"A Foolish Marriage Vow": John Dryden's Marriage a la Mode and Amphitryon

For our second episode on John Dryden, we'll talk about two of his plays which marked an innovation in the tragi-comic romance: Marriage a la Mode and Amphitryon.  We'll discuss the "split-plot" play, the exorcising of Restoration political anxieties, and why we sometimes mock that which we cherish.

Additional sound clip from Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Text of Marriage a la Mode: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15349/15349-h/15349-h.htm#page_231

Text of Amphitryon: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47679/47679-h/47679-h.htm#Page_1

Transcript

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends!  I’m so glad you could attend!  You’ve tuned into the Classic English Literature Podcast, the Interweb’s premiere destination for the literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural analysis of Brit Lit’s greatest hits.  Today’s episode is the second looking at the work of the chameleon-like John Dryden.  In our last outing, we discussed how Dryden’s satirical poems lampooned what he saw as the moribund literary culture of his time as well as excoriating the Whigs as their dastardly designs to disenfranchise James, Duke of York from the royal succession.  Dryden’s gifts served him well in these years, but following the fall of the House of Stuart, poor John fell from grace, committing himself to translating works by the Classical authors and dabbling once again with writing for the stage.

I want to look at Dryden the playwright in today’s show.  While really remembered for those poems we covered last time, most of his career was spent scribbling for the theatre.  He wrote over thirty plays and was among the most popular playwrights of the time.  The King’s Company contracted him in 1668 to produce plays for them and for the next decade and more writing for the stage was his primary occupation and source of income.  He pioneered what we call “heroic drama,” a type of tragedy written in heroic couplets and featuring larger-than-life characters, elaborate costumes, and exotic settings; these plays explored themes of love, honor, and duty. Later in his career, he abandoned this style in favor of more naturalistic speech and situation, though he never fully abandoned a tendency toward the mannered.  Dryden, however, did not care for such writing.  Despite defending the English stage in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, one gets the impression that Sniffy John felt the stage demeaned him and squandered his talents on the lower and middling sorts.

Nonetheless, he was a big player in the drama game, so today we’ll do a drive-by of two plays.  Which ones?  Well, that became something of a quest, friend listener.  You see, I knew I wasn’t going to do all 30 of the plays – heck, I did episodes on less than half of Shakespeare’s.  So, which plays would best represent Dryden’s oeuvre.  And here’s the thing.  Every source I consulted cited a different play as Dryden’s masterpiece – the only consensus I could find among critics is that his poems are better than his plays.  Not helpful.  Many did cite 1678’s All for Love, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, as a great play, but I did not want to do an episode on a reboot.  Since I could not find scholars who agreed on Dryden’s greatest play, I took a pragmatic approach and decided on the two plays I had on my shelves: 1673’s comedy Marriage a la Mode and 1690’s Amphitryon, which turned out to be the reboot of a reboot.  Oh, well.

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Tragicomic romance is very old in theater.  In fact, one might argue that tragicomic romance is key to the secularized drama that began to flourish after the medieval mystery and morality plays.   This is the kind of operatic stuff: grand quests, exotic locations, lost lovers, rulers, and heirs restored.  The bad guys die, the good guys live happily ever after, after confronting some dark dimension of the self.  This is really theatrical theater.  Shakespeare was great at it.

What happened to this warhorse of a genre in the Restoration period, and brought to its greatest iteration by Dryden, was an innovation called the “split-plot play.”  Say that rapidly and repeatedly and you’ll find yourself doing a creditable impression of Rowan Atkinson.  What happens is that such a play has two plots: one a tragedy, usually heroic, where the good guy may die, or at least get exiled.  This is juxtaposed with a comic plot and all that implies.  The effect, then, is at once harnessing the chaos of comedy by introducing tragic elements while simultaneously taming vaulting aristocratic heroism by alloying it with comedy.  What you end up with, if everything goes right, is a rather conservative genre that boosts middle-class self-awareness and self-importance.  When things don’t go right, well, you have a mess.

Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode is the very model of a Restoration split-plot tragicomic romance.  This is an excellent time to do the quick and dirty.

We’re in Sicily, where King Polydamas rules—but he’s not the rightful king. Years ago, he killed his predecessor and seized the throne. That means the real heir is somewhere out there in hiding. And surprise—he’s closer than anyone realizes, other than everybody in the audience and every reader.  That heir is Leonidas, who has grown up away from court, unaware of his true royal blood. Leonidas falls in love with Palmyra, the king’s beautiful daughter. But here’s the problem: Palmyra is supposed to marry Argaleon, an ally of her father, to cement the king’s power.

Leonidas and Palmyra spend a good deal of their time rhapsodizing each other in rhyming iambic pentameter while everyone else speaks in prose.  Polydamas breaks into blank verse on public occasions, but privately is haunted by guilt and paranoia about Claudian claim to the throne. Of course, eventually Leonidas is revealed to be the legitimate heir and Polydamas as a usurper. But instead of a Hamletesque bloodbath, the ending is surprisingly forgiving: Leonidas gets the throne and Palmyra, while Polydamas is spared and reconciled. I think Argaleon gets the chop.  So the tragic-heroic plot that seemed like it might end in carnage resolves into peace and stability.

And now for something completely different.  The comic plot feels like it belongs in a totally different play.

We’ve got two couples tangled in a web of flirtation. First, there’s Rhodophil, captain of the king’s guard, and Doralice—a married couple. Fine. Except Doralice is bored stiff with her husband, and she’s got her eye on another man, a courtier named Palamede, who’s been betrothed to the fashionable and flighty Melantha by his father.  Of course – you know where I’m headed, right? – she is Rhodophil’s lover.  On a side note, Melantha is a satire all on her own—she’s a toadying social-climber, obsessed with Paris, French fashions, and showing off her supposed sophistication. She sprinkles French phrases into her speech, usually getting them wrong, which makes her ridiculous.

So here’s how it plays out: Doralice flirts with Palamede. Palamede half-woos her back, but he’s also still expected to court Melantha. Meanwhile, Rhodophil—remember, Doralice’s husband—starts sniffing around Melantha. Everyone’s cross-flirting, trying on different lovers like they’re trying on outfits.

And in the end? Nothing really resolves neatly. Nobody dies, nobody reforms, nobody even seems that heartbroken. The couples more or less shuffle back into place, but with the strong sense that marriage is just a flimsy arrangement and desire is always going to wander.

Now, you’d think that at the end both plots would somehow thaw, melt, and resolve themselves into a dew.  But the dewn’t.  The noble world of Leonidas and Palmyra, with its destiny, crowns, and legitimacy, runs right alongside the frivolous bedroom comedy of Doralice and Melantha. Dryden doesn’t try to stitch them together—he just sets them side by side, like two mirrors held up to Restoration culture.  So, on one side, you’ve got the longing for order and legitimate rule, in an England still nervous after the Civil War and Restoration of Charles II. On the other, you’ve got a frank acknowledgement that when it comes to marriage and love, order is a joke, people are fickle, and relationships are always “à la mode”—just the fashion of the moment.

Of course, just because the plots don’t meld doesn’t mean that Dryden has not carefully constructed each as a reflection of the other.  Remember that Dryden often indulges in satire, and it seems to me that the comic plot here takes the mickey out of the serious plot.  We can see a somewhat jaded skepticism about the bombastic ideals of fidelity, honor, glory.

For instance – and here’s something rather obscure and interesting – double beds became fashionable in the Restoration period.  Before then, I reckon, upper class couples slept in separate rooms and lower class families slept in the hay with the animals.   Something like that.  Anyway, big beds were a big thing.  Rather than comment on the luxury or comfort of such a bed, or give a winking nudge to the coital possibilities of all that extra acreage, Dryden’s characters see it as a means of subverting marriage.  Rhodophil tells Palamede of his domestic sleeping arrangements: “And we lie with our backs to each other so far distant as if the fashion of great beds was only invented to keep husband and wife sufficiently asunder.”  I’m curious about the word “sufficiently” there.  Sufficient for what?  Marital armistice?  Infidelity?  Personal safety?  That’s left rather unclear.

