John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada: The Green-Eyed Monster Reconsidered

This paper demonstrates that John Dryden in The Conquest of Granada treats jealousy in men from the modern psychoanalytical perspective. When other playwrights of his period conceive man’s jealousy, in their plays, as a selfish sexual passion, Dryden views it more of socio-cultural and political influences. In other words, he does not narrowly confine jealousy to heterosexual love, nor does he bind it to man’s instinctual urge to protect his object of love, as his contemporaries do; rather, he encourages his audience to look beyond the heterosexual relationships to understand jealousy and its different manifestations within the heterosexual couple. In The Conquest of Granada, he suggests that jealousy in men has to do more with man’s relationship with other men as well as political and economic forces than with heterosexual love and its implications. Moreover, he does not neglect, or relegate to oblivion, those who view jealousy in a positive way; he allows them to present their argument freely and without being ridiculed. Then he rationally and gradually dissuades them from their convictions. Other playwrights of Restoration and eighteenth century (such as Davenant in The Siege of Rhodes, Etherege in The Man of Mode, Wicherley in The Country Wife, and Congreve in The Way of the World) inextricably bind jealousy to romantic love and present it as an intrinsic passion that is at odd with civilization. So jealous men, these plays suggest, are not to be listened to but always to be railed on and reprimanded. Contrary to this attitude, Dryden holds we have to listen to their viewpoint and to rationally disclose to them the potential evils of jealousy