baine charges it, like most of the rest, with plagiarism, and observes that the song is translated from Voiture, allowing however that both the sense and measure are exactly observed 1. The Tempest is an alteration of Shakespeare's play, made by 30 Dryden in conjunction with Davenant, 'whom,' says he, 'I found of so quick a fancy that nothing was proposed to him in [on] which he could not suddenly produce a thought extremely pleasant and surprising; and those first thoughts of his, contrary to the Latin proverb, were not always the least happy; and as his fancy was quick, so likewise were the products of it remote and new. He borrowed not of any other, and his imaginations were such as could not easily enter into any other man".' The effect produced by the conjunction of these two powerful 31 minds was that to Shakespeare's monster Caliban is added a sister-monster Sicorax; and a woman, who, in the original play, had never seen a man, is in this brought acquainted with a man that had never seen a woman 3. corrected by Dryden. . . . I never laughed so in all my life, and at very good wit therein, not fooling.' Diary, iv. 157. 'The Duke giving Mr. Dryden a bare translation of it out of a comedy of Molière [L'Étourdi], he adapted the part purposely for the mouth of Mr. Nokes, and curiously polished the whole. This and Love in a Tub [by Etherege] got the company more money than any preceding comedy.' DOWNES, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 38. The following is the opening stanza of each poem :'L'Amour sous sa loy N'a jamais eu d'amant plus heureux que moy. Bénit soit son flambeau, Son carquois, son bandeau ! Je suis amoureux : Et le ciel ne voit point d'amant plus heureux.' Euvres de Voiture, 1665, ii. 42. 'Blind Love, to this hour, Had never, like me, a slave under his power; Then blest be the dart That he threw at my heart; A joy so great as to be wounded with 2 writes Dryden, 'first taught me to admire Shakespeare.' Ib. p. 106. He died on April 7, 1668. The Preface is dated Dec. 1, 1669. lb. p. 108. Pepys saw it acted on Nov. 7, 1667. Diary, iv. 257. For Davenant's influence on Dryden see post, DRYDEN, 235. 3' Davenant designed the counterpart to Shakespeare's plot, that those two characters of innocence and love might the more illustrate and commend each other.' Dryden's Works, iii. 106. 'How much this comedy is now esteemed, though the foundation were Shakespeare's, all people know.' LANGBAINE, Dram. Poets, p. 463. Macready acted Prospero in this 'mélange' in 1821. In 1839 he produced Shakespeare's Tempest, ‘a play which had never been seen before.' It ran fifty-five nights. Macready's Reminiscences, i. 226; ii. 144. 'It was a singular felicity that Dryden's operas were set to music by Purcell. In The Tempest are some of the finest airs and sweetest harmonies that ever delighted the ear. Dryden had no skill in music. His wife had been a scholar of Purcell.' HAWKINS, Johnson's Works, 1787, ii. 447. 32 33 About this time, in 1673', Dryden seems to have had his quiet much disturbed by the success of The Empress of Morocco, a tragedy written in rhyme by Elkanah Settle; which was so much applauded as to make him think his supremacy of reputation in some danger. Settle had not only been prosperous on the stage, but, in the confidence of success, had published his play, with sculptures and a preface of defiance3. Here was one offence added to another; and, for the last blast of inflammation, it was acted at Whitehall by the court-ladies *. Dryden could not now repress these emotions, which he called indignation, and others jealousy; but wrote upon the play and the dedication such criticism as malignant impatience could pour out in haste 5. 34 Of Settle he gives this character 6. 'He's an animal of a most deplored understanding, without [reading and] conversation. His being is in a twilight of sense and some glimmering of thought, which he can never fashion into wit or English. His style is boisterous and rough-hewn, his rhyme incorrigibly lewd, and his numbers perpetually harsh and ill-sounding. The little talent which he has is fancy. He sometimes labours with a thought, but, with the pudder he makes to bring it into the world, 'tis commonly still-born; so As the last play mentioned, The Tempest, was published in the winter of 1669-70, and the Notes and Observations which Johnson goes on to criticize were not published till 1674, paragraphs 32-42 should have come later. 