of Pope, only Banks, Southerne, and Congreve produced plays of continuing popularity and influence through the eighteenth century. Banks ended a prolific career with "Cyrus the Great, or the Tragedy of Love" in 1696, but his popularity was mainly due to his three English historical tragedies, "Virtue Betrayed, or Anne Bullen," "The Island Queens" (Elizabeth and Mary Stuart), and "The Unhappy Favorite" (the Earl of Essex). These plays are interesting as an illustration of the survival on the stage of a dramatic species in a debased form. Though in blank verse, their material is that of the heroic play; their formula, much love-making and a pretense of portentous events; their persons, rivals in love,—two men with the same woman or two women with the same man,—a wicked minister, a revengeful woman, and the queen at the centre of the stage. There is no comedy, no physical horrors, and even the portents are reduced to a peculiar decorum:—

"Last night no sooner was I laid to restBut just three drops of blood fell from my nose."

The construction is on French models with few actors, continuity of scenes, and observance of the unities. Puerile in conception and more ridiculous in their bombast than Fielding's burlesque, they have enough rapidity of action, vivacity of claptrap, and extravagance of changing emotions to account for their stage success.

Thomas Southerne finished "Cleomenes" for Dryden, with whom he was closely associated, and his tragediesfollow Dryden's later work in maintaining the Elizabethan traditions of blank verse, comedy, double plots, shifting scenes, horrors, and persons of varied ranks. His "Loyal Brother" (1682) is wholly commonplace, and "The Spartan Dame" (1719) and "The Fate of Capua" (1700) do not depart from usual themes and methods, though the latter is in some respects Southerne's best play; but his two most successful plays, "The Fatal Marriage" (1694) and "Oroonoko" (1696), both based on novels by Mrs. Behn, present decided innovations in theme. "Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave" contains much comedy, and has little merit besides the novelty of the story, presenting the virtues of a negro slave. "The Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery" introduces the Enoch Arden story, attached to an outrageous comic underplot derived in part from Fletcher's "Nightwalker."

In the main plot, Biron, oldest son of Baldwin, has been captured by pirates and is supposed to be dead, his letters being kept secret and answered by his villanous brother, Carlos, who urges his wife Isabella to marry. After Baldwin, instigated by Carlos, has thrust her out from his house, she accepts the devoted Villeroy. Biron returns; she goes mad in a scene of great imaginative power; Carlos and his assistants endeavor to kill Biron, who is rescued by the returning Villeroy. Biron, however, dies; and an accomplice of Carlos, tortured upon the rack (on the stage), confesses and exposes Carlos. Then "enter Isabella distracted, her little son running in before, being afraid of her." She stabs herself.

Like Otway's "Orphan," this is virtually a domestictragedy, for there are no interests of state or court, and our sympathy is centred solely on the innocent distress of the heroine. Like Otway, again, Southerne gains his greatest effects by an appeal to pity. The sentimentality that we attribute to the days of Richardson's "Clarissa" earlier triumphed on the stage in the heroines of Lee, Otway, and Southerne.

Not less successful on the stage than the plays of Banks and Southerne was the single tragedy of Congreve. First acted in 1697, "The Mourning Bride" continued without alteration through the next century, and furnished Mrs. Siddons with one of her greatest parts. Congreve's remarkable dramatic ingenuity was skillfully exercised in combining all the elements that the average audience delighted in, and yet presenting these draped sufficiently to avoid offending the judicious. Classical form and technic permit a sensational and gruesome fifth act; dignified and facile verse gives way at times to outrageous rant; the usual plot of the rival ladies and rival lovers is ingeniously complicated to supply suspense, surprise, and a happy ending.

It is the day after the death of King Anselmo, prisoner of Manuel, King of Granada, whose daughter Almeira has been secretly married to Alphonso, son of Anselmo, and then separated from him by shipwreck. She confesses this marriage to her confidant, mourns Anselmo, and declares that she will never yield to her father and marry Garcia, son of the premier Gonzales. King Manuel returns from battle, having slain the Moorish king, and brings the queen Zara and other prisoners, among them a valiant warrior, Osmyn—Alphonso in disguise.At the tomb of Anselmo, Osmyn-Alphonso and Almeira meet and dissolve in grief.The king is in love with Zara and Zara with Osmyn. She offers to procure Osmyn's escape and to fly with him; but later on, discovering him with Almeira, she betrays them to the king. The king and Zara are now torn by love and jealousy. She obtains permission to have Osmyn strangled by one of her mutes, and the suspicious Gonzales assumes the costume of the mute in order to make sure of the execution. Meanwhile the king, learning of Zara's passion for Osmyn, determines to have him killed and then assume his clothing in order to confront Zara. Osmyn makes his escape; Gonzales kills the king, taking him for Osmyn; Zara, taking the body to be Osmyn's, drinks poison; Almeira is about to make the same mistake, when the soldiers enter with Osmyn at their head.

