Dryden Seminar (English 205).rtf 10.03.

29 9:26 PM

The Heart Has its Reasons that Reason Knows Nothing Of:
The Many Failings of All for Love.

by

Guy A. Duperreault

Student Number xxxxx

Engl 205-3

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Literature

Seminar Presentation

November 25, 1998

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The Heart Has its Reasons that Reason Knows Nothing Of: The Many Failings of
All for Love.

When I subscribed to undertake this seminar it was to have been a comparison between
Antony's character as portrayed by Dryden and Shakespeare. Since I find Shakespeare's Antony
to be an interesting and complex character I took on the task without having first read All for Love.
After having read it I was left with the somewhat daunting task of comparing an Antony that had
about as much character as a lobotomized Bill Gates to that of Shakespeare's vital description of a
powerful and ambitious man self-destructing in what we might call, today, a mid-life crisis.
After some discussion with various people about my antipathy to All for Love, and an
exploration of Dryden outside of the play, I decided to redirect my attention to why All for Love
fails as an exploration of character and even as an example of Neoclassical writing. (For me,
personally, the one "good" consequence of my having read the play is that I found in its failure the
inspiration to write my own verse — a satire of Dryden in form, content and spirit which I will
foist upon you later, so ready your spit-balls.)
I begin this critique with a quick biographical overview of Dryden, because a key to All for
Love's failure is found in Dryden's attitudes towards writing and life. So briefly, some key,
curious, and/or suggestive incidents:

He was born in 1631 into a protestant family. He was the first of fourteen children (which
is interesting given the psychological research into family birth order).
He had a classic education at Westminster "high" school and then at Cambridge, from
which he graduated with a B.A.. (More on his schooling later.)
He worked in a minor post within Cromwell's bureaucracy alongside Milton and Marvell.
In 1658 he wrote "Heroic Stanzas", a memorial of Cromwell.
Then in 1660 he wrote "A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred
Majesty" for Charles II.
In 1682 he wrote Religio Laici which defended the Church of England. (Some critics see
this as Dryden getting close to Catholicism (Davison 134). See Religio Laici in the
appendix for an excerpt in which he criticizes fanatical protestants.)
When the Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685, Dryden became a Catholic and
condemned protestantism through satire and verse. For example:

The bloody Bear an Independent beast,

Unlicked to form, in groans her hate expressed.
Among timorous kind the Quaking Hare
Professed neutrality, but would not swear...
The bristled Baptist Boar, impure as he,
(But whitened with the foam of sanctity)
With fat pollutions filled the sacred place....
"The Hind and the Panther" I.34...45 (cited in Davison 142)
In 1668 he was made Poet Laureate.
In 1689 James II was forced off the throne and replaced by the Protestant William.

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Thomas Shadwell replaced Dryden as Poet Laureate.

He died in 1700, still a Catholic, after mounting several unsuccessful plays and publishing
several successful translations.

Obviously this skeleton needs some expansion. His flip-flopping between political and
religious ideologies has resulted in him being labelled an "opportunist", although recent
biographies argue he was "a man of integrity and firm convictions, responding with admirable
consistency to the thorny problems of religions and politics" (Davison 14). I cannot say which is
the case, although I tend to lean towards the former, but for subjective rather than objective
reasons. In the two biographies I read, and All for Love's preambles, I did not get a feeling for the
man behind the words except anger. My own personal impression is that Dryden looked outside
himself for the truths of life, and as he grew older these truths needed to change, not because he
was maturing "spiritually" within himself in relation to his world, but because the changing
circumstances around him were clashing with his persona. In Jungian jargon, he mistook his
persona for his Self. Biographer George Wasserman writes:
...Dryden identified his personal religious beliefs with the broad via media of Anglicanism.
But his orthodoxy seems more expedient than genuine, for the strongly anti-rational
emphasis of [the poem Religio Laici] cannot have stopped short of Anglicanism and the
latitude of opinion its moderation encouraged.... [Religio Laici] provides ample evidence of
this tempermental readiness to submit to an omniscient authority in spiritual matters (30-1).

