92-) English Literature
John Dryden
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Since
the publication of Annus Mirabilis 12 years earlier, Dryden had given almost
all his time to playwriting. If he had died in 1680, it is as a dramatist that
he would be chiefly remembered. Now, in the short space of two years, he was to
make his name as the greatest verse satirist that England had so far produced.
In 1681 the king’s difficulties—arising from political misgivings that his
brother, James, the Roman Catholic duke of York, might succeed him—had come to
a head. Led by the earl of Shaftesbury, the Whig Party leaders had used the
Popish Plot to try to exclude James in favour of Charles’s illegitimate
Protestant son, the duke of Monmouth. But the king’s shrewd maneuvers
eventually turned public opinion against the Whigs, and Shaftesbury was
imprisoned on a charge of high treason.
As
poet laureate in those critical months Dryden could not stand aside, and in
November 1681 he came to the support of the king with his Absalom and
Achitophel, so drawing upon himself the wrath of the Whigs. Adopting as his
framework the Old Testament story of King David (Charles II), his favourite son
Absalom (Monmouth), and the false Achitophel (Shaftesbury), who persuaded
Absalom to revolt against his father, Dryden gave a satirical version of the
events of the past few years as seen from the point of view of the king and his
Tory ministers and yet succeeded in maintaining the heroic tone suitable to the
king and to the seriousness of the political situation. As anti-Whig
propaganda, ridiculing their leaders in a succession of ludicrous satirical
portraits, Dryden’s poem is a masterpiece of confident denunciation; as
pro-Tory propaganda it is equally remarkable for its serene and persuasive
affirmation. When a London grand jury refused to indict Shaftesbury for
treason, his fellow Whigs voted him a medal. In response Dryden published early
in 1682 The Medall, a work full of unsparing invective against the Whigs,
prefaced by a vigorous and plainspoken prose “Epistle to the Whigs.” In the
same year, anonymously and apparently without Dryden’s authority, there also
appeared in print his famous extended lampoon, Mac Flecknoe, written about four
years earlier. What triggered this devastating attack on the Whig playwright
Thomas Shadwell has never been satisfactorily explained; all that can be said
is that in Mac Flecknoe Shadwell’s abilities as a literary artist and critic
are ridiculed so ludicrously and with such good-humoured contempt that his
reputation has suffered ever since. The basis of the satire, which represents
Shadwell as a literary dunce, is the disagreement between him and Dryden over
the quality of Ben Jonson’s wit. Dryden thinks Jonson deficient in this
quality, while Shadwell regards the Elizabethan playwright with uncritical
reverence. This hilarious comic lampoon was both the first English mock-heroic
poem and the immediate ancestor of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.
Late
works
In
1685, after the newly acceded king James II seemed to be moving to Catholic
toleration, Dryden was received into the Roman Catholic church. In his longest
poem, the beast fable The Hind and the Panther (1687), he argued the case for
his adopted church against the Church of England and the sects. His earlier
Religio Laici (1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the consolations of
Anglicanism and against unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman
Catholics. Biographical debate about Dryden has often focused on his shifts of
political and religious allegiance; critics, like his hostile contemporaries,
have sometimes charged him with opportunism.
The
abdication of James II in 1688 destroyed Dryden’s political prospects, and he
lost his laureateship to Shadwell. He turned to the theatre again. The tragedy
Don Sebastian (1689) failed, but Amphitryon (1690) succeeded, helped by the
music of Henry Purcell. Dryden collaborated with Purcell in a dramatic opera,
King Arthur (1691), which also succeeded. His tragedy Cleomenes was long refused
a license because of what was thought to be the politically dangerous material
in it, and with the failure of the tragicomedy Love Triumphant in 1694, Dryden
stopped writing for the stage.
In
the 1680s and ’90s Dryden supervised poetical miscellanies and translated the
works of Juvenal and Persius for the publisher Jacob Tonson with success. In
1692 he published Eleonora, a long memorial poem commissioned for a handsome
fee by the husband of the Countess of Abingdon. But his great late work was his
complete translation of Virgil, contracted by Tonson in 1694 and published in
1697. Dryden was now the grand old man of English letters and was often seen at
Will’s Coffee-House chatting with younger writers. His last work for Tonson was
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which were mainly verse adaptations from the
works of Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Boccaccio, introduced with a
critical preface. He died in 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey between
Chaucer and Abraham Cowley in the Poets’ Corner.
