All posts tagged metaphor

All For Love, or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden (1677)

….we have lov’d each other
Into our mutual ruin.
(Antony to Cleopatra, All For Love Act 2)

John Dryden (1631 to 1700) was the dominant literary figure of the Restoration period, loosely 1660 to 1700. The period is sometimes called the Age of Dryden by academics who are paid to label things.

Dryden was extremely prolific. He not only wrote original poems – notably extended satires on the fierce politics and bickering theatre-world of the Restoration era – but produced an awe-inspiring number of translations, notably of Virgil’s Aeneid, of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio and translations from the Middle English of some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Not only this but during the revival of the theatre under the restored King Charles II, Dryden wrote some 30 plays, including texts for some of the earliest English operas.

Dryden’s dominance was in part due to his development of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters) and rhyme royal (rhymed iambic pentameters) into extremely flexible and expressive tools, for writing satirical poems, plays comic or tragic, and narrative verse, whether high toned or entertaining. He added a few variations to add variety, namely alexandrines and triplets. Triplets are when not two but three lines share the same end rhyme, and an alexandrine is a line of six beats or feet rather than the usual five of the pentameter, such as this line from the Faerie Queene:

And to the Dwarfe awhile his needlesse spere he gave.

Setting standards

But there’s a further reason for Dryden’s dominance. No other poet or playwright wrote so extensively about literature. Dryden not only set about establishing orderly blank verse as the standard medium for verse, and set out to revive serious high poetic drama in the theatre; he wrote numerous essays explaining why he wanted to do this and how he was setting about doing it. He was the greatest theorist and justifier of the great change in poetic style and medium which took place during his lifetime.

In Restoration England there was a great hankering for law and order and regularity. Laws were brought in to compel conformity to the state religion, the Royal Society brought together scientists who were seeking the fundamental laws of nature, and writers of the period were motivated to seek out the laws and rules which underpinned the best literature of the ages.

Dryden wrote very appreciatively about both Chaucer and Shakespeare – in fact his translations of Chaucer helped revive interest in him – but at the same time he deprecated them for ignoring what he took to be fundamental rules about correct format and diction and style appropriate to each poetic genre.

Bringing order to the drama

In particular, when it came to plays, Dryden was among many authors of the period in thrall to the so-called Three Unities. Two thousand years earlier the Greek philosopher Aristotle had delivered a series of lectures analysing the tragic plays of his time and noting what the most successful of them had in common. The most successful Greek tragedies tended to focus on just one subject and not waste the audience’s attention on sub-plots and distractions. They tended to happen in one place rather than a confusing variety of locations. And they tended to be very focused in time, often taking place in just one day, sometimes, like Oedipus Rex, taking place in real time, with no jumps, gaps or ellipses.

These were the three unities which later generations converted from being a shrewd analysis of the particular cohort of plays Aristotle chose to analyse into grand universal laws which ought to be applied to all serious dramas.

All this is by way of explaining why Dryden chose to rewrite Shakespeare’s tragic drama Antony and Cleopatra in order as nearly as possible to comply with the three unities.

Unity of Time Shakespeare’s play covers an extravagant ten years of ancient history, from Fulvia’s death in 40 BC to the lover’s suicide after the Battle of Actium in 30 BC. By contrast Dryden’s play covers just the last few days leading up to the main characters’ double suicide.

Unity of Subject Shakespeare’s play is diffuse in the sense that, beside the central story, it also touches on the war against Sextus Pompeius, the character of Lepidus, vivid portraits of Octavius Caesar and his entourage. Antony and Cleopatra covers a larger timeframe and has more named characters than any other Shakespeare play, some 57. By deliberate contrast, Dryden focuses right down on just ten named characters.

Unity of Setting And whereas Shakespeare’s play makes huge leaps in location, from Alexandria to Rome to Greece to Sicily to Athens, Dryden’s sticks to a handful of buildings in the capital of ancient Egypt, Alexandria.

So a concerted focus on setting, subject and time. All depicted in neat, regular and easily understandable verse.

Synopsis

Act One

The Egyptian priest Serapion sets the scene by describing ominous portents and prodigies which are afflicting the country, such as the untimely flooding of the Nile.

Cleopatra’s eunuch and chief minister Alexas dismisses all these omens, tells Serapion to stop broadcasting them, and instead focuses on the army of Caesar which is camped within sight of Alexandria.

Alexas rues the day Cleopatra ever met Antony and so got Egypt dragged into Rome’s civil wars. Alexas gives us the backstory that, since his ignominious defeat at the naval Battle of Actium, Antony has been hiding in the temple of Isis ‘a prey to black despair’, and refusing to see Cleopatra.

Enter Ventidius, a Roman general who is an old friend and colleague of Antony’s (‘A braver Roman never drew a sword’). He is appalled to witness Antony wandering distracted and depressed and insists, over the objections of Antony’s assistants, in seeing the great man.

In their dialogue Antony expresses worldweariness unto death and Ventidius laments that a man who was once ‘the lord of half mankind’ has been reduced to such a pitiable state out of wretched submission to ‘one light, worthless woman’).

After having a good cry together, Ventidius gets to the point of his visit which is that he has brought 12 battle-hardened legions with him from Syria. They will fight for Antony – but only on condition that he abandons Cleopatra. They are not prepared to die for a flighty foreign queen.

Antony is inspired and agrees these terms.

Act Two

The focus switches to Cleopatra who laments the tragic downturn in her fortunes to her maids, Charmion and Iras. Charmian reports back from a visit to Antony where she tried to persuade him to come see Cleopatra but she refused. Cleopatra sends Alexas.

Cut to Antony in company with Ventidius when Alexas enters bearing flattering messages from Cleopatra and gifts of jewellery for his generals and a bracelet of rubies for Antony. Ventidius gives vitriolic comments on this activity, calling Alexas a ‘vile crocodile’.

When Alexas fumbles to fix this bracelet on Antony’s wrist, he slyly asks wouldn’t he prefer the sender to tie it on herself, and introduces Cleopatra who enters, for the lover’s first confrontation in the play. Ventidius is disgusted and warns Antony to keep his resolve and Antony starts well by delivering a long speech outlining how love for Cleopatra has reduced him and his career to ruins. In fact ‘ruin’ is a key word in this act.

But, inevitably, Antony, like an alcoholic offered a bottle of scotch, relapses. The crux comes when Cleopatra presents a letter from Octavius himself in which Caesar has offered her not only continued rule over Egypt but the kingdom of Syria as well, if she would only surrender Antony. Now, by proving that she refused to do so, Cleopatra wins Antony all over again, he falls into her arms and proclaims his undying love.

Ventidius is disgusted:

VENTIDIUS: ⁠O Women! Women! Women! all the gods
Have not such pow’r of doing good to Man,
As you of doing harm.

Nonetheless Antony orders Ventidius to unbar the gate facing towards Caesar’s army, as he is keen to lead his (Ventidius’s) legions into battle.

Act Three

Between acts 2 and 3 Antony has led an army out of Alexandria and defeated Caesar’s army, leaving five thousand dead. The act opens with he and Cleopatra celebrating and mutually praising each other. But after a certain amount of hailing each other as Venus and Mars, respectively, Cleopatra and her entourage exit, allowing Antony’s loyal general and conscience, Ventidius to enter.

He pours cold water on Antony’s good mood by pointing out that Caesar has the whole world and any number of allies and their armies to draw on while Antony has only the finite resources and manpower of Alexandria.

Antony laments that he has had only one true real friend and proceeds to describe the kind of friendship which consists of a complete unity of mind and spirit, which makes me wonder whether he had read Cicero’s Essay on Friendship. (Although the idea of super friendship had been recycled countless times during the Renaissance and was probably available to Dryden as a cliché both of humanistic discourse.)

Anyway, this One True Friend he has in mind is the young Dolabella and Ventidius now proceeds, to Antony’s great surprise…to invite this same Dolabella on stage!

Antony recovers from his shock, embraces his young friend, and there is some dialogue where Dolabella upbraids him for falling thrall to Cleopatra, while Antony reminds Dolabella how utterly enthralled the latter was when Cleopatra made her grand entrance at Cydnus, and explains it was jealousy lest his young soul mate fall equally for Cleopatra which led Antony to banish him from his side (!)

[This offers Drydren the opportunity to do a direct rewriting of the most famous speech from Shakespeare’s play, when Enobarbus describes Cleopatra’s magnificent arrival at Antony’s camp by boat. Below I give a detailed comparison of Shakespeare and Dryden’s styles using a much smaller excerpt.]

Dolabella has come from Caesar’s camp to offer terms. Antony asks who was man enough to stand up to mighty Caesar and plea for terms? Was it Dolabella? Was it Ventidius? No, they reply; someone nobler and stronger than either of them. Then pray produce this prodigy, Antony demands.

At which, with a magician’s flourish, and with rather cheesy dramaturgy, Dryden presents Antony’s forsaken wife Octavia and their three small children! All of them then proceed to gang up on Antony:

⁠DOLLABELLA: ⁠Friend!
OCTAVIA: ⁠Husband!
BOTH CHILDREN: ⁠Father!

– his best friend Dolabella, his loyalest general Ventidius, his noble wife and his three children all beg him to abandon the Egyptian queen and treat with Caesar, who has made a surprisingly generous offer:

OCTAVIA: I’ll tell my Brother we are reconcil’d;
He shall draw back his Troops, and you shall march
To rule the East: I may be dropt at Athens;
No matter where, I never will complain,

At which point Antony utterly capitulates, giving in, begging their forgiveness, weeping, saying Octavia can lead him wherever she wills.

It seems that Cleopatra has heard of this reconciliation because her representative, Alexas, hurriedly arrives and…is ironically dismissed as too late by Ventidius, before he too departs. Alexas has a moment alone onstage to lament that a) as a eunuch he has never known love and passion b) he advised Cleopatra to drop Antony, she refused, so now she’s the one being dropped.

Enter Cleopatra and her entourage. Alexas barely has time to tell her that Antony has defected to the enemy when Octavia herself enters and the stage is set for a set-piece dramatic confrontation between wife and mistress, between duty and passion, between married chastity and sexual indulgence. Cleopatra wins on the topic of beauty and ‘charms’ but Octavia triumphs with her virtue, calling her rival, in effect, a whore.

Obviously this is all a man’s creation, written for a highly patriarchal society, in which the male-created characters speak and argue in terms dictated by patriarchy. Yet Shakespeare was writing for an even more hierarchical society and his women soar.

In Octavia’s handful of scenes in Antony and Cleopatra she emerges as a well-defined character and in her brief scene with Antony in Rome there is real affection and gentleness on both sides. Here, in Dryden, this little set-piece feels like a contrived and highly schematic binary opposition of the kind you find in his political poems.

That said, after Octavia sweeps off the stage, Cleopatra staggers with affliction:

CLEOPATRA: My sight grows dim, and every object dances,
And swims before me, in the maze of death.
My spirits, while they were oppos’d, kept up;
They could not sink beneath a Rivals scorn:
But now she’s gone they faint.

Act Four

Act 4 takes an unexpected turn. Antony asks Dolabella to tell Cleopatra he is leaving and the scene is initially mildly comic because Antony makes to leave three times but each time comes back to give Dolabella just a few more points to say to Cleopatra. It’s a portrait of a man struggling to tear himself away.

But this one request turns out to be the focus of the entire act because Ventidius overhears this arrangement and turns, rather suddenly, into a kind of organising spirit. For he realises that Dolabella is himself still in love with Cleopatra. Now Ventidius fantasises about stepping into Antony’s shoes (‘What injury/To him to wear the Robe which he throws by?’)

Ventidius also overhears (suddenly there is lots of overhearing and eavesdropping – all very Restoration comedy and very unlike the plain dealing of the first three acts) Alexas suggesting to Cleopatra that she make Antony jealous by encouraging Dolabella’s love making, the idea being that Antony will hear about this and be prompted to come running back to her.

ALEXAS: Th’ event wil be, your Lover will return
Doubly desirous to possess the good
Which once he fear’d to lose.

To make it even more staged and contrived, Ventidius gets Octavia to accompany him in eavesdropping on this scene, namely Dolabella supposedly passing on Antony’s final farewell to the queen. At first both play up to their roles i.e. Cleopatra feigns upset at Antony leaving but then says she might accede to Dolabella’s passion and Dolabella, thus encouraged, admits that he’s always loved her from afar. Flirtation:

DOLABELLA: ⁠Some men are constant.
CLEOPATRA: ⁠And constancy deserves reward, that’s certain.

