Tyrannick Faith: Martyr Drama, the Heroic Mode, and Dryden's Tyrannick Love

Religious uniformity (as promulgated under the 1662 Act of Uniformity and later renewals of the act) was Restoration England's chief strategy for addressing the nation's deep religious divisions. The ultimate failure of the Stuart monarchy may be attributed in part to the failure of this strategy, which kept alive the wounds of the Civil War and amplified political dissent. Recognizing the dangers that uniformity posed to their reigns, the Stuart kings often pursued other strategies, including toleration (which they attempted to grant in 1660, 1672, and 1687, with increasingly disastrous results). As their poet laureate, John Dryden also explored the possibilities of state management of dissent through toleration. Michael McKeon has observed that Dryden signaled his misgivings about the kingdom's prevailing model of unity-in-uniformity in the poem that earned him the poet laureateship, Annus Mirabilis (1667). Writing in response to the Fire of London and the Second Dutch War, and to the fractures in English unity those events had exposed, Dryden promoted an alternative model that "involves the abolition of division by subsuming group interests under that of the court." According to Dryden, it is possible for the state to maintain stability even with a diverse, sectarian population, but it requires universal submission to "court ideology."¹ That such submission would be an enormous prop to the power of the court is, of course, the most attractive aspect of this model of toleration, at least for Dryden and his patrons. Colin Jager finds Dryden maintaining similar positions in his poetry of the 1680s as well. In Religio Laici in particular, Jager perceives an anxious exploration of "the role of state power in creating and sustaining the largely empty spaces of tolerance"—empty spaces that set the boundaries of what cannot be tolerated, but that seek to avoid differentiating between anything that manages to exist within those boundaries.²

As political propaganda, the poems considered by Jager and McKeon were, inevitably, of limited use, confined as such works were to a relatively elite sphere of circulation and discussion. But Dryden also had access to a social arena that could more widely disseminate his arguments for religious toleration: the theater. As a site where people of diverse backgrounds and opinions came together to observe characters of diverse backgrounds and opinions resolve conflicts, the theater was an appropriate (if potentially dangerous) place to mount a vigorous defense of religious toleration. Most of Dryden's plays have little to say in support of toleration, and many even seem to argue against religious plurality (a fact no doubt indicative of the public's general feelings on the subject). Yet a few of his dramas do exhibit tolerationist agendas, and none more daringly than his heroic martyr drama, Tyrannick Love; or, the Royal Martyr (1669). Tyrannick Love is one of Dryden's least studied plays, no doubt due to its poor critical reputation. Although it had a successful initial theatrical run and was revived several times in subsequent decades, its critical reputation decayed with that of heroic drama itself, and it has never recovered. Scholars generally view it as a poorly plotted and hastily written propaganda piece, starring a villain whose bombast threatens to slip into self-parody.³ Eventually it even fell out of favor with its own author, who, embarrassed by the grandiloquence of Maximin (and The Conquest of Granada's Almanzor), said of some of their lines, "I knew they were bad enough to please, even when I writ them: But I repent of them amongst my Sins."⁴ I would argue, however, that the play ultimately fails not so much as a result of careless composition as of its outsized ambitions.⁵ The play is one of only a handful written in the Restoration to take religion as its central subject, and possibly the only one performed.⁶ Even more audaciously, Tyrannick Love confronts the problem of religious dissent and seeks to resolve it by urging toleration, even for (indeed, especially for) Catholics.

The difficulty of supporting such an agenda in Restoration England is reflected in the play's artistic...