The Listener, 29 (22 Apr 1943) 486-87
Most of us, whether English or not, have made our first acquaintance with English poetic tragedy through Shakespeare. Then we have read some of the best plays by other poets of Shakespeare’s time, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Webster and others. Even the best plays by these poets are seldom seen on the stage; and Shakespeare is the only dramatist some of whose plays have been produced almost continuously since they were written. But even the less-known plays of his contemporaries give pleasure in reading : they have moving scenes in them, and passages of great poetry. When we pass from the last plays in that tradition, written in the earlier years of Charles I, there is a span of years when the theatres were closed; and when a new generation of dramatists appears after the return of Charles II we find ourselves in a very different world. 2 Of this new age of Charles II and James II, John Dryden is without doubt the greatest poet. He was also the most distinguished dramatist, not in comedy, but certainly in tragic verse. The tragedies of the greatest poet of his age ought to be worth reading. But in trying to appreciate the plays of Dryden we all, at the beginning, experience great difficulty. We can see that they are the work of a man with a great gift of language, but this gift seems at first essentially prosaic, and essentially undramatic. We have come to see that Dryden is not to be compared with his predecessors, because he is trying to do something different. I want to take up briefly the chief obstacles which prevent us at first from enjoying his plays. These are: the versification and language; second, the way he deals with character and emotion; third, the type of plot.
Dryden’s earlier tragedies, or “heroic dramas,” are written in rhyming couplets; in the later plays he returns to blank verse. Of the first, of which The Indian Emperoris the earliest, the best in my opinion are The Conquest of Granadaand Aureng-Zebe. Of the second, those in blank verse, the most famous is All for Love, a play so closely following the plot of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatrathat it might pass for a re-writing of that play. 3 Now, rhymed couplets were always used in the French poetic drama of the seventeenth century. There are special reasons, in the nature of the French language, which make rhyme desirable; but rhyming verse never has established itself on the English stage, and I think never will. Blank verse is our natural form. The special reasons which justified Dryden and some of his contemporaries for using rhyme are three. First, the possibilities of blank verse had been temporarily exhausted. Second, English literature, and especially the drama, needed the new stimulus, which it got from French example. And third, the rhymed couplet was the form of verse most congenial to Dryden himself. The fact that he later abandoned it for the stage indicates that its possibilities were limited. Nevertheless, I think that his rhyming plays are more interesting, because more characteristic, than his blank verse plays. When he wrote the latter, he was challenging comparison not with Shakespeare but with some of the followers of Shakespeare, such as Philip Massinger, who could use that kind of verse just as well. When he used rhyme, he was doing something that nobody else could do or has ever done so well in English. It was not worth while for anyone else to try; but Dryden did something unique.
Now, to enjoy rhymed verse in an English play, we must expect some dramatic virtues and not others. We cannot just say that the form is artificial. We can say, in general, that rhymed verse is much less like real human beings talking, than blank verse is in the hands of a master. But Dryden’srhymed verse is more natural, more like conversation, than Dryden’sblank verse. It was more...