Such bickering contrasts, almost like a sorbet, to the swoony-dreaminess of Leonidas and Palmyra’s wooing.  Their love-talk is Spinal Tap pastoralism – turned up to 11.  In Act 3, they have a conversation of about 100 lines, but, oh, it feels so much longer.  Leonides notices that the hours of love fly by in court, while in the country they pass unnoticed.  Palmyra says something about the sun being brighter out in the fields, about how children frolicked about their humble cottage.  Then Leonides bursts out with:

When Love did of my heart possession take, 

I was so young, my soul was scarce awake: 

I cannot tell when first I thought you fair; 

But suck'd in Love, insensibly as Ayre.

 Ah, the innocence of youth!  Palmyra:

You kneeled; and, in my lap, your head laid down. 

I blush'd, and blush'd, and did the kiss delay: 

At last, my Subjects forc'd me to obey; 

But, when I gave the Crown, and then the kiss, 

I scarce had breath to say, Take that— and this.

Altogether very goopy.  But that’s the point, right?  They live in a fantasy world – the pastoral was always fanciful and mockable.  Remember Andrew Marvell?  A bit cynical, but more listeners probably identify with Rhodophil, Doralice, and the No-Man’s Land of their mattress.

But you know what?  You can mock something and still like it.  In fact, sometimes you mock something because you like it.  In fact in fact, maybe you mock something because you really wish it could be true, but you know it’s not, but you wish it could be anyway, so you make fun of it to allay your own unfulfilled longing.  I bet most people, deep down inside, are really goopy romantics.  Why do you think we call rom-coms “guilty pleasures” as they rack up millions.  Jeez.  We would love it to be that way, but we’re embarrassed by it.  I wonder if Dryden’s got a bit of that.  He’s fundamentally conservative – we already know that – and really likes the idea of stability and fidelity.  But he also recognizes that those things are often illusions, fantasies, so skewer them.

The lovers’ conversation reaches the crux when they lament the class divide that separates them.  Leonidas will willingly sacrifice his newfound royalty to remain faithful to his beloved Palmyra, for the king

threatens me with exile, and with shame, 

To lose my birth right, and a Prince his name; 

But there's a blessing which he did not mean, 

To send me back to Love and You again.

Clever Leonides!  For loving Palmyra, he can expect to be exiled and disinherited, so he can return to Palmyra!  

But she can’t stomach the idea of his dishonor:

Why was not I a Princess for your sake? 

But Heaven no more such miracles can make: 

And, since That cannot, This must never be; 

You shall not lose a Crown for love of me. 

Live happy, and a nobler choice pursue; 

I shall complain of Fate; but not of you.

See, at first she wishes she was a princess so she could marry him.  But even Heaven can’t make a princess out of a country girl, so she releases him to pursue his glorious destiny.  Oh, my irony detector is pinging!  Right, because we later find out she is a princess after all!  Ho, ho!

Since you all are the most clever and discerning of audiences, I’m sure you've twigged that there’s a current of political anxiety running beneath this surf-and-turf plot.  We have a murderous usurper on the throne and the succession is muddy at best: first no one, then Leonidas, then Palmyra.  It would certainly be too much to argue that Dryden’s working out an allegory of the Restoration’s political turbulence – that would be like trying to get a hippo into a wet suit.  But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see in this rather silly play some unease at the potentially shifting fortunes of the House of Stuart.  Check out our last episode for a deeper discussion of that topsy-turviness.