Of course whether or not his changes in attitude were motivated by what was occuring
outside or within himself is unanswerable. From the little I've read the answer is not likely to be
found in Dryden's writings, except very indirectly and tenuously, such as has been done above,
with Religio Laici. And biographer Dennis Davison writes that Dryden did not share his personal
self in a way which is readily apparent. Davison elaborates by saying that Dryden was more alive
in the world of ideas than ever he was in the material world. (See Appendix "A Man Alive..." for
the complete quoatation, which is very interesting.)
His having come to be more alive in the world of ideas and his fascination with
Neoclassicism was grounded in his "classical" training begun in Westminster. To give you an idea
of what the classically trained student experienced, here is a description of the four year
"programme":
The day began at quarter past five and ended twelve of fifteen hours later. After
Latin prayers, morning ablutions from the common washbasin, and breakfast, the boys
were marched, two by two, to their lessons. At six they began a two-hour session of
repeating their grammar — Latin out of Lily and Greek out of Camden.... In a semicircle
before the master, they recited the rules and then made extempore verses in Latin and Greek
upon themes suggested by the master. On alternate mornings, instead of making verses,
they were called upon to expound some part of a Latin or Greek author, such as Cicero,
Livy, Isocrates, Homer, or Xenophon. From eight to nine they were allowed time for
'beaver', a refreshment period. At nine they met for another two-hour period devoted to the
reading of those exercises, in prose and in verse, which they had prepared in their rooms
the night before. After lunch they came back at one o'clock for another two-hour session.
On this occasion the master expounded a selection from Virgil, Cicero, Euripodes or
Sallust, commenting on rhetorical figures, grammatical constructions, and explaining
prosody. Then followed an afternoon respite. The final meeting of the day was devoted to

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the repetition of a 'leaf or two' out of a book of rhetorical figures or proverbs, or sentences
chosen by the master. Then a theme was assigned, upon which the student was to compose
prose or verse essays in Latin or Greek before the next morning (Davison 20-1).
And university was not, it seems, much better. (See Appendix "Cambridge Sucks" for Milton's
and others' thoughts.) But Dryden liked his education!
To me this "schooling" sounds little different from military boot-camp and cult
indoctrination techniques, both of which are designed to suppress creative, individual thinking for
that of compliance to group-thought and the acceptance of authoritarian structures. And I wonder
if Dryden having liked it was his survival technique, not unlike what happens emotionally between
kidnapper and captive. In this case Dryden's creativity was kidnapped onto the coat tails of
Classicism as interpreted by Elizabethan and Italian intellectuals into Neoclassicism. And this
schooling, coupled with his obvious natural affinity towards intellectualism, was enough to propel
Dryden into a world of ideas, one largely untouched by, and even contemptuous of, the prosaic
ploddings of diurnal life.
And this is suggestive to me of why All for Love fails — and goes towards explaining the
nature of many of Dryden's satires and criticisms. While Dryden largely kept himself, except for
his anger, out of his writing, unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his ideology out. It was more
important to him to have his writing conform to his sense of truth and propriety than allow the
characters to come alive and mess those ideals up. (See the appendix, "Translations", to see the
extent to which Dryden tames Juvenal's brutal portrait of an unfaithful woman.) For example,
early in All for Love we are introduced to the agony of Antony's love:
I'm now turned wild, a commoner of nature;
Of all forsaken, and forsaking all,
Live in a shady forest's sylvan scene,
Stretched at my length beneath some blasted oak.
I lean my head upon the mossy bark,
And look just of a piece, as I grew from it;
My uncombed locks, matted like mistletoe,
Hang o'er my hoary face;... (I.232-39).
I cannot help but be reminded of Rosalind's jesting that Orlando does not have the look of love in
Shakespeare's As You Like It. Instead of allowing the character of Antony to express his pained
love, Dryden uses Antony to express an idealization of love's pain, an idealization Shakespeare had
Rosalind spoof with:
There is none of my uncle's marks [of love] upon you.... [They are a] lean cheek, which
you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which
you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not;... Then your hose should be
ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbotton'd, your shoe unti'd, and everything
about you demonstrating a careless desolation (III.ii.389-400).
Much of All for Love is filled with these exagerated manifestations of emotion. And it is these
idealizations which explain a great deal of the failures of character in All for Love. Instead of
imagining or developing characters who emote, Dryden used caricatures to express idealized
emotion with the result that his "characters" are flat and unconvincing. Even the writings of fairy
tales or fantasy cannot fail to have believable behaviours and characterizations within their un-
reality — we have to believe in the reality of Little Red Riding Hood if we are going to accept a
talking wolf, who in turn must be believable within the context, otherwise the text is forgotten.
A second equally fundamental failure of characterization is having characters frequently

