Title Dryden's Criticism of Shakespeare.pdf ✅

DRYDEN’S CRITICISM OF SHAKESPEARE It has been said of Dryden that “his virtues were his own, his faults those of his age.” Nowhere is this attribute better illustrated than in his attitude toward Shakespeare. When he judges according to those critical canons which the Restoration derived from Italian and French Aristotelian formalists of the 16th and 17th centuries, Dryden deplores Shakespeare’s irregularities and his lapses from good taste. But when Dryden liberates himself from neoclassic rules and speaks from the fullness of his intuitions as an artist, he reveres Shakespeare as
“the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.” A child of his time, Dryden criticizes Shakespeare for not constructing unified plots. The histories “are rather so many chronicles of kings, or the business many times of 30 or 40 years, cramped into a representation of two hours and a half .” By looking at nature “through the wrong end of a perspective,” Shakespeare in these plays renders a distortedly small image of life. Other plays—Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Love's Labour's Lost, and Measure for Measure—are “either grounded on impossibilities” or else so badly written as to be unsatisfactory both in their comic and in their serious parts. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—with the solitary exception of Ben Jonson—ignore the neoclassic unities of time, place, and action. Although Troilus and Cressida begins promisingly, the end “is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms” (Preface to Troilus and Cressida, 1679). Moreover, it violates poetic justice: “Cressida is false, and is not punished.” Shakespeare cannot be blamed entirely, however, for he wrote for a benighted age that doted upon ridiculous stories. Audiences demanded “magic supernatural things . . . And he then wrote, as people then believ’d ” (Prologue to The Tempest, 1667). Dryden’s chief complaint against Shakespeare is that his language is improper, “his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast .” Every page yields “either some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in sense” (Defence of the Epilogue, 1672). So thoroughly has the English language been purified since Shakespeare’s day, “that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some are ungrammatical,
others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is obscure” (Preface to Troilus). Dryden selects for particular censure the player’s speech in Hamlet, describing Hecuba’s clamorous reaction to the death of Priam: “Wise men would be glad to find a little sense couched under all these pompous words; for bombast is commonly the delight of that audience which loves Poetry, but understands it not: and as commonly has been the practice of those writers, who, not being able to infuse a natural passion into the mind, have made it their business to ply the ears, and to stun their judges by the noise.” Shakespeare could be carried away “beyond the bounds of judgment, either in coining of new words and phrases, or racking words which were in use, into the violence of a catachresis [misuse of words].” The foregoing quotation belongs to a period in Dryden’s life (c. 1679) when he seems especially to have felt the influence of Thomas Rymer, the neoclassic critic who attacked Shakespeare with single-minded vigour. Later Dryden admits that Restoration poets are more polished and correct, but he concedes that they cannot match their Elizabethan ancestors in strength. “Theirs was the giant race, before the flood” (Epistle to Congreve, 1694). Anyone can write regular plays and adhere to the unities. “But genius must be born, and never can be taught.” Congreve is Shakespeare’s spiritual descendant. “Heav’n, that but once was prodigal before, / To Shakespeare gave as much; she could not give him more.” Although Dryden may be pleased with his own accomplishments, he confesses that “a secret shame/ Invades his breast at Shakespeare’s sacred name” (Prologue to Aureng-Zebe, 1675). He draws inspiration from a portrait of Shakespeare that Sir Godfrey Kneller had painted and given to him. “With reverence [I] look on his majestic face; / Proud to be less, but
of his godlike race (‘Epistle to Kneller,’ 1694). It does not matter to Dryden that Shakespeare lacked formal learning. “He was naturally learn’d: he needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.” In this respect Shakespeare and Homer are alike, “in either of whom we find all arts and sciences, all moral and natural philosophy, without knowing that they ever studied them” (Discourse Concerning Satire, 1693). By looking “inwards” Shakespeare created distinctive characters, among them Henry IV, Mercutio, Falstaff, and Caliban. In Caliban he brought forth “a person which was not in Nature,” an extraordinary boldness yet one that Shakespeare carries off successfully. The quarrel between Brutus and Cassius is “incomparable,” and there is nothing in any other language to match the passion and poignancy of the deposition scene in Richard II. Shakespeare is not consistent, but he is capable of sublimity. “He is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets [as the tall cypresses generally tower above the lowly viburnum shrubs].” Dryden’s attitude toward Shakespeare is revealed not only in his poems and prefaces, but also in his actual writing for the stage. When the theatres were reopened in 1660 after having been closed during the Puritan interlude, the new companies, in the absence of a continuing performing tradition, depended initially upon revivals of Elizabethan plays, often “improved” to meet the allegedly superior tastes of Restoration playgoers. The practice continued throughout the period. Apart from scattered verbal echoes and borrowings, Dryden derived three plays directly from Shakespeare: The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), a