Dryden All for Love

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78001-693-1
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classics

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Dryden's 1677 play All for Love is a version of the Antony and Cleopatra story, told as a heroic tragedy. Antony and Octavius Caesar are struggling for control of what was to become the Roman Empire. Antony and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, are lovers and political allies, but their forces have been defeated at the battle of Actium. The play is set in Alexandria, under siege by Octavius Caesar. This edition in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is edited and introduced by Trevor R. Griffiths.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dryden, John

Leseproben

Introduction

John Dryden (1631-1700)

John Dryden was born in Northamptonshire on 19 August 1631. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1654, and published Heroic Stanzas in memory of Oliver Cromwell in 1659. However, his 1660 poem Astrea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second is a more accurate guide to the ways in which his political sympathies would develop. His first play, The Wild Gallant (1663), was not a major success but The Indian Queen (1664), co-written with his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard, a major shareholder in the King’s Company, which performed all his plays until 1678, established his reputation. In 1668 he published one of the key works of English literary criticism, his essay ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’, and then pursued an active writing career devoted to literary criticism, drama and poetry, much of it politically as well as aesthetically engaged.

On the death of William Davenant, his collaborator on a 1667 adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he succeeded him as Poet Laureate in 1668 by way of reward for his pro-monarchical propaganda. He was also appointed Historiographer Royal in 1670. He wrote both comedies and heroic tragedies and also tried his hand at the quixotic task of making Milton’s Paradise Lost into an opera (The State of Innocence, published but not performed, 1677).

Dryden’s political and religious views were conservative and he converted to Catholicism when James II became king in 1685. However James’s overthrow in the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 inevitably led to Dryden losing office, and he turned to translating and editing as means of generating income. His translations included poems and satires by the Roman writers Virgil and Juvenal as well as works by Chaucer and Boccaccio. He died on 1 May 1700.

All for Love: What Happens in the Play

The action takes place at the end of the Roman Civil Wars in which Antony and Octavius Caesar are struggling for control of what was to become the Roman Empire. Antony and Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, are lovers and political allies, but their forces have been defeated at the battle of Actium. The play is set in Alexandria, which is under siege by Octavius Caesar.

Act One: The Egyptian priest Serapion describes omens that foretell the doom of Egypt, but Alexas, a eunuch in Cleopatra’s service discounts them. He is worried because Antony is refusing to see Cleopatra. Ventidius, a Roman general, watches Antony lamenting his situation and then offers him his troops if he will leave Cleopatra. At the end of the act they agree to fight on together, without Cleopatra.

Act Two: Cleopatra laments the fact that Ventidius has won Antony over and that he is going off to fight refusing to see her. Charmion, Cleopatra’s lady in waiting, describes her meeting with the resolute Antony, and Alexas suggests one more try to get him back. As Antony and Ventidius march off to war, Alexas brings Antony gifts of jewels from Cleopatra and persuades Antony to let Cleopatra tie on his new bracelet. In the subsequent confrontation between Antony and Cleopatra, Ventidius attempts to drive a wedge between them by suggesting that Cleopatra would betray Antony if she could guarantee her own safety. This ploy backfires when Cleopatra produces a letter from Octavius Caesar to prove her constancy. Ventidius loses and the lovers are reconciled.

Act Three: Cleopatra greets Antony after he has defeated the besieging Romans. Ventidius tries to persuade him to use his success to make peace with Octavius Caesar and introduces Dolabella, Antony’s friend, whom Antony had banished because he was jealous of his love for Cleopatra. Dolabella indicates that a mysterious person has procured good peace terms for Antony with Octavius. Antony is delighted and promises that person a hearty welcome. Dolabella then produces Antony’s wife Octavia (Octavius’s sister) and their two daughters. After further debate, husband and wife are reconciled. Alexas’s attempts to meddle are brushed aside as Antony leaves. Cleopatra then confronts Octavia but comes off worse in the encounter.