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swearing eternal love, unconditional forgiveness and the like, only to reverse them a few lines later,
or in having a character describe another in terms which are continuously and frequently
contradicted. Such histrionics are taxing on both patience and credibility, and perhaps the worst
example of many comes when Dolabella says to Cleopatra:
I find your breast fenced round from human reach,
Transparant as a rock of solid crystal,
Seen through, but never pierced (IV.202-4).
This verse is poetical enough, but not fify lines earlier Cleopatra fainted in front of Dolabella from
the strain of lieing! How do I reconcile the stone shrouded heart with the one pierced by the
emotions which are killing her? This is not just bad characterization, it is simply bad writing. It
might be more believable if the level of Dolabella's hurt was understandable, but Dolabella knew
before talking with her that the chance of his love being requited was slim to zero.
The second idealization Dryden apparently struggled to apply were those of the rules of
Neoclassicism. In this he also failed, but at a more fundamental level. Ironically, the rules of
Neoclassicism were themselves an idealization of classical writing which failed to catch the spirit of
that writing.
So what is "Neoclassicism"? Well, it is actually a complex construct, in two parts, as
suggested by its nearly oxymoronic construction. The first part is that it ascribes to reason the
mandate of controlling imagination and the evils of passions. (For elaborations, see the Appendix
"Neo-Classicism — Definition".) The second aspect of it is that it claimed to have learned from the
classical writers the right or ideal way to tell a story. From Wasserman, citing Dryden, the
classical construct of a play was as "'A just and lively image of human nature, representing its
passions and humours, and the change of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and
instruction of mankind'" (56). Wasserman continues:
In no sense did the Classical concept of imitation of 'nature' mean a literal copying of the
'great outdoors'. 'Nature', for the ancients, was the general and unchanging order which
was perpetually operating in the universe. In imitating this order, the poet produced images
of the essential and persisting forms of things, ignoring their temporal, local, or accidental
aspects (56).
Wasserman then cites Dryden's take on what this meant:
'Nature always intends a consumate beauty in her productions, yet through the inequality of
matter the forms are altered.... For which reason, the artful painter and the sculptor,
imitating the Divine Maker, form to themselves, as well as they are able, a model of
superior beauties'. Dryden's translation...expresses the idealistic bias of his [Italian] source:
the represented image of 'nature' in art is superior to the unreal shadows of ideas in the
world of matter (57, from Dryden's "The Essay of Dramatic Poesy", II.118)).
Wasserman then elaborates on how Neoclassicism developed:
It was the labour of succeeding centuries to 'methodize' or to codify these Classical
conceptions of art into a system of rules; the tradition extends from Horace, through the
sixteenth-century...to the seventeenth-century...and its most vigourous English exponent
Thomas Rhymer. As originally conceived, the Neoclassical rules of art aimed at achieving
decorum and symmetry in imitation and at maintaining probability through the handling of
parts as they contribute to a whole.... 'If the rules be well considered,' Dryden later quoted
Rapin as saying, 'we shall find them to be made only to reduce Nature into a method, to
trace her step by step, and not to suffer the least mark of her to escape us: 'tis only by
these, that probability in fiction is maintained, which is the soul of poetry. They are

