Originally written for the class British Literary & Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. For further details about this, contact me.

The complex and somewhat idiosyncratic tragedies of John Dryden’s All for Love and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko appear to fall outside of the mainstream of their respective genres. All for Love is not a perfect tragedy with an unambiguous and compelling moral, andOroonoko is probably far from the first example of a Restoration tragedy—or tragicomedy—that comes to mind. Claiming that All for Love is not an effective tragedy because its lovers seem to be praised rather than punished[1] or that Oroonoko’s split-plot structure “has left most critics with a feeling of acute schizophrenia” (Hume, 285), is to make one kind of judgment about the plays, which is not to say there cannot be others. I believe All for Love is a tragedy, but not a formalist, over-moralizing tragedy in which the heroes are so much grander than ordinary figures their tragic flaws and fall are too incredible to be anything but allegories. Dryden’s heroes are both moralistic and realistic. And I believe Oroonoko can stand on its own as a different, adapted version of Behn’s novel, not necessarily as a lesser version, but as its own story, told in its own way. The characters remain true and honorable within the limits of the worlds created by the playwrights; though it means their deaths, they have followed the inevitable course all along and do not regret their actions, merely lament that their societies and fates in life are such are such that they must die to remain eternally together. Though we may see parallels to our own world, those parallels are not necessary for understanding the plays for their own sake.

Dryden also seemed to love the idea of the “moral” in a tragedy, but both All for Love and Oroonoko leave us with an incomplete or possibly vaguely drawn moral. All for Love seems to endorse “passionate love, though earlier in the play…passionate love is condemned as unreasonable and therefore immoral” (Emerson et al., 87), leaving us with a potentially ambiguous conclusion. Mapping the contemporary morality of sexual transgressions versus virtuous marriage (especially the modern morality of such acts) onto the plays invariably leads to more ambiguity. Both Dryden and Southerne, through their actors, do not completely pass judgment on their characters by the end—or least not the judgment or moral we might have been expecting, in either case—and we are left attempting to decide what the “moral” and “intention” of the work might have been. Southerne’s Oroonoko does not necessarily promote or attack slavery[2], nor is it an obvious royalist text (at least not as directly as Behn’s[3]), but it leaves us with a discomforting feeling, either because of the upsetting nature of the tragedy’s ending, or the semi-satirical nature of the ending of the comedic plot in conjunction with the ending of the tragic plot. Additionally, examining supposed authorial intent and its achievement in the text directs attention away from the morals and structures of the world created by the text itself.[4] Neither play seems to espouse as its moral or intent anything clearly obvious or comforting as we might expect, rather giving us more realistic (and by extension, possibly unsettling or different) conclusions.

The power in Dryden’s All for Love is not that the characters are more than human—it is that they are human, flawed and emotional, and often too passionate for pure reason to rule them. They are not allegorical statues of humans, but real people, and within the reality of those emotions of the play lay its power. Dryden heightens emotion and pulls us along his tragic journey in a way that is not lesser than that of Shakespeare, merely different.[5] Southerne’s Oroonoko similarly is not a perfect tragedy, nor do I believe it sets out to be; it is an updated version of a classical tragedy set in a romantic location but filled with familiar characters and themes to make it a tragedy for its contemporary audience, using ancient elements to give tell a very modern and realistic story. Its comic subplot does not undermine its tragedy in so far that it polarizes the tragedy, the contrast between the plots does not demean the main plot but uses the familiarity of the comic plot as a means with which to draw the audience into the romantic tragedy of the main plot. Like the narrator of Behn’s novelOroonoko, the Welldon sisters’ plot serves as a successful device—not a distracting addition—adding, by contrast, to the tone of the tragic main plot of the play.

