SOURCE: Canfield, J. Douglas. “Heroes and States: Heroic Romance.” In Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy, pp. 6-25. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000.

In this essay, Canfield uses Dryden's Conquest of Granada as an exemplary heroic drama in order to uncover the political and ideological values that underlie the genre.

The restored king and court had been quite taken with French drama in their exiled sojourn on the continent, particularly the rhymed romances and tragedies of France's greatest dramatist at midcentury, Pierre Corneille. So Charles II invited his courtier playwrights to follow suit. The very formal style of such plays, with their oratorical declamations, can only be appreciated today if we view them as operatic spectacles (indeed, such spectacles developed alongside them). Despite Puritanical strictures against the theater, Sir William Davenant had already staged the first version of the Restoration rhymed heroic play, The Siege...