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.
Read more about this topic: Heroic Drama
Famous quotes containing the words literary criticism, heroic, drama, literary and/or criticism:
“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a “better land,” without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“There can be no literary equivalent to truth.”
—Laura Riding (1901–1991)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)