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Silent Outrage: Dryden’s Answer to his Female Audience Following the Representation of Aureng-Zebe (1676)

Mathilde Alazraki

Résumés

Cet article se propose d’analyser la pièce Aureng-Zebe (1676) de John Dryden, en portant une attention particulière à la dédicace de son édition imprimée. Dans le paratexte de ce drame héroïque se déroulant dans l’Inde moghole, Dryden exprime sa gratitude envers son mécène, le comte de Mulgrave, et évoque la réception de la pièce par la King’s Company au cours de la même année. Si Aureng-Zebe fut saluée par Charles II comme l’une des meilleures œuvres de Dryden et accueillie favorablement par le public, l’auteur mentionne néanmoins les « censures » formulées par « quelques-unes des belles dames » présentes dans la salle. Ces critiques visaient principalement deux personnages féminins, Indamora et Melesinda, et dénonçaient le traitement que leur réservait le dramaturge. Cet article propose une étude approfondie de la réponse de Dryden à cette réception féminine – désormais muette – d’Aureng-Zebe, et met en lumière les tensions de genre qui traversent la scène de la Restauration. C’est en effet à cette période que les personnages féminins furent pour la première fois incarnés par des actrices, dont les rôles et les représentations de la féminité faisaient l’objet d’une attention accrue de la part d’un public également féminin. C’est dans ce contexte que Dryden, comme d’autres dramaturges de son temps, dut négocier la mise en scène du féminin.

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Texte intégral

1Aureng-Zebe, performed for the first time mid-November 1675 at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and published in 1676, is the last of Dryden’s heroic plays and is among his lesser-known works. Set in contemporary India, Aureng-Zebe is a story about a war of succession after the sons of the old Mughal emperor declared their ageing father unfit to rule. Aureng-Zebe, the Mughal hero, is the only one who stands by his father’s side and defends his throne from his half-brothers, the most powerful of all being Morat, the youngest son of the old emperor and the treacherous empress Nourmahal. This family affair is complicated by the fact that the old emperor lusts after Indamora, a young Kashmiri queen that he keeps captive and that he promised in marriage to Aureng-Zebe in exchange for putting an end to his brothers’ rebellion. According to The London Stage database, the play was performed at least twice in November 1675 in Drury Lane, with an additional court performance in May 1676. The publication of the play likely followed this performance, marking a six-month-gap between the premiere and the publication, which was within the norm of the time (Hume and Milhous 382). The play was not performed again until the Queen’s Theatre showed it in 1705 and, from there, it was played every year in London without fail until 1713, after which the play was less regularly performed.

2This play has been woefully understudied over the years, possibly because its eastern background is found in better-known plays by Dryden, like The Conquest of Granada (performed in two parts in 1670 and 1671, published in 1672) or Amboyna, a propagandist work depicting the massacre of English East India Company agents at the hands of Dutch VOC agents meant to fuel English nationalism when it was performed in 1673, at the height of the Anglo-Dutch War. When Aureng-Zebe is in fact studied, it is often to draw a parallel between its political plot and the context of Restoration England in the mid-1670s, when the matter of King Charles II (r. 1660-1685)’s line of succession started to raise concerns. However, even this political entanglement is overshadowed by Dryden’s later satirical works, written when the matter of royal succession turned into the full-blown Exclusion crisis, such as Absalom and Achitophel (1682) and The Medal (1682).

3It is thus worth considering what interest the play can present to us if we do not read it as a straightforward political commentary of the time. Putting political readings aside, Aureng-Zebe’s true interest may not lie in its inception, in the before of the play, but rather in its reception, that is to say its after. This article proposes to look at a rarely-studied element of the printed edition of the play, its paratext, and more specifically the dedication written by Dryden for his benefactor, the Earl of Mulgrave. This preface, largely ignored in scholarly analysis of the play, offers a glimpse of a controversy that marred the aftermath of the representation and which, surprisingly, has nothing to do with the Stuart line of succession. Instead, Dryden uses this dedication to answer the court ladies’ criticisms aimed at his play following its performance and makes a clear distinction between English heroic plays and French chivalric romances, two literary genres which, according to Dryden, were at the time tearing apart the gendered worlds of fashionable men and women inside the London court. While the actual criticisms aimed at Dryden are now lost to us, using his answer as the negative of a photograph to reconstruct the lost words of the ladies of the court can help us see the tensions surrounding gender and drama in the Restoration period.

