The word ‘adapt’ has its etymological root in the Latin ‘adaptare’, meaning ‘to make fit’. And today I’m going to attempt (or essay upon) how one might adapt Shakespeare, make his work fit, into the cultural, political, and historical context of their time. We’ll do this by looking at one of the most interesting adaptors of Shakespeare, John Dryden working with William Davenant, and one of the most fascinating adaptations of Shakespeare, the Restoration era The Tempest, Or, The Enchanted Island (1667).
One mustn’t be mislead by one’s modern-day sensibilities when it comes to ideas of imitation. Dryden attempts to imitate Shakespeare in so much as his definition of imitation as elucidated upon in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles:
I take Imitation of an Author, in their sense, to be an Endeavour of a later Poet to write like one, who has written before him, on the same Subject: that is, not to translate his Words, or to be Confin’d to his Sense, but only to set him as a Pattern, and to write, as he supposes that Author would have done, had he liv’d in our Age, and in our Country.
Imitation is not a direct translation for Dryden, but rather writing as the author might have done if he lived in his age.
This is important to keep in mind when adapting Shakespeare today.
The year is 2020. How would Shakespeare have written The Tempest if he were alive today?
That’s the premise from which the adaptor, translator, and imitator of Shakespeare should begin.
Shakespeare’s own use of the source material for his plays shows him to be exercising in the same way.
In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare is adapting the story of Antony from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in order for the events to fit with Elizabethan attitudes.
You can see one example of this in the messenger’s descriptions of Octavia to Cleopatra. Her face is ‘round, even to faultiness’ and ‘her forehead | As low as she would wish it’ (3.3. 30-4).
Octavia is described as unattractive by the standard’s of Shakespeare’s day, not Plutarch’s.
The difference between Dryden’s work and Shakespeare’s work is one of over fifty years in which political changes occupying this time frame had direct impact upon the theatre.
Shakespeare’s The Tempest is one that belongs to a Renaissance stage where playgoing, and the societal licentiousness accompanying it, is in abundance.
Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest belongs to a Restoration stage, just seven years after the dissolution of the interregnum; a period governed by puritanical rule in which, Nicholas Potter, in Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, summarizes, ‘the theatre went underground’.
In Dryden and Davenant’s adaptation, the playwright’s awareness of composition and the recent period of dramatic inactivity is manifest.
If you were adapting The Tempest for the stage today, what recent events, the ones which will arise in the history books a few decades down the line, would you make manifest?
Dryden’s Tempest can be seen as containing within it metaphors commenting on its own theatricality; for example, in Act II, Scene I:
Mustacho: Art thou mad, Trincalo? wilt thou disturb a settled Government, where thou
art a meer Stranger to the Laws of the Country?
Trincalo: I’ll have no Laws.
Ventoso: Then Civil-war begins. [Vent. Must. draw]
In this scene, the mariners are imposing a hierarchy on a natural and wild state, which mirrors Dryden’s imposition of form over Shakespeare’s original.
The imposition of a strict, formal structure reveals itself in the creation of additional characters in this play.
Each of Shakespeare’s characters in Dryden’s version have their counterpart.
Ariel has Milcha; Miranda does not stand alone but is accompanied by a sister, Dorinda, with both females having a male counterpart, Ferdinand and the newly constructed, innocent counterpart, Hippolito; Caliban has a sister.
As regards to why this may be useful, it could be seen that by imposing a stricter form such as this, the potential for Dryden’s adaptation to be perceived as fulfilling the generic requirements of comedy is more so that Shakespeare’s, whose play falls into uncertain generic categories.
The addition of more characters gives the potential for farcical misunderstanding, which is exploited later in the play.
Again, when adapting Shakespeare today, consider whether you may need to add or even remove characters?
Watch Peter Brook’s King Lear (1971). Scenes are out of order. Great lines cut. Why?
When Brook staged Hamlet, many applauded his adaptation, but even the most laudatory remarks were accompanied by a pondering as to why the iconic “Poor Yorick” scene was absent. I think I know the answer. Olivier’s production might have suited the sensibilities of the time, but Brook decided it didn’t suit the time in which he was producing.
In All for Love (1677), Dryden’s imposition of tight form manifests itself converse to his adaptation of The Tempest in a reduction of characters.