The king is in love with Zara and Zara with Osmyn. She offers to procure Osmyn's escape and to fly with him; but later on, discovering him with Almeira, she betrays them to the king. The king and Zara are now torn by love and jealousy. She obtains permission to have Osmyn strangled by one of her mutes, and the suspicious Gonzales assumes the costume of the mute in order to make sure of the execution. Meanwhile the king, learning of Zara's passion for Osmyn, determines to have him killed and then assume his clothing in order to confront Zara. Osmyn makes his escape; Gonzales kills the king, taking him for Osmyn; Zara, taking the body to be Osmyn's, drinks poison; Almeira is about to make the same mistake, when the soldiers enter with Osmyn at their head.

Perhaps no other single play is so representative of the various features of Restoration tragedy. It is not a tragedy, at all if one insists that tragedy should be logical and psychological; but it was praised by Voltaire and Dr. Johnson and approved by the London public for over a century.

Although the years from 1660 to 1700 offer little in tragedy that has proved of permanent value, they mark the continuance of thegenrein a full tide of popularity. Probably in no forty years since then have so many original tragedies appeared in the London theatres; certainly in no forty years since have so many Elizabethan tragedies been revived. Tragedies and tragicomedies together are in numbers almost equal to the comedies which we think of as especially distinguishing the Restoration stage. There was hardly a writer for the theatre who did not tryhis hand at tragedy. In spite of the rivalry of opera and comedy, it continued from Davenant to Southerne to delight the age. Its literary as well as its theatrical importance was maintained. Noble authors as well as the greatest wits, the Earl of Orrery, Granville, Dryden, and Congreve, courted the tragic muse. Tragedy written for the popular stage had, indeed, a literary eminence hardly recognized before, even in the generation preceding the Civil War. In comparison with their Elizabethan predecessors the tragedies of this time are, in fact, literary rather than popular. They draw their themes from French or English plays; they display little innovation and still less study of life; they adopt rules and regulations; they are conventional and artificial. They respond to literary traditions; they hardly express the sentiments or ideas of their age. Some exceptions there are; but even plays like those of Banks, which gained theatrical success without literary distinction, resembled their more worthy brethren in their adherence to convention rather than nature.

In the main Restoration tragedy must be regarded as a continuation and development of Elizabethan. The influence of Beaumont and Fletcher continued in the heroic plays and their after-effects. The wane of the heroic plays brought a return to the Elizabethans, and, notably in Lee, to some of the most characteristic features of the later revenge plays. The increasing influence of Shakespeare was felt not only in the worthy emulation of "All for Love" and in the various adaptations, butalso in the debates of the critics and through the whole warp and woof of tragedy. But what were preëminent in many of Shakespeare's contemporaries as in Shakespeare himself, poetry, passion, and characterization, were beyond the reach of any of the playwrights except Dryden, Lee, and Otway at their best. The worst excesses, the most undesirable conventions of the Elizabethans, excited imitation as much as their excellences. The Elizabethan bloom had gone to seed in unfavorable soil. It is not strange that after the horrors, bloodshed, and supernaturalism of Lee and Otway, and after the gross buffoonery that spoils tragedies otherwise so noble as "Don Sebastian," "Venice Preserved," and "The Fatal Marriage," there should have followed in the opening years of the next century a marked reaction to the decencies of French tragedy. In the Restoration period, however, the French influence, though manifest in the great vogue of the heroic plays and in a wide adoption of French ideas of structure and propriety, won only a partial triumph in checking and modifying the Elizabethan tradition. Its effect in supplying fresh incentives for worthy endeavor was slight, indeed, hardly discernible unless in the influence of Racine upon Otway. Tragedy, then, as handed down to the eighteenth century, was not a fixed and definite form, though measurably more so than a century before. It was still a conglomerate of various forms and tendencies, mingling relics of the medieval stage with reminiscences of Shakespeare and the manners of the court of Louis XIV. The sentimentaltragedies of Southerne and Otway, telling stories of distressed womanhood and exciting pity without any accessories of grandeur, were perhaps the most independent achievements of Restoration tragedy; the preservation of Shakespearean influence was its most important. But, in comparison with a century before, the changes in tragedy that were most noticeable and permanent were the restriction of themes, the narrowing of structure, and the conventionality and artificiality that extended to character and language as well as to themes and plots.

