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This article is reprinted from the Fall 1997 issue of FIDELIO Magazine. | ||||||||||||||
John Drydens Attack on Shakespeare:
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* Chaucers passage from The Nuns Priests Tale, in its original Middle English, reads as follows. (Readers unfamiliar with the Middle English of Chaucers age, are encouraged to sound the lines out aloud. The relationship to modern English should become clear.):
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There lived, as authors tell, in days of yore,
A widow somewhat old, and very poor:
Deep in a dell her cottage lonely stood,
Well thatched, and under covert of a wood.
This dowager, on whom my tale I found,
Since last she laid her husband in the ground,
A simple sober life in patience led,
And had but just enough to buy her bread:
But huswifing the little Heavn had lent,
She duly paid a groat for quarter rent;
And pinched her belly, with her daughters two,
To bring the year about with much ado.
&tc.
Pilgrams from Chaucers Canterbury Tales
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In 1660, to put down the great power and beauty of Shakespeares dramatic poetry, was both the purpose and the requirement of the new style for which Dryden was the standard-bearer. During the ascendancy of Puritanism and Cromwell, all plays had been banned in England. When the Stuart Restoration began the Enlightenment in Great Britain, the theaters reopened with Shakespeares plays virtually absent, except in the many rewrites by Dryden and such as Sir William Davenant, Thomas Shadwell, and Nahum Tate. The situation brings to mind todays modernist productions of Shakespeare, in which time, scene, and characterization are changed according to the passing whims and fads of chic directors; only, Drydens friends went much further, completely rewriting the poetry of the plays. As one scholar writes of Drydens theater, with brutal frankness:
Restoration drama lacked, above all, any higher moral quality. It presented either abstract and heroic chivalry, or lewd comedy. From both points of view, Shakespeares dramas were unacceptable to people of this time, who felt, as well, that he could not write decent English.4
John Drydens and Thomas Hobbes essays on dramatic and heroic poetry were crucial in defining, for the English public, the new style of English which Shakespeare could not write. Drydens Essay of Dramatic Poesy was very famous for its attack upon the blank versethat is, metrical, but unrhymed versein which all of Shakespeares plays are written. We shall see shortly, how crucial that was to the creation of sing-song in English poetry.
Dryden established the dominance of what he called the Rhyming Play, written entirely in closed, rhyming couplets; Sir Walter Scott called it a metrical romance of chivalry in the form of a drama. Dryden wrote:
Tragedy, we know, is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly; heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse. ... Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses; how much more so for tragedy.Dryden claimed that Shakespeare had been the first to write tragedy in blank verse; an assertion which was untrue, but showed Drydens eagerness to attack Shakespeare on this question.
In his Epilogue to The Conquest of Grenada (1669), he bragged, in closed couplets, that the critics of his day would have destroyed Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Ben Jonson; meanwhile flattering the worst side of the genteel Restoration spectators:
But were they now to write, when critics weigh,
And count each word and line throughout a play,
None of em, no, not Jonson in his height,
Could pass, without allowing grains for weight.
Think it not envy, that these truths are told;
Our poets not malicious, tho hes bold. ...
If love and honor now are higher raised,
Tis not the poet, but the age is praised.
Wits now arrived to a more high degree;
Our native language more refined and free.
Our ladies and our men now speak more wit,
Than all the former age of poets writ.
Dryden, Davenant, Shadvell, et al. hammered away at this theme in the Prologues and Prefaces to their plays, conspiring thus with arrogant modernist critics sitting out front, and progressively brainwashing their culturally sunken audiences into contempt for the coarse and rustic Shakespeare. Dryden rewrote Troilus and Cressida, complete with a Prologue spoken by a ghost of Shakespeare, whom he made to damn himself with faint praise:
Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age,
I found not, but created first the stage.
And if I drained no Greek or Latin store,
Twas, that my own abundance gave me more.