Besides
being the greatest English poet of the later 17th century, Dryden wrote almost
30 tragedies, comedies, and dramatic operas. He also made a valuable
contribution in his commentaries on poetry and drama, which are sufficiently
extensive and original to entitle him to be considered, in the words of Dr.
Samuel Johnson, as “the father of English criticism.”
After
Dryden’s death his reputation remained high for the next 100 years, and even in
the Romantic period the reaction against him was never so great as that against
Alexander Pope. In the 20th century there was a notable revival of interest in
his poems, plays, and criticism, and much scholarly work was done on them. In
the late 20th century his reputation stood almost as high as at any time since
his death.
Literary
Career
Perhaps
because of family pressure, Dryden largely avoiding publishing again until he
had left Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, and had
been in the employ of Oliver Cromwell’s government, probably in the Office of
Latin Secretary along with Milton and Marvell. This is perhaps the first
evidence of Dryden’s trimming his sails to the political winds, as centuries of
critics have accused him. His cousin, the prominent Puritan Sir Gilbert
Pickering, lord chamberlain to Cromwell, probably procured employment for
Dryden, and when the Protector died in 1659, Dryden, perhaps out of a sense of
duty either internally or externally imposed, published his “Heroique Stanzas,
Consecrated to the Glorious Memory …” of Cromwell. People—especially young
people—change their opinions all the time, so we should feel no compulsion to
make Dryden consistent. But this poem is filled with so many perplexing
ambiguities, as especially Steven N. Zwicker has noted, that no coherent
republican ideology emerges from it.
In
“Heroique Stanzas” Dryden’s ambivalence is expressed in the halting use of the
quatrain made fashionable in Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651). In
contrast, the assuredness of his heroic couplets in Astraea Redux (1660), his
poem celebrating Charles Stuart’s restoration, may perhaps indicate Dryden’s
comfort with a feudal monarchist rather than a bourgeois republican ideological
myth. Moreover, the first 28 lines of Astraea Redux can be read as seven
quatrains made up of couplets rather than alternating rhymes—as if to show
Dryden could write sophisticated quatrains his own way:
We
sigh’d to hear the fair Iberian Bride
Must
grow a Lilie to the Lilies side,
While
Our cross Stars deny’d us Charles his Bed
Whom
Our first Flames and Virgin Love did wed.
For
his long absence Church and State did groan;
Madness
the Pulpit, Faction seiz’d the Throne:
Experienc’d
Age in deep despair was lost
To
see the Rebel thrive, the Loyal crost.
The
image of the monarch as lover and his land as either loyal or disloyal spouse
are integral to Dryden’s ideological myth throughout the rest of his career.
Central to this myth is the ultimate theodicean problem/solution: if power is
the essence of government, then God himself can be stormed and “violated”; that
is, there is no metaphysical guarantee to enforce the bonds of fidelity between
leaders and people. For Dryden, normally absent Astraea (Justice) does return.
In this poem “Providence” rules not by sheer power but by law and thus ensures
that Charles’s “right” is ultimately upheld, that he cannot be “Gods Anointed”
in vain.
In
many ways Astraea Redux anticipates foundational tropes in Dryden’s later,
greater political poems: the iron law of oligarchy that belies rebellion’s
rhetoric; the analogy between King Charles and King David; the analogy between
the Puritans’ Solemn League and Covenant in Charles’s England and the
Catholics’ Holy League in Henri IV’s France; the hypocrisy of glozing the “sin”
of rebellion with the name of “Religion”; the counseling of mercy over justice;
and, finally, exhortation of the king to concentrate on England’s navy and its
trade. What little positive Dryden saw in Cromwell—his contribution to British
imperialism—can now be extended exponentially:
Our
Nation with united Int’rest blest
Not
now content to poize, shall sway the rest.
Abroad
your Empire shall no Limits know,
But
like the Sea in boundless Circles flow.
Dryden
identifies civilization itself, as opposed to a primitive “lawless salvage
Libertie,” with the “Arts” of “Empire” from Rome to contemporary England, an
empire that is at once patriarchal, hierarchal, monarchal, and commercial.
