After the production of The Rival Ladies in 1663, Dryden assisted Sir Robert Howard in the composition of a tragedy in heroic verse, The Indian Queen, produced with great splendour in January 1664. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert’s sister and daughter of the 1st earl of Berkshire, on the 1st of December 1663. Lady Elizabeth’s reputation was somewhat compromised before this union, which was not a happy one, and there is some evidence for the scandal in a letter written by her before her marriage to Philip, 2nd earl of Chesterfield. The Indian Queen was a great success, one of the greatest since the reopening of the theatres. This was in all likelihood due much less to the heroic verse and the exclusion of comic scenes from the tragedy than to the magnificent scenic accessories—the battles and sacrifices on the stage, the spirits singing in the air, and the god of dreams ascending through a trap. The novelty of these Indian spectacles, as well as of the Indian characters, with the splendid Queen Zempoalla, acted by Mrs Marshall in a real Indian dress of feathers presented to her by Mrs Aphra Behn, as the centre of the play, was the chief secret of the success of The Indian Queen. These melodramatic properties were so marked a novelty that they could not fail to draw the town. Dryden was tempted to return to tragedy; he followed up The Indian Queen with The Indian Emperor, or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, which was acted in 1665, and also proved a success.
But Dryden was not content with writing tragedies in rhymed verse. He took up the question of the propriety of rhyme in serious plays immediately after the success of The Indian Queen, in the preface to an edition (1664) of The Rival Ladies. In that first statement of his case, he considered the chief objection to the use of rhyme, and urged his chief argument in its favour. Rhyme was not natural, some people had said; to which he answers that it is as natural as blank verse, and that much of its unnaturalness is not the fault of the rhyme but of the writer, who has not sufficient command of language to rhyme easily. In favour of rhyme he has to say that it at once stimulates the imagination, and prevents it from being too discursive in its flights.
During the Great Plague, when the theatres were closed, and Dryden was living at Charlton, Wiltshire, at the seat of his father-in-law, the earl of Berkshire, he occupied a considerable part of his time in thinking over the principles of dramatic composition, and threw his conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an Essay of Dramatick Poesie and published in 1668. The essay takes the form of a dialogue between Neander (Dryden), Eugenius (Charles, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards earl of Dorset), Crites (Sir R. Howard), and Lisideius (Sir C. Sedley), who is made responsible for the famous definition of a play as a “just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Dryden’s form is of course borrowed from the ancients, and his main source is the critical work of Corneille in the prefaces and discourses contained in the edition of 1660, but he was well acquainted with the whole body of contemporary French and Spanish criticism. Crites maintains the superiority of the classical drama; Lisideius supports the exacting rules of French dramatic writing; Neander defends the English drama of the preceding generations, including, in a long speech, an examination of Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman. Neander argues, however, that English drama has much to gain by the observance of exact methods of construction without abandoning entirely the liberty which English writers had always claimed. He then goes on to defend the use of rhyme in serious drama. Howard had argued against the use of rhyme in a “preface” to Four New Plays (1665), which had furnished the excuse for Dryden’s essay. Howard replied to Dryden’s essay in a preface to The Duke of Lerma (1668). Dryden at once replied in a masterpiece of sarcastic retort and vigorous reasoning, A Defence of an Essay of Dramatique Poesie, prefixed to the second edition (1668) of The Indian Emperor. It is the ablest and most complete statement of his views about the employment of rhymed couplets in tragedy.
Before his return to town at the end of 1666, when the theatres (which had been closed during the disasters of 1665 and 1666) were reopened, Dryden wrote a poem on the Dutch war and the Great Fire entitled Annus Mirabilis. The poem is in quatrains, the metre of his Heroic Stanzas in praise of Cromwell, which Dryden chose, he tells us, “because he had ever judged it more noble and of greater dignity both for the sound and number than any other verse in use amongst us.” The preface to the poem contains an interesting discussion of what he calls “wit-writing,” introduced by the remark that “the composition of all poems is or ought to be of wit.” His description of the Great Fire is a famous specimen of this wit-writing, much more careless and daring, and much more difficult to sympathize with, than the graver conceits in his panegyric of the Protector. In Annus Mirabilis the poet apostrophizes the newly founded Royal Society, of which he had been elected a member in 1662.
From the reopening of the theatres in 1666 till November 1681, the date of his Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden produced nothing but plays. The stage was his chief source of income. Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, a tragi-comedy, produced in March 1667, was based on an episode in the Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus of Mlle de Scudéry, the historical original of the “Maiden Queen” being Christina, queen of Sweden. The prologue claims that the piece is written with pains and thought, by the exactest rules, with strict observance of the unities, and “a mingled chime of Jonson’s humour and of Corneille’s rhyme”; but it owed its success chiefly to the charm of Nell Gwyn’s acting in the part of Florimel. It is noticeable that only the more passionate parts of the dialogue are rhymed, Dryden’s theory apparently being that rhyme is then demanded for the elevation of the style. His next play, Sir Martin Mar-all, or the Feigned Innocence, an adaptation in prose of the duke of Newcastle’s translation of Molière’s L’Étourdi, was produced at the Duke’s theatre, without the author’s name, in 1667. It was about this time that Dryden became a retained writer under contract for the King’s theatre, receiving from it £300 or £400 a year, till it was burnt down in 1672, and about £200 for six years more till the beginning of 1678. His co-operation with Davenant in a new version (1667) of Shakespeare’s Tempest—for his share in which Dryden can hardly be pardoned on the ground that the chief alterations were happy thoughts of Davenant’s, seeing that he affirms he never worked at anything with more delight—must also be supposed to be anterior to the completion of his contract with the Theatre Royal. He was engaged to write three plays a year, and he contributed only ten plays during the ten years of his engagement, finally exhausting the patience of his partners by joining in the composition of a play for the rival house. In adapting L’Étourdi, Dryden did not catch Molière’s lightness of touch; his alterations go towards making the comedy into a farce. Perhaps all the more on this account Sir Martin Mar-all had a great run at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There is always a certain coarseness in Dryden’s humour, apart from the coarseness of his age,—a certain forcible roughness of touch which belongs to the character of the man. His An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer, an adaptation from Le Feint Astrologue of the younger Corneille, produced at the King’s theatre in 1668, seemed to Pepys “very smutty, and nothing so good as The Maiden Queen or The Indian Emperor of Dryden’s making.” Evelyn thought it foolish and profane, and was grieved “to see how the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times.” Ladies à la Mode, another of Dryden’s contract comedies, produced in 1668, was “so mean a thing,” Pepys says, that it was only once acted, and Dryden never published it. Of his other comedies, Marriage à la Mode (produced 1672), The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery (1673), The Kind Keeper, or Mr Limberham (1678), only the first was moderately successful.
While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he struck upon a really popular and profitable vein in heroic tragedy. Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a Roman play
