Excerpt from The English Heroic Play: A Critical Description of the Rhymed Tragedy of the Restoration

This essay was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Columbia University. A study of the English tragic drama of the latter half of the seventeenth century falls naturally into three parts: first, a critical survey of the plays with the object of determining the type, second, an inquiry into foreign origins and parallels, third, a history of the type in England, the occasion for its introduction, and the causes and stages of its decline.

The second and third of these parts, the research for which has already in large measure been done, I have reserved for future publication. The present thesis is a partial introduction to this more comprehensive work, and deals closely with the most famous genre of the period, commonly called the heroic drama.

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