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 little historical 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] The genre of 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 the spell 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 they were 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 essential certain 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, dreamed of 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 wit
In 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 war with 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 rapidity to 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 his own 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.