A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Palamon and Arcite

J >> John Dryden >> Palamon and Arcite



Produced by Ted Garvin, Charles Franks
& the Distributed Proofreaders Team




DRYDEN'S PALAMON AND ARCITE


EDITED
WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
GEORGE E. ELIOT, A.M.
ENGLISH MASTER IN THE MORGAN SCHOOL

TO
HENRY A. BEERS
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN YALE UNIVERSITY
WHO FIRST AROUSED MY INTEREST IN DRYDEN
AND DIRECTED MY STUDY OF HIS WORKS


THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

PREFACE.

To edit an English classic for study in secondary schools is difficult.
The lack of anything like uniformity in the type of examination required
by the colleges and universities complicates treatment. Not only do two
distinct institutions differ in the scope and character of their
questions, but the same university varies its demands from year to year.
The only safe course to pursue is, therefore, a generally comprehensive
one. But here, again, we are hampered by limited space, and are forced
to content ourselves with a bare outline, which the individual
instructor can fill in as much or as little as he pleases.

The ignorance of most of our classical students in regard to the history
of English literature is appalling; and yet it is impossible properly to
study a given work of a given author without some knowledge of the
background against which that particular writer stands. I have,
therefore, sketched the politics, society, and literature of the age in
which Dryden lived, and during which he gave to the world his _Palamon
and Arcite_. In the critical comments of the introduction I have
contented myself with little more than hints. That particular line of
study, whether it concerns the poet's style, his verse forms, or the
possession of the divine instinct itself, can be much more
satisfactorily developed by the instructor, as the student's knowledge
of the poem grows.

It is certainly a subject for congratulation that so many youth will be
introduced, through the medium of Dryden's crisp and vigorous verse, to
one of the tales of Chaucer. May it now, as in his own century,
accomplish the poet's desire, and awaken in them appreciative admiration
for the old bard, the best story-teller in the English language.


G. E. E. CLINTON, CONN., July 26, 1897.

INTRODUCTION.

THE BACKGROUND.


The fifty years of Dryden's literary production just fill the last half
of the seventeenth century. It was a period bristling with violent
political and religious prejudices, provocative of strife that amounted
to revolution. Its social life ran the gamut from the severity of the
Commonwealth Puritan to the unbridled debauchery of the Restoration
Courtier. In literature it experienced a remarkable transformation in
poetry, and developed modern prose, watched the production of the
greatest English epics, smarted under the lash of the greatest English
satires, blushed at the brilliant wit of unspeakable comedies, and
applauded the beginnings of English criticism.

When the period began, England was a Commonwealth. Charles I., by
obstinate insistence upon absolutism, by fickleness and faithlessness,
had increased and strengthened his enemies. Parliament had seized the
reins of government in 1642, had completely established its authority at
Naseby in 1645, and had beheaded the king in front of his own palace in
1649. The army had accomplished these results, and the army proposed to
enjoy the reward. Cromwell, the idolized commander of the Ironsides, was
placed at the head of the new-formed state with the title of Lord
Protector; and for five years he ruled England, as she had been ruled by
no sovereign since Elizabeth. He suppressed Parliamentary dissensions
and royalist uprisings, humbled the Dutch, took vengeance on the
Spaniard, and made England indisputably mistress of the ocean. He was
succeeded, at his death in 1658, by his son Richard; but the father's
strong instinct for government had not been inherited by the son. The
nation, homesick for monarchy, was tiring of dissension and bickering,
and by the Restoration of 1660 the son of Charles I became Charles II of
England.

Scarcely had the demonstrations of joy at the Restoration subsided when
London was visited by the devouring plague of 1665. All who could fled
from the stricken city where thousands died in a day. In 1666 came the
great fire which swept from the Tower to the Temple; but, while it
destroyed a vast deal of property, it prevented by its violent
purification a recurrence of the plague, and made possible the
rebuilding of the city with great sanitary and architectural
improvements.

Charles possessed some of the virtues of the Stuarts and most of their
faults. His arbitrary irresponsibility shook the confidence of the
nation in his sincerity. Two parties, the Whigs and the Tories, came
into being, and party spirit and party strife ran high. The question at
issue was chiefly one of religion. The rank and file of Protestant
England was determined against the revival of Romanism, which a
continuation of the Stuart line seemed to threaten. Charles was a
Protestant only from expediency, and on his deathbed accepted the Roman
Catholic faith; his brother James, Duke of York, the heir apparent, was
a professed Romanist.

