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Heroical Love in Dryden's Heroic Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Scott C. Osborn
Scott C. Osborn*
Affiliation:
Mississippi State University, State College, Miss.
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Extract

When Dryden wrote that love and valor ought to be the subjects of a heroic play, he did not define his conception of love. He, and presumably his readers, knew what he meant. During the past seventy-five years, however, the nature of his heroic love has severely exercised those who have tried to describe Restoration heroic drama. All have agreed that this love is of primary importance, but no one has offered a consistent or completely satisfactory analysis of it. The commonest view is that it reflects the sentimental, casuistical, metaphysical Platonic cultism—especially the doctrine of the uplifting power of love—fashionable in seventeenth-century heroic romances and Caroline drama. In the belief that this theory has been overemphasized and that it is not an adequate explanation of Dryden's heroic love, I propose to attack the problem from a different point of view in the hope of finding a clear and consistent pattern in his treatment of love.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 5-part1 , December 1958 , pp. 480 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Note 1 in page 480 See Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700 (Cambridge, Eng., 1923), p. 84.

“Heroic” love in English heroic drama has been traced to the general stream of Renaissance Platonism, through Italian and especially French influences, by A. E. Parsons, “The English Heroic Play,” Modern Language Rev., xxxm (1938), 2, 3, 6, 7. The Platonic influence has been derived from French heroic romances by Alexandre Beljame, Men oj Letters and the English Public in the Eighteenth Century (1881; London, 1948), pp. 41, 44, 45. For this view see also Margaret Sherwood, Dryden's Dramatic Theory and Practice (Boston, 1898), p. 65; B. J. Pendlebury, Dryden's Heroic Plays: A Study of the Origins (London, 1923), pp. 24-25. 69, 70; Montague Summers, ed. Dryden: The Dramatic Works (London, 1931), i, xliii-xliv; W. S. Clark, “The Sources of the Restoration Heroic Play,” Rev. of English Stud., iv (Jan. 1928), 58-59.

C. G. Child, “The Rise of the Heroic Play,” MLS, xn (1904), 169-171, thinks that Fletcher was an influence ir addition to that of French romances and other Frencr sources as transmitted by D'Avenant. Nicoll (pp. 84, 88; adds Francis Beaumont as an influence on Dryden's Pla tonism. But little similarity of Dryden to Beaumont anc Fletcher is found by J. W. Tupper, “The Relation of the Heroic Play to the Romances of Beaumont and Fletcher,‘ PMLA, xx (1905), 584-621. Felix E. Schelling, Elizabethat Drama, 1558-1642 (Boston and New York, 1908), n, 350 352, while agreeing on French influence, says that Carlell anc KilUgrew, not D'Avenant, were the typical pre-Restoratior exponents of heroic romance. The Caroline dramatists— D'Avenant, Carlell, Suckling, Killigrew, Cartwright—ar regarded as the major influence by Kathleen Lynch, “Con ventions of Platonic Drama in the Heroic Plays of Orrerj and Dryden,” PMLA, XLW (June 1929), 461-470. He: analysis elaborates the view of M. L. Poston, ”The Origin o the English Heroic Play,“ Modern Language Rev., xv (1921), 18. Cecil V. Deane, Dramatic Theory and the Rhyme Heroic Play (London, 1931), pp. 31, 32, 155, traces Dryden’: love to Corneille's ”true love,“ ”a moral debt which om pays to virtue.“ Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York 1936), pp. 60, 61, while postulating both French influenc and Caroline precedent, thinks heroic love is love elevated fc the status of other epic virtues by emphasis on its hardship rather than on its amenities.

Note 2 in page 480 Dryden himself said, “I shall never subject my charac ters to the French standard, where love and honor are to b weighed by drachms and scruples” (Essays of John Dryder, ed. W. P. Ker, Oxford, 1900, I, 157).

Note 3 in page 480 Tupper, pp. 590-591; Summers, p. xliii; Sherwood, p. 66

Note 4 in page 480 Lewis N. Chase, The English Heroic Play (New Yori 1903), p. 125; Tupper, p. 606; Sherwood, p. 62. Cf. Nicol p. 117, and Deane, pp. 154-155.

Note 5 in page 480 Sherwood, p. 63; Tupper, p. 606.

Note 6 in page 481 Chase, p. 119; Tupper, p. 607. Deane, though believing that Dryden was not averse to Corneille's ethical doctrine that duty is superior to love, concedes that Dryden frequently has characters whom overmastering passion or jealousy drives to ruin (p. 155).

Note 7 in page 481 This paragraph is summarized from Chase, pp. 4, 72, 113-117, 125-126, 130-132, 192,114-115.

