Heroic drama

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the 1670s in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject-matter. The term was invented by John Dryden for his play, The Conquest of Granada (1670). For the Preface to the printed version of the play, Dryden argued that the drama was a species of epic poetry for the stage, that, as the epic was to other poetry, so the heroic drama was to other plays. Consequently, Dryden derived a series of rules for this type of play.

First, the play was composed in heroic verse (closed couplets in iambic pentameter). Second, the play must focus on a subject that pertains to national foundations, mythological events, or important and grand matters. Third, the hero of the heroic drama must be powerful, decisive, and, like Achilles, dominating even when wrong. The Conquest of Granada followed all of these rules. The story was that of the national foundation of Spain (and King Charles II was known to be fond of Spanish plays), and the hero, Almanzor, was a man of great martial prowess and temperament.

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and others satirized heroic drama in The Rehearsal. The satire was successful enough that heroic drama largely disappeared afterward. Buckingham attacked the stupidity of blustering, military heroes, as well as the apparent self-importance of attempting a dramatic entertainment about the serious subjects of military and national history.

[edit] The place of Heroic Drama in literary criticism

Although today drama is divided up into numerous subgenres, Dryden worked from Classical critics. There was little dramatic critical theory for him to appeal to, and the new rules brought over from France (particularly those of Corneille and Boileau) did not match English theatrical history or practice. The emphasis on unities and on maintaining only Classically proscribed dramatic forms also came from Thomas Rymer, who condemned the heterogeneity of the stage. Aristotle had only spoken of satire, epic, and tragedy, and Horace also wrote only of comedy, tragedy and satire, and so Dryden was seeking to square actual theatrical practice with an ancient framework for literature. He was attempting his own neo-classicism. The First Folio of Shakespeare had divided Shakespeare's plays into "history," "tragedy," and "comedy," but these terms were stretched. Dryden, therefore, implicitly recognizes that drama had moved into the territory of other types of poetry, but he strives to restrain that freedom by reforming the stage to a true and epic subject matter. Buckingham's criticism of Dryden in The Rehearsal is partly Dryden's bombastic verse but, more pointedly, Dryden's personal interest in creating a "pure" drama. The character of Bayes is ludicrous more for his hubris in damning actual plays in favor of imagined ones than he is for being a poetaster.

Dryden's attempts would be failures. First, his own heroic dramas largely ceased after The Rehearsal. Second, the taste of the public itself changed, leaving his bombastic heroes unsupported. However, Dryden's descriptive attempts in dramatic theory would prove important, even as his proscriptive efforts at creating a drama from the rules would leave little trace. For all of the satire directed at it, Dryden's attempts at synthesizing ancient criticism with contemporary practice were an important factor in freeing the English stage from too slavish an imitation of Continental or Classical models.