Artful Arrangement

I have another blog online that I had began to write when I was at the library because my computer was driving me nuts and I had to take it in to get it fixed. So I thought I’d be there all day slaving away to the symphony of flu like symptoms that you always seem to hear in public places at this time of year, but to my good fortune I'm already back home listening to my own music, which thankfully has a better arrangement.

If I were to choose with of the plays I liked more in the story of Antony and Cleopatra I’d have to say that I prefer Dryden’s version to Shakespeare’s. First of all I find it difficult to read Shakespeare because he’s always using all these terms that I can understand. He’s full of these crazy phrases that seem to be slang and he’s so fond of word play that most times I think that he’s only playing with himself. If there’s a gleam of any pleasure to be derived from ‘We would so, and then go a-batfowling’ (Shakespeare, The Tempest, Line 178) it is more Shakespeare’s than mine. Two weeks ago I had to read the Tempest and Hamlet, over the course of a couple of days and I spent more time flipping back and forth through the index of words and the lines of the play that my reading was slowed down to a snails pace. Where is the pleasure in that? I even found Shakespeare harder to follow that Sir Phillip Sidney, which is saying a lot. Dryden though, not so difficult to follow, I found that the play was a good read and at some points I found myself surprised by the turn of events. For instance when Octavia comes to play the honour card against Antony. Some sort of noise escaped my throat, which I can only hope to others was a manly version of a gasp.

Dryden’s play sticks closer to the Unities of time, place and action than Shakespeare and at this point in my appreciation of literature I think it packs a better punch. It’s tighter probably because it has to be. The unities impose more restrictions on the writer but at the same time require the writer make more artful use his skill in delivering something that is just as strong playing at affecting the audience. I think Sidney does the same type of thing when he uses a variety of rhetorical devices, well known to people of his age, to highlight the combination of his skill and known device. The five acts of All for Love while observing unity also display it’s own unique unity. A cohesiveness that makes each of the emotional turns that Antony suffers through interesting and engaging.

It seems that Dryden owes a lot to the thoughts of Horace and Aristotle when it comes to the arrangement of All for Love and he comes off the better for the attempt in my eyes. To quote someone that Dryden seems to love to quote, Horace, (Ars Poetica) Dryden creates a play ‘so deftly fashioned out of familiar material that anybody might hope to emulate the feat, yet for all his efforts sweat and labour in vain. Such is the power of arrangement.’