[In the essay below, Brown considers the defining features of heroic drama.]

Heroic drama and comedy of manners are the familiar labels given to the major serious and comic plays of the Restoration English theater. In most criticism of the period, these descriptive terms are used to refer either to theme, to verse form, to the presence of certain kinds of characters, or to a particular artificial, sophisticated, and witty tone. Traditional categories of such duration and currency deserve respectful treatment, and they do provide an intuitively accurate and generally useful means of perceiving the large resemblances and distinctions among the plays of this period. But the imprecision of their definition and the diffuseness of their application have made it difficult to see any coherence either between the major and minor drama of the early Restoration, or between the traditionally irreconcilable serious and comic forms of the age.

If we accept the largest contours of these categories, however, and attempt not to transform them but to refine and clarify them—to provide them with precise and explicit definitions that extend beyond the narrow questions of theme, character, or language to the shape and significance of the whole drama—we can produce a set of formal concepts that remains true to the collective assessment of generations of audiences and readers and yet can also serve as a sharper critical tool. The broad notions of heroic drama and comedy of manners have an important but limited explanatory power; the technical formal concepts of heroic action and dramatic social satire, however, can provide the basis for a discussion not only of individual plays and of the relationship between similar plays, but also of the links among dissimilar plays, the decisive influence of Restoration forms upon the subsequent evolution of the genre, and the determining connection between dramatic form and the social context of the period.

The heroic action is shaped and governed by a system of precise epic, chivalric, or Platonic standards, which express the ideology of a self-consciously exclusive social class and which are justified aesthetically by neoclassical epic and dramatic theory. Alfred Harbage describes the heroic ideal as a “conception of virtue [that] was purely aristocratic, limiting the quality to the traits of epic heroes: physical courage, prowess in arms, magnanimity, and fidelity to a code of personal honor.”¹ The conflicts in these plays are defined, represented, and resolved entirely in terms of this aristocratic code. The protagonists are static emblems of Platonic or epic virtue, and their actions typically consist of a series of episodes in which that virtue is enacted and reenacted. As a rule, characterization is simple rather than complex, character development is minimal or absent, and depth or interiority are rare. The setting of this drama, like its language, is distanced and remote. In fact, the stichomythic debates that are so typical of the heroic action perfectly embody its most prominent and congruent formal attributes: a remote, elevated style and a precise and invariable social code. This is to say that the heroic plays of the period share a social form that reflects the historical context of an aristocratic, coterie theater and, more specifically, the particular situation of the aristocracy shortly after the monarchy's return.

Within the general confines of this category, the heroic action evolves from a rigid, straightforward, aesthetically simple, and ideologically sanguine version of the form to an increasingly problematic and complex one. In early heroic plays, like those of Davenant and Orrery, the governing aristocratic code is explicit and unambiguous. Character and conflict are shaped directly by a clear evaluative hierarchy that is rigidly and unvaryingly enacted in every episode of the plot. These plays automatically reproduce a social ideal whose primary political premise is royalist and whose central aesthetic quality is the elaboration of a self-consciously elevated, elitist, or baroque manner. In Dryden's mature heroic action, the form is complicated either by a fragmentation of the aristocratic code itself or by the challenge of a radical protagonist who eludes the orderly assumptions of that code. When the complexity outweighs the efficacy of the standards, and the evaluative hierarchy becomes arbitrary or meaningless, as in Lee's marginal heroic actions, the form has reached the end of the period of its generic priority. Heroic plays, like neoclassical epics, continue to be written in the late Restoration and early eighteenth century, but such works are historical anachronisms, no longer central participants in the development of their genre.

I

The most important early example of the heroic action is William Davenant's Siege of Rhodes (Pt. I: 1656, Pts. I and II, revised: 1661). Davenant is a significant figure for historians of the theater because of his association with the dramatic efforts of Henrietta Maria's court, his interregnum compositions, his own attempt at a heroic poem, and his later role as patentee of the Duke's company. The Siege of Rhodes is generally described as the first heroic play, and Dryden, the primary theorist of heroic drama, credits Davenant as well as Orrery with substantial influence on the form.² More significant in the context of this argument, however, is The Siege of Rhodes's illustration of the aesthetic and ideological simplicity of the early versions of the heroic action. The play's ideal is the perfect conjunction of the Platonic standards of honor and love. The conflicts that sustain its episodic action arise directly from the failure of this conjunction: each of the main characters comes perilously close to dying of dishonor, Alphonso because he suspects Ianthe's virtue and Ianthe because she resents Alphonso's jealousy.³ The conflict is resolved and the action ended when love and honor are joined—when Ianthe has conquered Solyman with her honor and virtue and consequently saved Rhodes and her love. The last lines of the play, spoken by Solyman to Ianthe, represent the conclusive and concluding expression of this heroic ideal:

And still, to Natures Darling, Love
(That all the World may happy prove)
Let Giant-Virtue be the watchfull Guard,
Honour, the cautious Guide, and sure reward:
Honour, adorn'd in such a Poets Song
As may prescribe to Fame
What loyal Lovers name
Shall farr be spread, and shall continue long. [Exeunt omnes]

[Pt. II, V.vi.216-23]

Literary historians commonly attribute the extreme artificiality and stylization of this play to its original interregnum presentation in recitative verse and to the strong influence of masque and opera upon Davenant's drama.⁴ The significance of such factors is incontestable, but they do not completely explain the internal logic or the external origins of the drama. Davenant chose to write dramatic opera after the Restoration,⁵ and his earlier nonoperatic Love and Honour (1634) aspires, in its main plot, to the same kind of esoteric and artificial tone and incident that is the hallmark of Restoration heroics. The Siege of Rhodes need not have been sung, or even produced on the narrow stage at Rutland House. The play's form in itself prescribes that distance, elevation, and stasis. The rigid evaluative hierarchy that governs the form is by definition a remote standard, the property of an elite class, uncommon and unrealistic. The enactment of such a standard is inevitably episodic and static, a series of emblematic scenes that display rather than involve. Proximity might make Alphonso's jealousy seem justified. Naturalness would certainly render the protagonists' symmetrical near-deaths ridiculous. And realism would contradict and invalidate all the assumptions of the form. In short, the details of the drama's manner—its style, tone, and language—are not merely local consequences of its theatrical context. They are integral characteristics of its form. In the context of a formal history, qualities like Davenant's extreme artificiality must first be defined formally, even though a full account of The Siege of Rhodes would ultimately return to the context of the play—and to the social, economic, and political as well as the intellectual, cultural, and theatrical history that determines its form.

The heroic actions of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, present the narrow heroic standards of conduct with even more simplicity and precision than Davenant's drama. Orrery's plays appear particularly rigid and hierarchical partly because he scarcely varies his dramatic formula from one work to the next, but mainly because his actions are simple and the terms that govern them are expressed in the form of repeated and explicit maxims. In Mustapha (1665), for instance, Zanger and Mustapha illustrate one of the most basic laws of Orrerian drama. Both are in love with the Hungarian queen, and they are required by honor to urge each other's suit:

MUSTAPHA.
True Friendship, Madam, cannot yield to this;
If you reject my Love, accept of his. …
ZANGER.
I am amaz'd at what you seem to do;
Let me not bear Loves wounds and Friendships too.
MUSTAPHA.
Only those Lovers should be counted true
Who Beauties int'rest, not their own pursue. …
ZANGER.
Madam, I thus would expiate my crime;
That which he beg'd for me I beg for him.(6)

In Henry the Fifth (1664) Tudor and King Henry engage in a similar exchange. Each pleads the other's suit, but, as Tudor explains, their social relationship alters the rule:

All, Sir, that in my cause is said by you
At once is for me, and against me too.
Howe're I'le rather speak than quite despair;
Since she is just and you my Rival are:
Yet, Sir, this diff'rence to my case is due,
You speak for me, but I resign for you.

[V.iv.325-30]

Honor demands that the aristocrat relinquish his love in favor of the monarch. The Black Prince (1667) provides perhaps the best example of this Platonic scrupulousness. The mistress of the king, Alizia, who lies dying of his unfaithfulness to her, gratefully receives the proof of his utter renunciation of her rival, but still determines to die:

KING.
If you forgive me, yet your Death pursue,
You will at once Forgive and Kill me too:
Loves Pow'r you wrong while at this rate you grieve,
For Love should heal worse Wounds, than it can give.
ALIZIA.
I can, alas, Sir, but too truely say
'Tis only Love which makes me disobey,
For I should not deserve the Love you give,
If after you recall'd it, I could Live.

