Not the Spring's mouth, nor breath of jesamin,
Nor violets' infant sweets, nor opening buds,
Are half so sweet as Alexander's breast.
Though "well-matched for a pair of quiet ones," Statira, of the two, is of milder mood.
The staging of the play must have been arduous, a battle of crows and ravens fills the air, an eagle and dragon meet and fight; the eagle and birds drop dead, the dragon flies away, and "soldiers walk off, shaking their heads," and no wonder! especially as the ghost of Philip is still walking, and a "monstrous child" is weeping blood into a silver bowl and throwing the gore over the percipients. When the jealous Roxana reaches Babylon, she is as passionate as Statira, and cries to the spectators,
Away, be gone, and give a whirlwind room!
The two queens meet with gentle words, but when their blood is up their language is on the level of the situation. Roxana is the readier with her knife; the dying Statira forgives her; Alexander dies in a delirium, with a lucid interval at the close.
Dryden and Lee worked together in "The Duke of Guise" (assassinated by order of Henri III) and in "Œdipus". The last is worth reading as an example of the taste of the time. The foundation is the "Œdipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles, from which passages are translated in blank verse. In the preface we learn that Corneille's "Œdipe" "is inferior to the original". The "Œdipus" of Lee and Dryden goes very far beyond,—and in that sense surpasses—the masterpiece of the Athenian. "All that one could gain out of Corneille was that an episode must lie, but not his way." For "custom has obtained that there must be an underplot of second persons," as, alas I there is, while the over-elaboration of the loves of Œdipus and Jocasta, "very curious and disgusting," would have seemed to Sophocles the work of Læstrygonians or some such uncouth barbarians. Jocasta murders all her children—she hangs the girls and stabs the boys, which proves that the taste of Englishmen was infinitely more brutal than that of the prehistoric framers of the original legend. Œdipus, after putting out his eyes as in the Greek, commits suicide—by jumping out of an upper floor window! The love affair of Eurydice, and the charge against her of being the murderess of Laius, are supremely absurd, while the ghost of Laius drives about in a chariot with those of three of his retainers. Even this nonsense is capped by a song about fiends who use red-hot tongs, and boiling cauldrons, and torture "with molten lead in it".
Lee and Dryden seem to have stimulated each the other's ambition to outdo the worst excesses of the most frantic Elizabethan playwrights. They knew, of course, that Œdipus, in the Attic myth, did not kill himself, like a distraught housemaid, by jumping out of a window; they knew that he lived, and that the children of Jocasta lived and furnished the materials for two noble dramas of Sophocles. But they thought that the blood could not be spread too thick.[2]
Dryden.
Though Dryden was a dramatist of the Restoration, he was so much else, was a link so strong in the golden chain of our poetry and prose, that he must be considered apart from smaller wits.
John Dryden was born in 1631, at Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire. His name is common in Teviotdale: his family was landed, and had a baronetcy: in Scotland it is not a landed name. From Westminster school Dryden went to Trinity, Cambridge, where he was known to Mr. Samuel Pepys. He entered in 1650, at 19, an age later than was usual. For some reason he did not like his University.