Ventidius and Octavia see and hear all this from the back of the stage (in a very stagey contrived kind of way). They see Dolabella pretend that Antony had been fierce and heartless in casting her off. But they are all surprised at the extent to which Cleopatra is distraught and collapses to the floor in a faint. This prompts Dolabella to regret his scheming and admit he was lying and to stagily beg forgiveness. Cleopatra joins in the mutual confessing, that admitting she was leading him on as a scheme. Now both succumb to guilt at their respective betrayals (of lover and friend).

But this doesn’t stop Ventidius and Octavia then returning to Antony and swearing they’ve seen Cleopatra and Dollabella holding hands and kissing. Ventidius even ropes in Alexas, who backs them up because, although he hadn’t witnessed the scene himself, this is what he recommended Cleopatra to do.

This all backfires for Ventidius. He hoped portraying them as lovers would finally extinguish any love for Cleopatra and set Antony free, but in the event Antony is so full of jealous anger at Cleopatra’s betrayal that it shocks and disgusts Octavia.

OCTAVIA: Tis not well,
Indeed, my Lord, ’tis much unkind to me,
To show this passion, this extreme concernment
For an abandon’d, faithless Prostitute.

Antony repeatedly tries to argue that Ventidius cannot be right, Cleopatra cannot have pledged love to Dolabella, that she still loves him and his obstinate determination to exculpate her infuriate Octavia. She thought they were completely reconciled at the end of Act 3 but now she sees how naive she has been. She realises Antony has but ‘half returned’ to her. And so she storms out for the final time, Ventidius, like any Restoration schemer, lamenting that Heaven has blasted his ‘best designs’.

The last element in the unfolding of this grand misunderstanding comes after Octavia has stormed out and Dolabella and Cleopatra enter only to be surprised at the ferocity of Antony’s accusations against them, calling them ‘false and faithless’ serpents.

They try to explain themselves but Antony refuses to believe them and Cleopatra in particular beats herself up that one minute’s feigning has now wrecked a lifetime of love. Antony orders them out of his sight, forever but even as he does so he weeps bitter tears. In other words, pity, fear and sympathy are wring to the maximum.

Act Five

Obviously the entire audience knows Antony and Cleopatra will die in this act so the only question is how Dryden handles the scenes, what speeches he gives them.

The act opens with Cleopatra grabbing a knife ready to kill herself and her maids Charmian and Iras struggling to stop her. With comic timing Alexas walks in and Cleopatra forgets suicide and turns her entire fury on him, the counsellor who suggested she play act being in love with Dolabella. Wretch! He has killed her!

Alexas reassures her that the plan half worked – Dolabella and Octavia both banished, Antony has returned to being a wounded animal and may, again, be wooed. He is right now up the tower of the Pharos watching the sea battle between the Egyptian and Roman fleets.

Right on cue, the high priest Serapion enters and announces that, far from attacking Caesar’s fleet, Cleopatra’s fleet sailed right up to it and…joined it! Everyone cheered and the Egyptians fell into line behind the Romans. Now they are entering the port and will soon be in the palace. Antony was beside himself with rage and tried to throw himself tom his death, was prevented, and is hurrying back into the city.

Serapion tells her to flee to her Monument and orders Alexas – the author of her recent banishment – to go and confront Antony and admit the pretending-to-be-in-love-with-Dolabella scheme was his idea. Cleo, Serapion and the others leave quivering Alexas to a soliloquy lamenting his fear.

Enter Antony and Ventidius who roundly insult the craven Egyptians then vow to rouse what men they can and launch an attack on the invaders and so meet their death like Romans.

They come across Alexas and Ventidius is prompted to kill him on the spot, but Antony thinks he’s too despicable to kill. He just wants to know where Cleopatra is. At which, Alexas tells them both the whopping lie that she has holed up in her Monument where, overcome with grief, she has stabbed herself to death.

Alexas’s motivation for this appears to be an extreme way of extenuating and justifying Cleopatra, faithful unto death, for he says her last words were of undying love for Antony. Antony is, of course, stricken with grief and guilt. Alexas thinks to himself his plan has worked, it has prompted Antony to realise how much he loves/loved Cleopatra. All he has to do now is say it was a false report and they will leap back into each others’ arms.

Ventidius expresses satisfaction that the bloody woman is dead and reminds Antony they promised to go out, all guns blazing. But Antony doesn’t care any more, is overcome with apathy and indifference: if Cleopatra is dead, then nothing matters any more.

ANTONY: What shou’d I fight for now? My Queen is dead.
I was but great for her; my Pow’r, my Empire,
Were but my Merchandise to buy her love;
And conquer’d Kings, my Factors. Now she’s dead,
Let Cæsar take the World,———
An Empty Circle, since the Jewel’s gone
Which made it worth my strife: my being’s nauseous;
For all the bribes of life are gone away.

There follows quite a long dialogue between Antony, who asks Ventidius to kill him and live to tell his story, and Ventidius who complains what it will look like if he lives on like a coward after his master has nobly quit the stage. But as Antony turns away his face in readiness for the death blow, Ventidius betrays him by stabbing himself.

Antony laments but praises his friend’s amity unto death; then falls on his own sword but messes it up, so he is badly wounded but not dead. He’s trying to kneel up to have another go when Charmian and Iras enter and Cleopatra!

In his agony, for a moment Antony thinks he has died and gone to heaven and his mistress is greeting him, but then realises he is still alive and Alexas lied to him.

Antony, rather trivially, double checks with Cleopatra that she is true and she never felt anything for Dolabella. Of course not! They place Antony, rather incongruously, in a chair and he delivers a stirring requiem:

ANTONY: ⁠But grieve not, while thou stay’st
My last disastrous times:
Think we have had a clear and glorious day;
And Heav’n did kindly to delay the storm
Just till our close of ev’ning. Ten years love,
And not a moment lost, but all improv’d
To th’ utmost joys: What Ages have we liv’d?
And now to die each others; and, so dying,
While hand in hand we walk in Groves below,
Whole Troops of Lovers Ghosts shall flock about us,
And all the Train be ours.

He gives Cleopatra a last kiss. [It’s notable how little actual sensual activity there is from this pair of lovers who are supposedly wallowing in the sink of sin. One kiss – that appears to be it.]

Despite the protests of her maids, Cleopatra resolves to die, motivated not least by a refusal to be led in triumph through the streets of Rome to be gawped at by the plebs. She bids the maids go fetch her finest clothes and jewellery and ‘the aspicks’.

They return, dress Cleopatra in her finery, who sits in the chair next to Antony’s, and addresses a speech to the snakes which are going to deliver her from a cruel world. Offstage they hear Serapion declaring Caesar is approaching so she hurries, forcing the snake to bite her on the arm. As Serapion beats on the locked doors the two handmaids apply the snake to themselves, too and slowly drowse down, laying on the body of their queen as Serapion’s men burst open the door and run up to them.

SERAPION: ⁠Charmion, is this well done?
CHARMION: ⁠Yes, ’tis well done, and like a Queen, the last
Of her great Race.

Serapion delivers a eulogy to the dead lovers and now we realise the point of the business with the chairs, the apparently incongruous notion of propping the dying Antony up on a chair. The intention was that the two dead lovers present a striking tableau, at the play’s very ending, of sitting on royal thrones:

SERAPION: See, see how the Lovers sit in State together,
As they were giving Laws to half Mankind.
Th’ impression of a Smile left in her face,
Shows she dy’d pleas’d with him for whom she liv’d,
And went to charm him in another World.
Cæsar’s just entring; grief has now no leisure.
Secure that Villain, as our pledge of safety
To grace th’ Imperial Triumph. Sleep, blest Pair,
Secure from humane chance, long Ages out,
While all the Storms of Fate fly o’er your Tomb;
⁠And Fame, to late Posterity, shall tell,
⁠No Lovers liv’d so great, or dy’d so well.

Several thoughts:

1. Shakespeare had ended his play with a scene of Cleopatra’s death which is so intense as to be uncanny, spectral, supernaturally intense. Dryden clearly had to end his play with a bang and you can imagine him casting around for a suitable final setup/scene/page and lines. This closing spectacle of the two dead lovers propped up on thrones makes a striking – and strikingly different from Shakespeare – final tableau.

2. But it is also subject to a very negative interpretation. They may be sitting there like emperors giving laws to half mankind, but they are in fact corpses, dead, powerless, defunct. they are a mockery of living power, a travesty of real authority. The real thing – Caesar – is at the door. And although he (tactfully on Dryden’s part) never makes an appearance in the play, his presence – and the awe due to real power – is present throughout and, in a sense, drives the entire plot.

3. Thus Dryden presents actors, directors and audiences with a very ambiguous tableau at the play’s end. It might be possible to take Serapion’s words at face value. But the more I mull it over the more the sight of two dead losers propped up on outsize thrones by their sycophants should probably be made to look macabre, outlandish, like the gruesome finale of a Hammer horror movie.

General thoughts

All For Love is surprisingly enjoyable. It’s an easy read. This is due to its greatest strength which is also its weakness, which is its tremendous clarity. Everything is clearly explained in calm and lucid iambic pentameters. The rhythm of the verse is as regular as the German train network. Everything arrives on time and in correct order. All the characters explain how they feel or what they are going to do with admirable candour and clarity. There is very little metaphor or simile and certainly nothing obscure or difficult, nothing to disturb the flow of high-toned sentiments. Even when the characters claim to be in a transport of passion, they still manage to explain it in clear and lucid language expressed with regular rhythm:

CLEOPATRA: … My Love’s a noble madness,
Which shows the cause deserv’d it. Moderate sorrow
Fits vulgar Love; and for a vulgar Man:
But I have lov’d with such transcendent passion,
I soar’d, at first, quite out of Reasons view,
And now am lost above it…

Even when it sounds poetic, the language, on closer examination, always turns out to be clear and rational:

VENTIDIUS: I tell thee, Eunuch, that she has unmann’d him:
Can any Roman see, and know him now,
Thus alter’d from the Lord of half Mankind,
Unbent, unsinew’d, made a Womans Toy,
Shrunk from the vast extent of all his honours,
And crampt within a corner of the World?

There are lots of places in Shakespeare which are puzzling to scholars and readers alike, lots of places where the thought is compressed into clever wordplay so convoluted or uses words referring to things or practices which are now so lost or obscure to us, that even the experts aren’t clear what he was trying to say. Nothing like that ever happens in Dryden. There is a steady trickle of metaphor and simile but nothing obscure, nothing puzzling, no sudden imaginative leaps to take your breath away. He has followed Cleopatra’s injunction to:

CLEOPATRA: ⁠Be more plain.

Mermaid’s inadequate notes

The notes to the 1975 Mermaid paperback edition I read, written by the editor N.J. Andrew, are disappointing. There aren’t many of them and what there are are mostly concerned with pointing out textual variations in the early printed editions, described in the clipped abbreviations of editorial scholasticism i.e. the dullest kind of notes possible for a classic text.

There is, admittedly, a second type of note, which is where he quotes passages from Shakespeare to indicate where Dryden copied or imitated the Bard. This also is pretty boring and he need only have given the reference not take up half the page quoting the entire passage. Editions of Shakespeare are easy to access.

What the reader very much does want is notes explaining the characters’ motivations, any obscurities, explaining some of the incidents referred to in the text which took place before the play started, or other people referred to in the text who don’t appear, and so on.

But there are almost no notes like that. Better than the tedious textual notes might have been references to the lives of Plautus or other ancient sources Dryden used. But again, nada. The Mermaid paperback is clearly printed and nice to hold in the hand but there must be editions with fuller, more useful notes.

A comparison

One of the places where Andrew highlights the comparison with Shakespeare is particularly famous and instructive. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Act 2 scene 2 line 239 onwards, Enobarbus is drunkenly praising Cleopatra’s amazing charisma to a table of Roman diners:

ENOBARBUS: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies

The first line is clear enough but the ‘cloy the appetites they feed’ bit requires a moment to process, as does its repetition in the next phrase. I think the idea is that male sexuality is usually quenched and dowsed after sex with a woman, sometimes leading to boredom or even repulsion. I had to look up the dictionary definition of ‘cloy’ to find that it is: ‘disgust or sicken (someone) with an excess of sweetness, richness, or sentiment.’ So I think the passage is based on the idea that women attract men who, however, often grow sick of them, particularly after their initial sexual appetite is satisfied. BUT that Cleopatra is not only different, but has the opposite effect, that the more men are with her and have sex with her, the more wild they are driven by love and lust.

Now I’m not very interested in this idea, as an idea, just the way it’s so densely expressed. Maybe I’m being dim, but I did have to look up the word and read the passage half a dozen times to be sure I understood it. So that’s what I mean by describing Shakespeare’s later style as dense and compact.