[V.iii.231-38]

The king convinces her that she should recover, but only by noting that her death would unjustly cause his own. All of these passages illustrate at once the means by which Orrery communicates the controlling values of the drama as well as the stylistic elevation and detachment that are formally contingent on those means.

Orrery's kind of heroic action amounts to a rather simple contest, in which the audience is presented with a cast of dramatis personae vying for merit by the standards of heroic honor provided, usually as maxims, at crises in the action throughout the play. The rules for the contest are so explicit that they constitute a catalogue of prescriptions for exemplary behavior. In Tryphon (1668), a representative play, the prescriptions, transcribed chronologically, make up a simple list that accurately records the essential structure of the action:

1. Honor obliges a daughter to regard filial allegiance over true love (II.iii).
2. Honor obliges a friend to reveal all secrets to her friend (II.iii).
3. Honor obliges a subject to hold allegiance to his king over allegiance to his friend (II.iv).
4. Honor demands that a woman value her word over her love, since without honor she would be unworthy of love (III.i).
5. A woman is bound by honor to conceal her love until her lover speaks (III.i).
6. Honor obliges a friend to help his friend, but only if that does not involve betrayal of another friend (III.ii).
7. When love and honor are at odds, a lover must choose to lose his love to honor (thus continuing to merit love) rather than to possess love without meriting it (III.iv).
8. A friend who betrays his friend is unworthy of love (IV.i).
9. Honor forbids a woman to accept her true love after being rejected by another (IV.ii).
10. Honor obliges a friend to die before fighting his friend (IV.ii).
11. Love and honor demand that a lover who cannot have his love must die (IV.ii).
12. Honor forbids a lover to seek revenge on his rival, since that makes him unworthy of love (V.ii).
13. Honor forbids any doubt about the suicide threats of a lover (V.ii).
14. Guilt and dishonor make one unworthy of love and turn it to hate (V.iii).
15. Neither love nor honor can be bought or sold, and love and honor forbid such an attempt (V.iii).
16. Love and honor oblige a lover to trust his love completely (V.iii).
17. Honor obliges a lover to give up his interest in his love if he has offended against love by injuring honor (V.iv).
18. Honor always obliges a lover to give up his love to his king (V.iv).

The ideology of the play is equally direct and explicit. Orrery is, of course, a royalist and nationalist, and those positions are frequently presented as detached sententiae, like King Henry's assertion:

That Prince, whose Flags are bow'd to on the Seas,
Of all Kings shores keeps in his hand the Keys:
No King can him, he may all Kings invade;
And on his Will depends their Peace and Trade.

[Henry the Fifth, V.i.57-60]

But more characteristically, Orrery's ideology simply informs the list of heroic maxims that shapes the play and that discriminates the deserving from the less deserving. This incorporation of ideology into the central judgmental hierarchy of the heroic action is typical of Orrery's nationalistic English history plays as well as of his largely fictional heroic drama. The historical context of Henry the Fifth, for instance, serves exactly the same end as the largely fictional context of Tryphon. The nationalistic details and royalist setting of the earlier play merely make the ideological content of the form more explicit. The rule that requires Tudor's relinquishment of his love in favor of Henry in Henry the Fifth (V.iv) or Seleucis's in favor of the new king, Aretus, in Tryphon (V.iv) is an obvious instance. The mere fact of monarchy determines the outcome of these love contests, and Orrery is careful to avoid any suggestion of a contradiction with the other Platonic law that the most impeccably honorable character deserves the woman by making both Tudor and Seleucis slightly defective in honor. Thus Tudor apparently fails to merit his love by too eagerly relinquishing it for honor in conceding to Henry, and Seleucis by attempting to win his love actively rather than honorably losing and thus truly meriting it.

Mustapha, Orrery's most popular play, provides the significant example of a heroic action with a tragic conclusion. It is symptomatic of the form that this tragedy does not differ fundamentally from plays like Henry the Fifth, The Black Prince, or Tryphon, all of which end happily. Mustapha and Zanger, two sons of Solyman the Magnificent, swear loyalty to each other, fall in love with the captive Hungarian queen, and honorably compete for her favors in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same rhetoric, and by exactly the same standards as Orrery's other heroic protagonists. Like Henry and Tudor in Henry the Fifth (V.iv), they urge each other's suits before their love. They swear eternal loyalty, despite their love rivalry, as do the prince and King John of France in The Black Prince (IV.i). And they express an eagerness to die for love and honor as do Demetrius and Aretus in Tryphon (IV.ii). The only difference is that Orrery takes them up on their interest in death.

The assumptions and effect of the play, obviously, are not like those of classical or Shakespearean tragedy. There are no tragic flaws. Zanger and Mustapha are as perfect as the protagonists who are permitted to live happily ever after in Orrery's other plays. In fact, the form of the heroic action is such that a fortunate or unfortunate conclusion requires no fundamental change in the structure of the drama. The heroic action is predicated on a series of clearly defined and absolutely rigid social principles, and not on any evolving or problematical relationship between those principles and the characters' eventual fates. We know that the ending is tragic when the characters do not get what Orrery's standards say they deserve, but we do not necessarily expect either a tragic or a fortunate conclusion to a heroic action. Instead, we expect and receive a clear judgmental hierarchy, and the particular pleasure provided by the form (for those who can appreciate it) consists in the systematic application of that hierarchy to the individual characters who, because they are static, in turn serve to diminish our anticipation of their fates: we are concerned mainly about how well they live up to their standards of honor, and only minimally with the likelihood of their living happily ever after. Thus, traditionally, the heroic action, like relatively few other forms, includes plays that end tragically as well as plays that end fortunately, without necessitating any major discriminations between the two. This important formal peculiarity need not be inferred solely from the varying endings of Orrery's plays or of Restoration heroic actions in general. It is also subject to internal, textual verification: The Vestal Virgin (1665), by Robert Howard, was written and printed with alternative tragic and comic conclusions.⁷

The episodic nature of the heroic action is both contributor and corollary to this aspect of its form, since the isolation of individual scenes serves to increase the static and emblematic representation of the characters and to diminish any anticipation of their fates as well as any depth or complexity in their portrayal. But the tendency toward episode is itself another consequence of the stern judgmental hierarchy of this form, which subordinates character development and process to the static enactment of a social code. The heroic dramatists, in their use of episodic structure, are deliberately imitating epic and heroic romance as these were understood in Renaissance epic theory.⁸ But here again the integrity of the heroic action obviously accounts in itself for the phenomena that can be explained extrinsically by reference to literary or theoretical sources.

II

With John Dryden's major drama we can begin to see portentous alterations in the shape of the heroic action. Dryden's most important contribution to the form, as Eugene Waith has shown, is the Herculean hero.⁹ Davenant and Orrery have no protagonists of the make of Montezuma, Maximin, or Almanzor. Furthermore, as the catalogue of Tryphon's heroic virtues illustrates, they tend to see love and honor ideally in some kind of cooperative interaction, where one produces or guarantees the other. But Dryden frequently emphasizes choice, at the expense of congruence, and his characters are less likely than Orrery's to discover and verbalize any necessary relationship between the two.¹⁰ Consequently, and most important, Dryden's heroic action is formally more complex, historically more transitional, and ideologically more self-conscious and daring than Davenant's or Orrery's. Where Orrery's royalism is supplied by maxim in a simplistic heroic hierarchy, Dryden's is rescued from the peril of political chaos by a form that deliberately risks and then completely undercuts the Herculean hero's challenge to society.

Within Dryden's own heroic career we can perceive two parallel and corollary evolutions: the development of a kind of heroic action that includes the erratic and godlike hero, and the subtle softening of the neat Orrerian hierarchy. The turn, in Aureng-Zebe (1675) and the much later Don Sebastian (1689) and Love Triumphant (1694), toward an adjustment of heroic form to the incorporation of pathetic effect is ultimately a consequence of these related earlier changes. In general, then, Dryden's heroic action represents the most sophisticated version of the form. Seen in the larger continuum from Davenant to Lee, Dryden's heroic drama, because of its choice of the Herculean hero and its fragmentation of the previously integrated love and honor code, stands somewhere between Orrery's rigid evaluative hierarchy and Lee's meaningless one. And finally, from a still broader perspective, it also anticipates the major formal shift to affective tragedy.