In
between the poems celebrating Cromwell and Charles, Dryden appears to have
moved toward his career as a professional writer, his deceased father not
having left him a sufficient income to survive where Dryden wanted to live—in
the hub of political and cultural activity, London. In the late 1650s he seems
to have lived with and written prefaces for the bookseller Henry Herringman,
and by the early 1660s he had moved into lodgings with Sir Robert Howard, a
younger son of Thomas Howard, first Earl of Berkshire, with impeccable Royalist
credentials and a budding literary career. In a system of symbiosis between
patrons and poets, Dryden had found himself a patron, and Howard had found
himself an editor and collaborator. Dryden helped prepare Howard’s first volume
of poems for the press in 1660, for which he wrote the first of many panegyrics
to prominent individuals, “To My Honored Friend, Sir Robert Howard,” and in
1664 they collaborated on The Indian-Queen, a drama that contributed
significantly to the Restoration fashion of rhymed heroic play (influenced,
among other things, by those the exiled court witnessed in France) and that
introduced what was to be the staple of Dryden’s later contributions, the noble
savage, whose powerful energy is eventually socialized.
Dryden’s
relationship with Howard is important in other ways: Dryden married his sister
Lady Elizabeth Howard in 1663. Why a member of so prestigious a family would
have stooped to a member of the lesser gentry remains a subject for
speculation. But the match was certainly advantageous for Dryden, who was now a
member of the powerful Howard family, several members of which aside from Sir
Robert were playwrights. Along with his brothers-in-law Dryden tried his hand
at his own plays. His first, a comedy entitled The Wild Gallant (1663), despite
being a failure, won the support of another influential aristocrat, Barbara
Villiers Palmer, Countess of Castelmaine, to whom Dryden addressed another
verse epistle. Indeed, with such encouragement, abetted by his collaboration
with Sir Robert (who had become a shareholder in the new Theatre Royal in
Bridges Street), Dryden became a stable writer for the King’s Company under Sir
Thomas Killigrew and began to succeed on his own with his first tragicomedy,
The Rival Ladies (late 1663?), and with a sequel to The Indian-Queen, The
Indian Emperour (early 1665).
Dryden
wrote three other panegyrics during the early 1660s: To His Sacred Majesty, A
Panegyrick On His Coronation (1661), To My Lord Chancellor (1662), and “To My
Honour’d Friend, Dr Charleton” (1663). In them he perfected the witty
compliment begun with the poem to Sir Robert. But he also perfected the device
of giving advice under cover of compliment, for example reminding the rakish
Charles in the Coronation poem that political stability depends on his choosing
a bride with all deliberate speed in order to ensure the succession. And the
Charleton poem reflects Dryden’s interest in the new science, an interest
rewarded by invitation in the early 1660s to become a member of the Royal
Academy of Science, although he appears not to have participated and was
subsequently dropped.
In
1665 the plague was so bad in London that Dryden had to rusticate himself and
his wife at her family estate in Charlton, Wiltshire. There he wrote three
excellent works: Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (1667), the first great
sustained work in English dramatic theory; Secret-Love (1667), a tragicomedy;
and Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 (1667). This “Historical Poem”
celebrating English victories at sea during the Second Dutch War and Charles
II’s conduct during the Great Fire of London won Dryden the poet laureateship
in 1668.
Because
it was published in 1667, Dryden’s heroic poem invites comparison with Milton’s
great epic Paradise Lost, first published in its ten-book format that same
year. Milton’s epic—written by this
radical Puritan secretary to Cromwell—looks back through its aristocratic mode
to classical and medieval times. Dryden’s poem, despite its aristocratic
elements of monarchism and heroic valor, its classical allusions and epic
similes, looks forward through its bourgeois celebration of mercantile expansion,
maritime dominance, and homely imagery of laboring citizens to the rule of a
capitalist Britannia under a constitutional monarch.
Michael
McKeon has brilliantly demonstrated that the poem is essentially political
propaganda designed to stifle domestic dissent by rallying the nation around
the common causes of war abroad and disaster at home. Dryden mythologizes
Charles II, his brother James, Duke of York, and the triumphant admirals and
generals as classical and Christian heroes and even gods. The care of the king
is portrayed as being analogous to divine providence. This mythologizing seems
deployed especially to defuse opposition to Charles and thereby to avert the
potential unraveling of the Restoration compromise. Thus Charles is portrayed
as the bride of his loyal country, or, even more explicitly, of the loyal City
of London, and Dryden—from his Dedication to the City through his portrayal of
the restored ship Loyal London to the restoration of the city itself as a
“Maiden Queen” of commerce—exhorts almost desperately a fidelity on the part of
the emergent bourgeoisie.
