Caroline Drama Research Articles

Heroical Love in Dryden's Heroic Drama

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

The Friendship Theme in Orrery's Plays

When Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, turned in his intervals of gouty leisure to dramatic composition, he made his plays supplement the political manœuvers of his active periods by embodying in them the crescent love-and-honor theme, which, rooted in pre-Commonwealth drama, was being sponsored by the Frenchified Charles II. But while thus pleasing the King and the Court by being alertly à la mode, he remembered the dramatic associations of his Cavalier days and revived after the Puritan depression certain elements of Jacobean and Caroline drama. Among them was the friendship theme, so frequently and significantly employed in plays of those former decades. If he had merely repeated the old situations and rephrased the worn clichés, there would be little point in analyzing his plays for his use of the theme except to show continuity between pre-Commonwealth drama and Restoration drama. But he modified it and made it an aid in his persistent king-worship. And more important still, he used the theme in developing the love-and-honor conflict.