SOURCE: Brown, Richard. “The Dryden-Lee Collaboration: Oedipus and The Duke of Guise.” Restoration 9, no. 1 (1985): 12-25.

In the essay below, Brown focuses on two plays written collaboratively by Lee and John Dryden—Oedipus and The Duke of Guise—maintaining that Lee's contribution to the plays was every bit as great as that of his more famous contemporary.

The fruits of the John Dryden-Nathaniel Lee dramatic collaboration, Oedipus (1678) and The Duke of Guise (1682), have met disparagement and neglect in our century.¹ Oedipus is supposed “an incredibly sensational melodrama,” a “travesty” of Sophocles; The Duke is sometimes called an embarrassing Tory propaganda play, in which Lee abandoned his Whig principles either in despair or under Dryden's domination.² Still, both works attracted wide notice in the Restoration, Oedipus in part for a reason of permanent interest: the place of such lurid emotionalism in the history of tragedy (recommended, in Dryden's Preface, by...