The play

4The plot of Aureng-Zebe focuses on the ageing Mughal Emperor and the battle of succession led by his sons, from which Aureng-Zebe emerges victorious. The play is a fictional retelling of the events that led to the enthronement of the real-life Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), who was ruling Mughal India at the time of performance. Exotic tragedies were fashionable in seventeenth-century Europe and Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe is reminiscent of other contemporary Oriental plays, from Settle’s 1673 The Empress of Morocco to Racine’s 1672 Bajazet (Dryden 383). The matter of who will claim the crown of India drives Dryden’s plot, but questions of gender and submission underpin this race for power when it becomes apparent that one of the characters of the play, the captive Kashmiri Queen Indamora, stands as a personification of the Mughal throne.

  • 1 He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1670.

5The play was written by Dryden at a time when he was both Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal for King Charles II (Hammond, ODNB).1 Moreover, at the time of the staging of Aureng-Zebe, there was a moment of vacancy in Anglo-Indian diplomacy, after the first official English ambassador Thomas Roe departed in 1619 and before the next representative of the Crown in India, William Norris, was appointed in 1699. In the absence of official diplomatic representation, ties between England and Mughal India were solely handled by the private board of directors of the East India Company. Post-colonial theorists have looked at the context of Dryden’s play and dubbed Aureng-Zebe an example of “the English seventeenth-century proto-colonialist political consciousness” realizing itself on the stage (Bhattacharya 154).

6The play opens after a rebellion against Aureng-Zebe’s father, the Old Emperor, whose character is based on the real-life Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658). The ageing monarch, who “from noon declines, / And, with abated heat, less fiercely shines” (1.1.79-82), is challenged by three of his four sons. Darah, the eldest, is said to be “to implacable revenge inclined,” and his hatred for his father makes him “a deadly foe” (1.1.91-93). Sujah, meanwhile, is described by the Mughal courtiers as “a bigot of the Persian sect” and his war against his father is believed to be sponsored by “a foreign interest” (1.1.95-96). Both Darah’s and Sujah’s rebellions are thwarted off-stage, leaving their younger brother, Morat, as the main contender for the Old Emperor’s throne. Even though he is the youngest brother, Morat is a more dangerous adversary than the other princes, partly because his rebellion is secretly supported by his mother Nourmahal,, the Emperor’s “imperious wife” (3.1.182) and stepmother to the other princes. Unlike the three brash contenders for the throne, Aureng-Zebe is “by no strong passion swayed” and proves to be the Emperor’s only loyal son, leading his father’s forces against the would-be usurpers: “His father’s cause upon his sword he wears, / And with his arms, we hope, his fortune bears.” (1.1.102-09).

7At first glance, it would appear easy to identify the heroes of the play, Aureng-Zebe and his father, as opposed to the villains, Morat and his brothers, aided by the treacherous Empress Nourmahal. Yet, these roles are complicated by the Old Emperor’s inability to rule India effectively. In his old age, the Emperor spends his time drinking and revelling in the pleasures of the flesh instead of governing, going as far as to say: “Were I a god the drunken globe should roll; / The little emmets with the human soul / Care for themselves, while at my ease I sat” (3.1.184-87). This lack of interest in governance leads the proper order of the world to be turned upside down, as if the entire globe was revolving in the same intoxicated haze as the Mughal Emperor. Next to this old and complacent monarch, his younger and more ambitious sons are vying for the chance to impose their mark on the world. While not officially presented as a contender for the throne, it is clear that Aureng-Zebe is the only one fit to restore order to the Mughal Empire, but his blind loyalty to his father and his devotion to patriarchal authority proves to be an obstacle to the play’s eventual resolution.

