Meanings of All for Love, 1677-1813.

The ongoing emphasis in literary studies on the work of literature as cultural artifact, or as one in anumber of "texts," literary and otherwise, that derive meaning only from their interdependence, hashad surprisingly little impact on Restoration and eighteenth-century theater studies, particularly thediscussion 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'smeaning, especially in a theater world that constantly evolves, as this one did. Yet, whether locatedin aesthetics, in political or social issues, or even in the circumstances or personalities around whicha 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 eighteenthcentury: the extent to which audiences dictated the content and mood of plays, and the extent towhich audiences, theaters, and new plays differed from each other. In prologue after prologue aswell as in critical commentaries, playwrights and theater connoisseurs lament that the tastes ofaudiences--on which a play's success depended--debase the fare proffered. Such objections (and thesheer number of them) point to the subordination of the playwright's aesthetic concerns to audienceexpectations about a play. (l) This raises interesting questions about those plays that had anylongevity during this period but that do not have a readily apprehensible universality of the kindgenerally attributed to, say, Shakespearian drama. If, as they did, audience demands kept pace withthe rapidly changing political and cultural milieus and theater personnel and atmospheres, then inorder to appeal to these ever-changing demands the durable plays of this period must be endowedwith 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 theeighteenth-century stage is one that in fact kept a Shakespearian play from the boards throughoutthe 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 thefutility of looking to Shakespeare for the key to All for Love, leaving critics still pondering the reasonfor the endurance of this starkly neoclassical play--one formal to a degree that even Dryden himselfexpressed nervousness about. (3) The critical dilemma has been confounded by the doggedlytraditional approach, however: attention has focused not on those qualities that allowed it to survivechameleon stages and fickle audiences from the Restoration to the Regency, but on uncovering aparticular moral, aesthetic, historical, or political meaning. (4) The red herring was perhaps thrownout by Dryden himself: the "excellency of the Moral" promised in the preface (10). Pursuit of thismoral, or at least of some pinpointable meaning that makes sense of it, has led to titles like "TheSignificance of All For Love" (1970) and to assurances that "the value system of the play" lies in acircumscribed historical context (2000). (5) The result of such searches for a single encompassingmeaning is that the only consistency amongst the criticism of All for Love is, as Harry Solomonnotes, its inconsistency. (6)

The play's elusiveness is itself, however, the key to its durability. In light of its stage history, All ForLove clearly has an openness and flexibility that, even as they have remained resistant to criticalanalysis, allowed the play to adapt to quite different theaters and audience needs. It was able toplease audiences of the 1670s and 1680s who were directed in their responses by Charles II, hislibertine courtiers, and the political and philosophical issues that riveted the Restoration. In the firstpart of the eighteenth century, it was equally able to attract more finicky audiences who loved tosympathize 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 thepreferred fare was spectacle and the sense of intimacy between audience and actors that the earlierperiod had enjoyed was lost due to the physical nature of the playhouses. For each of these eras ofproduction All For Love's significance simply cannot have been the same. Nor, clearly, was its appealsimilar from one dramatic season to another, as it catered to ever-changing moral tastes as well asto different social ranks. In the early eighteenth century, John Dennis saw All For Love as part of thelibertinism of the former age: "Certainly never could the Design of an Author square more exactlywith the Design of White-Hall, at the time when it was written, which was by debauching the Peopleabsolutely to enslave them." (7) The aristocratic women of the second and third decades of theeighteenth century most certainly were not offended by the play's moral content (as they were byother Restoration plays), however, for it was then frequently acted "At the Desire of several Ladiesof Quality" and even "By Their Royal Highness's Command." (8) At the same time, the various benefitperformances for actors and actresses, who relied upon All For Love to fill up a playhouse, aretestimony to its undiminished popular appeal. This is not to say that it was a fallback for theatercompanies; David Vieth has counted 123 performances from 1700 to 1800, and several LondonStage entries note that it had not been performed for a number of years. (9) Yet, over a 150-yearperiod of major and minor evolutions of the London stage, Dryden's neoclassical play was a staple ina 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 aholistic approach. All for Love's significance to the audience is located primarily in the moment ofproduction, and the relationship between the play and the world to which it is addressed during anygiven performance depends upon a number of complex elements. This fact poses, of course, thedifficulty, indeed the "impossibility" as Paula Backscheider has observed, of "reconstructing a pastevent (performance), of determining what appealed to a long-dead audience (what needs and desireswere met, what specifically triggered strong responses), and of articulating the complex relationshipbetween 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 offstagepersonalities, and critics generally agree that the soul of drama from the Restoration well into theeighteenth century is dynamic interaction between audience and players. Robert D. Hume's TheLondon Theatre World long ago pointed out how the physical nature itself of the playhousesdemanded a close audience/actor relationship, while Lisa Freeman's recent argument about culturalidentity and theatricality pivots on the absence in the theater of "a 'fourth wall' that could create thedouble illusion of separation and transparency between spectacle and spectator." (12) KristinaStraub has also argued convincingly that Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences wereaffected in their response to characters by their knowledge of the actors' private lives and personaltraits. (13) In this type of theater, actors contribute as much, if not more, to the meaning of anyperformance as the playwright does. Or, as Peter Holland puts it, to "find out how the audienceunderstood the play that they watched, a study of Thomas Betterton is as important as one of JohnDryden." (14)

The purpose of this essay, accordingly, is to consider a few different actors who played the key rolesin 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 concerninglikely audience response to the play is obviously speculation. Yet in addition to what is known aboutthe major actors who played Dryden's characters and about audience expectations of them, thereare some givens concerning certain periods of eighteenth-century life. It is clear, for example, that inyears of political turmoil, theatrical presentations of kingship or political strife were viewed ascommentary 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 thedifferences between performances, which is the main focus here, this essay draws upon what isknown, choosing the most studied dramatic periods as test cases for the probable significance of AllFor Love during these times. It begins by investigating the Restoration origins of the play, tracingthe play's versatility to self-contradictions within both drama itself and a culture that clung toaristocratic ideals even as it rejected them. It then examines two sets of productions staged in thedecades immediately before and after the turn of the century. (15) The Elizabeth Barry/ThomasBetterton and Anne Oldfield/Barton Booth versions of the play shared emphases that distinguishthem from the Restoration productions; however, new cultural factors feeding into the Booth andOldfield performances further transformed All for Love's original focus on civic duty. The essay looksfinally at late-eighteenth-century renditions of the play, arguing that its significance then derivedfrom the taste for spectacle and pageantry that went hand-in-hand with larger theaters. Theintention here is not to define the play's meaning for any of these performances, nor is it to trace thedevelopment of the play's impact on audiences over the period. It is rather to highlight thepossibilities of meaning given the theatrical and cultural variables at a given moment, and todemonstrate 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 itsperiod, the product of a particular cultural moment. Beginning with, if not before, John Dennis andhis complaint about its immorality (cited above), numerous critics have shown the various ways inwhich it is an artifact of the court of Charles II. The extent to which this is true explains itsremarkable 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 hasshown so convincingly, were inextricably intertwined. (16) As he confronted, consciously or not, thecultural dilemmas of the Restoration and considered the nature of the Drury Lane Theatre and staractors of the King's Company in the 1670s, Dryden produced a play full of such ambiguities andcontradictions that in subsequent renditions different scenes, characters, or aspects of the playcould shape, color, and bestow meaning upon it. As a result All for Love could take on whatevermood or emphases were needed for an audience.

