Meanings of All for Love, 1677-1813.(All for Love by John Dryden)

The ongoing emphasis in literary studies on the work of literature as cultural artifact, or as one in a number of "texts," literary and otherwise, that derive meaning only from their interdependence, has had surprisingly little impact on Restoration and eighteenth-century theater studies, particularly the discussion of plays themselves. Since the playwright's script is but one factor in any performance, concern for intertextuality should lead to exploration of the mutability of any durable play's meaning, especially in a theater world that constantly evolves, as this one did. Yet, whether located in aesthetics, in political or social issues, or even in the circumstances or personalities around which a play is written, the meaning or significance assigned to that play is almost invariably a fixed one. This critical tendency neglects two remarkable features of drama in the so-called long eighteenth century: the extent to which audiences dictated the content and mood of plays, and the extent to which audiences, theaters, and new plays differed from each other. In prologue after prologue as well as in critical commentaries, playwrights and theater connoisseurs lament that the tastes of audiences--on which a play's success depended--debase the fare proffered. Such objections (and the sheer number of them) point to the subordination of the playwright's aesthetic concerns to audience expectations about a play. (l) This raises interesting questions about those plays that had any longevity during this period but that do not have a readily apprehensible universality of the kind generally attributed to, say, Shakespearian drama. If, as they did, audience demands kept pace with the rapidly changing political and cultural milieus and theater personnel and atmospheres, then in order to appeal to these ever-changing demands the durable plays of this period must be endowed with qualities that are incompatible with the fixed meanings sought for them.

An outstanding example of a play with a critical history as remarkable as its endurance on the eighteenth-century stage is one that in fact kept a Shakespearian play from the boards throughout the entire period. John Dryden's All For Love (also known in its own time as Antony and Cleopatra) replaced Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra until 1813. (2) Howard Weinbrot long ago showed the futility of looking to Shakespeare for the key to All for Love, leaving critics still pondering the reason for the endurance of this starkly neoclassical play--one formal to a degree that even Dryden himself expressed nervousness about. (3) The critical dilemma has been confounded by the doggedly traditional approach, however: attention has focused not on those qualities that allowed it to survive chameleon stages and fickle audiences from the Restoration to the Regency, but on uncovering a particular moral, aesthetic, historical, or political meaning. (4) The red herring was perhaps thrown out by Dryden himself: the "excellency of the Moral" promised in the preface (10). Pursuit of this moral, or at least of some pinpointable meaning that makes sense of it, has led to titles like "The Significance of All For Love" (1970) and to assurances that "the value system of the play" lies in a circumscribed historical context (2000). (5) The result of such searches for a single encompassing meaning is that the only consistency amongst the criticism of All for Love is, as Harry Solomon notes, its inconsistency. (6)

The play's elusiveness is itself, however, the key to its durability. In light of its stage history, All For Love clearly has an openness and flexibility that, even as they have remained resistant to critical analysis, allowed the play to adapt to quite different theaters and audience needs. It was able to please audiences of the 1670s and 1680s who were directed in their responses by Charles II, his libertine courtiers, and the political and philosophical issues that riveted the Restoration. In the first part of the eighteenth century, it was equally able to attract more finicky audiences who loved to sympathize with characters and weep over heroines in distress, and who were profoundly interested in women's issues. The play also drew audiences to the cavernous Regency theaters, where the preferred fare was spectacle and the sense of intimacy between audience and actors that the earlier period had enjoyed was lost due to the physical nature of the playhouses. For each of these eras of production All For Love's significance simply cannot have been the same. Nor, clearly, was its appeal similar from one dramatic season to another, as it catered to ever-changing moral tastes as well as to different social ranks. In the early eighteenth century, John Dennis saw All For Love as part of the libertinism of the former age: "Certainly never could the Design of an Author square more exactly with the Design of White-Hall, at the time when it was written, which was by debauching the People absolutely to enslave them." (7) The aristocratic women of the second and third decades of the eighteenth century most certainly were not offended by the play's moral content (as they were by other Restoration plays), however, for it was then frequently acted "At the Desire of several Ladies of Quality" and even "By Their Royal Highness's Command." (8) At the same time, the various benefit performances for actors and actresses, who relied upon All For Love to fill up a playhouse, are testimony to its undiminished popular appeal. This is not to say that it was a fallback for theater companies; David Vieth has counted 123 performances from 1700 to 1800, and several London Stage entries note that it had not been performed for a number of years. (9) Yet, over a 150-year period of major and minor evolutions of the London stage, Dryden's neoclassical play was a staple in a repertory that rejected even David Garrick's attempt at Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. (10)

