Produced by Gary R. Young
Comments on the preparation of this e-text
The square brackets, i.e. [ ] are copied from the printed book,without change, except that a closing bracket "]" has been addedto the stage directions.
Character names have been expanded. For Example, CLEOPATRA was
CLEO.
Three words in the preface were written in Greek Characters.These have been transliterated into Roman characters, and areset off by angle brackets, for example, <melichroos>.
All for Love
by
John Dryden
The age of Elizabeth, memorable for so many reasons in thehistory of England, was especially brilliant in literature,and, within literature, in the drama. With some falling offin spontaneity, the impulse to great dramatic production lastedtill the Long Parliament closed the theaters in 1642; and whenthey were reopened at the Restoration, in 1660, the stage onlytoo faithfully reflected the debased moral tone of the courtsociety of Charles II.
John Dryden (1631-1700), the great representative figure inthe literature of the latter part of the seventeenth century,exemplifies in his work most of the main tendencies of the time.He came into notice with a poem on the death of Cromwell in 1658,and two years later was composing couplets expressing his loyaltyto the returned king. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, thedaughter of a royalist house, and for practically all the rest ofhis life remained an adherent of the Tory Party. In 1663 hebegan writing for the stage, and during the next thirty yearshe attempted nearly all the current forms of drama. His "AnnusMirabilis" (1666), celebrating the English naval victories overthe Dutch, brought him in 1670 the Poet Laureateship. He had,meantime, begun the writing of those admirable critical essays,represented in the present series by his Preface to the "Fables"and his Dedication to the translation of Virgil. In these heshows himself not only a critic of sound and penetratingjudgment, but the first master of modern English prose style.
With "Absalom and Achitophel," a satire on the Whig leader,Shaftesbury, Dryden entered a new phase, and achieved whatis regarded as "the finest of all political satires." Thiswas followed by "The Medal," again directed against the Whigs,and this by "Mac Flecknoe," a fierce attack on his enemy andrival Shadwell. The Government rewarded his services bya lucrative appointment.
After triumphing in the three fields of drama, criticism,and satire, Dryden appears next as a religious poet in his"Religio Laici," an exposition of the doctrines of the Churchof England from a layman's point of view. In the same yearthat the Catholic James II. ascended the throne, Dryden joinedthe Roman Church, and two years later defended his new religionin "The Hind and the Panther," an allegorical debate between twoanimals standing respectively for Catholicism and Anglicanism.
The Revolution of 1688 put an end to Dryden's prosperity; andafter a short return to dramatic composition, he turned totranslation as a means of supporting himself. He had alreadydone something in this line; and after a series of translationsfrom Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, he undertook, at the age ofsixty-three, the enormous task of turning the entire works ofVirgil into English verse. How he succeeded in this, readers ofthe "Aeneid" in a companion volume of these classics can judgefor themselves