Such an outlook incited the Whigs, under the leadership of Shaftesbury,
to support the claims of Charles' eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of
Monmouth, who, on the death of his father in 1685, landed in England;
but the promised uprising was scarcely more than a rabble of peasantry,
and was easily suppressed. Then came the vengeance of James, as foolish
as it was tyrannical. Judge Jeffries and his bloody assizes sent scores
of Protestants to the block or to the gallows, till England would endure
no more. William, Prince of Orange, who had married Mary, the eldest
daughter of James, was invited to accept the English crown. He landed at
Torbay, was joined by Churchill, the commander of the king's forces,
and, on the precipitate flight of James, mounted the throne of England.
This event stands in history as the Protestant Revolution of 1688.

During William's reign, which terminated in 1702, Stuart uprisings were
successfully suppressed, English liberties were guaranteed by the famous
Bill of Rights, Protestant succession was assured, and liberal
toleration was extended to the various dissenting sects.

Society had passed through quite as great variations as had politics
during this half-century. The roistering Cavalier of the first Charles,
with his flowing locks and plumed hat, with his maypoles and morrice
dances, with his stage plays and bear-baitings, with his carousals and
gallantries, had given way to the Puritan Roundhead. It was a serious,
sober-minded England in which the youth Dryden found himself. If the
Puritan differed from the Cavalier in political principles, they were
even more diametrically opposed in mode of life. An Act of Parliament
closed the theaters in 1642. Amusements of all kinds were frowned upon
as frivolous, and many were suppressed by law. The old English feasts at
Michaelmas, Christmas, Twelfth Night, and Candlemas were regarded as
relics of popery and were condemned. The Puritan took his religion
seriously, so seriously that it overpowered him. The energy and fervor
of his religious life were illustrated in the work performed by
Cromwell's chaplain, John Howe, on any one of the countless fast days.
"He began with his flock at nine in the morning, prayed during a quarter
of an hour for blessing upon the day's work, then read and explained a
chapter for three-quarters of an hour, then prayed for an hour, preached
for an hour, and prayed again for a half an hour, then retired for a
quarter of an hour's refreshment--the people singing all the while--
returned to his pulpit, prayed for another hour, preached for another
hour, and finished at four P.M."

At the Restoration the pendulum swung back again. From the strained
morality of the Puritans there was a sudden leap to the most extravagant
license and the grossest immorality, with the king and the court in the
van. The theaters were thrown wide open, women for the first time went
upon the stage, and they acted in plays whose moral tone is so low that
they cannot now be presented on the stage or read in the drawing-room.
Of course they voiced the social conditions of the time. Marriage ties
were lightly regarded; no gallant but boasted his amours. Revelry ran
riot; drunkenness became a habit and gambling a craze. The court
scintillated with brilliant wits, conscienceless libertines, and
scoffing atheists. It was an age of debauchery and disbelief.

The splendor of this life sometimes dazzles, the lack of conveniences
appalls. The post left London once a week. A journey to the country must
be made in your own lumbering carriage, or on the snail-slow stagecoach
over miserable roads, beset with highwaymen. The narrow, ill-lighted
streets, even of London, could not be traversed safely at night; and
ladies, borne to routs and levees in their sedan chairs, were lighted by
link-boys, and were carried by stalwart, broad-shouldered bearers who
could wield well the staves in a street fight. Such were the conditions
of life and society which Dryden found in the last fifty years of the
seventeenth century.

Strong as were the contrasts in politics and manners during Dryden's
lifetime, they were paralleled by contrasts in literature no less
marked. Dryden was born in 1631; he died in 1700. In the year of his
birth died John Donne, the father of the Metaphysical bards, or
Marinists; in the year of his death was born James Thomson, who was to
give the first real start to the Romantic movement; while between these
two dates lies the period devoted to the development of French
Classicism in English literature.