8Another complication in this initial separation between villains and heroes appears in the form of the Queen of Kashmir, Indamora, held captive at the palace. She was promised in marriage to Aureng-Zebe by his father on the condition that he successfully end his brothers’ rebellions. Unbeknownst to Aureng-Zebe, however, the Old Emperor also lusts after Indamora, thus foregoing his duties to his son, his wife Nourmahal, and his empire. Several critics have already mentioned Indamora’s role as an embodiment of the “Empire of the East,” encoded in her name which fuses the words India and “amor” (Alssid 455, Frost 28). To love Indamora is to love India and its riches, and to desire her affection is to desire the possession of the feminised East. This becomes visible when Indamora is courted not only by Aureng-Zebe and the Old Emperor, but also by Morat, who follows his father’s example by scorning his faithful wife Melesinda in favour of the captive Kashmiri Queen. Consequently, three more or less happy couples emerge: the Old Emperor and Empress Nourmahal, Morat and his wife Melesinda, and, finally, Aureng-Zebe and Indamora. Of the three pairs, only the last one appears well-matched. Much like the battle of succession tearing the empire apart, the domestic order of the play can only be restored by putting the proper match, Aureng-Zebe and Indamora, in power. The play thus follows the “traditional heroic-tragic analogy of the arts of love and war,” by foreshadowing Aureng-Zebe’s destiny which is to secure “two vast rewards” (1.1.110), the hand of Indamora and the throne of Mughal India (Alssid 454).

9In her study of gender and race in early modern literature, Kim Hall sums up the plot of several seventeenth-century works in a statement that echoes the plot of Aureng-Zebe: “men desire conquest, whereas women desire men” (189). The Indamora and Melesinda plotlines are solely focused on matters of the heart: Indamora is in love with the gentle and kind Aureng-Zebe while Melesinda remains steadfastly loyal to her husband Morat, even when he starts courting another woman in front of her. Neither Indamora nor Melesinda contest the patriarchal authority that oppresses them; if anything, they embrace it fully. Melesinda has no interest in the battle for succession and wishes for nothing more than her husband’s love: “I would to you the narrow world resign, / And want no empire while Morat was mine” (3.1.89-90). The one female character seeming to resist this gender division of Venus versus Mars is the Empress herself, Nourmahal. Following in the footsteps of Phaedra and her forbidden love for her stepson Hippolytus, Nourmahal harbours incestuous feelings for Aureng-Zebe and this, coupled with the Old Emperor’s disinterest in her, fuels an uncontrollable appetite for power which leads her to lust after the Mughal throne itself: “Virtue’s no slave of man; no sex confines the soul. / I for myself th’imperial seat will gain, / And he [Morat, who is marching on the Emperor’s palace] shall wait my leisure for his reign.” (5.1.239-41). The play concludes with Morat and his villainous mother dying, one slain in battle, the other committing suicide through poison. More surprising, however, are the fates of other characters: the Old Emperor makes amends for his unruly conduct and abdicates the throne to Aureng-Zebe, while the kind-hearted Melesinda commits suicide by throwing herself into the flames of her dead husband’s funeral pyre. Melesinda’s and Nourmaha’s suicides are the two final deaths on stage before Aureng-Zebe and Indamora are crowned Emperor and Empress.

10After looking at the plot of the play, one can legitimately be dissatisfied with the? prevalent academic reading, which sees in the Old emperor a representation of Charles II and in the character of Aureng-Zebe a depiction of the Duke of York, a foil to Morat/Monmouth (Sankey ODNB). While it is undeniable that a play about a war of succession performed in the mid-1670s would have echoed with contemporary concerns that were brewing in England at the time, assigning real-life counterparts to the characters is a risky endeavour. It is true that Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe would have served as a warning and a reminder of the chaos civil war can cause to an empire with a problematic line of succession, but it is also true that it would have been a very daring financial decision on the part of Dryden, the King’s Poet Laureate, to write a play presenting such an unflattering portrait of the King and have it performed in front of the King by the King’s Company. It is safer to assume that the political allegory behind Aureng-Zebe addresses general unrest in the kingdom, a common theme in Restoration plays (Payne 2000, xv), rather than a disguised criticism of Charles II. Moreover, one must not forget that when the play was being written in 1675, the question of the royal succession might have been a seed taking root in the minds of courtiers, but the Exclusion Crisis was still four years in the future. The audience of the play, back then and today, might make that parallel on their own, but it would have been perilous for Dryden himself to do so. Rather, Aureng-Zebe appears as one of many Restoration plays that advocates stability of the monarchy as a bulwark against a civil war. The real controversy might not be in its political allegory but in its dedication.

The paratext of Aureng-Zebe

11Gérard Genette defines the paratext as material “consisting of a discourse produced on the subject of the text that follows or precedes it” (1). However,

[m]ore than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold, […] a zone not only of transition but also of transaction a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved – is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies) (Genette 2).