Ward continues to supply the best history of the drama. Henceforth the standard authority for the history of the stage is Genest'sSome Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols., Bath, 1832. This is an invaluable collection of facts in regard to plays and actors, superseding preceding books on the subject and supplying material for subsequent ones. Other histories of the theatre are: Chetwood'sGeneral History of the Stage(1749);The Dramatic Mirror(1808); D. E. Baker'sBiographica Dramatica(1764, continued by Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones, 3d ed. 1812); Dibdin'sComplete History of the English Stage(1800). Lowe'sBibliographical Account of English Dramatic Literature(1888) will guide in their use. More recent histories of the theatre are: P. Fitzgerald'sNew History of the Stage(1882); Lowe's new edition of Doran'sTheir Majesties' Servants(1888); and H. B. Baker'sThe London Stage, 1576-1903 (1904).

Works of the Restoration period on the drama or theatre include a number of Dryden's essays, notably,The Essay of Dramatic Poesy,The Defence of the Essay,The Defence of the Epilogue,Of Heroic Plays, andThe Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy; Wright'sHistoria Histrionica(1699, reprinted in Dodsley and in Cibber's Life); Edward Phillips'sTheatrum Poetarum(1675); Langbaine'sAccount of the English Dramatic Poets(1691); Rymer'sTragedies of the Last Age(1678) andA Short View of Tragedy(1693); Dennis'sThe Impartial Critic(1693); and Jeremy Collier'sShort View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage(1698). Downes'sRoscius Anglicanus(1708, facsimile reprint, 1886) also contains interesting information on the period. Corneille, Boileau, Saint Evremond, the Abbé D'Aubignac, and Rapin are the French critics of most influence on the drama of this period, especially Rapin, whoseReflexions sur la poëtiquewas translated by Rymer (1674). J. E. Spingarn'sSeventeenth Century Critical Essays(now in press) will contain all the critical work of the period of importance, with a valuable discussion of its relation to French criticism.

There are collected editions of the works of most of the Restoration dramatists, but none of Settle or Banks. The Scott-Saintsbury edition is the standard for Dryden. Individual plays are to be found in many collections:The Modern British Drama, 5 vols. (1811); Oxberry'sNew English Drama(1812-25); Mrs. Inchbald'sModern Theatre(1811); Bell'sBritish Theatre(1797) and supplement.Dramatists of the Restoration, edited by Maidment and Logan, 14 vols., Edinburgh, 1872-79, includes the plays of Crowne, Davenant, Tatham, and John Wilson. Ward and theEnglish Drama(by K. L. Bates and L. B. Godfrey,op. cit.) direct to editions and monographs of the individual authors of this period.

J. J. Jusserand'sShakespeare en France(1898), Professor Lounsbury'sShakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, and Miss Canfield'sCorneille and Racine in England(1905) are important for certain phases of the drama. Concerning the heroic plays there is a considerable literature; see, especially, P. Holzhausen on Dryden's heroic plays,Englische Studien, vols. xiii, xv, and xvi (1890-92); L. N. Chase,The English Heroic Play(1903); J. W. Tupper,The Relation of the Heroic Play to Beaumont and Fletcher, Mod. Lang. Assn. Publ. 1905. C. G. Child,The Rise of the Heroic Play, Mod. Lang. Notes, 1904. Alex. Beljame'sLe Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au xviiiesiècle(1881) deals fully with Dryden and has an elaborate bibliography.

FOOTNOTES:[25]In this and subsequent chapters the dates in brackets give the year of the first presentation in the case of acted plays. The date of publication usually coincides with the year of acting.[26]Cf.James W. Tupper,Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romances of Beaumont and Fletcher. Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1905.[27]Ward (iii, 415) is in error in crediting public taste with condemnation of this play. Lavinia seems to have been one of Mrs. Barry's most successful parts.

[25]In this and subsequent chapters the dates in brackets give the year of the first presentation in the case of acted plays. The date of publication usually coincides with the year of acting.

[26]Cf.James W. Tupper,Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romances of Beaumont and Fletcher. Publ. Mod. Lang. Assn. 1905.