As an initial example of Dryden's heroic propensities, The Indian Queen (1664) can be seen as a pale early version of The Conquest of Granada. Its formal proximity to that later play gives additional credence to the argument, already well substantiated, for Dryden's virtually sole authorship.¹¹ In fact, The Indian Queen contains material typical of many of Dryden's later works. Just as The Indian Emperor dramatizes Almeria's stylized attempt to kill Cortez, The Indian Queen contains a scene in which two captive lovers are threatened in the prison by their infatuated captors, who approach, retreat, and change sides in the same emblematic pattern. Montezuma fights with and captures his lover's father, like Alphonso in Love Triumphant, only to have her reject him to join her father in captivity. Like Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada, he is a hero of unknown origin who, in the last act, is discovered to be the long-lost son of the king. And again like Almanzor, Montezuma is a turncoat: he first fights and conquers for the Ynca, then after quarreling with him goes over to the Mexicans, who consequently win the war.

But despite Montezuma's numerous resemblances to Almanzor, his presence in the play is less strongly felt, his language less bombastic; and The Indian Queen in general is less vehement and heroically violent than The Conquest of Granada. The play is shorter and simpler than Dryden's later heroic drama. Its action consists of mechanical and instantaneous decisions to change sides, to fall in love, to fight, or to die. Formally, then, though Montezuma's erratic heroism has a significant effect on the terms of judgment presented by the play, the simple love and honor choices made by the decidedly unerratic Acacis and Orazia dominate the action. There is less rant because these characters, like Orrery's, are merely required to act out the precise standards of the Platonic hierarchy.

The play is characterized by deeds like those in Tryphon. When Montezuma offers to free the captured Mexican prince, Acacis, the prince refuses to accept a dishonorable liberty¹²—but he is obliged in turn to help his captor escape to the Mexicans (I.i.122-23). Later, when Montezuma is captured by the Mexicans, Acacis, still bound by honor but now also his rival in love, frees and arms him, then challenges him to a duel. In the same scene Orazia, their beloved, who was also freed by Acacis, insists upon returning to prison, accompanied by Montezuma, to die with her father. Acacis, who has been wounded in the duel, consequently resolves not to die, since he is required by honor to live and free Montezuma from prison again. When Acacis discovers that Montezuma and Orazia are to be executed, he vows to die with them and eventually kills himself, though the rest are saved by a timely interruption.

The rigid Platonic code and the impeccable behavior of the characters in scenes like these make the play seem much closer to the drama of Davenant and Orrery than to The Conquest of Granada. But Montezuma is not always contained within the narrow bounds of the simple Orrerian categories. He deserves our admiration but, especially in the first half of the play, that admiration comes more from his advertised military prowess and his open defiance of the Ynca's royal authority than from any submission to nice standards of honor. Montezuma is an erratic, Herculean hero, though a restricted one, and his character and action are ordered on different terms from those of Acacis and Orazia.

In the first scene, for instance, Montezuma, enraged by the Ynca's refusal to reward his military victories with the hand of Orazia, thinks first of killing the Ynca, then of joining the opposing army, even though Acacis tells him such an act would be dishonorable:

No, I must your Rage prevent,
From doing what your Reason wou'd repent;
Like the vast Seas, your Mind no limits knows,
Like them lies open to each Wind that blows.

[I.i.59-62]

Montezuma's willful shifting of sides and his invincible military prowess are a visible threat to political stability. Dryden has introduced into an otherwise straightforward heroic form a character who is defined not by his simple compliance with the stated maxims of honor, but, at least on occasion, by his erratic and passionate defiance of them. How does a royalist dramatist reconcile this defiance with an aristocratic status quo?

As a static character in an episodic action, Montezuma does not evolve. Those critics who believe that he matures in the course of the play¹³ are responding to Dryden's concluding repudiation of Montezuma's radical individualism. But Dryden's formal incorporation of the subversive Herculean hero, in this work as in The Conquest of Granada, does not follow a simple formula of conversion and reward. Montezuma is nowhere explicitly converted to civic responsibility; he is given no scene of anagnorisis. In fact, the simplicity of his portrayal forbids the kind of complexity that would make such a transformation probable. Furthermore, if the play were merely a history of Montezuma's education in self-control, Dryden would certainly not have needed to exercise the formal sleight of hand with which he rescues The Indian Queen from social anarchy. Dryden uses Montezuma's loyalty to the studiously virtuous Orazia and the fortunate discovery of Montezuma's royal parentage, which legitimizes the hero's claims to her, to tame the Herculean demigod without quelling his subversive magnificence. The dangerous rebel turns out to be the rightful king of Mexico. Thus, despite its resemblance to Orrery's simplistic heroic action, The Indian Queen contains an element—Montezuma's character as represented by his early, erratic behavior—that prefigures Dryden's complex and transitional version of the heroic action as it is embodied in its most fully developed and integrated form in The Conquest of Granada.

The Indian Emperor (1665) contains no Herculean hero on the model of Montezuma in The Indian Queen or Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada. The Montezuma of this play is a different character from his earlier namesake. Neither he nor Cortez is able to change sides and carry victory with him, and neither is explicitly larger than life, as are the heroes of the other plays. Though Cortez wins in the end and carries off Cydaria, he presents no implicit challenge to society. He behaves in general like an orderly and ethical hero, freeing his captive and rival Orbellan after an honorable duel, releasing Montezuma from the tortures of the horrible Catholic priests, and allowing Guyomar and Alibech, after the conquest is over, to go “beyond the Mountains.” In fact, he represents explicitly, by the end of the play, the beneficial coming of responsible Christendom to the heathen world, and he is artfully dissociated at every point from the brutal Catholic priests and the lustful Pizarro. Thus, in choosing to dramatize the last days of the Indian empire, Dryden was forced to eschew the Herculean hero, since Montezuma must be weak enough to provide the pathos and nostalgia with which the play treats his hopeless defense, and Cortez must be honorable and responsible enough to embody the forces of civilization that succeed him.

The Indian Emperor, then, displays a rather conventional series of love-and-honor choices in various static and stylized episodes. The novelty of the play resides in Dryden's definition of those choices. In The Indian Queen we are presented in effect with two standards of judgment: one applies to the erratic Montezuma because he is apparently a superman incomparable to the other characters in the play, and the other to Acacis and Orazia, who are not assessed as demigods but rather according to the Platonic categories of Orrerian love and honor. In The Indian Emperor, however, though only the second standard is functional, the terms of the relationship between love and honor are not so clear.

This play, in fact, provides the first example of Dryden's fragmentation of the love-and-honor code. Guyomar and Odmar, for instance, who seem equally admirable and responsible for at least the first half of the play, must choose in an initial battle between saving Montezuma, their father and king, and Alibech, the object of their love. At this point in the action Dryden makes no connection, as Orrery inevitably would have, between love and honor. Guyomar follows honor and saves Montezuma, but his choice does not seem to imply that he now merits and will automatically receive Alibech's love. Odmar follows love and rescues Alibech, but he does not immediately forfeit love because of his loss of honor. Both go on to perform equally honorable acts. Guyomar saves Cortez's life to repay a debt of honor. Odmar later saves Guyomar from Montezuma. Only quite late in the play does Alibech decide which lover she prefers, and only at the point when her choice is made does Odmar appear to have forfeited both love and honor.

Thus, while The Indian Emperor never openly challenges the relationship between love and honor, it is rather slow to affirm it. The choice throughout most of the play is one of opposite extremes, each of which necessarily excludes the other. This weakening of the neat heroic hierarchy emerges in the assessment of Montezuma as well. His infatuation with Almeria never includes the “losing and meriting” act inevitable in an Orrerian play. It represents love with no reference to honor, depicted as an infatuation instead of being placed in a clearly defined love-and-honor hierarchy. This judgment, in its recognition of Montezuma's weakness, forms the basis of our nostalgic sense of the inescapable downfall of his ancient empire. In The Indian Emperor, then, Dryden is still experimenting with the heroic action, but by weakening and fragmenting the conventionally rigid standards of judgment rather than, as in The Indian Queen, by introducing a separate kind of hero with a separate kind of assessment.

