At the crossroads: gendered desire, political occasion, and Dryden and Lee's Oedipus.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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Let me begin with three common observations about the 1678 Oedipus of Dryden and Lee. First, more than their predecessor versions by Sophocles, Seneca, and Corneille, the Restoration playwrights emphasize the erotic nature of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and Jocasta. (1) Second, Creon is transformed from the relatively ambitionless playboy prince of Sophocles' original to the physically and morally twisted precipitator of the crisis, analogous to "the figure of Shaftesbury seen through royalist eyes and representations" (Novak, "Commentary to Oedipus" 462). (2) Third, as the previous suggests, Dryden and Lee's play, while offering no strict allegory, has relevance to contemporary events--the Popish Plot and the gathering Exclusion Crisis--not least in that, with its added subplot, their version focuses more than others on issues of legitimacy and succession. (3) My focus here is the link between the first observation--the exaggerated eroticism of the play--and the others, a link that exists since a patriarchal, monarchical society transmits its power and property through the body of a woman. That eroticism has usually been attributed to Lee's tendencies toward the sensationalistic, by contrast to Dryden's judicial and metaphysical emphases. (4) Insofar as that may be true, and I will severely qualify its applicability, I would argue that in the collaboration, especially in the depiction of Jocasta, if these are Lee's means, they nevertheless serve--in a complex way--Dryden's ends.

I

We should begin by placing the composition of Dryden and Lee's Oedipus in its historical context. Max Novak has written that in 1678 "the political theater of the Popish Plot [had] ... distracted ... theatergoers from the beauties of the legitimate stage" ("Commentary to Troilus and Cressida" 497). The Popish Plot, of course, was a series of alleged Catholic-backed plots that involved the planned assassination of Charles II by Jesuits, the installation of James on the throne, and a Catholic invasion. The Earl of Shaftesbury led the Whigs in exploiting the supposed danger by pressing for the exclusion of James from the succession and the legitimization of the Duke of Monmouth, Charles's bastard--and Protestant--son. The larger issue, of course, was a Parliamentary struggle to reverse the flow of power, to restructure both constitutional laws and historic notions of kingship, which was accomplished, finally, with the Glorious Revolution.

But Novak's term the "legitimate stage" posits a drama untainted by politics--arguably untrue of all theater, as indeed of all art. A most explicitly political work is Dryden's own Absalom and Achitophel, published in 1681during Shaftesbury's trial, the climax of the "Plot." Dryden first published it anonymously--a transparent attempt at distancing himself from his argument, but an attempt all the same. The relation of Oedipus to contemporary events is more oblique. In choosing to adapt so well known a play, Dryden and Lee could do implicitly what Dryden later did explicitly in the later political crisis, the Glorious Revolution, when he claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that his plays were not political commentaries but "plain stor[ies]" (Cleomenes 79). Dramatically, the collaborators would wait until 1683, with The Duke of Guise and its "Vindication," to make contemporary relevance more plain. Yet Oedipus does have at least broad relevance to the Popish Plot in that guilt is unexpectedly uncovered and innocence falsely accused. (It may be telling, too, that Dryden's next play, Troilus and Cressida [1679], is subtitled The Truth Found Too Late.)

Since Dryden, according to his own declaration, composed the whole design of Oedipus as well as writing Acts I and III ("Vindication" 344), it is worthwhile to review his personal involvement in contemporary events. In 1681, he claimed that he had "seen through" the Plot from the start (Winn 317). Be that as it may, as early as 1677, Dryden would have been aware and personally concerned with its developing implications. He would have followed the marriage of William of Orange to Mary, with its potential repercussions to adherents of James II, and in the dedication of All for Love he attacks Shaftesbury and Buckingham, asserts that "subverters of Governments" are no friends to the arts and equates Shaftesbury with Satan--a strategy he would return to in Absalom and Achitophel (Winn 304-05). In 1673, enemies had damned one of Dryden's plays as a "Catholic intrigue"; and in 1676 Catholic mass was said illegally only steps from Dryden's home (315). An actor who might have expected to participate in Oedipus, Matthew Medbourne, a Roman Catholic, was committed to Newgate on Titus Oates's testimony and died there in March (Novak, "Commentary to Oedipus" 444). Dryden's brother-in-law Charles, second Earl of Berkshire, who had written compromising letters to a "conspirator," fled to France in 1678 and died there in 1679 (Winn 315). Also in 1679, Dryden himself was beaten senseless with cudgels by three thugs, in all probability for a "lampoon" touching upon some members of the Opposition--which he had not even authored (325-29).

And certain specific passages in Oedipus's apparatus do indicate Dryden's orientation to the issues raised by the plot. In the prologue, for example, he urges that audiences not "pell mell to damning fall, / Like true born Brittains who ne'er think at all" and, more pointedly, warns against headlong, potentially disastrous commitment to action, like William of Orange's assault on Mons (23-26)--relevant since England was close to being drawn into a war with France and Holland, with Shaftesbury arguing strenuously for a war Charles opposed. The prologue closes with a similar caution against the "private spirit" of "Fanaticks" (30-31), that "numerous Host of dreaming Saints"(529) Dryden describes in Absalom and Achitophel (5) as joining with the Whigs in pressing for the exclusion of James. Similarly, the epilogue tells audiences, "We know not what you can desire or hope, / To please you more, but burning of a Pope" (33-34). Odai Johnson describes the Pope-Burning Pageants between 1673 and 1682 as "Whig theater [...] that sought by performative strategies to politicize the crowd as a stable subject of the Whig Party [...] a propagandized extension of the Whig party" (14). Dryden's strategy too is to camouflage politics in aesthetics, but that is a gauzy tactic when aesthetic matters are political matters and, in the 1670s, 80s, and 90s, dovetail with religious and metaphysical matters--a point to which I will return later.

II

Let us turn now to examine two of the broader analogues between politics and play: the representation of the Theban citizenry and of Creon. In Sophocles and in Seneca, the Theban chorus are almost unshakably loyal to their king. In Sophocles, at the peak of Oedipus's paranoiac rage against Creon, the Chorus only tells him "Sir, I have said before and I say again--be sure that I would have been proved a madman, bankrupt in sane council, if I should put you away [....]" (6) Even after the truth of parricide and incest is revealed, the chorus's response is more empathic than condemnatory: "To speak directly, I drew my breath / from you at the first, and so now I lull / my mouth to sleep with your name" (1221-23). In Dryden and...

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