Dryden, Corneille, and the Heroic Play

Abstract

not always been convinced that plays are worth taking seriously. Defenders of genre, such as Bonamy Dobree and Allardyce Nicoll, have generally offered extenuations rather than explanations, and apologies rather than arguments. Dobree, for example, has asserted that heroic play, the reverse of most of comedy of period, was an attempt to celebrate a code of conduct as contrived as language with which it was expressed. truth was that of ideal: its heroes were not men as they are, but men as writers would have liked them to be. ... The Restoration dramatists moulded men nearer to their hearts' desire, circumstances having made them desire men like that. It was duty of imagination to supply gaps in nature.' Nicoll, too, sees heroic play as a form of wish fulfilment, the true child of enervation that had come over England;2 and, more recently, Clifford Leech has asserted that heroic play was a response, both in its manner and its substance, to Restoration's increasing desire to live up to extravagant ideas of conduct.3 A number of important consequences follow from such statements and from assumptions which support them. The ethos of Dryden's plays is implicitly regarded as fanciful; his characters are considered psychologically undifferentiat d and unsound; and his plays as wholes are assumed to have substituted a bladdered