Compare that with a passage which seems pretty obviously derived from it in All For Love. Dryden has Antony tell Cleopatra to her face:

ANTONY: There’s no satiety of Love in thee;
Enjoy’d, thou still art new; perpetual Spring
Is in thy armes; the ripen’d fruit but falls
And blossoms rise to fill its empty place;
And I grow rich by giving.

It’s less impactful in at least three ways:

1. It’s more clearly expressed: ‘Enjoyed [i.e. after sex] thou still art new’ and the even clearer ‘Perpetual spring is in thy arms’.

2. For sure, there’s a metaphor about ripened fruit falling but being continually replaced with new blossoms (which promise evermore fruit), the implication being that her sexual allure is always new, and never falls into that surfeit or male repulsion which Shakespeare refers to. But the thing about both these metaphors (perpetual spring, ripened fruit) is how easy they are to understand. They’re more sensual and easy to process and so, also, more…well, relaxing. Contrast with the Shakespeare phrase that Cleopatra makes hungry where most she satisfies. This feels much more primeval; he is describing basic physical appetites, physical hunger, physical satisfaction after sex. At the same time, though, although these words describe basic physical processes they are, in a sense, also quite abstract, hunger being a very abstract word, like anger or love. So the Shakespeare passage manages to feel both more intellectual and more basic, at the same time! This maybe explains why, as a description, it feels a lot more intense, intensely physical yet intensely psychological, and all these factors help explain why it feels more dramatic.

3. And this brings me to my final point, which is the speech’s dramatic placement or context: by this I simply mean that having Enobarbus give his vivid description gives it all kinds of dramatic and psychological reverberations; because Enobarbus is a chorus to Antony’s actions who both approves and disapproves of his master’s infatuation, and so is ambivalent about the figure of Cleopatra. The opening lines sound like extravagant praise but Enobarbus goes on to be scathing about Cleopatra in the very next phrase, so it is an ambivalent, complex speech.

Moreover, it is a description of her in her absence given to a dinner party table of Romans who have never seen her so are all agog at Enobarbus’s account, which, of course, allows the old soldier, a bit drunk, to crank up his description, to exaggerate. In doing so he is bigging up himself as the top eye-witness to all Antony and Cleopatra’s affairs. The grandeur of the description reflects well on its teller.

4. And, lastly, and pretty obviously, Cleopatra is not there, so this is a conjuration from empty air, it is a word painting, it is a tone poem, it is Enobarbus showing off his way with words at the same time that Shakespeare is showing off his ability to conjure magnificence on a bare wooden stage. Quite apart from the subject matter, the speech conjures the pure magic of poetry on the stage, like Prospero with his staff.

Returning to the Dryden passage we find it lacks all of these complex multi-layered effects. In Dryden the speech is just part of Antony telling Cleopatra how wonderful she is. Obviously there’s some context in the specific context in the play i.e. it reflects Antony’s over-confidence in the military victory he’s just won, and the fact that he’s been swung round from deep depression into a renewed will to live, conquer and be in love; so, arguably, it reflects his manic mood and this explains why it is hyperbolic overstatement. But still…it almost completely lacks the complex psychological and dramatic multidimensionality of the Shakespeare version.

Hopefully, just this one comparison demonstrates how the Dryden is easier to process and enjoy, has merits of its own, but almost completely lacks the verbal, psychological and dramatic complexity which Shakespeare achieves.

‘Ruin’

Key words and symbols are often buried in Shakespeare and take rereading or rewatching to bring them out. Not least because his language is so packed with metaphors, imagery and word play it can be like spotting a needle in a haystack. By contrast, as in so many other things, keywords in Dryden are much easier to spot and process because his language is so much plainer and clearer, so repetitions stand out like a church spire in a landscape.

Thus it wasn’t difficult to notice the word ‘ruin’ recurring again and again. Not a very subtle choice of word or image or metaphor, on the contrary, a very rational choice for a drama about two people who ruin themselves, each other, their causes and countries. But it is repeated so many times it is clearly an attempt to create the same kind of verbal threading and echo that Shakespeare does so effortlessly.

ALEXAS: And Dolabella, who was once his Friend,
Upon some private grudge, now seeks his ruine…

ALEXAS: She dotes, Serapion, on this vanquish’d Man,
And winds her self about his mighty ruins…

VENTIDIUS: O, she has deck’d his ruin with her love,
Led him in golden bands to gaudy slaughter,
And made perdition pleasing…

VENTIDIUS: ⁠So, now the Tempest tears him up by th’ Roots,
And on the ground extends the noble Ruin.

ANTONY: I was so great, so happy, so belov’d,
Fate could not ruine me; till I took pains
And work’d against my Fortune,

ANTONY: ⁠That I derive my ruin
From you alone—
⁠CLEOPATRA: ⁠O Heav’ns! I ruin you!

ANTONY: ⁠All this you caus’d.
And would you multiply more ruins on me?

CLEOPATRA: …’twill please my Lord
To ruine me, and therefore I’ll be guilty.

VENTIDIUS: ⁠O Syren! Syren!
Yet grant that all the love she boasts were true,
Has she not ruin’d you?

ANTONY: This, this is she who drags me down to ruin!

VENTIDIUS: Justice and Pity both plead for Octavia;
For Cleopatra, neither.
One would be ruin’d with you; but she first
Had ruin’d you: the other, you have ruin’d,

OCTAVIA [going up to Cleopatra]: ⁠I would view nearer
That face, which has so long usurp’d my right,
To find th’ inevitable charms, that catch
Mankind so sure, that ruin’d my dear Lord.

And so on. No great perspicacity required to spot the keyword or to understand how Dryden intends it as the central theme of his play. For though Dryden gives the lovers the best love and passion poetry he can conceive, the long introductory essay to his play makes it crystal clear that he takes a strong moral line and thinks they were wrong and immoral. That their neglect of their duties – to their families, their friends, their armies and their countries – mean that their wretched fate was entirely deserved and fitting.

In Dryden’s view, we are not meant to admire history’s most famous lovers, but to condemn them.

Introduction to the defence speeches of Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC), without the benefit of coming from a patrician or aristocratic family, rose by hard work to become the leading Roman lawyer and orator of his day. For a generation he dominated the Roman courts, usually appearing for the defence. We know of 88 law speeches he gave and an amazing 58 of them survive in whole or in part. The Oxford University Press publish an excellent paperback containing five of his most famous defence speeches.

(Note that the Latin word pro simply means ‘for’ and takes the ablative case i.e. changes the ending of words and names to ‘o’, so that the speech ‘for Caelius’ is known as ‘Pro Caelio’ and so on – unless the name ends in ‘a’, in which case it stays the same, or already ends in ‘o’ in which case it adds ‘ne’ to the end. These are examples of the kind of rules you have to learn when studying Latin.). The five features speeches are:

Pro Roscio Amerino: his defence of Quintus Roscius Gallus, falsely accused of murdering his father
Pro Murena: defence of the consul-elect Lucius Licinius Murena, accused of electoral bribery (39 pages)
Pro Archia: defence of the poet Archias, on a citizenship charge
Pro Caelio: of Marcus Caelius Rufus , ex-lover of Clodia Metelli, on charges of poisoning and violence
Pro Milone: defence of Titus Annius Milo, accused of murdering Cicero’s hated enemy Clodius

The most obvious thing about the speeches is how long they are. I’ve no idea how long a modern defence address is but Cicero’s speeches occupy 30 to 40 pages of an average paperback and must have taken some time to deliver, especially stopping for all the dramatic pauses, the appeals to the jury and the strategic bursting into tears (he refers to his own tears of grief in several of the speeches). Did he memorise them and deliver them without notes? That, also, is an impressive feat.

The next most obvious thing is how complex the background and context of each case is. If you look them up online, you discover that each of Cicero’s major speeches has an entire Wikipedia article devoted to it because each one requires a meaty explanation of the context of the case: where it stood in Cicero’s career, and then the (generally very complicated) background of the case, including biographies of all the main participants, which themselves only make sense when carefully located within the feverish and tortuously complicated politics of the late Roman Republic.

Many law cases brought in ancient Rome were not objective products of what we think of as ‘justice’ but were entirely motivated by personal rivalries, sparked by the never-ending competition for office, but often just personal feuds or vendettas.

There was no police force in ancient Rome and, crucially, no office of public prosecution, no Crown Prosecution Service such as we have in modern England. In other words, you didn’t take your grievance to the authorities, who then carefully assessed whether there was a case to answer and decided whether to bring a criminal or civil case against a suspect or defendant. None of that framework existed. So people (generally rich and well-connected people) brought cases against individuals off their own initiative, using their own interpretation of the law.

And many of the cases were what I think are, in modern law, called ‘vexatious’, meaning they were not attempts to achieve objective justice but were nakedly biased attempts to game the system in the prosecutor’s favour, often shameless attempts to get political rivals convicted, exiled or maybe even executed. And this was accepted because everyone else was gaming the system, too. Personally motivated accusations and counter-accusations and counter-counter-accusations were the normal procedure.

The courts were one of the principal arenas in which the business of politics in Rome was played out: if you wanted to get rid of a political opponent, you prosecuted him and brought about his exile; if you failed, he might then prosecute you.
(Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, Introduction p.xxvii)

It was also the case that no one could be prosecuted while holding political office. Therefore a lot of the fiercely competitive vying to be elected to ‘magistracies’ or political offices in late Republican Rome was motivated not by keenness to serve, but as a tactic to dodge prosecution.

(This rose to a kind of climax with the political impasse which developed when Caius Julius Caesar refused to give up his command in Gaul and return to Rome unless he could be promised the opportunity to run for consul in his absence [an election he knew he could bribe his way to winning]. His sole reason for doing this being to avoid the prosecutions for corruption and malpractice which he knew he would face if he returned to Rome as a private citizen. Caesar knew this would happen because stentorian Republicans like Cato had made umpteen speeches promising to prosecute him. Therefore he had no choice but to seek election in order to win immunity, and he could only run in his physical absence because he knew that, as soon as he entered Rome as a private citizen, he knew he’d be tried, multiple times until his enemies got the result they wanted. When the senate rejected all his and his supporters’ attempts to negotiate this deal, he was left with no alternative but to enter Italy backed by his legions for security – thus triggering the civil war.)

D.H. Berry’s introductions

So before the reader gets anywhere near the speeches themselves, you have to mug up on their very complex background. And that’s where the OUP edition of Cicero’s Defence Speeches is outstanding. The editor and translator D.H. Berry not only provides an excellent general introduction to the volume, giving us a thorough and vivid overview of Cicero’s life and how it entwined with the complicated political context of the 70s, 60s and 50s BC, before going on to explain at some length the quirks of the Roman legal system…

But he also precedes each of the speeches with an in-depth summary of the political context and specific events which gave rise to it. This sounds simple but is, in each case, impressively complicated and absolutely vital: without a full understanding of the context you wouldn’t know what Cicero was trying to achieve in each speech. Berry is excellent at not only explaining the factual background but the strategy and tactics Cicero adopts in each speech.

General introduction

There were two main types of oratory: ‘forensic’ (from the Latin forensis meaning ‘of the forum’, which is where the public law courts were sited, also known as judicial) and ‘deliberative’ (the display of public oratory in political assemblies).

The Roman first court or ‘public inquiry’ was only set up in 149 BC and was followed by the establishment of further courts set up to try specific types of cases. Juries were large (sometimes hundreds of citizens) and if no court existed for the type of case, the trial was held in front of the entire people in the forum.

The system grew piecemeal for the next 70 years or so until it was swept away by the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 81 BC. He set up seven courts, designed to try specific types of case, namely murder, forgery, extortion, treason, electoral malpractice, embezzlement and assault.

The make-up of juries was a subject of controversy for decades – as you can imagine, if many cases were politically motivated, then who was allowed to sit on the jury was vitally important to both sides – until a law of 70 BC decreed they should be made up of one third senators, one third equites (or knights) and one third ‘tribunes of the treasury’ (who seem to have been a minor sort of equites).

In the decades that followed, more permanent courts were added, such as one devoted to violence, and other ad hoc types were created as and when required, such as the ‘sacrilege court’ set up to try Publius Clodius Pulcher for his famous dressing-up as a woman to infiltrate the women-only celebration of the Bona Dea being held at Julius Caesar’s house in 61 BC.

There were no public prosecutors. A defendant was prosecuted by the man who brought the case against him and any advocates or eminent men he could persuade to join him. The scope for doing deals and sharing prosecutions with social or political allies who stood to gain from a victory were endless.

Something else surprising: successful prosecutors were awarded their victim’s marks of honour and acceded to their rank in the senatorial hierarchy. So, on the face of it, a very strong motive to bring a prosecution and win.

