The Tragedy of All for Love

CLARENCE TRACY The Tragedy of All for Love Dryden never made any specific statement of his intentions in writing All for Love except for a remark at the beginning of his 'Preface' to the effect that what had attracted him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra was the 'excellency of the moral. For,' he explained, 'the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawfullove, and their end accordingly was unfortunate.' The notion that literature must give moral instruction as well as pleasure is at least as old as Horace and turns up in most Renaissance criticism. Nine years before, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden had included a clause in his working definition of a play in which it was declared that plays are written 'for the delight and instruction of mankind.'1 But he seems to have mentioned instruction rather as a matter of course, because, though there is much in the essay about 'delight,' there is remarkably little in it about 'instruction.' Similarly , in All for Love, his performance scarcely supports his statement; though his lovers suffer death, nothing in the action of the play connects their tragic fates with their extra-marital love affair. In fact, the tone ofthe last act is one of triumph rather than of shame and defeat: the lovers have escaped from the traps set for them by their enemies and are eternally reunited in death. The last speech in the play, put into the mouth of Serapion the high priest, describes them sitting together in state and pronounces their epitaph: 'No lovers lived so great, or died so well.' Indeed, was not their world 'well lost?' There may be a moral lesson in that, but not the lesson that Dryden spelled out. By common consent the 'Preface' is an unsatisfactory essay. According to F.L. Huntley,2 who wrote an article about it some years ago, it was written mainly as a contribution to Dryden's quarrel with his archenemy Rochester with only a marginal relevance to All for Love, and David Vieth, its most recent editor, complains that it is full of inconsistencies and non sequiturs.3 Both comments are justified. Most likely, too, Dryden was responding in it to criticisms made in coffee-houses. The air must have been full of such carping, because at first the play was not popular (though it became a hit after Dryden's death) and elsewhere in the 'Preface' he admitted that in one important particular his intention had misfired in production.4 So when he wrote the 'Preface' he was on the defensive. To claim as he did that in All for Love he had presented a UTQ, Volume XLV, Number 3, Spring 1976 THE TRAGEDY OF All for Love 187 shining example of poetic justice was to give his play the protection of one of the main neo-classical dogmas, which the recent publication of Thomas Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age had put in everybody's minds. But how seriously Dryden meant his statement about All for Love or how hopeful he was that his contemporaries would accept it at face value we ca:nnot know. Trite as was the moral lesson allegedly to be learned from All for Love, however, I am convinced that one of the purposes Dryden had in mind in altering the dramatic material taken over from Shakespeare, if not the main one, was to give the play intellectual and moral content that he could not find in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Comparisons between the two plays have usually concentrated on matters of form. and have done little more than show that Dryden imposed on his play the unities oftime, place, and action as well as the rule of decorum, trimming his material in whatever way he found necessary. His concern, it is assumed, was for tidying up and tucking in loose ends. Ifthe comparison is carried no further, his intention is misunderstood and his genius underrated. For what he did to Shakespeare's play was not unlike what our playwrights often do to the plays of Shakespeare and others. An age that applauds Brecht for turning the Beggar's Opera into the...