Underneath
the mythologizing, Dryden is attempting to placate the growing power of the
city as the center of trade and finance by getting it to view the real
challenge for England as the battle over who controls world trade. Only one
nation, one navy can and should control it (“What peace can be where both to
one pretend?”). Therefore, the logic of the poem goes, Britain should defeat
Holland, eclipse the trade of the rest of Europe, and make the world’s waters a
“British Ocean.” Thus British “Commerce” will make “one City of the Universe.”
But this universal city will not mark the end of competition in some sort of
utopian distribution of the cornucopia. Dryden’s model is one of acquisitive
proto-capitalism: “some may gain, and all may be suppli’d.” Then as now such a
trickle-down theory results in the “some” gaining a disproportionate amount of
the world’s wealth at the expense and exploitation of the many. Behind Dryden’s
cornucopia lies an imperialist theory of dominance.
Nevertheless,
at his very best Dryden the mythologizer of late feudalism and incipient
capitalism descends occasionally from his highly allusive and allegorical mode
to portray real people in material situations, as in these stanzas:
Night
came, but without darkness or repose,
A
dismal picture of the gen’ral doom:
Where
Souls distracted when the Trumpet blows,
And
half unready with their bodies come.
Those
who have homes, when home they do repair
To
a last lodging call their wand’ring friends.
Their
short uneasie sleeps are broke with care,
To
look how near their own destruction tends.
Those
who have none sit round where once it was,
And
with full eyes each wonted room require:
Haunting
the yet warm ashes of the place,
As
murder’d men walk where they did expire.
The
opening allegorical yet human image is worthy of Donne. For anyone who has
lived through fire, hurricane, or tornado, the stanzas painting the near or
already homeless are quite poignant. And Dryden’s maturity as a poet is
evidenced here by his masterful handling of not only image but sound: the
reversed iambs and spondees, the frequent alliteration and occasional assonance
(“Souls … blows”), and especially the freeze-frame quality of successive
emphasized syllables imitating the eyes’ movement from room to room around the
absent house.
Dryden
dares most by his inclusion, in these new heroic stanzas, of indecorously
technical and vulgar terms for material work by the laboring force of
shipbuilders called upon to repair the British fleet, from picking “bullets”
out of planks, to caulking seams with “Okum” and “boiling Pitch.” Dryden is no
democrat; he has no love here as elsewhere in his poetry for “th’ignoble
crowd,” and he hints at the anarchy unleashed by republican rebels. However, in
his image of these industrious laborers demonstrating their loyalty and
contributing to the cause, he raises them to the stature of the heroic. In the
same poem in which he mythologizes the duke of York and Prince Rupert and
George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, and King Charles himself, the reader
experiences the following realistic snapshots: Albemarle, his breeches
ignominiously blown off; and while the King harmlessly amuses himself playing
with the “new-cast Canons,” among the shipworkers. “To try new shrouds one
mounts into the wind, / And one, below, their ease or stifness notes.” By
diminishing heroes and exalting workers Dryden has at least leveled them into a
common humanity, united in a bourgeois image of cooperation between government,
venture capital, and guild labor in order to subdue the earth.
Dryden’s
return to London in the winter of 1666-1667 was triumphant. Several of his
plays were staged, new and old; the Essay was published; the King’s Company
signed Dryden to a contract in which he became a shareholder and agreed to give
them three new plays per year; and he received the laureateship—all before the
end of 1668. By the end of 1671 he had produced four more plays, including two
masterpieces, The Conquest of Granada, a rhymed heroic play in ten acts, and
Marriage A-la-Mode, a split-plot tragicomedy. Dryden had established himself as
the greatest dramatist of his time. And if one can separate out his development
as a poet per se—a difficult task when his plays have so much verse, so many
songs, and prologues and epilogues in couplets—one would have to conclude that,
despite the absence during these years of isolated poems, Dryden achieved a
virtuosity of verse and wit unequaled during the Restoration. Palmyra’s
description of her falling in love with Leonidas in Marriage A-la-Mode is
lovelily lyrical. The prologue to An Evening’s Love (1668) concerning poets as
worn-out gallants and the songs concerning wet dreams and worn-out marriage
vows from The Conquest of Granada and Marriage A-la-Mode respectively are
wickedly witty and wonderfully versified. But Dryden’s most impressive work is
probably his puckish epilogue to Tyrannic Love (1669), spoken by Nell Gwyn,
outrageously rakish actress and mistress to Charles II (among others). Having
played Valeria, daughter of the Roman emperor Maximin who martyrs Saint
Catharine, and having herself been a martyr to love, Nell is about to be
carried off at the end of the play, when she leaps up—most certainly to the
audience’s delight in such comic relief—and speaks the epilogue in couplets
that rival Alexander Pope’s for their colloquial and dramatically conversational
style:
To
the Bearer. Hold, are you mad? you damn’d confounded Dog,
I
am to rise, and speak the Epilogue.