Its flexibility stems primarily from what has been for critics one of the most significant problems ofthe play: its faulty heroic. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume only note what many others have whenthey state that the love and honor themes in All for Love and "the 'herculean' facets" of Antony'scharacter are evidence of Dryden's continued "fascination with the epic." They are also typical inremarking upon this play's "shrunken heroic," which they see as "testimony to Dryden's failingconfidence in superhuman heroes and heroic ideals." (17) Charles Hinnant focuses the problem alittle more sharply when he notes the incongruity between All For Love's domestic scenes andcharacters and the "larger-than-life scale of its legendary hero and heroine," and argues that theplay "incorporates an heroic ideal, but also inquires into the antiheroic limitations and contradictionswith which this ideal is beset." (18) In part this conflict between the distinctly heroic and thedistinctly unheroic elements of the play is a product of dramatic circumstances: when All for Lovewas first produced, the influence of Restoration heroic drama was still strong but its popularity hadpassed. Like the shift in generic tastes itself, however, the play's inconsistencies both reflect and areembedded in Restoration cultural and political turmoil. For, at the heart of the heroic is, of course,the issue of kingship and the ideologies centered in kingship. All for Love is typical of its time inaddressing anxieties over Charles II's reign, and like Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens (1677) whichprobably influenced it, (19) the play paradoxically presents for its first audiences both an ideal oftraditional, stable, patriarchal kingship and a world where authority is no longer centered in thepublic realm. This dichotomy rests on the figure of Antony, who is at once a great hero and an utterfailure as a hero.

Dryden's Antony is reminiscent of dramatic heroes of the Restoration stage, notably The RivalQueens' Alexander, yet he stands alone in embodying stark opposites at different moments of theplay. At the end of the first act, for example, Antony overcomes his passions and declares fulldedication to his role as emperor: "[M]y Soul's up in Arms / And Mans each part about me: onceagain, / That noble eagerness of fight has seiz'd me" (38). Just one act later, however, he defines hisobligations completely in terms of the private: "Faith, Honor, Virtue, all good things forbid, / That Ishould go from her, who sets my love / Above the price of Kingdoms" (54). Early in the play,Ventidius--who embodies public duty--tries to account for Antony's neglect of his kingly office:"Virtues his path; but sometimes 'tis too narrow / For his vast soul" (27). Dryden had made and wasto make similar excuses for Charles II's shortcomings in his public political poems from 1660 to1685. Despite a surface confidence and propagandistic function, poems as early as Astraea Redux(1660) and Annus Mirabilis (1667) and as late as Britannia Rediviva (1688) contain the same deeplyembedded ambivalence over monarchical authority as the play exhibits. That the poet laureate'sdubious portrayal of the monarchy he supported fed out of cultural anxieties is everywhere evidentin the period--from the currency of Filmer's Patriarcha to the elaborate pageants staged by CharlesII to fortify his power to innumerable literary works that undermine patriarchal power even as theyuphold it. (20) In presenting Antony both as an emblem of glorious kingly power and as a selfishindividual who ultimately surrenders all for a foreign mistress, then, All for Love reflects a socialorder as complicated as England's own in which kingship of an idealized past still existed and wasbelieved in, even as its demise was everywhere evident, particularly in Charles II's irresponsiblebehavior. In its emphasis on Antony both as king and as suffering individual, the play also validatesboth the public and the private realm as the controlling sphere of the individual's life.

The overall ambivalence of All for Love is intensified by its original cast, which featured the samestar actors as Lee's The Rival Queens and, significantly, William Wycherley's The Country Wife(1676). For a start, since the "attitude of the audience toward both Antony and Cleopatra is," asMichael Yots observes, "in large part, determined by its attitude toward Ventidius," Antony's identityas emperor depends as much upon the actor who plays Ventidius, the advocate of the state's all-importance, as it does upon the actor who plays Antony himself. In Restoration productions, thecrucial friendship was presented by Charles Hart and Michael Mohun. Montague Summers claimsthat the two "won particular acclaim for their portrayals of Antony and Ventidius." (21) Whether ornot they did, they were acknowledged for their onstage "noble friend" relationships. (22) In scenessuch as the following that constituted those reassuring portraits of ideal kingship, therefore,audiences must have felt convinced that Antony really was of one mind with Ventidius:

Come on, My Soldier!

Our hearts and armes are still the same: I long

Once more to meet our foes; that Thou and I,

Like Time and Death, marching before our Troops,

May taste fate to 'em ....

(38-39)

Such emphasis on the heroic and the public is simultaneously undermined, however, by the castingof Elizabeth Boutell opposite Hart as Cleopatra.

As Maximilian Novak and other critics have noted, the "Cleopatra who remarks in the fourth act

'Nature meant me / A Wife, a silly harmless, household Dove, / Fond without art, was merelyannouncing what the audience would have known from [Boutell's] appearance on stage and her firstspeech." (23) Both physically and in terms of her reputation, Boutell would have been much moreconvincing as a "household Dove" than as a majestic queen. Her stature was diminutive and, thoughpretty, she had "a Childish Look" and a "weak" voice. She "generally acted the young innocent Ladywhom all the Heroes are mad in Love with." (24) While the innocence of her typical stage charactersstarkly contrasted with her off stage one, Boutell herself cultivated her role as an object of maledesire in ways that highlight the absence of a "fourth-wall" in the Restoration theater. Throughouther career she sustained her breeches roles, one of which included her performance as MargeryPinchwife in the season before All For Love first appeared. In The Generous Enemies (1671),Boutell's character exploits her breeches part as she refers to her legs, implying that they are forsale after the show. (25) Her existence, in other words, depended upon supplying public pleasurewhether onstage or off. Lampoons provide evidence of her success in the latter; one from 1678, theyear following All for Love's debut, claimed,

Betty Bowtell is true to whom she petend

Then happy is hee whom she Chuses for freind

Shee faine would hang out widows peak for signe

But ther's noe need of Bush where there is so goodwine. (26)

Ten years later, satires were still praising her good nature, the 1688 Session of Ladyes calling her"Chestnut-man'd Boutel, whom all the Town F_ks." (27) Even if few members of Dryden's originalaudience had partaken of Boutell's offstage delights, a general sense of familiarity with the figure onthe stage would make Cleopatra's submission to her passions more convincing than her claims toregality. In these first productions, in other words, the efforts of the heroic Ventidius are thwartedby a thoroughly domestic figure, not by a stately queen. Further privileging of private passions wassurely the casting of Katherine Corey as Octavia. Like Ventidius, Octavia serves to highlight Antony'sneglect of his patriarchal duty. Played by Corey, who was much older than Boutell, physicallyunattractive, and known for her shrewish roles, however, Octavia could not have swayed audiencesympathies with her claims to free Antony from Cleopatra and all she stands for: "He was Roman, tillhe lost that name / To be a Slave in / Egypt; but I come / To free him thence" (3.1.421-23). HadRebecca Marshall played the female lead, as Dryden originally intended, the casting would still haveserved continually to subvert the plot's promotion of public duty. Though she did not share Boutell'sslight stature, Marshall did share her reputation. Whichever of the women portrayed Cleopatra, theaudience would know her (some of them intimately) as a whore, and the uneasy mixture of high andlow that constituted the performance was mirrored in the playhouse itself where the king displayedhis actress/mistresses.