In his next heroic play, Tyrannic Love (1669), Dryden comes much closer to the full development of his particular kind of Herculean hero. Maximin is a ranting protagonist like Almanzor, except for the significant fact that he is a villain. Maximin's extravagant tyranny and Catherine's equally defiant Christianity clearly dominate the action, despite the Orrerian love-and-honor conflicts of Valeria, Berenice, and Porphyrius. But Dryden avoids the socially subversive consequences of the positive demigod by making his protagonist a villain, and in addition by making Catherine, who also participates in the extravagance, a Christian martyr. In Tyrannic Love, as in the later Aureng-Zebe, the Herculean hero is split in two, so that one half can maintain the values of virtue and order and the other the erratic qualities of violence and passion.¹⁴ Dryden's heroic action ceases to be socially problematic from a royalist point of view when the Herculean hero is such that he must be killed in the end and his death seen as just and desirable. Maximin, unlike Montezuma in The Indian Queen, need not be incorporated into a stable society. He is clearly evil, and his death in itself represents a victory for the forces of order and justice. This type of heroic action, in which subversive defiance is consigned to the part of the villain, is illustrated equally well by Elkanah Settle's Cambyses (1671) or Aphra Behn's Abdelazer (1676).

Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada I and II (December 1670 and January 1671) is not a villain, but a protagonist who maintains the audience's sympathy throughout. He is introduced as a superman, who must be judged not by the common standards of love and honor that define Ozmyn and Benzayda,¹⁵ but by his own erratic and magnificent code of heroic assertion. We know this from the opening description of his incredible feats in the bullfight, from his own and other characters' statements, and from the apparent fact, borne out in each skirmish and battle of the play, that he is invincible. Like Montezuma of The Indian Queen, Almanzor is a kind of demigod whom we are called upon to admire unconditionally, and his actions are the translation of his magnificent passions and heroism into a dramatically visible form. But significantly, this later hero is a much stronger and formally much more dominant character than Montezuma. He performs acts of erratic and defiant heroism throughout the action, rather than merely at its beginning, and his verbal assertions, which set the tone of the play, are more frequent and vehement than Montezuma's. He explicitly challenges the social status quo, in speech and in deed. He can always justify his changes of side in the local war, but his response is based not upon any premises of royal control or civil order, but upon the assumption that “I alone am King of me.”¹⁶ He occasionally does behave rashly, and honorably admits his error (Pt. II: III.i.181-82), but this behavior itself is seen as a consequence of the admirable extravagance of his passion, and his admission is only further substantiation of the grandeur of his soul.

In short, Dryden designs Almanzor's career to represent a serious threat, not only to monarchy in general, but to the king of Granada in particular, and eventually to the invading Spanish army and the forces of European civilization and Christianity as embodied in Ferdinand and Isabella. In Part II, after all, he is only prevented from killing the duke of Arcos, and presumably from conquering all of the duke's forces, by a voice “from above” (Pt. II: V.iii.195), which informs him that the duke is his long-lost father.¹⁷

The play proceeds as a series of episodes in which Almanzor behaves admirably or passionately according to the Herculean standards applicable to demigods: the bullfight, his various battles, his passion for Almahide, his generous though reluctant decisions to fight for his rival. Though he acquires additional virtue from his contact with Almahide, our assessment of him does not evolve, but remains consistent with his initial grandeur and generosity. The heroic action, here as in The Indian Emperor, forbids a genuine development of character. Critics who see a change in Montezuma invariably find a similar transformation in Almanzor.¹⁸ But again, this view confuses the reversal of the plot with the reformation of the protagonist. The virtuous acts that Almanzor performs at Almahide's behest, while they do represent a change in his style of heroism, do not negate any of the Herculean principles that define his magnificence from the beginning of the play. When he sacrifices his love for Almahide, he does so out of “exalted passion,” claiming: “I dare be wretched not to make her so” (Pt. I: III.i.452-53). Dryden thus assigns the same motive to Almanzor's virtue as he does, from the first, to his protagonist's defiant heroism: “because I dare.” Almahide's power over Almanzor is demonstrated by his growing self-control and willingness to follow her lead of virtue, but it does not transform him into an obedient Orrerian hero. When encouraging him to perform his last generous act of fighting for her husband Boabdelin, Almahide exhorts Almanzor to “be a god again” (Pt. II: V.iii.114). She too evidently sees his virtue as an expression of his superhuman extravagance.

The career of this Herculean superman can be brought to a close only by the arbitrary imposition of a fortuitous and fortunate conclusion upon the static and episodic structure of his action.¹⁹ The duke of Arcos claims Almanzor as his son, the war ends, Almahide's troublesome husband dies in the last battle, and Almanzor and Almahide are taken in by the generous and kindly Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The extravagant hero remains unchanged. His submission to Almahide at the end of Part II simply repeats his similar submission to her at the end of Part I; the only addition is the sudden and unexpected good fortune by which the hero's situation is miraculously reversed. Thus Almanzor's fate is made to correspond with what we have felt he deserved throughout the play: he wins Almahide and the war, though only because she suddenly becomes a widow and he turns out, by paternity, to belong to the victorious army. Furthermore, the erratic hero, without ever revoking his claim that “I alone am King of me,” is made to accept the power and royal authority of the Spanish monarchy. The combination of Almanzor's fortuitous good fortune and Almahide's tested influence serves to incorporate the Herculean hero into an orderly social hierarchy at the conclusion of the play without qualifying his subversive magnificence.²⁰The Conquest of Granada ends as a celebration of stable monarchy, pronounced by Almanzor himself:

Our Banners to th' Alhambra's turrets bear;
Then, wave our Conqu'ring Crosses in the Aire;
And Cry, with showts of Triumph, live and raign,
Great Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain.

[Pt. II: V.iii.345-48]

This play, then, contains a more dangerous and problematic protagonist than either The Indian Queen or Tyrannic Love, but it also provides a more explicit and emphatic royalist social message.²¹ Unlike Montezuma's, Almanzor's challenge to civic order is vigorous and consistent. Unlike Maximin, this later demigod is no villain, but a hero designed to command our admiration and approval. And yet it is Almanzor himself who finally voices the play's conservative political and social ideology. The sophisticated heroic form of The Conquest of Granada consists of this juxtaposition of radical challenge and royalist resolution. The play reveals Dryden's ingenious efforts to bring these irreconcilable forces into formal conjunction.

The first means to this conjunction is the motivation of the plot. Almanzor is the admirable hero, but not the agent of his action. He is not only denied an active role in the arbitrary conclusion of the play, he is excluded from responsibility for his misfortunes as well. He attributes the vicissitudes of his love to the “Gods” (Pt. II: III.iii.183). And in his defiance of “fate,” he provides a metaphysical definition of his plight:

O Heav'n, how dark a Riddle's thy Decree,
Which bounds our Wills, yet seems to leave 'em free!
Since thy fore-knowledge cannot be in vain,
Our choice must be what thou didst first ordain:
Thus, like a Captive in an Isle confin'd,
Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind:
Wills all his Crimes, (while Heav'n th' Indictment draws;)
And, pleading guilty, justifies the Laws.—

[Pt. II: IV.iii.143-50]

“Fate” is also made responsible for the problems and misfortunes of the other characters, especially for the near-tragic difficulties of Ozmyn and Benzayda. These standard Orrerian lovers, like Acacis and Orazia, provide a model of strict aristocratic virtue that supports the royalist message of the play's conclusion, but they enact that virtue in a world of pervasive metaphysical reference.

“Fate” provides Dryden with an external means of motivating his action and bringing about the final reversal without implicating the erratic hero. The conservative conclusion of the play is thus easily dissociated from Almanzor's subversive character. This dissociation itself is only possible because of the inherent weakness of our concern for the ending of a heroic action. As we observed in Orrery's Mustapha, heroic drama is predicated on the static definition of the epic or Platonic virtues of the protagonist and not on any necessary relationship between those virtues and his fortunate or unfortunate end. Hence, the general nature of the form as well as Dryden's specific use of a pervasive metaphysical reference keeps radical and royalist scrupulously apart. Almanzor, the primary impediment to political order, is given no direct role in his action's conservative conclusion, and thus he is never forced to repudiate his heroic magnificence.