To
the Audience. I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye,
I
am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly….
O
Poet, damn’d dull Poet, who could prove
So
sensless! to make Nelly die for Love;
Nay,
what’s yet worse, to kill me in the prime
Of
Easter-Term, in Tart and Cheese-cake time!
I’le
fit the Fopp; for I’le not one word say
T’excuse
his godly out-of-fashion Play:
A
Play which if you dare but twice sit out,
You’l
all be slander’d, and be thought devout.
But
farewel, Gentlemen, make haste to me,
I’m
sure e’re long to have your company.
As
for my Epitaph when I am gone,
I’le
trust no Poet, but will write my own.
Here
Nelly lies, who, though she liv’d a Slater’n,
Yet
dy’d a Princess, acting in S. Cathar’n.
The
laughter must have brought down the house. Yet 20th-century critics do not seem
to understand that such wit does not undercut the seriousness of such plays as
Tyrannic Love, The Conquest of Granada, and Marriage A-la-Mode. Urbanity does
not mean a supercilious, ironic rejection of all values but rather a witty
reflexivity and studied insouciance about them.
By
1672, then, Dryden was at the height of his powers and reputation. He had added
to the title poet laureate that of historiographer royal. He hobnobbed with the
powerful and, despite his increasing family (by then, three sons), appears to
have aped the manners of his betters by fashionably taking a mistress, the
actress Ann Reeves. But the first hints of the tarnishing of his triumph had
also appeared: his feud with his brother-in-law Sir Robert over the aesthetic
merit of rhyme in drama escalated through Dryden’s Essay to Howard’s preface to
The Great Favourite; or, The Duke of Lerma (1668) to Dryden’s extremely
intemperate “Defence” of the Essay, prefixed to the second edition of The
Indian Emperour in the same year. Because this preface was removed from most
copies of this edition, one can speculate that Dryden realized his error in
judgment, but his relationship with his brother-in-law may have been
permanently damaged. A few years later, perhaps out of pique at Dryden’s pride
in his success, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, attacked Dryden as
a poetaster in The Rehearsal (1671). The era of Dryden’s public brawls with his
critics had begun.
Things
got worse when fire destroyed Dryden’s company’s theater at the inopportune
time of the rival company’s moving into an extravagant new theater in Dorset
Garden. Furthermore, the Duke’s Company was beginning to have the best actors
as Thomas Betterton gathered great young talent around him, and it was
beginning to attract new and successful playwrights: Thomas Shadwell, Edward
Ravenscroft, and Elkanah Settle. Dryden’s own new comedy, The Assignation
(1672), failed, and even his jingoistic propaganda attack against the Dutch
during the outbreak of the Third Dutch War, Amboyna (1673), did not salvage the
fortunes of the King’s Company. When their new theater in Drury Lane opened in
1674, Dryden, in an attempt to rival the extravaganzas of the Duke’s Company,
tried to turn his great admiration for Milton’s Paradise Lost to account by
creating an operatic version, The State of Innocence. He appears even to have
gone so far as to visit the aged and blind poet, with whom he had once worked,
in order to ask his permission. From all his references to Milton’s great poems
throughout his works, beginning perhaps as early as 1669, one can infer in what
respect Dryden held Milton, but unfortunately nothing is known of this meeting.
Even more unfortunately, for Dryden and the King’s Company at least, the
company could not afford to produce the opera, and it was never performed. At
this nadir of his career, Dryden sought an appointment at Oxford where he could
retire from the stage and write his own epic poem. Neither desire was realized.
Whether
caused by Milton’s great aesthetic achievements and his attack on rhymed plays,
or by Settle’s embarrassingly bathetic popular successes in Dryden’s erstwhile
favorite genre of rhymed heroic play, or just by Dryden’s own study (perhaps of
plays by the great French dramatist Jean Racine), Dryden began his comeback by
moving toward a more neoclassical form of drama. In Notes and Observations on
the Empress of Morocco (1674), he joined in an attack on Settle’s extravagance.
