always professing to follow the great old masters. These copies were not literary pieces like Milton's Samson, but pieces for the stage, which are now forgotten, but which are profoundly interesting in the literary history of the drama. Far the most important exponents of this movement are Addison, whose Cato was hailed by the French as the only really first-rate tragedy ever written in English, and Dryden, whose preface to his version of Troilus and Cressida expounds clearly his full recognition of Shakspere's genius, but his honest criticism of its uncouthness and its want of literary culture. To us this Troilus and Cressida is peculiarly interesting, because Dryden introduced into it the contest of the two brothers, professedly borrowed from the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides. I will relegate the lesser names to a note.[1]
120. While these revivals of Euripides were taking place in England, the French had so stereotyped their tragedy according to the model of Racine, that they
- ↑ The following are a few of the documents which illustrate this now obscure period of the- British drama in its relation to Euripides:
- 1677. Davenant's Circe (a combination of the Iphigenia in Tauris and the legend of Circe).
- 1685. The tracts of Thomas Rymer on tragedy, criticising Shakspere, and applauded by Dryden.
- 1690. Translation of the Abbé Hedelin's Art of the Stage, from the French.
- 1698. An Iphigenia, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields.
- 1700. Achilles anil Iphigenia in Aulis, produced at Drury Lane.
- 1715. Edmund Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus.
- 1726. The Hecuba of Richard West, afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland, which the author complains of as a failure,owing to an ignorant audience.
- 1748. An Iphigenia in Tauris, by Gilbert West.
- 1749. A Hecuba by Morell
