great an artist Racine was, in his own
somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his _Phedre_, or
_Iphigenie_, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. These
bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque,
the _Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671
at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to
the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic
methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's
comedy, _An Evening's Love_, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's _Le
Feint Astrologue_, and his _Sir Martin Mar-all_, from Moliere's _L'
Etourdi_. Shadwell borrowed his _Miser_ from Moliere, and Otway made
versions of Racine's _Berenice_ and Moliere's _Fourberies de Scapin_.
Wycherley's _Country Wife_ and _Plain Dealer_, although not
translations, were based, in a sense, upon Moliere's _Ecole des Femmes_
and _Le Misanthrope_. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the
Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was
Otway, whose _Venice Preserved_, written in blank verse, still keeps
the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages
weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great
scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his _All for Love_. And one,
at least, of his comedies, the _Spanish Friar_, is skillfully
constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and
he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he "forced his genius."

In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the
Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van
Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the _Country Wife_, the
_Parson's Wedding_, _She Would if She Could_, the _Beaux' Stratagem_,
the _Relapse_, and the _Way of the World_. These were in prose, and
represented {170} the gay world and the surface of fashionable life.
Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them
were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the
_Committee_ of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of
which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and
president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the
sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the
_Roundheads_ and the _Banished Cavaliers_ of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a
female spy in the servic