Play: All for Love

Overview
John Dryden’s All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1678) is a neoclassical reimagining of the Antony and Cleopatra story, concentrating on the lovers’ final days in Alexandria. Written in supple blank verse and confined to a single place with a compressed time frame, it trades Shakespeare’s panorama for an intimate domestic tragedy. Dryden’s focus is the fatal tension between Roman honor and erotic passion, and how private desire corrodes public duty until nothing remains but an absolute, annihilating choice.

Setting and Premise
Caesar’s victory at Actium has broken Mark Antony’s power. Alexandria, shaken by portents described by the priest Serapion, becomes a chamber of last decisions. Antony, exhausted and ashamed, has withdrawn from command. His loyal general Ventidius arrives to recall him to Roman greatness and to sever him from Cleopatra, whose love has become both refuge and ruin. The stage is a pressure cooker of counselors, rivals, and lovers, with Caesar’s legions tightening the noose.

Plot Summary
Ventidius finds Antony sunk in melancholy and coaxes from him a fragile resolution to abandon Cleopatra and reclaim honor. Cleopatra, surrounded by courtiers like Alexas and Charmion, fights despair with resolve and artifice. She and Antony meet once more, and their farewell is a battlefield of rhetoric and feeling; honor momentarily prevails.

Rome itself seems to enter in the form of Octavia, Antony’s dignified wife, who arrives with his children to restore the bond of law and duty. The confrontation between Octavia and Cleopatra, poised dignity against blazing passion, exposes the two claims on Antony’s soul. Pressed by Ventidius and moved by Octavia’s appeals, Antony vows to return to his Roman ties.

Alexas, ambitious, calculating, devises a counterplot to recover Antony for Egypt. He entangles Dolabella, Antony’s friend, in a scheme that stokes Antony’s jealousy by hinting at Cleopatra’s infidelity. Misread looks and contrived confidences undo Antony’s Roman resolution; the lovers’ estrangement turns to rage, then to renewed dependence as each wound deepens the bond it seems to sever. Meanwhile, Caesar’s terms harden, and the space for negotiation closes.

News, rumor, and stratagem accelerate the collapse. A report of Cleopatra’s death reaches Antony, who, believing the world gone with her, chooses self-slaughter over submission. Mortally wounded, he learns she lives, is borne to her, and dies reconciled, affirming that every lost crown and broken oath has been spent for love. Cleopatra, offered a politic mercy that promises public humiliation, rejects survival without sovereignty. Forewarned by Dolabella of Caesar’s intent, she arranges her death, taking the asp in a final assertion of royal will. Charmion follows her mistress into death, and Caesar, arriving too late to display his captives, registers the cost of triumph.

Characters and Dynamics
Antony is split between the ethos of Rome, courage, constancy, command, and the private kingdom he shares with Cleopatra. Cleopatra is neither mere siren nor pure queen; her love is shrewd, theatrical, sincere, and destructive, an energy that creates a world and consumes it. Ventidius embodies Roman plainness and loyalty, trying to rescue Antony from himself. Octavia represents lawful order and quiet endurance, the sobriety of a world Antony can no longer inhabit. Dolabella’s misplaced tenderness and Alexas’s intrigues become catalysts rather than causes, exposing how ready the lovers are to be misled.

Themes and Style
Dryden frames the catastrophe as a tragic arithmetic: to have love in its totality, all else must be forfeited. Honor, fidelity, reputation, and empire are weighed against a private ecstasy that admits no rival. The unities heighten moral clarity; the offstage battles and onstage arguments show public fate decided in private rooms. Blank verse, grave and flexible, replaces Dryden’s earlier rhymed thunder, lending the play an elegiac music appropriate to lovers who choose extinction over division.

Significance
All for Love stands as Dryden’s finest tragedy and the most successful Restoration answer to Shakespeare. By narrowing the canvas and purifying the conflict, it distills Antony and Cleopatra into a single, lucid proposition: the world is well lost when the prize is love, and the loss is terrible enough to make the saying true.