All for Love

All for Love; or, The World Well Lost is a tragedy written in 1677 by the English poet and playwright John Dryden (1631–1700). Drawing on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, it is one of the most frequently revived plays of the English Restoration stage. Written in blank verse, the play, as Dryden acknowledged in a preface published the same year, was his deliberate attempt to break free from the rhyming couplets then fashionable in heroic drama in favor of a blank verse closer to natural speech, and to follow French neoclassical taste by compressing the events of Shakespeare's original—scattered across many locations and spanning more than a decade—into the final day before the fall of Alexandria, concentrating the action on a small cast and a single setting. At its core lies Antony's repeated wavering between his political duties and military honor in Rome and his passion for Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt; the embassies of Octavius, the counsel of his old lieutenant Ventidius and of friends, and the emotional bonds of Cleopatra pull him in opposing directions, and the play ends with the deaths of both lovers in turn. Dryden removed the comic buffoonery and several minor characters of Shakespeare's play, simplifying and moralizing Cleopatra's complex character so that the tragedy and cost of "giving up the world for love" stand out more prominently. The play has long been regarded as a major text in the reform of English tragedy and comedy in the seventeenth century, and is a staple for comparative study of how Dryden and Shakespeare handle the same subject.