Written during an outbreak of plague that occasioned the shuttering of theaters in 1665-1666, the essay functions almost like a play itself. There are five acts—as Horace sanctioned “correct” (164)—and a central plot (to determine the highest and best form of theater, with the action of the literal battle in the background juxtaposed against the rhetorical battle on the barge floating down the Thames). There is also a cast of characters: Dryden’s friends rechristened with Latinate names. These faux-Roman names lend credence and authority to their arguments, in keeping with the era’s admiration for Greco-Roman culture. The setting gives this cast an occasion to debate the competence of contemporary English writers and the state of the English theater in comparison to the revered ancients and modern European rivals.

In discussing the work of contemporary poets, Crites initially compares them to “ravens and birds of prey” (149), swooping in to the battleground in order to pluck the choicest bits of “quarry” for their badly composed poems. They are metaphorical vultures, scavenging carrion from the ground: dead matter for leaden poetry. He gets even more worked up when Lisideius agrees with him and employs another—historically relevant, culturally sensitive—metaphor when he calls for “ill poets” to be “as well silenced as seditious preachers” (149).