12The dedication of Aureng-Zebe belongs to the subcategory of paratexts that Genette identifies as peritexts, indicating paratexts that physically accompany their texts inside the printed work, such as prefaces, dedications or afterwords (as opposed to epitexts, which exist outside of the book, such as reviews, rough drafts or correspondence). Dedications in printed plays were still a recent though rapidly growing phenomenon in the Restoration period. Peter Blayney gives us numbers for this expanding trend: 5% of playbooks first printed between 1583 and 1602 contained dedications, 19% for the period 1603-1622 and 58% between 1623 and 1642 (Blayney 395). “This evolution often reads as a symptom of the legitimation of the dramatic genre, its changing status from popular entertainment to literature worth conserving,” Béatrice Chaix Rouchon has noted (5). Devani Singh highlights the important role of the dedication in positioning the play favourably in the print marketplace: “If ‘worthy persons’ confer their honour onto such books, then playbooks might be elevated by virtue of naming a dedicatee. […] The sentiment ingeniously turns the conceit of worth upon itself: by the fact of having a dedicatee, the book both receives and bestows favour” (Singh 281). The Earl of Mulgrave, to whom the play is dedicated, was a member of the court closely aligned with Charles II and the Duke of York, and through him Dryden secured both royal access and patronage (Sankey ODNB).

13It is thus no surprise that Dryden’s dedication to Mulgrave includes a description of how the King approved of the play, saying that Charles II “graciously confirm’d afterwards, that it was the best of all my Tragedies, in which he has made Authentick my private opinion of it; at least, he has given it a value by his Commendation, which it had not by my Writing” (Dryden 155). This type of approval was especially important to write in the preface as Restoration playwrights could not yet profit from the public sale of their works by printers and booksellers, securing only a small sum of money when they sold the rights of the play for publication, which rarely exceeded 5£ (Payne 2024, 201). Instead, playwrights mainly relied on the publication to garner public interest in their works so that the public would then hopefully attend their future plays in theatres. Certainly, Dryden’s plays would have needed all the help they could get since the King’s Company was facing dire financial difficulties at the time and some actors even stopped playing in February 1676 as a protest against the financial situation of the playhouse in Drury Lane, leading Dryden to rely more than ever on patronage (Hermanson 14, Zwicker 4). In fact, we know from The London Stage database that Aureng-Zebe was performed at least twice in November 1675 at the Theatre Royal, before being performed again in May 1676, this time directly at court. It is likely during that performance that Dryden received criticism from a different kind of audience, to which he chose to respond in the dedication of the printed play. Indeed, Aureng-Zebe’s dedication does not simply reference his benefactor or the King, but also a third group of people which is not, as one might expect, a generic reader, but a very specific public, “the fair Ladies” who were in attendance during the court performance of the play in May 1676, and who criticized the last act of the drama (Dryden 155).

Dryden’s female critics

14Immediately after relaying the King’s praise, Dryden abruptly moves on to address his critics who, as he says, focused on the final act and, more specifically, on two female characters, Indamora and Melesinda:

That which was not pleasing to some of the fair Ladies in the last Act of it, as I dare not vindicate, so neither can I wholly condemn, till I find more reason for their Censures. The procedure of Indamora and Melesinda, seems yet, in my judgment, natural, and not unbecoming of their Characters. If they who arraign them fail not more, the World will never blame their conduct: And I shall be glad, for the honour of my Countrey, to find better Images of Virtue, mix’d with the frailties and imperfections of humane life (Dryden 155-156).

15We possess no direct evidence of any specific criticisms voiced by the ladies of the court against Aureng-Zebe; only Dryden’s words survive. It is therefore through his preface that we must reconstruct, in negative form, the contours of their objections. Reading Dryden’s dedication is akin to examining a photographic negative: we must invert his statements to infer what the court ladies might have said, namely that the procedure of Indamora and Melesinda seems unnatural and unbecoming of their characters. Only then can we piece back the criticisms of the “fair ladies” of the court, now forever silent.

16The first of these criticisms pertains to Indamora, the captive queen: “I have made my Heroine fearful of death, which neither Cassandra nor Cleopatra would have been; and they themselves, I doubt it not, would have outdone Romance in that particular” (Dryden 156). The reproach that Indamora behaves timidly, even cowardly, requires investigation to see which moment of the play this part might refer to. It likely stems from a line in the final act, when Morat’s army prepares to storm the castle and Indamora, leading Melesinda away, declares: “Weak women should, in danger, herd like deer” (5.1.177). Unlike Cleopatra and Cassandra, archetypes of courage and defiance in the face of adversity, Dryden’s heroine displays fear and passivity. This representation may well have offended the sensibilities of Dryden’s female audience, who were accustomed to heroines of greater fortitude in heroic drama.

