The Conquest of Granada

The Conquest of Granada is a Restoration era stage play, a two-part tragedy written by John Dryden that was first acted in 1670 and 1671 and published in 1672. It is notable both as a defining example of the "heroic drama" pioneered by Dryden, and as the subject of later satire.

The plot deals with the Spanish conquest of Granada in 1492 and the fall of Muhammad XII of Granada, the last Islamic ruler on the Iberian Peninsula.

The original 1670 production by the King's Company featured Edward Kynaston as "Mahomet Boabdelin, last King of Granada," Charles Hart as Almanzor, Nell Gwyn as Alimahide, Rebecca Marshall as Lyndaraxa, Elizabeth Boutell as Bezayda, Michael Mohun as Abdemelech, William Cartwright as Abenamar, and William Wintershall as Selin. The Prologue to Part 1 was spoken in the theatre by Nell Gwyn.

The play was revived in the early 1690s.

Dryden wrote the play in closed couplets of iambic pentameter. He proposed, in the Preface to the printed play, a new type of drama that celebrated heroic figures and actions in a meter and rhyme that emphasized the dignity of the action. Dryden's innovation is a notable turn in poetic diction in England, as he was attempting to find an English meter and vocabulary that could correspond to the ancient Latin heroic verse structure. The closed iambic couplet is, indeed, referred to as the "heroic couplet" (although couplets had certainly been used before, and with a heroic connotation, as Samuel Butler's parody in tetrameter couplets, Hudibras shows). As for subject matter, the hero of a heroic drama must demonstrate, Dryden said, the Classical virtues of strength and decisiveness. Inasmuch as the British Restoration stage was already under attack for the licentiousness of its comedies and the example set by its lewd actresses, Dryden was attempting to turn the tide to admirable subjects.

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