Dryden's claim in this essay was that poetic drama with English and Spanish influence [2] is a justifiable art form when compared to traditional French poetry.
The four speakers are Sir Robert Howard [Crites], Charles Sackville (then Lord Buckhurst) [Eugenius], Sir Charles Sedley [Lisedeius], and Dryden himself (Neander means "new man" and implies that Dryden, as a respected member of the gentry class, is entitled to join in this dialogue on an equal footing with the three older men who are his social superiors).
On the day that the English fleet encounters the Dutch at sea near the mouth of the Thames, the four friends take a barge downriver towards the noise from the battle.
Rightly concluding, as the noise subsides, that the English have triumphed, they order the bargeman to row them back upriver as they begin a dialogue on the advances made by modern civilization.
Invoking the so-called unities from Aristotle's Poetics (as interpreted by Italian and refined by French scholars over the last century), the four speakers discuss what makes a play "a just and lively imitation" of human nature in action.