More important, since “Fate” is explicitly apolitical, it enables Dryden to restrict Almanzor's action to the realm of private affairs. The real subject of the “conquest of Granada” is frustrated love, and Almanzor acts throughout the play on purely private motives. Even when he takes part in the great historical events that constitute the backdrop of his story, he does so as “a private man” (Pt. I: IV.ii.474). If he were a public hero, a Tamburlaine, for instance, Dryden would be unable to provide a conclusion that incorporated him into the social status quo. Only because his motivations are purely personal can Almanzor secure his dual fortunate fate—marriage to Almahide and allegiance to the king—without repudiating his heroic identity.

But The Conquest of Granada is designed to seem like a vehemently political drama. A historical event provides the setting, and the action represents the battles and intrigues attendant on that event. Many of the minor characters are obsessively concerned with political power and involved in political intrigue. And Almanzor himself is always seen as a potentially public hero, a “Soul which Empires first began” (Pt. I: IV.ii.475). The political references in setting, characterization, and language set up a consistent formal analogy between public and private affairs, between politics and Almanzor's heroic passions.²² This analogy transforms a private action into the vehicle for a public lesson, and it also makes possible the concluding equation of Almanzor's happy private fate with the conservative restoration of public order. It enables Dryden to have his subversive hero and his royalist message too.

The Conquest of Granada is a formal tour de force in which a contradiction is given dramatic substance. Its tone is even more elevated and exaggerated than that of Orrery's works or of Dryden's other heroic drama. In effect, Almanzor must indulge in more bombast, and the bombast itself must be violent enough for an audience accustomed to the heroic action to distinguish the special erratic and subversive nature of this particular protagonist. D. W. Jefferson, Bruce King, and other critics who discover absurdity, irony, or even satire in this drama testify to the greater degree of stylization and distance demanded by Dryden's mature heroic action.²³ The exaggeration essential to the depiction of the subversive Herculean protagonist is easily mistaken for irony, though Dryden gives no sign, either in the plays or in his comments on them, of such an intention.

As we have seen, Dryden is able to sustain the contradiction between royalist and radical only because the heroic action itself requires the dissociation of character and conclusion, the separation of merit and fate. In a sense, then, this sophisticated version of the form represents a fulfillment of the inherent potential of the heroic action: to assimilate everything, even the most radical challenge, to the static assertion of aristocratic ideology.²⁴ Significantly, the royalist position of The Conquest of Granada is asserted, not won, and asserted arbitrarily in the face of challenges that threaten society with chaos. The social stability of the conclusion does not represent the necessary consequence of the action, but rather an ideological incorporation, expressed formally, of the subversive hero that Dryden sought to portray. The arbitrariness of Dryden's restoration of civic order reproduces in dramatic form the instability that began to be felt in the political Restoration by the late 1660s and early 1670s with the impeachment of Clarendon, the decline of Cavalier control in the Commons, the weakening of the House of Lords, and the increasing power of merchant and agrarian capitalist interests in the nation.²⁵ In this sense, Dryden's most daring heroic action is an immediate product of its time, and its formal flirtation with and flight from social anarchy closely parallels the premises of the major dramatic social satire of the 1670s. Furthermore, Dryden's most sophisticated version of the form challenges the clarity and simplicity of the heroic hierarchy and thus anticipates the change to a new kind of serious drama that comes to express the full disaffection and disillusionment of a later decade.

In Aureng-Zebe (1675) Dryden avoids the confrontation he provokes in The Conquest of Granada. He divides the qualities of the Herculean hero between Aureng-Zebe and Morat, much as he divides heroic defiance in Tyrannic Love between Maximin and Catherine. Morat is a ranting, uncontrollable rebel, but he presents no ideological problem because, like Maximin, he is consistently seen as the villain and receives death, with our approval, for his defiance. Aureng-Zebe, on the other hand, an accomplished fighter, obeys, albeit with some difficulty, all the standards of love and honor. In this respect he is explicitly contrasted with Morat, who invariably ignores the Orrerian precepts that his counterpart upholds. Aureng-Zebe is so “excellently good”²⁶ that he can even forgive his father's unnatural rivalry for Indamora, among other crimes. In fact, the last lines of the play, in which the Emperor grants Aureng-Zebe the throne, are a direct pronouncement of his merit and its immediate consequence in his happy fate:

                                                                                Giving him Indamora's hand.
The just rewards of love and honor wear.
Receive the mistress you so long have served;
Receive the crown your loyalty preserved.
Take you the reins, while I from cares remove,
And sleep within the chariot which I drove.

[V.670-74]

In these respects, then, Aureng-Zebe resembles the characters in Dryden's earlier plays who embody the conventional, neatly integrated love-and-honor standard with none of the vagaries of the erratic hero: Acacis and Orazia in The Indian Queen and Ozmyn and Benzayda in The Conquest of Granada. Aureng-Zebe is somewhat like Orrery's kind of heroic action, with its primary emphasis on a discrimination of proper heroic behavior, defined not so much by maxim as by the repeated contrast between Aureng-Zebe and Morat. But the similarity, like many such resemblances in literary history, is deceptive. As several critics have noticed, Dryden uses the virtuous behavior of his characters in adversity to construct a deliberate appeal for pathos.²⁷ Where Orrery seeks our admiration, Dryden attempts to arouse our sympathy.

The repeated scene of misunderstanding between Aureng-Zebe and Indamora (Acts IV and V), in which Aureng-Zebe is induced to believe the innocent, pathetic Indamora false, anticipates the last misunderstanding in All for Love, which results in Antony's suicide. This kind of episode, which exploits the emotional potential of the painful confrontation between an innocent victim who, despite her pathetic pleading, cannot make herself understood or believed by her equally innocent but misled lover, is quite atypical of Orrery,²⁸ but common in Lee.²⁹ In Aureng-Zebe the scene serves as the focus and emblem of Dryden's formal intention. It epitomizes Dryden's definition of Indamora's pathetic innocence, and more generally, it conveys the import of the action: that individual virtue seems to be the inevitable victim of cruel circumstance.

The play consists of a series of episodes representing the assertion of virtue on the part of Indamora, Aureng-Zebe, and the notable subsidiary character Melesinda, Morat's forsaken and loving wife. Female innocence and weakness are at a premium. Unlike Dryden's earlier stalwart heroines, Melesinda weeps frequently, despairs, helplessly follows the unresponsive Morat about the stage, and is obviously powerless to provoke even a nominal losing-and-meriting sacrifice. Indamora, too, fears death and pathetically begs for her life (V.261-325), while Dryden's earlier characters, like Orrery's, would have leapt at the chance of suicide. In the process of the action, the very innocence and virtue of these characters result in a further worsening of their situation, until the final reversal rights the balance. But even after all the material obstacles to their happy fate are removed, Aureng-Zebe and Indamora must play out the last scene of misunderstanding, in which Indamora attempts to explain that her sympathy for the dying Morat, misinterpreted by Aureng-Zebe, does not involve a betrayal. And Melesinda, though fortunate ends are guaranteed for the other characters, goes off mourning to perish on Morat's funeral pyre, as a reminder of life's injustices to the innocent.

Thus, while Dryden's heroic action in Aureng-Zebe is significantly indebted to an Orrerian kind, to the extent that he varies that model he represents the beginnings of the major formal shift from heroic drama to affective tragedy. The fact that the Orrerian heroic action survived into the eighteenth century, while the extravagant form of The Conquest of Granada quickly became dated,³⁰ shows that the relatively passive features of the earlier form are more readily adaptable to the affective impetus in drama, even though the later one presents a more direct challenge to the rigid judgmental standards of the heroic mode. The growing importance of pathos and the corollary emphasis on innocence and weakness are typical of Otway and the later Lee, and of Dryden's Don Sebastian, Cleomenes, and Love Triumphant. But unlike Otway and Lee, Dryden produces only one genuine affective tragedy, All for Love. Aureng-Zebe remains a heroic action despite its concessions to pathos. Its careful definitions of heroic standards, its episodic representation, its unexpected and formally disjunctive fortunate conclusion, its stylized and distant tone and setting, and its subtle royalist public-private analogy are all products and characteristics of the heroic action. The play, in the end, is more like The Indian Queen and The Conquest of Granada than like All for Love or Otway's and Lee's pathetic plays, despite the particular similarities that, with the retrospective wisdom of literary history, we can discover in its attention to pathos and emotion.