Ironically, in fact, in these early productions this domestic Cleopatra is able to dominate the world ofa character shaped by an actor, who, as John Downes reports, might "Teach any King on Earth howto comport himself." (28) What makes this discrepancy between the heroic and the domestic at oncecredible and all the more unsettling for a Restoration audience is the knowledge that Charles IIhimself was perfectly capable of relinquishing all--or at least compromising his kingship andneglecting public duties--for the love of just such an actress as the notorious Boutell. Indeed theclosing scene with the princely Hart and the unprincely Boutell sitting magnificently in statetogether "As they were giving Laws to half Mankind" undoubtedly mirrored the scene in the king'sbox for those audiences graced by Charles's presence (110). The unsettling nature of All for Love asa heroic play is also intensified by the parallels between it and The Country Wife, parallels which

help domesticate it and draw it into the confusion of the Restoration here and now even as it holdsup traditions of an idealized past. In the dramatic season before All for Love was first produced,audiences had enjoyed watching Hart play against Boutell in Wycherley's play; not only wouldDryden's characters be affected by those roles in which the two actors had captivated audiences butthe emotional impact of the two plays as each reflected issues at the heart of Restoration life musthave been similar, despite Derek Hughes's claim that the two most popular Restoration genres arediametrically opposed. (29) First, the roles of the mockheroic Homer and the housewife Margery,whose breeches appearance acknowledged the actress's power over men, cannot have been vastlydifferent from those of the inadequately heroic Antony and the housewife wannabe yet mythicalseductress, Cleopatra. Second, in The Country Wife too, questions of social authority and stabilityrevolve around the antics of a figure reminiscent of the charismatic but irresponsible Charles II. Themost significant element shared by the two plays, however, is the failure of each to supply anyresolution to the problems posed. As critics' complaints about the play's faulty moral indicate, thetableau scene that closes All for Love by framing the lovers as examples for posterity depends asmuch upon dramatic conventions and the artificial transforming powers of art for its satisfaction asthe close of The Country Wife with its dance of cuckolds and disconcerting resurrection of socialorder.

The uncertainties of Charles II's reign, in other Words, manifest themselves in the uncertainties ofAll for Love, as it is shaped by the Restoration personalities of Hart and Boutell. As a result,however, the play gains a durability that enables it to last throughout the eighteenth century,outliving even Lee's popular play which became burlesque and Wycherley's which became obscene.The key lies in the play's lack of a stable value system even as it yearns for one. Its irresolutionenables it to present as equally worthy of audience attention human shortcomings and old-styleheroism connected with kingship of an idealized past, private, and public obligations, an ordinarywoman's weakness and vulnerability, and a prince's charisma. The contraries are interwoven in sucha way that each can become convincing, overshadowing its opposite, depending on the energies orinfluences operating on it at any particular moment. The problem faced by critics is the desire topinpoint an unshifting value system within a literary or political framework (for example) rather thanin the moment of production. When J. Douglas Canfield argues, for instance, that since Octavia's loveperhaps "will not endure, but Cleopatra's will" so "in the value system of the play, Cleopatra does'deserve' Antony 'more'" he does not account for the play's endurance among audiences, socialclasses, and political moments for which and in which value systems are quite different, nor for theimpact of a particular actress and her reputation and typecasting on the role of Cleopatra orOctavia. Even as Canfield proceeds to describe how the play emanates from and negotiates acomplex historical moment, he insists upon a fixed meaning. He notes that "Lee and Dryden in theseplays make the mistress more attractive than the wife, reflecting again at the moment of England'sdynastic crisis one of the aristocracy's central myths of endemic instability because it ultimatelycannot control the genealogy upon which it depends for continuity." He limits the play's significanceto a Restoration context, however, as he argues that it achieves a "socially irresponsible fantasy oftranscendence of a world too tough to govern" with the result that Dryden transforms "a feudaltransgression into the bourgeois fantasy of the private." (30) If the play's significance lies in themoment of production and the cultural circumstances feeding into and out of that moment, thenDryden's transformation of a historical or ideological transgression or transcendence of a bafflingworld is not the point. What is important is his juxtaposition and validation of both old and new asthe play works to uphold the myths of aristocratic rule while puncturing them and promoting abourgeois ideal of the private that was no longer a fantasy and that would imbue the play withmeaning in the early eighteenth century especially. Likewise, Hinnant's enquiry into the way inwhich the sentimentality deriving from unheroic actions and emotions of Cleopatra and Antonyundermine the ideal of heroic self-transcendence assumes for the play fixed moral and civic codes.All For Love's significance at different points throughout the eighteenth century, however, depends

upon its ability to exploit at one moment its potential for sentimentality, and at another, featuresembedded in its heroic underpinnings.

Following the Hart/Boutell/Corey team was the Betterton/Barry/ Bracegirdle trio. Precisely whatdramatic seasons featured All For Love starring these actors cannot be known; however, recordssuggest performances by them in the years immediately preceding and following the turn of thecentury (31)--years during which audience composition and interests retreat ever further from thoseof the Stuart era. Overwhelming evidence points to the discovery of "new leaders," as Jocelyn Powellputs it, in the "female element of society" as court influence over London society and playhousesdiminished. (32) As Robert Hume observes, in the 1680s, "'The Ladies' turn up more and more oftenin prologues and epilogues." (33) This trend continues into the eighteenth century as playwrightsfelt obliged to cater to an audience that, as Backscheider argues, is increasingly interested in worksby female writers and in women's social roles. (34) These audience-centered forces, combined withthe Elizabeth Barry/Anne Bracegirdle portrayal of Cleopatra and Octavia, point to performances ofAll For Love in which issues of civic duty and aristocratic ideology are powerfully overshadowed byemphasis on personal passions and the plight of women.

While Barry's notorious personal reputation (like Boutell's suggests the vulnerability of this nextCleopatra to the censure of those who could not separate actress from character or who (like JohnDennis) insisted upon the social implications of Antony's love, her power as an actress was sufficientto shift sympathy to Cleopatra in a way that is still felt in today's performances of Shakespeare'sAntony and Cleopatra. Barry's most remarkable skill, according to her contemporaries, was herability to move audience's passions. Colley Cibber remarks that her "[v]oice full, clear, and strong"was such "that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her: And when Distress, or Tendernesspossess'd her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody, and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity,she had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive."Of these powers she "gave the most delightful Proofs in almost all the Heroic Plays of Dryden andLee." Added to such abilities, the "presence of elevated Dignity" (35) that Cibber also attributed toBarry points to the impact on the audience of this Cleopatra's abandonment to transcendent sorrow:

My Love's a noble madness,

Which shows the cause deserv'd it. Moderate sorrow

Fits vulgar Love; and for a vulgar Man:

But I have lov'd with such transcendent passion,

I soard, at first, quite out of Reasons view,

And now am lost above it--No, I'm proud

'Tis thus: would Antony could see me now.

(39-40)

As Jocelyn Powell concludes, above all, Barry was able to "elevate the feeling above the sense"--thereason why Cibber indeed preferred her in "the nobler Love of Cleopatra, or the tempestuousJealousy of Roxana." (36) What Barry clearly gave to Dryden's Cleopatra that Boutell could not have,in other words, was a stature and a dignity; what she did for the play was to shift the emphasis awayfrom civic duty and onto private passions and individual suffering.

