ABSTRACT
CHASE’s book has the virtues of very wide coverage, and extensively documents the ideals and conflicts portrayed in the heroic play. Some would still follow him in seeing all the plays as uncritically celebratory, but few would now accept his historical methodology, for he is insensitive to evolution and change, and uninterested in intellectual and political context. He treats heroic drama as a stable, monolithic genre, displaying diversity (in, for example, the variable value placed on chastity) but not chronological development. He does not substantially distinguish the early efforts of William D’Avenant and Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery from the very different kind of drama introduced by John Dryden, and even yokes John Crowne’s Caligula (1698), a Whig celebration of the Glorious Revolution, with the royalist plays of the 1660s.
