English Tragic Theory in the Late Seventeenth Century

William Gillette once observed, with professional amusement and contempt, that if the record of the effect of scholars, thinkers, and critics upon the drama could be roused to life-that is, to consideration but for a moment, it would demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that Drama is perfectly immune from the maneuvers of any germ that may lurk in what people who are supposed to be 'Intellectual' may say or otherwise put forth regarding it. 1 However accurate this disavowal of influence may be, its extension, the denial of effective relationships between criticism and drama, is surely false. Serious dramatists develop their work from preexisting concepts of what plays can and should do; those concepts, in turn, alter as the scope and stress of the body of dramatic literature alters. The years from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century were years in which literary criticism, reasoned statement and analysis, flourished in England; they were also years in which English tragedy underwent metamorphosis. I should like to suggest that the metamorphosis was reflected in the criticism, and to indicate as precisely as possible the critical portcullises through which the emotional, sentimental, tragedy of the post-heroic years entered and made itself master. That tragedy has, in some way, a didactic moral purpose, was, of course, a commonplace of the seventeenth century, as it had been a commonplace throughout medieval and Renaissance criticism.2 Those changes in attitude and, therefore, in technique

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