xcellency; and this opinion he had publicly intimated in the
"Essay of Dramatic Poesy." In the preface to the very first of
Shadwell's plays, printed in 1668, he takes occasion bitterly, and with
a direct application to Dryden, to assail the grounds of this criticism
and the comedies of the author who had made it.[17] If this petulance
produced any animosity, it was not lasting; for in the course of their
controversy, Dryden appeals to Shadwell, whether he had not rather
countenanced than impeded his first rise in public favour; and, in 1674,
they made common cause with Crowne to write those Remarks, which were to
demolish Settle's "Empress of Morocco." Even in 1670, while Shadwell
expresses the same dissent from Dryden's opinion concerning the merit of
Jonson's comedy, it is in very respectful terms, and with great
deference to his respected and admired friend, of whom, though he will
not say his is the best way of writing, he maintains his manner of
writing it is most excellent[18]. But the irreconcilable difference in
their taste soon after broke out in less seemly terms; for Shadwell
permitted himself to use some very irreverent expressions towards
Dryden's play of "Aureng-Zebe," in the Prologue and Epilogue to his
comedy of the "Virtuoso;" and in the Preface to the same piece he
plainly intimated, that he wanted nothing but a pension to enable him to
write as well as the poet-laureate.[19] This attack was the more
intolerable, as Dryden, in the Preface to that very play of "Aureng-Zebe,"
probably meant to include Shadwell among those contemporaries
who, even in his own judgment excelled him in comedy. In 1678 Dryden
accommodated with a prologue Shadwell's play of the "True Widow;" but to
write these occasional pieces was part of his profession, and the
circumstance does not prove that the breach between these rivals for
public applause was ever thoroughly healed; on the contrary, it seems
likely, that, in the case of Shadwell, as in that of Settle, political
hatred only gangrened a wound inflicted by literary rivalry. After their
quarrel became desperate, Dryden resumed his prologue, and adapted it to
a play by Afra Behn, called the "Widow Ranter, or Bacon in
Virginia."[20] Whatever was the progress of the dispute, it is certain
that Shadwell, as zealously attached to the Whig faction as Dryden to
the Tories, buckled on his armour among their other poetasters to
encounter the champion of royalty. His answer to "The M