In this, All for Love was transformed to ensure its success as an eighteenth-century play just as anew dramatic mode became established. As Elizabeth Howe notes, Powell sees Barry as a majorforce in the general shift toward a drama that aimed to "stir [rather] than penetrate human nature."(37) Whatever the extent to which this is true, Barry's Cleopatra clearly had much the same effect asher Calista--the lead character in Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent (1703). This she-tragedyepitomizes not only the new pathos of drama but also its concern with women's plights. Its prefacepromises the audience "A melancholy tale of private woes: / No princes here lost royalty bemoan, /But you shall meet with sorrows like your own" (16-18). Indeed, despite its aristocratic characters,the destructive passions of the play are aimed not at highlighting any crisis of aristocratic ideologybut at showing "men and women as they are"--particularly women (28). (38) In her repentance,Calista (doubtless with great passion in Barry's creation) agonizes that women's "weak, imperfectnatures" make them "blind with passions" and "prone to evil" (5.1.152-53).Yet much like Cleopatrawho, again powerful in Barry's rendering, draws attention to her neglect throughout the play,Rowe's heroine censures society's treatment of women. Calista appeals directly to the women in theaudience as she cries "How hard is the Condition of our Sex, / Thro' ev'ry State of Life the Slaves ofMan?" and, as Shaun Strohmer observes, ultimately she rejects "the notion that feminine domesticitylights the path to virtue." (39)

Only against this kind of backdrop, one that highlights the interests and accustomed fare of turn-o--the-century audiences, is it possible to entertain notions about the meaning of All for Love duringthis period. That stage activity reflected new cultural imperatives is highlighted by Howe, whopoints to "other female developments: a popular sovereign, Queen Mary, ruled alone while herhusband campaigned abroad, a number of pamphlets were published extolling the rights of women,and the first English periodical conceived solely for women was produced." (40) Indeed, evidencethat Dryden's Restoration heroic play addressing civic responsibility had become part of a newcultural ethos is its incorporation into one of the first English novels by England's first professionalwoman writer. As Backscheider observes, in her portrayal of a culturally transgressive heroine inLove Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, Aphra Behn draws upon All for Love:

Evoking "One day passed by, and nothing saw but love; / Another

came, and still 'twas only love / The suns were wearied out with

looking on, / And I untired with loving" (2:285), Sylvia writes, "I

saw the day come on, and cursed its busy light, and still you cried,

one blessed minute more, before I part with all the joys of life!

And hours were minutes then, and day grew old upon us

unawares." (41)

By the mid-eighteenth century, Dryden's title itself conjured up associations of women's readingmaterial for at least one aspiring author, whose prose romance has nothing to do with the play fromwhich it steals its name: All for Love; Or the World Well Lost: A New Romance, Founded Entirely OnFiction (1762). The widespread nature of such interplay between the theater and literary worlds isdocumented by Kristina Straub, who points, among other evidence, to the way the Memoirs of PegWoffington (1760) cast "the actress in the role of a novelistic, sentimental heroine." (42) Certainly, inthe last years of the seventeenth century, the novelistic romance quality latent in All for Love isfurther exploited by the casting of Anne Bracegirdle as Octavia.

For twenty years beginning in 1689, audiences loved, in fact demanded, to see Barry andBracegirdle paired in stereotyped tragic roles. Since Barry was the older, more experienced actressand the two women were friends, Bracegirdle inevitably took the subordinate role and did notthreaten or feel threatened by Barry's seniority. (43) Audiences used to this pairing would havetherefore experienced quite differently from All for Love's first audiences Cleopatra's and Octavia'scontending claims on Antony, especially during the famous tension-filled quarrel. Octavia accusesCleopatra,

Who made him [Antony] cheap at Rome, but Cleopatra?

Who made him scorn'd abroad, but Cleopatra?

At Actium, who betrayed him? Cleopatra.

Who made his Children Orphans? and poor me

A wretched Widow? Only Cleopatra.

(70)

Her rival responds, "Yet she who loves him best is Cleopatra. / If you have suffer'd, I have suffer'dmore" (70). Played by Boutell and Corey in the 1670s, this scene doubtless reinforced the dilemmafor an audience intellectually but not emotionally behind Octavia's cause: It also doubtless verged onthe comic, thereby further highlighting the generic and moral uncertainty of those firstperformances. In Barry and Bracegirdle's moving version, however, intense pathos must haveprevailed--particularly for an audience emotionally susceptible to suffering heroines. The ascendantclaim of Barry's Cleopatra could be taken for granted as the actresses took on familiar paired roles,yet Bracegirdle's blameless reputation reinforced her character's claim.

As a play about a powerful but very human queen, All For Love was well poised, then, to meet theneeds of a world witnessing the rise of female power inside and outside the theater. Much the samecan be said of the Anne Oldfield/Barton Booth performances during and after the reign of QueenAnne, by which time sentimental drama was well established. Records of numerous performancesduring the 1720s indicate the enormous popularity of these productions until at least the dramaticseason 1727-28. In large part, the significance--and popularity--of All for Love during this period canbe attributed to Oldfield's impact on audiences and the type of role she customarily played. Yet, heretoo, the cultural ethos of the early eighteenth century must be factored into the audience'sexperience of the play during this period.

Given the prevalence of so-called "weeping" plays in these early decades of the century, if Barry wasable to invoke audience sympathy for Cleopatra's plight as an abandoned lover, then Oldfieldcinched All for Love's status as an early-eighteenth-century play. Unlike Barry, Oldfield had arespectability that transcended the social stigma/surrounding other actresses: Thomas Daviesreports that despite public knowledge of Oldfield's liaisons with the aristocrats Mainwaring andChurchill, "she was invited to the houses of women in fashion, as much distinguished forunblemished character as elevated rank." (44) Frequently during the 1720s, in fact, All for Love wasstaged "At the Desire of Several Ladies of Quality." While the phrase appears beside the records ofmany plays, it does show that the demand for Dryden's play came in part from aristocratic women.Records also show that several times during the 1720s, All for Love was performed in closeproximity to Ambrose Philips's The Distrest Mother, sometimes in the same week. (45) Oldfield's roleas Andromache in that play--a characteristic one for her both onstage and off--sheds light on the

significance of Dryden's tragedy in this decade. (46)

The apparatus surrounding Philips's play about the Greek king Pyrrhus's disastrous passion for theTrojan widow and mother, Andromache, underscores the period's dramatic imperatives. Thededication to the Duchess of Montague argues that the "principal Action and main Distress of thePlay is of such a Nature, as seems more immediately to claim the Patronage of a Lady." The prologueaccordingly invites the customary "Tears," and the epilogue addresses itself to the vulnerability of"Ladies, who protract a Lover's Pain." Throughout the play, the distress of Andromache remains thecentral focus and the audience is rewarded in its expectations of Oldfield's heroine by scenes such asthose where she confides,

Andromache will not be false to Pyrrhus;

Nor violate her sacred Love to Hector.

This Hour I'll meet the King; the holy Priest

Shall join us, and confirm our mutual Vows.

This will secure a Father to my Child.

This done, I have no further Use for Life. (47)

Having wept tears of admiration and pity for this distressed widow earlier in the week or the season,an audience will be equally prone to Oldfield's Cleopatra as she defends her position:

If you [Octavia] have suffer'd, I have suffer'd more.

For I have lost my Honour, lost my Fame,

And stain'd the glory of my Royal House,

And all to bear the branded Name of Mistress.

