The Significance of the Restoration Rhymed Heroic Play

Abstract

MIUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the Restoration rhymed heroic play, the bulk portraying its significance only in terms of literary or theatre history, characterizing it as an outrageous experiment that failed. Most critics do not understand how anyone could have taken this bombastic stuff seriously. Some critics have gone so far to save for respectability those heroic plays of John Dryden as to view their significance as satirical.1 I should like to examine their significance in the primary sense, that is, their signification. What are they really about? When this thematic significance has been discussed, it has usually been reduced to exaggerated conflicts between love and honor or, at best, reason and passion. There have been some notable exceptions, particularly concerning Dryden's heroic plays,2 but even here recently Alan S. Fisher has argued that The Conquest of Granada is really