Heroic Drama in Literary Criticism
Today, drama is divided up into numerous sub-genres; Dryden, however, worked from Classical critics. There was little dramatic critical theory for him to appeal to, and the new rules brought over from France (particularly those of Corneille and Boileau) did not match English theatrical history or practice. The emphasis on unities and on maintaining only Classically proscribed dramatic forms also came from Thomas Rymer, who condemned the heterogeneity of the stage. Aristotle had only spoken of satire, epic, and tragedy, and Horace also wrote only of comedy, tragedy and satire, and so Dryden was seeking to square actual theatrical practice with an ancient framework for literature. He was attempting his own neo-classicism. The First Folio of Shakespeare had divided Shakespeare's plays into "history," "tragedy," and "comedy," but these terms were stretched. Dryden, therefore, implicitly recognizes that drama had moved into the territory of other types of poetry, but he strives to restrain that freedom by reforming the stage to a true and epic subject matter.
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