Week 4: Propaganda, Power, and the Theatre: Dryden, Marriage A-la-Mode

(perf. 1671/2, pub. 1673)

This is our first foray into the world of Restoration theatre, where (at least in the early 1670s) Charles II’s
reign was being supported and consolidated, and, shockingly(!), women played women for the first time.
Although we are going to move onto looking at more subversive and critical Restoration comedies as we
move through the module, we are going to begin by looking at a tragicomedy that deals with some big ideas
about kingship and rebellion, as well as love and loyalty. As well as these more serious themes, however, the
play gives us a more satirical ‘low’ plot, which seeks to explore the institution of marriage and how it sits
with ‘fashionable’ behaviour. In class we will think about how far the play works as a piece of pro-monarchy
propaganda (particularly how it responds to the recent past), the importance of the genre of tragicomedy,
what is being celebrated and/or criticised by the play (including whether it is ever acceptable to break vows),
and what exactly is being said about gender relations and the freedom of women. By the end of the session
we will have a clearer sense of how the stage could be utilised to uphold but also examine prevailing
ideologies.

Set reading:

- Dryden, Marriage A-la-Mode

- To think about the genre of tragicomedy, dip into Canfield, ‘The Ideology of Tragicomedy’ (PDF
available on the KLE), and chapter on ‘Tragicomedy’ from the Cambridge Companion to English
Restoration Theatre (ed. Deborah Payne Fisk) – library e-book (but long quotation below).

Study questions:

Group 3: In this period (the early 1670s) why might Dryden have found the genre of tragicomedy
important/useful? How can the play be read politically? (see Canfield article PDF on the KLE and
long quotation from the online Cambridge Companion below)

Whatever the precise limits, tragicomedy was a popular and thriving genre during the Restoration,
particularly in the period 1660-1671, when most of it was either written or produced

Reflects and reaffirm an aristocratic ideology. It does not, however, do so simplistically. It focuses on
the theme of constancy in order to test that ideology's most necessary cement in the fires of irony and
the forces of dialectic. Especially, sexual constancy

Religious play? Moral dilemma and focus on fidelity

For these agreements are certainly abetted by the discovery on Palamede's part that he really does
like his fiancee and on Rhodophil's part that he really must still love his wife if he is jealous of her.
Doralice employs again apparently mock religious language to help reestablish those fundamental
bonds of society when she responds to her husband's doubts about her chastity

Pamela is no beleaguered princess or witty lady but a servant girl rewarded with admission into the
aristocracy, her meriting of which is attested not so much by her chastity as by her ability to entertain
guest

Amalthea, whose love for Leonidas is unrequited but who nevertheless summons aid for him at the
crucial moment. Retiring to a nunnery at the end and sublimating her love upward to a god

Group 4: Can you see any thematic links between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ plots? What do you think the
effect on the audience might have been seeing these two plots side by side?
 Group 1: To what does the title of the play refer? What does it mean? What is the play inviting us to
be critical of?

Group 2: How do you think audiences were meant to react to Palmyra’s rigidly obedient behaviour to
her tyrant father? See this quotation from a conduct manual for married women, William Whately’s
A Bride Bush (1617, but reprinted) to help you think about this:

‘In whatsoever thing obeying of [her husband/father] does not disobey God, she must obey:
and if not in all things, it were as good in nothing. It is a thankless service if not general. To
yield alone in things that please herself, is not to obey him but her own affections. The trial of
obedience is when it crosses her desires.’

(William Whately, A Bride Bush (1617, but reprinted) – text reprinted in Aughterson,
Renaissance Woman, pp. 30-34).

Everyone: How do we read the endings of both plots?

From the chapter on ‘Tragicomedy’ in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (2012):

The 'serious' plays of this era are all variations of tragicomedy. The Restoration playwrights needed
tragicomedy to prop up the Restoration. The reopening of the theatres reverberated as an unmitigated
victory yell for the Royalists, and the playwrights embedded the uneasy monarchical myth into the
very structure of the new tragicomedies. During the first decade, two evanescent forms of
tragicomedy developed, flourished, and disappeared. Both forms are split with parallel, independent
plots. The first, divided tragicomedy, splits abruptly and distinctly into upper and lower plots. In
these equally dominant plots, the characters from one plot seldom if ever communicate with those in
the other plot. Besides achieving unique theatrical effects, the dichotomized plots also made a subtle
psychological and political comment. In the heroic plot, the playwrights recalled the troubled days of
1640-60 at the same time that they distanced them by the reassuring low plot which mimicked the
everyday life of Charles II's court. The new form culminated in Dryden's Marriage A-la-Mode.

Like a Rorschach test, early Restoration drama tells us much about the emotional history of the Civil
War and Interregnum years. Tragicomedy lies at the center of Restoration consciousness. Historians
know little of what the survivors of civil war, regicide, and restoration felt and thought, but if we
examine these tragicomedies, we clarify much of what has remained mysterious about the mental
and emotional habits of Restoration Englishmen. The new playwrights remembered the time, in the
words of Hedelin's 1684 translator: 'when we were Embroiled in civilWars [sic] here in England ...
the Whole Kingdom was become the Stage of real Tragedies.' (35) Their mentality contained one
major story: in a frenzy of malice, the villainous Oliver Cromwell murdered the holy martyr Charles
I, but Providence intervened to bring back his son. No matter how tragic the days after 1642 and
1649, in the end the King came into his own again. This tragicomic lesson is at the base of
Restoration tragicomedy - and except for formal comedies, all Restoration plays are tragicomedies.
The very nature of tragicomedy made the genre suitable for marketing a restored king with a
decapitated father. The playwrights used tragicomedy as a political tool for reinstating the Stuarts.
Tragicomedy prevailed in part as a compliment to the king, reassuring him that all the world rejoiced
in his return. Teetering between tragedy and comedy, Restoration England was never secure about
the happy ending. The playwrights rewrote tragedies into tragicomedies, always in a tremor of
suspense, wondering if the happy ending would continue, hoping that the king would stay on his
throne. Their primary organizing principle was the need for a happy ending, no matter what the cost
to the art form. The playwrights assured the king of unfeigned devotion to the new regime - the new
ending to regicide is restoration, tragedy becomes tragicomedy. The very structure of the plays
allowed them to be readily used for political propaganda. Playwrights deliberately set up a state of
anxiety whose resolution reinforced the established regime and confirmed the divine right of the
Stuarts.