And in the above cited essay, Dryden wrote;
For the lively imitation of Nature being in the definition of a play, those which best fulfill that law ought to be superior to the others. ... But the chronicles of Shakespeare look upon Nature through the wrong end of a perspective, and thus do not delight.Shakespeares interweaving of comic and tragic elements in his plays was also denounced, Dryden claiming that they would cancel and destroy each other. But Dryden does allow one way in which the dramatic poet mayindeed, mustheighten the imitation of Nature. And that isRhyme! Thus Drydens formula: Images of Nature + Rhyme = Tragedy.
The hand of Hobbes and the Royal Society behind these attacks upon the greatest of English poets, shows clearest in Drydens attack upon Metaphor (under its old name, Trope):
I have never heard of any other foundation of Dramatic Poesy than the imitation of Nature; neither was there ever pretended any other by the Ancients or Moderns, or me. ... The words describing Nature must not admit too curious an election, too many tropes, or anything in the writing which carries the public away from the object, to the poets own mind.
Let us now illustrate that true dramatic speaking of classical poetry, is generated by agape; and sing-song in poetry, by sensually-bound eros. We will compare a dramatic scene of Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, with a scene from The Indian Queen, one of Drydens most celebrated tragedies of chivalric love.
Both scenes portray the secret meeting, and impassioned speech, of star-crossed lovers who are under compulsion never again to see each other.
Act III, Scene V of Romeo and Juliet seems to present the young lovers last meeting. As of the dawn which they await, Romeo is banished from Verona to Mantua, on pain of death, for killing Juliets arrogant cousin Tybalt, in a street swordfight started by that aristocratic-erotic fool, Mercutio. The hopes of Romeo and Juliet, of Friar Lawrence, and of the spectators, that their love might end the deadly civil war between their families, seem blasted. The idea, the Metaphor of Metaphors of the tragedythat the teenaged lovers must be truly willing to die, to win for others the triumph of lovewhich idea first appeared in the Prologue to Act I, is now dramatically presented on the stage.
Friar Lawrence, the lovers protector, is a Franciscan. In that historical Italy where Shakespeare set his playItaly before the Fifteenth-century Golden Renaissanceit was the Friars Minor, the Franciscan preachers, who alone were able to pacify the brutal feuds of aristocratic families which tore Italian cities apart. Romeo and Juliet could be called Shakespeares Franciscan tragedy, for the famous prayer of St. Francis began, Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; Where there is hatred, let me sow love. And, this higher idea is already suspended above the scene, in the minds of the audience.
In this scene, the whole dialogue is a single classical poem, written in Shakespeares beautiful unrhymed (blank) verse, within which are five rhymed couplets, very deliberately placed.
Scene V.An open Gallery to Juliets Chamber, overlooking the Garden.
[Enter Romeo and Juliet]
Juliet: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It is the nightingale and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear
It is the nightingale, and not the lark,
That piercd the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.
Romeo: It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Nights candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Juliet: Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I:
It is some meteor that the sun exhales,
To be to thee this night a torch-bearer,
And light thee on thy way to Mantua:
Therefore, stay yet; thou needst not be gone.Romeo: Let me be taen; let me be put to death;
I am content, so thou wilt have it so.
Ill say yon grey is not the mornings eye,
Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthias brow;
Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:
I have more care to stay, than will to go.
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How ist my soul? lets talk,it is not day.Juliet: It is, it is,hie hence, be gone, away!
It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division;
This doth not so, for she divideth us:
Some say the lark and loathéd toad change eyes;
0, now I would they had changd voices too!
Since arm from arm, that voice doth us affray,
Hunting thee hence, with hunts-up to the day.
0, now be gone; more light and light it grows.
Romeo: More light and light,more dark and dark our woes!
The first line, in Juliets voice
Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
echoes the final couplet in both voices
0, now be gone; more light and light it grows.
More light and light,more dark and dark our woes!
which concentrates all the tense, dramatic change, which has taken place in this scene-poem of a mere few moments. It is this ending couplet by which the scene remains in the spectators memory, as the play moves on.
Take the opening line, and then place the rhyming couplets in succession, and you see, condensed and dramatized, the rapid change which takes place in the lovers commitments and emotions.
Juliet: Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.
Romeo: I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Juliet: Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I.
