AN UNHEROIC DRAMATIST
ROGER BOYLE is one of the great bores of literature, and it can hardly have been a labour of love for Mr. Clark to edit for the first time these eight ponderous heroic plays, hardly lightened by two attempts at comedy. Yet all admirers of the period will be grateful : there is a peculiar satisfaction in seeing one more gap in Restoration scholarship filled with such immense effi- ciency: no crack between the bricks. Nat for them the rather hollow excuse that Orrery was the pioneer of heroic drama in England. They will read with gorged satisfaction that one of these plays, The Tragedy of Zoroastres, has never before been printed and that Orrery's first play (Mr. Clark leaves us in no doubt of this) The Generall has been previously printed only in a private edition of eighty copies. Another great booming bogus piece, The Tragedy of King Saul, is added to the Orrery canon for the first time. All this, with the really magnificent notes on Restoration stage-craft„ :s a not unworthy harvest of eight years' labour.
Roger Boyle (let us extend praise as far as it will go) was not always a worse poet than was Lee in his earliest plays : there are a few charming lines to be unearthed in The Generall (Mr.
. Clark Curiously prefers the duller, maturer, emptier Henry thE' Fifth):: ,
• Death which mankind in such high awe does- keel') Can only hold us in eternal sleep,
; And if a life after this life remains,
Sure to our loves belong those happier, plains. There in blest fields Ill pass the endless hours,
And him I crown with love, I'll crown with flowers.
It is very very minor poetry, of course, but it does shine out among the heroic sentiments. Otherwise the Chief pleasure in this his best play is in the period note. Surfeited with action on the screen, one finds a curious charm in the passivity and irrelevance of a scene which opens : ' Filaclin : Lett us then of our mistresses discourse.
Roger Boyle was not the man for heroic drama. Dryden with his inalterable belief in authority which took him logically by way of Cromwell to the Catholic Church, yes : Lee with the turbulent generous mind that brought .him to Bedlam, yes :-• but we are aware of too great a gap between the man and his poetry when we get as low as Settle, and Boyle presents us with. the same incongruity. Mr. Clark has written his life in greater .
detail though with infinitely less charm than Eustace Budgell L (to whose eighteenth-century biography he might surely, have paid the tribute of a footnote) and the portrait he rather stiffly draws is that of a very politic man, a man who lived on the dubious borderline between prudence and treachery. He ' played no part in the Civil War in England,- being fortunate '. enough to be occupied in Ireland against the Catholic rebels : , on the King's death he .began to, correspond- with- Charles Burnet, if not his chaplain Morrice, saw_ through his pretence to religion, and there is one moment in The Generall when a somewhat similar dramatic situation allows a direct comparison with Dryden. It will be remembered how Don Sebastian dealt with the theme of suicide : ; Brutus and Cato might discharge their Souls; 37- =
And give them furlo's for another world : But we like Centries are oblig'd to stand In starless nights, and wait th' appointed hour.
but .Cromwell got possession of the letters and in a remarkable scene which Mr Clark might have Printed fin detail pre- sented Jilin with the Choice between the Tower and a comnnd in Ireland. .Eoyle, of _course,.:iook. the command, and on Cromykell's death_began :again his politic moves. But he was. forestidled_bly Monck . the patriot always moves. f-astet_than . the _politic. _Nevertheless he _became a. friend of the _King, ' wrote plays at the. Royal command .and when he. had _the .gout, served in' Ite.land, intrigued against.. Ormonde, and died unlamented by Burnet at the age of 59.
A man quite remarkably. free, from the impediments of-friend- ship,„ how. can he do else but write a little hollowly on that favourite heroic theme?. _ _ But that Tway be better understood Knowe friendshipp greater tye than blood. . A sister is a name Mint not contend
With the more high and 'sacred name of friend: . _ But hear the politic accents of Burnees "very fickle and false man" in the character of Altemera : When I am forc'd of two. ills one to choose,. 'Tis virtue then the greatest to refuse." When in this straight I by the Gods am plac'd, I'll rather cease to Live than live unchaste. - .
Without religion and without friendship Orrery tried to write , heroic dramas : the succession of plays, one imitated from the other, soon palled, even on Pepys, and_ he tried, his hand at : comedy. Guzman is quite, unreadable buffpone,ry, but , of Mr. Anthony it is just possible to say that it is as good as the worst of D'prfey. He was, if that is .,in .hi favour, a clean writer : but then he seems to have had as little passion as he
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