The ethos of drama: rhetorical theory and dramatic worth

3. The Worth of Words

76   C h a p t e r 3 The Worth of Words In the seventeenth century, John Dryden wrote when language reformers attacked abstract words as meaningless, and in our time, David Hare and others have written when words themselves were reduced by some to marks on a page. In Dryden’s time, “insignificant” was the pejorative attached to words like “conscience”; in Hare’s time, “indeterminacy” to words like to “truth” and “faith.” The practice of these dramatists and others , however, has rebuked the theoretical position that abstract value terms carry no verifiable or practical meaning. John Dryden’s name appears frequently in scholarly accounts of language reform in the seventeenth century in England for several good reasons: he belonged to the Royal Society committee on language: his essays frequently deal with language as such: and he has long been regarded as an early master of a mature prose style.1 In 1930, R. F. Jones implied that a causV 1. Many critics notice Dryden’s membership in the Royal Society; Robert D. Hume summarizes several accounts and adds, “[George] Watson argues convincingly that the influence is much less than has been supposed” (Dryden’s Criticism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970], 44; Watson’s “Dryden and the Scientific Image” appears in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18 [1963]: 25–35). Hume “think[s] it safe to say that in almost every essay Dryden discusses style or The Worth of Words   77 al chain connects Dryden’s prose to the influence of the Royal Society and to John Wilkin’s attempt to forge a language of signs with universal, common significance: thirty-eight years later, Philip Harth saw Wilkins’s influence reaching Dryden through Cambridge.2 Two recent critical comments indicate that scholarship has generally accepted Dryden’s association with the Royal Society as evidence of abiding convictions that disposed him toward a plain, unornamented style. In the University of California Works (1984), Maximillian Novak glosses Dryden’s assertion that “progress has been made in making words “usefull ”: “Dryden may be thinking of the committee of the Royal Society established for this purpose, and of men like John Wallis who had helped found the Royal Society.”3 Relating Dryden’s poetry to the standards of the reformers, Barbara Shapiro says that Dryden defended English poetry and drama in terms almost identical to those of Thomas Sprat. And Dryden, a member of the Royal Society, also advocated a literary standard that emphasized clarity of expression.4 Like Shapiro, Harth sees the Royal Society influencing more than Dryden’s poetry: Dryden did not abandon the idea of the Royal Society when he relinquished his membership...Rather, he carried these ideals stylistic problems—they are his most abiding concern” (63). Samuel Johnson’s praise helped establish Dryden’s reputation as a master of prose: “The clauses are never balanced, nor the periods modelled; every word seems to drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place” (Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birbeck Hill [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905], 1, 418). 2. R. F. Jones, “Science and English Prose Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century,” reprinted from PMLA 45 (1930) in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), 103–4. Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 17–18. 3. John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, ed. Maximillian E. Novak, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 13:223, 528. All references to Dryden are to this edition unless otherwise noted. Hereafter, volume and page numbers for citations of Dryden’s prose, along with act, scene, and line numbers for quotations from the plays, are included parenthetically in the text. 4. Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 260–61. 78   The Worth of Words with him into another sphere...The advancement of learning which Bacon predicted from his method need not he confined to natural philosophy: it can be extended to all the arts and sciences , including poetry.5 Harth does not directly allege that Dryden embraced the reformers ’ standards of language, but even his carefully qualified argument associates Dryden, as most scholars do, with Sprat, who advocated “so...