By the time our second play of the day was put out in 1690 – 17 years after Marriage a la Mode – all of the anxieties latent in that play had made themselves manifest.  The Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the death of Charles, the ascension of James, and the Glorious Revolution.  Dryden was no longer Poet Laureate nor Historiographer Royal and was forced back into writing for the stage to earn his bread.  In the year of the Battle of the Boyne, which cemented William of Orange’s kingship, Dryden produced Amphitryon at Drury Lane.  It was boffo at the box office and was very popular through the 18th century.

Genre-wise, Amphitryon is what scholars call a Menippean satire.  Why is that important and why should you care?  Well, it’s not and you needn’t, really – knowing what Menippean satire is will not make your breath minty fresh, make your whites dazzlingly bright, nor make you devastatingly sexy.   We must face such hard truths.  But, you’re the one who tuned into a podcast about 17th century drama, so you have this coming.  Menippean satire is a classical form of satire that originated with the Greek writer Menippus of Gadara (3rd century BCE). It’s less about mocking individuals and more about mocking ideas, mental attitudes, and cultural pretensions.  Think of it as satire aimed at worldviews rather than people.  If Juvenalian satire is a stiletto aimed at corrupt individuals, and Horatian satire is a chuckle at human folly, then Menippean satire is a carnival that pokes fun at intellectual arrogance and cultural nonsense. It’s digressive, chaotic, and explodes pretensions by mixing the profound with the ridiculous.

See – your life has not improved one little bit.

Dryden’s Amphitryon is not entirely his, of course—like a lot of Restoration plays, it’s a remix. The myth of Jupiter’s seduction of Alcmene was a popular source for drama, especially in the version by Plautus, from probably early in the 2nd century BCE.  Moliere gives it a glow-up in 1668, and that’s the one that Dryden really leans on.  So: another quick and dirty.

Picture it: Thebes. A respectable general named Amphitryon is off killing people in the name of civic order while his wife, Alcmena, waits dutifully at home. Jupiter, king of the gods, decides Alcmena sure is looking fine – she’s turned just the way he intended when he created her and now it’s time to pluck the fruit of his labors. Wow, that sounded so much worse out loud.  Many of you probably know that Jupiter hardly ever makes sexy times in his own person.  Oh, no – he likes to get his freak on with some cosplay: here’s an incomplete list of his carnal camo: a swan, a bull, an eagle, a cuckoo, an ant, a dragon, a pigeon, heifer, a shepherd, a cloud, and a golden shower.  Don’t wish to kink-shame, but Jupiter sure finds himself some freaky women.

Anyway, for this rapey rendezvous, he goes as Amphitryon, strolls into Alcmena’s bedchamber, and gets it on.

Now, Jupiter has brought Mercury along as a wingman – get it?  Wingman, ah.  Mercury impersonates Amphitryon’s servant, Sosia, so when the real Sosia tries to come home and report for duty, he’s met with his own doppelgänger, and he’s better at being Sosia than Sosia is. Puts a whole new spin on identity theft.

So when the real Amphitryon finally gets home from battle, Alcmena greets him with uh, less enthusiasm than he’d like – ‘cause he’s really enthusiastic to see her. Baffled by her blase exhaustion, he rages jealously until the divine truth is revealed: yes, Jupiter’s been in his bed, but hey, silver lining, Alcmena’s about to give birth to Hercules. Well, that’s not a silver lining, is it?  How about this: your wife can’t tell the difference between you and a god!  That’ll soothe the fragile male ego.  Go, quick!  Run and tell your bros!

Dryden laces the whole thing with winking commentary about sex, honor, and power. At one point, Mercury tries to de-euphemize Jupiter’s intentions, saying, “The truth on’t is, adultery is its proper name.”  But it’s not, is it?  It’s rape.  But it isn’t treated as horror; it’s a divine joke, a cosmic bedroom comedy. Gods take what they want, men splutter about honor, and women are caught somewhere in between, trying to reconcile duty with desire.

But . . . let’s not assume that the male characters here are to be seen as normative.  Jupiter, especially, is not a role model.  Mercury and Night discuss their boss’s proclivities:

Night. Jupiter would do well to stick to his wife, Juno.