There wants but life, and that too I would lose

For him I love.

(70)

Oldfield's nobility and typecasting here could not but fix the focus sharply on the harshness ofwomen's lot. Her pairing with Mary Porter as Octavia can only have enhanced the strong feminineappeal of these performances. While Porter did not have the same charisma as Oldfield (making herall the more suited to the subordinate female role), her many lead roles point to her competence.(48) Most significantly, her effectiveness in passionate tragedy was such, according to HoraceWalpole, that she even surpassed Garrick. (49) The Drury Lane company embellished these eveningsof high sentiment with the glamor that audiences also lapped up, for Cibber remarks upon therichness of the costumes: "Upon the Revival of Dryden's All For Love, the Habits of that Tragedyamounted to an Expence of near Six Hundred Pounds; a Sum unheard of, for many Years before."(50)

Perhaps most significant to a consideration of All for Love's meaning at this time is the dramaticshift--also a novelistic trait--to interest in the psychology of characters that The Distrest Motherindisputably marks. (51) The play's preface declares that the "true Sublime ... rises out of nobleSentiments and strong Images of Nature." These sentiments and images of nature indeed overridethe play's perfunctory didacticism. Like All for Love, The Distrest Mother points to how detrimentalto duty private passions are, yet nowhere does any character, least of all Pyrrhus, compromisepersonal desires for public duty. Unlike Antony, whose mood swings and temper tantrums areinduced by a conscience reminding him he was once a great emperor and soldier, Pyrrhus, equallyaware that his "disorder'd Soul / Wavers between th'Extremes of Love and Rage," barely glances atthe national consequences of his all-consuming passion. (52) Despite pressure from the Greeks torelinquish the Trojan widow and marry Menelaus's daughter Hermione, Pyrrhus's attempts to winover Andromache involve a repudiation of his Greekness: "I'll free your Son; I'll be a Father to him: /Myself will teach him to avenge the Trojans" (14). When he does recognize his role as a king ("Nor,"he storms, "will I endanger / My Realms to pleasure an ungrateful Woman"), he speaks only out ofanger, and his resolve folds the moment Andromache indicates she will marry him.

Philips's notable disregard for national heroism is part of a new cultural ethos; as Harriet Guest andJohn Barrell observe of the early eighteenth century, "heroes of epic were now unimaginable, for theessential condition of epic heroism was that the hero should somehow represent, within himself, allthe members of his society. But the proliferation of interests and occupational identities within acommercial society meant that no individual could now fulfill that representative task." (53) Theinterest in characters' psychological states that replaced interest in national heroism is evidentthroughout the play--in Orestes' and Andromache's agonized deliberations as well as in Pyrrhus'sjealous ravings. Viewed from within this context, Antony's wavering in All for Love becomessignificant for its portrayal of a mind in pain, not for the love/duty dilemma that critics have focusedon.

Further reinforcing private passions as the focus of the evening during a handful of the Oldfieldproductions of All for Love is Colley Cibber's afterpiece Myrtillo: A Pastoral Interlude. (54) Thispiece opens with Laura lamenting,

LOVE! With what fantastick Sway

Thou mak'st poor Mortal Hearts Obey!

I Love, and am Belov'd again,

Yet treat my Lover with Disdain.

(7)

Myrtillo responds,

Tho' Pursuing

Is my Ruine,

'Tis my Fate to love her:

Reason no Relief can raise me....

(9)

In universalizing and providing another example of those fateful passions that have just "ruined"Antony and Cleopatra, Myrtillo not only further diminishes any blame that a theatergoer mightassign to Dryden's characters, but it suggests that the lovers' follies might well be the audience'sown. Having twice seen in one evening's entertainment the all-consuming power of love, audiencesperhaps left the theater concluding with Myrtillo and Laura that "[t]he proof of love / Is finding joy inPain" (12). (55)

The meaning that All for Love took on for audiences whose sympathies lay with the private individualis also indicated in the similarity of its language of mercantilism and fortune to that which pervadesliterary culture in the first half of the century. The instability of the world in which theseOldfield/Booth performances ran is highlighted by Richard Steele's devotion of seven issues of hisThe Theatre 1720 to the South Sea speculation. The general nervousness is most apparent in hiscomments in No. 23 (Saturday, 19 March 1720): "Since I have known the World ... I have notthought the Nation in so imminent Danger, as I think it at present, from the applauded Project ... ofputting the Funds for discharge of the publick Debts, into the Care and Management of the Directorsof the South-Sea." (56) That many theatergoers were deeply involved in these affairs is suggested byJohn Dennis's 1702 observation on the people swelling audiences in the eighteenth century: "A greatmany younger Brothers, Gentlemen born, who have been kept at home, by reason of the pressure ofthe Taxes. Several People, who made their Fortunes in the late War; and who from a state ofobscurity, and perhaps of misery, have risen to a condition of distinction and plenty." (57) Certainly,the play's use of the language of a world that spins on a shilling increases during these decades ofEngland's mercantile growth and endless continental wars. Philips's selfish hero Pyrrhus is typical inhis description of the precariousness of love:

See the many Dangers I have pass'd.

The Merchant thus, in dreadful Tempests tost,

Thrown by the Waves on some unlook'd for Coast;

Oft turns, and sees, with a delighted Eye,

Midst Rocks and Shelves the broken Billows fly:

And, while the outrageous Winds the Deep deform,

Smiles on the Tumult, and enjoys the Storm.

(29)

Indeed a 1720 "Prologue intended for All for Love Reviv'd" indicates how central their money-dominated world was to the thinking of Dryden's early-eighteenth-century admirers.

The author taunts his audience, "Look on yourselves, ye gaming Race, with Scorn":

Great Dryden could your Sires surprise,

E'er Funds were given, or Stocks could fall and rise,

E'er Avarice had banish'd Love and Truth,

And with its vile Contagion seiz'd e'vn Youth;

When Vice had yet no other Fools to show,

But the well-natur'd Cully and the Beau:

'Twas All for Love the World well lost of old,

But now for Money better bought and sold. (58)

Here the reign of Charles II is portrayed as a mythical golden past that, though not earnestlyyearned for, can be contrasted with the degeneracy of a present corrupted by money. While thisprologue seems not to have been used, the play's language of fortune and money endows it withcontemporary relevance for a society acutely aware of life's precariousness. Antony's despair at thebeginning of act 5, for example, may well serve as a social wake-up call:

What shou'd I fight for now? My Queen is dead.

I was but great for her; my Pow'r, my Empire,

Were but my Merchandise to buy her love;

And conquer'd Kings, my Factors. Now she's dead,

Let Caesar take the World,--

An Empty Circle, since the Jewel's gone

Which made it worth my strife.

(101-2)

For audiences sensitized to such mercantile language, Antony here renders the play a bitingcommentary on a world where all is for sale instead of for love. Likewise, his slightly earlier self-reproach highlights the difference between the play's significance to its first audiences and itseighteenth-century counterparts. A Restoration audience seeking to reassure itself that a hero'sinterests should be the good of the state and the family is going to applaud the moral awakening ofthe Antony who laments,

My whole life

Has been a golden dream, of Love and Friendship.

But, now I wake, I'm like a Merchant, rows'd

From soft repose, to see his Vessel sinking,

And all his Wealth cast o'er.

(99)

Members of an eighteenth-century audience who are themselves victims of fortune's wheel in love,in party politics, or in the South Sea bubble, however, are more likely to feel with Antony the pain oflife's shipwrecks than to bequeath moral judgment upon him.

