Dramatic Poetry Research Articles

On Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

On Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Addison's Cato and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Joseph Addison's Cato is the most important English verse drama of the eighteenth century; Allardyce Nicoll calls it “a landmark in the history of tragedy.” In addition, it is of great political interest, for its production in the turbulent year before the death of Queen Anne made it the rallying piece for Whigs and Tories, both of whom enrolled its propaganda on their side. Hence any document which throws new light on its composition is significant for that reason alone. That Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote a critique of Cato before it was produced, and that Addison followed several of her suggestions for improving his tragedy add to the importance of such a discovery. As a letter-writer Lady Mary has a secure reputation, but her brilliant, aggressive intellect impelled her to take a far more active and varied part in the literary scene of her time than has previously been realized. In her serving as play-doctor for such an influential drama as Cato we have further evidence of her versatility.

Directing the Verse Play

Directing the Verse Play

Collier's ’History of English Dramatic Poetry‘

Collier's ’History of English Dramatic Poetry‘

Dryden and the Rules: The Preface to Troilus and Cressida

THE Preface to Dryden's adaptation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is one of the best, if not one of the liveliest, of Dryden's essays.1 Although it contains one of his fine appreciations of Shakespeare, it lacks the pleasing self-revelation and the exciting personal controversy which distinguish the Preface to All for Love and the Preface to the Fables. On the other hand, it is somewhat more logical and systematic than many of the essays; it is the discussion of a single important problem and sticks close to the business at hand. The principles are expounded in a more complete and orderly fashion than in most of Dryden's essays, and the abstract exposition is constantly interspersed with applications to specific writers, especially Shakespeare. The principles are, as we shall see, French neoclassical principles of the most orthodox kind; and yet, when Dryden comes to apply them to Shakespeare, the judgment which he makes of the earlier poet is a very favorable one. It is all too easy for a reader of Dryden to imagine him as a man torn between a theoretical respect for the French rules and a natural love for such irregular writers as Chaucer and Shakespeare ;2 and this view certainly finds support in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, where Dryden, quite unable to reconcile Shakespeare and the rules, is forced to set up a double standard-regularity for the French and variety for the English. The Essay, however, is a relatively early work, and one should not assume that the critical dualism which it exhibits is

On the Persons in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

On the Persons in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

The curious phenomenon of Spanish verse drama

The curious phenomenon of Spanish verse drama

The Occasion of "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy"

DR. JOHNSON introduced the invidious distinction between the general and the occasional in Dryden's criticism, declaring in the Lives that his occasional positions are sometimes interested, negligent, or capricious-inconstant to his general precepts. In a less pejorative sense An essay of dramatic poesy illustrates the occasional as well as the general, but it is unique in Dryden's criticism because it was published without any visible means of support, not as a pendant to another work. Some writers, mistaking the personal apology in the Defence of an Essay-which, as a matter of fact, is incident only to the argument about rhyme-have overplayed the occasional bias of the Essay with respect to Sir Robert Howard. But one provocation to the Essay, to which an unidentified allusion directs us, has been unaccountably neglected. This motivation helps to explain the Essay, and even its concern with dramatic principles, without challenging its conformity to its own laws. When Dryden wrote the Essay, the French and English had already clashed in a notable exchange of opinion. The occasion actually led to diplomatic action and the banishment of the offender. The occasion especially concerned the Royal Society1 and so provided another reason why Dryden might not be insensitive to the controversy. It is hardly necessary to remark that complimentary allusions to science are a conspicuous feature of the Essay, which was probably written before he was dropped by the Society.2 But it does seem necessary to remark that dramatic poetry had been an issue in this clash. The famous exchange, in which the Royal Soci ty was directly involved, had for its principals Samuel Sorbibre and Thomas Sprat, and produced works which long kept a certain notoriety in England. It is, therefor , all the more strange that they have never entered the discussion of circumstances incident to the Essay of dramatic poesy. In the same year that Dryden published The rival ladies, with its prefatory defense of rhyme in serious plays, Samuel Sorbibre pu lished his Voyage to England3 and raised a storm of indignation, which was embarrassing to the Royal Society because he had been admitted a member. Thomas Sprat, the official spokesman for he Society, laid down his History