In All for Love, Dryden’s Antony, like Shakespeare’s, “is a tragic hero in Aristotle’s vocabulary” and Cleopatra is “a fully tragic figure” (Barnet, 332). Yet, rather than condemn his main characters in the play’s, he instead defends “the role of imagination in poetic expression” (King, 269) with his re-telling; not attempting to copy Shakespeare or his predecessors, simply telling a different story. This story is one in which “Dryden has transformed a feudal transgression [into] the bourgeois fantasy of the private” by showing “the last of the aristocratic heroes, revealed for all his literal magnanimity to be no moral superior, [yielding] on the stage of history to the new man of dispassionate bourgeois efficiency” (Canfield, 75). Given the atmosphere 1677 London, Dryden seemingly made a smart and realistic choice in not attempting to punish Antony for his transgressions and adultery, but to demonstrate the worthiness of Cleopatra by developing their relationship as ultimately legitimate and by showing Cleopatra to be a worthier, more faithful and devoted character than Octavia, Antony’s own wife.

Cleopatra is no simple character as she would have us believe, wondering if she is “worth a tear” (II.79). In her essay, “The Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy,” Laura Brown states that Cleopatra’s function is to elicit “the pitying response” which “defines her function in the action and ultimately the significance of her and Antony’s fate,” calling the main characters “passive victims whose dramatic significance is defined by their pathetic situation rather than their aristocratic merit” (432). While Dryden’s Cleopatra is not the active, elusive character manipulating her own fate as is Shakespeare’s, neither is she completely passive, nor is she wholly a “middle class” woman. If anything she perceives her life as too complex for her desires and wishes simply to have the life of a wife to enjoy the pleasure of a husband her title and lands—and fortune—have so effectively kept her from having. And yet, despite the fact that Cleopatra has consistently “won” Antony from his wife and children, she scorns the title of mistress, the one Antony consistently gives to her. She claims that “Antony / Has taught my mind the fortune of a slave” (II.16-17) and because she cannot see herself as more than that to him, she scorns the word “respect,” saying, “How I disdain it! / Disdain myself, for loving after it!” (II.91-92). Her complex desires here reveal themselves not only through her self-pity, but through her apparent disdain also for her kingdom and earthly responsibilities. When she claims that because of the depth of love for Antony she has “refused a kingdom; / That’s a trifle: / For I could part with life, with anything / But only you” (II.463-66) she almost seems foolish, but for a woman who as a mere child “gave [Antony] love / but [was] too young to know it” (II.307-308), it can seem almost understandable. Dryden effectively sets it up that “within the value system of the play, Cleopatra does ‘deserve’ Antony ‘more’ (III.450)” (Canfield, 71). If Dryden did attempt “the achievement of sympathy and compassion for the errors of the main characters” (King, 270) rather than attempting pure tragic retribution and catharsis, he does so effectively by bringing Cleopatra down from the exalted heights of tragic heroine to ordinary, desiring, loving woman, to better educe our sympathy to those desires.

That so proud and regal a character as Cleopatra can envy the “dull, insipid lump” (II.95) of Octavia seems impossible for the Romans in the play to comprehend; those hints of character complexity invite attack from Ventidius, Octavia, Dollabella, and even Antony. Octavia is proud and loves for the sake of upholding her fastidious “honor in the form of her reputation, which qualifies her ‘love’ as something far more of a vice than the love of Antony and Cleopatra” (Emerson et al., 85). Cleopatra is consistently personified by the Romans as “Fortune” herself (Canfield, 67), described as being as “inconstant” as the blindfolded figure of the fickle Roman goddess Fortuna, spinning her wheel of fate. While the Romans characterize Cleopatra as the embodiment of fortune—ill fortune, at least—the most passionate (if not the most offensive) preacher of this is Cleopatra herself. She denies the charges of promiscuity weighed against her and tells Antony she “ne’er had been but yours” (II.408), claiming that by opening herself to him she did not drag him down to ruin and away from his wives, but simply, as she tells Octavia, offered “easier bonds” (III.486). By drawing Cleopatra as a more ordinary, human tragic heroine, Dryden brings the story of Antony and Cleopatra from mythic heights and presents it on its own terms.

Some have argued that All for Love is not a perfect tragedy, that the intervention of the minor characters (Dollabella and Alexas) is the cause, or one of the causes, of the fatal mistake which leads to the main characters’ demises.[6] While the work of the minor characters does serve to “unwittingly advance the catastrophe” (Levine, 248), it is not entirely their fault; without the inherent, tragic flaws of the main characters, the tragedy would not end fatally. “The principles are themselves ultimately responsible for the catastrophe” (Levine, 256). The tragic flaws of the heroic characters are still the cause of the “fatal consequence” (V.436). Antony’s insult to Octavia is the action that leads her to reject him and allow him to freely return to Cleopatra, and Cleopatra’s decision to play into Alexas’ duplicitous scheme leads her to an ultimately tragic fate. The fatal actions of Antony and Cleopatra lead to their demises. These actions are consistent with their characters, which have been established and developed throughout the play.