It is also necessary to remember that in Restoration productions, Antony's forcefulness as atraditional hero depends on his periodic allegiance with Ventidius (see above). In the eighteenthcentury, this old soldier is much more likely to be a liability to audience sympathy for Antony.Because of the many social problems created by England's endless continental wars, soldiers oftenfeatured in a questionable light on the stage. For example, in George Farquhar's The RecruitingOfficer (1706), which was frequently performed in the same week as AM For Love particularly in1722-24 (and which also starred Oldfield), all the soldiers are licentious and corrupt. Even thedashing Captain Plume, played by the charismatic Robert Wilks, is no more honorable than any ofthe others--nor more inclined to place national interests above personal ones. Likewise, inFarquhar's The Beaux Stratagem (1707), which featured with All for Love in at least the 1718-19dramatic season (and which again starred Oldfield), soldiers are mocked and the sympathy of theplay lies with those particularly vulnerable to fortune: women and younger brothers. (59) As part ofthis milieu focused on private concerns, All for Love can have little remaining significance as aheroic play in the Restoration sense.

At the end of the century, the dramatic pendulum swung back toward heroism. It was, however,heroism of a different kind, one that derived from the idealized and frequently otherworldlycharacters that pageantry generated. Again All for Love's adaptability ensured its survival in newtheatrical conditions. Full of arrested moments and stage directions demanding theatrical poses, Allfor Love brims with potential for a company not only catering to a demand for spectacle butoperating in a milieu where, as Michael Wilson and Heather McPherson have recently separatelyshown, visual and theatrical arts began to intermingle. (60) The center of the play, after all, suppliesa climax for a performance full of musical interludes and framed scenes: the stage direction reads,"At one door, Enter Cleopatra, Charmion, Iras, and Alexas, a Train of Aegyptians: at the other,Antony and Romans. The entrance on both sides is prepar'd by Musick; the Trumpets first soundingon Antony's part: then answer'd by Timbrels, &c. on Cleopatra's. Charmion and Iras hold a LaurelWreath betwixt them. A Dance of Aegyptians. After the Ceremony, Cleopatra Crowns Antony" (55).By the 1780s, this potential for spectacle undoubtedly shaped the admittedly few performances ofAll for Love, especially during those performances starring Sarah Siddons.

The key figure in what Heather McPherson has convincingly shown to be the "intersecting spheresof late-eighteenth century visual and theatrical culture" is the great tragic actress, whose portrait bySir Joshua Reynolds both rendered sublime personified tragedy as it "immortalized" Mrs. Siddonsand was the pinnacle in the achievements of that great artist. Those qualities that Siddons embodiesand so imparts to Tragedy in Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse--her "grand style" and "dignity," herunearthliness--are in fact those for which William Hazlitt praised her performances:

She raised tragedy to the skies....It was something above nature. We

can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the

fables of mythology, of the heroic and dignified mortals of elder

time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired

by the gods. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her

breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified.... To have

seen Mrs. Siddons was an event in everybody's life. (61)

These similarities between Siddons's influences on the worlds of art and theater suggest that theexperience of an audience gazing upon her in a role like that of Cleopatra might well have been thatof gazing on her in a portrait. If then, as McPherson argues, Reynolds's challenge in 1783 "was notmerely to paint Mrs. Siddons, but rather to create the definitive representation of the greatesttragedienne to grace the British stage," so the challenge for theater managers must have been tocreate the definitive tragedy in each performance starring Siddons. (62) All for Love, in whichCleopatra is tragic love personified, provides just such an opportunity. Likewise, if, as McPhersonalso says, Reynolds "successfully amalgamated celebrity portraiture and the grand manner with thedirect emotional appeal and drama of the stage and the ethos of tragedy," so the emotional appeal ofthe stage and its tragedy surely amalgamated--and drew for its energy upon--celebrity portraitureand the grand manner. (63) Naturally, then, a production of All for Love featuring a "socioculturalphenomenon and aesthetic artifact" like Siddons is going to be shaped by the images of herpermeating the culture. (64)

The structure itself of the play facilitates the consequent inevitable emphasis on the tragicexperience, in the majestic figure of Cleopatra, and on her divine love. As Margaret Lamb points out,All for Love offers much to the "slower pulse and pathetic pictures [that] suited the acting styles ofthe Kembles and the large Regency theatres (which required tableaux)." (65) The cuts made to it inthe late eighteenth century also seem designed not merely to allow room for musical interludes andafterpieces but to heighten the majesty of the play and give it the air of an ancient tale told througha series of pictures--thereby reinforcing Siddons's impact as an embodiment "to our imagination [of]the fables of mythology, of the heroic and dignified mortals of elder time." A copy taken from themanager's book at Drury Lane, probably dated 1795, excises the quarrel between Cleopatra andOctavia, an omission that obviously enhances both characters' dignity. (66) This 1795 edition alsoshowcases the play's fabular dimension. At the beginning of act 3, following the pantomime scenewhere Cleopatra crowns Antony, two speeches highlighting both characters' human vulnerability arecut. In this way, Antony's and Cleopatra's stature as mythical figures is squarely the focus of the firstdialogue in which Antony worships Cleopatra as "my brighter Venus" and she bows to him as "mygreater Mars." The human element is diminished, in other words, and the play concerns itself with asemidivine hero and heroine who exist only in mythology and aesthetics.

In 1813 bardolatry finally enabled Shakespeare to eclipse All For Love as John Philip Kemblesuccessfully staged Antony and Cleopatra: its first production since Garrick's failed attempt in 1759.By now, Dryden's and his play's reputations suffered as being "didactic, cold, and formal" under theshadow of Shakespeare's "elegant wildness." (67) Even so, All For Love's influence was not to bedenied: Kemble incorporated 1,000 lines from it into his Antony and Cleopatra. As CarolyneStringfellow observes, moreover, the main features of the eighteenth-century All For Love thatKemble most obviously drew upon were, paradoxically, its status as a "domestic tragedy" and itspresentation of a "hero and heroine of an idealized 'love and honor' conflict." In depending upon thetwo diametrically opposed features that imbued All For Love with significance in the early, middle,and late eighteenth century respectively, Kemble's Antony and Cleopatra highlights above all elsethat the durability of Dryden's play over almost 150 years of fickle audiences and constantly evolvingcultural and theatrical climates is wholly owing to its versatility. This in turn sheds light on theextent to which, in the eighteenth century especially, lines on a page of playtext intended forperformance are dependent for their meaning or significance on the cultural and theatrical forces

working upon them at the moment of production. Perhaps too, notions of universality are explodedby the inherent dynamism that enabled Dryden's restricted and restricting play to survive a centuryand a half of tumultuous change. While it is easy to assume the presence of some timeless quality ina "classic," a truly durable play must, as All for Love did, become in the hands of actors and in thewinds of theatrical change different things to different audiences at different times.

