by John Dryden
May move the soldiers to the better cause.
You’ll second me? [To Pala.
Pala. Or die with you: No subject e’er can meet
A nobler fate, than at his sovereign’s feet. [Exeunt.
[Clashing of swords within, and shouts.
Enter Leonidas, Rhodophil, Palamede, Eubulus, Hermogenes, and their Party, victorious; Polydamas and Argaleon, disarmed.
Leon. That I survive the dangers of this day,
Next to the gods, brave friends, be yours the honour;
And, let heaven witness for me, that my joy
Is not more great for this my right restored,
Than ’tis, that I have power to recompense
Your loyalty and valour. Let mean princes,
Of abject souls, fear to reward great actions;
I mean to shew,
That whatsoe’er subjects, like you, dare merit,
A king, like me, dares give.
Rho. You make us blush, we have deserved so little.
Pala. And yet instruct us how to merit more.
Leon. And as I would be just in my rewards,
So should I in my punishments; these two,
This, the usurper of my crown, the other,
Of my Palmyra’s love, deserve that death,
Which both designed for me.
Poly. And we expect it.
Arga. I have too long been happy, to live wretched.
Poly. And I too long have governed, to desire
A life without an empire.
Leon. You are Palmyra’s father; and as such,
Though not a king, shall have obedience paid
From him who is one. Father, in that name
All injuries forgot, and duty owned. [Embraces him.
Poly. O, had I known you could have been this king,
Thus god-like, great and good, I should have wished
To have been dethroned before. ’Tis now I live,
And more than reign; now all my joys flow pure,
Unmixed with cares, and undisturbed by conscience.
Enter Palmyra, Amalthea, Artemis, Doralice, and Melantha.
Leon. See, my Palmyra comes! the frighted blood
Scarce yet recalled to her pale cheeks,
Like the first streaks of light broke loose from darkness,
And dawning into blushes. — Sir, you said [To Poly.
Your joys were full; Oh, would you make mine so!
I am but half restored without this blessing.
Poly. The gods, and my Palmyra, make you happy,
As you make me! [Gives her hand to Leonidas.
Palm. Now all my prayers are heard:
I may be dutiful, and yet may love.
Virtue and patience have at length unravelled
The knots, which fortune tyed.
Mel. Let me die, but I’ll congratulate his majesty: How admirably well his royalty becomes him! Becomes! that is lui sied, but our damned language expresses nothing.
Pala. How? Does it become him already? ’Twas but just now you said, he was such a figure of a man.
Mel True, my dear, when he was a private man he was a figure; but since he is a king, methinks he has assumed another figure: He looks so grand, and so august!
[Going to the King.
Pala. Stay, stay; I’ll present you when it is more convenient. I find I must get her a place at court; and when she is once there, she can be no longer ridiculous; for she is young enough, and pretty enough, and fool enough, and French enough, to bring up a fashion there to be affected.
Leon. [To Rhodophil.]
Did she then lead you to this brave attempt?
[To Amalthea.] To you, fair Amalthea, what I am,
And what all these, from me, we jointly owe:
First, therefore, to your great desert we give
Your brother’s life; but keep him under guard
Till our new power be settled. What more grace
He may receive, shall from his future carriage
Be given, as he deserves.
Arga. I neither now desire, nor will deserve it;
My loss is such as cannot be repaired,
And, to the wretched, life can be no mercy.
Leon. Then be a prisoner always: Thy ill fate
And pride will have it so: But since in this I cannot,
Instruct me, generous Amalthea, how
A king may serve you.
Amal. I have all I hope,
And all I now must wish; I see you happy.
Those hours I have to live, which heaven in pity
Will make but few, I vow to spend with vestals:
The greatest part in prayers for you; the rest
In mourning my unworthiness.
Press me not farther to explain myself;
‘Twill not become me, and may cause your trouble.
Leon. Too well I understand her secret grief, [Aside.
But dare not seem to know it. — Come, my fairest; [To Palmyra.
Beyond my crown I have one joy in store,
To give that crown to her whom I adore. [Exeunt.
EPILOGUE.
