SOURCE: Evans, David R. “‘Private Greatness’: The Feminine Ideal in Dryden's Early Heroic Drama.” Restoration 16, no. 1 (spring 1992): 2-19.

In this essay, Evans explores the role of the female characters in Dryden's heroic plays The Indian Queen, The Indian Emperor, and Tyrannick Love.

Within the relatively large body of criticism on Dryden's heroic drama, little attention has been paid to how the plays deploy female characters. In some respects this neglect is not surprising, because they are, after all, “heroic dramas,” and in most people's minds—certainly in Dryden's—a hero is by definition a male. Despite, or perhaps because of such a male-centered concept of the hero, an examination of the female characters in Dryden's heroic drama yields substantial insight into the ideology he embodied in these works.

What I shall term the “heroic ideology” is of course strongly conservative in almost every respect: conspicuous royalism, anti-revolutionary thematics...