With regard to tragedy, Dryden is amply representative of his age. The period is less rich in tragedy than it is in comedy, for several reasons. (a) The spirit of the time was too irresponsible and vivacious to provide a healthy breeding-ground for this type of play. (b) The average poetical standard was not high; and tragedy of a superior type needs a high level of poetic merit. (c) There was a lack of fresh models, the tragedians being dependent on the Elizabethan plays (which were not popular), and on the classical French tragedies. Yet there are a few tragedians who deserve a brief mention.
1. Thomas Otway (1651–85). As was so often the case with the dramatists of the time, Otway had a varied and troubled career, closed with a miserable death. His first play, Alcibiades, was produced about 1675; then followed Don Carlos (1676), The Orphan (1680), and his masterpiece, Venice Preserved (1682).
Venice Preserved (see p. [226]) for long held the reputation of being the best tragedy outside Shakespeare, and that reputation has kept it in the forefront. It shows his work at its best. It has a rugged and somber force, and reveals a considerable skill in working out a dramatic situation. But Otway tends to lay on the horrors too thickly; his style is unreliable, and his comic passages are farce of the coarsest kind. If he is second to Shakespeare, he is a very bad second.
2. Nathaniel Lee (1653–92). Lee’s life is the usual tale of mishaps, miseries, and drunkenness, with a taint of madness as an additional calamity. He wrote many tragedies, some of which are Nero (1673), Sophonisba (1676), The Rival Queens (1677), and Mithridates (1678). He also collaborated with Dryden in the production of two plays.
During his own time Lee’s name became a byword to distinguish a kind of wild, raving style, which in part at least seems to have been a product of his madness. But he can write well when the spirit is in him; he has a command of pathos, and all through his work he has touches of real poetic quality.
3. Elkanah Settle (1648–1724). Settle was in some ways the butt of his literary friends, and Dryden has given him prominence by attacking him in his satires. In his day he obtained some popularity with a heroic play, The Empress of Morocco (1673). It is a poor specimen of its kind, but his other dramas are worse.
4. John Crowne (1640–1703). Crowne is another of the dramatists who attacked Dryden and who were in turn assailed by the bigger man. A voluminous playwright, Crowne’s best-known works are the tragedies of Caligula (1698), a heroic play, and Thyestes, in blank verse, and a comedy, Sir Courtly Nice (1685). Crowne is quite a good specimen of the average Restoration dramatist. The plays show considerable talent and a fair amount of skill in versification.
5. Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718). During his lifetime Rowe was a person of some importance, and was made Poet Laureate in 1714. His best-known plays are Tamerlane (1702), The Fair Penitent (1703), and the popular Jane Shore (1714). Johnson says of him, “His reputation comes from the reasonableness of some of his scenes, the elegance of his diction, and the suavity of his verse.”
POETRY
Samuel Butler (1612–80). Besides Dryden and the tragedy-writers the only considerable poet of the period is Samuel Butler, and his fame rests on one work, Hudibras.