Georgia State University

NOTES

(1) Howard Weinbrot remarks, for example, "In 1701 George Farquhar makes plain what the poetshould study to understand native genius: 'The rules of English Comedy don't lie in the Compass orAristotle, or his Followers, but in the Pit, Box, and Galleries.'" See Britannia's Issue: The Rise ofBritish Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1993), 160. Ofthe innumerable prologues that complain about audience power over the playwrights, the originalprologue to George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676) is typical in the abuse it hurls at theaudience it is courting: "A muse o'th'better sort's ashamed to own ye. / Nature well-drawn and witmust now give place / To gaudy nonsense and to dull grimace." See George Etherege, The Man ofMode, ed. W. B. Carnochan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 5. Paula Backscheiderunderscores the audience's influence when she points out that "reactions of first-night audiencescould determine revisions. In an age when the name of the playwright did not appear on playbills orin newspaper advertisements, the playwright literally lost control of the text as no other category ofwriter did." See Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture inEarly Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 127.

(2) The explanatory notes to John Downes's Roscius Anglicanus claim that Dryden's contemporariesalso knew All for Love as Antony and Cleopatra. The same note remarks too that "Shakespeare'sAntony and Cleopatra was only revived once during the eighteenth century, and that for the firsttime since the Restoration, January 3rd, 1759, Garrick appeared as Antony to the Cleopatra of Mrs.Yates, but the acting was considered poor and the play was only repeated six times." See JohnDownes, Roscius Anglicanus: Or an Historical Review of the Stage, ed. Montague Summers (1708;reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1929), 133-34.

(3) Howard Weinbrot, "Alexas in All for Love: His Genealogy and Function," Studies in Philology 64(1967): 625-39. Of the play's neoclassical form, Dryden apologizes in his preface that the "Fabrick ofthe Play is regular enough, as to the inferior parts of it; and the Unities of Time, Place and Action,more exactly observ'd, than, perhaps, the English Theater requires" (The Works of John Dryden, ed.Maximillian E. Novak et al., vol. 13 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 10). Allsubsequent citations from the play are to this volume and are given by page number.

(4) Notable exceptions that focus on the text in production are Peter Holland's The Ornament ofAction: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979) and Jocelyn Powell's Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge, 1984). Neither,however, examines how the meaning of text changes from one performance season to another--theconcern of this essay. Powell even damns Dryden's play for its lack of theatricality: "All for Love hasmany beauties. It is beautifully plotted, and beautifully written.... But it remains obstinately wooden"(153). Essays that deal with the performance aspect of All for Love are Michael Yots's "Dryden's Allfor Love on the Restoration Stage," Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 16.1 (1977): 1-10 and Margaret Lamb's "All for Love and the Theatrical Arts," in The Analysis of Literary Texts:Current Trends in Methodology, ed. Randolph D. Pope (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1980): 236-43. YetYot's fine essay confines the meaning of Dryden's play to its Restoration productions, while Lamb

argues that it had the same (neoclassical) significance in performances throughout the eighteenthcentury. Judith Milhous and Robert Hume include an essay on All for Love in their ProducibleInterpretation: Eight English Plays 1675-1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,1985). Their concern, however, is with an ideal production and they do not examine how the playmeant quite different things to different audiences.

(5) Derek Hughes, "The Significance of All for Love," English Literary History 37 (1970): 540-65. J.Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy (Lexington: Universityof Kentucky Press, 2000), 71.

(6) Harry M. Solomon, "Tragic Reconciliation: An Hegelian Analysis of All For Love," Studies inPhilology 81, no. 2 (1984): 185-211.

(7) The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1939-43), 163.

(8) Ben Ross Schneider, comp., The London Stage, 1660-1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments& Afterpieces, together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment, vol. 2, bk. 2(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960-1979), 521, 642.

(9) See John Dryden, All for Love, ed. David Vieth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), xiv.The London Stage notes, "Not performed these x years" (vol. 1, bk.1, 265). This can mean, however,that a play was not performed at a particular theater, not that there was no London performanceover the period cited. The number of performances of the play by any given cast is impossible todetermine because of incomplete records. See note 15 below.

(10) The staging and failure of Garrick's attempt at Shakespeare's play is discussed by GeorgeWinchester Stone, "Garrick's Presentation of Antony and Cleopatra," Review of English Studies 13(1937): 20-38.

(11) Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early ModernEngland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xiv.

(12) Freeman also notes that David Garrick's reforms in the 1760s "ultimately paved the way for thewithdrawal of action behind the 'fourth wall' of the proscenium." See Lisa A. Freeman, Character'sTheater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2002), 7, 3. Edward A. Langhans draws upon Richard Leacroft's classicDevelopment of the English Playhouse (London, Methuen, 1973) as he discusses the "remarkableintimacy" of the Restoration and earlier eighteenth-century theaters, and shows how this was lost asthe distance between the stage and the closest audience members increased in the late part of thecentury. See Robert D. Hume, ed., The London Theatre World, 1600-1800 (Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1980), 42.

(13) The notion that the "specularization of players did not end when the player left the stage" iscentral to Kristina Straub's Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Straub also argues that the "curiosity of eighteenth-century 'fans' is not dissimilar to that of their twentieth-century counterparts. Particular players,such as West Digges and George Anne Bellamy, were more interesting to the public for the romanceof their personal lives than for what they did onstage" (12). Audience interest in the personal lives ofactors is also highlighted throughout the biographical sketches in Philip H. Highfill et al., ABiographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & other Stage

Personnel in London, 1660-1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973-1993).

(14) Peter Holland, Ornament of Action, x.

(15) It is not possible to determine in exactly how many performances or even in precisely how manyseasons any of these teams of actors presented the play. The London Stage records, for example, thefirst known performance by the Hart/Boutell cast on Wednesday, December 12, 1677; the editorsnote, however, that this was "probably not the premiere" for the attendance was "too small for thepremiere of a new work by John Dryden." Nor can we be sure if these actors continued in theperformances listed for the play in 1686 and 1694--perhaps not the only ones in these decades, justthe known ones. Two other London Stage entries for the 1690s add, moreover, that the play wasreprinted and therefore "may have been revived at this time." Recorded performances by theBetterton/Barry/Bracegirdle team are just as scanty, with a number in the first decade of theeighteenth century listed as "cast not known." At least one of these, in May 1704, was a benefitperformance for Mrs. Barry, so it is likely that she and Betterton starred as Antony and Cleopatra atthis time. Records do indicate, however, that the Booth/Oldfeld team enjoyed a long-lived success atDrury Lane early in the century. Under these actors, the play had a very good run in the 1718-19season then remained a staple for the next eight years, being performed generally at the beginning,middle, and end of each theater season. See The London Stage, 1660-1800, vol. 1, bk. 1, 265, 398,450; vol. 2, bk. 2, 67.

(16) See especially the discussion of Charles II's London in Spectacular Politics.

(17) Milhous and Hume, Producible Interpretation, 109.

(18) Charles Hinnant, "All for Love and the Heroic Ideal," Genre 16, no. 1 (1983): 57. Arthur Kirsch(for example) also comments that "the heroism of All for Love is subverted at every turn bysentimental effects which emphasize not the heroic glory of love, but its domesticity andcompassion" (quoted in Yots, "Dryden's All for Love on the Restoration Stage," 4).

(19) The influence of Lee's play on Dryden is discussed by Yots, "Dryden's All for Love," 6-7.

(20) Paula Backscheider discusses the importance of Charles II's pageantry in the first section("Charles II's London as National Theater") of her Spectacular Politics. The currency of Sir RobertFilmer's Patriarcha in Restoration England is discussed by Peter Laslett. See John Locke, TwoTreatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 32. Twooutstanding examples of writers who undermine patriarchal power even as they ultimately uphold itare Aphra Behn (e.g., The Rover, The Feigned Courtesans) and Thomas Otway (e.g., VenicePreserv'd).

