During which age did Heroic tragedy flourish?
Answers
Heroic Tragedy is a name given to the form of tragedy which had some vogue in the beginning of the Restoration period (1660-1700). It was drama in the epic mode – grand, rhetorical and declamatory at its best and often bombastic at its worst. Its themes were love and honour, and it was considerably influenced by French classical drama, especially by the works of Corneille and Racine. John Dryden thus defined it in the preface to The Conquest of Granada (1672) : “ An heroic play ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem ; and consequently … love and valour ought to be the subject of it”. In these plays, as in an epic, the protagonist is a large-scale warrior whose actions involve the fate of an empire. A noble hero and an equally noble heroine are typically placed in a situation in which their passionate love is in conflict with the demands of honour and with the hero’s patriotic duty to his country. When the conflict ends in a disaster, the effect is a tragedy