John Dryden - Delphi Poets Series

by John Dryden

  ‘And shall the daughter of Darius hold him? That puny girl? that ape of my ambition, That cried for milk when I was nursed in blood? Shall she, made up of watery element, Ascend, shall she embrace my proper God, While I am cast like lightning from his hand? No, I must scorn to prey on common things. Though hurled to earth by this disdainful Jove, I will rebound to my own orb of fire, And with the wrack of all the heavens expire.’

  Even when the thought is dignified and noble, it frequently loses dramatic propriety from want of keeping with the speaker or the situation:

  ‘Therefore, my friend, Let us despise the torrent of the world, Fortune, I mean, and dam her up with fences, Banks, bulwarks, all the fortresses which virtue, Resolved and manned like ours, can raise against her: That, if she does o’erflow, she may at least Bring but half ruin to our great designs; That being at last ashamed of her own weakness, Like a low-baséd flood, she may retire To her own bounds, and we with pride o’erlook her.’

  Into what Cato’s mouth has Lee put this deliverance of Stoic dignity? Truly, into Cæsar Borgia’s. Machiavelli having been privy to all Borgia’s villainies, is selected to pronounce the moral of the play:

  ‘No power is safe, nor no religion good, Whose principles of growth are laid in blood.’

  A proposition supposed to have been irrefragably established by five acts full of poniards and poisons. This childish want of nature Lee shares with most of the tragic dramatists of the Restoration period. He is mainly glare and gewgaw, and seldom succeeds but in those scenes of passion and frenzy where extravagant declamation seems a natural language. There is little to remark on his dramatic economy, which is that of the French classical drama. His characters are boldly outlined and strongly coloured, but transferred direct from history to the stage, or wholly conventional. His merit is to have been really a poet. ‘There is an infinite fire in his works,’ says Addison, ‘but so involved in smoke that it does not appear in half its lustre.’ The following scene from Mithridates is a fair example of the mingled beauties and blemishes of his tragic style:

  ‘Ziph. Farewell, Semandra; O, if my father should Fall back from virtue, (’tis an impious thought!) Yet I must ask you, could you in my absence, Solicited by power and charming empire, And threaten’d too by death, forget your vows? Could you, I say, abandon poor Ziphares, Who midst of wounds and death would think on you; And whatsoe’er calamity should come, Would keep his love sacred to his Semandra, Like balm, to heal the heaviest misfortune?

  Sem. Your cruel question tears my very soul: Ah, can you doubt me, Prince? a faith, like mine, The softest passion that e’er woman wept; But as resolv’d as ever man could boast: Alas, why will you then suspect my truth? Yet since it shews the fearfulness of love, ’Tis just I should endeavour to convince you: Make bare your sword, my noble father, draw.

  Arch. What would’st thou now?

  Sem. I swear upon it, oh, Be witness, Heav’n, and all avenging pow’rs, Of the true love I give the Prince Ziphares: When I in thought forsake my plighted faith, Much less in act, for empire change my love; May this keen sword by my own father’s hand Be guided to my heart, rip veins and arteries; And cut my faithless limbs from this hack’d body, To feast the ravenous birds, and beasts of prey.

  Arch. Now, by my sword, ’twas a good hearty wish; And, if thou play’st him false, this faithful hand As heartily shall make thy wishes good.

  Ziph. O hear mine too. If e’er I fail in aught That love requires in strictest, nicest kind; May I not only be proclaim’d a coward, But be indeed that most detested thing. May I, in this most glorious war I make, Be beaten basely, ev’n by Glabrio’s slaves, And for a punishment lose both these eyes; Yet live and never more behold Semandra. [Trumpets.

  Arch. Come, no more wishing; hark, the trumpets call.

  Sem. Preserve him, Gods, preserve his innocence; The noblest image of your perfect selves: Farewell; I’m lost in tears. Where are you, Sir?

  Arch. He’s gone. Away, my lord, you’ll never part.

  Ziph. I go; but must turn back for one last look: Remember, O remember, dear Semandra, That on thy virtue all my fortune hangs; Semandra is the business of the war, Semandra makes the fight, draws every sword; Semandra sounds the trumpets; gives the word. So the moon charms her watery world below; Wakes the still seas, and makes ‘em ebb and flow.’

