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Giles's-in-the-Fields are the graves of George Chapman, who translated Homer; Andrew Marvel, who wrote such lovely lyrics; Rich, the manager, who brought out "The Beggar's Opera," and James Shirley, the fine dramatist and poet, whose immortal couplet has often been murmured in such solemn haunts as these: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.
To reproduce the form and pressure of the Thirty Years' War, at one of its most exciting moments, was an alluring problem to a dramatist who had written a history of the struggle, and who had always felt that his strength lay in the historical drama. Serious musings upon 'Wallenstein' began, as we have seen, in the autumn of 1796.
Robertson the historian and Home the dramatist were now among his neighbors, and no doubt used their influence in getting the young clergyman a living. He finally settled at Inveresk, where his life was a very pleasant round of cares and duties. Hume, Adam Smith, Blair, Smollett, and Robertson now figure largely in his personal record, so that he had no lack of genial companions.
As he studies, too, he will perhaps wish with me that some great dramatist may hereafter take Eugippius's quaint and rough legend, and shape it into immortal verse. For tragic, in the very nighest sense, the story is throughout.
Perhaps in his case the gifts of imagination and invention were sometimes dulled because he was to such a great extent an adapter. The idea of the novelist may inspire a dramatist with an idea for a play, but the novelist's treatment of his idea hardly ever supplies the dramatist with useful materials. We have had scores of radically bad plays adapted by clever men from good novels.
He viewed the drama with all the reverence of an ancient Greek. On his tombstone he caused himself to be described as "Dramatist, novelist, journalist." "Dramatist" he put first of all, even after long experience had shown him that his greatest power lay in writing novels. But in this early period he still hoped for fame upon the stage. It was not a fortunate moment for dramatic writers.
We may now turn to the second of the two themes with which Dryden is mainly occupied in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. What are the conventional restrictions that surround the dramatist, and how far are they of binding force?
The dramatist has verily to BUILD, is committed to architecture, to construction at any cost; to driving in deep his vertical supports and laying across and firmly fixing his horizontal, his resting pieces at the risk of no matter what vibration from the tap of his master-hammer.
Practically all of his earlier writings, like the short story, The Sadducee of Amsterdam , as well as the essays entitled Public Characters , On the Philosophy of History , and Contemporaries , are evidence of the intense interest of the author in the social, philosophical, and political leaders of the time. They are preliminary studies, to be used by him presently in his work as a dramatist.
Such a patient recasting of material for the ends of verbal exactness and accuracy suggests ways in which the imagination may deal with characters and scenes in order to stimulate and foster its own activity. It is well to recall at frequent intervals the story we read in some dramatist, poet, or novelist, in order that the imagination may set it before us again in all its rich vitality.
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