The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden.
§ 25. Ravenscroft
Edward Ravenscroft, though chiefly a writer of comedy, produced a tragi-comedy called King Edgar and Alfreda (1677); and a tragedy, The Italian Husband, acted 1697, and full of horrors. It was probably suggested by a tale in Thomas Wright’s The Glory of God’s Revenge against Murther and Adultery (1685). Mrs. Aphra Behn, though principally known through the medium of her comedies and novels, wrote several tragedies, the first of which, Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge (1677), was altered from Marlowe’s Lust’s Dominion. Mrs. Manley, who achieved an unenviable reputation as a novelist, also produced several lurid tragedies, of which the first, The Royal Mischief, appeared in 1696. Thomas Rymer, author of The Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and of other critical work, in which he attacked the Elizabethan tragic poets, chiefly on account of their failure to observe the unities, published, in 1678, one of the last rimed tragedies in Edgar, or the English Monarch, which strictly observes the classic rules.