Dryden's later serious drama is transitional in the sense that it contains this same distinct preference for pity over admiration. But Dryden continues to write heroic actions long after his younger contemporaries have turned irrevocably to affective tragedy. His concession to pathos and innocence never entails a lowering of the tone of his plays or of the status of his characters.³¹ With the exception of All for Love, he consistently creates dramatic actions in which social standards are determinant. The later Lee, however, and Otway, Banks, Southerne, and others who represent the general formal shift to affective tragedy, demote the criterion of judgment altogether, presenting fictional worlds in which the action is based instead upon the pathetic situation of the characters. Dryden does not consistently go this far. But because duty is a process of obedience rather than an occasional assertion of magnificence, and because sympathy is an accession of fellow feeling rather than static admiration, his later heroic plays are less episodic, more coherent actions than The Indian Queen or The Conquest of Granada.

Don Sebastian (1689), like Aureng-Zebe, presents heroic virtue and endurance as the admired standard of aristocratic behavior, but the focus of its action is the tragic situation of the protagonists' incest. Love Triumphant (1694) represents what remains in the 1690s of Herculean extravagance; Alphonso, like Montezuma and Almanzor, advertises his willingness to accept total disruption of the state if he cannot secure his love. The fortuitous happy ending of this play, brought about by the sudden and rather arbitrary expression of mercy on the part of the tyrannical king, provides an explicit dramatic example of Dryden's tendency throughout his career to equate an asserted civil stability with the granting of royal mercy. Ferdinand and Isabella show such mercy to Almahide and Almanzor, as do David in Absalom and Achitophel and Albion in Albion and Albanius. In Love Triumphant, as in all these works, the spontaneous final act of mercy serves to add an even further degree of chance to the reinstatement of social order, since it makes that order depend explicitly on the arbitrary decision of an obviously fallible monarch.

As I have described them, the general characteristics of Dryden's heroic actions define his place in the local evolution from Orrery to Lee as well as his relation to the larger formal shift, which comprehends that local evolution, from the heroic action to affective tragedy. First, as we have seen in The Indian Emperor and The Conquest of Granada, Dryden deliberately disturbs rigid and simple judgments of merit, either by making honor and love apparently irreconcilable and thus eliminating the clear and obvious choice as it manifests itself in Davenant and Orrery, or by introducing an erratic character who cannot be contained by the standard categories and whose radical individualism actually challenges the royalist status quo. Lee's early heroic actions represent a further step in the undermining of simple Orrerian assessment in their depiction of a world of judgemental anarchy, where merit is undetermined or undeterminable. This in turn parallels the central feature of the fully developed affective form, where the action is ordered not by the status, but by the pathetic situation of the characters.

In addition, Dryden's career, as it develops after The Conquest of Granada and the heyday of Restoration heroics, tends toward more pathetic, innocent, and virtuous protagonists, and even toward an emphasis on defenseless women. This constitutes a strong thematic resemblance both to Lee's early, pathos-ridden heroic plays and to the affective tragedy, which begins with Lee's Rival Queens and Dryden's All for Love and dominates the serious drama of the next two decades. In his use of pathos to augment the appeal of the heroic action, Dryden presents as a subsidiary means the formal factor that is the determining end of affective tragedy.

III

Nathaniel Lee's early heroic plays contain formal experiments with the assessment of character that provide us with an unusually precise definition of the limits of the heroic action and of the ideological assumptions that it embodies and that Lee apparently did not consistently share. Because Lee is a transitional figure, I have included his later, mature plays in my description of affective form, but in some ways The Rival Queens and Lucius Junius Brutus resemble Sophonisba and Gloriana as much as they do Otway's affective tragedies, Venice Preserved and The Orphan. The distinction between Otway's early heroic play, Don Carlos, and his later affective drama is similarly ambiguous. In these writers the transition from heroic to affective is almost imperceptible, primarily because the substitution of pathetic situation for social status as a formal determinant cannot absolutely divide the two forms: a character who is admirable by heroic standards can also be seen as a pathetic victim. To the extent that a play is fully an affective tragedy, however, the judgments typical of heroic drama are systematically superseded or obliterated, and this formal ambiguity disappears.

Sophonisba; or Hannibal's Overthrow (1675), one of Lee's most popular plays, is generally representative of his early heroic drama. Like Gloriana (1676), it contains most of the usual qualities of the heroic action: stylized and episodic scenes, love-and-honor conflicts, extravagant defiance of the gods, and an emphasis on heroic glory, death, suicide, and conquest. But Lee's episodes of heroism convey an air of irrationality and randomness that is immediately attributable to his implicit rebellion against the nice judgmental constraints of the heroic action and to his related turn to pathetic effect at the expense of character consistency.

Sophonisba contains two nominally related plots. One, the material of its subtitle, bears most of the burden of the play's allegiance to the heroic action. It portrays the defiant Hannibal and his equally heroic lover Rosalinda in the throes of their last battle against the Romans. The other plot, which ends with the double suicide of Massinissa and his lover Sophonisba, emphasizes pathetic defeat, inaction, failure, retreat, and submission. While both plots produce an oppressive sense of desperation and doom, and both heroes are passionate victims of the powers of love, the presence of Hannibal enables Lee to maintain the heroic action while injecting as much emotion as possible into the form. Hannibal's heroism raises the pitch of the play, but Massinissa and Sophonisba's action gives it all of the material and some of the sensuous effect of pathos. This vacillation between heroic and pathetic is typical of the early plays of the “new writers” of the mid-1670s, most of whom were to become full-fledged affective tragedians. Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), Don Carlos (1676), and The Rival Kings (John Banks, 1677) all provide clear examples of this phenomenon. The Rival Kings, like Sophonisba, mixes two separate dramatic modes. One is heroic and involves the boasts and vaunted bravery of Alexander and Oroondates, the rival kings. The other tends toward the pathetic in its portrayal of Alexander's and Ephestion's deaths.

But Lee's attempt to supply pathetic effect within the formal limits of the heroic action produces another kind of consequence besides that of the divided plot. Many of the main characters in Sophonisba and Gloriana are inconsistent, or at least profoundly enigmatic. Sophonisba, for example, is introduced as a grand, Cleopatra-like figure, whose main fear is that she will be forced to endure a Roman triumph. Her first lines propose a defiant suicide at the approach of Massinissa's forces:

Though Massinissa has the King or'ethrown:
And his Victorious Troops possess the Town.
Yet Sophonisba is, and shall be free,
Spight of the frighted Senators Decree.
They blush to see this life so glorious shine;
And fear their Eagle's eyes, should dazled be with mine.

[III.iv.3-8]

Her maids counsel her, however, to try to win over Massinissa instead, and in the ensuing confrontation Sophonisba does just as her maids advise. She and Massinissa were avowed lovers before her forced marriage to another, and Massinissa proves to be highly vulnerable to her charms, which she plies with such art as to pretend to resist, though gently, his plan to save her from the Roman wrath by marrying her himself. It is never clear whether this scene represents a defiant and desperate heroine's ambiguous use of her lover as an escape from an ignominious defeat, or a pathetic and moving reconciliation. From this point on, however, Sophonsiba is no longer the glorious queen of her entrance, but rather an innocent victim of fate and misunderstanding. In the intimate and pathetic suicide with which she and Massinissa end their story and the play, Lee presents the pair as loyal and passionate lovers, entirely unconcerned with glory or defiance, who bid a moving farewell to life and each other and follow their draught of poison with a parting kiss.

The elusive portrayal of Sophonisba, as well as the inconsistency of numerous other characters in these plays,³² is an immediate consequence of Lee's emphasis on pathetic effect. In his attention to the emotionalism of individual scenes, especially toward the conclusion of the drama, he neglects the consistency of the characters involved. Sophonisba's behavior is determined by her role in the intensification of Massinissa's torturous dilemma: the choice between love and Rome. This subordination betrays the hierarchy of Lee's formal predilections: effect, at least at times, is obviously more important than the consistent portrayal of individual character.

