Volume 49, Number 14 · September 26, 2002
Some Advice for Poets
By James Fenton
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since. It is not that poets have not tried. On the contrary, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries innumerable verse dramas were written and indeed performed, but none of this survives in the English repertoire. Nor is this very likely to be a case of unjust neglect. Classical companies have often searched for abandoned theatrical masterpieces from this fallow period, but have failed to come up with much of interest after Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1682).
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