  John Crowne (1640-1703?).

  The remaining dramatists of the Restoration, with the exception of the brilliant group of comic authors near the end of the century, who demand a separate notice, undoubtedly belong to the class of playwrights. The most characteristic playwright of all, taking the term in the sense of a steady competent workman destitute of originality, was perhaps John Crowne. Crowne was the man to supply the playhouses with a regular output of respectable work, and, as he had no other object than to suit his market, we perhaps learn better from him and his like than from writers of genius what the public of the day required. It seems rather extraordinary that such heavy tragedies as Crowne’s should have been marketable in any age; but it must be considered that the tragic stage had to be kept going for the sake of the actors, and that if people would not have Shakespeare they must take what they could get. Indifferent plays, moreover, may make fine spectacles; and Crowne’s Julianas, Reguluses, and Caligulas served the purpose of habitual playgoers, that is, of playgoers from the force of habit, as well as better pieces. The success of Crowne’s comedies is less difficult to understand. Here he really gave the public a fair reflection of itself, and exhibited contemporary manners with truth, if with no great brilliancy. On one occasion he soared higher, and (1685) created a real type in the exquisite coxcomb, Sir Courtly Nice. The rest of the play is partly imitated from the Spanish, but the character of Nice is Crowne’s own. The humour is considerably overdone, but is still a genuine piece of comedy, which culminates at the end, when the infuriated fop rushes from the stage, vowing to be avenged, ‘as far as my sword and my wit can go.’ The English Friar (1689), a satire on the Tartufes of the Roman Catholic persuasion, is also a remarkable piece, the parent of a long line of imitations. In City Politics (1673), Crowne’s first comedy, the Whig party in the City is held up to obloquy in the transparent disguise of a Neapolitan rabble, and the satire is keen and vivid. The Married Beau (1694) is remarkable as a reversion towards the style of Fletcher and Shirley. Calisto is an interesting attempt to revive the ancient masque. The only one of Crowne’s serious dramas entitled to much attention is Darius, where the poetry is frequently fine, but the characters are tame. Not much is known of his life. He appears to have been taken in youth to America, and to have returned by 1665, when he published a romance entitled Pandion and Amphigenia. His connection with the stage commenced in 1671 with Juliana, and terminated with Caligula in 1698. He would seem to have been a precise and matter-of-fact man, and is ridiculed by Rochester as ‘Little starch Johnny Crowne with his ironed cravat.’ He was fond of accompanying his plays with long prefaces and dedications, which throw some light on his opinions and private history, and, so far as they go, exhibit his disposition in an advantageous light. From one of them it appears that he suffered in his latter days from ‘a distemper seated in my head.’ His tantalizing gleams of talent as a lyrist have been already mentioned.

  Thomas Southern (1660-1746).

  Thomas Southern undoubtedly belonged to the genus playwright, and has none of the flashes of poetry which occasionally seem to exalt Crowne to a higher rank. His distinction rather arises from the financial success of his pieces, which was such that he died ‘the richest of all our poets, a very few excepted.’ For this, however, he is said to have been indebted not so much to the actual vogue of his pieces as to his assiduity in soliciting tickets. It is to be wished that he had been equally assiduous in collecting facts about Shakespeare, if, as is somewhat doubtfully asserted, his father came from Stratford-on-Avon. He was born at Dublin in 1660, and is said to have been a servitor at Oxford and a student at the Middle Temple. This he forsook for the army, but hi
s service cannot have been of long duration. His first play, The Loyal Brother (1682), was designed to compliment the Duke of York upon the failure of the Exclusion Bill. He was not a very industrious writer, producing only ten plays down to 1726, and of these only two, The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroonoko (1696), had any considerable reputation even in his own day. Both, however, kept the stage until an advanced period of the nineteenth century. The diction of both pieces, though never rising into poetry, and interlarded with dull scenes intended to be comic, is by no means contemptible; the main strength, however, consists in the situations, which are really powerful, and in the writer’s art in arousing an interest both in his innocent and his mixed characters. Respected as a relic of the past, a decorous church-goer with silver hair, Southern lived far into the eighteenth century, and came sufficiently under its influence to repent of his mingling of tragic and comic action in the same piece; which indeed he had reason to regret, not because he had done it, but because he had not done it better.

