SOURCE: Barbeau, Anne T. “Dryden's Plays of Ideas.” In The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays, pp. 3-23. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

In this essay, Barbeau examines the view that Dryden's heroic plays emphasized ideas over emotion.

Samuel Johnson's accurate judgment of Dryden is that the latter's “favourite exercise” consists in ratiocination and that, as a result, he is deficient in portraying natural passion and sensibility.¹ This estimate would have had a pejorative connotation for a reader of the late eighteenth century, when sentimental drama had sufficiently displaced, in the public esteem, that theater of ideas which had reached its apogee in the dramatic works of Dryden, Etherege, and Congreve. Nowadays, however, it would simply put Dryden in league with George Bernard Shaw, whose lack of natural passion does not prevent him from winning favor in the twentieth-century theater. Sir Walter Scott shares Johnson's view of...