Romeo: I have more care to stay, than will to go.
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How ist, my soul? lets talk,it is not day.
Juliet: It is, it is,hie hence, be gone, away!
Juliet: 0, now be gone; more light and light it grows.
Romeo: More light and light,more dark and dark our woes!
There are, in Romeos and Juliets minds in this poem, two hypothesesto fly, or to stand and dielinked in Metaphor to the continuous questioning, lark or nightingale? To stand and die for love, is nobler in their minds and in the development of the play as a whole, especially as seen from its conclusion. Thus, there is created an emotional longing for the higher, nobler idea, and this longing is agape: love for their families, for peace and for humanity around them, fused with love for each other. But, although they glimpse it, and each of them in turn expresses a deep desire to be careless of their lives for something higher, the scene turns and rushes them away from it for now, and thus down to tragic woe. And this rapid change of ideas and emotions, is what is concentrated in the rhymed couplets, in changing images of night to morning. To flee to Mantua means, deceptively, lifewhich lights him on his waybut it means a retreat from love; it recalls Romeos sin in killing Tybalt; it is, they feel deeply, worse than death.
The subject of this dramatic poetry is not sensual attraction or romantic love; and, although it is full of images of nature, it is not evoking the sensuous appreciation of natural beauties, either. There is no erotic painting of images or passions here. All these images, in the expression of Percy B. Shelley, are employed to draw the operations of the human mind, or those external actions by which they are expressed.
Those who love Shakespeare, know that he uses rhymed couplets in this way throughout his plays. They have the power to move our mind and memory, because they mark the new or unusual idea, the ambiguity, the turning point of the dramatic action; they are singularities. They mark the appearance of a new and different musical theme entering within the blank verse. We see that these rhymed couplets, here, mark the turning points of what is, otherwise, beautiful unrhymed verse. All of the play of the lark or nightingale images, is set forth in this open blank verse, which is itself full of dramatic pauses, brief rests or silences, and other smaller singularities. This is poetry which can be spoken in a fully natural manner of address, between the characters and toward the spectators, and with all of the drama of accompanying gesture, breath, pause, silent rest, action, even confrontationand still retain its beauty.
What is meant by the openness of this blank verse, becomes clear if we let John Dryden attempt to rewrite and close it, as was his habit. Dryden arrogantly rewrote six of Shakespeares plays, sometimes changing their names, and set on his fellow Enlightenment playwrights to rewrite many more. He also rewrote John Miltons Paradise Lost entirely in rhyming couplets, retitling it State of Innocence, or, The Fall of Man. Milton, who was still alive (1664), but a political and literary outcast unable to stop this indignity, wrote that Dryden was an excellent rhymer, but no poet at all.
Take these lines of Shakespeares blank verse:
Romeo: It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Nights candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Juliet: Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I:
By the example of Drydens work, as shown below, we can be sure that if Dryden had chosen Romeo and Juliet to rewrite, he would have rendered these lines as follows:
Romeo: No nightingale, it was the lark of morn;
See, love, the eastern clouds with light are torn:
Nights candles are burnt out by coming day,
Which walks the misty mounts as if in play.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
Juliet: Tis no daylight that glints upon my eye.
And the later, most dramatic lines of Romeo, in Drydens hands, would have become:Romeo: Tis not the lark that now with notes so sweet,
The vaulty heavn above our heads does beat:
I have more care to stay than will to go.
I welcome death if Juliet wills it so.
Let me sound out my soul, for tis not day.
Juliet: It is, and so you must be gone away!
This is excellent rhyming, but no poetry at all, to paraphrase Milton. These are closed couplets, as John Dryden perfected their manufacture as Great Britains Poet Laureate. There are no singularities in these lines; never is their smooth flow of iambic rhythm interrupted, except by the pause that goes with the rhyme at the end of each line; and whatever meaning the line expresses, is supposed to end there, also. Drydens pride was his smooth numbers, referring to the perfect rhythmical construction of his closed, five-measure couplets.