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founded upon good sense, and sound reason, rather than on authority' (Essay I.228). But
even though the rightness of the rules could be theoretically justified by their relation to
nature and the laws of reason, their practical influence upon many critics was authoritarian;
for they tended to divert the attention of writers from 'Nature,' and to limit imitation either
by the precedent of those ancients from whom the rules derived, or by the common sense
criteria of an approximate realism. Nature and Homer were the same: so ran the first article
of the Neoclassicist's faith. As Aristotle had noticed, many of the ancients contrived their
dramatic actions singly, without interruption or variation of interest; many plays, moreover,
limited the time and place of the action to the time of its representation and the space of its
stage. By following their example, a play might be justified as an imitation of nature: thus
was the most characteristic regulation of Neoclassical criticism — the doctrine of dramatic
unities — ratified as a law. Imitation of 'nature' had become imitation of Classical models;
and probability, 'the soul of poetry,' had become synonymous with verisimilitude (57-8).
(For Davison's take on how idealizing Classical writing limited the Neoclassicists, see
"Delimitation of the Neoclassicists" in the appendix.)
From this history and definitions, it is clear that All for Love fails at being an example of
"true" Neoclassical writing by, at the very least, not adhering to the silly verisimilitude requirement.
But it also fails because its melodrama and hyperbole remove from it any natural expression of
"natural" people: it is simply unreal, which is an amazing feat of writing given that the
circumstances of the play were in fact real.
In All for Love Dryden idealized a form of writing and applied it to a story which simply
could not be told that way. Ironically this idealization failed to catch the spirit desired by the
Classical writers he had tried to imitate. And even worse, Dryden idealized human emotions
outside of human beings which turned them into moaning and simpering caricatures with whom it
is difficult to relate, let alone sympathize with. And All for Love was, above all, badly written.
If I hadn't done this paper I would not have considered reading anything else by Dryden,
but in his critiques and satires, where his ideology and anger serves the forum, his writing is
actually quite enjoyable, but he has not sense of how to write people.

And now for my verse satire of Dryden:

Critics, like poets, when wits have they none

Have one sure course, from their plodding words, run!
This lesson's all 'round, I'll cite just this one,
A melodrama, that canst be but made fun,
By a dull windbag who thinks himself wise.
But his sharp wit is just emperor's guise;
He thumps his words with dull and heavy foot,
The meaning grey with moans and groans and soot.
Academic, thinker, hypocrite, teacher;
From podium high 'tis easy, as preacher,
To cast foppish stones at life in the muck,
To denigrate others with words that still suck.
Empty tripe spewed with his egotist's quip,
Softly waxed hard with skilled sycophants' lip,

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Makes true nonsense of his own gaudy pants —

He masturbates — to his own puerile cants —
His mind, for his ideals are more vivid
Then ever notions of life well liv'd.
The well-titled laureate, with words plush,
Belies life's truth, which is awesome and flush,
Needs clean-up Bill, his a-morality
And mire him in mere sentimentality.
With ideals of love he is fixated;
On twisting humans, unexpurgated,
Into whimps, rants and evil simians,
Who mock wit with flaccid simulcrums
Of the love-look Rosalind taunted poor
Orlando the lack — the marks of ardour,
The lean cheek, the dark eyes, the unkempt locks
The vital spirit and the tattered frocks.
So we see melodramatic abscess,
Antony's hot love puffed-up with excess;
The empty gesture and the vacant stare,
The look of life lost and truly bad hair!
"Oh woe is me, oh shame and awful life
I've left my state and screwed my wife
For a shallow Queen with fair and white skin!"
(Despite being of Greek and Arab kin —
An anachronism, true, of petty size —
But exhorted in Bill to exorcise.)
How to make such drivel speak through Tony
When Willie's messy words spoke vitally?
Vital words, that's what gives us all life's chords!
It's not in our stars but in his poor words
That Bill stands a colossus above him,
And, he a mere sentimentalist, forgotten.

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APPENDIX

FROM RELIGIO LAICI:

The book thus put in every vulgar hand,

Which each presumed he best could understand,
The common rule was made the common prey,
And at the mercy of the rabble lay.
The tender page with horny fists was galled,
And he was gifted most that loudest bawled:
The spirit gave the doctoral degree;
And every member of a company
Was of his trade and of the bible free...
Study and pains were now no more their care;
Texts were explained by fasting and prayer:
This was the fruit the private spirit brought,
Occasioned by great zeal and little thought.
While crowds unlearned, with rude devotion warm,
About the sacred viands buzz and swarm,
The fly-blown text creates a crawling brood,
And turns to maggots what was meant for food.
A thousand daily sects rise up and die;
A thousand more the perished race supply...(400-22).
(Cited in Davison 140.)

