An English Garner | Page 5

Drayton are of great interest. Meres was plainly a man of
muddled and inaccurate learning, of no judgment, and of no critical
power, a sort of Elizabethan Boswell without Boswell's virtues, and it
is no paradox to say that it is this which gives his Discourse its chief
interest. It probably represents not his own but the judgments current
on contemporary writers in Elizabethan literary circles. And we cannot
but be struck with their general fairness. Full justice is done to
Shakespeare, who is placed at the head of the dramatists; full justice is
done to Spenser, who is styled divine, and placed at the head of
narrative poets; to Sidney, both as a prose writer and as a poet; to
Drayton, to Daniel, and to Hall, Lodge, and Marston, as satirists. We
are surprised to find such a high place assigned to Warner, 'styled by
the best wits of both our universities the English Homer,' and a modern
critic would probably substitute different names, notably those of
Lodge and Campion, for those of Daniel and Drayton in a list of the
chief lyric poets then in activity. In Meres's remarks on painters and
musicians, there is nothing to detain us.
Of a very different order is the important critical treatise which comes

next, Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, to which are prefixed as
prolegomena Dryden's Dedicatory Epistle to The Rival Ladies, Sir
Robert Howard's Preface to Four New Plays, and, as supplementary,
Howard's Preface to The Duke of Lerma, and Dryden's Defence of the
Essay of Dramatic Poesy. As Dryden's Essay, like almost all his
writings, both in verse and prose, was of a more or less occasional
character, it will be necessary to explain at some length the origin of
the controversy out of which it sprang, as well as the immediate object
with which it was written.
The Restoration found Dryden a literary adventurer, with a very slender
patrimony and with no prospects. Poetry was a drug in the market;
hack-work for the booksellers was not to his taste; and the only chance
of remunerative employment open to him was to write for the stage. To
this he accordingly betook himself. He began with comedy, and his
comedy was a failure. He then betook himself to a species of drama, for
which his parts and accomplishments were better fitted. Dryden had
few or none of the qualifications essential in a great dramatist; but as a
rhetorician, in the more comprehensive sense of the term, he was soon
to be unrivalled. In the rhymed heroic plays, as they were called, he
found just the sphere in which he was most qualified to excel. The taste
for these dramas, which owed most to France and something to Italy
and Spain, had come in with the Restoration. Their chief peculiarities
were the complete subordination of the dramatic to the rhetorical
element, the predominance of pageant, and the substitution of rhymed
for blank verse. Dryden's first experiment in this drama was the Rival
Ladies, in which the tragic portions are composed in rhyme, blank
verse being reserved for the parts approaching comedy. In his next play,
the Indian Queen, written in conjunction with Howard, blank verse is
wholly discarded. The dedication of the Rival Ladies to Orrery is
appropriate. Roger Boyle, Baron Broghill, and first Earl of Orrery, was
at this time Lord President of Munster, and it was he who had revived
these rhymed plays in his _Henry V._, which was brought out in the
same year as Dryden's comedy. Whoever has read this drama and
Orrery's subsequent experiments, Mustapha (1665), the Black Prince
(1667), Tryphon (1668), will be able to estimate Dryden's absurd
flattery at its proper value.
But these dramatic innovations were sure not to pass without protest,

though the protest came from a quarter where it might least have been
expected. Sir Robert Howard was the sixth son of Thomas, first Earl of
Berkshire. He had distinguished himself on the Royalist side in the
Civil War, and had paid the penalty for his loyalty by an imprisonment
in Windsor Castle during the Commonwealth. At the Restoration he
had been made an Auditor of the Exchequer. Dryden seems to have
made his acquaintance shortly after arriving in London. In 1660
Howard published a collection of poems and translations, to which
Dryden prefixed an address 'to his honoured friend' on 'his excellent
poems.' Howard's rank and position made him a useful friend to Dryden,
and Dryden in his turn was no doubt of much service to Howard.
Howard introduced him to his family, and in December 1663 Dryden
married his friend's eldest sister, the Lady Elizabeth Howard. In the
following year Dryden assisted his brother-in-law in the composition of
the Indian Queen. There had probably been some misunderstanding or
dispute about