Instead of having a large cast, which helps contribute to a sense of tragedy that is bound to ideas of state in Antony and Cleopatra, Dryden’s smaller cast works on a symbolic level but also on one that emphasises the domestic aspects of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Barbara Hodgson, in ‘Antony and Cleopatra in the theatre’, helps establish why Dryden may be reducing the size of the cast, for social and political reasons:
Ever since Antony and Cleopatra left the open, non-illusionistic platform stage for which it was written, where change of scene did not mean change of scenery and where locale was established by characters’ lines […] and actors’ presences, subsequent performances have struggled with (and against) the play’s geographical restlessness, its sheer size, its evocative spaces.’
In Restoration England, a new theatrical space was developing. A space that favoured the small and restrained over the all-inclusive. With the puritanical rule of the interregnum fresh in Dryden’s mind, he favours the ceremonious.
In the preface to All for Love, he cites Montaigne as saying, ‘Nous ne sommes que ceremonie’ (‘We are nothing but ceremony’) and declares of the French poets, ‘All their Wit is in their Ceremony’, and yet he himself subscribes to the idea of substance being subservient to style.
This is apparent in All for Love in its attempt to make Shakespeare’s play adhere to the Aristotelian idea of drama needing to conform to the unities of time, place, and action.
This is not only apparent through a reading of All for Love but is also stated overtly by Dryden in his ‘Essay of Dramatick Poesie’ (1668):
Out of these two has been extracted the Famous Rules which the French call, Des Trois Vnitez, or, The Three Unities, which ought to be observ’d in every Regular Play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.
The first recorded production of Shakespeare’s version of The Tempest is in 1611, whilst the first recorded performance of Dryden’s is in 1667.
Shakespeare’s version is close to the time of the expedition of the Virginia Company in 1609, with the aristocracy of Sir George Somers and future Virginia governer, Sir Thomas Gates arriving at Jamestown after a long storm.
This shows its significance, with historical proxmity, in Shakespeare’s text but does not explain why Dryden, in a text which freely adapts Shakespeare’s original, decides to place emphasis on this idea, with the event being further removed from his time.
Given Dryden’s insistence on formalising, structuring, and ceremony, this strand of Shakespeare’s story can then be viewed as as metaphor for the politics of the stage in Dryden’s time; the imposition of structured Restoration writing on a Renaissance text, which is more wild and liberal with dramatic conventions.
In Dryden’s adaptation one can see the interplay between wild elements, as metaphor for the old way of theatre, and imposed structures and systems of order, metaphor for the new way of theatre.
The addition of a scene showing discourse between Miranda, and the new character addition of Dorinda, emphasises an Edenic state of being that contrasts with the attempts at imposing a new order by the mariners:
Dorinda: […] strait I spy’d
A huge great Creature.
Miranda: O you mean the Ship.
Dorinda: Is’t not a Creature then? It seem’d alive. […]
Mir: In this great Creature there were other Creatures,
And shortly we may chance to see that thing,
Which you have heard my Father call, a Man
Dor: But what is that? For yet he never told me.
Mir: I know no more than you: But I have hear
My Father say, we Women were made for him. (Act I, Scene II)
The innocence of Miranda and Dorinda, emphasised by the scenes depicting an Edenic state of nature, are focused on for Dryden to work up the comedic elements of Shakespeare’s original to a greater height, in a similar fashion to which he contends his aim in All for Love is to work up pity to a ‘greater height’.
Dryden is attempting to make Shakespeare’s play more comedic.
Shakespeare’s original conforms to ideas that govern a sense of what makes a Shakespearean comedy in its structure (with certain motifs such as the father obstacle to young lovers’ affections, concluding in a positive resolution), however it also subverts traditional generic forms, with it being unclear as to how to categorize it.
Dryden makes the genre more implicit by including many more overt jokes.
In Shakespeare’s play, instances of humour are predominantly confined to the Trincalo/Stephano subplot, however Dryden adds humour to the Miranda/Dorinda/Hippolito plot, exploring how ideas of innocence can be conducive to humour.
This humour mainly derives from infantile misunderstandings. With the characters of Miranda, Dorinda, and Hippolito, not having the experience of seeing one of the opposite sex (with the exception being their father in the case of the female protagonists) this leads way to comedic irony.
The audience is not in this state of innocence and inexperience and so the characters’ misunderstandings are comical; for example, in Miranda’s statement in Act II, Scene II:
if I can but ‘scape with Life, I had rather |be in pain nine Months, as my Father threaten’d | then lose my longing.
The audience understand what Prospero would have meant in telling his daughter this.
The comedy arises by Miranda’s reinstatement of this reported speech with the suggestion that she does not know to which this pain is referring to.
