Page:EB1911 - Volume 08.djvu/638

 dealing with the persecution of the Christians by Maximin, in which St Catherine is introduced, and with her some supernatural machinery, was produced in 1669. It is in rhymed couplets, but the author again did not trust solely for success to them; for, besides the magic incantations, the singing angels, and the view of Paradise, he made Nell Gwyn, who had stabbed herself as Valeria, start to life again as she was being carried off the stage, and speak a riotous epilogue, in violent contrast to the serious character of the play. Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada, a tragedy in two parts, was written in 1669 to 1670. The historical background is taken chiefly from Mlle de Scudéry’s romance of Almahide, but Dryden borrows freely from other books of hers and her contemporaries. This piece seems to have given the crowning touch of provocation to the wits, who had never ceased to ridicule the popular taste for these extravagant heroic plays. Dryden almost invited burlesque in his epilogue to the second part of The Conquest of Granada, in which he charged the comedy of the Elizabethan age with coarseness and mechanical humour, and its conceptions of love and honour with meanness, and claimed for his own time and his own plays an advance in these respects. The Rehearsal, written by the duke of Buckingham, with the assistance, it was said, of Samuel Butler, Martin Clifford, Thomas Sprat and others, and produced in 1671, was a severe and just punishment for this boast. Davenant was originally the hero, but on his death in 1668 the satire was turned upon Dryden, who is here unmercifully ridiculed under the name of Bayes, the name being justified by his appointment in 1670 as poet laureate and historiographer to the king (with a pension of £300 a year and a butt of canary wine). It is said that The Rehearsal was begun in 1663 and ready for representation before the plague. But this probably only means that Buckingham and his friends had resolved to burlesque the absurdities of Davenant’s operatic heroes in The Siege of Rhodes, and the extravagant heroics of The Indian Queen. Materials accumulated upon them as the fashion continued, and by the time Dryden had produced his Tyrannic Love, and his Conquest of Granada, he had so established himself as the chief offender as to become naturally the central figure of the burlesque. Later Dryden fully avenged himself on Buckingham by his portrait of Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel. His immediate reply is contained in the preface “Of Heroic Plays” and the “Defence of the Epilogue,” printed in the first edition (1672) of his Conquest of Granada. In these, so far from laughing with his censors, he addresses them from the eminence of success. “But I have already swept the stakes; and, with the common good fortune of prosperous gamesters, can be content to sit quietly; to hear my fortune cursed by some, and my faults arraigned by others, and to suffer both without reply.” Heroic verse, he assures them, is so established that few tragedies are likely henceforward to be written in any other metre. In the course of a year or two The Conquest of Granada was attacked also by Elkanah Settle, on whom Dryden revenged himself later, making him the “Doeg” of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel.

His next tragedy, Amboyna (1673), an exhibition of certain atrocities committed by the Dutch on English merchants in the East Indies, put on the stage to inflame the public mind in view of the Dutch war, was written, with the exception of a few passages, in prose, and those passages in blank verse. An opera which he wrote in rhymed couplets, called The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, an attempt to turn part of Paradise Lost into rhyme, as a proof of its superiority to blank verse, was prefaced by an “Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence,” and entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1674, but it was never acted. The redeeming circumstance about the performance is the admiration professed by the adapter for his original, which he pronounces “undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.” Dryden is said to have had the elder poet’s leave “to tag his verses.” In Aurengzebe, which was Dryden’s last, and also his best, rhymed tragedy, he borrowed from contemporary history, for the Great Mogul was still living. In the prologue he confessed that he had grown weary of his long-loved mistress rhyme and retracted, with characteristic frankness, his disparaging contrast of the Elizabethan with his own age. But the stings of The Rehearsal had stimulated him to do his utmost to justify his devotion to his mistress, and he claims that Aurengzebe is “the most correct” of his plays. It was entered at Stationers’ Hall and probably acted in 1675, and published in the following year.

After the production of Aurengzebe he seems to have rested for an interval from writing, enabled to do so, probably by an additional pension of £100 granted to him by the king. During this interval he would seem to have reconsidered the principles of dramatic composition, and to have made a particular study of the works of Shakespeare. The fruits of this appeared in All for Love, or the World Well Lost, a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, produced in 1678, which must be regarded as a very remarkable departure for a man of his age, and a wonderful proof of undiminished openness and plasticity of mind. In his previous writings on dramatic theory, Dryden, while admiring the rhyme of the French dramatists as an advance in art, did not give unqualified praise to the regularity of their plots; he was disposed to allow the irregular structure of the Elizabethan dramatists, as being more favourable to variety both of action and of character. But now, in frank imitation of Shakespeare, he abandoned rhyme, and, if we might judge from All for Love, and the precepts laid down in his “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” prefixed to Troilus and Cressida (1679), the chief point in which he aimed at excelling the Elizabethans was in giving greater unity to his plot. He upheld still the superiority of Shakespeare to the French dramatists in the delineation of character, but he thought that the scope of the action might be restricted, and the parts bound more closely together with advantage. All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra are two excellent plays for the comparison of the two methods. Dryden gave all his strength to All for Love, writing the play for himself, as he said, and not for the public. Carrying out the idea expressed in the title, he represents the two lovers as being more entirely under the dominion of love than Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Antony is moved by other impulses than the passion for Cleopatra; it is his master motive, but it has to maintain a struggle for supremacy; “Roman thoughts” strike in upon him even in the very height of the enjoyment of his mistress’s love, he chafes under the yoke, and breaks away from her of his own impulse at the call of spontaneously reawakened ambition. Dryden’s Antony is so deeply sunk in love that no other impulse has power to stir him; it takes much persuasion and skilful artifice to detach him from Cleopatra even in thought, and his soul returns to her violently before the rupture has been completed. On the other hand, Dryden’s Cleopatra is so completely enslaved by love for Antony that she is incapable of using the calculated caprices and meretricious coquetries which Shakespeare’s Cleopatra deliberately practises as the highest art of love, the surest way of maintaining her empire over her great captain’s heart. It is with difficulty that Dryden’s Cleopatra will agree, on the earnest solicitation of a wily counsellor, to feign a liking for Dolabella to excite Antony’s jealousy, and she cannot keep up the pretence through a few sentences. The characters of the two lovers are thus very much contracted, indeed almost overwhelmed, beneath the pressure of the one ruling motive. And as Dryden thus introduces a greater regularity of character into the drama, so he also very much contracts the action, in order to give probability to this temporary subjugation of individual character. The action of Dryden’s play takes place wholly in Alexandria, within the compass of a few days; it does not, like Shakespeare’s, extend over several years, and present incessant changes of scene. Dryden chooses, as it were, a fragment of a historical action, a single moment during which motives play within a narrow circle, the culminating point in the relations between his two personages. He devotes his whole play, also, to those relations; only what bears upon them is admitted. In Shakespeare’s play we get a certain historical perspective, in which the love of Antony and Cleopatra