17Yet Dryden’s allusion to “Romance” is particularly revealing as it is a different genre from drama. In the notes to his edited collection of Dryden’s works, Vinton Dearing points out that the women of the court at the time would have been more familiar with Cassandra and Cleopatra’s depictions in the French romances by Gautier de Costes de La Calprenède than with their dramatic or classical counterparts (Dryden 407-408). French romances were immensely fashionable throughout seventeenth-century Europe and quickly reached England through translation. Gautier de Costes’ romance Cassandra, a ten-volume work written between 1642 and 1645, was translated into English as early as 1652, while his Cleopatra, a twelve-volume story written between 1646 and 1658 followed soon after. Both enjoyed wide popularity well into the eighteenth century. Yet these heroines were not the historical or mythological figures we might expect. La Calprenède’s Cassandra narrates the decline of the Persian Empire, while his Cleopatra tells the story of the daughter that Cleopatra allegedly had with Antony (Magendie 18, Encyclopedia Britannica). Thus, Dryden’s reference to Cassandra and Cleopatra is more than a simple appeal to literary precedent: it is a pointed jab at his critics. By invoking these characters, Dryden subtly mocks the court ladies for their preference for fashionable French romances over classical or dramatic sources. Beneath his ostensibly deferential tone lies a characteristic note of irony, an early manifestation of the satirical wit that would come to dominate his writings of the 1680s.

18Dryden’s attack on romance does not stop here but becomes more explicit: “Yet their Mandana (and the Cyrus was written by a Lady) was not altogether so hard-hearted: for she sat down on the cold ground by the King of Assyria, and not onely piti’d him, who dy’d in her defence; but allow’d him some favours, such, perhaps, as they would think, shuld onely be permitted to her Cyrus” (Dryden 156). This is a reference to Madeleine de Scudéry’s romance Artamènes or the Great Cyrus, an epic romance set in Persia where the hero, Cyrus, searches for his fiancée princess Mandana who has been abducted by the King of Assyria. This King starts as the villain of the story but is eventually redeemed when he sacrifices himself to save Mandana (Magendie 7). The parallel with the final act of Aureng-Zebe is striking: Dryden’s Indamora forgives a dying Morat for having attempted to rape her and even goes as far as exclaiming “Oh stay; or take me with you when you go; / There’s nothing now worth living for below” (5.1.470-71). By invoking Scudéry’s romance, Dryden wittily turns his critics’ own literary references against them, reminding the court ladies that even the heroines of their cherished romances are capable of extending compassion to their would-be violators.

19Again, we have to look at Dryden’s words as the negative of a photograph in order to pluck out what might have been the now silent criticisms aimed at him by his female audience, particularly those embedded in his parenthetical remarks: “and the Cyrus was written by a Lady” (Dryden 156). Parentheses, while ostensibly marginal and digressive, paradoxically serve to emphasize what they attempt to subordinate. What Dryden states, while at the same time trying to gloss over it, is the fact that The Great Cyrus, a very popular romance in ten volumes published between 1649 and 1653 and translated into English in 1655, was written by a woman. Implicit in this remark is the suggestion that among the criticisms directed at Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe was the charge that, as a male author, he lacked the capacity to portray women convincingly. This criticism finds echoes with a question that continues to preoccupy twenty-first-century audiences and critics alike: whether male writers can depict believable female characters without perceiving them through what is commonly referred to as the male gaze.

20Dryden’s rhetorical strategy in response to this charge is both defensive and adversarial. By referring to Mandana as “their” heroine, he establishes a sharp opposition through the possessive pronoun and draws a line between the ladies of the court, with their cherished French romances, and himself, the playwright defending the superiority of English heroic drama. This binary – romance versus drama, the court ladies’ taste versus Dryden’s artistic principles – structures the entire dedication. The figures of Mandana, Cassandra, and Cleopatra, drawn from continental romances, stand in contrast to Dryden’s dramatic heroines, who, according to the dedication, embody a truer and more elevated conception of female heroism. The paratext thus becomes a controversial space in which competing visions of femininity and heroism are negotiated through literary genres.

