ABSTRACT
The exact state of the English drama at the time when John Dryden began to contribute to it, and the precise nature and relations of the phenomena presented by it during the thirty years of his activity as a playwright, are questions on which there is still room for much treatment. The fancy for rhyme in tragedy had already made itself evident, though it had not got the upper hand; and Dryden was already quite conscious of his strength in rhyme. With All for Love Dryden had reached, not merely as it may seem to some, the summit of his achievement in tragedy, but, as is hardly contestable, the limit of his experiments in it. Dryden's knowledge of the limitations of his own great powers, quite as much as any mistaken critical theorizings at the moment, would always have prevented his attempting the vast chronicle-sweep of that original.
