Vol. 23 No. 1 · 4 January 2001
pages 29-32 | 6325 words
Unwritten Masterpiece
Barbara Everett
Dryden of course neither wrote nor adapted a Hamlet. But sometimes negatives, or questions, can say as much as positives. And Dryden is perhaps an odder, a more involved figure than might be surmised from his enormous productivity – from his energy, his directness, his mass and variety of achievement. This first of our great professional poets may have understood very fully the oxymoron in that phrase, ‘professional poet’: may have known, even beyond the withdrawals of his own temperament, how many silences went into being so formidably articulate. Biographers don’t forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 2 · 25 January 2001
From John Thompson
The record of production rediscovery, over the last fifteen years, of plays that had seemed unplayable suggests that, despite Barbara Everett's doubts (LRB, 4 January), we won't know whether Dryden's plays might work on stage until they are performed. Aureng-Zebe would be the obvious first choice and I confess myself completely baffled as to why nobody attempts it; its rhymes were once the reason, but we have become used to clever rhymed translations of plays from other languages, so it's probably only a matter of time.
Further to the Hamlet core of Everett's argument, a striking aspect of Dryden's early plays is their relentlessly Oedipal theme, their obsession with ferocious fathers who are forever interfering with their splendid sons' loves. This is the other way round from Hamlet, at least from the Freud-Jones Hamlet: it is as though Claudius, or for that matter a still-alive Old Hamlet, were to try to exercise their fatherly/ kingly 'rights' to possess Ophelia. The central irony of Dryden's move from the heroic drama to Absalom and Achitophel is that real-life politics in Britain suddenly did become a matter of a rebellion of a son (the illegitimate Duke of Monmouth) against a father (Charles II, quite a man for the ladies, as Monmouth's own existence testified). Dryden now goes over to the father's side, brilliantly so, while finding another father-figure to excoriate in Achitophel (the Earl of Shaftsbury), who may be seen as a version of Claudius if we view the poem through a Hamlet optic.
John Thompson
London SW13