Act Four: Antony asks Dolabella to tell Cleopatra that he is leaving, afraid that he might break down if he does it himself. Ventidius overhears Dolabella wondering if he should make another try for Cleopatra and decides to attempt to use his knowledge to deepen the split between Antony and Cleopatra. Alexas counsels Cleopatra to flirt with Dolabella as a way of making Antony jealous. Dolabella agrees to try to engineer a last meeting between the general and the queen. Ventidius and Octavia see Dolabella taking Cleopatra’s hand and, by revealing that Antony is trying to make Cleopatra’s peace with Octavius, Ventidius persuades Octavia to use what they have seen as a means of furthering the rift between Antony and Cleopatra. Alexas confirms the story, Antony gets angry and Octavia, who is furious with him for getting angry about Cleopatra’s apparent treachery, then leaves for good. Dolabella and Cleopatra try to explain themselves, but Antony doesn’t believe them and ends the act more isolated than before.

Act Five: Cleopatra is suicidal, the Egyptian fleet has gone over to the Romans and Alexas wants to do a deal with Caesar. Cleopatra goes to her monument, leaving Alexas to tell Antony the truth about the attempt to make him jealous. Antony and Ventidius have decided to go down fighting, but Alexas tells Antony that Cleopatra is dead. Antony asks Ventidius to kill him, but Ventidius kills himself instead. Antony then botches his own suicide attempt. Cleopatra discovers him dying and decides to kill herself. Serapion discovers the queen and Antony dead but sitting in state and delivers their eulogy.

Dryden and Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1608) has become the definitive dramatic treatment of the story for the English-speaking world, so most readers and audiences approach Dryden’s play from a perspective heavily influenced by both Shakespeare’s language and his treatment of the story. This places Dryden in a false position as someone who presumptuously attempted to improve on Shakespeare. In fact All for Love is not an adaptation of Shakespeare in the same way as Dryden and Davenant’s Tempest or Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681). Dryden does not include large chunks of the original material from a Shakespearean source play, nor does he attempt to ‘improve’ on a ‘faulty’ original by tinkering with aspects of its structure. Rather All for Love is, as Dryden indicates in his preface, a treatment of the same source story that Shakespeare used, influenced both positively and negatively by his approach to it, but also indebted to other classical sources and to versions such as Sir Charles Sedley’s play Antony and Cleopatra which was also first performed in 1677.

The Shakespeare and Dryden versions of the story have enjoyed contrasting theatrical careers: All for Love was the favoured treatment throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, but lost ground to Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. All for Love is now seldom staged, although Prospect Theatre Company staged it in tandem with Shakespeare’s play in the 1970s, with Barbara Jefford and John Turner as the leads, encouraging audiences to make comparisons between the different treatments of the story. A 1991 revival at London’s Almeida Theatre with Diana Rigg as Cleopatra confirmed the play’s theatrical viability, as ‘one of the few working models of English baroque tragedy’ (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday, 5 May 1991).

The Theatre

Plays had been banned in the republican period of the Commonwealth and the theatres had been closed down in 1642. When they reopened officially at the Restoration in 1660 there were two significant departures from the past: the old open air amphitheatres such as the Globe were finally abandoned in favour of indoor theatres, and actresses were introduced for the first time to play female roles instead of the trained youths familiar from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. The new theatres of the Restoration adopted the kinds of changeable scenery that had been introduced to the English theatre through the masque, a form of spectacular musical and theatrical entertainment staged at the court in the early seventeenth century. This scenery was made up of shutters that could be moved in grooves across the stage from each side, so that scene changes consisted of opening and closing these shutters behind the actors. Actors entered through doors at either side of the proscenium arch, or from between the scenery shutters at the side, or, sometimes, were discovered as the shutters parted and then came forward onto the large forestage to act the scene. This meant that, although the performers still shared the same space as the audience, they were now acting against a background of pictures that in some way illustrated the play.

Since the auditorium and the stage were evenly lit (by candles) throughout the performance, the audience could see themselves as well as they could see the actors. The actors would have worn contemporary fashions, so any topical resonances in the plays would have been reinforced by the dress codes. Although acting style is notoriously difficult to recapture, All for Love is full of speeches commenting on how other people are behaving – a...