Emperor, one of the best of his heroic plays.  The seriously critical portion of this admirable little treatise deals with Howard’s attacks on the employment of rhyme in tragedy, on the observance of strict rules in dramatic composition, and on the observance of the unities.  But irritated by the tone of Howard’s tract, Dryden does not confine himself to answering his friend’s arguments.  He ridicules, what Shadwell had ridiculed before, Howard’s coxcombical affectation of universal knowledge, makes sarcastic reference to an absurdity of which his opponent had been guilty in the House of Commons, mercilessly exposes his ignorance of Latin, and the uncouthness and obscurity of his English.  The brothers-in-law afterwards became reconciled, and in token of that reconciliation Dryden cancelled this tract.

The Essay of Dramatic Poesy was written at Charleton Park in the latter part of 1665, and published by Herringman in 1668.  It was afterwards carefully revised, and republished with a dedication to Lord Buckhurst in 1684.  Dryden spent more pains than was usual with him on the composition of this essay, though he speaks modestly of it as ‘rude and indigested,’ and it is indeed the most elaborate of his critical disquisitions.  It was, he said, written ’chiefly to vindicate the honour of our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.’  Its more immediate and particular object was to regulate dramatic composition by reducing it to critical principles, and these principles he discerned in a judicious compromise between the licence of romantic drama as represented by Shakespeare and his School, and the austere restraints imposed by the canons of the classical drama.  Assuming that a drama should be ’a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind,’ it is shown that this end can only be attained in a drama founded on such a compromise; that the ancient and modern classical drama fails in nature; that the Shakespearian drama fails in art.  At the conclusion of the essay he vindicates the employment of rhyme, a contention which he afterwards abandoned.  The dramatic setting of the essay was no doubt suggested by the Platonic Dialogues, or by Cicero, and the essay itself may have been suggested by Flecknoe’s short Discourse of the English Stage, published in 1664.

The Essay of Dramatic Poesy may be said to make an era in the history of English criticism, and to mark an era in the history of English prose composition.  It was incomparably the best purely critical treatise which had hitherto appeared in our language, both synthetically in its definition and application of principles, and particularly in its lucid, exact, and purely discriminating analysis.  It was also the most striking and successful illustration of what may be called the new prose style, or that style which, initiated by Hobbes and developed by Sprat, Cowley, and Denham[1] blended the ease and plasticity of colloquy with the solidity and dignity of rhetoric, of that style in which Dryden was soon to become a consummate master.