John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  May every imprecation, which your rage

  Can wish on me, take place, if I am false!

  Diom. Nay, since you’re so concerned to be believed,

  I’m sorry I have pressed my charge so far:

  Be what you would be thought; I can be grateful.

  Troil. Grateful! Oh torment! now hell’s bluest flames

  Receive her quick, with all her crimes upon her!

  Let her sink spotted down! let the dark host

  Make room, and point, and hiss her as she goes!

  Let the most branded ghosts of all her sex

  Rejoice, and cry,— “Here comes a blacker fiend!”

  Let her —

  Cres. Enough, my lord; you’ve said enough.

  This faithless, perjured, hated Cressida,

  Shall be no more the subject of your curses:

  Some few hours hence, and grief had done your work;

  But then your eyes had missed the satisfaction,

  Which thus I give you, — thus — [She stabs herself; they both run to her.

  Diom. Help! save her, help!

  Cres. Stand off, and touch me not, thou traitor Diomede; —

  But you, my only Troilus, come near:

  Trust me, the wound, which I have given this breast,

  Is far less painful than the wound you gave it.

  Oh, can you yet believe, that I am true?

  Troil. This were too much, even if thou hadst been false!

  But oh, thou purest, whitest innocence, —

  For such I know thee now, too late I know it! —

  May all my curses, and ten thousand more,

  Heavier than they, fall back upon my head;

  Pelion and Ossa, from the giants’ graves

  Be torn by some avenging deity,

  And hurled at me, a bolder wretch than they,

  Who durst invade the skies!

  Cres. Hear him not, heavens;

  But hear me bless him with my latest breath!

  And, since I question not your hard decree,

  That doomed my days unfortunate and few,

  Add all to him you take away from me;

  And I die happy, that he thinks me true.[Dies.

  Troil. She’s gone for ever, and she blest me dying!

  Could she have cursed me worse! she died for me,

  And, like a woman, I lament for her.

  Distraction pulls me several ways at once:

  Here pity calls me to weep out my eyes,

  Despair then turns me back upon myself,

  And bids me seek no more, but finish here. [Points his Sword to his Breast.

  Ha, smilest thou, traitor! thou instruct’st me best,

  And turn’st my just revenge to punish thee.

  Diom. Thy worst, for mine has been beforehand with thee;

  I triumph in thy vain credulity,

  Which levels thy despairing state to mine;

  But yet thy folly, to believe a foe,

  Makes thine the sharper and more shameful loss.

  Troil. By my few moments of remaining life,

  I did not hope for any future joy;

  But thou hast given me pleasure ere I die,

  To punish such a villain. — Fight apart;[To his Soldiers.

  For heaven and hell have marked him out for me,

  And I should grudge even his least drop of blood

  To any other hand. [Troilus and Diomede fight, and both Parties engage at the same time. The Trojans make the Greeks retire, and Troilus makes Diomede give ground, and hurts him. Trumpets sound. Achilles enters with his Myrmidons, on the backs of the Trojans, who fight in a ring, encompassed round. Troilus, singling Diomede, gets him down, and kills him; and Achilles kills Troilus upon him. All the Trojans die upon the place, Troilus last.

  Enter Agamemnon, Menelaus, Ulysses, Nestor, Ajax, and Attendants.

  Achil. Our toils are done, and those aspiring walls,

  The work of gods, and almost mating heaven,

  Must crumble into rubbish on the plain.

  Agam. When mighty Hector fell beneath thy sword,

  Their old foundations shook; their nodding towers

  Threatened from high the amazed inhabitants;

  And guardian-gods, for fear, forsook their fanes.

  Achil. Patroclus, now be quiet; Hector’s dead;

  And, as a second offering to thy ghost,

  Lies Troilus high upon a heap of slain;

  And noble Diomede beneath, whose death

  This hand of mine revenged.

  Ajax. Revenged it basely:

  For Troilus fell by multitudes opprest,

  And so fell Hector; but ’tis vain to talk.

  Ulys. Hail, Agamemnon! truly victor now!

  While secret envy, and while open pride,

  Among thy factious nobles discord threw;

  While public good was urged for private ends,

  And those thought patriots, who disturbed it most;

  Then, like the headstrong horses of the sun,

  That light, which should have cheered the world, consumed it:

  Now peaceful order has resumed the reins,

  Old Time looks young, and Nature seems renewed.

  Then, since from home-bred factions ruin springs,

  Let subjects learn obedience to their kings.[Exeunt.

  EPILOGUE.

  SPOKEN BY THERSITES.

  These cruel critics put me into passion;

  For, in their lowering looks I read damnation:

  You expect a satire, and I seldom fail;

  When I’m first beaten, ’tis my part to rail.

  You British fools, of the old Trojan stock,

  That stand so thick, one cannot miss the flock,

  Poets have cause to dread a keeping pit,

  When women’s cullies come to judge of wit.