Dryden effectively establishes Antony’s suspicious and stubborn character in Act I; he is a man who jumps to conclusions and is not easily dissuaded from them, often adopting a pessimistic or melancholic attitude.[7] Recalling Antony’s behavior from Act I, his consistent behavior in Act IV should come as no surprise. When Antony stubbornly (yet rightly) refuses to believe Cleopatra has been false to him, he betrays the fragile peace he has wrought with Octavia and Rome by showing not only his inability to control his emotions by refusing to say goodbye to Cleopatra, but also his “extreme concernment / For an abandoned, faithless prostitute” (IV.447-48), when he hears the allegations of Cleopatra’s betrayal.

Cleopatra is also at fault. She admits the danger of following Alexas’ council from the start: “You shall rule me, / But all, I fear, in vain” (II.123-24) but she follows that council and allows him to speak to Antony on her behalf, despite Antony’s avowal that he will not see her. Later, when Cleopatra admits she does not believe in the power of jealousy to do anything but ill: “jealousy’s a proof of love, / but ’tis a weak and unavailing med’cine; … [it] has no pow’r to cure” (IV.82-85) and yet she still agrees to Alexas’ idea, desperate for any possible solution to her doleful situation, we should recall, from the beginning, her character and notice its consistency in predicting her actions. Despite Alexas’ manipulation of the weak and hurt Cleopatra, he is not entirely at fault for the decision Cleopatra is responsible for making that triggers the events leading to the tragedy. Cleopatra has consistently shown herself to be a character of strength over the years, despite her frequent despair over her present circumstances. She has additionally shown her ability to see through Alexas’ smooth words and her willingness to berate Alexas when necessary,[8] proving to some degree that she is not easily manipulated. When she discovers the depth of despair to which the scheme has driven Antony, Cleopatra blames Alexas, “’Twas thy design brought all this ruin on us” (V.130). And though she is right, that it was Alexas’ idea, it was Cleopatra’s actions that drove Antony into believing Alexas’ words[9] as true. She immediately hurries to “be justified” (V.146) and tragically, arrives too late.

Both Cleopatra and Imoinda are not as “independent” per se as their male counterparts, but neither are they weak and completely passive. They, like the men they love, are willing victims or “slaves” to their love, and also like their men, seem to give up certain freedoms that Charlotte Welldon, for instance, relishes. Charlotte makes wry and insightful observations about the natures of the minor characters (as well as amusing and honest generalizations of her sex and of men) that would never come from the proud and mournful Cleopatra or the enamored Imoinda. To the tragic heroines, love is less a free enterprise than a kind of slavery, but within the confines of the world of the plays, to be a slave to love is a preferable and desirable situation, despite the inherent consequences.

Imoinda, in Oroonoko, is not as a rich character as Cleopatra is and generally seems a reactive rather than active character, responding to either Oroonoko or the Lieutenant Governor. Where Cleopatra laments, desiring to be a wife, Imoinda is a wife, representing all of the passive, completely dutiful characteristics Charlotte Welldon, in contrast, does not. Welldon is an interesting comparative to Imoinda; though her ultimate goal is marriage, and she is willing to give up what she has gained by the play’s end to become the wife she has wanted to become, she is representative of a much more contemporary and active sort of woman than Imoinda. Instead, it is as if Oroonoko takes up the roles of both the Antony and Cleopatra characters—he has Antony’s active, assertive royal heritage paired with Cleopatra’s weakness of being on the weaker side of the conflict.[10]

So, what role does Imoinda serve within the play? If Dryden did assume “that the essence of drama is to produce pity for the hero” (King, 269), under that definition of tragedy Southerne succeeds by using Imoinda well to that effect. The heightened emotional language and reliance upon Imoinda as a “victim” for pathetic effect establish “a context of sympathetic immediacy for the dilemma [she depicts]” (“Defenseless Woman,” 434). Cleopatra accuses Octavia of having “the specious title of wife” which can “gild [her] cause and draw the pitying world / To favor it” (III.524-26) but where Octavia is “undeniably self-righteous” (Emerson et al., 85) and undeserving of that pity, Imoinda truly is. Southerne effectively educes our pity, our pathos, through Imoinda, increasing the overall tragic effect of the main plot through her consistent character.

