In the serious plays produced shortly after the Restoration there is an artificial declamatory elevation which, joined with bustling action and elaborate spectacle, for some years dazzled audiences. Later this “heroic” type of play yielded to dramas of pathos and sentimentality. Sir William Davenant was a major influence behind the emergence of heroic play, even though Dryden himself liked writing such plays. Dryden, in fact, is not only the chief playwright in this type but also the principal contemporary commentator on it. In his essay Of Heroic Plays, prefixed to The Conquest of Granada(1672), he analyzes and defends the type; in the prefaces to All for Love(1678) and The Spanish Friar(1681) he recants. Davenant he regarded as the father of the type, though he recognized it as a development both of the Elizabethan tradition and of “Corneille and some French poets”. He also recognized the influence of Ariosto and the heroic poem, observing that “an heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem; and, consequently, that Love and Valour ought to be subject of it.”
Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, who among the first writers of heroic tragedy exercised considerable influence, took up this habit, reintroduced from France and favoured by Charles II. He used English materials in two historical plays. Henry V(1664) and The Black Prince(1667), but cast them in the form of French tragedy and used the popular device of antithetical emotions to tear the souls of his persons between the conflicting duties due to a mistress and to a mistress and to a friend or between love and filial duty. In The General (1664) the hero is torn between love and honour, while the emotional conflicts of Mustapha(1665) are extremely complex. Orrey’s language was marked by a strong but artificial style.
Dryden’s The Indian Queen, written in collaboration with Sir Robert Howard, hit the English stage January 1664, and for more than a decade thereafter Dryden remained as the master-author of heroic plays. In The Indian Queen love and valour, the prescribed motives are the conflicting forces. The great success of this play induced Dryden to produce a sequel next year entitled The Indian Emperor. After a gap of four years Dryden returned to heroic plays with Tyrannick Love or, The Royal Martyr in 1699. The plot introduces us to the tyrant Maximin as a protagonist. There is no villainess; and St. Catherine of Alexandria (as “captive queen”) introduces an element of Christian apologetics, later more significant in Dryden’s nondramatic poetry.
Thrilling as the final rants of Maximin were, they less varied and effective than the poetical rhetoric of Dryden’s most elaborate heroic play, The Conquest of Granada, a play in two parts (1670,1671) filling ten highly complicated acts. The moral instruction seems to be that a nation divided against itself, as were the Moors in Granada, is easy prey armies led by an affective general such as Almanzor, who is Dryden’s loudest realization of a full-blown hero. The character of Almanzor and the poetry in which it is expressed are most remarkable. It is true that Almanzor is frequently absurd, yet his actions always have a basis in reason and are at the same time thoroughly romantic. In 1675 Dryden produced the last of his rimed heroic plays Aureng-Zebe. The stock elements of earlier heroic comedies are to be found in this also.
Even in his later tragedies, Dryden could not completely escape from the mould of heroic plays. His All for Love(1677) and Troilus and Cressida(1679) both have characters whose humanity is artificialized in heroic terms. Dryden’s last plays, Cleomenes(1692) and Love Triumphant(1694) did not achieve much success.
Elkanah Settle was another playwright to achieve moderate success with heroic plays. His The Empress of Morocco(1673), was quite popular and was often compared with Dryden’s plays. The play is hardly more absurd than some of Dryden’s, but its plotting, which concerns the successful intrigues of a wicked empress and her lover against her son, is less well knit lay in its highly spectacular scenic effects.
The chief tragic writers of the period were Lee, Otway, and Southerne. John Banks, with seven or eight tragedies, and Crowne, with eleven, are definitely inferior to these three. All these men are influenced by the heroic play, by Elizabethan tragedy (especially by the “tragedy of blood”), and by the French tradition formulated from Aristotle and Seneca in the early part of the seventeenth century. However, all of the marked a gradual movement away from heroics towards sentimental pathos.
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