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.

Dryden’s All For Love, Post 1

Antony and Cleopatra was the first book in a long time to appeal to both the literary and fannish sides of my brain, and as such, it leaves a terrible vacuum, which I have filled in a fannish way.

Specifically, I’m reading John Dryden’s All For Love or, The World Well Lost, written about seventy years later in explicit response to Antony and Cleopatra; a rewrite of the play, but with the additional, incredibly bravely-taken challenge of obeying the Greek tragic unities – distilling the whole sprawling epic (which makes so much of its years-long pauses, and its death scenes in which characters have to wait for hours until they bleed out) into a single day of defeat.

Thus far (middle of Act II) I’m not sure whether he’s going to make it. It doesn’t help that his versions of the characters are not so complex, fascinating and ultimately pitiful as Shakespeare’s; they’re literary-fiction characters, tight and satirical, not the sprawling edifices I’m used to. We are not meant to sit in their brains, but rather to watch them helplessly, aghast at the terrible decisions they’re making, and at the terrible effects their self-absorption will have on their subjects and companions.

Because the other thing about Dryden is that he refuses to participate in Shakespeare’s neutral view of history. His story is not actually about Antony and Cleopatra, but about Egypt and Rome, and he actively condemns the leads for putting their romance above the needs of their station; indeed, he presents them as somewhat clueless royal creatures, relying for motivation upon their retainers, Ventidius the Roman general (a strikingly modern character, a bit of a self-conscious parody of the macho, blinkered action hero, though also a very clever man) and Alexas the Egyptian eunuch (an urbane realist who smilingly accepts Ventidius’ jokes about his missing balls while coldly out-talking and out-maneuvering people of much greater manifest intellectual capability). (Ventidius and Alexas hate each other.)

Comparatively, when we first see Antony, he’s somewhat unsuccessfully (but with a fair degree of pathos and poetry, since the whole point of Antony is that he can pretty much do anything except get younger) Hamleting around an Egyptian stronghold, a man of action clumsily trying to get his fists around the idea of depression. On Dryden’s chosen day, his empire is already lost, and he flings himself down and delivers a long, passionate monologue in which he fantasizes about running off to live in the kind of woodland pastoral only a lifelong urbanite would imagine. When Ventidius, who’s been watching him secretly, finally reveals himself, Antony breaks off his ramble (which, through exhaustive description of the forest scene, is made to seem extraordinarily long and involved although it actually isn’t) and they share a beautiful moment of understatement:

ANTONY

Art thou Ventidius?

VENTIDIUS

Are you Antony? I’m liker what I was, than you to him I left you last.

ANTONY

I’m angry.

VENTIDIUS

So am I.

This is a great exchange, half restrained tragedy and half well-timed wry comedy, but again, Dryden seems removed from his characters, and it shows in the suddenness of the transition from a near-break with reality to a moment of total self-awareness. It’s not an insane thing to imagine, but it’s something Shakespeare finessed better (partly by keeping most of the transitions between scenes, and partly by establishing Antony’s character earlier, so that the different fragments refer to an earlier and more coherent self). Played out so baldly, and without setup, it doesn’t work as well, even though you have to admire Dryden for trying to lay the whole matter before you in such a transparent way.

His Cleopatra is, thus far, a disappointment: manipulative without mastery, melodramatic without strength, lacking any more than a practical Brutus’ wit. It’s difficult to believe that she’s a queen who rules by charisma, and Dryden also makes a couple of absolutely inexplicable decisions in his portrayal of her history. Foremost among these is the idea that Antony has been responsible for much of her rise to power. Apparently, he has admired her chastely from afar almost since childhood, and her earlier relationship with Julius Caesar was horrible rudeness on Caesar’s part (and not much more). This decision takes most of the agency from Cleopatra, which would be a legitimate character decision – except that it means we suddenly know nothing about her. If Antony has always had her life firmly in hand, if she started (indeed) as his de facto ward, then who is she, and what does she want? If you’re going to do it this way, then the whole play is now about Antony, and that’s a sad loss.

Though, again, so far the significant characters are Ventidius and Alexas anyway; even Antony’s level of agency is modest compared to Ventidius’ drive (why has he actually interrupted Antony’s forest reverie? To convince him to come and lead an emergency army he happens to have raised). In its relentless focus on the nominally minor parts, it’s almost a proto-proto-proto Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I suspect Dryden (again, in a very modern way) is simply bored with traditional heroes in a particular way that I think shows limitation rather than imagination.

This is my response merely to the first act and part of the second, of course. I found this kind of early-impression post useful the last time I wrote about a play, so I’m putting it up even though I find it quite likely (since Dryden displays a good deal of intelligence and humor) that there are massively improving reversals and twists to come.