1) Many plays
have scenes that provide initial information. In Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, this scene is at act 1.280-345. Comment on
anything that’s not clear either from this situation, or from the dramatic
revelations and declarations occurring a bit later, at 1.370-442. What do we
know by the end of act 1 … or what seems unclear here?
or
2) Melantha
seems to be quite a character. I haven’t ever seen this play performed, but I
bet she’s a scene-stealer. What do you think of her initially?
or
3) Comment on
the last lines of act 2 (439-535), and especially on Leonidas’s last lines,
including the spider metaphor.
or
4) Discuss another part of today’s reading that
seems to be in need of exploration, elucidation, or comment.
By the end of act 1, the play has already introduced a huge mess of plots, characters, and intrigues which are difficult to wrap one’s mind around. There seem to be at least two, if not three plots running in parallel. First, there’s the mess of love plots – the newcomer, about to be married, falls instantly in love with a lady, who is married. It turns out, she is married to the newcomer’s friend, who has a mistress who hangs out with the princess. Then there is the king, who is a usurper, and he has a sort of adopted son and daughter. He discovers his long lost son – and a girl who looks like she could be his long lost daughter (theoretically – they don’t know the gender of the long lost child). So there is a scene of reuniting, and then jealousy gets involved – the adopted and long lost sons don’t get along. And finally, it seems that the newly discovered boy and girl are a couple, but it’s unclear.
ReplyDeleteIn a way that’s far less jarring than Oroonoko, this play seems to be combining two different sorts of plays in one. The marriage comedy plot is pretty seamlessly combined with the dramatic reuniting plot (meaning, the royal intrigue part), but it’s still strange to have two different rather than complementary plots running side by side. Perhaps later in the play they will become more enmeshed. This combination also has the interesting choice of placing a comedy in a noble setting instead of a mundane, city setting. The intrigue of court meshes well with the knotting up of a comedy, but usually noble settings are reserved for tragedy.
Palmede is a real winner: "but to be shut up in a bed with her, like two cocks in a pit, humanity cannot support it. I must kiss all night in my own defence, and hold her down, like a boy at cuffs, and give her the rising blow every time she begins to speak." Now, I understand you're smitten with that other woman--you know, the one you've spent as much time with as your betrothed, Palmede--but, come on, that language is so uncalled for. Also, are you the daftest man to have ever lived? Rodophil tells you that he's super into some gorgeous but intolerable woman, and then you meet your fiancé, who you describe in the same way, and then watch as she goes off to meet Rodophil and you don't even imagine that the women are one and the same? Seriously, man? Get it together. "It is pretty odd that my mistress should so resemble his." Yes, it is revealed to the men soon after that they've made such a mistake, but it's pretty funny that it isn't immediately, instantaneously clear to Palamede. Goodness gracious, we are one act into this business and the play is already one of the most ridiculously convoluted entanglements we've read. Interestingly, the thing at the heart of this hyper-active confusion of lovers is that Palamede and Rhodophil deeply believe it is their natural right to have a harem of women for their pleasure. The rest of the mess is borne of that twisted conception of the male-female relationship. It's too early to tell, but it seems that Dryden may be critiquing this thought process and behavior? Is he suggesting that men ought not think of their relationships with women as a drunken game of Jenga, moving too many pieces around simultaneously so that the whole darn house comes crashing down. "For, since all women have their faults and imperfections, it is fit that one of them should help out the other." -- this has to be one of the most cuttingly painful lines for a modern woman to read; it is so callous, so unfeeling, so focused on the masculine pleasuring of his hormonal desires to the absence of any consideration of women as a Person. It is precisely that the line is seemingly somewhat innocuous on the face of it that it is so sharp; surely, one says, there are far worse lines about women in early modern literature. Well, yes, but it is a comment like this, a statement about how this man thinks about the structure of his life, that is the worst. "the benefit of our variety would be theirs," says Rhodophil. That's a really difficult statement to convince a woman of today.
ReplyDeleteMy initial opinion of Melantha is that she is a handful. From the moment she meets her future husband she begins rattling off instructions to him of what their marriage will be. She cuts him off every time he tries to speak. Dryden is probably over exaggerating her character to make her the example of the tyrannical wife. She epitomizes why the male characters are so repulsed by the notion of marriage. Melantha is portrayed as a caricature. She is an obsessively talkative social climbing, flighty, authoritarian woman (who clearly wears the pants in the relationship) and really the heart of the commedy (in my oppinion). Although Rhodophil claims that she is his mistress, she barely acknowledges his existence in the first half of the play. In fact she seems equally disinterested in her future husband as well. In general she seems indifferent to the men. Her attention centers around royalty and gossip.
ReplyDeleteSomething that I found particularly comedic is the way that the men are so adamant that marriage is a terrible institution which only serves to make life miserable and destroys any passion that may have once existed in a romantic relationship, Yet simultaneously they are hopeless romantics, specifically Palamede. He declares his love for Doralice, within moments of making her acquaintance. When he meets Doralice, he converses with her for maybe a minute before declaring, "after this, if I should not declare myself most passionately in love with you, I should have less wit than yet you think I have." I think Palmede is confusing feelings of lust for feelings of love, I don't believe that he actually understands the meaning of the word since he throws it out at a woman he has just met, essentially a stranger. Rhodolphi, on the other hand, Another hopelessly romantic character is Leonidas, his devotion to Palmyra is evident at the end of Act II. Palmyra and Leonidas' relationship seems to be the only one in which the feelings are mutual and genuine.
Once again, I was struck by how different this play was from anything I had previously read, although to be honest I think by now my shock says more about me, than it does about the play (there’s a little self-deprecating humor for you there, something I have yet to see in any of these plays, mostly full of self-aggrandizing characters)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this one was complicated, which is to be suspected. It employed both means of confusing a modern audience, multiple plots, and multiple literary styles. It also seems to throw any audience off, because the usual propriety expected in a noble house is absent from the start. The bawdiness is introduced by a song sung by Doralice, which attracts the attention of Palamede and the two arrange to meet. And then, Doalice’s husband reveals that he is unhappy in his marriage and so we now have four people who’s plots involve marriage (in a play called Marriage ala Mode? I did not see that coming Dryden) When I was looking up the text of the play I can across a series of paintings by William Hogarth in 1743-45, in which he portrayed an arranged marriage (one of which is the cover of our book). This play and these painting both portray marriage as shackles to true love and freedom, a concept that would be most significant to nobility. It may seem interesting that the subjects of this play are upper-class, and not city-folk, but it is them, who have the hardest time with marriage, because they almost never marry for love. Perhaps, that is where this play will lead? To a redemption of the those bound by an arranged marriage, whose only means of escaping their golden manacles, is to get…well plastered.
Link to one of the paintings:
http://silverandexact.com/2012/04/11/marriage-a-la-mode-2-the-tete-a-tete-william-hogarth-1745/