Merc. He has been married to her above these hundred years; and that's long enough, in conscience, to stick to one woman.

Night. She's his sister too, as well as his wife; that's a double tie of affection to her.

Merc. Nay, if he made bold with his own flesh and blood, 'tis likely he will not spare his neighbours.

Night. If I were his wife, I would raise a rebellion against him, for the violation of my bed.

Merc. Thou art mistaken, old Night; his wife could raise no faction. All the deities in heaven would take the part of the cuckold-making god, for they are all given to the flesh most damnably.

Hardly a portrait of clean-living.  And despite his somewhat abstemious tone here, Mercury is no puritan.  He brags that his divine power allows him to “view her naked through all her clothes.”  That’s what he likes to do with his suprahuman powers.  Nice.  One the one hand, it’s Benny Hill-style throwback bawdiness.  But there are, of course, real questions of consent at play here.

Because the hub-bub around all this is not about Alcmena’s violation, but about Amphityron’s honor and its vulnerability to her inconstancy.  He accuses her “of all that prodigality of kindness / Given to another and usurped from me.”  Note that he uses a political term for his cuckolding – usurp.  Like Marriage a la Mode and its shifting royal succession, this play raises questions about authority, legitimacy, and the right to command loyalty—all of which would resonate with Dryden’s contemporaries navigating questions of monarchy, religion, and succession.  Those questions, of course, depend upon the restriction – or at least the strict monitoring – of female agency.  Amphitryon thunders at his wife: “after this Affront, / This foul Indignity, done to my Honour, / Divorcement is but petty Reparation.”  

But Alcmena refuses to falsely confess to adultery.  She throws her husband’s honor back at him and defends her own.  Incredulous at his accusations, she wonders what exactly he thinks of her: “And am a foul adultress?”  He answers: “What thou art / Thou stand’st condemned to be by thy relation.”  What a strange line.  I mean, he’s saying you have accused yourself, basically.  But the ambiguity of the word “relation” is intriguing: meaning here “what you have just said, what you have told me,” but we can’t escape the echo of familial relationship, bloodline – the mechanism of succession.  And we know that Alcmena is with Jupiter’s child, and that that child will be Hercules, certainly a hero greater than Amphitryon.

Anyway, she doesn’t take her husband’s condemnation, defying him thus:

Go, thou unworthy Man; for ever go: 

No more my Husband; go thou base Impostour; 

Who tak'st a vile pretence to taint my Fame; 

And, not content to leave, wouldst ruine me. 

Enjoy thy wish'd Divorce: I will not plead 

My Innocence, of this pretended Crime: 

I need not; spet thy Venom; do thy worst: 

But know, the more thou wou'dst expose my Vertue, 

Like purest Linen laid in open Air, 

'Twill bleach the more, and whiten to the view.

She blasts him with high-caliber blank verse – she is noble, her thinking clear and organized.  She is not cowed by the blusterings of a wounded male ego.  And she puts her finger on what I think is a key theme, in both plays, actually.

Let’s look at her word choice in that speech.  Notice how often she invokes ideas of deception, dissembling, illusion.  Let’s see: impostor, pretense, pretended, expose, open, view.  Both plays foreground impersonation, doubling, and disguise.  Look at the whole interaction between Sosia and Mercury about who’s the better Sosia – it’s about performance and appearance.  Theater itself is a theme. Jupiter literally acts a role (Amphitryon), while Restoration wits act out seduction scripts (Marriage à la Mode). Dryden uses theatrical play to question truth, fidelity, and social reality in an age suspicious of appearances.

Well, that’s enough of that.  If you dug this episode, please let the algorithm know: post a 5 star rating on your platform, I would really appreciate it.  Tell a friend about the sterling work done here at the Classic English Literature Podcast.  Drop me a line.  Drop me some cash by clicking “support the show” if you got some in your couch cushions you don’t need.  Thanks for listening, thanks for your support, and I’ll see you here at the theatre in a couple of weeks.