However, they didn’t gain respect from doing this, often the reverse, and prosecuting was generally seen as an invidious role, unless you were obliged to carry it out by civic or family duty or gross injustice. The role of defender was much more socially respected, which explains why in almost all of Cicero’s cases he appears for the defence. The general idea was to mount one spectacular prosecution to make your name, then seek the safety of defending (a career path Cicero explicitly recommends in Pro Caelio, 73).

Also surprising is that it was forbidden by law to pay a defence attorney. This law had been passed as long ago as 204 BC to prevent bribery, but in a roundabout way led to subtler corruption. Roman society functioned via complex webs of clients and patrons. Patrons gave protection and assistance to clients who in turn waited on their patrons in their houses, in the street, rallied support for them at elections and so on. (These scenes are described by Cicero himself in Pro Murena, 70.)

In a legal setting an advocate (actually called, in Latin, a patronus) was a continuation of this intricate web of allegiances. Cicero might choose to defend a client because he owed them favours (he defended men who had supported him during the Catiline crisis of 63) or to put someone in his debt. It was never done out of charity or public duty. Every relationship, every act in ancient Rome, had undertones of politics and power.

Another surprisingly important factor was personal charisma. Roman trials put less weight on the evidence (they didn’t have the tradition of presenting forensically objective evidence that we do) and much more on the character of the people involved. Often a legal speech spent more time assassinating the character of the accused, or the accuser, than querying any of the supposed facts.

And this extended to the character of the advocate himself. Many of Cicero’s speeches not only defend his client’s character and denigrate the character of the plaintiff, but they also viciously attack the character of the prosecuting attorneys. By the same token, all the speeches in the volume draw heavily on Cicero’s own character and record as part of the defence.

Cicero obsessively invokes the auctoritas he acquired after ‘saving the nation’ during the Catiline crisis, repeatedly describes the risks he ran, the danger he faced, his boldness of action.

In my own consulship I undertook a bold venture for the sake of yourselves and your children. (Pro Milone, 82)

He is not slow to remind everyone that Cato had called him ‘the Father of the Nation’. He does all this in order to bring his (he hoped) huge moral authority to bear on the case.

(For example, when he reminds the jury of his role in saving the nation and then uses this authority to personally vouch for Marcus Caelius Rufus’s good character in Pro Caelio, 77, let alone the half or dozen or more references to it throughout Pro Milone.)

[This emphasis on character and personality is not restricted to Cicero’s speeches. It permeates the histories written at the time. Lacking any theories of society or economics, otherwise intelligent men like Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius fall back again and again on individual character as the primary engine of history and human affairs, in a manner which we, as heirs to 2,000 years of evermore sophisticated social theory, frequently find naive and simplistic.]

Trials took place in the open air (what happened if it rained?). The presiding magistrate and scribes sat on a raised platform (tribunal) at the front of the court, while the jury (probably) sat on benches slightly raised off the ground. The plaintiff, defendant, their advocates, legal advisers, friends and families sat in two groups to one side. And this diorama was open to the forum and to sometimes huge crowds of the general public who gathered to watch and follow every trial, especially if it was of someone eminent or promised juicy gossip.

Trials were more like theatre than we are used to. The defendant had to wear mourning clothes and not shave or wash for several days in order to present a piteous spectacle. Berry gives examples of defendants who refused to comply with this ridiculous convention and were promptly convicted, regardless of the proceedings, solely because of their affront to tradition.

The prosecution spoke first, laying out the case, then the defence rebutted the prosecution points – only then was any evidence presented. Oddly, to us, in some of Cicero’s speeches he guesses at what the evidence will be.

Slaves could be made to give evidence but only under torture. Nowhere does Cicero refer to the shocking inhumanity of this tradition, which sheds light on the fear of all the slaves in the ‘comedies’ of Plautus and Terence that they might find themselves being tortured if their master gets into any kind of legal difficulty.

The magistrates (praetors) overseeing a case often knew nothing about the law (praetors were elected to hold office for only one year). They simply kept the peace and ensured the rules were complied with. (Cicero is on record as complementing the father of the future Augustus, Gaius Octavius, for his fairness and calm in supervising trials.)

How many jurors were there? Evidence is mixed, but it seems to have been a surprising 75, 25 from each of the three categories mentioned above. Jurors were not allowed to confer and voted immediately after the evidence was presented in a secret ballot. They were each given a wax table with A for absolvo on one side and C for condemno on the other. They rubbed out the letter they didn’t want and popped the table in an urn, then a court official totted up the votes.

If a defendant was found guilty the official penalty was death. But since there were no police and the defendant was never in anyone’s ‘custody’, it was generally pretty easy for them to leave the court, the forum, pack up their things and go into voluntary exile. Before most Italian tribes were given Roman status in 90 BC, this might mean retiring to places like Praeneste (only 23 miles from Rome) but by the time Cicero was a prosecutor it meant having to leave Italy altogether. Massilia, the large thriving port on the south coast of Gaul (modern Marseilles) was a popular destination and was where both Verres, who Cicero successfully prosecuted for corruption, and Milo, who he failed to defend from prosecution for murder, ended up living out their lives in well-heeled exile there.

Rhetorical style

Following his extremely useful and informative summary of Cicero’s career and the apparatus of Roman laws, Berry gives an equally useful explanation of the rhetorical techniques Cicero used in his speeches.

Cicero’s prose style is highly artificial. Sentences are long, sometimes a third of a modern page, sometimes longer. The style is ‘periodic’, meaning the sentences only achieve closure and make their meaning clear right at the end. The result is suspense: the audience hangs on the orator’s words and the succession of subordinate clauses, waiting to find out whether the sentence will end as they expected (with a nice sense of completion) or will deliver a surprise (gasps of delight). You can see how, done well, this could enthral a crowd.

Sometimes clauses are in pairs, to create balance, either/or.

‘For it is not my enemies who will take you away from me but my dearest friends; not those who have on occasion treated me badly, but those who have always been good to me,’ (Pro Milone, 99)

Sometimes they come in threes, to provide a crescendo effect. Pairs and trios create a balanced civilised effect. By contrast, sometimes his sentences pile up 4, 5, 6 7 short clauses to create a machine gun effect, to create something more feverish and frantic.

‘No witness, no accomplice has been named. The entire charge arises out of a malevolent, disreputable, vindictive, crime-ridden, lust-ridden house.’ (Pro Caelio, 55)

Cicero took great care to make sure his clauses ended with certain rhythms. Apparently these cadences were named, categorised and taught by teachers of oratory, although Berry doesn’t list or explain any, and they’re not really detectable in English translation.

The jurors and the public watching the trial knew all about these techniques and assessed speakers on their skill at deploying them. Cicero tells an anecdote about a crowd bursting into applause at an advocate’s particularly elegant turn of phrase.

In addition to rhythm a trained orator could deploy:

Anaphora

The repetition of words or phrases in a group of sentences, clauses, or poetic lines.

If you restore Caelius to me, to his family, and to the country, you will have a man who is dedicated, devoted and bound to you. (Pro Caelio 80)

Asyndeton

The omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses, as in ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.

Apostrophe

A speech or address to a person who is not present or to a personified object. Cicero frequently addresses the spirit of dead, venerable Romans, or addresses the spirit of murdered Clodius, or addresses figures not physically present in the court (such as Pompey, directly addressed in Pro Milone).

Exclamation

For example, ‘O gods!’ the speaker pretending to give way to moments of emotion.

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Berry assures us these are everywhere present in Cicero but it is, of course, impossible to judge in translation.

Metaphor

One consul handing over to another informs him of the current challenges and issues in much the same way that the captain of a ship putting into port tells the captains of ships just setting out about the weather and pirates (Pro Murena, 4). A metaphor which is revived later in the speech, in the extended comparison of elections to unpredictable ocean currents or storms in (35 to 36).

Rhetorical strategies

At a higher level than specific tricks of rhetoric are larger-scale rhetorical tactics.

Appropriating the prosecution

Often he repeats the points the prosecution has made in order to rebut them. He does this by quoting them but often twisting the points in such a way as to suit himself, to tee up the kind of rebuttal he wants to make – as when he repeats a series of points allegedly made by Cato in Pro Murena, 67 onwards).

Inventing opposition points

One step beyond twisting prosecution points is inventing possible objections to what he’s saying in order to easily counter them. There are hundreds of instances along the lines of:

‘You will no doubt ask me, Grattius…’ (Pro Archia, 12)
‘Someone will surely ask…’ (Pro Archia, 15)

In which he attributes to the opposition lines of attack which he then easily refutes.

Rhetorical questions

Why do I mention his mother and his home when the penalty of the law deprives him of his home, his parent, and the company and sight of his friends? Shall the poor man go into exile, then? Where? To the east, where for many years he serves as a legate, led armies and performed heroic deeds? (Pro Murena, 89)

If Caelius had really given himself up to the kind of life that is alleged, would he, when still a young man, have brought a prosecution against an ex-consul? If he shied away from hard work, if he were enslaved to pleasure, would he do battle here every day, go in search of personal enmities, bring prosecutions, and run the risk of being prosecuted himself? And would he also maintain for so many months now and in full view of the entire Roman people a struggle for one of two things – his own political survival or glory? (Pro Caelio, 47)

Mimicry

As when Cicero imagines the feelings of soldiers called on to vote for Murena and remembering his many achievements in the army of the East (Pro Murena, 36) or mimics the voices of sceptical voters on election day (Pro Murena, 45).

Or the great sequence in Pro Caelio where he pretends to be one of Clodia’s ancestors brought back from the dead to thunder against her immoral behaviour.

There’s another type of mimicry. Surprisingly, the defendant was not allowed to speak at their own trial and so Cicero sometimes speaks for them, in the sense of putting words into their mouths and telling the jury, this is what X said to me, these are his very words.

This is notable at the climax of Pro Milone where sections 94 , 95 and 98 purport to be the sad but stoic speech of Milo himself.

If you combine this technique with ‘apostrophe’, addresses to people either absent or dead, you can see why the speeches are highly dramatic in the sense that there are a surprising number of characters in them, not as in a play, obviously, but being named, addressed, invoked and even attributed whole speeches which are then performed in another voice.

Changing the subject

In Pro Milone Cicero doesn’t bother denying that Milo was responsible for the murder of Clodius, but tries to shift the ground of argument to the issue of whether Milo was acting in justifiable self defence. Specifically, he argues that the incident wasn’t a random accident but a carefully contrived ambush by Clodius and so his client was only responding as Great and Eminent Romans Throughout History had responded i.e. by defending himself. This strategy failed and Milo was convicted.

Invoking famous men

In all the speeches Cicero invokes the memory of Great and Noble Romans from history who he says behaved like his client. It is a variation on invoking his own auctoritas.

Closely related is the Appeal To Patriotism. All of the speeches invoke the idea that jury must acquit his client because The Very Existence of the State is at stake!

‘In this trial you hold the whole country in your hands!!’ (Pro Murena, 83)

Invoking the sad family

At the end of Pro Murena and Pro Caelio Cicero invokes the tragic spectacle of the defendant’s family, his aged father, his weeping mother or wife, on their knees, begging for their son or husband or father to be freed and their family happily reunited.

The Appeal to the Romans’ very strong sense of Family Values seems to have been a tried and trusted, standard strategy (Pro Caelio, 79 and 80).

Crying

In several of the speeches Cicero refers to the fact that he himself is weeping, crying at the spectacle of such a valiant, heroic, brave, virtuous, patriotic, dutiful and wonderful person having been brought low by his fiendish enemies and so utterly deserving of vindication and acquittal that he, Cicero, cannot help bursting into floods of tears, he cannot see the jury, he cannot see the court, he can barely speak for grief!

‘But I must stop now. I can no longer speak for tears…’ (Pro Milone, 105)

Repetition

Obviously the rule of three, or using multiple clauses to say the same thing, or asking a series of rhetorical questions are all types of repetition. But a big feature of all the speeches which Berry doesn’t really address is their repetitiveness. Cicero often says he’s going to address a point, addresses it, tells us he’s finished with it, and yet several pages (a few minutes) later, brings it up again.

I can’t find the precise references now but in the three longest speeches, he has a tendency to make a point, wander off to something completely different, then revert to the same point later. This was the single factor which made reading them difficult for me, the sense that they didn’t have a clear logical flow – a beginning, middle and end – but on the contrary, I found all the speeches rambling and digressive and often hard to follow, with no higher level logic.

