Lay lashing the departing waves

Cleopatra held by Charmion and Iras in All for Love, 1777 engraving by Edward Edwards

[Image source: Wikipedia .]



Act I
Scene I.—The Temple of Isis
Enter SERAPION, MYRIS, Priests of Isis

  SERAPION. Portents and prodigies have grown so frequent,
  That they have lost their name. Our fruitful Nile
  Flowed ere the wonted season, with a torrent
  So unexpected, and so wondrous fierce,
  That the wild deluge overtook the haste
  Even of the hinds that watched it: Men and beasts
  Were borne above the tops of trees, that grew
  On the utmost margin of the water-mark.
  Then, with so swift an ebb the flood drove backward,
  It slipt from underneath the scaly herd:
  Here monstrous phocae panted on the shore;
  Forsaken dolphins there with their broad tails,
  Lay lashing the departing waves: hard by them,
  Sea horses floundering in the slimy mud,
  Tossed up their heads, and dashed the ooze about them.
Enter ALEXAS behind them

MYRIS. Avert these omens, Heaven!

  SERAPION. Last night, between the hours of twelve and one,
  In a lone aisle of the temple while I walked,
  A whirlwind rose, that, with a violent blast,
  Shook all the dome: the doors around me clapt;
  The iron wicket, that defends the vault,
  Where the long race of Ptolemies is laid,
  Burst open, and disclosed the mighty dead.
  From out each monument, in order placed,
  An armed ghost starts up: the boy-king last
  Reared his inglorious head. A peal of groans
  Then followed, and a lamentable voice
  Cried, Egypt is no more! My blood ran back,
  My shaking knees against each other knocked;
  On the cold pavement down I fell entranced,
  And so unfinished left the horrid scene.
  ALEXAS. And dreamed you this? or did invent the story,
       [Showing himself.]
  To frighten our Egyptian boys withal,
  And train them up, betimes, in fear of priesthood?

(Opening of John Dryden's All for Love (1677))


Phocae -- seals
Sea horses -- hippopotamuses
Boy king -- Ptolemy XIV, died aged 15. It's been supposed, though not for certain, that his elder sister Cleopatra had him poisoned.

In the early part of All for Love we are made to feel very ill-disposed towards Cleopatra. It's remarkable how the play then contrives to swing us right round, so that by the end we're completely on her side.

The priests of Isis don't, as it turns out, have any large part to play in the concentrated chamber drama that follows. But when Serapion returns at the very end, it gives us a thrill and a reminder of a larger world in which both love and honour are stilled, set in a landscape.

Strange to see Dryden writing in blank verse and trying out some of the tools in Shakespeare's workshop. When Dryden gets too close to Shakespeare we gulp or flinch from pastiche, but when he maintains the right distance there's a muscular tautness about his verse, imaged scenes that are definite and somehow exciting. Evidently T.S. Eliot also appreciated Dryden's blank verse as a model for writing verse drama; though it didn't save his own work in that dubious genre, maybe not Byron's either. At the same time All for Love is a natural focus for Eliot's idea of "dissociation of sensibility" in the later 17th century; its characters reason or feel, but not both at the same time.

Serapion's description doesn't, perhaps surprisingly, mention crocodiles. His stranded river-creatures are all smooth-contoured, not crenellated. They feel naked, like civilian populations exposed to something outside their way of life; surgery or war or force majeure. Both the riverbed and the lone aisle disclose what should not be seen.

[Image source: https://www.gigcity.ca/2019/02/08/review-all-for-love-one-for-all/ . From Peter Hinton's Student Theater production at the University of Alberta, Feb. 2019. Antony was played by Diego Stredel, Cleopatra by Helen Belay.]

All for Love would be a great choice for a small theatre company, I reckon. It requires no boats, armies, scenery -- just some offstage music, a sword and a basket. You don't need many actors and Dryden's fluid development of dramatic situations feels easier to bring off than some of Shakespeare's dizzying demands.

*

I'm happy to discover that Sir Walter Scott, in his introductory note to All for Love, likewise picked out the passage about the Ptolemies' vault. "It is impossible to bestow too much praise on the beautiful passages which occur so frequently in "All for Love."" Most modern accounts are grudging, and Scott's enthusiasm valuably points up a revolution in taste since his day.

Dryden ended his preface, "I prefer the scene betwixt Antony and Ventidius in the first act to anything which I have written in this kind". This assertion didn't persuade David M. Vieth, who edited the play in 1972.

 Much of the Preface appears disingenuous. Far from having "excelled myself" in All for Love (perhaps with reference to earlier heroic dramas such as The Conquest of Granada), Dryden worked at cross-purposes. Neither the play nor its subtitle bears out his contention that he was attracted to the story of Antony and Cleopatra by "the excellency of the moral" the Preface claims to find there, the punishment of "unlawful love". The difficulty with the confrontation between Octavia and Cleopatra in Alexandria is not, as Dryden must have realized, that it divides the audience's sympathies, or that it is unhistorical, but that it makes Octavia look like an overly aggressive middle-class housewife invading her unfaithful husband's "love nest". Can Dryden really have preferred the exchange in Act I between Antony and Ventidius, after which Antony retains little tragic stature, "to anything which I have written in this kind" -- and what "kind" is it, beyond a faint "imitation" of Shakespeare's quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (Julius Caesar, IV.iii)? A sequence of neatly dove-tailed non sequiturs, the Preface is primarily Dryden's long-delayed attempt to smother the attack on him in An Allusion to Horace, the Tenth Satyr of the First Book, which had been circulating in manuscript since its composition in the winter of 1675-1676 by the witty young courtier John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester (1647-1680).

