The center of discussion for this essay is that of the Heroic Play. Most people would never have heard of this type of play let alone have read one. The device used in this type of play is the heroic couplet which today would seem a very strange form to use for a drama of any description. Many of us would dismiss those plays as pure nonsense, yet no matter how absurd they may be to us now, they were immensely popular and much requested during their day.

We should not immediately condemn the method or form in which these plays were written. As Dryden stated, “let every man enjoy his taste”. His statement was made more in reference to the tragedy style, but the sentiment still applies to other forms.

Considering the style, we may ask ourselves: What experience or enjoyment are we to expect from such a play? When it comes to the heroic play, we cannot expect to necessarily see the same approach to life today as playwrights did in the seventeenth century. In fact, it will not be the language, but the device used that takes us aback.

All this in our stride, if we come to this type of play with an open mind and can restrain the desire to criticize (too quickly), we may well find something to our liking.

Generally, heroic dramatists wrote according to a fixed requirement or set of rules you might say, but they also enjoyed the exploitation of the art form, namely the heroic couplet. They considered a play as a lively imitation of human nature, although at times we may find the incidents quite unbelievable because of the almost impossible situations the characters have been placed in. Even so, their emotions are not altogether unbelievable and there is plenty of conflict between characters in the play.

Dryden, a great proponent of the heroic play stated, “an heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem consequently Love and Valour ought to be the subject of it”. He also authored several essays defending the use of heroic couplets in drama.

For readers today, it is the rime that causes the obstacle. Simply stated, people do not converse in rime, but this is one of the virtues of a heroic play in celebrating heroic virtues, those of Love and Valour.

For the heroic play itself, the skill lies with the poet-dramatist, and the rime needs to come as natural as possible so that the characters rise above it all and bring the audience into the realm of poetry without realizing it. As we would know from other discussions, poetry is used for the natural expression of intense emotion. Audiences at this time were used to this manner of expression and would have expected it, along with extravagant displays associated with the presentation itself.

Even though the heroic play was popular, there was a shift away from it to the more popular verse drama (sometimes referred to as poetic drama). It was in some ways similar but did not utilize the heroic couplet. Some of the most popular dramas, those by Shakespeare, did not use the heroic couplet. In fact, there is only one occurrence of them appearing, and those two couplets appeared in Othello but used in a very different way.

The form of the heroic couplet in drama was very different to that perfected by Pope. Pope’s couplets were generally self-contained in that each couplet represented a single thought, idea or statement. This style was unsuitable for drama. Many reasons have been proffered for this, the main one being that the attention given to a written poem is not the same as that given to a speech in theater. The theater form does not need to be and cannot be as intense. If so, the audience will be lost. Pope’s couplets are too well defined and too precise for dramatic theatre.

Variations were introduced into the heroic plays to distract the audience from the monotony of form and rime. One can imagine the effect of the continual assault of rimed heroic verse, something to be avoided at all costs.

Such variations may have included not using perfect or full rimes, the use of a single unriming verse between couplets, and at times the introduction of the alexandrine which at this time was the only allowable inclusion in heroic couplets. These were popularly used to take away the monotony of pure heroic couplets and the expected rime. In certain cases, the humble quatrain was introduced to relieve the tension.

It was the point when verse forms began departing from the heroic couplet to blank verse, but blank verse was considered too luxuriant for the stage because it could run for many lines. Either the reader was likely to run out of breath, or the audience would be bored to death, at least fall asleep or walk out, none of which was desired.

However, the heroic couplet in its strict sense was not appropriate for the stage due to its sense and the requirement of balancing each verse. The medium is too harsh and strict to be able to convey the rapid changes required for emotion and passion for theater. The stage form is meant to move the audience and imitate conversation. Flexibility is the key where the emphasis arrives on the words meant to convey the thought or feeling. Thus, there must be the ability to vary the pace of the verse which the strict heroic couplet was incapable of accommodating if there were not for the use of variations.

Excepting all the criticism of heroic plays, they still hold great value for us in the development of stage drama. If one does not experiment, one achieves nothing. Not only do we learn from their successes and failures, but we also obtain a glimpse of how much audiences have changed, their likes and dislikes. We may also gain a little knowledge of the social conditions and expectations of the time.

It is surprising, the ingenuity of the human mind and creativity. There have been some attempts to revive poetic drama, not all heroic, but that written in verse rather than prose, or it may be a combination of both. Unfortunately, there has not been any remarkable success in this effort.

Nevertheless, heroic plays have their part to play even if only historically, and we would all benefit, especially poets and dramatists, to revisit these plays at least once to see what we may be able to use ourselves … or steal.

Ferrick Gray