  As we strew rat’s-bane when we vermin fear,

  ‘Twere worth our cost to scatter fool-bane here;

  And, after all our judging fops were served,

  Dull poets, too, should have a dose reserved;

  Such reprobates, as, past all sense of shaming,

  Write on, and ne’er are satisfied with damning:

  Next, those, to whom the stage does not belong,

  Such whose vocation only is — to song;

  At most to prologue, when, for want of time,

  Poets take in for journey-work in rhime.

  But I want curses for those mighty shoals

  Of scribbling Chloris’s, and Phyllis’ fools:

  Those oafs should be restrained, during their lives,

  From pen and ink, as madmen are from knives.

  I could rail on, but ‘twere a task as vain,

  As preaching truth at Rome, or wit in Spain:

  Yet, to huff out our play was worth my trying;

  John Lilburn ‘scaped his judges by defying:

  If guilty, yet I’m sure o’ the church’s blessing,

  By suffering for the plot, without confessing.

  LIMBERHAM

  OR, THE KIND KEEPER

  The extreme indelicacy of this play would, in the present times furnish ample and most just grounds for the unfavourable reception it met with from the public. But in the reign of Charles II. many plays were applauded, in which the painting is, at least, as coarse as that of Dryden. “Bellamira, or the Mistress,” a gross translation by Sir Charles Sedley of Terence’s “Eunuchus,” had been often represented with the highest approbation. But the satire of Dryden was rather accounted too personal, than too loose. The character of Limberham has been supposed to represent Lauderdale, whose age and uncouth figure rendered ridiculous his ungainly affectation of fashionable vices. Mr Malone intimates a suspicion, that Shaftesbury was the person levelled at, whose lameness and infirmities made the satire equally poignant. In either supposition, a powerful and leading nobleman was offended, to whose party all seem to have drawn, whose loose conduct, in that loose age, exposed them to be duped like the
hero of the play. It is a singular mark of the dissolute manners of those times, that an audience, to whom matrimonial infidelity was nightly held out, not only as the most venial of trespasses, but as a matter of triumphant applause, were unable to brook any ridicule, upon the mere transitory connection formed betwixt the keeper and his mistress. Dryden had spared neither kind of union; and accordingly his opponents exclaimed, “That he lampooned the court, to oblige his friends in the city, and ridiculed the city, to secure a promising lord at court; exposed the kind keepers of Covent Garden, to please the cuckolds of Cheapside; and drolled on the city Do-littles, to tickle the Covent-Garden Limberhams.” Even Langbaine, relentless as he is in criticism, seems to have considered the condemnation of Limberham as the vengeance of the faction ridiculed.

  “In this play, (which I take to be the best comedy of his) he so much exposed the keeping part of the town, that the play was stopt when it had but thrice appeared on the stage; but the 004 author took a becoming care, that the things that offended on the stage, were either altered or omitted in the press. One of our modern writers, in a short satire against keeping, concludes thus:

  “Dryden, good man, thought keepers to reclaim,

  Writ a kind satire, call’d it Limberham.

  This all the herd of letchers straight alarms;

  From Charing-Cross to Bow was up in arms:

  They damn’d the play all at one fatal blow,

  And broke the glass, that did their picture show.”

  Mr Malone mentions his having seen a MS. copy of this play, found by Lord Bolingbroke among the sweepings of Pope’s study, in which there occur several indecent passages, not to be found in the printed copy. These, doubtless, constituted the castrations, which, in obedience to the public voice, our author expunged from his play, after its condemnation. It is difficult to guess what could be the nature of the indecencies struck out, when we consider those which the poet deemed himself at liberty to retain.

  The reader will probably easily excuse any remarks upon this comedy. It is not absolutely without humour, but is so disgustingly coarse, as entirely to destroy that merit. Langbaine, with his usual anxiety of research, traces back a few of the incidents to the novels of Cinthio Giraldi, and to those of some forgotten French authors.

  Plays, even of this nature, being worth preservation, as containing genuine traces of the manners of the age in which they appear, I cannot but remark the promiscuous intercourse, which, in this comedy and others, is represented as taking place betwixt women of character, and those who made no pretensions to it. Bellamira in Sir Charles Sedley’s play, and Mrs Tricksy in the following pages, are admitted into company with the modest female characters, without the least hint of exception or impropriety. Such were actually the manners of Charles the II.d’s time, where we find the mistresses of the king, and his brothers, familiar in the highest circles. It appears, from the evidence in the case of the duchess of Norfolk for adultery, that Nell Gwyn was living with her Grace in familiar habits; her society, doubtless, paving the way for the intrigue, by which the unfortunate lady lost her rank and reputation. It is always symptomatic of a total decay of morals, where female reputation neither confers dignity, nor excites pride, in its possessor; but is consistent with her mingling in the society of the libertine and the profligate.

  Some of Dryden’s libellers draw an invidious comparison betwixt his own private life and this satire; and exhort him to

  Be to vices, which he practised, kind.

  But of the injustice of this charge on Dryden’s character, we have spoken fully elsewhere. Undoubtedly he had the licence of this, and his other dramatic writings, in his mind, when he wrote the following verses; where the impurity of the stage is traced to its radical source, the debauchery of the court:

  Then courts of kings were held in high renown,

  Ere made the common brothels of the town.