Thus have my spouse and I informed the nation,
And led you all the way to reformation;
Not with dull morals, gravely writ, like those,
Which men of easy phlegm with care compose, —
Your poets, of stiff words and limber sense,
Born on the confines of indifference;
But by examples drawn, I dare to say,
From most of you who hear and see the play.
There are more Rhodophils in this theatre,
More Palamedes, and some few wives, I fear:
But yet too far our poet would not run;
Though ’twas well offered, there was nothing done.
He would not quite the women’s frailty bare,
But stript them to the waist, and left them there:
And the men’s faults are less severely shown,
For he considers that himself is one. —
Some stabbing wits, to bloody satire bent,
Would treat both sexes with less compliment;
Would lay the scene at home; of husbands tell,
For wenches, taking up their wives i’ the Mall;
And a brisk bout, which each of them did want,
Made by mistake of mistress and gallant.
Our modest author thought it was enough
To cut you off a sample of the stuff:
He spared my shame, which you, I’m sure, would not,
For you were all for driving on the plot:
You sighed when I came in to break the sport,
And set your teeth when each design fell short.
To wives and servants all good wishes lend,
But the poor cuckold seldom finds a friend.
Since, therefore, court and town will take no pity,
I humbly cast myself upon the city.
THE ASSIGNATION
OR, LOVE IN A NUNNERY
A COMEDY.
Successum dea dira negat —
Virg.
This play was unfortunate in the representation. It is needless, at the distance of more than a century, to investigate the grounds of the dislike of an audience, who, perhaps, could at the very time have given no good reason for their capricious condemnation of a play, not worse than many others which they received with applause. The author, in the dedication, hints at the “lameness of the action;” but, as the poet and performers are nearly equally involved in the disgrace of a condemned piece, it is a very natural desire on either side to assign the cause of its failure to the imperfections of the other; of which there is a ludicrous representation in a dialogue betwixt the player and the poet in “Joseph Andrews.” Another cause of its unfavourable reception seems to have been, its second title of “Love in a Nunnery.” Dryden certainly could, last of any man, have been justly suspected of an intention to ridicule the Duke of York and the Catholic religion; yet,
as he fell under the same censure for the “Spanish Friar,” it seems probable that such suspicions were actually entertained. The play certainly contains, in the present instance, nothing to justify them. In point of merit, “The Assignation” seems pretty much on a level with Dryden’s other comedies; and certainly the spectators, who had received the blunders of Sir Martin Mar-all with such unbounded applause, might have taken some interest in those of poor Benito. Perhaps the absurd and vulgar scene, in which the prince pretends a fit of the cholic, had some share in occasioning the fall of the piece. This inelegant jeu de theatre is severely ridiculed in the “Rehearsal.”
To one person, the damnation of this play seems to have afforded exquisite pleasure. This was Edward Ravenscroft, once a member of the Middle Temple, — an ingenious gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of “Titus Andronicus” too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme;” in which Monsieur Jourdain is, with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish Paladin; and where Moliere took the opportunity to introduce an entrée de ballet, danced and sung by the Mufti, dervises, and others, in eastern habits. Ravenscroft’s translation, entitled “The Citizen turned Gentleman,” was acted in 1672, and printed in the same year; the jargon of the songs, like similar nonsense of our own day, seems to have been well received on the stage. Dryden, who was not always above feeling indignation at the bad taste and unjust preferences of the age, attacked Ravenscroft in the prologue to “The Assignation,” as he had before, though less directly, in that of “Marriage a-la-Mode.” Hence the exuberant and unrepressed joy of that miserable scribbler broke forth upon the damnation of Dryden’s performance, in the following passage of a prologue to another of his pilfered performances, called “The Careless Lovers,” acted, according to Langbaine, in the vacation succeeding the fall of “The Assignation,” in 1673:
An author did, to please you, let his wit run,
Of late, much on a serving man and cittern;
And yet, you would not like the serenade, —
Nay, and you damned his nuns in masquerade:
You did his Spanish sing-song too abhor;
Ah! que locura con tanto rigor!
In fine, the whole by you so much was blamed,
To act their parts, the players were ashamed.
Ah, how severe your malice was that day!
To damn, at once, the poet and his play:
But why was your rage just at that time shown,
When what the author writ was all his own?
