Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie

This one is weird. Four London dramatists with Classical names—Neander, Lisideius, Crites, and Eugenius—get in a barge and go floating down the Thames on June 3, 1665. They get in the boat so they can hear the naval battle going on between the English and the Dutch at Lowestoft, but then instead of paying attention to the sound of cannons (the battle is never mentioned in the course of the Essay), they argue about the role of verisimilitude in contemporary English Drama. Topics include:

• How artificial (=contorted?) the syntax of plays should be
• Whether multiple plots are okay and if so what they're supposed to accomplish
• Whether blank verse is better than rhyme, or whether rhyme is better than blank verse
• Whether one character telling another to shut the door is properly part of the dramatic action or not and so whether it should or shouldn't be in verse

I'd forgotten that the Essay isn't just Dryden saying what he thinks plays should do—because he has four different characters debating with each other, they're able to offer different opinions and interpretations of similar themes (number of plots, number of humors in the various characters, degree of artificiality in language) without having to come up with any single opinion. So that's nice, although I think a lot of critics who cite Dryden quickly (particularly Jonson critics, who like to dwell on how Neander thinks Jonson's not quite in Shakespeare's league) forget that it isn't just Dryden talking: that he's representing a less individuated and more social picture of what 1660's London dramatists were doing. So basically, I guess, my reading of the Essay is just a reminder to myself not to over-simplify when treating criticism that everyone refers to but doesn't read fully. (Sadly, there's almost no other reason to read the Essay. It's dreadfully boring. But those who cite it without reading it through—see me, spring of 2008—get a distorted sense of the opinions and attitudes it offers about the state of the play.)

Eighteenth-Century Thought

Turns out, the best way to read a 900-page summary of eighteenth-century English theology and moral philosophy is to put it on an iPod (in distressingly robotic Mac synthesizer voice) and go walking in the woods.  Finished the first volume that way this afternoon.  

So far I'm interested in reading more of Hume and Paine, but the rest of that volume bores the hell out of me.  I suspected it bored Stephen too—he starts including unnecessary extra sentences where he calls certain writers immature, insults their prose, notes they were only writing for advancement in the church or would rather have been doing chemical experiments instead or had fun evicting gypsies from around St. Paul's in such-and-such-a-year.  

I took pictures of spores, molds and fungi, too.  

"Great forces may work slowly; and it is only after many disturbances and long continued oscillations that the world is moved from one position of equilibrium to another. Progress is the rare exception: races may remain in the lowest barbarism, or their development be arrested at some more advanced stage during periods far surpassing that of recorded history; actual decay may alternate with progress, and even true progress implies some admixture of decay."  (Leslie Stephen, The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, v.1, ch.1 "Introductory," sec. 17 "summary," page 17)