Oroonoko, on the other hand, is presented with many more complexities than Imoinda. He is a “noble” man with “Roman” characteristics; he is even named “Caesar” (I.ii.281) in honor of his regal bearing. He is even more of a “Christian” by his actions—his willingness to forgive, his open love, his reluctance to do wrong—than many of the colonists in the play. Oroonoko’s characterization as “a prince, born only to command” (I.ii.208-209) and a “noble” man draw a clear parallel between him and Antony, but Oroonoko is not the same character. In fact, Antony and Oroonoko are strikingly dissimilar characters, unlike in their behavior and emotions, though there are some similar aspects, especially in the interplay between love and duty for both men. Both love their respective women with a passion to overwhelm a nation; Antony tells Ventidius that “Heav’n knows, I love / Beyond life, conquest, empire, all but honor” (I.491-92), but after she comes to him, he loses all resolve to follow Ventidius:

Faith, honor, virtue, all good things forbid
That I should go from her who sets my love
Above the price of kingdoms….
I’ll not be pleased with less than Cleopatra. (II.506-508;512)

Oroonoko, once rejoined with Imoinda, professes his love and devotion in very similar terms:

This little spot of earth you stand upon
Is more to me than the extended plains
Of my great father’s kingdom. Here I reign…
Your love my empire, and your heart my throne. (II.iv.186-190)

Yet despite the similarly worded avowals of devotion, they are different kinds of lovers—probably stemming directly from their differences of age and experience.

The essential details of their ages and current stations in life do seriously impact the nature of their characters. Antony and Cleopatra are older; they have loved a lifetime together, had children together. Oroonoko was divided from his bride after their secret wedding was revealed and their future life together—represented by Imoinda’s pregnancy—is only potentially beginning. Antony earned the ability to be with Cleopatra only after she had been “enjoyed” (II.315) by Caesar first. “He was my lord / And was, beside, too great for me to rival” (II.313-14). Oroonoko faces a similar situation to the one Antony had faced as a young man—with the Lieutenant Governor holding power over him, among others, stepping between him and Imoinda—but the crucial detail is that while Antony loved and wished to have Cleopatra for himself as a young man, he had no “legal” claim to her in the way Oroonoko has with Imoinda—the claim of marriage. At the present time of the play, Antony and Cleopatra are [still] not married and their being together does not ensure any legitimate dynasty will continue beyond them, and their being together disrupts the currently existing nation (represented in Act III with Octavia and the children). Even Dollabella comments on age, saying, “Mine was an age when love might be excused, / When kindly warmth and when my springing youth / Made it a debt to Nature” (III.208-10), seeming to imply that because Antony could not have Cleopatra completely as a young man, he should not have taken her as an older man. Dollabella comments further on the nature of the love Antony has shared with Cleopatra, saying, “The loss was private that I made; / ’Twas but myself I lost. I lost no legions; / I had no world to lose, no people’s love” (III.221-23). Oroonoko is only a king’s son, however, without Antony’s responsibility; he and Imoinda are furthermore married and their future together seems only to have personal (or perhaps local) implications, not the world-shattering implications of Antony and Cleopatra’s. And yet, both men are slaves, in different ways, chained to their fates and love: when Antony went to Cleopatra, he was hidden “from the bus’ness of the world, / Shut out inquiring nations” (II.323-24) for Cleopatra’s sake, losing the “name” of “Roman” “to be a slave in Egypt” (III.481-82), whereas Oroonoko, in the Lieutenant Governor’s words, “would well deserve / The empire of the world” (IV.ii.93-94)—if he were not presently a slave, and without the misfortune to be married to the intended mistress of the Lieutenant Governor.

