Dryden's Plays.—Although Dryden's reputation is based on his other poems, and although his dramas have conduced scarcely at all to his fame, he did play a principal part in this department of literary work. Dryden made haste to answer the call, and his venal muse wrote to please the town. The names of many of his plays and personages are foreign; but their vitality is purely English. Of his first play, The Duke of Guise, which was unsuccessful, he tells us: "I undertook this as the fairest way which the Act of Indemnity had left us, as setting forth the rise of the great rebellion, and of exposing the villanies of it upon the stage, to precaution posterity against the like errors;"—a rebellion the master-spirit of which he had eulogized upon his bier!
His second play, The Wild Gallant, may be judged by the fact that it won for him the favor of Charles II. and of his mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland. Pepys saw it "well acted;" but says, "It hath little good in it." It is not our purpose to give a list of Dryden's plays; besides their occasional lewdness, they are very far inferior to his poems, and are now rarely read except by the historical student. They paid him in ready money, and he cannot ask payment from posterity in fame.
On the 13th of January, 1667-8, (we are told by Pepys,) the ladies and the Duke of Monmouth acted The Indian Emperour at court.
The same chronicler says: The Maiden Queene was "mightily commended for the regularity of it, and the strain and wit;" but of the Ladys à la Mode he says it was "so mean a thing" that, when it was announced for the next night, the pit "fell a laughing, because the house was not a quarter full."
But Dryden, as a playwright, does not enjoy the infamous honor of a high rank among his fellow-dramatists. The proper representations of the drama in that age were, in Comedy, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar; and, in Tragedy, Otway, Rowe, and Lee.
Wycherley.—Of the comedists of this period, where all were evil, William Wycherley was the worst. In his four plays, Love in a Wood, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, The Country Wife, and The Plain Dealer, he outrages all decency, ridicules honesty and virtue, and makes vice always triumphant. As a young man, profligate with pen and in his life, he was a wicked old man; for, when sixty-four years of age, he published a miscellany of verses of which Macaulay says: "The style and versification are beneath criticism: the morals are those of Rochester." And yet it is sad to be obliged to say that his characters pleased the age, because such men and women really lived then, and acted just as he describes them. He depicted vice to applaud and not to punish it. Wycherley was born in 1640, and died in 1715.
Congreve.—William Congreve, who is of the same school of morals, is far superior as a writer; indeed, were one name to be selected in illustration of our subject, it would be his. He was born in 1666, and, after being educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was a student at the Middle Temple. His first play, The Old Bachelor, produced in his twenty-first year, was a great success, and won for him the patronage of Lord Halifax. His next, The Double Dealer, caused Dryden to proclaim him the equal of Shakspeare! Perhaps his most famous comedy is Love for Love, which is besides an excellent index to the morality of the age. The author was quoted and caressed; Pope dedicated to him his Translation of the Iliad; and Voltaire considered him the most successful English writer of comedy. His merit consists in some degree of originality, and in the liveliness of his colloquies. His wit is brilliant and flashing, but, in the words of Thackeray, the world to him "seems to have had no moral at all."
How much he owed to the French school, and especially to Molière, may be judged from the fact that a whole scene in Love for Love is borrowed from the Don Juan of Molière. It is that in which Trapland comes to collect his debt from Valentine Legend. Readers of Molière will recall the scene between Don Juan, Sganarelle and M. Dimanche, which is here, with change of names, taken almost word for word. His men are gallants neither from love or passion, but from the custom of the age, of which it is said, "it would break Mr. Tattle's heart to think anybody else should be beforehand with him;" and Mr. Tattle was the type of a thousand fine gentlemen in the best English society of that day.
His only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, although far below those of Shakspeare, is the best of that age; and Dr. Johnson says he would go to it to find the most poetical paragraph in the range of English poetry. Congreve died in 1729, leaving his gains to the Duchess of Marlborough, who cherished his memory in a very original fashion. She had a statue of him in ivory, which went by clockwork, and was daily seated at her table; and another wax-doll imitation, whose feet she caused to be blistered and anointed by physicians, as the poet's gouty extremities had been.
Congreve was not ashamed to vindicate the drama, licentious as it was. In the year 1698, Jeremy Collier, a distinguished nonjuring clergyman, published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage; a very vigorous and severe criticism, containing a great deal of wholesome but bitter truth. Congreve came to the defence of the stage, and his example was followed by his brother dramatists. But Collier was too strong for his enemies, and the defences were very weak. There yet existed in England that leaven of purity which has steadily since been making its influence felt.