SOURCE: Brown, Laura. “Heroic Action.” In English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History, pp. 3-27. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

In the essay below, Brown considers the defining features of heroic drama.

Heroic drama and comedy of manners are the familiar labels given to the major serious and comic plays of the Restoration English theater. In most criticism of the period, these descriptive terms are used to refer either to theme, to verse form, to the presence of certain kinds of characters, or to a particular artificial, sophisticated, and witty tone. Traditional categories of such duration and currency deserve respectful treatment, and they do provide an intuitively accurate and generally useful means of perceiving the large resemblances and distinctions among the plays of this period. But the imprecision of their definition and the diffuseness of their application have made it difficult to see any coherence...