Marriage à la mode (play)

The play belongs to the Restoration theatre’s mixture of tragic seriousness and urbane sexual comedy. Dryden wrote Marriage à la mode during the period when English theatres had reopened under Charles II and playwrights were adapting continental plots, heroic conventions, and fashionable repartee for new commercial audiences.³ The work was first performed in 1673, probably by the King’s Company, and was published soon afterward. Its title refers not simply to a wedding but to marriage treated as a contemporary social fashion: a field of negotiation, display, inheritance, and erotic choice. The play’s five-act structure alternates between a court-centered serious plot and a lighter intrigue plot, allowing Dryden to place elevated questions of legitimacy beside comic attacks on vanity and infidelity.

The action contrasts a threatened political order with unstable private relationships. In the Sicilian plot, Polydamas’s court is endangered by questions of succession and concealed identity, while Leonidas and Palmyra are drawn into a love story complicated by their uncertain family relationship. The parallel comic action follows the competing desires of Rhodophil, Palamede, Doralice, and Melantha. Friendships are tested when men who have professed loyalty discover that they desire the same women, and the women manipulate, resist, or expose the assumptions built into courtship. Disguise and recognition eventually connect the separate strands. Dryden’s plot depends less on psychological realism than on reversals, overheard conversations, and the theatrical pleasure of seeing characters mistake social performance for moral character.²

Marriage in the play is presented as both a private attachment and a public transaction. The serious plot treats dynastic marriage as inseparable from sovereignty, legitimacy, and political stability; the comic plot turns the same institution into a contest over pleasure, reputation, and sexual freedom. Dryden therefore places heroic language beside the sharper idiom of Restoration comedy, a characteristic feature of a theatre shaped by aristocratic patronage and commercial competition.⁴ The play has generally attracted less attention than Dryden’s major poems and later tragedy, but it is significant for showing how he combined genres rather than choosing between them. Its moral perspective is also deliberately unsettled: wit can expose hypocrisy, yet cleverness itself becomes another form of manipulation.

The play’s distinctive feature is its deliberate doubleness rather than a single dominant plot. The Sicilian material recalls the older tradition of romance, with endangered rulers, hidden identities, and eventual recognition, while the contemporary-sounding comic scenes evoke the manners associated with Restoration comedy. That contrast makes the title especially pointed: “fashionable” marriage appears both as a dynastic instrument and as a fashionable game of sexual reputation. The work also illustrates Dryden’s transitional position between heroic drama and the more conversational comedy associated with later seventeenth-century theatre. Modern readers may find the tonal shifts abrupt, but those shifts were part of the play’s design, inviting audiences to compare political marriage with the unstable bargains made by its supposedly less serious lovers.¹

Restoration comedy

A form of English comedy associated with the theatres reopened after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, often marked by wit, sexual intrigue, and satire of manners.

Tragicomedy

A dramatic form combining serious danger or political conflict with comic plots, characters, or resolutions.

Recognition

A plot revelation in which a character’s identity, ancestry, or relationship is disclosed, frequently changing the course of the action.