In 1675, although he gave the King’s Company another excellent rhymed heroic
play, Aureng-Zebe, in the prologue he bade farewell to his “long-lov’d Mistris,
Rhyme” (and probably his other mistress, Ann Reeves, as well) as he began to
imitate Racine. His next three serious plays were blank-verse, neoclassical
tragedies, and one—All for Love (1677)—was the greatest tragedy of the
Restoration; indeed, it remains the greatest tragedy in English after Shakespeare,
and it is still performed in England. His theory of the late 1670s ("Heads
of an Answer to Rymer,” “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy"), influenced
by Thomas Rymer and the French critics, as well as by Racine, became more
neoclassical. And he turned his attention to the translation of classics.
Dryden began severing ties with the King’s Company had begun as early as 1677,
when he insisted on the third night’s profits from All for Love. It continued
with the Duke’s Company’s production of The Kind Keeper in 1678 (apparently
because the King’s Company did not want it).
But
before Dryden made the transition from King’s to Duke’s, from romance to
neoclassical tragedy, from depression to renewed vigor as dramatist, he had
some scores to settle. When his fortunes were sinking, he had appealed to John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, to patronize him, but, after some initial
flirtation, Rochester proved inconstant, supported Dryden’s rival Shadwell
instead, and lampooned Dryden in “An Allusion to Horace.” Dryden had been
feuding with Shadwell over the theory of comedy for years in various prefaces
and dedications, but the two had remained relatively conciliatory and had
collaborated with John Crowne in the attack on Settle. In early 1676, however,
the same year Rochester’s satire was circulating in manuscript, Shadwell broke
the facade of civility and lampooned Dryden as well throughout his comedy The
Virtuoso.
Dryden
responded with a vengeance probably doubled by displaced anger at Rochester and
compounded by his own poor fortunes, both literal and figurative, in the first
half of the decade. Beginning most likely in the summer of 1676, Dryden wrote
one of the two greatest satires in English against rival poets, Mac Flecknoe
(the other is Pope’s Dunciad, 1728—1743). He certainly had finished it by 1678,
though it circulated in manuscript until unauthorized publication in 1682. The
controlling fiction of the poem is succession, a daring motif in a country
where the restored monarch had produced no legitimate male heir. Witness the
brashness of the opening lines:
All
humane things are subject to decay,
And,
when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey[.]
The
phenomenology of the first reading dictates that the reader’s expectations for
a heavy, topical political poem have been aroused. The next couplet provides a
crashing diminuendo:
This
Fleckno found, who, like Augustus, young
Was
call’d to Empire, and had govern’d long.
The
poem is a mock panegyric, a paradoxical encomium, complete with parodic
procession and coronation. Dryden the poet laureate destroys his rival by
crowning him anti—poet laureate, king of “the Realms of Non-sense”: “from
Ireland let him reign / To farr Barbadoes on the Western main”—that is, he
reigns over the unpopulated Atlantic Ocean! By making Richard Flecknoe his
poetic forebear, Dryden denies Shadwell the lineage he has claimed, to be a new
Son of Ben (Jonson) because of his dedication to a comedy of humors. Instead,
Flecknoe was a poetaster who paid to have his plays published, who sometimes
changed a title and added a little window dressing to get one produced (Erminia
[1661] to Emilia [1672]), whose plays, whether produced or not were uniformly
bad. To make Shadwell Flecknoe’s heir was to put down another upstart,
especially by portraying him as impotent, capable of producing urine and feces
and freaks but no legitimate, manly poetic progeny.
Throughout
the poem Dryden combines references to dirt with references to myth. The latter
does not “transcend” the former (another favorite metaphor of critics) but
coexists with it, cocreates the joke, which is intended to amuse Dryden’s
friends, antagonize his enemies, and hurt Shadwell himself. Curiously, the
Dryden who seems so preoccupied in his prologues and epilogues with
establishing a bourgeois community of taste that contemns “low” artistic
techniques and types such as slapstick and farce reveals himself to be the
master of Rabelaisian humor. In the cruelest cut of all, he has Flecknoe say to
Sh____ (Shadwell), “With whate’er gall thou sett’st thy self to write, / Thy
inoffensive Satyrs never bite.” Dryden’s satire has bitten so well that he has
effectively decapitated Shadwell for three centuries, precisely because he has
so masterfully combined high and low. Playing a mock—John the Baptist to
Shadwell’s mock-Messiah, Flecknoe prepares the way for a mock—Triumphal Entry
into Jerusalem-London, where not palm leaves
But
scatter’d Limbs of mangled Poets lay:
From
dusty shops neglected Authors come,
Martyrs
of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum.