At Dryden's birth Ben Jonson was the only one of the great Elizabethan
dramatists still living, and of the lesser stars in the same galaxy,
Chapman, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Heywood all died during his
boyhood and youth, while Shirley, the last of his line, lingered till
1667. Of the older writers in prose, Selden alone remained; but as
Dryden grew to manhood, he had at hand, fresh from the printers, the
whole wealth of Commonwealth prose, still somewhat clumsy with Latinism
or tainted with Euphuism, but working steadily toward that simple
strength and graceful fluency with which he was himself to mark the
beginning of modern English prose.

Clarendon, with his magnificently involved style, began his famous
_History of the Great Rebellion_ in 1641. Ten years later Hobbes
published the _Leviathan_, a sketch of an ideal commonwealth. Baxter,
with his _Saints' Everlasting Rest_ sent a book of religious consolation
into every household. In 1642 Dr. Thomas Browne, with the simplicity of
a child and a quaintness that fascinates, published his _Religio
Medici_; and in 1653 dear old simple-hearted Isaak Walton told us in his
_Compleat Angler_ how to catch, dress, and cook fish. Thomas Fuller,
born a score or more of years before Dryden, in the same town,
Aldwinkle, published in 1642 his _Holy and Profane State_, a collection
of brief and brisk character sketches, which come nearer modern prose
than anything of that time; while for inspired thought and purity of
diction the _Holy Living_, 1650, and the _Holy Dying_, 1651, of Jeremy
Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preëminent in the prose of the
Commonwealth.

But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of
Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his
own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him
with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure
in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for
definite chronology, we should scarcely realize that they worked in the
same century. While, therefore, no sketch of seventeenth-century
literature can exclude Milton, he must be taken by himself, without
relation to the development, forms, and spirit of his age, and must be
regarded, rather, as a late-born Elizabethan.

When Dryden was born, Milton at twenty-three was just completing his
seven years at Cambridge, and as the younger poet grew through boyhood,
the elder was enriching English verse with his _Juvenilia_. Then came
the twenty years of strife. As Secretary of the Commonwealth, he threw
himself into controversial prose. His _Iconoclast_, the _Divorce_
pamphlets, the _Smectymnuus_ tracts, and the _Areopagitica_ date from
this period. A strong partisan of the Commonwealth, he was in emphatic
disfavor at the Restoration. Blind and in hiding, deserted by one-time
friends, out of sympathy with his age, he fulfilled the promise of his
youth: he turned again to poetry; and in _Paradise Lost_, _Paradise
Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_ he has left us "something so written
that the world shall not willingly let it die."

I have said that Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of
his age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite
other than _L'Allegro_ and _Lycidas_. In the closing years of the
preceding century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet
Marino was developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under
similar influences adopted similar methods.

To seize upon the quaintest possible thought and then to express it in
as quaint a manner as possible became the chief aim of English poets
during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Donne had
encountered trouble in obtaining his wife from her father. Finding one
morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and
himself, he was overcome by its poetic possibilities, and wrote:


"This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and temple is;
Tho' parents frown, and you, we're met
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet."


To strain after conceits, to strive for quaintness of thought and
expression, was the striking characteristic of all the poets of the
generation, to whom Dr. Johnson gave the title Metaphysical, and who are
now known as the Marinists. There were Quarles, with his Dutch
_Emblems_; Vaughan, Sandys, Crashaw, and pure-souled George Herbert,
with his _Temple_. There were Carew, with the _Rapture_; Wither and his
"Shall I wasting in despair"; the two dashing Cavaliers Suckling and
Lovelace, the latter the only man who ever received an M.A. for his
personal beauty. There was Herrick, the dispossessed Devonshire rector,
with _Hesperides_ and _Noble Numbers_, freer than were the others from
the beauty-marring conceits of the time. There, too, were to be found
the gallant love-maker Waller, Cowley, the queen's secretary during her
exile, and Marvell, Milton's assistant Secretary of State. But these
three men were to pledge allegiance to a new sovereignty in English
verse.

In the civil strife, Waller had at first sided with Parliament, had
later engaged in a plot against it, and after a year's imprisonment was
exiled to France. At this time the Academy, organized to introduce form
and method in the French language and literature, held full sway.
Malherbe was inculcating its principles, Corneille and Molière were
practicing its tenets in their plays, and Boileau was following its
rules in his satires, when Waller and his associates came in contact
with this influence. The tendency was distinctly toward formality and
conventionality. Surfeited with the eccentricities and far-fetched
conceits of the Marinists, the exiled Englishmen welcomed the change;
they espoused the French principles; and when at the Restoration they
returned to England with their king, whose taste had been trained in the
same school, they began at once to formalize and conventionalize English
poetry. The writers of the past, even the greatest writers of the past,
were regarded as men of genius, but without art; and English poetry was
thenceforth, in Dryden's own words, to start with Waller.