Very different from Antony is the way in which Oroonoko is willing to forgive and does not easily or quickly place blame. The way in which he reacts to Imoinda regarding how they were separated and how they are reunited is a good example of this aspect of his character. Oroonoko cannot blame his father for his love of Imoinda and his jealousy (III.ii.1-2) citing instead Imoinda’s ethereal beauty which no man can easily deny. This both demonstrates the forgiving character of Oroonoko (especially as compared to the accusing, jealous Antony) and prepares us to anticipate the Lieutenant Governor’s already apparent love as potentially dangerous. Even Imoinda’s beauty is apparent to Aboan, who excuses Oroonoko, who “must not blame” Oroonoko for his love and adoration of her (III.ii.81). Oroonoko is also quick to forgive; he forgives the Captain for selling him into slavery, calling him “the minister of fate” (II.iv.176).

For a “savage” character, Oroonoko consistently exemplifies Christian characteristics, including, as stated, forgiveness, but also a passionate desire for justice instead of revenge, and a dependence on the honor of a man’s keeping his word. He demonstrates a strict code of morals to which not many characters in the play adhere, and his death at the end is tragic in part because when he dies, that morality seems to die with him. He does not initially want to be a part of the scheme to rise up against the planters and “murder the innocent” because he does not want them to have earned their misfortune by their “crimes” (III.ii.125;124). And when he does agree to lead the rebellion, it is not for revenge, and he does not desire it to be bloody; even when captured, he says, “I would not urge destruction uncompelled” but he is not a complete pacifist, because he believes in justice, threatening to defend if attacked (IV.ii.22-23). But Oroonoko is not altogether “godlike,” for when the Lieutenant Governor breaks his word with him and threatens Imoinda severely, Oroonoko vows to find justice for him, and finally does, acting as “the hand of justice” (V.v.347) personally. Oroonoko is changed by his situation from a nonviolent man into a murderer (in the name of justice) but even so cannot endure living with such a mark against himself—and finally dies, making all “as it should be” (V.v.350). He has more “virtue” (V.v.354) in the end than any of the characters (perhaps save Imoinda), and their deaths represent a tragic loss of moral virtue in their world.

Oroonoko is also open and honest in an almost naïve way. It is not a negative mark of his character but rather a demonstration of the magnanimity with which he loves, clearly demonstrating his “noble,” Christian characteristics—but also a product of his lack of life experience with the travails of fate in the way that Antony has experienced. Where Antony is almost embittered at points about the way their love has brought them to their “mutual ruin” (II.286), Oroonoko is optimistic and passionate, even after he is betrayed and both he and Imoinda face death. “All our prosperity is placed in love” (II.iv.184) Oroonoko tells Imoinda after they are rejoined, a love of such force Oroonoko even asks for our understanding:

No man condemn me, who has never felt
A woman’s power or tried the force of love:
All tempers yield and soften in those fires. (V.v.9-11)

There is an endearing, understandable quality to such openness and love, and Oroonoko here, as throughout the play, is not condemned for his deep, passionate love, but seems to be asking for understanding, and possibly praise for his steadfastness to his more mortal goals of assisting Aboan and the other slaves in their rebellion.

Finally, the loss of the promise of the future Oroonoko should have with Imoinda is heartbreaking in a way Antony and Cleopatra’s is not. When Antony and Cleopatra go together to “another world” it is proudly, “as they were giving laws to half mankind” (V.584), an image readily believable because that is—independently—what each ruler did in life. Their deaths are praised and remembered fondly, the preservation in death of a love that their society could not let continue. And it is remembered mournfully, with Serapion’s closing remarks:

…Sleep blest pair
Secure from human chance, long ages out,
While all the storms of Fate fly o’er your tomb,
And fame to late posterity shall tell,
No lovers lived so great, or died so well. (V.590-94)

But for Oroonoko and Imoinda, dying together is not so much a preservation of an idealized life they could not share, as Cleopatra’s last arrangements make hers and Antony’s out to be, but a preservation of their current life as a means to avoid the terrible fate, “to be butchered” (V.v.128), that awaits them if they are found by the very people they tried to rebel against. They choose instead to kill themselves “and so prevent” their attackers from making them suffer (V.v.175-79). These ends are different from each other, but within the framework of each play, the characters are consistent and flawed, inevitably leading to their respective ends.

