[In this excerpt, Hume suggests that while many plays designated as “heroic” share important features, there is no single quality or trait shared by all of them.]

How cohesive is ‘heroic drama’? Plainly this depends on your definition. Is a prosperous ending necessary? If so, what is Orrery's Mustapha? Is a villain-centred play truly heroic? I would say no—not unless a character of virtue figures prominently in contrast, as in Tyrannick Love. Does opera count?—and if not, do we ignore The Siege of Rhodes? Is rhyme a sine qua non? A play like The Mourning Bride, in blank verse, falls somewhere between prosperous-ending tragicomedy and the full-blown heroic. Such questions seem to me paramount. A great deal of critical attention has been expended on sources and influences—most of it profitless. The whole unhappy business need not be reviewed yet again. One can admit the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher while still acknowledging the excellent work of such critics as Arthur Kirsch and Harold Brooks in showing us the importance of Corneille as a model. But here I am concerned simply with play types.

Hostile critics imply that one lot of jingling bombast is much like the next. At the other extreme, critics have tried to define discrete ‘schools’. Thus Nicoll establishes three groups: Drydenesque rant and battle; Orrerian history plays; and quasi-French displays of ‘calm, precision, and artificiality’.¹ This division leaves me uncomfortable: even in Henry the Fifth Orrery's ideas of history are extremely loose, while the French or ‘neoclassical’ group seems to consist of insufficiently inflated oddments like Caryll's The English Princess and Shipman's Henry III of France. Neither in theory nor in practice can I find evidence for such differentiations. One looks then for common ground and for points of variance.

The defining element in the heroic play broadly conceived is the titanic protagonist. In Waith's words, the object is a ‘celebration of greatness, where the conflicts of tragedy are replaced by ritual exaltation’. In practice, the

principal characters pursue energetically some ideal which stretches human capacities to the utmost, whether the ideal is impossibly remote and therefore self-destructive, like that of Coriolanus, or attainable, like that of Caesar in The False One; whether self-centred, like that of Tamburlaine, or beneficial to all, like that of Henry V; perverted, like those of the villain heroes, or thoroughly noble, like those of the chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche who, early and late, appear in the most romantic plays. The energy of their quest is an affirmation of the ideal, finding its natural dramatic expression in an elevated and extravagant rhetoric which we call heroic rant.²

But whether a play should be categorized as heroic depends on how central the ‘idea of greatness’ is. Where evil in one predominant character is stressed, I think we have a rather different kind of play, as in Lee's Nero. The presence of a comic plot (as in Secret Love) changes the character and impact of the whole. Where the principal action of the play shows the fall of the glorified hero, the pattern of high tragedy predominates over heroic exaltation, as in All for Love (a play Waith finds substantially heroic). The presence of overtly political elements can similarly shift attention from the heroic, as in The Duke of Guise.

Heroic characterization is clearly the key element, though not always an overriding and defining one. But supposing it predominant, what are the possible variables? The elements generally commented upon are rant and emotion; psychology; scenery; verse disputation; and moral design. None is a sine qua non; all are generally present to some extent. Nonetheless, early experiments show surprising variation.

Dryden acknowledges Davenant's Siege of Rhodes (1656 in its original form) as the first step, and so it is, though critics sometimes classify it separately as an opera. Davenant's dedication of the 1663 quarto discusses ‘heroique Plays’; declares the subject to be ‘Ideas of Greatness and Vertue’; commends Corneille; and defines his play's object to be ‘heightening the Characters of Valour, Temperance, Natural Justice, and complacency to Government’. Dryden could have used the same words. The import of The Siege is complicated by its different versions (1656, 1661). Dent, however, argues persuasively that ‘it was originally written not as an opera but as a play’, then cut and made musical to evade government objections to plays.³ Thus the work was probably written in heroic couplets, mangled, and then mostly restored. Its features seem striking: Christian-pagan conflict in a siege; love and heroism stressed; scenery exploited as much as possible. Rutland House imposed technical limitations, but even just using back flats (in 1656) Davenant was able to manage five spectacular scenes: Rhodes at peace; the city besieged; Solyman the Magnificent's pavilion and throne; the castle he has built on Mount Philermus; and finally the scene of the general assault. The scenes do not change, even when the action jumps to Sicily. Given a working theatre in 1661, Davenant was glad to introduce appropriate quick scene changes with sliding flats. His desire for spectacle is obvious. The language is noble but fairly plain; psychology is simple and strictly functional—love, honour, and Alphonso's irrational jealousy of his wife, the brave and virtuous Ianthe. The heart of the play lies (as Davenant suggests in the 1656 preface) in ‘Heroical’ representation of ‘the Characters of Vertue in the shapes of Valor and conjugal Love’. Characters, language, and sentiments are less hoity-toity than in Caroline précieuse drama, but this is what the author of Love and Honour (1634) has half an eye on.

