Elkanah Settle

Elkanah Settle 1648-1724, English dramatist and poet. Thanks to the patronage of the earl of Rochester, Settle's heroic dramas for a time rivaled those of Dryden. His most successful play, the elaborate and bombastic Empress of Morocco (1671), provoked a long quarrel with Dryden, who satirized Settle as Doeg in Absalom and Achitophel.

Settle, Elkanah (1648–1724), the author of a series of bombastic oriental melodramas which threatened Dryden's popularity and aroused his hostility. His The Empress of Morocco (1673) had such a vogue that Dryden, with Crowne and Shadwell, wrote a pamphlet of criticism of it. Dryden satirized Settle as Doeg in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. Settle published Absalom Senior, or Achitophel Transpros'd in 1682, and Reflections on Several of Mr Dryden's Plays in 1687.

Settle, Elkanah (1648–1724), Restoration dramatist, who began his theatrical career by staging drolls at the London fairs. He then turned to playwriting, his first play, Cambyses, King of Persia (1671), being put on at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre. A second, The Empress of Morocco (also 1671), was a heroic drama first presented at Court and revived in 1673 at Dorset Garden with Betterton in the leading role. It was the first English play to be published with scenic illustrations, which have provided valuable evidence on the theatre of the time. It was parodied in a farce produced at Drury Lane towards the end of 1673. Settle wrote a number of other plays, mainly tragedies, now forgotten but successful enough in their day to enrage Dryden, who considered his own popularity at Court endangered by that of Settle and satirized him as Doeg in Absalom and Achitophel. Towards the end of his life Settle returned to Bartholomew Fair, writing and acting in drolls at Mrs Minn's (or Myn's) booth, where he is also recorded as having played a ‘dragon in green leather of his own invention’.