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One: In the Beginning
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13 one In the Beginning Z Z Z New things to come, and old to pass away. —John Dryden, The Latter Part of the Third Book of Lucretius, against the Fear of Death. De Rerum Naturae (1685) Upon the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the Puritan ban against theaters was lifted immediately. A strong supporter of both public and private theatrical entertainments, Charles II issued patents to William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew to stage productions in the capital, granting their theaters direct royal patronage and protection. From its inception, therefore , Restoration theater was closely tied to the Court and reflected its core values. In tragedy, it was heroic drama that most fully expressed the chivalric ideology favored by the Court. Strictly bound by the rules of classical drama, heroic tragedy provided a mimetic representation of noble characters engaged in noble actions and was highly artificial both in theme and style. Its protagonists were heroic military leaders, valiant characters whose actions, set in remote times and exotic locations, were unrealistic and detached from the present. Plots usually concluded with the euphoric union of Love and Honor, always assumed to be mutually dependent rather than antithetical. The traditional heroic protagonist—indomitable in battle and admirable in conduct—could rely on a stable hierarchy of values and was seldom faced with difficult choices as he made his way toward the happy resolution envisaged by the chivalric-epic code. Among the literary models for heroic drama were Elizabethan hero-plays, courtly romances, French neoclassical tragedy, Italian opera, and, of course, Renaissance epic poetry, especially Ariosto. Indeed, according to Dryden, Ariosto’s theme—“le donne, i cavalier, l’arme e gli amori”—set the standard for the entire genre.¹ The overarching cultural model instead was Platonic: the heroic protagonist of Restoration drama is an ideal being, a model of perfection to be imitated, Backstage in the Novel 14 superior to contingent reality. This made for somewhat static characters lacking in psychological development or pronounced tragic qualities; the hero was supposed to inspire the audience’s admiration for his noble spirit and martial prowess. Furthermore, dramatic conventions imposed a rigid structure on the genre, which inevitably concluded with the requisite happy ending, confining the tragic elements of the play to the first four acts. But from the very first productions by William Davenant, such as The Siege of Rhodes (Rutland House, 1656), and by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (Mustapha [1665], as well as Henry the Fifth [1664]), heroic tragedy was seldom formally pure and coherent and often featured a tormenting dilemma or a tragic choice between Love and Honor that exposed the fragility of the heroic moral code. As Paolo Bertinetti remarks, “Heroic tragedy offered an image of the upper ranks of society that corresponded to their desired self-representation. . . . But it was only an image, an illusion belonging to a world that had ceased to exist by the time of the Restoration, when in the span of a few short years harsh realities intervened to belie the rhetoric of an aristocracy unable to discharge its role as guide to the nation.”² The best early example of the mixed heroic, which integrates pathetic elements into the pure heroic, is provided by the work of the greatest dramatist and critic of the time, John Dryden (1631–1700), in whose plays one can clearly discern the emergence of opposing tensions. In Dryden the heroic mode comes up against, and mixes with, its counter-mode, exposing the breakdown of the heroic and foreshadowing the formal changes that would lead to pathetic tragedy. The Herculean hero (such as Montezuma in The Indian Queen, by Dryden and Sir Robert Howard [1664]) yields the stage to a divided and tormented protagonist, whose sphere of action is increasingly private rather than public and political. Laura Brown has pointed out, for example, that frustrated love is the real theme of the play that epitomizes Dryden’s heroic drama, The Conquest of Granada (staged from December 1670 to January 1671 and printed in 1672).³ A similar theme resurfaces a few years later in Aureng-Zebe (1676), built on the manifestly pathetic contrast between the innocent and persecuted Indamora and the blind but blameless Aureng-Zebe. As Dr. Johnson acutely observed many years later, the tragedy is characterized by an unprecedented generic mixture: “The personages [in the play] are imperial; but the dialogue is often domestick, and therefore susceptible of sentiments accommodated to familiar incidents.”⁴ As Aureng-Zebe lucidly describes his predicament: [54.158.248...