[27]Ward (iii, 415) is in error in crediting public taste with condemnation of this play. Lavinia seems to have been one of Mrs. Barry's most successful parts.

In tragedy the division between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is less marked than that which distinguishes in general the literatures of the Restoration and the Augustan eras. Yet by 1700 most of the leading dramatists of the preceding generation had ceased to write for the stage; and the death of Dryden marked the end of the old, as the beginning of the reign of Anne, with its important changes in politics, society, and literature, marked the beginning of a new development in tragedy. The attack of Jeremy Collier (1698) was also an important landmark in the history of the drama, assisting in a notable change from the preceding licentiousness and toward a moralized and sentimentalized comedy. A similar change in tragedy was its most apparent departure from Restoration models. Chastened language and a stricter moral censorship of both subjects and sentiments reflected that refinement of which the age of Addison and Pope was wont to boast.

The theatrical conditions governing the reign of Queen Anne were not very different from those of the Restoration. There was a general complaint, as there has been ever since, that operas and spectacles werecrowding the serious drama out of favor, but there was still abundant opportunity to see many of the best plays of the Elizabethan and Restoration periods. Of tragedies, we find in a single season, 1703-04, "Hamlet," "Othello," "Julius Cæsar," and alterations of "Macbeth," "Lear," "Richard III," "Timon," and "Titus Andronicus," Shirley's "Traitor," and Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy," "Valentinian," and "A King and No King," "The Loyal Subject," and other of their tragicomedies. "Henry VIII," "Rollo," "Bonduca," and "Philaster" were performed within the next few years. Of Restoration tragedies, Banks's "Unhappy Favorite" and Lee's "Rival Queens" were perhaps the most popular, and other plays of Banks, Lee, Otway, Dryden, Congreve, and Southerne were acted yearly. A number of the heroic plays also still kept the stage, including Howard's "Indian Queen," Dryden's "Conquest of Granada," "Indian Emperor," and "Aureng Zebe." Throughout the century both the London and the provincial theatres presented each year a large number of old plays, including many of these already mentioned. The Elizabethan tragedies, except Shakespeare's, and the heroic plays gradually disappeared from the regular repertoire, but Shakespeare's tragedies steadily gained in popularity, and "The Unhappy Favorite" (rewritten as "The Earl of Essex"), "The Orphan," "Venice Preserved," "Oronooko," "The Fatal Marriage" (altered as "Isabella"), "All for Love," and "The Mourning Bride" maintained their places intothe nineteenth century. Tragedy thus had its permanent representatives in this group of stock plays, to which newcomers gained admission only by marked success on the stage.

To these stock plays no writer of the eighteenth century made more notable additions than Nicholas Rowe, the first editor of Shakespeare, whose work began the century, borrowed much from his predecessors, and yet introduced most of the changes which distinguish the eighteenth century type of tragedy from that of the Restoration or Elizabethan period. His first play was followed by four other tragedies by 1707, and, after an interval of seven years, by "Jane Shore" (1714) and "Lady Jane Grey" (1715). Of the first five, three are of little interest except as representing common variations of the prevailing type. They all relate love stories of rivalry and intrigue among heroic personages, and all observe the French proprieties in structure. "The Ambitious Stepmother," like so many predecessors and successors, places the scene in an oriental court; "Ulysses" more daringly invades Homeric territory; and "The Royal Convert" turns to early English history, a field which literary patriotism was appropriating for tragedy.

In "Tamerlane" (1702), love and intrigue play subordinate parts to the political and moral interest which the author endeavored to centre upon his protagonist. Tamerlane, who, we are told, was patterned on William III, is an extremely pious pagan, who overtops conquest with mercy and adorns every occasion with a moralizingdiscourse. Had he ever encountered his Marlowean namesake, he would have shed the pitying tear. In general, the structure is on the French plan, but the large number of characters and the considerable amount of action recall Elizabethan models. The verse, too, with its feminine endings, occasionally reminds one of Fletcher, and the figures of speech are feebly patterned on Shakespeare, while the ravings of Bajazet are worthy of Nat Lee. The play, long acted every November fifth, seems to have owed its great success to its high moral tone and its patriotic eloquence. It set the key for many similarly patriotic tunes.

"The Fair Penitent" (1703) links itself with the two later "She-tragedies," to borrow a term from one of their epilogues. Its prologue proclaims an innovation from the usual tragic themes of monarchs' cares and lost royalty, because—

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