All for Love
By John Dryden
()
About this ebook
John Dryden
John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. Vinton A. Dearing, editor of the California Dryden edition, is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Read more from John Dryden
Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Marriage A La Mode: “Better shun the bait, than struggle in the snare. ” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Aeneid by Virgil: Translated by John Dryden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absalom and Achitophel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHarvard Classics: All 71 Volumes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnnus Mirabilis; The Year of Wonders, 1666: An Historical Poem Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hind & The Panther: “Beware the fury of a patient man.” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlmanazor and Almahide - Volume 1: or, The Conquest of Granada. The First Part Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHalloween, A Theme In Verse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Life of St Francis Xavier, of the Society of Jesus, Apostle of the Indies, and of Japan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAureng-Zebe: A Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe State of Innocence: And Fall of Man. An Opera Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEpistles, Elegies, Epitaphs & Pastorals Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLimberham: or, The Kind Keeper Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Poetical Works of John Dryden, Volume 2 With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll for Love Or, the World Well Lost A Tragedy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All For Love Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Indian Emperor Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Assignation: “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOedipus: A Tragedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The AeneidEnglish Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5His Majesties Declaration Defended Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Rhyme A Dozen - 12 Poets, 12 Poems, 1 Topic ― Music Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlbion and Albanius: An Opera Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to All for Love
Related ebooks
Love's Labour's Lost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSeven against Thebes: Unabridged Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAntigone Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsArden of Faversham by William Shakespeare - Apocryphal - Apocryphal (Illustrated) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Flutter of the Goldleaf, and Other Plays Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Pot of Gold and Other Plays Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Study Guide for Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOedipus at Colonus Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5King Lear Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Great Gatsby Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Pericles Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Alls well that ends well Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dutch Lover: "There is no sinner like a young saint." Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Atheist's Tragedy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLysistrata Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Miser and Other Plays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The White Devil Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDrinks With Dead Poets: A Season of Poe, Whitman, Byron, and the Brontes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Heracleidæ (Heracleidae): (Herakles' Children) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Emperor Jones Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for John Ford's "Tis a Pity She's a Whore ('Tis…)" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemembrance and Pantomime: A Play Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Iphigenia at Aulis Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Way of the World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Physican in Spite of Himself aka A Doctor Despite Himself: Le Médecin Malgré Lui Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDark Sublime (NHB Modern Plays) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnthony and Cleopatra Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Amphitryon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
General Fiction For You
The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The City of Dreaming Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man Called Ove: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Unhoneymooners Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Fine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Ends with Us: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paris Apartment: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Alchemist: A Graphic Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The King James Version of the Bible Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mythos Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Labyrinth of Dreaming Books: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beartown: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Recital of the Dark Verses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Good and Evil Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nettle & Bone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shantaram: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for All for Love
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
All for Love - John Dryden
EPILOGUE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The age of Elizabeth, memorable for so many reasons in the history of England, was especially brilliant in literature, and, within literature, in the drama. With some falling off in spontaneity, the impulse to great dramatic production lasted till the Long Parliament closed the theaters in 1642; and when they were reopened at the Restoration, in 1660, the stage only too faithfully reflected the debased moral tone of the court society of Charles II.
John Dryden (1631-1700), the great representative figure in the literature of the latter part of the seventeenth century, exemplifies in his work most of the main tendencies of the time. He came into notice with a poem on the death of Cromwell in 1658, and two years later was composing couplets expressing his loyalty to the returned king. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of a royalist house, and for practically all the rest of his life remained an adherent of the Tory Party. In 1663 he began writing for the stage, and during the next thirty years he attempted nearly all the current forms of drama. His Annus Mirabilis
(1666), celebrating the English naval victories over the Dutch, brought him in 1670 the Poet Laureateship. He had, meantime, begun the writing of those admirable critical essays, represented in the present series by his Preface to the Fables
and his Dedication to the translation of Virgil. In these he shows himself not only a critic of sound and penetrating judgment, but the first master of modern English prose style.
With Absalom and Achitophel,
a satire on the Whig leader, Shaftesbury, Dryden entered a new phase, and achieved what is regarded as the finest of all political satires.
This was followed by The Medal,
again directed against the Whigs, and this by Mac Flecknoe,
a fierce attack on his enemy and rival Shadwell. The Government rewarded his services by a lucrative appointment.
