er of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had
fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to
France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two
years--had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as
1656, by presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with
instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly
sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the
dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable
painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the
female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to
be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell
Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater.

Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of
the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV.
writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his contemporaries
in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been
formed in 1636, for the preservation of the purity of the French
language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of
literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on
tragedy, and {168} one in particular on the _Three Unities_. Dryden
followed his example in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1667), in which
he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in
preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his
tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, _All for
Love_, 1678, founded on Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, he returned
to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to
keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the
Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed
what they called "heroic plays," such as the _Indian Emperor_, the
_Conquest of Granada_, the _Duke of Lerma_, the _Empress of Morocco_,
the _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _Nero_, and the _Rival Queens_. The
titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were
great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote
from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and
pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The
tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on
Shakspere, but to see how