The use of rime was therefore at variance with that definition of a play which Lisideius, with the approval of his interlocutors, gives in the Essay, and which requires it to be 'a just and lively image of human nature.' Ibid., p. 357.

When he (Milton) began to write blank verse, the blank verse of the dramatists, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into more or less rhythmical prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows not only used the utmost licence of redundant syllables at the end of the line, but hustled and slurred the syllables in the middle till the line was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so plentifully that it became impossible even for the most attentive ear to follow the metre. . . . The history of blank verse reflects with curious exactness the phases of the history of the drama. When the metre was first set on the stage, in the Senecan drama, it was stiff and slow-moving; each line was monotonously accented, and divided from the next by so heavy a stress that the absence of rhyme seemed a wilful injury done to the ear. Such as it was, it suited the solemn moral platitudes that it was called upon to utter. Peele, Marlowe, and Shakespeare made the drama lyrical in theme and treatment; the measure, adapting itself to the change, became lyrical in their hands. As the drama grew in scope and power, addressing itself to a greater diversity of matter, and coming to closer grips with the realities of life, the lyrical strain was lost, and blank verse was stretched and loosened and made elastic. During the twenty years of Shakespeare's dramatic activity, from being lyrical it tended more and more to become conversational in Comedy, and in Tragedy to depend for its effects rather on the rhetorical rise and fall of the period than on the unit of the line. From the drama of Charles the First's time, when inferior workmen had carried these licences to the verge of confusion, it is a perfectly natural transition to the heroic couplet for Tragedy and the wellbred prose of Etherege for Comedy. Blank verse had lost its character; it had to be made vertebrate to support the modish extravagances of the heroic plays; and this was done by the addition of rhyme. Comedy, on the other hand, was tending already, long before the civil troubles, to social satire, and the life-like repre

sentation of contemporary characters and manners, so that prose was its only effective instrument.

WALTER RALEIGH, Milton, p. 190.

To the above conspectus of modern views on the general subject should be added Mr. Swinburne's Study of Shakespeare, pp. 32-48. The whole of the passage should be read, but the following only can here be quoted :

Shakespeare was naturally addicted to rhyme, though, if we put aside the Sonnets, we must admit that in rhyme he never did anything worth Marlow's Hero and Leander: he did not, like Marlow, see at once that it must be reserved for less active forms of poetry than the tragic drama. . . . But in his very first plays, comic or tragic or historic, we can see the collision and conflict of the two influences; his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step and note by note to the strong advance of that better genius who came to lead him into the loftier path of Marlow. There is not a single passage in Titus Andronicus more Shakespearean than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little birds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole scene preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we find in the baser parts of the play; and these, if any scenes, we may surely attribute to Shakespeare. In this play then (First Part of Henry VI), more decisively than in Titus Andronicus, we find Shakespeare at work (so to speak) with both hands-with his left hand at rhyme and his right hand at blank verse. The left is loth to forego the practice of its peculiar music; yet, as the action of the right grows freer and its touch grows stronger, it becomes more and more certain that the other must cease playing, under pain of producing mere discord and disturbance in the scheme of tragic harmony. . . . The example afforded by the Comedy of Errors would suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument for romantic comedy. . . . What was highest as poetry in the Comedy of Errors was mainly in rhyme; all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by Ægeon

...

and the appearance, in the last scene, of his wife: in Love's Labour's Lost, what was highest was couched wholly in blank verse; in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance

It is perhaps not so certain as is generally assumed that the rhyming play is dead beyond recall. It is probably not wholly without significance that the two most popular (though debased) of English stage-forms-the pantomime and the burlesque-are both in rhyme. A man of genius may yet show what can be done with rhyme, and he is most likely to show it in the field suggested by Mr. Swinburne. When, in the prologue to the last of his rhyming tragedies (Aureng-zebe), Dryden confessed to weariness of rhyme, his reason was that 'Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound,' and he was clearly thinking of tragedy. But in certain kinds of romantic comedy, the artificiality of effect produced by those fetters might conceivably be only a grace the more.

W. T. A.

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION.

My father was actually engaged upon the revision of this book at the time of his death (November, 1900), and his working-copy contains a number of 'n's' in the margin, over against the passages on which he intended to write new notes. Some, at all events, of those notes were actually written, but they have unfortunately not been found. In these circumstances I have done my best to carry out his intentions so far as I could divine them. My task has been a good deal facilitated by the appearance of Prof. W. P. Ker's scholarly edition of the Essays of John Dryden (2 vols., Clarendon Press, 1900), and I have also to acknowledge obligations to Dr. A. W. Ward, whose History of English Dramatic Literature has been constantly at my elbow, and who has moreover rendered to his late friend and kinsman the service of piety involved in his allowing me to consult him upon special points. Perhaps the most prominent feature of my revision is the copiousness of quotation from Corneille. In no other way did it seem possible to bring home to the reader the greatness of Dryden's debt-extending not only to ideas and arguments, but even phrases-to his French contemporary. It should be added that the New English Dictionary, which is now far advanced, and which, it is already evident, will considerably lighten the labours of future annotators on English classics, has been freely drawn upon. The longer of my own notes are printed in square brackets.

WILLIAM T. ARNOLD.

May, 1901.

EPISTLE DEDICATORY

TO THE ESSAY OF

DRAMATIC POESY1

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

CHARLES, LORD BUCKHURST2, n

MY LORD,

3

As I was lately reviewing my loose papers, amongst the rest I found this Essay, the writing of which, in this rude and indigested manner wherein your lordship now sees it, served as an amusement 5 to me in the country, when the violence of the last plague had driven me from the town. Seeing then our theatres shut up, I was engaged in these kind of thoughts with the same delight with which men think upon their absent mistresses. I confess I find 10 many things in this Discourse which I do not now approve; my judgment being not a little altered"

1 A edition of 1668. B= edition of 1684 (here, in the main, reprinted). C=edition of 1693.

2 C has, 'Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of their Majesties Houshold, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, &c.' Lord Buckhurst had become Earl of Dorset in 1677. It is hard to say why Dryden did not give him his proper title in the edition of 1684.

The great plague of 1665 (Malone).

B

4

a little altered, A.