After triumphing in the three fields of drama, criticism, and satire, Dryden appears next as a religious poet in his Religio Laici,
an exposition of the doctrines of the Church of England from a layman's point of view. In the same year that the Catholic James II. ascended the throne, Dryden joined the Roman Church, and two years later defended his new religion in The Hind and the Panther,
an allegorical debate between two animals standing respectively for Catholicism and Anglicanism.
The Revolution of 1688 put an end to Dryden's prosperity; and after a short return to dramatic composition, he turned to translation as a means of supporting himself. He had already done something in this line; and after a series of translations from Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, he undertook, at the age of sixty-three, the enormous task of turning the entire works of Virgil into English verse. How he succeeded in this, readers of the Aeneid
in a companion volume of these classics can judge for themselves. Dryden's production closes with the collection of narrative poems called Fables,
published in 1700, in which year he died and was buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Dryden lived in an age of reaction against excessive religious idealism, and both his character and his works are marked by the somewhat unheroic traits of such a period. But he was, on the whole, an honest man, open minded, genial, candid, and modest; the wielder of a style, both in verse and prose, unmatched for clearness, vigor, and sanity.
Three types of comedy appeared in England in the time of Dryden—the comedy of humors, the comedy of intrigue, and the comedy of manners—and in all he did work that classed him with the ablest of his contemporaries. He developed the somewhat bombastic type of drama known as the heroic play, and brought it to its height in his Conquest of Granada
; then, becoming dissatisfied with this form, he cultivated the French classic tragedy on the model of Racine. This he modified by combining with the regularity of the French treatment of dramatic action a richness of characterization in which he showed himself a disciple of Shakespeare, and of this mixed type his best example is All for Love.
Here he has the daring to challenge comparison with his master, and the greatest testimony to his achievement is the fact that, as Professor Noyes has said, fresh from Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra,' we can still read with intense pleasure Dryden's version of the story.
PREFACE
The death of Antony and Cleopatra is a subject which has been treated by the greatest wits of our nation, after Shakespeare; and by all so variously, that their example has given me the confidence to try myself in this bow of Ulysses amongst the crowd of suitors, and, withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the mark. I doubt not but the same motive has prevailed with all of us in this attempt; I mean the excellency of the moral: For the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love; and their end accordingly was unfortunate. All reasonable men have long since concluded, that the hero of the poem ought not to be a character of perfect virtue, for then he could not, without injustice, be made unhappy; nor yet altogether wicked, because he could not then be pitied. I have therefore steered the middle course; and have drawn the character of Antony as favourably as Plutarch, Appian, and Dion Cassius would give me leave; the like I have observed in Cleopatra. That which is wanting to work up the pity to a greater height, was not afforded me by the story; for the crimes of love, which they both committed, were not occasioned by any necessity, or fatal ignorance, but were wholly voluntary; since our passions are, or ought to be, within our power. The fabric of the play is regular enough, as to the inferior parts of it; and the unities of time, place, and action, more exactly observed, than perhaps the English theatre requires. Particularly, the action is so much one, that it is the only one of the kind without episode, or underplot; every scene in the tragedy conducing to the main design, and every act concluding with a turn of it. The greatest error in the contrivance seems to be in the person of Octavia; for, though I might use the privilege of a poet, to introduce her into Alexandria, yet I had not enough considered, that the compassion she moved to herself and children was destructive to that which I reserved for Antony and Cleopatra; whose mutual love being founded upon vice, must lessen the favour of the audience to them, when virtue and innocence were oppressed by it. And, though I justified Antony in some measure, by making Octavia's departure to proceed wholly from herself; yet the force of the first machine still remained; and the dividing of pity, like the cutting of a river into many channels, abated the strength of the natural stream. But this is an objection which none of my critics have urged against me; and therefore I might have let it pass, if I could have resolved to have been partial to myself. The faults my enemies have found are rather cavils concerning little and not essential decencies; which a master of the ceremonies may decide betwixt us. The French poets, I confess, are strict observers of these punctilios: They would not, for example, have suffered Cleopatra and Octavia to have met; or, if they had met, there must have only passed betwixt them some cold civilities, but no eagerness of repartee, for fear of offending against the greatness of their characters, and the modesty of their sex. This objection I foresaw, and at the same time contemned; for I judged it both natural and probable, that Octavia, proud of her new-gained conquest, would search out Cleopatra to triumph over her; and that Cleopatra, thus attacked, was not of