The Assignation: “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.”

By John Dryden

John Dryden was born on the 19th August 1631 in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire. Over the course of his career he made an immense contribution to literary life, so much so that the Restoration Age is also known as the Age Of Dryden. He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College Cambridge. In 1654 he graduated from Trinity but a short while later his Father died leaving him a little land and with it an income but unfortunately not enough to live on. He returned to London during the Protectorate and at Cromwell’s funeral on November 23rd 1658 he walked in a procession with the Puritan Poets. That same year he published his first major poem, Heroique Stanzas (1658), a restrained eulogy on Cromwell's death. In 1660 he celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the interregnum is a time of anarchy, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order. With this Dryden established himself as the leading poet of the day and with it came his allegiance to the new government. On December 1st 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard who was to bear him three sons. He also began to write plays now that theatres had re-opened after the Puritan ban. In 1665 the Great Plague of London ensured that all London theatres were closed again. Dryden retreated to Wiltshire. The next year the Great Fire of London swept through London. In 1667, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the events of 1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation. By 1668 he was the Poet Laureate and had also contracted to write 3 plays a year for the King’s Company. This was for many years to now become the main source of his income and of course his Restoration Comedies are almost without peer. Dryden’s career remains a glorious example of English culture and for many he is as revered as Shakespeare. Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stage Door
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783944989

John Dryden

John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.  Vinton A. Dearing, editor of the California Dryden edition, is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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The Assignation Or, Love In A Nunnery by John Dryden

A Comedy

Successum dea dira negat

VIRG.

John Dryden was born on the 19th August 1631 in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire.  Over the course of his career he made an immense contribution to literary life, so much so that the Restoration Age is also known as the Age Of Dryden.

He was educated at Westminster and Trinity College Cambridge. In 1654 he graduated from Trinity but a short while later his Father died leaving him a little land and with it an income but unfortunately not enough to live on.

He returned to London during the Protectorate and at Cromwell’s funeral on November 23rd 1658 he walked in a procession with the Puritan Poets.

That same year he published his first major poem, Heroique Stanzas (1658), a restrained eulogy on Cromwell's death. In 1660 he celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the interregnum is a time of anarchy, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.

With this Dryden established himself as the leading poet of the day and with it came his allegiance to the new government.

On December 1st 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard who was to bear him three sons.

He also began to write plays now that theatres had re-opened after the Puritan ban.

In 1665 the Great Plague of London ensured that all London theatres were closed again.  Dryden retreated to Wiltshire.  The next year the Great Fire of London swept through London. 

In 1667, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the events of 1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation.

By 1668 he was the Poet Laureate and had also contracted to write 3 plays a year for the King’s Company.  This was for many years to now become the main source of his income and of course his Restoration Comedies are almost without peer. 

Dryden’s career remains a glorious example of English culture and for many he is as revered as Shakespeare.

Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later

Index Of Contents

The Assignation

To My Most Honoured Friend Sir Charles Sedley

PROLOGUE.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

SCENE - Rome.

ACT I.

SCENE I. A Room, a great glass placed.

ACT II.

SCENE I. The front of a Nunnery.

SCENE II. A Street.

SCENE III. A Night-piece of a Garden.

ACT III.

SCENE I. The Front of the Nunnery.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT IV.

SCENE I. A Dressing-chamber.

SCENE II.

SCENE III. A Chapel.

SCENE IV. The Nunnery-Garden.

SCENE V.

SCENE VI.

ACT V. SCENE I.

SCENE II. The Street.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV. The Nunnery Garden.

EPILOGUE.

John Dryden – A Short Biography

John Dryden – A Concise Bibliography

THE ASSIGNATION.

This play was unfortunate in the representation. It is needless, at the distance of more than a century, to investigate the grounds of the dislike of an audience, who, perhaps, could at the very time have given no good reason for their capricious condemnation of a play, not worse than many others which they received with applause. The author, in the dedication, hints at the lameness of the action; but, as the poet and performers are nearly equally involved in the disgrace of a condemned piece, it is a very natural desire on either side to assign the cause of its failure to the imperfections of the other; of which there is a ludicrous representation in a dialogue betwixt the player and the poet in Joseph Andrews. Another cause of its unfavourable reception seems to have been, its second title of Love in a Nunnery. Dryden certainly could, last of any man, have been justly suspected of an intention to ridicule the Duke of York and the Catholic religion; yet, as he fell under the same censure for the Spanish Friar, it seems probable that such suspicions were actually entertained. The play certainly contains, in the present instance, nothing to justify

them. In point of merit, The Assignation seems pretty much on a level with Dryden's other comedies; and certainly the spectators, who had received the blunders of Sir Martin Mar-all with such unbounded applause, might have taken some interest in those of poor Benito.

Perhaps the absurd and vulgar scene, in which the prince pretends a fit of the cholic, had some share in occasioning the fall of the piece. This inelegant jeu de theatre is severely ridiculed in the Rehearsal.