Any discussion of this play (and of the other durable plays from this period) must, then, take a holistic approach. All for Love's significance to the audience is located primarily in the moment of production, and the relationship between the play and the world to which it is addressed during any given performance depends upon a number of complex elements. This fact poses, of course, the difficulty, indeed the "impossibility" as Paula Backscheider has observed, of "reconstructing a past event (performance), of determining what appealed to a long-dead audience (what needs and desires were met, what specifically triggered strong responses), and of articulating the complex relationship between social life and works of art.... "Yet, as Backscheider continues, despite the lacunae, a "wealth of evidence survives that permits new discoveries about how [plays] were experienced." (11) This is particularly true of information about actors and actresses and their onstage and offstage personalities, and critics generally agree that the soul of drama from the Restoration well into the eighteenth century is dynamic interaction between audience and players. Robert D. Hume's The London Theatre World long ago pointed out how the physical nature itself of the playhouses demanded a close audience/actor relationship, while Lisa Freeman's recent argument about cultural identity and theatricality pivots on the absence in the theater of "a 'fourth wall' that could create the double illusion of separation and transparency between spectacle and spectator." (12) Kristina Straub has also argued convincingly that Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences were affected in their response to characters by their knowledge of the actors' private lives and personal traits. (13) In this type of theater, actors contribute as much, if not more, to the meaning of any performance as the playwright does. Or, as Peter Holland puts it, to "find out how the audience understood the play that they watched, a study of Thomas Betterton is as important as one of John Dryden." (14)

The purpose of this essay, accordingly, is to consider a few different actors who played the key roles in All for Love between 1677 and 1813, and to place their performances within a cultural context. The paucity of information about circumstances of production means that any judgment concerning likely audience response to the play is obviously speculation. Yet in addition to what is known about the major actors who played Dryden's characters and about audience expectations of them, there are some givens concerning certain periods of eighteenth-century life. It is clear, for example, that in years of political turmoil, theatrical presentations of kingship or political strife were viewed as commentary on contemporary problems. Similarly, in particular years, certain cultural issues--say, interest in women's writing and women's social roles or the ambiguity surrounding heroism in a mercantile world--permeate the theater as much as any other medium. In order best to highlight the differences between performances, which is the main focus here, this essay draws upon what is known, choosing the most studied dramatic periods as test cases for the probable significance of All For Love during these times. It begins by investigating the Restoration origins of the play, tracing the play's versatility to self-contradictions within both drama itself and a culture that clung to aristocratic ideals even as it rejected them. It then examines two sets of productions staged in the decades immediately before and after the turn of the century. (15) The Elizabeth Barry/Thomas Betterton and Anne Oldfield/Barton Booth versions of the play shared emphases that distinguish them from the Restoration productions; however, new cultural factors feeding into the Booth and Oldfield performances further transformed All for Love's original focus on civic duty. The essay looks finally at late-eighteenth-century renditions of the play, arguing that its significance then derived from the taste for spectacle and pageantry that went hand-in-hand with larger theaters. The intention here is not to define the play's meaning for any of these performances, nor is it to trace the development of the play's impact on audiences over the period. It is rather to highlight the possibilities of meaning given the theatrical and cultural variables at a given moment, and to demonstrate what qualities ensured durability on the eighteenth-century stage.

Paradoxically, given its adaptability over the century, All For Love was, as much as other plays of its period, the product of a particular cultural moment. Beginning with, if not before, John Dennis and his complaint about its immorality (cited above), numerous critics have shown the various ways in which it is an artifact of the court of Charles II. The extent to which this is true explains its remarkable survival. Despite his famous claim that this was the only play he wrote for himself, Dryden wrote into it the paradoxes of the theatrical and political stages, which, as Backscheider has shown so convincingly, were inextricably intertwined. (16) As he confronted, consciously or not, the cultural dilemmas of the ...