  Thomas Shadwell (1640-1692).

  Thomas Shadwell is remarkable as the leading Whig votary of belles lettres after the death of Marvell, a distinction which secured him the laureateship upon the cashiering of Dryden. To call him poet would be a gross misapplication of the term, and Dryden’s withering couplet might seem justified if he had nothing but his serious verse to rely upon:

  ‘With all his bulk, there’s nothing lost in Og, For every inch that is not fool is rogue.’

  His title to recollection, however, rests upon things as remote from poetry as possible — his coarsely indecent, but humorous comedies, which are undoubtedly of value as reflecting the manners of the time. Shadwell, in imitation of Ben Jonson, laid himself out to study ‘humours,’ so well defined by Ben himself:

  ‘When some peculiar quality Doth so possess a man that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers From their complexions all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.’

  We have seen the like in Dickens, who, possessing little delicacy of psychological observation, laid himself out to study obvious eccentricities of character, the more grotesque the better, and frequently made the entire man the incarnation of an attribute. This is certainly not very high art, but has recommendations for the stage which it lacks in the novel; it is easy to write, easy to act, and gives genuine entertainment to the crowd of spectators. Shadwell valued himself so much upon his performances in this way as to declare in his preface to The Virtuoso that he trusted never to have less than four new humours in any comedy. Shadwell’s plays, though poorly written, might still be read for their humour, were it not for their obscenity; his chief merit, however, is to bring the society of his time nearer to us than any other writer. No other records such minute points of manners, or enables us to view the actual daily life of the age with so much clearness. This is especially the case in his Epsom Wells (1675), Squire of Alsatia (1688), and Volunteers (1692). From Dryden’s satire, which must have had a basis of truth, he would seem to have been just the boisterous corpulent bon vivant we might expect. ‘If,’ said Rochester, ‘Shadwell would burn all he writes and print all he says, he would have more wit and humour than anybody.’ His friend, Dr. Nicholas Brady, vouches for the openness and friendliness of his temper; and further describes him as ‘a complete gentleman.’ But this was in a funeral sermon. The regard for Otway, imputed to him by Rochester, is creditable to him.

  The violent death of Archbishop Abbot’s gamekeeper would have passed unnoticed if the poor man had been shot by anybody but the archbishop himself; and Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) would have slipped away in the crowd of poetasters if Rochester had not taken it into his head to pit him against Dryden. In the sense in which the mysterious W. H. was ‘the only begetter of Shakespeare’s sonnets,’ he may hence claim to be the parent of one of the most scathing pieces of invective in the language. Although, however, Doeg is undoubtedly Settle, Settle is not wholly Doeg. Miserable as his lampoons are, a line here and there is not destitute of piquancy; and if his Empress of Morocco (1673) has no literary pretensions, it is important in literary history for having so moved the wrath of Dryden, and in the history of the drama for having been issued with plates which contribute greatly to our knowledge of the internal arrangements of the Restoration Theatre. By a singular irony of fortune, his fate bears some analogy to that of his mighty antagonist. Settle lost caste by changing his politics at the wrong time, as Dryden his religion; but while Dryden bore up against the storm of adversity, Settle sunk into obscurity, and ultimately into the Charter House. Of his twenty plays none but The Empress of Morocco is now ever mentioned, unless an exception be made in favour of Ibrahim, the Illustrious Bassa (1676), noticeable, as Professor Ward remarks, for being founded upon one of the voluminous French romances of the day.

  Some other playwrights would deserve extended notice in a history of the drama, but are only entitled to the barest mention in a general literary survey. Among these are Sir Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, and joint-author with him of The Indian Queen, the most important of whose plays is The Committee (printed 1665), a satire on the Commonwealth, described by Sir Roger de Coverley as ‘a good old Church of England comedy:’ John Wilson, Recorder of Londonderry, author of three comedies and a tragedy of more than average merit; Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery; Sir Charles Sedley, Major Thomas Porter, and John Lacy, all very mediocre as dramatists; Thomas D’Urfey, better known than any of the above, but not by his writings, which are below mediocrity. The ten plays of Edward Ravenscroft procured him no other reputation than that of a plagiarist. Some female dramatists will be mentioned in another place.