This
mixing of sacred and scatological is positively medieval in its folk humor.
Dryden can pretend that Shadwell has debased Jonson into selling “Bargains,
Whip-stitch, kiss my Arse,” but this last phrase is exactly what Dryden has
commanded Sh____ to do.
After
the success of All for Love and the growing chances for his security with the
Duke’s Company, Dryden must have felt emboldened enough to settle his other
score by attacking Rochester himself in his preface to the published version of
the new play in early 1678. Squire Dryden asserts his talents as a literary
professional to be superior to those of the court wits, who properly ought to
confine their literary dabbling to being good patrons. Perhaps Dryden was
feeling protected by his new patron, the dedicatee of All for Love, Lord
Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby. Indeed, shortly after Danby’s fall
from power in 1679, Dryden was attacked by thugs in Rose Alley and beaten
soundly. Did Rochester and his friends finally take their revenge? Or by that
time had Dryden offended someone else (suggestions have included the King’s
mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, and the Whig Opposition)?
The point of the beating is that Dryden was considered uppity enough for some
group to want to teach him a lesson. But if they thought they would intimidate
him, they were mistaken.
In
1678 occurred the infamous Popish Plot. Several witnesses, most notorious among
them Titus Oates, offered perjured testimony to the effect that the Jesuits
were planning the overthrow of the government and a return of England to the
yoke of Catholicism—a threat that Englishmen, in the light of characters in
their history since the time of Henry VIII, from Bloody Mary to Guy Fawkes,
found credible. (Indeed, they were right to be suspicious, for the Stuarts had
made an unholy alliance with France eventually to deliver their nation back
into the Catholic fold.) Several Catholic heads rolled; Catholic peers were
removed from the House of Lords; the duke of York and his new Catholic duchess,
Maria Beatrice, had to go into exile; and a new Parliament was elected, one
that was ready to pass legislation to exclude James from the throne because of
his religion: thus the name given to this political turmoil, the Exclusion
Crisis. Some of the principals tried to get Charles to declare his bastard son,
James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, his legitimate heir. Several playwrights jumped
on the anti-Catholic bandwagon as if to say, “we might disagree with the
exclusionists, but we are not therefore in favor of a foreign-based Catholic
takeover, ultimately by Rome through France.” Dryden himself grabbed onto the
wagon in his next play, The Spanish Fryar (1680), in which he satirizes a
priest; nevertheless, in the high plot he strenuously upholds the principle of
hereditary, patrilineal monarchal succession. He apparently (his authorship is
disputed) even more stridently defended Charles’s dissolution of Parliament in
a pamphlet entitled His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681). And finally he wrote one of the great
political poems in the English language, Absalom and Achitophel (1681).
Dryden
uses the familiar trope of superimposing scriptural story over current events.
He had already availed himself of the David story in Astraea Redux. The
consequences for propaganda are obvious. Dryden endows his vision of events
with sacred authority: the social and the sacred Logos are the same. Thus a
theoretical dispute over the mode of political succession gets mythologized and
mystified. Parliament’s struggle to control succession becomes a blasphemous,
ultimately Satanic revolt against “heavens Anointing Oyle.” Absalom’s
sacrilegious revolt against David gets reenacted in contemporary history. The
evil counselor Achitophel becomes Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury,
one of the leaders of the Parliamentary party, who was caricatured repeatedly
in ways reminiscent of Shakespeare’s treatment of Richard III. Dryden adds the
further fillip of overlaying Miltonian pattern: Achitophel/Shaftesbury becomes
Satan tempting an anti-Messiah to be the people’s “Saviour.”
One
of the problems with the biblical parallel is that its arc is tragic. It is as
if Dryden wrote Monmouth into a text from which he could not escape. David
threatens at the end, “If my Young Samson will pretend a Call / To shake the
Column, let him share the Fall.” David’s urge, on the other hand, is to be
lenient. But Monmouth never did heed the poet’s advice; he led a revolt upon
his father’s death in 1685 and was executed. Moreover, as with the biblical
David, Dryden’s David/Charles is trammeled up in the consequences of his
adultery. Dryden opens again brilliantly:
In
pious times, e’er Priest-craft did begin,
Before
Polygamy was made a sin;
When
man, on many, multiply’d his kind,
E’r
one to one was, cursedly, confind:
When
Nature prompted, and no law deny’d
Promiscuous
use of Concubine and Bride;
Then,
Israel’s Monarch, after Heaven’s own heart,
His
vigorous warmth did, variously, impart
To
Wives and Slaves: And, wide as his Command,
Scatter’d
his Maker’s Image through the Land.
