Dryden and the Critical Theories of Tasso

Abstract

question of patriotic honor, of vindicating native tradition from unjust censure-the question which is most prominent in A,n Essay of Dramatic Poesy and the Heads of an Answer to Rymer. On the other there is the dramatist's practical question how far we ought to imitate our own poets, Shakespeare and Fletcher, in their tragedies. In the Preface to Troilus and Cressida, where he faces the latter issue most squarely, concludes as follows: ... We ought to follow [Shakespeare and Fletcher] so far as they have copied the excellences of those who invented and brought to perfection dramatic poetry; those things excepted which religion, customs of countries, idioms, of languages, etc., have altered in the superstructures, but not in the foundation of the design.3 2 Preface to An Evening's Love; Dedication to the Aeneis; in John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poetry and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (Everyman, 1962), I, 154 and II, 232. This edition, which has certain textual advantages over Ker, is cited hereafter as Watson. The old misconception that Boileau turned against Tasso does not survive a careful reading of the texts; compare A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (Paris, 1925), p. 310 with the clearer view in John M. Aden, Dryden and Boileau: The Question of Critical Influence, SP, L (1953). 495-496. The error may have been encouraged by a misreading of a passage in A Discourse concerning Satire (Watson, II, 82-83) where accuses Tasso of servile imitation of Homer. Though taken by Ker and Watson to refer to Jerusalem Delivered, it really applies to Tasso's alteration of his poem, that is, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, a pedantically classical rewriting of the Liberata which has never found favor with readers or critics. 3 Watson, I, 243, 246. Virgil and his successors are only so far true heroic poets as they have built upon the foundations of Homer (Preface to Albion and Albanius, Watson, II, 36).