A MAN ALIVE IN THE WORLD OF IDEAS:

His learning was considerable, especially in the classics and theology. But my impression
is that Dryden read books about life, rather than experiencing it at first hand. What has
Dryden to tell us about Nature, about human love, about the comical, poignant details of
everyday life? He can translate Virgil's Georgics and Pastorals for us, where 'Amaryllis
fills the shady groves' and on the altar Tityrus sacrifices 'the tender findings of my woolly
breed', but of Marvell's or Herrick's English countryside there is little evidence. In the
Heroic Plays human love is represented by rhetorical posturings gloating sexual desire, and
Dryden's religious poems are mainly polemical or argumentative. Nobody has ever felt
emotionally or spiritually nearer to Christ through reading Religio Laici or The Hind and
the Panther, and I daresay many Christians have grimaced at Dryden's reference to
religious faith in terms of insurance and banking:
Faith is the best insurer of thy bliss;
The bank above must fail before the venture miss.
And whereas the diaries of Pepys or Evelyn, and the narratives of John Bunyan, teem with
fascinating details of everyday life among many classes of society, Dryden rarely quits the

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world of ideas, of controversy, except to set a farcical scene for Shadwell's coronation, to
suggest Charles' death-chamber, or to allude in his plays to aristocratic wenching exploits
and middle-class indignation to them. Pepys tells us of parties, friendly visits, tiffs with
Mrs. Pepys, flirtations with pretty girls in church, of state affairs and of seamen dying of
hunger in the London streets, and both he and Bunyan unfold for us the variety of life
among the middle and artisan classes. A bookish classical education and the scholastic
disputing-matches still in vogue in Cambridge cannot be entirely responsible for Dryden's
intellectual bent, or his lack of interest in the detail of contemporary life, but must surely
have strengthened a natural inclination. And therefore the charge that Dryden's rational, if
rhetorical, style and his attraction to arguing and persuading, excluded visual narrative
effects and emotional intensity, has much truth in it (Davison 26-7 my emphasis).

CAMBRIDGE SUCKS:

Milton described scathingly his years at Cambridge University as listening to 'nothing but
the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry'. John Hall, also at
Cambridge, wrote sharply: 'We have hardly professors for the principle faculties, and these
but lazily read — and carelessly followed'. Winstanley's comment on universities was even
more pungent: 'standing ponds of stinking waters!' (Davison 22).

Translations from Juvenal's Sixth Satire:

by Dryden:
She duly, once a month, renews her face;
Meantime, it lies in daub, and hid in grease;
Those are the husbands's nights; she craves her due,
He takes fat kisses, and is stuck in glue.
But, to the loved adult'rer when she steers,
Fresh from the bath, in brightness she appears:
For him the rich Arabia sweats her gum;
And precious oils from distant Indies come:
How haggardly soe'er she looks at home.
Th'eclipse then vanishes; and all her face
Is opened, and restored to every grace.
The crust removed, her cheeks as smooth as silk,
Are polished with a wash of asses' milk...
But, hadst thou seen her plastered up before,
'Twas so unlike a face, it seemed a sore (Davison 110-11).

This sounds harsh, but is tame compared to a modern translation, which supposedly better
captures "[s]omething of Juvenal's brutal attack and moral repugnance..." (Davison 111).

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by Rolfe Humphries (1958):

Nothing is worse to endure than your Mrs. Richbitch, whose visage
Is padded and plastered with dough, in the most ridiculous manner.
Furthermore, she reeks of unguents, so God help her husband
With his wretched face stunk up with these, smeared by her lipstick.
To her lovers she comes with her skin washed clean. But at home
Why does she need to look pretty? Nard is assumed for the lover,
For the lover she buys all the Arabian perfumes.
It takes her some time to strip down to her face, removing layers
One by one, till at last she is recognisable, almost,
Then she uses a lotion, she-asses' milk; she'd need herds
Of these creatures to keep herself supplied...
But when she's given herself the treatment in full, from the ground base
Through the last layer of mud pack, from the first wash to a poultice,
What lies under all this — a human face, or an ulcer? (Davison 111).

(Juvenal died around 140A.D.)

NEOCLASSICISM — DEFINITION:

The view of poetry which we are suggesting that Dryden took in 1660, a view which may
in general be termed Neoclassical in the role it assigned to reason or judgement as a control
of the imagination, constituted a critical phase in what W.K. Wimsat has called the 'long
struggle ... between the custodian of pure ideas and pure fact, dialecticians and scientists, on
the one hand, and on the other, the custodians of the riches of the "word,"'...(Wasserman
40).