Note 8 in page 481 Some Platonists have obliquely suspected this aspect of love in Dryden but have not explored its implications. Nicoll (p. 115) thinks it obvious that a swift-striking, uncontrollable love should extinguish common sense, but seems to believe this effect not irreconcilable with Platonism. Parsons (pp. 6, 2, 3) says that in the “Homeric” branch of heroic derivatives, as opposed to French heroic romances, love was often represented as a temptation or an obstacle to the hero; but Parsons thinks the English heroic play was influenced more by Tasso's Platonic doctrine of the uplifting power of love and by the French romances, and less by French heroic drama, in which honor usually wins. See also Lynch, p. 464, and Deane, p. 155.

Note 9 in page 481 “The Loveres Maladye of Hereos,” Modern Philology, XI (1914), 541.

Note 10 in page 481 Dedication of Aurengzebe, in Summers' edition of The Dramatic Works (see n. 1 above), iv, 85.

Note 11 in page 481 References to Dryden's plays in the text will cite act and scene only, since no standard edition (except Noyes's Selected Dramas, noted below) has numbered lines; act only will be cited if it has just one scene. The following editions have been used: The Spanish Friar (SF), in John Dryden, ed. George Saintsbury, Mermaid Ser. (London, n.d.), Vol. ii; The Conquest of Granada, Pts. I and ii (CG I, CG ii) and Marriage a la Mode (MLM), in Selected Dramas of John Dryden, ed. George R. Noyes (New York, 1910); The Indian Queen (IQ), The Indian Emperor (IE), Tyrannic Love (TL), Aurengzebe (AZ), and Secret Love (SL), in Dryden: The Dramatic Works, ed. Summers, Vols. I, iii, iv.

Note 12 in page 482 More explicit than Dryden, D'Avenant, one of Dry-den's models for heroic drama, said of the characters in Gondibert that their motives were “derived from the distempers of love and ambition.” Quoted by Pendlebury, p. 43. Pendlebury (pp. 24-25) complains that “heroic” love is “most improperly so termed,” since one hardly expects a hero to be an abject slave to his own passion. But in view of the second meaning of “heroic,” it is for this precise reason that the term is most fitting.

Note 13 in page 482 Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), p. 132. For the statements of doctrine in this and the following paragraph, see pp. 144, 145, 131, 146, 147, 133, 154, 17, 150, 134-137, 143, 165, 149, 151. Babb's book is an expansion of his article, “The Physiological Conception of Love in the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Drama,” PMLA, LVI (Dec. 1941), 1020-35. In The Elizabethan Malady Babb rightly says: “Melancholy did not cease to be a subject of interest in 1642—or in 1742” (p. vii).

Note 14 in page 482 The Elizabethan Malady, p. 155.

Note 15 in page 483 See Denis Saurat, Milton, Man and Thinker (New York, 1925), pp. 19, 149-155, 170-171, 221, 233.

Note 16 in page 483 Besides the medieval treatises of Arabic and European medical scientists like Avicenna and Arnaldus de Villanova, and Andreas Capellanus' treatise on courtly love, there were later popular expositions such as Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie (1568), Jacques Ferrand's Eratomania or a Treatise.. of Love, or Erotique Melancholy (1612, in French), or Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind in General (1630).

Note 17 in page 483 Regarding the close similarity of Burton to the other writers, see Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, pp. 128-142. Lowes (pp. 536-537) notes the “amazing similarity” between Burton's Anatomy and Ferrand's Eratomania.

Note 18 in page 483 This and the two following paragraphs are summarized from George F. Sensabaugh, The Tragic Muse of John Ford (Stanford, 1944), pp. 20-26, 26-34, 51-53. See also Bergen Evans, The Psychiatry of Robert Burton (New York, 1944), pp. 49, 56, 72, 86, 100.

Note 19 in page 483 Summarized from The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1924), p. 465. For similar statements of others regarding religious melancholy, see Babb, The Elizabethan Malady, pp. 47-54, 64-66.

Note 20 in page 489 This aspect of love in Dryden has been developed by the Platonic interpreters, though not always fully or accurately. Summers says that Berenice, Almahide, and Indamora take a Platonic tone with their lovers and “enforce the philosophy that love is of the soul, and of the soul alone” (i, xliii). Miss Lynch says that “Platonic wisdom is won with difficulty” over passion and jealousy, but she adds that pure Platonic love discredits and subdues, though it often does not wholly extinguish, physical passion (p. 462). Tupper rightly says that the heroine loves ardently but stands for purity of conduct, whereas the hero would sacrifice all for love; but, though Tupper says that the plays show a contrast between pure and sensual love, he believes that love undergoes no violent wrenchings, that “in the typical heroic play” the basic conflict is between the passion of the wicked King and Queen for heroine and hero respectively and the love of the hero and heroine, and that few of the plays resolve the conflict into an absolute choice between love and honor (pp. 590-592, 605-606, 609, 616).',Chase goes even further astray. Though stating that “according to some, Reason cures Love and succeeds it,” he believes that championing reason's cause is unusual and that “reason plays a small part where women are concerned” (pp. 129-131).