and after The Rival Ladies, which is partly in rhyme partly in blank verse,—and The Indian Queen (1664), a play entirely rhymed, in which he assisted his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard,—he brought out, early in 1665, his tragedy of The Indian Emperor, which, like The Indian Queen, is carefully rhymed throughout. In the enforced leisure which his residence at Charlton during the plague brought him, he thought over the whole subject, and this Essay of Dramatic Poesy was the result.
In the course of time Dryden modified more or less the judgment in favour of rhyme which he had given in the Essay. In the prologue to the tragedy of Aurungzebe, or the Great Mogul (1675), he says that he finds it more difficult to please himself than his audience, and is inclined to damn his own play:—
Not that it's worse than what before he writ.
But he has now another taste of wit;
And, to confess a truth, though out of time,
Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme.
Passion, he proceeds, is too fierce to be bound in fetters; and the sense of Shakspere's unapproachable superiority,—Shakspere, whose masterpieces dispense with rhyme,—inclines him to quit the stage altogether. Nevertheless his original contention,—however under the pressure of dejection, and the sense perhaps of flagging powers, he may afterwards have been willing to abandon it,—cannot be lightly set aside as either weak or unimportant; a point on which I shall have something to say presently.
Five critical questions are handled in the Essay, viz.—
1. The relative merits of ancient and modern poets.