  Before passing to the opulent comedy of the latter part of the century, two writers remain to be mentioned, one of whom stands alone in the drama of the period, while the other forms the transition to the comedy of Wycherley and Congreve. In describing George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, as one standing apart, we refer to the character of his solitary work, and not to his share in it; for, though passing solely under his name, there can be little doubt that it was the production of a junto of wits, of whom he was not the wittiest. Butler, Sprat, and Martin Clifford are named as his coadjutors. Buckingham, who must be credited with a keen sense of the ridiculous, had already resolved to satirize rhyming heroic plays in the person of Sir Robert Howard, when the latter’s retirement diverted the blow to Dryden, whom Butler, as we shall see, did not greatly relish, and against whose device of rhyme, Sprat, as we have seen, had committed himself by anticipation. The play chiefly selected for parody is The Conquest of Granada, which certainly invited it. Dryden appears as Bayes, in allusion to his laureateship; and, although his perpetual use of ‘egad’ seems derived from the usage by one of his dramatis personae rather than his own, we cannot doubt that his peculiarities of speech and gesture were mostly copied to the life. Within a week the town were unanimously laughing at what they had been unanimously applauding; and, scurrilous and ill-bred as the mockery of The Rehearsal was, it must be allowed to have been neither uncalled for nor unuseful. The machinery of the piece is sufficiently indicated by its title. Bayes entertains the dissembling Johnson and the unsympathetic Smith with a rehearsal of The Two Kings of Brentford, commenting meanwhile and explaining, vaunting beauties and extenuating miscarriages with a verve that still amuses, notwithstanding the far superior treatment of the same theme in Sheridan’s Critic. Some of the scenes are highly farcical; and some of the passages are very fair hits at the bombast and other extravagances of the writers of heroic plays, for Dryden is by no means the sole object of satire:

  ‘The blackest ink of fate was sure my lot, And when she writ my name, she made a blot.’

  ‘Durst any of the Gods be so uncivil, I’d make that God subscribe himself a Devil.’

  ‘The army’s at the door, and in disguise Demands a word with both your majesties.’

  ‘Yes, I think, for a dead person, it is a good way enough of making love, for being divested of her ter
restrial part, and all that, she is only capable of these little, pretty, amorous designs that are innocent, and yet passionate.’

  One of Bayes’s precepts may be commended to the attention of any who may think of reviving rhyming tragedy. It also shows the cramped condition of the theatre in Dryden’s day:

  ‘Bayes. Gentlemen, I must desire you to remove a little, for I must fill the stage.

  Smith. Why fill the stage?

  Bayes. O sir, because your heroic verse never sounds well but when the stage is full.’

  Sir George Etheredge (1634-1691).

  Sir George Etheredge is neither an edifying nor an attractive writer of comedy, but his plays are of considerable historical importance as prototypes of the comedy of manners afterwards so brilliantly developed by Congreve. They are Love in a Tub (1664), She Would if She Could (1668), and The Man of Mode (1676). The last is celebrated for the character of Sir Fopling Flutter, who is said to have been the image of the author, though it is added on the same authority that his intention had been to depict himself in the character of the heartless rake Dorimant, whom others took for Rochester. All the plays suffer from a deficiency of plot, a deficiency of wit, and a superfluity of naughtiness, but cannot be denied to possess a light airy grace, and to have imbibed something of the manner, though little of the humour, of Molière. By his own account the author was lazy, careless, and a gamester. Little, except that ‘he was knighted for marrying a fortune,’ is known of his history until 1685, when, unexpectedly to himself, he was appointed envoy to Ratisbon, and details become copious from the accidental preservation of his letter-book, now in the British Museum. The general tone of his correspondence is good-natured and easy; he seems to have made just the kind of ambassador to be expected from an idle man of fashion without diplomatic experience; while he may well have merited his friends’ description of him as ‘gentle George,’ and his repute as easy and generous. The Revolution deprived him of his post; he seems to have refused allegiance to William, and to have died at Paris in 1691.