SHAKESPEARE:

THOMAS HEYWOOD.

.1603-1613 .died about 1650

Scottish Church.

1637

1658

.1570-1627

JOHN SUCKLING.

1609-1641

1575-1625

Civil War begins.

1642

ROBERT HERRICK,

.1591-1674

JOHN WEBSTER:

Execution of Charles.

.1649

1621-1678

1616

The Commonwealth

1649-1653

.1593-1632

JOHN FORD.

1586-1640

1642

CHAPTER IX

THE RESTORATION

I. INTRODUCTION

Political History of the Restoration Era.-The year 1660 marks the return of Charles II. to the throne which his father had lost, and the beginning of an era known as the period of the Restoration. Historically the age is in sharp contrast with the grea century that began in 1558 with the accession of Elizabeth. That epoch was, as we have seen, one of intense national and individual energy, of zealous devotion to religious and political ideas which finally involved the country in civil war. In the age of the Restoration men were weary of all this excitement and turmoil, and ready to accept any system which promised order and peace. The king himself was idle and pleasure-loving, indisposed to take the trouble to push his royal prerogative to extremes, and inclined to a do-nothing foreign policy. Under his rule England sank from the great position in European affairs which she had held under Cromwell, to that of paid ally of the French king. The reign of Charles II. was marked by such public calamities as the Great Plague in 1665, and the Fire of London in 1666; but neither these nor the misfortunes of foreign war, in the course of which the Dutch fleet entered the Thames, stirred the English people from its lethargy. Only when, after the death of the king in 1685, his brother, who succeeded him as James II., attempted to undo the work of the Reformation, did the nation rise, and, by the Revolution of 1688, set aside the male line of the House of Stuart and placed upon the throne the daughter of James II., Mary, and her husband, William of Orange.

Social and Literary Tendencies. The contrast between the age of Elizabeth and that of Charles II. is as strongly

marked in social and intellectual life. The former period was a time when the unmeasured possibilities of the new world of the Renaissance gave scope to the far-reaching desires of men. The imagination, whether dealing with knowledge as in Bacon, or with human power as in Marlowe, or with the things of faith as in Milton, took wings to itself and flew. In the Restoration era, on the contrary, men were content to remain at peace within the limits of the world of things which they could see and touch. In science they gave themselves, not to visions of all knowledge, but to patient investigation of facts immediately about them; in statecraft they imagined no Utopias, but worked out principles of practical politics and party government; in social life they had learned to fear the spirit of individualism, leading to such violent contrasts as that between Cavaliers and Puritans, and therefore tried to set up ideals of life in accordance with reason and "common-sense," to which all men should conform. The literature of the time is a faithful reflection of these tendencies. It is largely concerned with the facts of the immediate world of London, with contemporary men and politics, and with social life. And it reflects the spirit of uniformity in the agreement of writers, both in prose and poetry, upon rules and principles in accordance with which they should express themselves. The acceptance of these literary conventions, drawn from the practice of writers of the past, marks the difference between the classic age of Dryden and Pope, and the romantic epoch of Spenser and Shakespeare.

French Influence. In this difference the influence of France counted for much. There the reaction against the poetic license of the Renaissance had set in somewhat earlier. Its result is seen in the work of Corneille and Racine, who developed a drama on the lines of Latin tragedy, succeeding where the English classicists of the sixteenth century had signally failed. It must be remembered that many Englishmen of the class which cared for literature and the stage, spent years of exile in France, and naturally came to accept the principles of French taste. Through the new artistic conceptions brought back to England by the

exiles, French influence upon English literature, especially upon the English drama, was strengthened. To their notions of refinement the license of the older dramatists seemed uncouth. "I have seen Hamlet," wrote Evelyn, "but now these old plays begin to disgust this refined century, since their majesties have been so long abroad."

The Heroic Couplet.-The most striking way in which English poetry reflected the spirit of the new era, was in its substitution of a single form for the lawless variety of the age which had gone before. This form, called the heroic couplet, consisted of two pentameter lines connected by rhyme. It had been used in earlier periods, for example by Chaucer; but in his hands the couplet had not been necessarily a unit, the thought having often been drawn out into the succeeding pair of verses, with no pause at the rhyming word. The literary ideals of the Restoration may be illustrated by the comparison of a few lines from the prologue to the Canterbury Tales,

with these from the chief poet of the Restoration, John Dryden:

"A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest rang'd;
Without unspotted, innocent within,

She fear'd no danger for she knew no sin."

In the first, it is clear, the couplet exerts little control over the thought, which runs on into the second pair of verses; in the second the thought is limited and regulated by the acceptance of a precise and narrow form; and this limitation and regulation were the chief qualities of Restoration poetry.

II. JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)

Dryden's Early Life.-Dryden was born in 1631 at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, his parents being of the upper middle class, and of Puritan sympathies. He was sent to Westminster School, and thence, in 1650, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained seven years. During this time his father died, leaving him a small property. His first important verse was an elegy on the death of Cromwell, written in 1658. Two years later, however, Dryden, with the mass of Englishmen, had become an ardent royalist; and he welcomed the return of Charles, in a poem in couplets called "Astræa Redux"-("The Return of the Goddess of Justice"). In 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, a woman of higher rank than his own. It may have been the desirability of increasing his income that, just before this marriage, drove Dryden to write his first comedy, The Wild Gallant. It certainly was his accumulating financial necessities that kept him writing for the stage constantly down to 1681. During this period his only poem of importance was "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), ("The Wonderful Year"), a chronicle of events of the preceding year, which had been distinguished by several victories at sea over the Dutch, and by the great London fire.

Dryden's Satires.-In 1681 Dryden began the succession of political poems which have generally been accounted his best works. The times were troubled. The court and the country were divided between the partisans of the king's brother, who, though a Papist, was recognized as the heir to the throne, and those of the king's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, whom certain persons zealous for the Protestant faith were disposed to set up as a rival candidate. The leader of the latter party was the Earl of Shaftesbury. In the Bible story of the revolt of Absalom against King David, Dryden found an apt parallel to existing circumstances in England; and his satire Absalom and Achitophel exposed the relations of Monmouth, the prince, and Shaftesbury, the evil counsellor, with merciless humor. The poem became im