2 It was the first play that ever was sold in England for two shillings, and the first that ever was printed with cuts.' DENNIS, Preface to Remarks upon Pope's Homer. Three quarters of a century later Dodsley was selling Irene and seven other tragedies for eighteenpence each. See advertisement at the end of Theatrical Records, 1756. Goldsmith did not like sculptures.' 'The vulgar,' he writes, 'buy every book rather from the excellence of the sculptor than the writer.' Goldsmith's Works, iii. 87. 3 There is no preface; the defiance occurs in the Dedication.' Cunningham's Lives of the Poets, i. 281. Dennis's Remarks, &c., Preface; post, DRYDEN, 101. For Rochester's Prologue to the play see Eng. Poets, XV. 71. 5 Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco; or some few Erratas to be printed instead of the Sculptures with the second Edition of that Play, 1674. Langbaine's Dram. Poets, p. 440; Dryden's Works, xv. 393. 'Mr. Dryden, Mr. Shadwell and Mr. Crown began to grow jealous, and they three wrote Remarks on The Empress of Morocco. DENNIS, Remarks, &c., Preface. Of these Notes, &c., Malone writes: 'The Preface, I think, from internal evidence is Dryden's; and one passage in the body of the piece, and the Postscript, though I have some doubts concerning the latter.' Malone's Dryden, ii. 271. Paragraphs 34 and 35 in the text belong to the Preface (Works, xv. 399, 400), and 41 to the passage (ib. pp. 402-4). The rest therefore is not Dryden's. See post, DRYDEN, 116, for a second character of Settle. that, for want of learning and elocution, he will never be able to express any thing either naturally or justly!' This is not very decent; yet this is one of the pages in which 35 criticism prevails most over brutal fury. He proceeds: 'He has a heavy hand at fools, and a great felicity in writing nonsense for them. Fools they will be in spite of him. His King, his two Empresses, his villain, and his sub-villain, nay his hero, have all a certain natural cast of the father. . . . Their folly was born and bred in them, and something of the Elkanah will be visible.' This is Dryden's general declamation; I will not withhold from 36 the reader a particular remark. Having gone through the first act, he says: 'To conclude this act with the most rumbling piece of nonsense spoken yet, "To flattering lightning our feign'd smiles conform, Which back'd with thunder do but gild a storm." Conform a smile to lightning, make a smile imitate lightning, and flattering lightning; lightning sure is a threatening thing. And this lightning must gild a storm. Now if I must conform my smiles to lightning, then my smiles must gild a storm too; to gild with smiles is a new invention of gilding. And gild a storm by being backed with thunder. Thunder is part of the storm; so one part of the storm must help to gild another part, and help by backing; as if a man would gild a thing the better for being backed, or having a load upon his back. So that here is gilding by conforming, smiling, lightning, backing, and thundering. The whole is as if I should say thus, I will make my counterfeit smiles look like a flattering stone-horse, which, being backed with a trooper, does but gild the battle. I am mistaken if nonsense is not here pretty thick sown. Sure the poet writ these two lines aboard some smack in a storm, and, being sea-sick, spewed up a good lump of clotted nonsense at once.' Here is perhaps a sufficient specimen; but as the pamphlet, 37 though Dryden's, has never been thought worthy of republication and is not easily to be found, it may gratify curiosity to quote it more largely. ""Whene'er she bleeds, He no severer a damnation needs, That dares pronounce the sentence of her death, That attends that breath.-The poet is at breath again; breath can never 'scape him; and here he brings in a breath that must 38 be infectious with pronouncing a sentence; and this sentence is not to be pronounced till the condemned party bleeds, that is, she must be executed first, and sentenced after; and the pronounc ing of this sentence will be infectious, that is, others will catch the disease of that sentence, and this infecting of others will torment a man's self. The whole is thus: when she bleeds, thou needest no greater hell or torment to thyself than infecting of others by pronouncing a sentence upon her. What hodge-podge does he make here! Never was Dutch grout such clogging, thick, indigestible stuff. But this is but a taste to stay the stomach; we share a more plentiful mess presently. 