But from a larger perspective, the collective inconsistencies of Lee's characters produce a sense of judgmental incoherence and instability that gives these plays their peculiarly disturbing tone. In this respect, Lee's constitutional neglect of character consistency is only a local manifestation of his more general attitude toward assessment. In most cases, his inconsistent characters are used to pathetic advantage. In all cases, however, they entail a subversion of judgment and evaluation. And this subversion, in turn, generates Lee's inclination toward affective form, in which judgment is superseded by emotional response. Since our understanding of these elusive or inconsistent characters is frequently and rudely undercut, our reliance on formal assessment in general is seriously imperiled. The worlds of Lee's early plays are largely impregnable to evaluation because we are never permitted to see through the contradictory external behavior of the characters to ascertain the true state of their emotions or their souls. We never discover whether Sophonisba is a manipulative queen or an injured lover, and the random opacity of her characterization is presented as casually as if it merely reflected an obvious state of affairs.

Sophonisba remains a heroic action, however. Massinissa's choices are consistently phrased in the familiar love-and-honor terms and consistently presented as formally meaningful, though it appears in the end that he cannot have love with honor, as the earlier heroes invariably could. Love and honor are in this play in conflict. Massinissa chooses love, and his choice and consequent suicide provide a prime example of the fragmentation of the Orrerian standard in late heroic drama. This is a significant, but not in itself a fundamental, change in the heroic action. Despite its tampering with the coherence and reliability of assessment, the play provides no substitute for the clear and self-contained evaluative hierarchy of heroic form. It represents, in the terms of our definition, only an experiment in the direction of affective tragedy.

The unique form of Sophonisba, however, reflects an attitude toward experience that we will discover to be typical of the affective tragedy's rejection of judgment and discrimination in favor of emotion as an end in itself. Lee's early plays illustrate, incoherently, his refusal to judge and his sense that discrimination is impossible, and this attitude is echoed in his pessimistic version of the fragmented heroic standard. In his later plays the indeterminacy of evaluation begins to be rationalized through its incorporation into a form that simply eliminates judgment altogether.

IV

This segment of formal history illustrates both the uniqueness of the particular plays that I have used to define the heroic action and the coherence and continuousness of the evolution of serious drama in the period. The form typically contains simple, static, and flat characters who are presented in repeated, stylized episodes according to an explicit, self-enclosed, and socially defined standard that is necessarily restricted to the narrow representation of a particular class. In this respect, the heroic action from Davenant to Lee is relatively regular and consistent. It embodies the royalist ideology of the reinstated aristocracy, and the initial simplicity and evaluative clarity of its dramatic world reflect the early, unqualified assertion of a class ideal at the time when that ideal still seemed possible, or at least admirable. But as we have seen, beneath the surface of that consistency, the heroic action has a short-lived history of its own, moving from extremely rigid and explicit evaluative categories to more arbitrary, exceptional, or subtle distinctions of virtue, until finally the formal efficacy of such assessments is altogether subverted, along with the ideology which they had expressed and affirmed. If Davenant's and Orrery's simplistic plays reveal the obliviousness of the illusory royalist self-confidence of the 1660s, Dryden's best and most sophisticated heroic action voices the implicit tensions that became evident in the political settlement by the end of the first decade of the Restoration.

The development of the primary serious dramatic form of this period, then, is discernible as a series of slight alterations of orientation within the larger category of the heroic action. Our perception of the course of this generic history does not depend upon the documentation of influence or cooperation, though of course those relationships existed at various times among all these dramatists. It does not depend upon a survey of sources in heroic romance or epic theory, though the findings of such studies provide significant substantiation for our observations. It is not impeded by an awareness of the vagaries of minor playwrights and plays, nor does it exclude such works from consideration. Our understanding of this segment of dramatic history depends first upon our definition of its primary form. That definition comprehends the attributes that are common to heroic drama in general, but it also discriminates among individual writers and individual works. Thus the larger conception that permits us to document the aesthetic originality and uniqueness of a play like The Conquest of Granada also provides us with a description of the changes that take place between Orrery and Lee and enables us to anticipate the more essential changes in the shift to affective tragedy.

The perspective of the later forms will clarify the relationship between the increasing emphasis upon emotional effect and the weakening of evaluative assessment that we have observed in embryo in Dryden's and Lee's heroic actions. These two phenomena are reciprocal manifestations of the same incipient formal change, incomplete and sporadic in Dryden, more clearly recognizable in early Lee, but receiving full realization only in the true affective tragedy. As love and honor drift apart, dramatists can begin to describe pathetic, essentially honorless characters who choose only love. In general, the breakdown of the clear evaluative hierarchy in this highly artificial form produces an intensification of emotional effect as well as involvement. Conversely, the growing formal prominence of pity and sympathy begins to preclude any absolute and rigid standard of behavior: the turn to pathos itself forces a further fragmentation of the love-and-honor hierarchy. The disintegration of the heroic standard ultimately implies the substitution of some new kind of formal coherence that does not depend on judgmental categories at all.

The Conquest of Granada, as the keynote of this portion of my history, provides a more specific example of the parallel between the serious drama and the comedy of this period. The two forms are notably distinct from one another in material and manner—so distinct in fact that several critics have argued that they are fundamentally dissimilar, and that the period is “schizophrenic.”³³ The differences between the forms are numerous and significant, but they are not deep. As we shall see, dramatic social satire also presents a protagonist who threatens the status quo, but, like Almanzor, that protagonist secures our approval, at one level, throughout his action. While his admirable characteristics are maintained, his challenge to society is defused formally, in a manner that can produce no true social reconciliation but that instead provides two judgments in satiric disjunction, in the same way that Dryden's best heroic play juxtaposes royalist and radical.

Notes

1. Cavalier Drama: An Historical and Critical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Modern Language Association, 1936), p. 55 and pp. 48-71 and passim. See also Kathleen M. Lynch, “Conventions of Platonic Drama in the Heroic Plays of Orrery and Dryden,” PMLA 44 (1929): 456-71; Cecil Victor Deane, Dramatic Theory and the Rhymed Heroic Play (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1931); A. E. Parsons, “The English Heroic Play,” Modern Language Review 33 (1938): 1-14; and Eugene M. Waith, “Dryden and the Tradition of Serious Drama,” in John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (London: Bell, 1972), pp. 58-89, especially pp. 60-68.

2. John Dryden, “Of Heroic Plays: An Essay,” in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 157-58, and “To Roger, Earl of Orrery, Prefixed to The Rival Ladies,” in Of Dramatic Poesy, vol. 1, p. 9.

3. The Siege of Rhodes, A Critical Edition, ed. Ann-Mari Hedbäck, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 14 (Uppsala: Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1973), Pt. I, Act V. Subsequent references will be noted in the text.

4. Eric Rothstein, Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 127-30; Waith, Ideas of Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 194-203.

5. Macbeth, 1663. For the argument in favor of this date, see Christopher Spencer, Davenant's “Macbeth” from the Yale Manuscript: An Edition, with a Discussion of the Relation of Davenant's Text to Shakespeare's (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 1-16.

6. The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. William Smith Clark, II (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937), vol. 1, III.iii.395-420. Subsequent references to Orrery's plays will be to this edition and will be noted in the text.

7. One of the problems that Hume identifies in the classification of heroic drama is precisely this one of the “prosperous ending” (The Development of English Drama, p. 192). The formal definition of the heroic action that I have attempted to develop in this chapter, however, clearly shows how and why heroic plays with fortunate conclusions and heroic plays with unfortunate conclusions are related. Hume's emphasis on “heroic characterization” as the “key element” (p. 194) does not. The issue of the “villain-centred” play (pp. 193 and 199-202), which Hume also raises, is similar, and similarly resolved.

8. B. J. Pendlebury, Dryden's Heroic Plays: A Study of the Origins (London: Selwyn and Blount, 1923); Deane, Dramatic Theory and the Rhymed Heroic Play, pp. 5-15 and passim; Parsons, “The English Heroic Play”; Reuben Arthur Brower, “Dryden's Epic Manner and Virgil,” PMLA 55 (1940): 119-38; John Harrington Smith and Dougald MacMillan, Commentary to The Works of John Dryden, vol. 8, ed. Smith, MacMillan, Vinton A. Dearing, Samuel H. Monk, and Earl Miner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1962), pp. 284-87.