21The second character who appears to have attracted the ire of the ladies of the court is Melesinda, Morat’s wife. Unlike her war-mongering and overly ambitious husband, Melesinda appears as a gentle and loving soul, enduring humiliation and rejection, repeatedly abused by her husband who does not care for her and prefers Indamora the captive princess. Yet, in the final act, as he lies dying, Morat repents of his cruelty, bidding her to “[b]e happy, Melesinda; cease to grieve, / And for a more deserving husband live” (5.1.384-85). Despite her husband’s dying wish, Melesinda throws herself into Morat’s burning funeral pyre, proudly saying: “My love was such, it needed no return; / But could, though he suppli’d no fuel, burn […]” and “die is too base a word; / I’ll seek his breast, and, kindling by his side, / Adorned with flames, I’ll mount a glorious Bride” (5.1.628-35). Her suicide, shocking by its violence, is not unexpected from Dryden, who in some of his other works like Amboyna has depicted rape and torture on and off-stage, putting his heroic dramas firmly in the category of what has been described by Anne Hermanson as “the horrors plays of the Restoration” (Hermanson 1).

22And yet, it is this suicide that Dryden has to defend against his critics:

I have made my Melesinda, in opposition to Nourmahal, a Woman passionately loving of her Husband, patient of injuries and contempt, and constant in her kindness, to the last: and in that, perhaps, I may have err’d, because it is not a Virtue much in use. Those Indian Wives are loving Fools, and may do well to keep themselves in their own Countrey, or, at least, to keep company with the Arria’s and Portia’s of old Rome: some of our Ladies know better things” (Dryden 156).

Here, Dryden’s tone oscillates between justification and irony. On the one hand, he defends Melesinda’s unwavering devotion as a mark of virtue; on the other, he displaces blame by attributing her excess of love to her “Indian” nature, invoking the practice of sati (widow immolation) as recorded in early modern travel narratives about Mughal India (Terry 305). Yet, even as he draws upon sati for tragic effect, Dryden condemns it as barbaric and obsolete, linking Indian “loving fools” with the Roman heroines Arria and Portia, classical figures who also committed gruesome suicides in the name of love, Aria by stabbing herself and Portia, Brutus’ wife, by swallowing hot coals.

23To a twenty-first-century audience, attuned to post-Me Too sensibilities, Melesinda’s suffering and self-annihilating devotion to her abusive husband appear deeply troubling. What is particularly revealing, however, is that Dryden’s female contemporaries seem to have shared a similar discomfort. This reaction can be understood in light of the unique theatrical culture of the Restoration, when women, newly permitted to perform on the English stage, played scenes of female suffering before an audience that included many educated women familiar with French romances written by female authors. Within this echo chamber, the female spectators’ empathy for actresses may have heightened their sensitivity to the representation of female pain and passivity, a bond that existed between female actresses and audiences on and off the stage (Solomon 11-15). It is thus possible that the audience’s feelings for the actress who played Melesinda (Mary Corbett) might have also influenced their reception of her death on stage.

Courting scandal in Restoration England

24From this initial study of Aureng-Zebe’s paratext, several questions emerge: why did Dryden choose to address these criticisms within the dedication of the printed play, thereby ensuring their preservation for posterity? Why did he not confine himself, as was customary, to expressions of royal praise and false modesty? The answer lies, I would argue, in the final lines of his response to the controversy:

“But, it may be, I am partial to my own Writings: […] ‘Tis not therefore impossible, but that I may alter the conclusion of my Play, to restore my self into the good Graces of my fair Criticks. And your Lordship, who is so well with them, may do me the Office of a Friend and Patron, to intercede with them on my promise of amendment. The Impotent Lover in Petronius, though his was a very unpardonable crime, yet was receiv’d to mercy on the terms I offer” (Dryden 156-157).

At first glance, it may seem surprising that Dryden, who has spent the dedication deftly deflecting the charges brought against his play, should suddenly appear so eager to regain the favour of the court ladies that he offers to revise his ending in order to appease them. Yet the irony of this statement is immediately apparent when one considers its context: this promise of revision appears in the printed version of the play, a more permanent medium, published six months after the play first premiered in Drury Lane. The notion that Dryden might “alter the conclusion” of a published work is a rhetorical gesture rather than a genuine concession and his promise to amend the play is thus an act of literary performance aimed as much at mocking his critics as at entertaining his readers. To appreciate Dryden’s full defence, however, one must understand the reference to Petronius’s “Impotent Lover.”

