I'm the kind of reader that eats up 18th Century satire, but despite my enthusiasm for that kind of work, John Dryden scares me. Perhaps it's because his name implies dryness (which is often true), or perhaps it's because, to my mind, his work doesn't sparkle in the way that his contemporaries' does (see Swift and Pope). Nevertheless, Marriage a-la-Mode is an amusing and surprisingly vulgar exploration of love and marriage, at a time when thoughts on both were changing radically.

The play features two overlapping but mostly independent plots: in one, the young royal Leonidas attempts to woe the fair Palmyra, but each has a unique relation to the usurper kind Polydamas, creating class conflicts that threaten their relationship. In the other, slightly less convoluted plot, friends Rhodophil and Palamede are each arranged into marriages that make them unhappy, but both are seeking mistresses that will ease their dissatisfactions. Unfortunately for both of the men, his mistress is the other's wife; hilarity, as expected, ensues.

The two plots, which deal in different ways with questions of class and identity, are really only tangentially related but play off each other in interesting thematic ways. The regal plot, which is the less interesting of the two, is fairly staid and inoffensive, and more strongly invested in political intrigue and masquerading than anything else. It is unsurprising that later stagings of the play omitted this plot entirely, but in the context of Dryden's original vision, it offers an interesting contrast to the more playful second plot.

It is in those scenes featuring Rhodophil and Palamede that Dryden's linguistic skills shine. The play's roguish characters are well-versed at double entendre and outright vulgarity, creating many plays on words that cut a blue streak across the already amusingly immoral proceedings. Perhaps time has dulled the effect of the barbs at French fakeness, but the rest of the dialogue remains lively and spry. The many near-misses between the would-be cuckolds are particularly wonderful, as they attempt to explain away coincidence after coincidence, unable to defend their own reasons but also unable to slay the other's hole-ridden arguments. The result is a pleasant diversion to the severity of the first plot.

For anyone who is hesitant to approach Dryden, Marriage a-la-Mode offers a wonderful point of entry. The New Mermaids edition particularly treats the original vision of the play as tantamount to later revisions, giving it a certain amount of artistic and scholarly authenticity. While not as well known as his other works, the play is still a great example of the wide breadth of Dryden's gifts as both a satirist and a poet.