9. I have adopted Waith's term, from The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962), because it includes all the implications of extravagance, near-divinity, egotism, defiance, and subversive individualism absent from the definition of the Orrerian hero. See Dryden, “Of Heroic Plays,” pp. 163-66.

10. This observation is substantiated by literary historians, who describe Orrery's drama as a product of the French classical tradition and Dryden's, in contrast, either as the heir of a separate, Homeric tradition, as a reaction to French classicism, or as a product of the native English tradition. See Allardyce Nicoll, “The Origin and Types of the Heroic Tragedy,” Anglia 44 (1920): 325-36; Deane, Dramatic Theory and the Rhymed Heroic Play, pp. 17-27, 188-203, 207-13; and Parsons, “The English Heroic Play.” Corneille's judgmental standard, like Orrery's and unlike Dryden's, is typically defined as a coherent whole. See, for instance, Le Cid, in Théâtre choisi de Corneille, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1961), III.iv.886-96.

11. The play was originally published by Robert Howard. For primary attribution to Dryden, see Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900, vol. 1: Restoration Drama 1660-1700, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), p. 110; J. H. Smith and MacMillan, Commentary to The Works of John Dryden, vol. 8, pp. 283ff.; Waith, “Dryden and the Tradition of Serious Drama,” p. 69, n. 2; and George McFadden, Dryden: The Public Writer 1660-1685 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 72-79. Howard's biographer, Harold James Oliver (Sir Robert Howard [1626-1698]: A Critical Biography [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1963], pp. 63-67), represents the opposing position.

12. The Works of John Dryden, vol. 8, ed. J. H. Smith and MacMillan, I.i.92-95. Subsequent references to The Indian Queen will be noted in the text.

13. For example, Jean Gagen, “Love and Honor in Dryden's Heroic Plays,” PMLA 77 (1962): 208-20; and Anne T. Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 74-76.

14. Waith, The Herculean Hero, pp. 178-81. Dryden himself suggests that Maximin “was designed by me to set off the character of S. Catherine” (“Preface to Tyrannic Love,” in Of Dramatic Poesy, vol. 1, p. 139).

15. Ozmyn and Benzayda, like Acacis and Orazia in The Indian Queen, are Orrerian characters, deliberately conceived to conform to a French standard of virtue (Dryden, “Of Heroic Plays,” p. 165).

16. The Works of John Dryden, vol. 11, ed. Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, Dearing, George R. Guffey, Alan Roper, and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978), Pt. I: I.i.206. Subsequent references to The Conquest of Granada will be noted in the text.

17. Dryden defends his hero's extravagant defiance and irregular behavior as part of his admirable, epic character (“Of Heroic Plays,” pp. 163-66, and dedication to The Conquest of Granada, p. 6). Contemporary comments on the play show that Dryden succeeded in his design of representing Almanzor as socially and politically threatening. For a summary of the pamphlet attacks on Dryden and his heroic protagonists, see Arthur C. Kirsch, Dryden's Heroic Drama (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 35-46.

18. John Winterbottom, “The Development of the Hero in Dryden's Tragedies,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 52 (1953): 161-73; Gagen, “Love and Honor in Dryden's Heroic Plays”; George R. Wasserman, John Dryden (New York: Twayne, 1964), pp. 86-87; and Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays, pp. 114-17. Rothstein (Restoration Tragedy, pp. 56-57, n. 7) also takes exception to this assertion of moral movement in the heroic play, arguing convincingly that the heroic technique necessarily produces a morally static character.

19. For a full discussion of the arbitrariness of the play's conclusion, see Alan S. Fisher, “Daring to be Absurd: The Paradoxes of The Conquest of Granada,” Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 414-39.

20. Waith also emphasizes the influence of the heroine in providing the final means of incorporating the hero into society (The Herculean Hero, pp. 159-68). My argument, however, gives equal weight to fortuitous circumstance.

21. “The first rule … is to make the moral of the work … as namely Homer's (which I have copied in my Conquest of Granada) was that union preserves a commonwealth, and discord destroys it” (Dryden, “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” in Of Dramatic Poesy, vol. 1, p. 248).

22. For discussions of the public-private analogy in this and Dryden's other plays, see Kirsch, Dryden's Heroic Drama, pp. 110-11; and Michael W. Alssid, “The Design of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64 (1965): 452-69, and “The Perfect Conquest: A Study of Theme, Structure and Characters in Dryden's The Indian Emperor,” Studies in Philology 59 (1962): 539-59.

23. D. W. Jefferson, “Aspects of Dryden's Imagery,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 20-41, and “‘All, all of a piece throughout’: Thoughts on Dryden's Dramatic Poetry,” in Restoration Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies vol. 6 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 159-76; Bruce King, Dryden's Major Plays (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1966), p. 2; and Robert S. Newman, “Irony and the Problem of Tone in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 10 (1970): 439-58. These views, I believe, are linked to the belief that Dryden was a sceptical fideist, advanced most notably by Louis I. Bredvold in The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1934). For a convincing critique of that position, see Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), ch. 1.

24. J. Douglas Canfield makes a similar point, though from a very different perspective, in his discussion of the heroic play's “attempt to reinscribe [an ancient chivalric code] across the pages of a disintegrating cultural scripture.” See “The Significance of the Rhymed Heroic Play,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1979): 49-62, especially p. 50.

25. For a summary of Dryden's political loyalties in these crucial years, see McFadden, Dryden: The Public Writer, especially pp. 59-65 and 88-94. For further background, see David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 141-47; Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), pp. 223-32; and Clayton Roberts, The Growth of Responsible Government in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 155-96.

26. Aureng-Zebe, ed. Frederick M. Link (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1971), IV.ii.192. Subsequent references will be noted in the text.

27. Kirsch, Dryden's Heroic Drama, pp. 118-28; and Waith, “Dryden and the Tradition of Serious Drama,” pp. 78-81. Leslie Howard Martin's claim that the play merely embodies the précieuse elements of the French heroic tradition, which had not been imported to England, ignores the precedent of Orrery's drama as well as the distinct differences in tone and effect between the French Platonic mode and English pathos (“The Consistency of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe,” Studies in Philology 70 [1973]: 306-28). Waith accounts both for the precedent in the romance tradition and for the significant shift toward pathetic tragedy.

28. In The Black Prince (V.iv), when Plantaginet is first reconciled (offstage) with the Prince, Orrery actually chooses to omit the representation of the initial pathos of such a scene, though it is included in the plot.

29. Gloriana, V.ii; Mithridates, IV.i; and Constantine, III.ii, in The Works of Nathaniel Lee, 2 vols., ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke (New Brunswick, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1954-55). Subsequent references to Lee's plays (except The Rival Queens and Lucius Junius Brutus) will be to this edition and will be noted in the text.

30. Nicoll, “Origin and Types of the Heroic Tragedy.”

31. Waith, Ideas of Greatness, pp. 255-57.

32. In Sophonisba, Scipio and Massina. In Gloriana, Caesario, Augustus, and Julia.

33. For example, Anne Righter, “Heroic Tragedy,” in Restoration Theatre, ed. Brown and Harris, pp. 135-58; and John Traugott, “The Rake's Progress from Court to Comedy: A Study in Comic Form,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 6 (1966): 381-407. This view is traceable to the stereotype of the period advanced early in this century, most notably by Bonamy Dobrée, who claimed that, while the comedy represents a realistic depiction of the manners of the time (Restoration Comedy 1660-1720 [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1924], pp. 26-30), the serious drama provides an ideal that the epic-hungry but disillusioned Restoration could only attain in art (Restoration Tragedy 1660-1720 [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1929], ch. 1). Thus, he argues in his later book that the serious drama is “the reverse of most of the comedy of the period” (p. 22). My argument in this chapter and the next suggests that these critics correctly notice particular differences among the plays, but that their methodology prevents them from seeing the fundamental formal similarities that I have attempted to document. For a different sort of answer to the schizophrenic school, see Kirsch, Dryden's Heroic Drama, p. 35.