An interesting similarity between the plays are the functions of Ventidius and Aboan within the plot. To that end much of their language is similar, especially in the scenes in which they attempt to convince their friend and lord of the necessity of his duty to lead his people in battle, instead of first following his heart. Both characters rely on the poetics of a heightened, Roman masculinity of honor, duty, action, and agency to attempt to convince their respective lords of their duty. Ventidius speaks to Antony’s honor and duty: “Up, up, for honor’s sake; twelve legions wait you / and long to call you chief” (I.387-388), and because nations hang in the balance, even the soldiers whom Antony would command have a condition for him—that they will not fight for Cleopatra. But Aboan, a dutiful man who loves Oroonoko, is a tougher, more embittered character than Ventidius; he has suffered much and seeks personal revenge for his fate in a way Ventidius does not, and as such his language is that of frustration and anger where Ventidius’ is the language of “officious love” (I.365), of a neglected favorite. They both call to their lords’ noble heritage in an attempt to convince them of their duty to action, Aboan telling Oroonoko:

Oh royal sir, remember who you are,
A prince, born for the good of other men,
Whose godlike office is to draw the sword
Against oppression and set free mankind. (III.ii.155-58)

Ventidius similarly calls to Antony’s nobility, calling him:

My Emperor; the man I love next heaven:
If I said more, I think ’twere scarce a sin;
Y’are all that’s good, and god-like. (I.281-83)

They reinforce the aristocratic themes of the play, of the duties of the ruling class to their people, and by their masters’ failures to complete their duties with success, demonstrate its tragic possibilities. They each reinforce the importance of the correct aristocratic lineage by each using their lords’ children as a means by which to argue; Ventidius summons Octavia and her young daughters to visibly convince Antony of the family—and duty to that family—he is abandoning.[11] Aboan begs Oroonoko think of the heir Imoinda carries, of the line that would “be born / To pamper up their pride and be their slaves” (III.ii.174-75) rather than following nature’s course.

The fact that both Ventidius and Aboan are compliments of their lords’ personalities is effective in their attempts to convince them; they may more easily play Devil’s advocate and show to their lord what their lord, in his own strident and stubborn way, cannot see because of his character. Ventidius is the idealist of the pair, painting Antony with hyper-masculine language as if supplying by substitution that aspect of Antony’s Roman heritage he has lost by being with Cleopatra. “For manhood’s sake” (II.233), Ventidius pleads with Antony, in an attempt to keep him from succumbing to Cleopatra. Aboan is more practical and ruthless, using more of the language of liberty as his argument, claiming a rebellion is “justified / By self-defense and natural liberty” (III.ii.103-104). Oroonoko is the pacifist and idealist of their pair, reluctant to take up a weapon against his captors and thereby commit a crime for which they can, in laws he can appreciate, convict him. Aboan is also suspicious of their masters, telling the trusting Oroonoko though he has done nothing wrong, “If they incline to think you dangerous, / They have their knavish arts to make you so” (III.ii.208-209). In a way it is Oroonoko’s openness and trust of Aboan and his willingness to cooperate that leads to his downfall, having seen no alternate choices himself; like Cleopatra in following Alexas’ advice, Oroonoko follows Aboan’s to an ultimately fatal end. At the end, such love and loyalty finally brings these secondary characters down to follow their lords’ fates. Ventidius promises Antony, as proof of his loyalty, “I can die with you too, when time shall serve” (I.381), and Aboan tells Oroonoko, “My life was yours, and so shall be my death” (V.v.39). Their deaths reinforce the aristocratic hierarchy of the plays, demonstrating visibly the cost of loyally supporting a tragic hero.

