Dryden and the Art of Transversion

Dryden and the Art of Transversion Leslie Howard Martin Bayes. Why, sir, my first rule is the rule of transversion, or régula duplex—changing verse into prose, or prose into verse, alternative as you please . . . if it be prose, put it into verse (but that takes up some time). . . . — The Rehearsal (1671) Since Buckingham and his collaborators first euphemistically styled Dryden’s frequent and often unacknowledged borrowings “transversion,” scant attention has been paid these “plagiarisms” in the serious actions of his tragicomedies. A notable example is the main plot of Secret Love, the play whose prologue Langbaine , echoing The Rehearsal, instanced as evidence of the dramatist’s “making use of Bayes’s Art of Transversing.”! The story’s source in the “History of Cleobuline, Queen of Corinth” from Grand Cyrus (Part VII, Book ii), an original admitted by Dryden in the preface, is well known. So also are the source’s al­ legorical background and the most pertinent textual passages.2 But the prevailing impression is one of a routine translation, compressed in language and occasionally innovative in action, from Madeleine de Scudéry’s romance. In reality, however, comparison beyond juxtaposed texts and observed episodic parallels suggests that contrary to the coiners’intention, the term “transversion” ought at least in Secret Love to denote an adap­ tive effort performed with considerable skill. While his audience’s interest was doubtless whetted by the allegorical connection between the Queen of Sicily (Scudéry’s Cleobuline) and the celebrated Queen Christina of Sweden, Dryden’s rationale for choosing to dramatize this particular epi­ sode probably had little to do with history or with Christina’s notoriety as an eccentric. The récit was unlike any other in ro­ mances and offered the playwright a theme, as well as a treat­ ment, of unusual novelty. Madeleine de Scudéry’s account of the 3 4 Comparative Drama Corinthian Queen did, of course, involve a conventional motif, the love of a monarch for one of inferior station, but it avoided the commonplace, making the ruler female and not obviating barriers to her happiness by legerdemain. To audiences steeped in préciosité the “History of Cleobuline” seemed a poignant, even heroic tale, uncommonly strong in its appeal to “pity” and “noble” in its rejection of a debasing match in the name of “Glory.” The romances’ propensity for sentimental rather than tragic stories becomes especially conspicuous when the treatment given material similar to that of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, the relationship of a female ruler to a lover not of royal blood, is compared with the earlier English play. Aside from its want of Webster’s macabre sensibility, the “History of Cleobuline” aims only at the peculiarly stylized and remote “pity” familiar in the heroic drama3 and not at genuine pathos. Restoration readers chiefly relished and “pitied” the Corinthi­ an Queen’s “nobility” in a situation itself of a generic précieuse kind. Courtesy books and polite conversation manuals abounded in dialogues culled from French romances or from Caroline “Platonic” plays elucidating “secret love” among the refinements of passion: Quest. Why is it that secret Love is more burning than that which is discovered? Answ. Because in the one a fire doth consume but in the other a friend doth give advice to quench the flames.4 To the same point is William Cartwright’s four-line poem, “Love Inconcealable”: Who can hide fire? If’t be uncover’d, Light, If cover’d, Smoake betraies it to the sight: Love is that fire, which still some sign affords, If hid, the’are Sighs; If open, they are words.5 Like the tragedies of ancient Greece, Dryden’s play was by its title a thing already known, not in story but in sentimental motif. To this piquantly précieuse theme Dryden brought an in­ genuity for maintaining rather than altering the original’s tone and content. To change a romance story required far less ability than to transfer it to the stage with sentiments, theme, and characters substantially intact. Madeleine de Scudéry’s dialogue, written in her habitually graceful but unhurried style, required drastic editing, and only a portion of her numerous narrative Leslie...