Orrery's The Generall (written 1661; staged 1664) makes an interesting contrast. As W. S. Clark proves, it was written without knowledge of changeable scenery.⁴ Three plays later, with The Black Prince (1667), Orrery does finally start to localize his scenes sharply. The later works allow for fancy staging and spectacle, but Orrery's formula initially appears without regard for spectacle. Rhyme is conspicuous in that formula, and in Orrery's much quoted account of the play's genesis. Charles II

Commanded me, to write a Play for Him; … And therfore … I Presumed to lay at his majts Feet, a Trage-Comedi, All in Ten Feet verse, & Ryme. I writt it, in that manner … because I found his majty Relish'd rather, the French Fassion of Playes, then the English.⁵

The Generall is basically an inflated Caroline précieuse tragicomedy. The inflation consists of rhyme; strict concentration on admiration for exalted characters (with no comic relief); provision of valour and refined sentiment; and almost endless philosophizing and argumentation. The subject of this disputation is naturally ethical problems posed by conflicts of love and honour. In Henry the Fifth, Mustapha, and The Black Prince pseudo-history is replaced by ‘real’ if wildly imaginative history; the scenic element grows; crude verse and plain language become more polished, complex, and intense. Orrery's bent, however, is plain from the start. Action is suppressed, psychology and moral design left simple, sentiment exalted but rant avoided: emphasis is on super-subtle ethical calculus and what Clark calls ‘sophistical argument’. Orrery's plays tend to consist of endless series of reports and static debates appropriate to the chilly loftiness of tone he cultivates. A major exception is the execution scene in Mustapha and what follows it: the violence unleashed there is melodrama (as Clark complains), but for once dramatically effective. In all, ‘history’ seems to me less the defining element in these plays than super-précieuse sentiment and versified ethical disputation. These features appear regularly in later heroic plays, but nowhere else in Carolean drama are they so prominent.

The formula Dryden evolved (and explained in ‘Of Heroique Playes’) is both intensely personal and highly influential. He was an admirer and collaborator of Davenant's, and he addressed extravagant praise to Orrery in his dedication of The Rival Ladies (1664), commenting especially on the possibilities in ‘Argumentation and Discourse’ among ‘great and noble’ persons. From the start, Dryden is disposed to exploit the possibilities opened up by both men, but he adds his own concerns. Always fascinated by the epic mode, he argues ‘That an Heroick Play ought to be an imitation, in little of an Heroick Poem: and consequently, that Love and Valour ought to be the Subject of it’. Therein he aims to present ‘to view’ ‘the highest patern of humane life’. Heroic characterization is practised against a duly spectacular backdrop; verse disputation appears, but in smaller chunks. Dryden differs from Orrery in wanting much more in the way of action, drums, and trumpets, and in preferring the grandiose to the achingly précieuse. He criticizes The Siege of Rhodes for want of ‘design, and variety of Characters’, as well as for dull style. His curiously naïve view that ‘the Poet is … to endeavour an absolute dominion over the minds of the Spectators’ (i.e. ‘to perswade them, for the time, that what they behold on the Theatre is really perform'd’) is widely quoted, but is not a good key to the nature of the experience Dryden contrives. Predictably, he is much concerned with language; as he inclines to the grandiose, the depiction of titanic passion leads him into rant. (Settle and Lee push this development on into the realm of rhapsodic nonsense, but Dryden should not be damned for their excesses.) Besides providing fancier language and more action than his predecessors, Dryden gives rather less simplistic psychological portraits. Such critics as Kirsch and Barbeau have been able to demonstrate a good deal of subtlety and complexity in Dryden's characters. As character studies, however, Dryden's plays certainly will not stand comparison with Jacobean tragedy, and too much must not be claimed for them in this respect. The special element that Dryden adds to his predecessors' formulae might be called a detailed moral design. Barbeau has treated this subject best, though her notion of ‘intellectual design’ seems excessively abstract. In his major heroic plays, The Indian Emperour, Tyrannick Love, and The Conquest of Granada, Dryden establishes a central cultural-religious contrast (Spaniards-Indians, Christian-pagan) and presents a picture of social decay and collapse. Simultaneously, he gives us a series of contrasting character studies. Thus in The Indian Emperour we watch the internal disintegration of the Indian state. Montezuma, the passion-ridden ruler, is contrasted with the conqueror Cortez, who increases his self-command during the play. Kirsch comments on how carefully Dryden balances Cortez's courtship of Cydaria against Montezuma's pursuit of Almeria. A similar antithesis is drawn between the brothers Guyomar and Odmar, the one duty-, the other love-oriented. From the play emerges a double picture of the exemplary hero: Cortez embodies passion ultimately bounded, while Guyomar's strict obedience is rendered active and responsible. This dual sense of the hero, passionate and correct, reappears in Almanzor and Ozmyn five years later. Like Corneille, Dryden is much interested in the conflict between internal will and external obligations, and he likes to set up the elaborate, almost schematic comparisons so well analysed by Barbeau.