What do you do with your voice, as you recite such couplets? You walk your voice, rhythmically, to the end of each line, and there you let it stop, andjingle, with a rhyme. Then, pressing your vocal carriage-return, you repeat this again, and again, and again. If the sentiment you are expressing is thought to be deeply passionate, you can let your voice swagger, or rhumba down that fixed line, or let it die away to a faint, mournful tiptoeing, but you must keep in smooth time. You, or at least your voice, become a cross between a metronome and an automaton, trying to make itself express an erotic emotionsince never could such swishy waltzing express an idea. And this, you are taught to think of, as reciting poetry.
There is no exaggeration in this. Let us examine the actual dramatic poetry of the great John Dryden, along with his protégé Alexander Pope, who were the towering fountains of English poetry for two hundred years after they and their Enlightenment backers had driven Shakespeares plays from the stage.
* A sample of the original passage, from Paradise Lost, Book I, with Miltons own spelling:
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Moloch: Changed as we are, were yet from homage free;
We have, by hell, at least gained liberty:
Thats worth our fall; thus low though we are driven,
Better to rule in hell, than serve in heaven.
Lucifer: There spoke the better half of Lucifer!
Asmoday: Tis fit in frequent senate we confer,
And then determine how to steer our course;
To wage new war by fraud, or open force.
The dooms now past, submission were in vain.
Moloch: And were it not, such baseness I disdain;
I would not stoop, to purchase all above,
And should contemn a power, whom prayer could move,
As one unworthy to have conquered me.
Beelzebub: Moloch, in that all are resolved, like thee.
The means are unproposed; but tis not fit
Our dark divan in public view should sit;
Or what we plot against the Thunderer,
The ignoble crowd of vulgar devils hear.
Lucifer: A golden palace let be raised on high;
To imitate? No, to outshine the sky!
All mines are ours, and gold above the rest,
Let this be done; and quick as twas expressed.
Gustave Doré Summoning the rebel angels to the conclave: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heavn. |
In this fragment of Dryden, his pure sing-song was improved somewhat by the fact that he was rewriting a great classical poem. If we look closely at Beelzebubs second and third lines, we even find that that old devil has gotten away with a couplet which is not closed; with an expression which ends in mid-line, and a line which ends without the end of an expression.
In Drydens many original tragedies and comedies, the romantic sing-songing is far worse. Here is the promised scene from The Indian Queen, one of Drydens most successful and famous plays. In it, the hero Almanzor, having just slain thousands single-handedly in battle, seeks out his lady Almahide in her private walk, for a final attempt at wooing. Since this is a chivalric drama, the lady is, of course, married (or enslaved) to a nobleman, and must rebuke him.
She: My light will sure discover those who talk.
Who dares to interrupt my private walk?
He: He who dares love, and for that love must die.
And knowing this, yet dares love on, am I.
She: That love which you can hope, and I can pay,
May be received and given in open day;
My praise and my esteem you had before;
And you have bound yourself to ask no more.
He: Yes, I have bound myself; but will you take
The forfeit of that bond, which force did make?
She: You know you are from recompense debarred;
But purest love can live without reward.
He: Pure love had need be to itself a feast;
For like pure elements, twill nourish least.
She: It therefore yields the only pure content;
For it, like angels, needs no nourishment.
To eat and drink can no perfection be;
All appetite implies necessity.
He: Twere well, if I could like a spirit live;
But do not angels food to mortals give?
What if some demon should my death forshow,
Or bid me change, and to the Christians go;
Will you not think I merit some reward,
When I my love above my life regard?
She: In such a case your change must be allowed;
I would myself dispense with what you vowed.
He: I to die that hour when I possess,
This minute shall begin my happiness.
She: The thoughts of death your passion would remove;
Death is a cold encouragement to love.
He: No; from my joys I to my death would run,
And think the business of my life well done:
But I should walk a discontented ghost,
If flesh and blood were to no purpose lost.
&tc.
This repartee could continue on indefinitely, expressing fixed, personal (my own inner) passions, in clipped, syllogistic identities, its unchanging boundaries always marked by the iron necessity of rhyming. If this is speaking poetry, then Percy Shelley was completely wrong when he wrote, in A Defense of Poetry,
Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination, by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices, whose void forever craves fresh food.