The comic subplot has many levels of importance in Oroonoko and is a crucial element in the play for several reasons. As Robert D. Hume argues, “to juxtapose heroic pathos and hard-style sex comedy creates a contrast that can be used either to exalt or subvert the ‘high’ element” (285), and in Oroonoko, it serves a contrasting function primarily, breaking up the tense and dramatic main plot and preventing it from threatening melodrama or losing focus. It also allows for a “modernization” of the main romantic heroic tragedy plot. Rather than changing the characters of Oroonoko and Imoinda too dramatically from Behn’s fictional counterparts, to make them more “realistic” and less heroically archetypical—wherein lay their potential power—Southerne injects a levity and reality to his version of Oroonoko through the device of the Welldon sisters’ scheme for marriage. Where All for Love relies solely on the detachment from reality that a romantic tragedy allows its audience, to convey a distant almost allegorical moral, the somewhat more contemporary (yet essentially still romantic) setting of Oroonoko and its noticeably contemporary comedic subplot give it an immediacy and recognizability that may enable an audience to more easily identify with the tragedy.

A good subplot serves to reveal additional character depth and dimensions by giving us a chance to see the main characters in different situations or reacting to different personalities. The Welldons are the first characters we see on stage and they, like the narrator of Behn’s novel, bring us into the world of the play because of their open natures, cleverness, and familiarity. The audience would immediately recognize such figures, generating personal identification and allowing for a more resonant and accessible reaction to the spectacle of the shackled Oroonoko appearing on stage in Act I, Scene ii. “Are all these wretches slaves?” (I.ii.204) Lucy asks, with an apparent incredulity an audience already identifying with her and Charlotte would feel deeply. They are the characters who ground the romance and tragedy in elements of the every day, making the play as a whole more accessible and more immediate to the audience.

Another way to view the subplot is its purpose as an ending alternate to that of the Oroonoko and Imoinda suicide ending. Canfield says the subplot is important because, “Britain needs another ending, and Southerne supplies it in his comic plot” (195). As Canfield also suggests, there is a clear satirical tone in the ending of the play because Oroonoko is ultimately more honorable, more Christian-seeming than his supposedly superior counterparts. Though the comic plot ends successfully, the Welldons still have played a nasty trick, despite how much Lackitt and her son may have deserved it, while Oroonoko dies, “guilty of no unbridled passion that destroys him” (Canfield, 196). The thought that the inheritors of this colonial world are “imperial tricksters” (Canfield, 196) is little better than the tragic ending, but it is satirical in its apparent honesty. Southerne does not romanticize his ending or try to trick his audience into believing that the evils of colonialism do not exist. It is an intelligent ending, richer than it would have been without the presence of the comedic subplot.

Both All for Love and Oroonoko have been carefully and purposefully constructed, and neither is attempting to—nor succeeds at—being a facsimile of its original version. They are both adaptations, translations, revisionings of compelling stories refit within their independent author’s creatively constructed worlds and moral frameworks, and deserve to be examined on their own terms. Their characters serve effectively designed purposes and are largely realistic; in the case of a very archetypical character like Imoinda, effective and fresh contrasts—the Welldons—serve to compliment and complicate the lack of her individual character. The plays both establish morals without overt or unrealistic didacticism; Antony and Cleopatra’s love is forbidden by their society’s laws, true, but by the end of the play, Dryden himself does not punish them for it—leaving the audience open to decide for themselves about the ultimate eternal fates of the main characters—not a shortcoming of the play, but rather a realistic and welcome conclusion to a powerful, thought-provoking tragedy. Oroonoko and Imoinda die and with them dies their morality and high virtue, leaving us with the Welldons—rather, the Stanmores and Lackitts—to inherit the earth; it is not an entirely comfortable idea, yet it is not unrealistic. The audience would likely see familiar faces in the Welldon sisters and want them to succeed in their endeavors, as they do, affirming some successful enterprising aspect of society while regretting the loss of another. Both plays exhibit that “world well lost,” the subtitle of All for Love, and leave us with that curious sense of loss and the ambiguous question of what we have gained—leaving us to decide exactly what that is.

Bibliography

Barnet, Sylvan. “Recognition and Reversal in Antony and Cleopatra.” Shakespeare Quarterly 8.3 (1957): 331-334.

Brown, Laura. “The Defenseless Woman and the Development of English Tragedy.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 22.3 (1982): 429-443.

Brown, Laura S. “The Divided Plot: Tragicomic Form in the Restoration.” ELH 47.1 (1980): 67-79.

Canfield, J. Douglas. Heroes & States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2000.

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