All for Love by John Dryden
Like the Folklore and Fable
of last week's volume, the Modern English Drama
collected in volume eighteen actually represents a great diversity of
work. The plays range almost two centuries, from the Restoration to the
Romantic era. There are comedies and tragedies, prose dramas and verse,
and some seem written more for the page than the stage.
Of the authors represented, only Dryden has appeared earlier in the Classics -- as the translator of the Aeneid. Both that translation and his play All For Love include lengthy prefaces, and it may be that Dryden is more impressive as a critic -- even of his own work -- than as an artist. The preface to All For Love makes a fitting opening to this survey of post-Elizabethan drama, because it states directly the problem all these writers face:
In my style, I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose. I hope I need not to explain myself, that I have not copied my author servilely: Words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages; but it is almost a miracle that much of his language remains so pure; and that he who began dramatic poetry amongst us, untaught by any, and as Ben Jonson tells us, without learning, should by the force of his own genius perform so much, that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come after him.
I have yet to make sense of the order of the Classics, which feature Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans in the 46th and 47th volumes, but includes Dryden here in volume 18. Nonetheless, reading through the Classics in the way that I have encourages one to see certain works within the context of the literary traditions from which they emerged. Dryden himself demands such consideration with his choice of material in All For Love:
The death of Antony and Cleopatra is a subject which has been treated by the greatest wits of our nation, after Shakespeare; and by all so variously, that their example has given me the confidence to try myself in this bow of Ulysses amongst the crowd of suitors, and, withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the mark. I doubt not but the same motive has prevailed with all of us in this attempt; I mean the excellency of the moral: For the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love; and their end accordingly was unfortunate.
This is a sly rhetorical move: is it really the the excellency of the moral
that motivates, or the chance to take one's own measures?
Of course, the answer may be a bit of both. The question, then, becomes
-- where does he measure? In this case, I'm still not sure. Dryden was
a master of the heroic couplet (into which he translated the Aeneid),
but here he writes in blank verse, and the result is often quite fine.
Here is Antony's general, Ventidius, rousing him to battle:
No; 'tis you dream; you sleep away your hours
In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy.
Up, up, for honour's sake; twelve legions wait you,
And long to call you chief: By painful journeys
I led them, patient both of heat and hunger,
Down form the Parthian marches to the Nile.
'Twill do you good to see their sunburnt faces,
Their scarred cheeks, and chopt hands: there's virtue in them.
They'll sell those mangled limbs at dearer rates
Than you trim bands can buy.
Still, I was occasionally bored by this play, as I never am by Shakespeare, and at no point was I moved in the way I am each time I read the last act of Lear or Othello. It's an unfair comparison, of course, even if Dryden asks for it.
The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
The two plays that follow Dryden's in this volume are written in
unmetered prose, which gives them a less anxious place within the
dramatic tradition. They also happen to be comedies, thought farce
is perhaps the better term. The day I spent earlier this week reading The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer
was one of the most enjoyable in recent memory. As with any good farce,
there is lots of rather silly word play. Mistaken identity abounds. The
plot is advanced through subterfuge and, where necessary, bald
coincidence, until the end, when the guy gets the girl. And it's all a
lot of fun. I'm tempted just to leave it at that, but I will say that
these plays also reminded me that sometimes an author chooses his
subject not for taking measure but for giving pleasure.
The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Blot in the Scutcheon by Robert Browning
Manfred by Lord Byron
The volume ends with plays by three Romantic poets. Two of the three -- Shelley's The Cenci and Byron's Manfred -- weren't really intended for performance. The Cenci reads less like a closet drama than Manfred does, but Shelley must have known that it's subject matter -- the plot centers on an act of incestous rape -- would keep it off the stage. Both plays are best read as long Romantic poems. Manfred bears resemblances to Faust (which comes in the next volume), in its treatment of a man who seeks superhuman, alchemical knowledge and ultimately comes to pay for this desire. Both plays have the dark, gothic feel that makes Byron's and Shelley's brand of Romanticism so appealing (to me, at least).
Browning, on the other hand, wrote his plays with the stage in mind, and A Blot in the Scutcheon is a wonderful dramatic tragedy. I don't know if it's much performed these days, but it ought to be. I wrote earlier that Dryden's play didn't move me in the way that tragedy sometimes can. But I didn't fully realize this until a few days later, when I found myself crying as I read the last few lines of Browning's play.
--CRB, May 24, 2007
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