'Now to dish up the poet's broth that I promised: "For when we're dead and our freed souls enlarg'd, Then gently, as a happy lover's sigh, Like wandering meteors through the air we'll fly, We'll steal into our cruel fathers' breasts, There read their souls, and track each passion's sphere: And in their orbs view the dark characters Of sieges, ruins, murders, blood and wars. We'll blot out all those hideous draughts, and write Gentle as nature in its infancy: Till soften'd by our charms their furies cease, And their revenge resolves into a peace. Thus by our death their quarrel ends, Whom living we made foes, dead we'll make friends." If this be not a very liberal mess, I will refer myself to the stomach of any moderate guest. And a rare mess it is, far excelling any Westminster white-broth. It is a kind of giblet porridge, made of the giblets of a couple of young geese, stodged full of meteors, orbs, spheres, track, hideous draughts, dark characters, white forms, and radiant lights, designed not only to please appetite and indulge luxury, but it is also physical, being an approved medicine to purge choler, for it is propounded by Morena as a receipt to cure their fathers of their choleric humours: and were it written in characters as barbarous as the words, might very well pass for a doctor's bill. To conclude, it is porridge, 'tis a receipt, 'tis a pig with a pudding in the belly, 'tis I know not what; for, certainly, never any one that pretended to write sense had the impudence before to put such stuff as this into the mouths of those that were to speak it before an audience, whom he did not take to be all fools; and after that to print it too, and expose it to the exami nation of the world. But let us see what we can make of this stuff: "For when we're dead and our freed souls enlarg'd". Here he tells us what it is to be dead; it is to have our freed souls set free. Now if to have a soul set free is to be dead, then to have a freed soul set free is to have a dead man die. "Then gently, as a happy lover's sigh They two like one sigh, and that one sigh like two wandering meteors, "-shall fly through the air "— That is, they shall mount above like falling stars, or else they shall skip like two Jacks with lanthorns, or Will with a wisp, and Madge with a candle. 'And in their airy walk steal into their cruel fathers' breasts, 39 like subtle guests. So that their fathers' breasts must be in an airy walk, an airy walk of a flier. And there they will read their souls, and track the spheres of their passions. That is, these walking fliers, Jack with a lanthorn, &c. will put on his spectacles, and fall a reading souls, and put on his pumps and fall a tracking of spheres; so that he will read and run, walk and fly at the same time! Oh! Nimble Jack. Then he will see, how revenge here, how ambition there-The birds will hop about. And then view the dark characters of sieges, ruins, murders, blood, and wars, in their orbs: Track the characters to their forms! Oh! rare sport for Jack. Never was place so full of game as these breasts! You cannot stir but flush a sphere, start a character, or unkennel an orb!' Settle's is said to have been the first play embellished with 40 sculptures; those ornaments seem to have given poor Dryden great disturbance. He tries however to ease his pain by venting his malice in a parody 3. 'The poet has not only been so impudent to expose all this 41 stuff, but so arrogant to defend it with an epistle; like a saucy booth-keeper that, when he had put a cheat upon the people, would wrangle and fight with any that would not like it or would offer to discover it: for which arrogance our poet receives this correction; and to jerk him a little the sharper, I will not transpose [trans-prose] his verse, but by the help of his own words trans-nonsense sense, that, by my stuff, people may judge the better what his is: I Ante, DRYDEN, 32. See post, LYTTELTON, 17, for 'poor Lyttelton.' 3 For the lines parodied see Works, xv. 404 n. |