I don't know anything about the Rochester angle, but much of what Vieth says in this paragraph will chime with the reactions of other modern readers, if I am typical of them.

So it's salutary to compare Scott's view. He quotes an early review in which Mrs Porter, in the role of Octavia, "drew not only respect, but the more affecting approbation of tears from the audience". This sounds as if Dryden knew, better than we can, how his audiences would respond to a wronged wife. It's true that Octavia in the confrontation scene is unamiable, but how is this a "difficulty", unless we take the view that wronged characters should be always angelic? On his own part Scott remarks, "It happens, therefore, with Octavia, as with all other very good selfish kind of people; we think it unnecessary to feel any thing for her, as she is obviously capable of taking very good care of herself."

As for the scene that Dryden singles out for distinction, Scott says:

The rough old Roman soldier is painted with great truth; and the quarrel betwixt him and Antony, in the first act, is equal to any single scene that our author ever wrote, excepting, perhaps, that betwixt Sebastian and Dorax; an opinion in which the judgment of the critic coincides with that of the poet. It is a pity, as has often been remarked, that this dialogue occurs so early in the play, since what follows is necessarily inferior in force. Dryden, while writing this scene, had unquestionably in his recollection the quarrel betwixt Brutus and Cassius, which was justly so great a favourite in his time, and to which he had referred as inimitable in his prologue to "Aureng-Zebe"...

No-one, it seems, thought Dryden in his Preface was being disingenuous; Scott was only the latest of critics who took the superlative quality of the Ventidius/Antony scene in Act I as self-evident.

*

But, thinking about that hypothetical production of All for Love, one problem stands out: what are we going to make of Antony? Dryden's "turns" can make his hero seem feebly indecisive; in each of the first three acts he switches direction, in the fourth he is more petulant than resolute, and in the fifth he switches direction twice. He's seen too often in the situation of shying away from a woman (Cleopatra, Octavia) who is going to make him change his mind:  Lord Emsworth and his sister Connie come disastrously into view. How can we make the audience care about Antony?

But after all the Lord Emsworth analogy is inexact. Like any good Wodehouse hero he has no truck with love or honour or anything but his own comfort, but with Antony love and honour are everything. And it isn't another's superior force of will that overcomes him, but his own susceptibilities: to his lover, his loyal soldier, his best friend, his neglected wife and children.

If Antony were surrounded by his enemies, not by those he loves, we've no doubt he would be magnificent. Ruthless perhaps, or not. ("I can forgive / A foe, but not a mistress and a friend.")

Is he, then, a person driven hither and thither by the need to please others? I don't think so. But it isn't just spontaneously generous feelings either. He's also driven by an idea of himself, an idea of the magnificent thing to do, a revulsion from what's mean or base (everything that's figured in the other emperor Octavius, in Antony's view). And these thoughts lead to irreconcilable loyalties and to a willingness, perhaps too self-indulgently, to despair, to crash -- magnificently.

The love between Antony and Cleopatra is a given; I mean, very little of Dryden's play is devoted to manifesting the intensity of their love together.  (For a while I toyed with the thought that you could portray theirs as a junkie relationship, Antony hopelessly addicted to what he and Cleopatra indulge in privately, but it wouldn't fly.)

A better approach, maybe, is to take a cue from Dollabella and Ventidius (Act III, 188ff.); Antony is no longer young. His love affair is no longer young either, but he has grown used to it, and now he cannot will a life separate from Cleopatra. Driven by other demands and by stirrings of who he once was, he tries to reawaken his sense of a wider sphere of life, the calling of his reputation, his position, his family; but (as Alexas sees) always half-heartedly. Within him there remains not so much a loyal commitment to Cleopatra as an inability to do without her.

Consequently, while there's something awe-inspiring and affecting about the lovers and their tragic end, it isn't really heroic. In fact the gestures and language of heroism are deflated in All for Love because they tend to refer to all the amazing things that Antony says he's going to do, but never does.

Indeed the mock-heroic beckons. In Act II the revitalized Antony (abetted by Ventidius) indulges in a page or two of magnificent scorn of Octavius (II, 110 ff.) but Antony's getting ahead of himself and we already suspect he'll be reined in by the Egyptian court and by his own feelings for Cleopatra, as duly happens. So these strutting beohrtwords look rather silly.

That's not to say that an audience would actually laugh here, but there are other places where they'd laugh. Cleopatra's false act of come-hither to Dollabella, no matter how unwillingly assumed, is bound to tickle them. When Ventidius and Octavia spy on Cleopatra's acting, and stop spying at exactly the right moment to misunderstand it, then we seem to have descended into a world of intrigue, a potentially comic one. And when Ventidius laments "O women! Women! Women!" a modern audience will inevitably guffaw; perhaps Dryden's audience wasn't immune to the comedy of it, either.

In short, All for Love isn't fundamentally a play of character, nor one that seeks to plumb the depths of tragedy. It dramatizes a well-known tragic story, but from a perspective of cool appraisal, not partial to any side and not seeking to pull us down into its tragedy but to let us admire the brilliance of its expression, its situations and its fluid turns.