The Rehearsal (play)

The Rehearsal was a satirical play aimed specifically at John Dryden and generally at the sententious and overly ambitious theatre of the Restoration tragedy. The play was staged in 1671 and published anonymously in 1672, but it is certainly by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and others. Several people have been suggested as collaborators, including Samuel Butler of Hudibras fame, Martin Clifford, and Thomas Sprat, a Royal Society founder and later Bishop of Rochester.

The play concerns a playwright named Bayes attempting to stage a play. The play he is going to put on is made up almost entirely of excerpts of existing heroic dramas. The name "Bayes" indicates the poet laureate. The previous poet laureate had been William Davenant, and Davenant did stage spectacles and plays with exceptionally bombastic speeches from the heroes (e.g. The Siege of Rhodes). However, the poet laureate at the time of the play was Dryden, and most of the excerpts in the play-within-a-play are liftings from Dryden. In particular, Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, which had been his most popular play (and the one whose preface had defined "heroic drama"), is the play Buckingham parodies. Dryden had written other heroic drama aside from The Conquest of Granada. In fact, he had been so prolific in that vein that Martin Clifford accused him of "stealing from himself." The reason that The Conquest of Granada was such a target, however, is the Preface to the printed version of The Conquest of Granada. There, Dryden scolds his fellow dramatists for having immoral heroes and low sentiments, and he proposes a new type of theatre, the heroic drama. Buckingham's play is, in a sense, the old theatre biting him back. In The Rehearsal, a director/author attempts to put on a new play, and he lectures his actors and critics with impossible and absurd instructions on the importance of what they are doing.

...
Wikipedia