Conclusion

The cumulative effect of all these techniques is that the speeches, especially when written down and published (as Cicero took care to have done) are emphatically not the language of ordinary speech. The orator has done a lot of work preparing them and he expects the audience to do some work to appreciate them. It is intended to sound ‘theatrical and high flown’ in Berry’s phrase. The fact that I found them long-winded and often quite confusing maybe says more about my taste, shaped as it is by the 20th century taste for laconic brevity, than Cicero’s verbose and long-winded achievement.

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy’s big biography of Augustus contains lots of factual asides about aspects of late Republican Rome. Some of these concern the law and provide context to these speeches:

Legal attacks could easily end a career and so were far more high-stakes than in our society (p.94).

Goldsworthy gives an example of the rhythm of Cicero’s sayings in Latin. This was a throwaway remark he made about young Octavius, laudanum adulescentum, ornandum, tollendum – which means ‘we will praise the young man, reward and discard him’ – and, apparently, caused a serious breach in their relations (p.122) – but it’s one of the few examples I have of the rhythm of Cicero’s language in Latin.

He reinforces the notion that a) since there was no equivalent of the Crown or State, legal cases could only be brought by individuals and b) prosecuting was seen as invidious, unless one was defending family pride or there was a really gross example of wrongdoing – and so accusers tended to be young men out to make a name for themselves with one or two eye-catching prosecutions, before settling into the more congenial and socially accepted role of defence counsel, exactly the career Cicero followed (Augustus: From Revolutionary to Emperor by Adrian Goldsworthy p.43). He repeats the point on page 281:

Prosecution was generally left to the young, and had long provided an opportunity for youthful aristocrats to catch the public eye at an early stage in their careers.

Goldsworthy refers to ‘the aggressive and abusive tone common in Roman trials’ which we’ve seen plenty of evidence of (p.280).

Above all, Goldsworthy makes the most devastating single point about Cicero’s speeches with striking simplicity:

A glance at Cicero’s speeches is enough to show the readiness with which Roman advocates distorted the truth. (p.278)

For all his pontifications about Justice, for all his exhaustive descriptions of Law epitomising Reason In Action – Cicero was a highly professional and convincing liar.

Credit

Defence Speeches by Cicero, translated and edited by D.H. Berry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2000.

Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

The Double Dealer by William Congreve (1693)

‘I will deceive ’em all, and yet secure myself…This double-dealing is a jewel.’
(thoughts of the Double Dealer himself, the villainous Jack Maskwell)

After the smash hit success of his first play, The Old Bachelor, Congreve quickly followed up with his second play, The Double Dealer, performed later the same year (1693).

It is an experimental play, quite a bold move for a young man of 23. What makes it experimental is that the action is set almost entirely in just one place, namely A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining.

In the dedication to the printed version of the play, Congreve explicitly says he set out to observe Aristotle’s three unities, unity of time and place and subject matter, to produce what he describes as ‘a true and regular comedy’.

The so-called unities derive from Aristotle’s work The Art of Poetry or Poetics, written around 335 BC. In this text Aristotle analysed the successful plays of ancient Greece to see what they had in common and deduced some common features they shared, that:

most of them concern just one subject uncluttered by sub-plots or digressions
they all take place in one location
and they all tale place in the space of at most a day, often often in ‘real time’ i.e. over the same amount of time that the play takes to perform and watch i.e. about three hours.

In Aristotle’s book these three ‘unities’ are the results of an empirical analysis of the plays that had been written up to his time. In the hands of later critics and theorists they were turned into ‘rules’ which good drama must obey, especially in France and especially in the 17th century.

And it was from contemporary French writers that Congreve took the idea of the unities and, indeed, some of these French critics (le Bossu, Rapin and Dacier) are mentioned in the play itself – albeit the reference is given to the pretentious bubblebrain Lady Froth and so played for laughs. (I wonder whether this is because the idea was seen as frenchified and pretentious…)

Anyway, in the dedicatory letter to the printed edition, Congreve is explicit about his wish to fulfil them, saying he ‘was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama’. The Double Dealer is a playwright’s experiment at using Aristotle’s three unities in the composition of a Restoration comedy.

We’ve mentioned how The Double Dealer fulfils unities of time and place (almost all set in the long gallery at Lord Touchwood’s house, and taking place on just one evening) – but the unity of subject matter?

The classic Greek plays were extremely sparse and pure. Restoration comedy, by contrast, made a virtue of building up a labyrinth of complex plots and sub-plots, with the characters themselves hatching schemes, putting on disguises, and carrying out endless cons and scams. So you’d have thought that unity of subject was a non-starter for a playwright working in the genre Congreve was engaged in, yet that is not his opinion.

I made the plot as strong as I could because it was single, and I made it single because I would avoid confusion, and was resolved to preserve the three unities of the drama.

Is it single? Maybe he’s referring to the way everything in the plot stems from just one event, the planned marriage – the next day – of Mellefont and Cynthia, and the way the play then proceeds to engender numerous plots (and counter-plots) they all spring, at root, from that one theme.

Well, so much for the theory he expounds in the preface – how much does it work in practice?

CAST

Men
Maskwell, a villain; pretended friend to Mellefont, gallant to Lady Touchwood, and in love with Cynthia
Lord Touchwood, uncle to Mellefort
Mellefont, promised to, and in love with Cynthia
Careless, his friend
Lord Froth, a solemn coxcomb
Brisk, a pert coxcomb
Sir Paul Plyant, an uxorious, foolish old knight; brother to Lady Touchwood, and father to Cynthia

Women
Lady Touchwood, in love with Mellefont
Cynthia, daughter to Sir Paul by a former wife, promised to Mellefont
Lady Froth, a great coquette; pretender to poetry, wit, and learning
Lady Plyant, insolent to her husband, and easy to any pretender

Music

As with The Old Bachelor, the incidental music and settings of songs were written by Henry Purcell.

NB Scene divisions The Penguin paperback edition of the four plays of William Congreve is very light on scene division, dividing acts into 2 or 3 scenes at most, based on a change of location.

By contrast, the Project Gutenberg online edition – which is itself a facsimile of the edition edited by critic G.S. Street at the very end of the 19th century – indicates the start of a new scene every time the personnel on stage change i.e. when anyone exits or enters. Since people are continually coming and going in Restoration comedies, this means there can be as many as 25 ‘scenes’ in each act.

To begin with I summarised the play just in paragraphs addressing the main plot or character developments. But in Act 4, I switched to using Street’s notation, copying his ‘scene’ numbers, even when they indicated that a character was alone onstage for only a couple of sentences.

I did it as an experiment to see if it makes my text more or less readable. I think it makes it slightly more disjointed and maybe harder to read. On the other hand, it means the reader (you) gets definitive information about who is on stage, or leaving or entering, at every moment of the play.

Which layout do you prefer?

Act 1

Introduces the location – A gallery in the Lord Touchwood’s house, with chambers adjoining – key characters and the set-up. A formal dinner is taking place.

Male characters Mellefont is the male lead. His sidekick is Careless. There is a shallow fop who fails to see how crude and tactless he is, named Brisk. Lord Touchwood, whose home they’re in, is Mellefont’s uncle. Mellefont is engaged to the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant, who is a guest at the dinner. They are scheduled to be married the following morning. Other male guests include the pert coxcomb Brisk and the solemn coxcomb, Lord Froth (‘But there is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh; ’tis such a vulgar expression of the passion; everybody can laugh…when I laugh, I always laugh alone.’) And also there is a fellow rake on Mellefont and Careless’s level, Jack Maskwell.

Female characters The ladies attending the dinner are Lord Touchwood’s wife, who has a secret passion for Mellefont. Cynthia, the daughter of Sir Paul Plyant who is engaged to Mellefont. Sir Paul’s wife and Cynthia’s mother, the lascivious Lady Plyant, and the solemn coxcomb Lord Froth’s wife, the pretentious Lady Froth.

The play opens with Mellefont following Careless out into the gallery. Dinner is over. The menfolk are in one room, presumably the dining room, while the women have retired to another room at the end of the gallery for tea and gossip.

Careless is fed up of the men’s guzzling and senseless words and so was going to pay the women a visit. Mellefont catches up with him and says he has something important to tell him but at exactly that moment they are interrupted by Brisk who has also followed Careless from the dining room and now makes a display if thinking himself a grand and clever fellow, using elaborate metaphors which he then points out – which the other two put up with, and the audience laugh at, till he’s dispatched back to the dining room.

It’s very important to all these plays that the lead characters are established as being on an upper plane of wit and sophistication. They all use the same technique to establish this which is to include at least one pretentious, high-falutin and idiotic fop to show how not to do it – how wit and style easily degenerate into clever-clever mannerisms and pretentious speech which at the same time fails to understand what is going on. In a way it’s a most important dynamic than the more obvious one of that between the sexes. Through this simple device the audience is invited to identify with the two clever lead figures (it’s always two, the minimum number which allows dialogue) and to share in their mocking scorn of the stupid fop figure.

The plays are designed to make the audience feel superior and clever.

Mellefont reveals that Lady Touchwood came to his bedroom and made an advance to him, which he rejected, since when she has taken a furious hatred of him and is doing everything she can to undermine his reputation with Sir Paul, his prospective father-in-law. Therefore Mellefont asks Careless if he will woo Lady Plyant to take up her time and ensure she isn’t influenced against the marriage by wicked Lady Touchwood. Lord and Lady Froth will be too busy admiring each other and the idiot Brisk. Mellefont will keep an eye on his uncle, Lord Touchwood, and Jack Maskwell has promised to keep a watch on Lady Touchwood.

But as his name, and the cast list, indicate, Maskwell is ‘a villain’ working directly against Mellefont’s interests, who is prepared to egg on Lady Touchwood’s malice, because he himself is in love with Mellefont’s fiancee, Cynthia. Though Mellefont thinks he is a trusted friend, Careless quickly explains that he (Careless) doesn’t like him (Maskwell) and suspects him of conspiring with his Aunt, Lady Touchwood.

So, in just the first few minutes of the play, Congreve has established all the characters, their relationships, the baddies’ scheme against him and his counter-plan. It reminds me of the game of strategy, Risk. You feel some kind of process flow diagram is required to capture not only the relationships, but the flows of energy, of ‘hate’ and ‘love’ and the elaborate scheming.

The other menfolk join Mellefont and Careless in the gallery, Sir Paul and Lord Touchwood drunk and reel off to see the women, leaving Brisk and Lord Froth to display their pretentiousness and folly to the two male leads e.g. Lord Froth goes to plays solely not to laugh at them and thus mock the authors. Which Careless says is idiotic, and they then debate what is meant by wit. Then go off to join the ladies

Enter Lady Touchwood and Maskwell, in effect The Conspirators. She is livid with him. He is sly. It becomes clear that, on the rebound from Mellefont’s rejection, hot and indignant, she allowed Maskwell to sleep with her, or:

MASKWELL: I pressed the yielding minute, and was blest.

Thus – as Lady Touchwood sees it – degrading her and betraying his patron, Lord Touchwood, her husband, who has sponsored Maskwell’s rise.

At his words Lady Touchwood quickly flares up into a fury, pacing up and down, and Maskwell keeps having to wait for her to calm down. Maskwell shrewdly sees that what lies at the root of her fury is her ongoing unrequited passion for Mellefont. She loves him and hates him at the same time. Maskwell vows to help her by breaking off Mellefont’s match with Cynthia to which she greedily agrees.

Maskwell tells her he has a Cunning Plan. Lady Touchwood must persuade Lady Pliant that Mellefont is secretly in love with her. Do this, and more of the plan will follow… They exeunt.

Act 2

Lady Froth (dim) and Cynthia (Mellefont’s clever fiancée). Froth is comically pretentious and patronising.

LADY FROTH: For sure my Lord Froth … wants nothing but a blue ribbon and a star to make him shine, the very phosphorus of our hemisphere. Do you understand those two hard words? If you don’t, I’ll explain ’em to you.
CYNTHIA: Yes, yes, madam, I’m not so ignorant. —At least I won’t own it, to be troubled with your instructions. [Aside.]

In this scene Lord and Lady Froth get ample room to display their nauseatingly self-satisfied love for each other, they praise Brisk for his infinite wit, and generally preen and show off to each other. Lady Froth writes, poems and plays, she has even now completed an epic poem titled The Syllabub, a play on words given that her husband’s name is Froth.

These scenes powerfully convey the sense that ‘we’ – the Truly Tasteful – are adrift in a sea of fools.

They push off, leaving the stage to the two young lovers, Mellefont and Cynthia, who proceed to demonstrate that they are intelligent, level headed and, above all, equal in the cut and thrust of witty conversation. They compare marriage to a game of bowls, or a game at cards.