DELIMITATION OF THE NEOCLASSICISTS:

[Classical scholar Gilbert Highlet] tells us that 'all the Roman verse-satirists write in a bold,
free-running hexameter, which has a range unequalled by that of any other metre except
perhaps English blank verse at its fullest development. They can make it do almost
everything from comical light conversation to sustained and lofty declamation'. On the
contrary, the Drydens and Popes 'write in the stopped couplet — a metre capable of great
delicacy and wit, but quite unable to attain a wide range of emotion, or a copious variety of
effects'. He concludes that, compared with their classical models, they are 'severely
limited'. ... Moreover, the forces of genteel respectability influenced Dryden
somewhat...so that the colourful slangy talk, the eccentric vocabulary, or coarse abuse are
replaced by polite innuendos or abstract terms. The verbal tricks of the Hudibras [by
Samuel Butler published with praise from King Charles II in 1662], which Dryden
disdained, are similar to some of the devices of the Roman satirists, and in refining his
language and adopting the heroic couplet, Dryden also had to say farewell to the huge
variety of Latin satire (Davison 108-110).

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NOTABLE PASSAGES IN ALL FOR LOVE AND COMMENTS:

Antony's finding strength from Ventidius's flattery reflects very poorly on his character!
Ventidius. No prince but you
Could merit that sincerity I used,
Nor durst another man have ventured it.
But you, ere love misled your wand'ring eyes,
Were sure the chief and best of the human race,
Framed in the very pride and boast of nature,
So perfect, that the gods who formed you wondered
At their own skill, and cried, "A lucky hit
Has mended our design." Their envy hindered,
Else you had been immortal, and a pattern,
When heav'n would work for ostentation sake,
To copy out again.
Antony. But Cleopatra —
Go on, for I can bear it now (I.400-13).
Poor Antony! Ventidius is a mere sycophant and Antony the butt to be kissed! And if this
is not bad enough, Antony then praises Ventidius by dismissing all his other advisers as
mere flatterers!
Thou only lov'st, the rest have flattered me (I.414).
Not only is this ironic with respect to flattery, it is with respect to love as well. Antony's
problem as he and Ventidius see it is an excess of love — for Cleopatra. But in Dryden's
descriptions there is very little separating the "good" love of men for one another from that
of the "evil" of loving a woman. For example, can you discern who said the following of
Antony?
Heav'n's blessing on your heart for that kind word!
May I believe you love me? Speak again (I.415-6).

Dryden likes to, at times, torture English!

Alexas.
And yet she begs not now you would not leave her (II.162).

It is amusing that in Dryden's need to idealize Cleopatra, he "has" to remove her from her
race!
Antony.
I thought how those white arms would fold me in,
And strain me so close, and melt into love; (III.1-2).

I found All for Love's general misogyny annoying. Perhaps the worst example is:
Cleopatra.

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Can I do this? Ah, no; my love's so true

That I can neither hide it where it is,
Nor show it where it is not. Nature meant me
A wife, silly, harmless, household dove,
Fond without art, and kind without deceit;
But Fortune, that has made a mistress of me,
Has thrust me out to the wide world, unfurnished
Of falsehood to be happy (IV.89-96).
The misogyny I see in this is that Dryden is likely saw this description of an "honest"
women as being a compliment, rather than being condescending and imprisoning in its
idealization of womanhood.

While All for Love is filled to past the gag point with hyperbole, I just had to include at least
one passage as an example of bad writing. Also, his characterization is so bad that the
speaker her is indistinguishable, for the most part, from Antony or Dolabella. The fact that
it is also an example of his idealization of the evil woman is just a bad-writing bonus:
Ventidius.
I pity Dolabella, but she's dangerous.
Her eyes have pow'r beyond Thessalian charms
To draw the moon from heav'n. For eloquence,
The sea-green Sirens taught her voice their flatt'ry,
And while she speaks, night steals upon the day,
Unmarked of those who hear. Then she's so charming
Age buds at sight of her, and swells to youth.
The holy priests gaze on her when she smiles,
And with heaved hands, forgetting gravity,
They bless her wanton eyes. Ev'n I, who hate her,
With a malignant joy behold such beauty,
And while I curse, desire it (IV.233-44).