Till then, he borrowed from romance, and did translate;
And those plays found a more indulgent fate.
Ravenscroft, however, seems to have given the first offence; for, in the prologue to “The Citizen turned Gentleman,” licensed 9th August 1672, we find the following lines, obviously levelled at “The Conquest of Granada,” and other heroic dramas of our author:
Then shall the knight, that had a knock in’s cradle,
Such as Sir Martin and Sir Arthur Addle,
Be flocked unto, as the great heroes now
In plays of rhyme and noise, with wondrous show: —
Then shall the house, to see these Hectors kill and slay,
That bravely fight out the whole plot of the play,
Be for at least six months full every day.
Langbaine, who quotes the lines from the prologue to Ravenscroft’s “Careless Lovers,” is of opinion, that he paid Dryden too great a compliment in admitting the originality of “The Assignation,” and labours to shew, that the characters are imitated from the “Romance Comique” of Scarron, and other novels of the time. But Langbaine seems to have been unable to comprehend, that originality consists in the mode of treating a subject, more than in the subject itself.
“The Assignation” was acted in 1672, and printed in 1673.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE.
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
ACT I.
ACT II.
ACT III.
ACT IV.
ACT V.
EPILOGUE
TO MY MOST HONOURED FRIEND, SIR CHARLES SEDLEY, BART.
Sir,
The design of dedicating plays is as common and unjust, as that of desiring seconds in a duel. It is engaging our friends, it may be, in a senseless quarrel where they have much to venture, without any concernment of their own. I have declared thus much beforehand, to prevent you from suspicion, that I intend to interest either your judgment or your kindness, in defending the errors of this comedy. It succeeded ill in the representation, against the opinion of many of the best judges of our age, to whom you know I read it, ere it was presented publicly. Whether the fault was in the play itself, or in the lameness of the action, or in the number of its enemies, who came resolved to damn it for the title, I will not now dispute. That would be too like the little satisfaction which an unlucky gamester finds in the relation of every cast by which he came to lose his money. I have had formerly so much success, that the miscarriage of this play was only my giving Fortune her revenge; I owed it her, and she was indulgent that she exacted not the payment long before. I will therefore deal more reasonably with you, than any poet has ever done with any patron: I do not so much as oblige you for my sake, to pass two ill hours in reading of my play. Think, if you please, that this dedication is only an occasion I have taken, to do myself the greatest honour imaginable with posterity; that is, to be recorded in the number of those men whom you have favoured with your friendship and esteem. For I am well assured, that, besides the present satisfaction I have, it will gain me the greatest part of my reputation with after ages, when they shall find me valuing myself on your kindness to me; I may have reason to suspect my own credit with them, but I have none to doubt of yours. And they who, perhaps, would forget me in my poems, would remember me in this epistle.
This was the course which has formerly been practised by the poets of that nation, who were masters of the universe. Horace and Ovid, who had little reason to distrust their immortality, yet took occasion to speak with honour of Virgil, Varius, Tibullus, and Propertius, their contemporaries; as if they sought, in the testimony of their friendship, a farther evidence of their fame. For my own part, I, who am the least amongst the poets, have yet the fortune to be honoured with the best patron, and the best friend. For, (to omit some great persons of our court, to whom I am many ways obliged, and who have taken care of me even amidst the exigencies of a war) I can make my boast to have found a better Mæcenas in the person of my Lord Treasurer Clifford, and a more elegant Tibullus in that of Sir Charles Sedley. I have chosen that poet to whom I would resemble you, not only because I think him at least equal, if not superior, to Ovid in his elegies; nor because of his quality, for he was, you know, a Roman knight, as well as Ovid; but for his candour, his wealth, his way of living, and particularly because of this testimony which is given him by Horace, which I have a thousand times in my mind applied to you:
Non tu corpus eras sine pectore: Dii tibi formam,
Dii tibi divitias dederant, artemque fruendi.
Quid voveat dulci nutricula majus alumno,
Quam sapere, et fari possit quæ sentiat, et cui
Gratia, forma, valetudo contingat abunde;
Et mundus victus, non deficiente crumena?
