The Critic 1668–84

Abstract

The sense of a new beginning which is manifest in the public poems and the new dramatic repertoire of the early 1660s is evident too in the development of the critical essay, a form which Dryden rapidly mastered and made the medium for a debate over the theory and practice of drama. The self-consciousness which Dryden displayed as a dramatist, able to manipulate a complex and shifting relationship between stage and audience, is applied here to defining the identity of the age for which he is working, seeking to understand and explain how the new culture differs from the old, and what the tasks are which confront a writer at this particular time. The essays are often polemical, justifying various technical practices such as the use of rhyme in heroic drama, but they also campaign for a sense of the special character and achievement of Restoration culture. The critical preface was not invented by Dryden: Jonson had written prefaces and prologues which justified his art against ignorant misreading, and during the republic writers such as Cowley, Davenant, Denham and Hobbes had set out their ideas about the heroic poem or the theory of translation. But in Dryden’s hands the preface becomes a way of defining and shaping contemporary culture, and in so doing establishing Dryden’s own position as the period’s dominant man of letters.