Under the newly adopted canons of French taste, narrative and didactic
verse, or satire, took first place. Blank verse was tabooed as too
prose-like; so, too, were the enjambed rhymes. A succession of rhymed
pentameter couplets, with the sense complete in each couplet, was set
forth as the proper vehicle for poetry; and this unenjambed distich
fettered English verse for three-quarters of a century. In the drama the
characters must be noble, the language dignified; the metrical form must
be the rhymed couplet, and the unities of time, place, and action must
be observed.

Such, in brief, were the principles of French Classicism as applied to
English poetry, principles of which Dryden was the first great exponent,
and which Pope in the next generation carried to absolute perfection.
Waller, Marvell, and Cowley all tried their pens in the new method,
Cowley with least success; and they were the poets in vogue when Dryden
himself first attracted attention. Denham quite caught the favor of the
critics with his mild conventionalities; the Earl of Roscommon delighted
them with his rhymed _Essay on Translated Verse_; the brilliant court
wits, Rochester, Dorset, and Sedley, who were writing for pleasure and
not for publication, still clung to the frivolous lyric; but the most-
read and worst-treated poet of the Restoration was Butler. He published
his _Hudibras_, a sharp satire on the extreme Puritans, in 1663. Every
one read the book, laughed uproariously, and left the author to starve
in a garret. Of Dryden's contemporaries in prose, there were Sir William
Temple, later the patron of Swift, John Locke who contributed to
philosophy his _Essay Concerning the Human Understanding_, the two
diarists Evelyn and Pepys, and the critics Rymer and Langbaine; there
was Isaac Newton, who expounded in his _Principia_, 1687, the laws of
gravitation; and there was the preaching tinker, who, confined in
Bedford jail, gave to the world in 1678 one of its greatest allegories,
_Pilgrim's Progress_.

Dryden was nearly thirty before the production of the drama was resumed
in England. Parliament had closed the theaters in 1642, and that was an
extinguisher of dramatic genius. Davenant had vainly tried to elude the
law, and finally succeeded in evading it by setting his _Siege of
Rhodes_ to music, and producing the first English opera. At the
Restoration, when the theaters were reopened, the dramas then produced
reflected most vividly the looseness and immorality of the times. Their
worst feature was that "they possessed not wit enough to keep the mass
of moral putrefaction sweet."

Davenant was prolific, Crowne wallowed in tragedy, Tate remodeled
Shakspere; so did Shadwell, who was later to measure swords with Dryden,
and receive for his rashness an unmerciful castigation. But by all odds
the strongest name in tragedy was Thomas Otway, who smacks of true
Elizabethan genius in the _Orphan_ and _Venice Preserved_. In comedy we
receive the brilliant work of Etheridge, the vigor of Wycherley, and, as
the century drew near its close, the dashing wit of Congreve, Vanbrugh,
and Farquhar. This burst of brilliancy, in which the Restoration drama
closes, was the prelude to the Augustan Age of Queen Anne and the first
Georges, the period wherein flourished that group of self-satisfied,
exceptionally clever, ultra-classical wits who added a peculiar zest and
charm to our literature. As Dryden grew to old age, these younger men
were already beginning to make themselves heard, though none had done
great work. In poetry there were Prior, Gay, and Pope, while in prose we
find names that stand high in the roll of fame,--the story-teller Defoe,
the bitter Swift, the rollicking Dick Steele, and delightful Addison.

This is the background in politics, society, and letters on which the
life of Dryden was laid during the last half of the seventeenth century.
There were conditions in his environment which materially modified his
life and affected his literary form, and without a knowledge of these
conditions no study of the man or his works can be effective or
satisfactory. Dryden was preëminently a man of his times.


* * * * *

LIFE OF DRYDEN.


