The Jewel of Great Price: Mutability and Constancy in Dryden's all for Love

Abstract

Sleep, blest Pair, Secure from chance, long Ages out, While all the of fly o'er your Tomb.1 This speech by the Egyptian priest Serapion at the end of John Dryden's Allfor Love terminates what the major theme of the play but one that has gone virtually unnoticed in criticism until recently. In one of the most provocative articles ever published on the best English tragedy of the entire Restoration, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Derek W. Hughes has shown for the first time that almost all, the imagery of All for Love coalesces into a megapattern of mutability.2 This interpretation brings together and makes sense out of all the imagery of vacillation,3 of extremes, of flux and flood, ebb and flow, storms and shipwrecks and sinking, fortune and fate, chance and change, ripeness and rottenness, loss and ruin, Time and Death (AL I.450) imagery which culminates in the humane chance' and Storms of Fate of Serapion's speech. Unfortunately, Professor Hughes goes too far, all the way to relativism and nihilism: only objective certainty in the play, he writes, is instability (p. 556), and all and hints of transcendence or immortality are mere fantasy (passim)i' Professor Hughes thus seems to me to misinterpret the play on both external and internal grounds. First, he wrenches the play out of its proper literary tradition. The leitmotiv of mutability does not look forwards to Harold Pinter's Collection, as he says (p. 547), but backwards not only to a general Renaissance tradition best represented perhaps by Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos but more specifically to a long tradition of Antony and Cleopatra plays in the Renaissance in which this motif paramount, teaching not the lesson of nihilism but of sic transit gloria mundi. Finally, Professor Hughes misreads the play itself, for despite his insistence that no objective, transcendent ideals successfully oppose themselves to the motif of mutability, Dryden does oppose a balancing motif, constancy. And Dryden does it primarily again through imagery, that of jewelry, which associated throughout with Cleopatra. She the play's jewel of great