Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert's sister and daughter of the 1st earl
of Berkshire, on the 1st of December 1663. Lady Elizabeth's reputation
was somewhat compromised before this union, which was not a happy one,
and there is some evidence for the scandal in a letter written by her
before her marriage to Philip, 2nd earl of Chesterfield. _The Indian
Queen_ was a great success, one of the greatest since the reopening of
the theatres. This was in all likelihood due much less to the heroic
verse and the exclusion of comic scenes from the tragedy than to the
magnificent scenic accessories--the battles and sacrifices on the stage,
the spirits singing in the air, and the god of dreams ascending through
a trap. The novelty of these Indian spectacles, as well as of the Indian
characters, with the splendid Queen Zempoalla, acted by Mrs Marshall in
a real Indian dress of feathers presented to her by Mrs Aphra Behn, as
the centre of the play, was the chief secret of the success of _The
Indian Queen_. These melodramatic properties were so marked a novelty
that they could not fail to draw the town. Dryden was tempted to return
to tragedy; he followed up _The Indian Queen_ with _The Indian Emperor,
or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards_, which was acted in 1665,
and also proved a success.

But Dryden was not content with writing tragedies in rhymed verse. He
took up the question of the propriety of rhyme in serious plays
immediately after the success of _The Indian Queen_, in the preface to
an edition (1664) of _The Rival Ladies_. In that first statement of his
case, he considered the chief objection to the use of rhyme, and urged
his chief argument in its favour. Rhyme was not natural, some people had
said; to which he answers that it is as natural as blank verse, and that
much of its unnaturalness is not the fault of the rhyme but of the
writer, who has not sufficient command of language to rhyme easily. In
favour of rhyme he has to say that it at once stimulates the
imagination, and prevents it from being too discursive in its flights.

During the Great Plague, when the theatres were closed, and Dryden was
living at Charlton, Wiltshire, at the seat of his father-in-law, the
earl of Berkshire, he occupied a considerable part of his time in
thinking over the principles of dramatic composition, and threw his
conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an _Essay of
Dramatick Poesie_ and published in 1668. The essay takes