To call the results ‘intellectual’ may be an overstatement. Dryden's political, social, and moral attitudes are readily deducible from the plays, but the quasi-allegorical ‘design’ is embedded in a totality in which language, character, and spectacle figure prominently. In this context, the design seems less an overt disquisition than an expression of outlook and an intuitive exploration of the heroic ethos. Dryden's contrasts are essays in definition: he is not content to present the cut and dried virtues sung by Davenant and Orrery. Waith shrewdly remarks that

Dryden's best plays have a dialectical structure which constantly aims at a definition of heroic values, while Lee's … are less schematic and less concerned with fine distinctions. They are lyrical celebrations of a kind of greatness which is frequently manifested in states of extreme emotion, whether pity, fury, fear or exaltation.⁶

As Waith's comment suggests, Lee has his own blend of the possible elements. Heroic exaltation remains, but here fed with supercharged emotions, exaggerated language, and abnormal psychology. The searing, choking intensity of Lee's heroic plays makes a startling contrast with Orrery's customary frozen calm. Yet both writers indubitably celebrate heroical greatness. Spectacular staging helped Lee at the box office, as it did Settle. But the element which makes Lee's plays what they are is the centrality of violent emotion and its expression in streams of words forced past the limits of sense. To categorize Lee with one of his predecessors would be futile. Dryden's success undoubtedly spurred on later writers, and Settle is an imitator, albeit a dismal one. Crowne's The Destruction of Jerusalem and Banks's The Destruction of Troy (both 1677) develop this tradition after a fashion.

Given the jingling rhymes, the bastard history, the tortuous intrigues, and the hordes of seemingly indistinguishable foreign character names, even the sympathetic reader is likely to find that one play blurs into the next. Actually, neither flavour nor formula is at all constant. Banks's pathos and Lee's rant and bloody endings are a long way from Dryden's practice. Even the political philosophy has occasioned confusion. Early attacks on Dryden⁷ led to frequent interpretation of his heroes as glorifications of libertinism or of amoral Hobbesian power-mongering, a view which is ridiculous. Dryden does use Hobbesian ideas extensively—to characterize his villains.⁸ Predictably, Dryden's position on rebellion is quite conservative: the power-seeker (Maximin, Morat) destroys himself; the hero who rebels against injustice (Almanzor, Porphyrius) is handled sympathetically, but not whole-heartedly endorsed. An almost opposite cliché, that heroic drama is simply divine-right propaganda, has an element of truth for Dryden, Davenant, and Orrery, but is flatly contradicted by Lee's work, much of which dwells on the tyranny of kings.⁹ In short, when we speak of the heroic play (rhymed or not) we are referring to a phenomenon with a readily definable central idea, but, in other respects, with a great deal of room for divergence.

Notes

1. Allardyce Nicoll, A History & English Drama, 1660-1900 Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1952), p. 116.

2. Eugene Waith, Ideas & Greatness: Heroic Drama in England (London, 1971), pp. 3, 169. I am uncomfortable about the inclusion of villain heroes as defining presences.

3. Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera (1928; rpt. New York, 1965), Chapters 3 and 4. Quotation from p. 65. Dent's very full analysis is excellent.

4. The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, 2 vols., ed. William Smith Clark, II (Cambridge, Mass., 1937), I. 28. Clark's excellent Critical and Historical Prefaces and notes are the best (almost the only) account of Orrery's plays, and I am indebted to them.

5. Dramatic Works, I. 23.

6. Waith, pp. 241-2.

7. Notably by Richard Leigh, The Censure of the Rota (Oxford, 1673), who claims that Dryden's political and moral philosophy is taken ‘from Mr. Hobs’ (p. 19).

8. A point decisively demonstrated by Louis Teeter, ‘The Dramatic Use of Hobbes's Political Ideas’, ELH, iii (1936), 140-69, and more particularly by John A. Winterbottom, ‘The Place of Hobbesian Ideas in Dryden's Tragedies’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, lvii (1958), 665-83.

9. A point elaborated by Frances Barbour, ‘The Unconventional Heroic Plays of Nathaniel Lee’, University of Texas Studies in English, (1940), pp. 109-16.