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 Greek than 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 French style 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 the heroic 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 tragedies were 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.