For an example of how Dryden could not keep his morality out of the play, he has the
manipulative and conniving eunuch, Alexas, preach on the moral consequences to the
woman who comes between husband and wife! I find this bizarre and completely outside
of his character. It is amusing that it also contains anachronistic references to Christian
theology and morality. (It also requires either a strong stomach or vomit bag to read.)
Alexas.
And yet, though love and your unmatched desert
Have drawn her from the due regard of honour,
At last heav'n opened her unwilling eyes
To see the wrongs she offered fair Octavia,
Whose holy bed she lawlessly usurped.
The sad effects of this improsperous war
Confirmed those pious thoughts (V.359-65).

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At the end of act IV, Antony's mis-appraisal of Alexas is not just unbelievable, it is
downright laughable. It belies his character, for if he had been unable to understand people
and motivations, to see through manipulations, he might have remained a successful general
but would never have come to rule the world. And Alexas is particularly transparent as
described by Dryden. And while it could be argued that Antony was so besotted by his
love for Cleopatra he could not see it, after eleven years and three children, as well as the
so-called good advice of astute Ventidius, for him not to have at least an inkling of Alexas's
character is preposterous.

I also noted a couple of passages which had the hallmarks of women accusing other of
being witches and witch trials. The first example is in the conflict between Octavia and
Cleopatra, in which Octavia says "Dost thou not blush to own those black endearments/
That make sin pleasing" (III.443-4). This is subtle reference, if it is one at all, but the
following is not! Upon hearing of Cleopatra's death, Antony found the proof of her
innocence:
Antony.
Then thou art innocent, my poor dear love,
And art thou dead?
O those two words! their sound should be divided:
Hadst thou been false, and died; or hadst thou lived,
And hadst been true — But innocence and death!
This shows not well above (V.236-41).

MISCELLANY:

One of the most interesting aspects of Dryden is how he epitomizes one of the
psychological types as described by Carl Jung. I see Dryden as a highly differentiated
extraverted-thinking type. This would infer that his shadow would be introverted feeling,
and highly undifferentiated. This simple observation goes a great length to explain why his
"feeling" i.e. emoting characters, have no character — they are the manifestations of his
undifferentiated shadow.

When Dr. Johnson wanted to describe Dryden's general significance for poetry he said 'He
found it brick and left it marble' (Davison 108). [Smooth but cold.]

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of. [Shakespeare was well aware of
this, but Dryden pretended that the mind could completely overrule the heart. Hubris! A
bane of existence — and good writing!]
(Blaise Pascal, Pensées.)

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Shakespeare:

From Othello on the use of time:

Iago. Thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time (II.ii.387). [Too bad Dryden did not head these wise
words instead of attempting to stick to verisimilitude.]
(definition: dilatory. Tending to cause delay; having the purpose of gaining time)

Re. Othello and Believability:

The conviction of reality is extraordinary, considering that the action, regarded in the light
of reason, is full of improbability. But Shakespeare knew how easily the light of reason is
extinguished in mean, especially in certain types of men, and he was, in 1604, so sure a
master of characterization and of theatrical illusion, that he could make acceptable in his
medium what would not be so in another. He further strengthens credibility by building the
action upon relentlessly simple lines (Neilson: Othello 1094).

Re. Antony and Cleopatra and Characterization:

[N]o play of Shakespeare's is less prosaic in style, and in none is the splendour of his
imagination more superbly exhibited in the presentation of human character (Neilson:
Antony 1295).

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WORKS CITED

Davison, Dennis. Literature in Perspective: Dryden. London, GB: Evans Brothers Limited,
1968.

Dryden, John. All for Love. Ed. David M. Vieth. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 1972.

Neilson, William A. and Charles J. Hill, Eds. "Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra."
Shakespeare: Complete Plays and Poems. Eds. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis
Hill. Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949.

Neilson, William A. and Charles J. Hill, Eds. "Introduction to Othello." Shakespeare: Complete
Plays and Poems. Eds. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill. Cambridge, Mass.:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949.

Wasserman, George. John Dryden. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964.

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