  There virgins honourable vows received,

  But chaste, as maids in monasteries, lived.

  The king himself, to nuptial rites a slave,

  No bad example to his poets gave;

  And they, not bad, but in a vicious age,

  Had not, to please the prince, debauched the stage.

  Wife of Bath’s Tale.

  “Limberham” was acted at the Duke’s Theatre in Dorset-Garden; for, being a satire upon a court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that play-house. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to “Marriage-a-la-Mode.” Ravenscroft also, in his epilogue to the “Citizen turned Gentleman,” acted at the same theatre, disowns the patronage of the courtiers who kept mistresses, probably because they Constituted the minor part of his audience:

  From the court party we hope no success;

  Our author is not one of the noblesse,

  That bravely does maintain his miss in town,

  Whilst my great lady is with speed sent down,

  And forced in country mansion-house to fix.

  That miss may rattle here in coach-and-six.

  The stage for introducing “Limberham” was therefore judiciously chosen, although the piece was ill received, and withdrawn after being only thrice represented. It was printed in 1678.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE.

  DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

  ACT I.

  ACT II.

  ACT III.

  ACT IV.

  ACT V.

  EPILOGUE.

  TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOHN, LORD VAUGHAN, &c.

  My Lord,

  I cannot easily excuse the printing of a play at so unseasonable a time, when the great plot of the nation, like one of Pharaoh’s lean kine, has devoured 007 its younger brethren of the stage. But however weak my defence might be for this, I am sure I should not need any to the world for my dedication to your lordship; and if you can pardon my presumption in it, that a bad poet should address himself to so great a judge of wit, I may hope at least to escape with the excuse of Catullus, when he writ to Cicero:

  Gratias tibi maximas Catullus

  Agit, pessimus omnium, poeta;

  Tanto pessimus omnium poeta,

  Quanto tu optimns omnium patronus.

  I have seen an epistle of Flecknoe’s to a nobleman, who was by some extraordinary chance a scholar; (and you may please to take notice by the way, how natural the connection of thought is betwixt a bad poet and Flecknoe) where he begins thus: Quatuordecim jam elapsi sunt anni, &c.; his Latin, it seems, not holding out to the end of the sentence: but he endeavoured to tell his patron, betwixt two languages which he understood alike, that it was fourteen years since he had the happiness to know him. It is just so long, (and as happy be the omen of dulness to me, as it is to some clergymen and statesmen!) since your lordship has known, that there is a worse poet remaining in the world, than he of scandalous memory, who left it last. I might enlarge 008 upon the subject with my author, and assure you, that I have served as long for you, as one of the patriarchs did for his Old-Testament mistress; but I leave those flourishes, when occasion shall serve, for a greater orator to use, and dare only tell you, that I never passed any part of my life with greater satisfaction or improvement to myself, than those years which I have lived in the honour of your lordship’s acquaintance; if I may have only the time abated when the public service called you to another part of the world, which, in imitation of our florid speakers, I might (if I durst presume upon the expression) call the parenthesis of my life.

  That I have always honoured you, I suppose I need not tell you at this time of day; for you know I staid not to date my respects to you from that title which now you have, and to which you bring a greater addition by your merit, than you receive from it by the name; but I am proud to let others know, how long it is that I have been made happy by my knowledge of you; because I am sure it will give me a reputation with the present age, and with posterity. And now, my lord, I know you are afraid, lest I should take this occasion, which lies 009 so fair for me, to acquaint the
world with some of those excellencies which I have admired in you; but I have reasonably considered, that to acquaint the world, is a phrase of a malicious meaning; for it would imply, that the world were not already acquainted with them. You are so generally known to be above the meanness of my praises, that you have spared my evidence, and spoiled my compliment: Should I take for my common places, your knowledge both of the old and the new philosophy; should I add to these your skill in mathematics and history; and yet farther, your being conversant with all the ancient authors of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with the modern — I should tell nothing new to mankind; for when I have once but named you, the world will anticipate all my commendations, and go faster before me than I can follow. Be therefore secure, my lord, that your own fame has freed itself from the danger of a panegyric; and only give me leave to tell you, that I value the candour of your nature, and that one character of friendliness, and, if I may have leave to call it, kindness in you, before all those other which make you considerable in the nation.

  Some few of our nobility are learned, and therefore I will not conclude an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and scholar; but as the 010 world goes now, ’tis very hard to predicate one upon the other; and ’tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman can be a friend to poetry. Were it not for two or three instances in Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they might have leisure to turn pamphleteers, and augment the number of those abominable scribblers, who, in this time of licence, abuse the press, almost every day, with nonsense, and railing against the government.

  It remains, my lord, that I should give you some account of this comedy, which you have never seen; because it was written and acted in your absence, at your government of Jamaica. It was intended for an honest satire against our crying sin of keeping; how it would have succeeded, I can but guess, for it was permitted to be acted only thrice. The crime, for which it suffered, was that which is objected against the satires of Juvenal, and the epigrams of Catullus, that it expressed too much of the vice which it decried. Your lordship knows what answer was returned by the elder of those poets, whom I last mentioned, to his accusers: