John Dryden: All for Love, or the World Well Lost

Dryden himself gives “tragedy” as the play’s genre on the title-page of the 1678-edition, and adds: “Written in the Imitation of Shakespeare’s Stile [sic! – “style”]”. Indeed, Dryden also consulted other Shakespearean plays than Antony and Cleopatra, though All for Love is primarily based on that tragedy. There are so many differences between Dryden’s and Shakespeare’s approach that All for Love is undoubtedly an independent play, not only putting the emphases elsewhere but locating the basic conflict (the ‘reason’ for tragedy) in a by far more straightforward manner and using a by far more limited number of characters, some of them made almost protagonists (cf. Ventidius and Dolabella). One could say that the

“imitation” (the ‘following’) of Shakespeare means that Dryden wished to write the story of Antony and Cleopatra as Shakespeare would write it, not at the beginning, but at the end, of the 17th century, in a more “polite” and “refined” age, observing some important theatrical conventions (especially the three unities). Dryden “translated” Shakespeare into the language, the fundamental categories and the manners of the Restoration. And, by the standards he largely established himself (i.e. by his own standards), he created a masterpiece.

Dryden, the conscientious philologist, also gives his non-Shakespearean sources in the Preface to the play: Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594, revised in 1607, a play dealing with Cleopatra after Antony’s death), Sir Charles Sedley’s Antony and Cleopatra (performed ten months before Dryden’s play, 12 February, 1677), Plutarch’s Life of Antony (from which Shakespeare took the narrative line as well), Dio’s Roman History and Appian’s Civil Wars. In this Preface, he also talks contemptuously about Racine’s Phaedra (which had been published only 8 months before All for Love went to the press), pointing out that especially the misunderstanding, at the end of the play, between Theseus and Hyppolytus is

169

Back to the Contents



highly implausible, and so is Hypolitus’s death (Poseidon-Neptune swallowing him up).

Indeed, Dryden allows more to happen on stage than Corneille or Racine ever could: e.g.

Ventidius’s and Antony’s suicides by the sword happen in front of us, an act of violence French classicism could never afford. Racine does not go beyond Phaedra’s death on stage, and even then it is caused by poison (roughly the way Cleo kills herself)

Dryden – although he is never explicit on the actual time the action requires (and, indeed, there are two battles squeezed into the plot) – has to locate everything in Alexandria, more precisely into Cleo’s palace. He does apologise for this in the Preface, himself being afraid that to bring Octavia and Antony’s two little daughters to Egypt is a great ‘poetic licence’ – but rules demand it. The plot is by far more straightforward than in Shakespeare’s play: Dryden starts after the defeat at Actium and in Act II (lines 250-310) he uses the quarrel between Antony and Cleo to recount, as if in ‘a nutshell’, the previous events (including Fulvia’s death, the event Shakespeare uses as a starting-point). Dryden starts with a repentant Antony, piously fasting and praying in the temple until Ventidius comes (who has a very minor role in Shakespeare, as the conqueror of the Parthians) and shakes Antony up and persuades him to be the honourable general again. From this time on, Antony, throughout the play, will be wavering between duty (valour) (represented by Octavia and his two daughters, i.e. family ties – Octavius Ceasar is not even a character in the play and he is only mentioned by Octavia a few times) and his love for Cleopatra, which is, once again, more ‘honourable’

than erotic. It is primarily the rich, even spicy eroticism, the combination of an almost orgasmic love with the motif of death, which has been exorcised from Shakespeare’s play:

Shakespeare saw love and death as hopelessly intertwined, death being a climax of the erotic experience; Dryden creates the primary tension between love and duty (cf. Antony’s exclamation in V, 159-160: “Is there left / A possibility of aid from valour?”, when valour is explicitly thematised) and treats death as a kind of solution. Interestingly, in Act I, line 220, it is precisely Octavia who is associated with non-being in the sense that Octavia is allowed to hold Antony only after her husband’s death, and even then only in the form of his material

‘residues’, while it is suggested that Cleo’s life ends with Antony’s and that their souls cannot be possessed by anyone: ANTONY: “Some few days hence [...] When thou’rt contracted in thy narrow urn / Shrunk to a few cod ashes. Then Octavia / (For Cleopatra will not live to see it), / Octavia then will bear thee in her widowed hand to Ceasar; / Ceasar will weep, the crocodile will weep, / To see his rival of the universe / Lie still and peaceful then.” Love is interpreted in a highly Platonic way (which, in itself, is not without erotic overtones): in Act II, line 253-255 Antony makes a clear reference to Plato’s Symposium: “If I mix a lie / With any truth, reproach me freely with it; / Else favour me with silence”. (In the Symposium it is Alcibiades [hero of Plutarch’s Lives] who, when describing his love for Socrates, pleads: “If I say anything which is not true, you may interrupt me if you will, and say ‘that’s a lie’” (trans.

by B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed., Oxford, 1953, I, 547-548). The Symposium describes three ascending levels of love: the first, physical and romantic, only for a single person; the second is intellectual and is for many people, and the third is spiritual for an object of absolute and of divine value (the ‘eidos’). It seems that in order to justify Antony’s neglect of duty, Dryden wishes to imply that the Roman hero’s love towards Cleopatra is of the third kind in the Platonic sequence and Octavia only represents – in Dolabella’s words – a “mean”, i.e. “She’s neither too submissive / Nor yet too haughty” (III, lines 269-270), which is not enough for a man who is, even acc. to Aristotle, an example of megalopsychia (Lat.

magnamitas, ‘greatness of the soul’). It is in Aristotle’s Niccomachian Ethics that we find the description of the man who simply deserves a great passion, and for that passion, of a divine kind, the partner is only Cleo. Yet this, of course, deprives the quality of the attachment from the directly sensual. Still, Antony is the perfect hero of tragedy for Dryden, since in his character good and bad traits are typically ‘mixed’; Ventidius says (Act III, line 49-51) about

Antony: “His virtues are so mingled with his crimes, / As would confound their choice to punish one / And not reward the other”, while Antony tells Octavia: “For I can ne’r be conquered but by love / And you [Octavia] do all for duty” (III, 316).

Moreover, in Shakespeare we see the expression of love on both sides, e.g. Cleo’s sudden shifts of passion, her humiliation of the messenger (whom she once kicks, once rewards, depending on what he says about Octavia’s “complexion”), her desperation, her being full of hot desire, often finding an outlet in powerful metaphors. In Dryden, Cleopatra (as many of the other characters) tends to analyse her feelings instead of actually living or performing them. “My love’s a noble madness / Which shows the cause deserved it.

Moderate sorrow / Fits vulgar love, and for a vulgar man; / But I have loved with such transcendent passion, / I soared at first quite out of reason’s view, / And now I am lost above it”. (II, lines 16-22) That the basis of comparison is reason is highly characteristic and it is, of course, one thing to say that one is mad and to behave like a madwoman. It is generally true that while in Shakespeare metaphors fight (and annihilate each other), in Dryden abstract principles are at war, e.g. VENTIDIUS: “Justice and pity both plead Octavia / For Cleopatra, neither. / One would be ruined with you, but she first / Had ruined you; the other you have ruined, / And yet she would preserve you” (III, 341-346).

Antony’s wavering takes the following course: he is persuaded by Ventidius to fight but he cannot be persuaded to leave Cleo: the negotiation between Antony, Cleo and Ventidius in Act II is almost a trial-scene, one of the best of the play – yet in Dryden they negotiate and analyse, while in Shakespeare there is a combat of “super-metaphors”. At the beginning of Act III, reconciliation between the two lovers (“Mars and Venus”) seems to be perfect, in roughly the geometrical middle of the play. Then Ventidius, who never ceases to try to “save”

Antony form the evils of the “whore”, brings Dolabella, Antony’s “bosom friend” into play (and, thus, into the play, a character Shakespeare first ‘uses’ in Ceasar’s train in Act III, Scene 12, to make him reappear, for not more than “Ceasar, I shall” in V.1 and his longer exchange with Cleo is only in V.2, – he is the one who tells Cleo that Ceasar wishes to abuse her and her children). In All for Love, Dolabella introduces, in turn, Octavia and the children: Antony melts and decides to leave Egypt. However, he asks Dolabella (one time also Cleo’s admirer) to say “farewell” to the Egyptian Queen ‘in his stead’ and this ‘mission’ proves to be too successful: Dolabella gets seduced by Cleo’s ‘poison’ (beauty), while Cleo pretends (in careful calculation) to be falling in love with him. Antony is furious, Octavia gets offended and leaves, Alexas, Cleo’s false and lying servant is called as a witness, Dolabella finally leaves, while Antony and Cleopatra are enemies again.