Into this civilised conversation intrude Lord and Lady Plyant, the former hopping mad because he thinks Mellefont is using Cynthia as a pretext (‘a stalking horse’) to seduce his wife, Lady P. Both are outraged and insist on taking Cynthia away from this snake in the grass. Mellefont instantly detects the malign hand of Lady Touchwood.

Leaving Lady Plyant and Mellefont alone. The comedy in this scene comes from the way Lady Plyant starts out outraged and scandalised at what they’ve been told of Mellefont fancying her, but then slowly dwells on the weakness of the flesh, and of course she is attractive, very attractive, and so, well, nature must take its course:

LADY PLYANT: I know love is powerful, and nobody can help his passion. ’Tis not your fault; nor, I swear, it is not mine. How can I help it, if I have charms? And how can you help it, if you are made a captive?

Lady Plyant becomes increasingly confused about her own attitude, then, as other characters approach, flees.

Mellefont soliloquises that this complication – the red herring that Mellefont fancies Lady Plyant – is his aunt’s doing sure enough – yet it is a relatively simple ruse, ‘a trifling design’. Surely there is more behind. A suspicion which echoes Maskwell’s earlier explanation to Lady Touchwood that he has ‘a stronger plot’.

Enter Maskwell. He feigns hearty friendship with Mellefont and proceeds to tell him most of the truth i.e. Lady Touchwood is conspiring against her marriage and has asked him, Maskwell, to be her tool, to conspire to cancel the marriage, in reward for which he, Maskwell, will receive Cynthia.

Mellefont is innocently grateful to ‘his friend’ and asks for details but Maskwell says people are coming. Return in an hour and he will explain everything. Mellefont exits.

Maskwell delivers a soliloquy, much like one of Iago’s soliloquies, explaining his ideology i.e. all’s fair in love and war, and lying and cheating appear the same to the external viewer as truth and honesty.

MASKWELL: Treachery? What treachery? Love cancels all the bonds of friendship, and sets men right upon their first foundations.

Most of the poems and songs in these plays are conventional jingles, but he delivers a quatrain which has genuine psychological power:

Why will mankind be fools, and be deceived,
And why are friends’ and lovers’ oaths believed,
When each, who searches strictly his own mind,
May so much fraud and power of baseness find?

Act 3

Lord and Lady Touchwood during which the Lord finds Lady all too quick to believe bad things of Mellefont and wanting to call the marriage off. He suspects her. She moves to overcome this doubt by going on to say that Mellefont made a pass at her too, only a few days ago, it was probably nothing… and so cunningly infuriating Lord Touchwood till he vows to strip Mellefont naked and throw him out in the street. She pushes him into a side room.

Enter Maskwell and he and Lady Touchwell continue with their conspiracy i.e. they must continue to work on Lord Touchwood and not let his anger to Mellefont cool. Maskwell tells her to tell Lord Touchwood that he (Maskwell) is a good friend to Mellefont, but tried to restrain his passion for Lady T, and vowed he would tell Lord T next time Mellefont told him he was about to make another pass at her. Lady Touchwell agrees, but in an aside Maskwell tells the audience this manoeuvre will also allow Maskwell to cheat Lady Touchwood – the person he’s talking to at that moment. What a bad man!

Lady Touchwood departs to continue playing on Lord Touchwood’s anger at Mellefont. They arrange to meet back up at 8pm that night.

Maskwell has a soliloquy in which he thinks aloud how difficult it is to keep up a pretence of passion for Lady Touchwood who now bores him. He makes the cynically unpleasant point that pretending passion is easy enough in the build-up sex, ‘before fruition’ – but afterwards much harder.

Along comes Mellefont and Maskwell outlines a cunning plan to him. He explains that Lady Touchwood – as payment for Maskwell fouling up the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia – has offered him, Maskwell, her body. He is to go to her apartment at 8pm to ravish her. Now – how about Mellefont comes along a little after and catches them about to have sex? Maskwell will run out a back passage, leaving Mellefont to confront Lady Touchwood with her attempted adultery. She will have to comply with his wishes, and they will be to cease and desist putting obstacles in the way of his marriage to Cynthia.

Mellefont overflows with gratitude to Maskwell, promises to rendezvous with him at 7.45 tonight, Maskwell exits.

Careless joins Mellefont and tells him how his wooing of Lady Plyant is going i.e. he’s struggling, she goes on and on about her virtue, and they both laugh and what a hen-pecked husband she has made out of Lord Plyant.

At which point Lord and Lady Plyant enter. It becomes clearer than ever that Lady P really henpecks, badgers and humiliates her husband in public. A boy brings a letter. He goes to give it to Sir Paul but Lady P insists she receives it. Just one of the ways in which the normal hierarchy of male authority is undermined in their marriage.

While she opens the letter, Sir Paul laments to Careless that he has a fine estate, town houses and so on, but no heir. Surely that is easy to remedy, says Careless. No, alas, replies Sir Paul, his wife will only let him touch her once a year, if then. In fact they go on to describe the way Sir Paul lets himself be swaddled in blankets like a baby before bed-time to render him utterly incapable of movement, let alone seduction.

Presumably this is meant to be comic, and the audience is meant to fall about at Sir Paul’s pathetic figure, but it comes across on the page as rather sad. The comic patter continues to its logical conclusion, which is Lord Plyant wishing Careless could help him to achieve a male heir. Well, says Careless, I may be able to help you out there…

Enter Lord Froth and Cynthia. Lord Froth is the fool who has a downer on anyone laughing, such a vulgar habit! Cynthia humours the old fool.

Boy enters with another note, Sir Paul tries to interrupt Lady Plyant but she is deep in conversation with Careless, who says aside to Lord Plyant that he is managing the matter they talked of – i.e. Sir Paul thinks Careless is somehow wrangling Lady P into having sex with her husband, whereas we realise Careless is chatting her up to at least give her the impression he wants to have sex with her. Or does he want to have sex with her? And is Sir Paul in fact, genuinely encouraging Careless to do so?

Exit Sir Paul. Enter Brisk and Lady Froth. She, if you remember, fancies herself as a writer, so they enter discussing the merits of scenes in her epic poem, a passage designed to expose their ignorance and lack of taste so the audience can laugh at them. They join with Lord Froth in ridiculing some acquaintances, Lady Whiffler, Mr Sneer and Sir Laurence Loud.

In an aside Cynthia says she has realised there’s no-one so stupid as can’t find even stupider people to mock and condemn. She often makes remarks like this, choric comments on the action.

A chair has arrived in which apparently is conveyed Lady Froth’s daughter. It is indicative of her vain pretensions that she has named her daughter Sapho (after the ancient Greek poet) and very publicly claims she can’t be without seeing her every two hours or so. For some reason, giving children pretentious names reminded me of Posy Simmonds’s cartoon strip, Posy, mocking middle class pretensions. Three hundred years separate the two. Nothing really changes.

Act 4

Mellefont and Cynthia. I find them an attractive couple. Neither is cheating or deceiving the other. They speak as complete equals without recourse to all the insults common in Restoration comedy. They contemplate running off and marrying for love, damn the fact that she’s an heiress (aha). Then she says no, but to prove his devotion, she is counting on Mellefont bringing Lady Touchwood to heel.

They exit and give way to Careless and Lady Plyant. If you remember, Mellefont asked his friend Careless to seduce Lady Plyant so as to prevent her listening to and becoming part of Lady Touchwood’s campaign to derail Mellefont’s marriage. This scene is designed to show Lady Plyant’s wordy self-regard, which is quite funny, but the real comedy lies in Careless adopting and exaggerating the rhetoric of a devoted lover, interspersed with exasperated asides to the audience complaining about how difficult it is to keep up this charade.

Finally, after reams of loverly doggerel, Lady Plyant breaks and weeps at his loverly devotion – at which point Careless tells the audience he’s struggling not to burst out laughing. At which point Sir Paul appears with his daughter, Cynthia. Careless quickly hands Lady Plyant a love letter and scarpers.

Now, you may remember that Lady Plyant had caused a great fuss when she accused Mellefont of making a pass at her. Now she changes her tune. Now she declares it was an honest mistake on her part, she believes Mellefont is honourable, and when her husband pushes her on the subject, says she believes so because Mr Careless has told her so. Smart Cynthia immediately see her (step)-mother is in love with Careless, and has changed to her (Cynthia’s) side i.e. supporting the marriage of Cynthia and Mellefont – because Careless has asked her to.

Now Lady Plyant asks for that letter which Sir Paul received in the last act. She wants to read Careless’s love letter under pretence of reading Sir Paul’s. As you might expect it is full of lovey expressions but when she goes to return Sir Paul’s letter to him, she gives him Careless’s love letter by mistake!

Brisk arrives to say there’s music and dancing in the hall and can they please release Cynthia to go dance and also, could Sir Paul send Careless to the dancing if he meets him. Sir Paul promises and exits.

Brisk, by himself, soliloquises, telling us he is love with Lady Froth and fussing and fretting about what to say to her.

Enter Lady Froth for a ridiculous comic scene in which they both declare their love yet mock each other, incapable of taking themselves or the situation seriously. They embrace and at that precise moment her husband, Lord Froth, enters.

Scene VII Thinking quickly, Lady Froth converts the embrace into practicing the country dancing which even now is taking place in the main hall. Lord Froth is momentarily jealous then realises they are dancing and relaxes. A bit. Still suspicious.

The scene contains a particularly crude piece of double entendre. Embroidering on her excuse, Lady Froth asks her husband if he will practice dancing with her.

LADY FROTH: Shall you and I do our close dance, to show Mr. Brisk?
LORD FROTH: No, my dear, do it with him.
LADY FROTH: I’ll do it with him, my lord, when you are out of the way.

You can well imagine the arch way an actress can deliver that line to the audience which roars with laughter, 330 years ago, as today. They all exit.

Scene VIII Enter Lady Plyant and Careless. Now we see the denouement of the mistaken letter gag. Lady P just has time to tell Careless she’s given her husband Careless’s love letter before…

Scene IX he enters, reading the letter which makes it perfectly plain Careless is scheduled to rendezvous with his wife that night and plough her. He is incensed and very bitter that he has spent three years being swaddled up every night, while his wife is all the time arranging for him to become a cuckold.

Scene X However, Careless has had time to come up with a cunning plan and Lady Plyant now enters, asks her husband if he has read this outrageous letter, and turns the tables by asking whether he – Sir Paul – was complicit in this scheme to debauch her? Eh? Eh? And Sir Paul is so hen-pecked that she brilliantly succeeds in persuading him that she is the wronged party, insists she will ask for a divorce. Because of course, Sir Paul did ask Careless to melt his wife, so he feels somehow responsible.

There’s a little exchange which makes it clear that, as punishment, not only will Sir Paul be utterly swaddled again tonight, as usual, but his right hand which is usually kept free so he can… will also be bound in cloths. So he can what? Pee, presumably, Surely. Lady Plyant storms impressively out.

Scene XI Enter Careless. The audience now sees Careless spinning elaborate excuses. He says he tried to talk Lady Plyant into being more amenable to her husband, then pretended to be in love with her and her, then went to the lengths of writing her a love letter. He promises to report back if it has any effect, but laments that she is a tower of chastity! This is an impressive story and Sir Paul falls for it, rejoicing in his wife’s virtue.

Scene XII Mellefont and Maskwell. It’s 7.45pm. Maskwell tells Mellefont to sneak into Lady Touchwood’s chambers so as to be ready to leap out apparently catching her in the act of being unfaithful with Maskwell, thus putting himself in a position to make her stop trying to undermine Mellefont’s marriage. Got it?

Scene XIII Maskwell soliloquises, explaining that he has an ‘after game’ to manipulate the situation further.

Scene XIV Enter Lord Touchwood. Maskwell plays him, playing up to what Lady Touchwood told her husband, namely that Maskwell knew about Mellefont’s wish to ravish Lady Touchwood, but tried to stop him. Maskwell plays the loyal friend who doesn’t want to betray his best friend, but… says he had hoped it was a one-off indiscretion, but now finds Mellefont resolved in his villainy. Prove it! says Lord Touchwood. And now we see why Maskwell has arranged for Mellefont to be in Lady Touchwood’s chambers. Maskwell tells him to meet him 15 minutes hence outside Lady Touchwood’s chamber and he will give the lord the proof he requires. Touchwood agrees and they part.

Scene XV Mellefont hiding, wishes Lord Touchwood were her to see his wife debauched by Maskwell.

Scene XVI Enter Lady Touchwood saying Maskwell is late. She is expecting simply to have sex with him.

Scene XVII Enter Maskwell apologising for being late. They start to kiss, at which moment Mellefont leaps out from behind an arras, Lady Touchwood screams, Maskwell runs out the back door.