To recite classical poetry, beautifully, we must face the fact that over the past three hundred fifty years, all popular poetry has come to be dominated by the erotic sing-songing invented by Dryden. Let it be the love-poem, the popular satire, the Amazing Grace, the Sunday school moral rhyme, the Limerick (which Dryden may have invented as well), or the Hallmark Greeting Card (Now that Christmas time is here,/ Have days of joy and nights of cheer). All follow the erotic, yet logical formula of those Seventeenth-century forces of Venetian cultural domination of Britain, and their heirs. They celebrated first Dryden, then the even more pervasive, cynical Alexander Pope (who was, incidentally, not fit even to unlace Drydens poetic shoes), then Sir Walter Scott; and they brutally attacked the poetry of Keats and Shelley as formless and incomprehensible, because it broke completely from the formula.
Never before the time of Dryden, was English poetry written, or recited in this sing-song manner. Nowhere in the plays, sonnets, or other stanzas of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and their contemporaries, nor the earlier poetry of such as Goeffrey Chaucer, does any such formula-chanting as we now call poetry recitation appear.
Look back, afresh, at the blank verse lines of Romeo and Juliet. Here is a complex thought of Romeo, expressed in a four-line unit of poetry; acceptance of Juliets image that it is the nightingale, it is still night; but the idea underlying that image, emerging unexpected, for the first timedeath for Love.
Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat
The vaulty Heaven so high above our heads.
I have more care to stay, than will to go.
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
The four lines are organized with a harmonic distribution of pauses and rhymes. The first two present an image (although paradoxically: I hear a lark, and describe a non-lark), and those two lines flow together as a single expression, with no shade of pause at the first line. The third line is a new idea: Romeos care and his will are opposed. Why? But then the fourth line, the dramatic eruption of the idea to stand and die, is punctuated with three pauses, each more emphatic than the last. The third pause completely ends an expressed idea; then packs in another one, a bombshell: Juliet wills it so! So the clear singularities, pauses of increasing importance, in this four-line unit-idea, become rapidly more dense: the end of the second line, the end of the third, and then three times in the fourth. The unusual appearance of rhyme at the end, has a dramatic purpose. It makes the listener hear the third line again at the end of the fourth: Romeos conflicting care and will have a new meaning after hearing Juliet wills it so.
Following this four-line unit-idea, is the most powerful of the rhyming couplets, the dialogue-couplet in which, first, Romeo looks into his soul and expresses three separate, emerging ideas in a single verse
How ist, my soul? Lets talk,it is not day.
and Juliet then dramatically contradicts them all, in a verse involving five separate pauses
It is, it is. Hie hence, be gone, away!
Here, the repetitive sound of the rhyme emphasizes the complete overturning of Romeos thoughts by Juliets change of mind; from here, the lovers sink deep into woe. These lines are extremely dense in dramatic singularities. They would fill Dryden with awe and terror. When Keats and Shelley wrote poetry this way from 1810 to 1822, both Tory and Whig literary establishment reviews crashed down upon their heads, and attempted to extirpate them from English literature entirely. Shelley, for example, was accused by the British Monthly Review of employing, in his Prometheus Unbound, a licentiousness of rhythm, and rhyme which is truly contemptible. But, this is common enough for Shakespeare; it is appropriate to expressing the struggles of agape to overcome fixed circumstances and fixed, erotic ideas of happiness.
Listening to these lines, we hear exactly what Shelley evoked above: that poetry attracts to the imagination ever new thoughts, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. These intervals and interstices, the openings for new thoughts, are to be heard in all dramatic poetry that is modeled on the classical ideal of agapic creativity.
1. John Dryden, The Parallel of Poetry and Painting, 1680.
2. Thomas Hobbes, The Answer to the Preface, of Gondibert, 1650.
3. Percy B. Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, 1821.
4. Allardyce Nicoll, Dryden as an Adapter of Shakespeare, (London: Oxford University Press, 1922).
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