Without any preparation or particular explanation, Antony, at the beginning of Act V, is at war with Ceasar again and this time on sea he loses (this we find in Shakespeare, too).

Antony, having lost, decides to defend the city (together with Ventidius) to the last drop of his blood, when Alexas brings the news of Cleopatra’s death. This makes everything meaningless for Antony and when the news of Ceasar’s approach arrives, he commits suicide, to be attended, very quickly, by Cleo. They make it up and before Ceasar would break in through the door, Cleo takes her famous snakes (“the aspics”) in this play, too.

There are some fine metaphors in Dryden, as well, e.g. “Jealousy is like / A polished glass held to the lips when life’s in doubt: / If there be breath, ‘twill catch the damp, and show it” (IV, lines 71-73) [obviously with some references to King Lear]. CLEO.: “There [on my bed] I till death will his unkindness weep, / As harmless infants moan themselves asleep” (III, lines 483-484). But even into the – rather theoretical – discussion of boundless mercy, the ideas of measure and proportion find their way: cf. DOLABELLA: “Heaven has but / Our sorrows for our sins, and then delights / To pardon erring man: sweet mercy seems / Its darling attribute, which limits justice, / As if there were degrees in infinite, / And infinite would rather want perfection / Than punish to extent” (IV, 538-542).

171

The difference between Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s respective techniques can be best appreciated if we compare texts where they are both describing the ‘same’ reality, yet in markedly different terms:

Shakespeare, II, 2, 190-222 ENOBARBUS:

When she first met Mark Antony she pursed up her heart upon the river of Cyndus... [she took possession of his heart on the Cyndus River].

The barge [war-driven ship] she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop [upper deck] was beaten gold;

Purple [royal dye] the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stoke, and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As [As if] amorous of their strokes. For [as for]

her own person,

It beggared all description. She did lie

In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue [fabric interwoven with gold thread] –

O’er-pictoring that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature [Outdoing even the picture of Venus in which the artist outdid nature]. On each side her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids, With divers-coloured fans whose wind did seem To glow [make glow] the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did. [...]

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides [sea nymphs]

So many mermaids, tended her i’the’eyes [under her watchful eyes]

And made their bends adornings [made their curtsies additions to the decoration] At the helm A seeming mermaid steers. The silken tackle [sails and ropes]

Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands That yarely frame [artfully carry out] the office.

From the barge

A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs [banks]. The city cast Her people out upon [toward] her, and Antony, Enthroned i’th’market-place, did sit alone,

Whistling to th’air, which but for vacancy [which if not for the fact that its absence would have left a vacuum] Had [would have] gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

And made a gap in nature.

Dryden, III, 160-182 ANTONY:

...she came from Egypt

Her galley down the silver Cyndos rowed, The tackling silk, the streamers waved with gold;

The gentle winds were lodged in purple sails;

Her nymphs, like Nereids, round her couch were placed,

Where she, another sea-born Venus, lay. [...]

She lay, and leant her cheek upon her hand, And cast a look so languishingly sweet As if, secure of all beholders’ hearts,

Neglecting she could take’em. Boys like Cupids Stood fanning with their painted wings the winds That played about her face; but if she smiled, A darting glory seemed to blaze abroad, That men’s desiring eyes were never wearied, But hung upon the object. To soft flutes

The silver oars kept time; and while they played, The hearing gave new pleasure to the sight, And both to thought. ‘Twas Heaven, or somewhat more;

For she so charmed all hearts, that gazing crowds Stood panting on the shore, and wanted breath To give their welcome voice.

11.5. Restoration Comedy: William Wycherley (1641-1715): The Country Wife (1675) and