25Gaius Petronius Arbiter, a Roman author from the reign of Nero, is generally credited with the authorship of the Satyricon, one of the earliest prose fictions in European literature. [The Satyricon is a sprawling and satirical narrative that now only remains in fragments (Grimal)]. It follows the misadventures of three Romans whose experiences oscillate between the serious, the comic, and the overtly sexual. The text is full of heterosexual and homosexual encounters, feasting, orgies, and moral excess, offering a parody of Roman decadence. At the centre is the protagonist, Encolpius who, incurring the wrath of a priestess of Priapus, the god of fertility and virility, is struck by a humiliating spell of impotence. His punishment only ends in the closing section of the narrative, when another priestess of Priapus intervenes to restore his potency through a painful ritual that includes the beating of his genitals as a way to repent.

26By likening himself to the impotent Encolpius, Dryden simultaneously parodies his own supposed submission and exposes the absurdity of the court ladies’ moral and literary pretensions. Dryden’s metaphorical offer to let his “fair Critics” beat him into repentance is thus not an act of humility but a tongue-in-cheek insult: he appropriates the language of sexual humiliation to ridicule the moral authority of his female audience. The result is an image that is overtly self-deprecating and truly ironic: by referencing a work only known by learned Latin readers, he asserts his own intellectual and authorial authority over his French romance-loving audience.

*

27Why, then, did Dryden choose to include the ladies’ criticisms in the dedication to Aureng-Zebe? As Gérard Genette has shown, the paratext constitutes a strategic threshold between the author and the reader, a space designed to shape the reception of the text and to make the audience view it favourably. Who that favourable audience is, however, would vary greatly depending on who is looking at the female characterisation in Aureng-Zebe. Dryden offers a wide spectrum of feminine agency, from the masculine and power-hungry Nourmahal to the over-devoted and self-destructive Melesinda. The only surviving female character, Indamora, occupieswhat the male playwright considers a safe middle ground, being submissive to a reasonable degree. However, this male-sanctioned depiction of femininity was heavily criticised by the ladies of the court, now used to French romance heroines that take centre stage over their male counterparts. Faced with these new critiques, Dryden uses his dedication not simply to defend his play but to reposition the debate to his own advantage. Striking back at the court ladies and, by extension, at the French romances they admired, he aligns himself with those readers and spectators who, like him, favoured English dramatic traditions over continental prose fiction. The result is a calculated appeal to national taste as well as to male literary authority. Since the publication directly followed the play’s performance at court, almost six months after it premiered in Drury Lane and at a time of unprecedented financial trouble for the King’s Company, one can wager that Dryden aimed to capitalise on this moment of royal interest in Aureng-Zebe to stir controversy and further entertain Charles II through his witty barbs against the ladies of the court.

28Thus, Dryden’s inclusion of this polemic within the paratext serves a commercial purpose. Just like internet culture today where attention equals affection, controversy in the seventeenth-century could sell. There is no such thing as bad publicity. By framing his dedication with Charles II’s praise of the play, Dryden effectively shields himself against any serious backlash while simultaneously provoking a lively debate between the champions of theatre and the enthusiasts of romance, between men and women, between English and French literary sensibilities. This tension directly profits Dryden. Whether readers sided with him or with his critics, curiosity was bound to increase attendance at his performances and enhance his reputation as a playwright. This was crucial as Dryden, like other playwrights of his time, made little money from the publication of his plays, profits going instead to printers and booksellers. His revenue depended primarily on the success of his works on stage. By transferring the controversy from the ephemeral space of oral criticism to the fixed form of print, Dryden not only neutralizes his detractors (rendering them silent) but also amplifies his own voice. The dedication thus becomes a space in which Dryden transforms censure into publicity and criticism into financial opportunity.

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Notes

1 He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1670.

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Mathilde Alazraki, « Silent Outrage: Dryden’s Answer to his Female Audience Following the Representation of Aureng-Zebe (1676) »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2025, consulté le 08 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/16255 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15ffq

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Mathilde Alazraki

Mathilde Alazraki, an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay, is a lecturer in early modern English studies at the Université de Rouen Normandie in France and part of the ERIAC research unit (UR 4705). Her PhD thesis, defended in 2023 under the supervision of Ladan Niayesh at Université Paris Cité, is entitled “Women and Diplomacy between England and the East during the Early Modern Period (1558-1676)”.

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