The Tragedy of All for Love

Abstract

Dryden never made any specific statement of his intentions in writing All for Love except for a remark at the beginning of his 'Preface' to the effect that what had attracted him to the story of Antony and Cleopatra was the 'excellency of the moral. For,' he explained, 'the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love, and their end accordingly was unfortunate.' The notion that literature must give moral instruction as well as pleasure is at least as old as Horace and turns up in most Renaissance criticism. Nine years before, in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden had included a clause in his working definition of a play in which it was declared that plays are written 'for the delight and instruction of mankind.' But he seems to have mentioned instruction rather as a matter of course, because, though there is much in the essay about 'delight,' there is remarkably little in it about 'instruction.' Similarly, in All for Love, his performance scarcely supports his statement; though his lovers suffer death, nothing in the action of the play connects their tragic fates with their extra-marital love affair. In fact, the tone of the last act is one of triumph rather than of shame and defeat: the lovers have escaped from the traps set for them by their enemies and are eternally reunited in death. The last speech in the play, put into the mouth of Serapion the high priest, describes them sitting together in state and pronounces their epitaph: 'No lovers lived so great, or died so well.' Indeed, was not their world 'well lost?' There may be a moral lesson in that, but not the lesson that Dryden spelled out.