I give up on a pithy title; this is my All For Love followup post.

I know I don’t like All For Love because I’ve been putting off reading the last act for five days. I still haven’t, but it looks like I won’t until the followup-post pressure’s off, so let’s forge on.

Dryden underestimates his audience, I think. In riffing off Antony and Cleopatra, All For Love does the same things Antony and Cleopatra did -realistic characters, character-based comedy, a tragedy of misunderstandings- and presents it as a new take on the story, while in fact, all he’s really done is get rid of Shakespeare’s epic scale. He has made the characters more “realistic” (probably not the word Dryden would use, but I think that was his intent) in that he’s made them vague and easily manipulated, taken away their emotional extremities; he does not seem to believe that there are people in the world who act like Shakespeare’s characters, or alternatively, he doesn’t seem to see artistic potential in slightly overplaying.

However, there’s no real way for me to get into the author’s mind, so why don’t I talk about the book, where I’m on firmer ground? If that’s even a reasonable distinction?

Let’s start by praising Dryden. The incidents in the play are ingenious. They’re like incidents in a great movie; they’re visual, and they’re also heavily symbolic – not in a “daffodil means sadness” way, but in a “this shot compresses a larger conflict” way. This is not my favorite way to tell a story, but there is little doubt that Dryden is brilliant when, for example, he has Octavia come to plead with Antony to return – brings his kids – instructs the kids openly on how to cling to him for maximum bathos – martyrs herself obnoxiously (and is called on it by the helpless Antony) – all played as intentional emotional blackmail. We associate this kind of anti-sentimentalism with the modern world, and the modern world with the best of everything; I freely admit I’m probably tumbling into this fallacy when I call this scene great, but on the other hand, it is great. Maybe if I were living in 1850 I’d have to free myself from my times a little more to think so (actually, this is probably a big part of my resentment of All For Love: it too closely resembles what’s currently fashionable in thought, it doesn’t flatter me by demanding I work for it). But it is an objectively gorgeously-plotted play. I hope.

Dryden also does a fine job of retelling an epic as a drawing-room melo-comedy-something. He is formally brave. He reduces the characters to a few vital and thus more highly concentrated roles, in the process giving us the great characters of Ventidius, Alexas (who become increasingly obvious and annoying characters as the play runs on, but are still interesting and funny) and to a lesser extent Dolabella. Dolabella is a transparent plot device, actually, but Dryden does a nice job of writing him: a well-motivated, diplomatic youth in an awkward position. It doesn’t help, however, that Dryden tells him to be in love with Cleopatra. Dolabella’s passionlessness is so striking that it initially seems that Dryden’s setting it up so that he’s actually interested in Antony, and Antony’s blind to it. This could be interesting, but alas, the more time passes, the more this potential wrinkle smooths.

I was somewhat wrong in my initial assessment that Dryden is trying to be epic and satirical about the failures of royal leadership, and also that it’s not really about the leads (though it would still be better titled Antony and Ventidius or, The Room Mis-Judged). I’m completely convinced now that he’s focused on the formal tricks listed above: epic-into-personal-drama. That Shakespeare’s play already has a perfectly good personal drama is not Dryden’s problem.

I was completely correct in my initial assessment that Dryden really shafts Cleopatra, who has not yet demonstrated even a touch of the strength, wit, failings and personal power of Shakespeare’s, and even states (without irony) at one point that she was born to be an ordinary woman. I respect all that in theory; it’s the same thing Shakespeare does, sort of, giving these royal or martial characters strongly humanizing traits and really bringing home the fact that they can’t live inside their myths – but on the other hand, Shakespeare’s characters certainly live up to them. I don’t understand how Dryden’s Antony and Cleopatra have even held on to their thrones. It is fine to write about ordinary people (though if they lack remarkable gifts, they had better be in very interesting or pathetic situations) if the audience doesn’t know that they have extraordinary life histories, that in the case of these ancient politicians, these are people who’d be dead now if they weren’t extraordinary.

Part of this is the dramatic-unities thing. You can’t give it any real sense of history and these characters -without their history- are much weaker even if you change nothing else. In the end, I think, I continue to respect Dryden’s experiment, but I really can’t like it.

I don’t think I’ll write more about All For Love unless Act V really, really shocks me one way or the other. Like, if one of the leads suddenly says, “I’ve written a play about us, my chuck!” and produces a copy of Antony and Cleopatra, and then they perform that instead.