Donne's Prosody

From the Elizabethan prosodists we shall obtain no more than a few scattered hints concerning Donne's versification. Prosodists are notoriously conservative, and the Elizabethans are no exception. Putten-ham, in spite of his evident pleasure in the sound of verse, still places his confidence in the final arbitration of the eye; and it is thus that he comments on the diagram of a stanza-form: “most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible; for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e converso.” This ocular prosody leads him to say that “it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie then to leave an unplesant dissonance to the eare by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime Dore with Restore then in his truer orthographie, which is Doore.” Even with the rise of lyric and of dramatic blank verse this attitude does not disappear. Campion, for instance, makes the sensible remark that normal accent “is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent in any language the true value of the sillables is to be measured.” And he knows that “we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write; for the sound of them in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters.” Yet he inconsistently admits length by position, as in Trumpington.

Ictus, Accent, and Statistics in Latin Dramatic Verse

Ictus, Accent, and Statistics in Latin Dramatic Verse

XLV. Notes on Ben Jonson's English

In a well-known passage in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden, pursuing his critical “examen” of The Silent Woman, tempers his extravagant praise of Ben Jonson's dramatic skill with serious criticism of his language.If there is any fault in his language, ‘twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously in his comedies especially; perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours.

Finding the Drama in Dramatic Verse

Finding the Drama in Dramatic Verse

Dryden and Howard, 1664-1668: The Text of 'An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' 'The Indian Emperor' and 'The Duke of Lerma,' with Other Controversial Matter

Dryden and Howard, 1664-1668: The Text of 'An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,' 'The Indian Emperor' and 'The Duke of Lerma,' with Other Controversial Matter

Ictus and Accent in Early Latin Dramatic Verse

That accent as well as quantity plays a certain rô1e in the structure of early Latin dramatic verse is no new doctrine. It has been present in some form or other to the minds of most writers on Plautine and Terentian prosody since the time of Bentley, who in hisSchediasma de metris Terentianis(1726, second edition 1727) laid the foundations of modern research into this somewhat thorny subject. Unfortunately, however, the question has been complicated from the very first by the introduction of a third term into the discussion, viz. the termictus, with the result that the fundamental issue has been obscured and to some extent side-tracked. Bentley was himself responsible for this result; for it was he who introduced into his text of Terence those ictus-marks which have figured in most texts of Plautus and Terence down to the present day. And his whole theory of Terentian verse was dominated by the postulate that it was delivered on the stage with a stress of the voice falling rhythmically on the ‘rise’ (or, as he called it, the ‘arsis’) of each foot: e.g.Malúm quod ísti dí deaéque omnés duínt.

"Crites" in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

"Crites" in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy

Ego Emphatic and Unemphatic, in Rises and Falls of Old Latin Dramatic Verse

It is commonly believed that pronouns ego, tu, etc., are only expressed when emphatic; and this dogma has recently been made one of foundation stones of a doctrine of recessive words in OL. verse by Professor Phillimore in Classical Review. My object here is not to criticize Professor Phillimore's doctrine as a whole; but present inquiry was suggested to me by his Terentiana, and it has resulted in convincing me that dogma that ego is always and necessarily emphatic is a mere a priori assumption.' This is, indeed, a paradox; but the time shall give it proof. In this article I have made only a beginning of demonstration. Ego occurs over two thousand times in Plautus alone. But I have examined all Plautine and Terentian instances in which it is used with common verbs eo, eam, ibo, abeo, abeam, and a great many of those with verbs of knowing, perceiving, and like (e.g., scio, nescio, novi, audio, video), and a few with sum. My examination has been conducted entirely without prejudice; I have included all examples as they came to hand. If anyone is sceptical, let him experiment with ego facio or ego with a verb of saying. But I have attempted more than making of a list of emphatic and unemphatic instances; I have classified them in such a way as to show relation of emphasis and non-emphasis to rise' and fall' of foot. It is commonly asserted that Plautus and Terence tried to secure in every foot coincidence of word-accent or sentence-accent with so-called ictus of verse. But, as Professor Housman said to me last summer, if they aimed at this, how is it that they were not more successful? I cannot, of course, deal with this big question here; but my instances will provide material for considering to what extent Ritschlian doctrine is true in