Scene XVIII It takes Lady Touchwood a while to calm down during which she and Mellefont converse in a relatively high-flown tragic register, he recommending her to Christian penitence, she talking about hell and damnation. All a bit damned serious, what. Finally they reach the stage Mellefont wants, which is for Lady Touchwood to repent and say she will put no more barriers in the way of Mellefont’s marriage to Cynthia.

Scene XIX Maskwell softly lets Lord Touchwood in through the door.

Scene XX Lady Touchwood sees Lord Touchwood in hiding. Suddenly she realises she can switch the situation to her own advantage. Suddenly she starts struggling with Mellefont and begging him not to ravish her. He thinks she’s gone mad until Lord Touchwood leaps out of hiding and runs towards him with his sword raised.

Lady Touchwood virtuously holds her husband back, claiming Mellefont knows not what he does. Mellefont realises he has destroyed his own case, and becomes almost delirious. [This all feels a lot more like a tragedy than a comedy.] When Touchwood’s back is turned Lady T grins at Mellefont and makes the horn symbol behind her own husband’s back. God, she has totally totally triumphed and Mellefont is driven to paroxysms of frustration as they exeunt.

Scene XXI Mellefont soliloquises with an intensity which recalls Hamlet.

Oh, I could curse my stars, fate, and chance; all causes and accidents of fortune in this life!

Even at this nadir of his fortunes he believes Maskwell is his friend and they had a good plan and it’s just bad luck that it went wrong.

Act 5

Scene I Lady Touchwood is blessing her good fortune that her husband happened to enter the chamber at that moment, Maskwell enthusiastically agreeing, although we know it was his doing.

Scene II Lord Touchwood approaching, Lady T exits. Maskwell has a brief soliloquy saying he will manage Touchwood.

Scene III Seeing Touchwood in earshot Maskwell delivers a fake-honest monologue in which he berates himself for being false to his friend in order to be virtuous and help Lord Touchwood. In case I haven’t emphasises this, remember that Maskwell owes his place in the world, i.e. position and money, to Touchwood’s support.

It works perfectly. Persuaded of his saintly virtue, Touchwood comes forward and declares that he will blast Mellefont from the family, and put Maskwell in his place. Maskwell feigns being overcome and then says there is one last thing to make his happiness complete… Cynthia’s hand in marriage? says Touchwood. He will arrange it with Sir Paul. He exits.

Scene IV Maskwell alone realises a) his scheme has totally succeeded but b) if either Mellefont or Lady Touchwood hear about his betrothal to Cynthia they will both immediately realise he’s been gulling them and will unite against him. He must be cunning. He must mix a lot of truth with his lies. The best deceits are the almost true ones.

No mask like open truth to cover lies,
As to go naked is the best disguise.

Scene V Enter Mellefont and Maskwell makes haste to tell him the complete truth, that Lord Touchwood has appointed Maskwell his heir and affianced him to Cynthia, but claims he wants none of it, and says he has a cunning plan. They go off to find Cynthia.

Scene VI Cut to the scene in which Lord Touchwood tells Lady Touchwood his plan i.e. to make Maskwell his heir and marry him to Cynthia. Lady Touchwood is appalled, specially when Lord T tells her Maskwell himself told him how in love with Cynthia he is. Lady T is furious. The rat!

Scene VII Lady Touchwood alone soliloquises. O villain! This isn’t at all funny, it has real tragic force:

What, have I been bawd to his designs, his property only, a baiting place? Now I see what made him false to Mellefont. Shame and distraction! I cannot bear it, oh! what woman can bear to be a property? To be kindled to a flame, only to light him to another’s arms; oh! that I were fire indeed that I might burn the vile traitor.

Scene VIII Enter Sir Paul. Lady Touchwood with Lady MacBeth hauteur calls him a fool and a cuckold which feeble Sir Paul takes to be a joke. He wants to find his wife to discuss the revolution in events i.e. Touchwood disinheriting Mellefont and replacing him with Maskwell. Lady T tells him that if he allows for the cancellation of the marriage and raising of Maskwell, she will tear his eyes out! He thinks she’s mad and goes off to find his wife to discuss the fate of their daughter (Cynthia).

Scene IX Maskwell reveals his cunning plan to Cynthia and Mellefont which is to arrange to borrow Lord Touchwood’s coach and six and elope with Cynthia, and the family chaplain to marry them. Or at least tell Touchwood that’s the only way he can gain Cynthia. He assures Mellefont he’s not actually going to do it – though of course he is.

Maskwell tells Mellefont that he, Mellefont, will dress up as the chaplain so the whole thing will be under his control. Both he and Cynthia are bamboozled by the complexity of the double bluff of the plan (as was I) but Mellefont agrees to meet in my lady’s dressing chamber. Mellefont exits.

Scene X Maskwell tells Cynthia he’s had second thoughts, He’ll meet her in the chaplain’s chamber on the corner of the gallery. She agrees but says you must tell Mellefont. Of course I will, says Maskwell, lying. She exits.

Scene XI Maskwell soliloquises the deep down the deceived want to be deceived. He told them exactly what the plan is yet neither of them smelt a rat. Now to recruit the chaplain or, as they seem to have been called in the aristocratic cant of the day, the ‘Levite’, in this case a Mr Saygrace.

Scene XII He knocks on the door of Mr Saygrace who opens it. There is some comedy about the chaplain’s garrulity but Maskwell now explains the plot. He has paid Saygrace to provide a clerical suit but sewn up the sleeves. They’ll now send the suit to Mellefont’s rooms. While he struggles to get into it Cynthia will arrive back, the room will be kept dark and Cynthia will be persuaded that Saygrace is really Mellefont. And so will accompany Maskwell down to the carriage and so be carried away and married against her will.

Saygrace is a small but perfectly formed example of the claim that Congreve gives every one of his characters distinctive speech patterns, e.g:

MASKWELL: Have you stitched the gown sleeve, that Mellefont may be puzzled, and waste time in putting it on?
SAYGRACE: I have: the gown will not be indued without perplexity.

Scene XIII Maskwell is with Lord Touchwood who tells him something has triggered Lady Touchwood and she has gone mad with rage, something about him, Maskwell. Damn, Maskwell had feared just this possibility – she’s realised how he has used her. Lord Touchwood is irked that his wife is disobeying him and wishes Maskwell’s marriage could be signed and sealed this evening. This falls perfectly into Maskwell’s wishes and he tells Lord Touchwood he has a cunning plan…

Scene XIV Enter Careless and Cynthia. Careless has seen and overheard just enough to realise Maskwell is concocting some wicked plan.

Scene XV Enter Mellefont, joining Careless and Cynthia. Careless tells him Maskwell is a villain and intends to betray him. Mellefont refuses to believe it. They all see Saygrace leaving his room with a bundle under his arm and the two men follow him.

Scene XVI Leaving Cynthia to encounter Lord Touchwood. Touchwood is musing to himself, surprised that Maskwell had such an intricate plan already worked out, and had arranged it with the chaplain. When she overhears the word chaplain, Cynthia really realises something is wrong. She begins to tell Lord Touchwood that here is betrayal but at that moment they hear the voices of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood from a nearby room.

Scene XVII Touchwood and Cynthia hide and witness the following scene: Lady Touchwood is so outraged by Maskwell’s betrayal she is holding a dagger and prepares to strike. But his impassive confident smile disarms her, she drops it and starts weeping, saying she never could resist him. Lord Touchwood is stupefied.

Lady Touchwood tells him why she was so angry – because she heard he was to marry Cynthia. Maskwell asks her how could he, who had enjoyed bliss in her arms, possibly choose any other woman? Listening to this Lord Touchwood splutters and chokes with anger.

Maskwell now tells Lady Touchwood that the entire plan has been to please her and prove faithful to her. How so? Well, explains Maskwell, he has told Mellefont to meet them in my lady’s dressing chamber. Well, Lady Touchwood should be there disguised as Cynthia, and accompany him down the stairs. When he realises it is her not Cynthia, he will be in her power and she can force him to love her. And if he won’t, she can stab him in the heart – and Maskwell gives her the dagger! He tells her to run and change. She is amazed at the cunning of his villainy and runs off.

Scene XVIII Maskwell soliloquises, overheard by Cynthia and Touchwood. He congratulates himself on his quick thinking and hopes out loud that Cynthia is ready at the meeting place. (She’s not; she’s still hidden onstage overhearing everything along with Lord Touchwood.) And exits.

Scene XIX Cynthia and Touchwood emerge from their hiding place. Touchwood is beside himself with rage and mortification. His wife the adulterer and Maskwell the villain! He vows to forgive Mellefont and to humiliate the baddies. Let’s round up the entire cast, he says, and bring them back here. Exeunt.

Scene XX A funny scene in which dim Sir Paul explains everything is topsy-turvy to Lord Froth who’s been having a nap. What’s topsy-turvy asks Froth, my wife? No no, says Sir Paul, she’s in the garden with Brisk. Doing what? Laying their heads together? What? Writing poetry, my lord, making couplets. WHAT? So it’s a little bit of comic relief between the tragic outbursts and the final scene.

Scene XXI Enter Lady Froth and Brisk, greeting her husband and unwittingly continuing the rude double entendres when she says she has been lying on her back in the garden studying the stars. Has she now?

Scene XXII Enter Lady Plyant, Cynthia and Careless i.e. almost the entire cast is assembled. Careless is explaining to Lady Plyant about the conspiracy they have discovered, she says Oh my Lord are all men so fickle and Careless gallantly replies, ‘Madam, you have charms to fix inconstancy’, to which she blushes.

Scene XXIII At that moment there is a loud shriek and Lady Touchwood comes running onstage pursued by her husband dressed as a curate. They struggle, she breaks free and runs away.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: Go, and thy own infamy pursue thee.

Scene XXIV Enter Mellefont dragging Maskwell. He accuses him to his face, contemns him, but Maskwell (like Iago) says nothing. Touchwood orders his servants to seize him. This is all very tragic and Shakespearian. Congreve brings off a nice little bit of comic repartee right at the end of the play, for the assembled fops and fools are of course astonished by what they’re witnessing.

BRISK: This is all very surprising, let me perish.
LADY FROTH: You know I told you Saturn looked a little more angry than usual.

That made me laugh out loud. But the whole thing suddenly ends. Lord Touchwood says, Mellefont I forgive you, and tells everyone to be merry.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: We’ll think of punishment at leisure, but let me hasten to do justice in rewarding virtue and wronged innocence. Nephew, I hope I have your pardon, and Cynthia’s.
MELLEFONT: We are your lordship’s creatures.
LORD TOUCHWOOD: And be each other’s comfort. Let me join your hands. Unwearied nights, and wishing days attend you both; mutual love, lasting health, and circling joys, tread round each happy year of your long lives.

Well, yes, but mainly No, no they can’t because the tone has become intense and serious and a few cheerful words cannot undo the generally dark tendency of the previous few hours.

Aspects of The Double Dealer

The Plot

I can see why the play was not a success, but it’s not, I think, from the ‘experimental’ unity-of-place aspects. Instead it’s the plot. It feels like everything has been sacrificed to the fiendishly complex set of interlocking schemes, which continually escalate in invention and complexity until, as Lord Touchwood says:

I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery.

It feels like so much energy went into mapping out these plots and stratagems that none was left over for the comedy. Comedy comes in numerous forms, but 1. the play has no dominating comic figure such as the great Widow Blackacre in William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer or the awesome Lord Foppington in John Vanbrugh’s play The Relapse. And 2. there are surprisingly few comic situations. Instead the core situations are often quite serious, and the comically dim characters – weak-willed Sir Paul Plyant and his bossy wife, and the absurdly pretentious Lady Froth and her giggling husband Lord Froth, plus the idiot fop Brisk – are simply wheeled on at regular intervals to plaster over the more serious foundations.

In other words, the comedy doesn’t very often arise from the plot or situations, but feels bolted on, almost as an afterthought.

Tragedy not comedy

The other really obvious element which undermines its enjoyment as a comedy is that quite a lot of it deals with genuine, extreme and tragic emotions, which are expressed in extreme tragic rhetoric. When Lady Touchwood goes to stab Maskless she is in real emotional agony:

LADY TOUCH: Ha! Do you mock my rage? Then this shall punish your fond, rash contempt. [Goes to strike.]

When Lord Touchwood realises a) how Maskwell has played him but even worse b) how his wife has been unfaithful to him with one man and is planning to do it again with another, he is in real torment.