(21) Quoted in Yots, "Dryden's All for Love," 7. I haven't been able to find Summers' original source.

(22) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors and Actresses, s.v. "Mohun, Michael."

(23) The Works of John Dryden, ed. Maximillian E. Novak et al., 13:377.

(24) See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, s.v. "Boutell, Elizabeth"; and Thomas Betterton, TheHistory of the English Stage from the Restauration to the Present Time, Including the Lives,Characters and Amours of the most Eminent Actors and Actresses, compiled by Edmund Curll andWilliam Oldys from the notes of T. Betterton (London, 1741), 21.

(25) Thus observes Elizabeth Howe in her The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57.

(26) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors and Actresses, s.v. "Boutell, Elizabeth."

(27) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors and Actresses, s.v. "Boutell, Elizabeth." Howe also quotesthis passage. See The First English Actresses, 35.

(28) Quoted in Yots, "Dryden's All for Love," 1.

(29) He argues that the "Carolean audience was particularly split in its personality, turning into Mr.Hyde to watch The Country-Wife and reverting to Dr. Jekyll in order to demand more and moreheroism." See Derek Hughes, English Drama 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1996),455.

(30) See J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy Lexington:University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 75.

(31) The London Stage records a court performance by Betterton, Barry, and Bracegirdle in thedramatic season 1703-04. See note 15 above.

(32) Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, 155.

(33) Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century(Clarendon: Oxford, 1976), 340.

(34) Backscheider points out that in the 1695-96 season "over one third of all new plays were bywomen or adapted from women's work." She also notes that "[i]nterest in women had never beengreater, and they had become an increasingly significant group of 'culture consumers.' Theircontemporaries saw them as an important part of the theater audience and believed that they hadbegun to have considerable influence. By that time, 'she-tragedies' and plays by men who allegedlycatered to the female audience held secure places in every season's repertoire and were even said tohave 'overrun the Nation'" (Spectacular Politics, 71-72). David Roberts looks in detail at the varietyof women who populated the theaters and at the ways in which playwrights negotiated their femalepatrons. See David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-1700 (Oxford:Clarendon, 1989).

(35) Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber: With an Historical View of the Stageduring His Own Time, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 92.

(36) The comment is that of Colley Cibber; see An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 92. It is alsoquoted in Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, 158.

(37) Howe, The First English Actresses, 108; Powell, Restoration Theatre Production, 157.

(38) Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent, ed. Malcolm Goldstein (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1969), 5.

(39) Shaun M. Strohmer, "'My Eyes Take Pleasure to Behold Thee': Spectatorship and the Mastery ofPassion in The Fair Penitent," Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 14, no. 2 (1999): 61-62.

(40) Howe, The First English Actresses, 109.

(41) Spectacular Politics, 117. Backscheider in fact sees Behn's allusion to Dryden as a "demand thatreaders judge the lovers within a context of larger civic concerns." This is only true, however, ifreaders remain focused on the political underpinnings of both the play and the novel-something thatseems unlikely at a moment when the reader's attention is focused on the heroine's extravagantpassion. Backscheider's argument also, of course, suggests that All for Love is in fact incapable ofthe kind of transformation I am arguing for it.

(42) Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects, 97. The full title of the Memoirs is Memoirs of the CelebratedMrs. Woffington, Interspersed with Several Theatrical Anecdotes; The Amours of Many Persons ofthe First Rank; and some Interesting Characters Drawn from Real Life (London, 1760).

(43) This is discussed by Howe, The First English Actresses, 156.

(44) Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London, 1784), 2:434.

(45) London Stage, vol. 2, bk. 2, 758.

(46) A contemporary of Oldfield, William Egerton, observes of her status as mother with illegitimatechildren (by the aristocratic Mainwaring and Churchill), "The Distrest Mother seemed now to be thecase of Mrs Oldfield both on, and off, the Stage" (Egerton, Faithful Memoirs of that JustlyCelebrated, and most Eminent Actress of her Time. Mrs Ann Oldfield [London, 1731], 49).

(47) Ambrose Philips, The Distrest Mother: A Tragedy, 7th ed. (London, 1734), 56-57, n. 71. JoanneLafler says that "The Distrest Mother was clearly a personal triumph" for both Booth and Oldfield(The Celebrated Mrs. Oldfield: The Life and Art of an Augustan Actress [Carbondale: SouthernIllinois University Press, 1989], 98).

(48) Lafler feels that Oldfield promoted Porter's career "at the expense of other actresses becauseshe did not regard her as a serious rival." See The Celebrated Mrs. Oldfield, 96.

(49) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, s.v. "Oldfield, Anne."

(50) Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 277.

(51) See Brean Hammond's discussion of this shift in drama and novels in his ProfessionalImaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740: 'Hackney for Bread' (Clarendon: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997), especially 120.

(52) Philips, The Distrest Mother, 15.

(53) See John Barrell and Harriet Guest, "On the Use of Contradiction: Economics and Morality inthe Eighteenth-Century Long Poem," in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, EnglishLiterature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 132.

(54) The London Stage records four performances of Myrtillo. Two other classical masques arerecorded as having followed All for Love a couple of times each in the 1720s: Diana on MountLatmos and Apollo and Daphne, or Harlequin's Metamorphosis. Most often a "Grand Dance" orsimply "Dancing" constituted the afterpiece.

(55) Colley Cibber, Myrtillo: A Pastoral Interlude as it is Performed at the Theatre Royal (London,[1715]).

(56) Richard Steele, The Theatre 1720, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 97-98.

(57) Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:293.

(58) Cited in Richard Steele, The Theatre 1720, 45-46.

(59) Shirley Strum Kenny notes how the soldiers in Farquhar's plays represent "mockery ofconventional idealized attitudes toward warfare." Kenny also argues, however, that thecharacterization of these soldiers owes a great deal to the success of a character who, she contends,does not draw laughter for his military role: Sir Harry Wildair, the lead in Farquhar's second play,The Constant Couple, or a Trip (1699). See Shirley Strum Kenny, "Farquhar, Wilks, and Wildair; orthe Metamorphosis of the 'Fine Gentlemen,'" Philological Quarterly 57, no. 1 (1978): 60, 51. Thepoint here is that Ventidius's civic function in All for Love would be weakened by the stereotypessurrounding the stage's military characters.

(60) Michael S. Wilson, "Columbine's Picturesque Passage: The Demise of Dramatic Action in theEvolution of Sublime Spectacle on the London Stage," The Eighteenth Century: Theory andInterpretation 31, no. 3 (1990): 191-210. Heather McPherson, "Picturing Tragedy: Mrs Siddons asThe Tragic Muse Revisited," Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 3 (2000): 401-30.

(61) Cited in A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, s.v. "Siddons, Sarah."

(62) McPherson, "Picturing Tragedy," 408.

(63) Ibid., 411.

(64) Heather McPherson, "Exhibition Review," Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 283.

(65) Lamb, 241.

(66) The full title of the copy is All for Love, or, The World Well Lost, A Tragedy. In Five Acts.Written by Mr. Dryden. Taken from The Manager's Book at the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane (London,1795).

(67) As Carolyne Ellison Stringfellow puts it in her discussion of this Kemble production. See"Shakespeare and Dryden in the Nineteenth Century: John Philip Kemble's Pastiche of Antony andCleopatra," Postscript 2 (1985): 50.

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