Certainly the poets of that age enjoyed much happiness in the conversation and friendship of one another. They imitated the best way of living, which was, to pursue an innocent and inoffensive pleasure, that which one of the ancients called eruditam voluptatem. We have, like them, our genial nights, where our discourse is neither too
serious nor too light, but always pleasant, and, for the most part, instructive; the raillery, neither too sharp upon the present, nor too censorious on the absent; and the cups only such as will raise the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. And thus far not only the philosophers, but the fathers of the church, have gone, without lessening their reputation of good manners, or of piety. For this reason, I have often laughed at the ignorant and ridiculous descriptions which some pedants have given of the wits, as they are pleased to call them; which are a generation of men as unknown to them, as the people of Tartary, or the Terra Australia, are to us. And therefore as we draw giants and anthropophagi in those vacancies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better; so those wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of extravagancies amongst us, for want of understanding what we are. Oftentimes it so falls out, that they have a particular pique to some one amongst us, and then they immediately interest heaven in their quarrel; as it is an usual trick in courts, when one designs the ruin of his enemy, to disguise his malice with some concernment of the kings; and to revenge his own cause, with pretence of vindicating the honour of his master. Such wits as they describe, I have never been so unfortunate as to meet in your company; but have often heard much better reasoning at your table, than I have encountered in their books. The wits they describe, are the fops we banish: For blasphemy and atheism, if they were neither sin nor ill manners, are subjects so very common, and worn so threadbare, that people, who have sense, avoid them, for fear of being suspected to have none. It calls the good name of their wit in question as it does the credit of a citizen when his shop is filled with trumperies and painted titles, instead of wares: We conclude them bankrupt to all manner of understanding; and that to use blasphemy, is a kind of applying pigeons to the soles of the feet; it proclaims their fancy, as well as judgment, to be in a desperate condition. I am sure, for your own particular, if any of these judges had once the happiness to converse with you, — to hear the candour of your opinions; how freely you commend that wit in others of which you have, so large a portion yourself; how unapt you are to be censorious; with how much easiness you speak so many things, and those so pointed, that no other man is able to excel, or perhaps to reach by study; — they would, instead of your accusers, become your proselytes. They would reverence so much sense, and so much good nature in the same person; and come, like the satyr, to warm themselves at that fire, of which they were ignorantly afraid when they stood at a distance. But you have too great a reputation to be wholly free from censure: it is a fine which fortune sets upon all extraordinary persons, and from which you should not wish to be delivered until you are dead. I have been used by my critics much more severely, and have more reason to complain, because I am deeper taxed for a less estate. I am, ridiculously enough, accused to be a contemner of universities; that is, in other words, an enemy of learning; without the foundation of which, I am sure, no man can pretend to be a poet. And if this be not enough, I am made a detractor from my predecessors, whom I confess to have been my masters in the art. But this latter was the accusation of the best judge, and almost the best poet, in the Latin tongue. You find Horace complaining, that, for taxing some verses in Lucilius, he himself was blamed by others, though his design was no other than mine now, to improve the knowledge of poetry; and it was no defence to him, amongst his enemies, any more than it is for me, that he praised Lucilius where he deserved it; paginâ laudatur eâdem. It is for this reason I will be no more mistaken for my good meaning: I know I honour Ben Jonson more than my little critics, because, without vanity I may own, I understand him better. As for the errors they pretend to find in me, I could easily show them, that the greatest part of them are beauties; and for the rest, I could recriminate upon the best poets of our nation, if I could resolve to accuse another of little faults, whom, at the same time, I admire for greater excellencies. But I have neither concernment enough upon me to write any thing in my own defence, neither will I gratify the ambition of two wretched scribblers, who desire nothing more than to be answered. I have not wanted friends, even among strangers, who have defended me more strongly, than my contemptible pedant could attack me. For the other, he is only like Fungoso in the play, who follows the fashion at a distance, and adores the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford. You can bear me witness, that I have not consideration enough for either of them to be angry. Let Mævius and Bavius admire each other; I wish to be hated by them and their fellows, by the same reason for which I desire to be loved by you. And I leave it to the world, whether their judgment of my poetry ought to be preferred to yours; though they are as much prejudiced by their malice, as I desire you should be led by your kindness, to be partial to,