To one person, the damnation of this play seems to have afforded exquisite pleasure. This was Edward Ravenscroft, once a member of the Middle Temple, an ingenious gentleman, of whose taste it may be held a satisfactory instance, that he deemed the tragedy of Titus Andronicus too mild for representation, and generously added a few more murders, rapes, and parricides, to that charnel-house of horrors [1]. His turn for comedy being at least equal to his success in the blood-stained buskin, Mr Ravenscroft translated and mangled several of the more farcical French comedies, which he decorated with the lustre of his own great name. Amongst others which he thus appropriated, were the most extravagant and buffoon scenes in Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme; in which Monsieur Jourdain is, with much absurd ceremony, created a Turkish Paladin; and where Moliere took the opportunity to introduce an entrée de ballet, danced and sung by the Mufti, dervises, and others, in eastern habits. Ravenscroft's translation, entitled The Citizen turned Gentleman, was acted in 1672, and printed in the same year; the jargon of the songs, like similar nonsense of our own day, seems to have been well received on the stage. Dryden, who was not always above feeling

indignation at the bad taste and unjust preferences of the age, attacked Ravenscroft in the prologue to The Assignation, as he had before, though less directly, in that of Marriage a-la-Mode. Hence

the exuberant and unrepressed joy of that miserable scribbler broke forth upon the damnation of Dryden's performance, in the following passage of a prologue to another of his pilfered performances, called The Careless Lovers, acted, according to Langbaine, in the vacation succeeding the fall of The Assignation, in 1673:

An author did, to please you, let his wit run,

Of late, much on a serving man and cittern;

And yet, you would not like the serenade,

Nay, and you damned his nuns in masquerade:

You did his Spanish sing-song too abhor;

Ah! que locura con tanto rigor!

In fine, the whole by you so much was blamed,

To act their parts, the players were ashamed [2].

Ah, how severe your malice was that day!

To damn, at once, the poet and his play [3]:

But why was your rage just at that time shown,

When what the author writ was all his own?

Till then, he borrowed from romance, and did translate[4];

And those plays found a more indulgent fate.

Ravenscroft, however, seems to have given the first offence; for, in the prologue to The Citizen turned Gentleman, licensed 9th August 1672, we find the following lines, obviously levelled at The Conquest of Granada, and other heroic dramas of our author:

Then shall the knight, that had a knock in's cradle,

Such as Sir Martin and Sir Arthur Addle[5],

Be flocked unto, as the great heroes now

In plays of rhyme and noise, with wondrous show:

Then shall the house, to see these Hectors kill and slay,

That bravely fight out the whole plot of the play,

Be for at least six months full every day.

Langbaine, who quotes the lines from the prologue to Ravenscroft's Careless Lovers, is of opinion, that he paid Dryden too great a compliment in admitting the originality of The Assignation, and labours to shew, that the characters are imitated from the Romance Comique of Scarron, and other novels of the time. But Langbaine seems to have been unable to comprehend, that originality consists in the mode of treating a subject, more than in the subject itself.

The Assignation was acted in 1672, and printed in 1673.

Footnotes:

1. In the prologue to this beautified edition, Ravenscroft modestly tells us:

Like other poets, he'll not proudly scorn

To own, that he but winnowed Shakespeare's corn:

So far was he from robbing him of's treasure,

That he did add his own, to make full measure.

2. This looks as if there had been some ground for Dryden's censure upon the actors.

3. A flat parody on the lines in Dryden's prologue, referring to Mamamouchi:

Grimace and habit sent you pleased away:

You damned the poet, but cried up the play.

4. It is somewhat remarkable, that the censure contained in what is above printed like verses, recoils upon the head of the author, who never wrote a single original performance. Langbaine, the persecutor of all plagiarism, though he did not know very well in what it consisted, threatens to pull off Ravenscroft's disguise, and discover the politic plagiary that lurks under it. I know, continues the biographer, he has endeavoured to shew himself master of the art of swift writing, and would persuade the world, that what he writes is extempore wit, and written current calamo. But I doubt not to shew, that though he would be thought to imitate the silk-worm, that spins its web from its own bowels, yet I shall make him appear like the leech, that lives upon the blood of other men, drawn from the gums; and, when he is rubbed with salt, spews it up again.

5. Sir Martin Mar-all we are acquainted with. Sir Arthur Addle is a similar character, in a play called Sir Solomon, or, The Cautious Coxcomb, attributed to one John Caryll.

TO MY MOST HONOURED FRIEND, SIR CHARLES SEDLEY, BART [1].

SIR,

The design of dedicating plays is as common and unjust, as that of desiring seconds in a duel. It is engaging our friends, it may be, in a senseless quarrel where they have much to venture, without any concernment of their own [2]. I have declared thus much beforehand, to prevent you from suspicion, that I intend to interest either your judgment or your kindness, in defending the errors of this comedy. It succeeded ill in the representation, against the opinion of many of the best judges of our age, to whom you know I read it, ere it was presented publicly. Whether the fault was in the play