Essay of Dramatick Poesie

''Essay of Dramatic Poesie'' is a work by John Dryden, England's first Poet Laureate, in which Dryden attempts to justify drama as a legitimate form of "poetry" comparable to the epic, as well as defend English drama against that of the ancients and the French. The Essay was probably written during the plague year of 1666, and first published in 1668. In presenting his argument, Dryden takes up the subject that Philip Sidney had set forth in his '' Defence of Poesie'' in 1580.

The treatise is a dialogue among four speakers: Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander. The four speakers are Sir Robert Howard rites Charles Sackville (then Lord Buckhurst) ugenius Sir Charles Sedley isedeius and Dryden himself (''neander'' means "new man" and implies that Dryden, as a respected member of the gentry class, is entitled to join in this dialogue on an equal footing with the three older men who are his social superiors).

On the day that the English fleet encounters the Dutch at sea near the mouth of the Thames, the four friends take a barge downriver towards the noise from the battle. Rightly concluding, as the noise subsides, that the English have triumphed, they order the bargeman to row them back upriver as they begin a dialogue on the advances made by modern civilization. They agree to measure progress by comparing ancient arts with modern, focusing specifically on the art of drama (or "dramatic poesy").

The four men debate a series of three topics: (1) the relative merit of classical drama (upheld by Crites) vs. modern drama (championed by Eugenius); (2) whether French drama, as Lisideius maintains, is better than English drama (supported by Neander, who famously calls Shakespeare "the greatest soul, ancient or modern"); and (3) whether plays in rhyme are an improvement upon blank verse drama—a proposition that Neander, despite having defended the Elizabethans, now advances against the sceptical Crites (who also switches from his original position and defends the blank verse tradition of Elizabethan drama). Invoking the so-called unities from Aristotle's ''Poetics'' (as interpreted by Italian and refined by French scholars over the last century), the four speakers discuss what makes a play "a just and lively imitation" of human nature in action. This definition of a play, supplied by Lisideius/Sedley (whose rhymed plays had dazzled the court and were a model for the new drama), gives the debaters a versatile and richly ambiguous touchstone. To Crites' argument that the plots of classical drama are more "just," Eugenius can retort that modern plots are more "lively" thanks to their variety. Lisideius shows that the French plots carefully preserve Aristotle's unities of action, place, and time; Neander replies that English dramatists such as Ben Jonson also kept the unities when they wanted to, but that they preferred to develop character and motive. Even Neander's final argument with Crites over whether rhyme is suitable in drama depends on Aristotle's ''Poetics'': Neander says that Aristotle demands a verbally artful ("lively") imitation of nature, while Crites thinks that dramatic imitation ceases to be "just" when it departs from ordinary speech—i.e. prose or blank verse.

A year later, the two brothers-in-law quarrelled publicly over this third topic. See Dryden's "Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1669), A Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy where Dryden tries to persuade the rather literal-minded Howard that audiences expect a play to be an ''imitation'' of nature, not a surrogate for nature itself.

References

External links

''Essay of Dramatic Poesy''
(1668 text, edited by Jack Lynch)

{{John Dryden

17th-century essays
1668 works
English essays
Essays about poetry
Works by John Dryden
Essays in literary theory
17th-century literature of England