LORD TOUCHWOOD: Astonishment binds up my rage! Villainy upon villainy! Heavens, what a long track of dark deceit has this discovered! I am confounded when I look back, and want a clue to guide me through the various mazes of unheard-of treachery. My wife! Damnation! My hell!

Maskwell has more in common with a tragic villain such as Iago than a comic character like Lord Foppington, and he sets the tone which, despite various comic interludes, ends up feeling really quite dark and intense.

Tragic register

Extreme words and expressions predominate.

Hell Almost from the start Hell is invoked, Mellefont describes the hell in Lady Touchwood’s imagination (‘hell is not more busy than her brain, nor contains more devils than that imagination); it is a frequent ejaculation (‘Hell and damnation!’, ‘Confusion and hell!’, ‘Hell and the devil!’, ‘Hell and amazement!’

Villain I associate the word ‘villain’ with Hamlet:

O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,–meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;

The word villain occurs 11 times in all of Hamlet, but 26 times in The Double Dealer.

Devil 16 times.

But it’s the way this tragic vocabulary is combined into firebreathingly earnest speeches:

LADY TOUCHWOOD: Death, do you dally with my passion? Insolent devil! But have a care,—provoke me not; for, by the eternal fire, you shall not ’scape my vengeance. Calm villain! How unconcerned he stands, confessing treachery and ingratitude! Is there a vice more black? Oh, I have excuses thousands for my faults; fire in my temper, passions in my soul, apt to ev’ry provocation, oppressed at once with love, and with despair. But a sedate, a thinking villain, whose black blood runs temperately bad, what excuse can clear?

Violence

Right at the start Mellefont tells Careless that, provoked, Lady Touchwood made a run for his sword to do him or herself an injury. Later Lady Touchwood threatens to stab Maskwell. Maskwell gives her back the dagger so she can stab Mellefont. Lord Touchwood has to be restrained from drawing his sword and stabbing Mellefont when he thinks the latter has deflowered his wife, threatening to write the word ‘villain’ in his face with the tip of his sword!

Divorces not marriages

Comedies generally end in marriages, and this one sort of does, but the over-riding impression is of the catastrophic collapse of Lord Touchwood’s marriage, which dominates everything else, and finds echoes in Brisk’s adultery with Lady Froth and Lady Plyant’s verging on the edge of adultery with Careless.

Normally in these plays, one marriage at most is adulterated and its failure is outnumbered by two or so happy new marriages at the end. In this play the almost certain adultery of three marriages just outweighs the supposedly happy marriage which concludes it.

Incest

In fact, now I come to review the play, the theme of incest is almost more prevalent than marriage.

1. Mellefont is Lord Touchwood’s nephew. That means that, when Touchwood is led to believe Mellefont has been sleeping with Lady Touchwood it meant he was having sex with his own aunt – which was, in those times, considered incest – a crime she makes the most of when she play acts that Mellefont is ravishing her for the benefit of Lord Touchwood who has just entered the room:

LADY TOUCHWOOD: I’ll grow to the ground, be buried quick beneath it, e’er I’ll be consenting to so damned a sin as incest! unnatural incest!

2. Cynthia is Sir Paul Plyant’s daughter. Her mother died and Sir Paul remarried, so the current Lady Plyant is Cynthia’s step-mother. In other words, early in the play when Lady Plyant is led to believe that Mellefont wants to sleep with her, she stretches a point to claim that sleeping with your fiancée’s step-mother is incest:

LADY PLYANT: Oh, the impiety of it… and the unparalleled wickedness! O merciful Father! How could you think to reverse nature so, to make the daughter the means of procuring the mother?
MELLEFONT: The daughter to procure the mother!
LADY PLYANT: Ay, for though I am not Cynthia’s own mother, I am her father’s wife, and that’s near enough to make it incest.

Sir Paul Plyant and Lady Touchwood are brother and sister, tying the family relationships even tighter together. This sense of the characters forming a close-knit circle is a kind of geneological counterpart to the unity of place. It is a kind of unity of family which helps to make the play feel claustrophobic, as if it is all taking place within one family. It isn’t, but sometimes it feels as if it is.

Hamlet

Lord Touchwood is Mellefont’s Uncle. The accusation of incest keeps recurring. The keyword ‘villain’ is repeated. That, along with the frequent drawing of swords, reminds me more than ever of Hamlet. As does the unity of place – the claustrophobic castle at Elsinor and the claustrophobic gallery of Lord Touchwood’s house. And as does the frequent hiding in order to hear characters make key confessions – as Polonius hides behind an arras or Hamlet comes across Claudius praying, and as Touchwood sees the scene where Lady Touchwood pretends to be ravished, or Cynthia and Touchwood hide and finally discover the truth about Lady T and Maskwell.

Not the plot – the mood are sometimes cognate.

A family alliance

In fact in his introduction to the Penguin edition, Eric Rump points out that the marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia will not only unite two families but save them. It is made plain that Sir Paul Plyant has no male heir, only a daughter (Cynthia) and the way his second wife treats him, is unlikely to have any more children, while it is equally clear that Lord Touchwood, though blessed with properties, has no heir at all which is why he has adopted his nephew Mellefont as heir.

In other words, without the marriage, both families will go extinct. So there’s more than just money and a pretty woman riding on the marriage. There is the survival of two lineages, which explains Lord Touchwood’s outburst when Cynthia casually says she has vowed never to marry if she can’t marry Mellefont:

SIR PAUL: Never to marry! Heavens forbid! must I neither have sons nor grandsons? Must the family of the Plyants be utterly extinct for want of issue male? O impiety!

In which case:

All were ruined, all my hopes lost. My heart would break, and my estate would be left to the wide world.

A plight which will, presumably, have carried more weight and been more readily understandable to its original audience 330 years ago.

Soliloquies

And that brings me to another of the ways the play was experimental which is the large number of soliloquies it contains. In other Restoration comedies plenty of characters give little asides directly to the audience, but this is different. An ‘aside’ is almost always comic, whereas a soliloquy or dramatic monologue is almost always serious and, in this play, often very serious, Machiavellian and wicked.

The widespread use of soliloquy is another way in which the play feels like it’s using the language, the tone and techniques more associated with tragedy than comedy.

In fact the extensive use of soliloquy was singled out by commentators on the play for criticism, and Congreve goes to some lengths to defend it in the dedicatory epistle. He argues that a man alone talking to himself is generally a bad sign in life, but that a man thinking – weighing the pros and cons of an action – cannot be conveyed any other way onstage except through the medium of words. The audience cannot sit and watch a man doing nothing but think silently for 3 or 4 minutes. Therefore soliloquy must be allowed, or as Congreve drolly puts it, the playwright is ‘forced to make use of the expedient of speech, no other better way being yet invented for the communication of thought’.

And he makes the additional point about soliloquy that it tends to depict a character who’s contemplating criminal or anti-social activity. If a character is in love or anxious or afraid, they can easily share these feelings with a confidant – and hence most of the lead characters in Restoration comedy come accompanied by a confidant and a lot of the text consists of lead and confidant sharing thoughts, analysing the situation and so on.

But if a character is contemplating a crime, or a scheme whereby he or she plans to deceive some or all of the other characters, then by its very nature the character has to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Thus the surprising ubiquity of soliloquy in The Double Dealer is not a wilful experiment, it reflects the fact that two of the central characters – Maskwell and Lady Touchwood – spend a great deal of time devising schemes and then evaluating their schemes. It reflects the high proportion of ‘villainy’ in the text.

And pondering all this has made me understand better why soliloquy is more often found in tragedy – where wicked characters such as Iago or Macbeth are scheming – than in comedy – where the mere fact that you have characters joking about themselves or others requires dialogue.

So the mere existence of soliloquies in a play is a good indication of its fundamentally tragic nature. And the number of soliloquies in this play indicate that beneath all the (often very funny) comic scenes, lurks a fundamentally serious plot structure.

The happy couple

A final peculiarity is that the (often deeply buried) motor of the plot is the planned marriage of Mellefont and Cynthia which Maskwell’s malignancy is devoted to spiking. And yet the happy couple are very rarely on stage alone together, only two or three times and each one relatively brief.

In other words, the central relationship the whole narrative is meant to be about, is only very thinly sketched in. Eric Rump describes it as having a certain ‘autumnal feeling’ about it. And this is another reason why it pales into insignificance compared to the twin infidelities of Lady Touchwood and her towering tragic rages, which carry vastly more dramatic weight.

I can see why it ‘failed’. It’s a tragedy masquerading as a comedy. There are quite a few really funny scenes and moments in it – Brisk and Lady Froth converting a passionate embrace into a dancing lesson springs to mind, Careless brilliantly explaining away the love letter to his wife which was enraging Sir Paul, and Brisk’s nonchalant comment right at the end – but there are also howling rages, threats of murder and violence, references to incest, and it ends with a woman running howling offstage, an honourable marriage in ruins, and a Machiavellian villain dragged off virtually in chains.

And I can see why Congreve was cross that it failed and defends himself at more than usual length in the dedicatory epistle to the printed version. He had put a lot of effort into it. He was trying to do something new. He was hurt that carping critics attacked almost every aspect of his play.

Anyway, once bitten… In his third play he returned to a purity of comic tone and to the trusted comic techniques, which helped make it one of his best.

Metaphors

Having noticed Congreve’s stylish use of metaphors in The Old Bachelor, I was alert for them in this play, such as Careless’s casual military metaphor:

CARELESS: So you have manned your works; but I wish you may not have the weakest guard where the enemy is strongest.

Describing Maskwell’s faithlessness uses metaphors of gardening:

CARELESS: His affection to you, you have confessed, is grounded upon his interest, that you have transplanted; and should it take root in my lady, I don’t see what you can expect from the fruit.

This ability to choose an appropriate metaphor and then to extend it gracefully, is a sign of wit, and a sign of fools is that their analogies or metaphors are graceless or inappropriate. Here is Lady Plyant mixing her metaphors with laughable effect (and being complimented on it by her doting husband):

LADY PLYANT: Have I behaved myself with all the decorum and nicety befitting the person of Sir Paul’s wife? Have I preserved my honour as it were in a snow-house for these three years past? Have I been white and unsullied even by Sir Paul himself?
SIR PAUL: Nay, she has been an invincible wife, even to me; that’s the truth on’t.
LADY PLYANT: Have I, I say, preserved myself like a fair sheet of paper for you to make a blot upon?
SIR PAUL: And she shall make a simile with any woman in England.

Whereas cognoscenti like Mellefont and Maskwell are masters of the extended metaphor:

MELLEFONT: Maskwell, welcome, thy presence is a view of land, appearing to my shipwrecked hopes. The witch has raised the storm, and her ministers have done their work: you see the vessels are parted.
MASKWELL: I know it. I met Sir Paul towing away Cynthia. Come, trouble not your head; I’ll join you together ere to-morrow morning, or drown between you in the attempt.
MELLEFONT: There’s comfort in a hand stretched out to one that’s sinking

Useful phrases

When Lady Touchwood picks up a suggestion of Maskwell’s and adds an improvement, Maskwell says admiringly:

Excellent! Your ladyship has a most improving fancy.

‘You have a most improving fancy.’ I’d love to say that to someone in real life.

Radio production

Reviews of Restoration plays

The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)
The Man of Mode by George Etheredge (1676)
The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)
Introduction to the plays of William Wycherley by W.C. Ward
The Rover by Aphra Behn (1677)
The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)
The Double Dealer by William Congreve (1693)
Love For Love by William Congreve (1695)
The Relapse by Sir John Vanbrugh (1696)
The Provoked Wife by Sir John Vanbrugh (1697)
The Way of The World by William Congreve (1700)

2 Comments

by Simon on July 31, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on July 31, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/31/the-double-dealer-william-congreve/

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All For Love, or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden (1677)

Setting standards

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Synopsis

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Act Four

Act Five

General thoughts

Mermaid’s inadequate notes

A comparison

‘Ruin’

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Introduction to the defence speeches of Cicero

D.H. Berry’s introductions

General introduction

Rhetorical style

Anaphora

Asyndeton

Apostrophe

Exclamation

Alliteration, assonance and wordplay

Metaphor

Rhetorical strategies

Appropriating the prosecution

Inventing opposition points

Rhetorical questions

Mimicry

Changing the subject

Invoking famous men

Invoking the sad family

Crying

Repetition

Conclusion

P.S. Adrian Goldsworthy’s comments

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The Double Dealer by William Congreve (1693)

CAST

Music

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Aspects of The Double Dealer

The Plot

Tragedy not comedy

Tragic register

Violence

Divorces not marriages

Incest

Hamlet

A family alliance

Soliloquies

The happy couple

Metaphors

Useful phrases

Radio production

Related links

Reviews of Restoration plays

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