Colloquial Contractions in Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Shakespeare as a Test of Authorship

F. G. Fleay presented to the New Shakspere Society in 1874 his epoch-making paper On Metrical Tests as Applied to Dramatic Poetry. Many early investigations of authorship had been excellent, and some scholars looked askance at the utilization of cold statistics in literary criticism; but Fleay's methods, followed later by Boyle and others, have been vindicated. To Fleay and Boyle the fundamental idea of this paper, namely, that the work of the collaborating dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Massinger and Shakespeare in the case of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be tested by a consideration of colloquial contractions or elisions in words used by the authors, must acknowledge inspiration. The test will involve the use of statistical tables of colloquialisms which bear some resemblance to the metrical tables of Fleay and Boyle.

The Position of "Deferred" Nouns and Adjectives in Epic and Dramatic Verse

-Our appreciation of classical verse is seriously affected by the difficulty of estimating certain factors in ancient verse that are alien to most modern poetry. The editor of Horace's Odes notes the artistic interlocking of words; the student of Propertius discovers a high degree of conscious art in the rhymed endings of words at the ends of metrical phrases; the student of epic observes the emphasis produced by position at the beginning of the hexameter, or the artificial bracketing of a verse by words at the beginning and end which are in sound or sense, or both, closely related. Such observations are often quite true from a descriptive standpoint; but after these features have been described there remains a more difficult problem: Just what degree of conscious art is represented by such features of ancient verse? To what extent are they due to conditions of verse composition beyond the poet's control? To what extent do they reveal a happy compromise between mechanical necessity and the artist's natural desire to enforce the thought and embellish the form ? The final appreciation of the poet's art must carry us beyond mere description, which is seldom altogether free from the influence of the critic's sympathy with modern poetry, and lead us to an understanding of the peculiar problems of the ancient poet, of the necessary adjustment of conflicting factors, many of which are foreign to modern verse. A feature of epic verse that has escaped general recognition but has been incidentally noted by one or two special students of Homer and Vergil is the somewhat monotonous regularity with which words and phrases that escape into the second verse of a sequence of two verses stand at the beginning of the second verse rather than elsewhere. Such words are closely connected in thought with the first verse and might reasonably be expected to stand somewhere near the beginning rather than the end of the second verse in response to the natural requirements of collocation. But there is a stereotyped

The Origin and Form of Aeolic Verse

The Aeolic dimeter and trimeter constitute so considerable a part of Greek lyric and dramatic poetry that the correct apprehension of their form is a matter of great moment. The Greek metricians comprehended this rightly, in the main, but in the first half of the nineteenth century the doctrine of these learned men was supplanted by a new theory that attempted to apply the principles that underlie modern poetry to the explanation of the undoubtedly complex rhythm of these clauses. Many scholars persistently maintain this theory. It is not difficult to discover why it was invented (it is absolutely new) and why it remains attractive. That the quantitative rhythms and metres of Greek poetry should seem complicated to men whose language is accentual is inevitable, whereas modern metres and rhythms are notoriously simple. The limitations imposed upon poetic form by accentual speech are extreme. No modern poet, for example, has attempted Ionic or Cretic measures. Again Greek music was simple, and both music and dance were under the control of the singers, but modern music is a complex art, and casts language in an iron mould. Nevertheless musical expression must be the basis of comparison, so far as we allow ourselves to institute it, between ancient and modern rhythms. The attempt to conform Greek lyrics to the elementary—and uncertain—rhythms of modern poetry that is merely read or recited implies a fundamental misconception of relations. Greek lyrics were melic. Agathon, in the Thesmophoriazusae, sings as he composes. These Greek songs were never intended to be read by anybody, Greek or barbarian.

Sigmatism in Greek Dramatic Poetry

Sigmatism in Greek Dramatic Poetry