It is comical misunderstanding that is often the basic foundation for the comedy genre, often leading to farce.
Dryden’s adaptation is one that simultaneously looks back to past theatrical conventions, such as medieval ones, in order to retain those aspects which are stylised, formal, and ceremonious in order to incorporate itself in a new theatrical era, which was similarly concerned with formal conventions.
This can be seen in the parallels between Act II Scene III, with Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo observing the spirits, and medieval morality plays. Both have the introduction of spirits acting in a metatheatrical self-conscious way.
Dryden and Davenant’s Tempest
Pride. Lo here is Pride, who first led them astray,
And did to Ambition their Minds then betray.
Enter Fraud.
Fraud.And Fraud does next appear,
Their wandring Steps who led.
When they from Virtue fled,
They in my crooked Paths their Course did steer.’
Wisdom (morality play), line 101
Anima:‘I þat represent here the sowll of man’
Everyman (morality play), lines 115-9
Death: ‘I am Dethe, that no man dredeth,
For every man I reste, and no man spareth;
For it is Goddes commaundement
That all to me sholde be obedyent’
In a way, this could be interpreted as a self-consciousness of dramatic form itself.
With the reinstatement of theatre in the Restoration being a radical practice, this time, more so than the time of the Renaissance when play-going was in abundance, the audience would have been aware that they were watching a play.
Dryden and Davenant are exploiting the idea of a woman who has never seen a man before to its full extent because they see the possibility for it to make comments on the idea of romance and provide great comedy.
Dorinda and Mirdana are learning to love from a blank slate and it is a chivalrous courtly love, as implied in Act III, Scene II, when Prospero informs Dorinda that her ‘Sighs were poisonous, they infected you’.
Prospero then provides an education to Dorinda in how to obtain a man’s love in a courtly chivalric way:
Let thim not dare to touch your naked Hand, |But keep at distance from him […] It is the way to make him love you more.
Dryden finds solace in themes of love governed by rules such as the chivalric code in an era which was slowly becoming accustomed to the reintroduction of the stage.
Comedy is provided with Hippolito’s break from these established conventions:
Ferd: There are many more
Besides that Beauty, which you love.
Hip: I will have all
Of that Kind, if there be a hundred of ‘em.
Ferd: But, noble Youth, you know not what you say.
This innocence resulting in a reaction against the more conservative norm of love is what creates comedy here, and also in the scene between Hippolito and Dorinda:
Hip: As I’m a Man, I’ll tell you blessed News,
I’ve heard there are more Women in the World,
As fair as you are too.
Dor: Is this your News? You see it moves not me.
Hip: And I will have ‘em all.
Dor: What will become of me then?
Hip: I’ll have you too.
But are not you acquainted with these Women?
Dor: I never saw but one.
Hip: Is there but one here?
This is a base poor World, I’ll go to th’other;
I’ve heard Men have abundance of ‘em there.
But pray where’s that one Woman?
Dor: Who, my Sister?
Hip: Is she your Sister? I’m glad o’ that: You shall
Help me to her, and I will love you for it.
It could be seen that Dryden and Davenant are commenting on the unnaturalness of courtly love as a model for sexual passion.
Monogamy is accepted as the norm by Ferdinand who has arrived at the island from a society in which such rules are in place (as evidenced by the mariners of his crew immediately setting about constructing rules and governance on the island).
Monogamy is not even considered by Hippolito who has been confined to a cave his entire life, separate from such a society, and who has not seen a woman. His natural impulse is towards polygamy. What results is comedic as Ferdinand and Dorinda try to resist against this manifestation of primal passion.
More implicit in this play, however, given Dryden’s favour for structure and the ceremonious is the idea of the civilized man seeing the primal man as possessing ignorance because he does not understand or naturally conform to these societally constructed modes of being. He is seen as something of pity.
Hippolato is closer to animal nature than man, he has not developed a moral conscience. Hippoloto has to die in order to be reborn as more human and renounce his primal instincts in favour of a code of sexual passion that is constructed in relation to religion:
Dor: Pray how began your Difference first?
Hip: I fought with him for all the Women in the World.
Dor: That Hurt you had was justly sent from Heav’n
For wishing to have any more but me.
Hip: Indeed I think it was, but I repent it,
The Fault was only in my Blood, for now
‘Tis gone, I find I do not love so many.
This view is one that is concordant with the Restoration sensibilities and mirrors Dryden’s attempt to formalise and contain the wild Shakespearean stage in order to adapt it, and make it fit, his own time.