An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

“But my comfort is if we are overcome it will be only by our own countrymen; and if we yield to them [the ancients] in this one part of poesy, we more surpass them in all the other.”

In a continuation of the above, the discussion is one in which national reputation is at stake. After the humiliations of civil war and the repressions of Puritan rule, the English must reassert their literary superiority. Eugenius argues that, with regard to poetry, the English can only be surpassed by the English. He goes on to assert that “the drama is wholly ours” (154). Thus, from poesy to drama to dramatic poesy, the English have conquered.

“We have added nothing of our own, except we have the confidence to say our wit is better; of which none boast in this our age but such as understand not theirs.”

In contradiction to Eugenius’s assertions, Crites argues in favor of the ancients here suggesting that only those who do not understand the ancients would suggest they were relatively lacking in wit. This undermines Eugenius and the English writers he defends and gives Crites a rhetorically slippery advantage: To argue against the ancients, he claims, is by definition to misapprehend their abilities. The reasoning is a circular entrapment.

“If by these rules (to omit many other drawn from the precepts and practice of the ancients) we should judge our modern plays, ‘tis probable that few of them would endure the trial.”

Crites posits that modern playwrights neglect or ignore the three unities of time of place, and of action. In the defense of the moderns, it emerges that not only did the ancients themselves routinely break these rules (as Eugenius will respond), but also that the moderns break these rules to better and more natural effect (as Neander will respond).

“But as they have failed both in laying of their plots and in the management, swerving from the rules of their own art by misrepresenting nature to us, in which they have ill satisfied one intention of a play, which was delight, so in the instructive part they have erred worse. Instead of punishing vice and rewarding virtue, they have often shown a prosperous wickedness and an unhappy piety.”

Eugenius points out that the ancients often conclude their plays with dubious morals; he uses the example of Medea’s revenge and Cassandra’s rape, among others. This goes against the idea, set out at the beginning of the debate, that the intention of a play is not only to delight but also to instruct—that is, to provide moral guidance.

“On the other side, if you consider the historical plays of Shakespeare, they are rather so many chronicles of kings, or the business many times of thirty or forty years, cramped into a representation of two hours and a half, which is not to imitate or paint nature but rather to draw her in miniature; to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a perspective, and receive her images not only much less but infinitely more imperfect than life. This, instead of making a play delightful, renders it ridiculous.”

Lisideius critiques Shakespeare’s tendency to shatter the rules of the three unities. His plays are sprawling tales, sometimes spanning years rather than hours, which (Lisideius argues) renders nature imperfectly. He also personifies nature as a woman, as Crites himself has done earlier in the essay.

“A continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent; we must refresh it sometimes, as we bait in a journey, that we may go on with greater ease.”

Neander defends the tragicomedy of the English theater by suggesting that too much drama is hard on the spirit. He metaphorically suggests that, just as a long journey must be broken up with rest (an archaic meaning of “bait”), so too must a tragic play be relieved by comedy. Thus, Neander justifies the contradiction in terms that is tragicomedy with an appeal to human nature.

“But when these petty intrigues of a play are so ill ordered that they have no coherence with the other, I must grant that Lisideius has reason to tax that want of due connexion; for co-ordination in a play is as dangerous and unnatural as in a state.”

Neander argues that there is room for more than one plot in a play, contrary to the rules of the three unities, but only when the plots are well ordered and connected. The metaphor here references the Puritan Interregnum, a “dangerous and unnatural” interlude in the natural (and, supporters would argue, divinely ordered) succession of the monarchy.

“Since that time it is grown into a custom, and their actors speak by the hourglass like our parsons; nay, they account it the grace of their parts, and think themselves disparaged by the poet if they may not twice or thrice in a play entertain the audience with a speech of a hundred lines.”

Neander argues against the French use of monologue—introduced, as he says a few lines earlier, “to comply with the gravity of a churchman” (190). He symbolically links these requisite monologues to hypocritical preachers who give their sermons based on a set time simply because they are required to do so, rather than because nature or moral instruction warrants it. This is an implicit rebuke of Puritan rule in England.

“Now what, I beseech you, is more easy than to write a regular French play, or more difficult than to write an irregular English one, like those of Fletcher or of Shakespeare?”

Neander implies that literature should value complexity over simplicity, just as he will later imply that it should value masculine displays over feminine manners and great passion over meek sensibility. All of these values describe more than what matters to the stage; they are also attached to national character. The dialogue about the merits of the modern English theater is also a conversation about the best qualities of the English character.

“To begin then with Shakespeare. He was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too.”

While Shakespeare flouted the rules regularly, as Lisideius previously pointed out, his writing nevertheless hews most closely to nature (according to Neander). Nature here is inextricably linked to the soul and thus to the divine: Nature is an objective and eternal truth towards which it is the poet’s duty to strive. It goes beyond the senses—“you more than see it”—and into the heart and soul itself.

“Yet this argument, if granted, would prove that we may write better in verse but not more naturally.”

This encapsulates Crites’s argument against the use of rhyme in dramatic plays: he concedes that verse may be a higher form of writing than prose or even blank verse, but it is not a more natural way to write. Neander responds that verse is nature elevated, so that using rhyme in the dialogue of a play ennobles it.

“‘Tis like the murmuring of a stream, which not varying in the fall, causes at first attention, at last drowsiness. Variety of cadences is the best rule, the greatest help to the actors and refreshment to the audience.”

Neander uses a simile comparing the babble of a brook to the monotonous cadence of an actor using either all rhyme or all blank verse in his speech. Variety, complexity, and originality are more important—and, ironically, more natural—than stringent adherence to the rules. The cadences of nature vary, as should the cadences of scripted speech.

“For the genius of every age is different; and though ours excel in this, I deny not but that to imitate nature in that perfection which they [ancients] did in prose is a greater commendation than to write in verse exactly.”

According to Neander, the genius of the ancients expresses itself differently than the genius of the moderns; their use of blank verse should now give way to the use of dramatic poesy, which is the particular talent of Neander’s fellow moderns. As the ultimate goal of Augustan poetry is to combine wit with judgment in order to faithfully represent nature, the use of rhyme best fulfills that.