Free English Literature Dissertations - The Adaptation Of Shakespeare Also Provided An Ideal Way Of Reviving Plays
The adaptation of Shakespeare also provided an ideal way of reviving plays with a proven degree of popularity to which to add a political subtext (largely in the shape of commentary on the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis), with the provision of a degree of protection from repercussions from opposing factions; Dryden’s own use of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida has been seen ‘as a Trojan Horse by which to smuggle a guarded royalist polemic onto the stage’ (Dobson p.73) but he does actually blur some of the political issues of loyalty and kingship of Shakespeare's play, forced, as he feels himself to focus on the pathos of the suffering Cressida. The scenes in Agamemnon’s camp are extensively cut, although Dryden remodels the Prologue in an attempt to realign the play’s genre, claiming it as an honorary British history play, through its link with the Brut legend, relating
how Trojan valour did the Greeks excel;
Your great forefathers shall their Fame regain.
(in Scott vol. XIII Prologue l.38-39)
Dryden’s play throughout removes the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s; its regular plot may give a greater sense of closure and an ordered whole, but sacrifices some of the character complexity and motivation, substituting as it does innocence for blame and simple misunderstanding for responsibility.
Altogether more successful in its time than Troilus and Cressida was Dryden’s The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (1667), co-authored by William Davenant. The artistic motives behind the play are clear: Dryden and Davenant modernise a great deal of Shakespeare’s language and embrace the technical innovations especially musical ones of the new theatres. The Preface also shows a preoccupation with providing a degree of symmetry in ‘the Design[of] the Counterpart to Shakespear’s Plot’ (in Clark p.84 Preface) through the quartet of lovers, and whilst averring a ‘high veneration’ (ibid. p.83) for Shakespeare, places the play in a tradition of adapting Shakespeare’s plays stretching (tenuously) back to John Fletcher. The play has, however, been censured by critics such as Hazleton Spencer as mere ‘genteel smut’ (in Dobson p.44), and indeed it does seem to make much play with the novelty of the cross-dressed actress ‘forc’dto present a boy’ (in Clark p.87 Prologue l.29-30), thereby actually drawing their attention to the fact, since anyone wanting proof of her true sex must join her ‘abed’ (ibid. p.88 l.38). This aside, Dryden and Davenant’s play seems to aim at something more than other adaptations such as Thomas Duffett’s straightforward burlesque The Mock-Tempest (1674).
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