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Revision as of 16:06, 28 July 2005 by Geogre (talk | contribs) (Better. At least it ''says'' something now.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Heroic drama is a type of play popular during the 1670s in England, distinguished by both its verse structure and its subject-matter. The term was invented by John Dryden for his play, The Conquest of Granada (1670). For the Preface to the printed version of the play, Dryden argued that the drama was a species of epic poetry for the stage, that, as the epic was to other poetry, so the heroic drama was to other plays. Consequently, Dryden derived a series of rules for this type of play.
First, the play was composed in heroic verse (closed couplets in iambic pentameter). Second, the play must focus on a subject that pertains to national foundations, mythological events, or important and grand matters. Third, the hero of the heroic drama must be powerful, decisive, and, like Achilles, dominating even when wrong.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and others satirized heroic drama in The Rehearsal. The satire was successful enough that heroic drama largely disappeared afterward.
Although today drama is divided up into numerous subgenres, Dryden worked from Classical critics. Aristotle had only spoken of satire, epic, and tragedy, and Horace also speaks only of comedy and tragedy and satire, and so Dryden was seeking to square actual theatrical practice with an ancient framework for literature. The First Folio of Shakespeare had divided Shakespeare's plays into "history," "tragedy," "romance" and "comedy," but these terms were stretched. Dryden, therefore, implicitly recognizes that drama had moved into the territory of other types of poetry, but he wishes to restrain that freedom by reforming the stage to a true and epic subject matter. Buckingham's criticism of Dryden in The Rehearsal is partly Dryden's bombastic verse but, more pointedly, Dryden's personal interest in creating a "pure" drama. The character of Bayes is ludicrous more for his hubris in damning actual plays in favor of imagined ones as he is for being a poetaster.
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