John Dryden was born at the vicarage of Aldwinkle, All Saints, in
Northamptonshire, August 9, 1631. His father, Erasmus Dryden, was the
third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden of Cannons Ashby. The estate descended
to Dryden's uncle, John, and is still in the family. His mother was Mary
Pickering. Both the Drydens and Pickerings were Puritans, and were
ranged on the side of Parliament in its struggle with Charles I. As a
boy Dryden received his elementary education at Tichmarsh, and went
thence to Westminster School, where he studied under the famous Dr.
Busby. Here he first appeared in print with an elegiac poem on the death
of a schoolfellow, Lord Hastings. It possesses the peculiarities of the
extreme Marinists. The boy had died from smallpox, and Dryden writes:


"Each little pimple had a tear in it To wail the fault its rising did
commit."


He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, May 18, 1650, took his B.A. in
1654, and then, though he received no fellowship, lingered at the
university for three years. Tradition tells us that he had no fondness
for his Alma Mater, and certainly his verse contains compliments only
for Oxford.

His father had died in 1654 and had bequeathed him a small estate. When,
in 1657, he finally left the university, he attached himself to his
uncle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, a general of the Commonwealth. In 1658 he
wrote _Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's Death;_ but shortly thereafter he
went to London, threw himself into the life of literary Bohemia, and at
the Restoration, in 1660, wrote his _Astroea Redux_, as enthusiastically
as the veriest royalist of them all. This sudden transformation of the
eulogist of Cromwell to the panegyrist of Charles won for Dryden in some
quarters the name of a political turncoat; but such criticism was
unjust. He was by birth and early training a Puritan; add to this a
poet's admiration for a truly great character, and the lines on Cromwell
are explained; but during his London life he rubbed elbows with the
world, early prejudices vanished, his true nature asserted itself, and
it was John Dryden himself, not merely the son of his father, who
celebrated Charles' return.

On December 1, 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter
of the Earl of Berkshire, and the sister of a literary intimate.
Tradition has pronounced the marriage an unhappy one, but facts do not
bear out tradition. He nowhere referred other than affectionately to his
wife, and always displayed a father's warm affection for his sons, John,
Charles, and Erasmus. Lady Elizabeth outlived her husband and eventually
died insane.

During the great plague in London, 1665, Dryden fled with his wife to
Charleton. He lived there for two years, and during that time wrote
three productions that illustrate the three departments of literature to
which he devoted himself: _Annus Mirabilis_, a narrative and descriptive
poem on the fire of 1666 and the sea fight with the Dutch, the _Essay on
Dramatic Poesy_, his first attempt at literary criticism in prose, and
the _Maiden Queen_, a drama. In _Annus Mirabilis_ we find the best work
yet done by him. Marinist quaintness still clings here and there, and he
has temporarily deserted the classical distich for a quatrain stanza;
but here, for the first time, we taste the Dryden of the _Satires_ and
the _Fables_. His _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ started modern prose.
Hitherto English prose had suffered from long sentences, from involved
sentences, and from clumsy Latinisms or too bald vernacular. Dryden
happily united simplicity with grace, and gave us plain, straightforward
sentences, musically arranged in well-ordered periods. This was the
vehicle in which he introduced literary criticism, and he continued it
in prefaces to most of his plays and subsequent poems.

At this same time he not only discussed the drama, but indulged in its
production; and for a score of years from the early sixties he devoted
himself almost exclusively to the stage. It was the most popular and the
most profitable mode of expression. He began with a comedy, the _Wild
Gallant_, in 1662. It was a poor play and was incontinently condemned.
He then developed a curious series of plays, of which the _Indian
Emperor_, the _Conquest of Grenada_, and _Aurengzebe_ are examples. He
professedly followed French methods, observed the unities, and used the
rhymed couplet. But they were not French; they were a nondescript
incubation by Dryden himself, and were called heroic dramas. They were
ridiculed in the Duke of Buckingham's farce, the _Rehearsal_; but their
popularity was scarcely impaired.

In 1678 Dryden showed a return to common sense and to blank verse in
_All for Love_, and, though it necessarily suffers from its comparison
with the original, Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, it nevertheless
possesses enough dramatic power to make it his best play. He had
preceded this by rewriting Milton's _Paradise Lost_ as an opera, in the
_State of Innocence_, and he followed it in 1681 with perhaps his best
comedy, the _Spanish Friar_.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.