However
wittily Dryden opens the poem, the ultimate point of its portrayal of David’s
promiscuity is that “No True Succession” can “attend” the “seed” of David’s
concubines. Another of Dryden’s bold openings has cut to the heart of the
matter. When Absalom and David both later complain that Absalom was born too
high but not high enough, they may blame “Fate” or “God,” but the fault is
clearly David’s own.
However,
the point of Dryden’s poem is neither to recuperate Monmouth nor admonish
Charles. It is to discredit thoroughly Charles’s enemies and their putative
political theory, praise his steadfast friends, and vindicate Charles himself.
The first objective Dryden accomplishes with perhaps the most devastating
rogues’ gallery of satiric portraits ever assembled. The portraits are not
devastating solely because of vitriolic lampooning, though there is plenty of
that. They are devastating because they at first appear evenhanded, a studied
moderation designed to appeal to the common sense of Dryden’s contemporary
audience. Dryden’s portrait of Absalom, for example, appears balanced. He is
like one of Dryden’s noble savages. But the difference is that he does not turn
out to be the legitimate heir, and he knows it, acknowledging David’s “Right”
to rule and that of his “Lawfull Issue,” if he should have any, or of his
“Collateral Line,” that is, his brother. When through ambition fostered by his
noble nature Monmouth succumbs to Achitophel’s Satanic temptation, Dryden again
assumes the strategy of lamentation:
Unblam’d
of Life (Ambition set aside,)
Not
stain’d with Cruelty, nor puft with Pride;
How
happy had he been, if Destiny
Had
higher plac’d his Birth, or not so high!
His
Kingly Vertues might have claim’d a Throne,
And
blest all other Countries but his own:
But
charming Greatness, since so few refuse;
‘Tis
Juster to Lament him, than Accuse.
The
master stroke here is Dryden’s sympathy toward Monmouth’s ambiguous position in
the hierarchy resulting from the circumstances of his birth (not his but
Charles’s fault) coupled with his insistence (as well as Charles’s own) that
nevertheless he remains illegitimate. Even if he were legitimate, Dryden
implies, he would never be the heir (because he has shown by his character that
he could never merit it?); he might have blessed other countries with his noble
virtues (through royal intermarriage), but not—and never—his own.
Dryden
also portrays the “Best” of the “Malecontents” assembled by Achitophel—that is,
primarily, the Country party among the Lords—as being essentially well-meaning
but “Seduc’d by Impious Arts” into believing the “power of Monarchy” a threat
to “Property.” Thus identifying with and appealing to the moderates in the
House of Lords, Dryden does not want to seem to be maligning his betters. He
saves his nastiness generally for the middle and lower classes, whom he
portrays as motivated by “Interest,” parsimonious “Husbandry,” desire for
“Preferment,” or, under the hypocritical guise of (dissenting) religion, the
sheer desire “all things to Destroy,” especially monarchy itself. Dryden
portrays the common “herd” as mindless, those “Who think too little, and who
talk too much.”
Dryden’s
next justly famous portraits are representatives of the three classes. From the
truly rebellious aristocrats (implicitly a mere fringe group) he selects his
old enemy Buckingham, whom he portrays as too inconstant in his moods,
postures, and political positions to remain constant to any one—or, by
implication, to the king. Dryden’s representative of the middle class is the
hypocritical Puritan Shimei (Slingsby Bethel, sheriff of London), whose
animosity against the office of king itself is so strong he fears not to curse
“Heavens Annointed,” and whose very religion is simply a means for his personal
“Gain.” As do modern satirists with televangelists, Dryden turns Shimei’s
canting rhetoric against him:
For
Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf,
Yet
lov’d his wicked Neighbour as himself:
When
two or three were gather’d to declaim
Against
the Monarch of Jerusalem,
Shimei
was always in the midst of them:
And,
if they Curst the King when he was by,
Would
rather Curse, than break good Company.
In
a wonderful marriage of sound, sight, and sense, the middle triplet here
inserts a third line into the usual couplet form as if in imitation of the
insinuation of Antichrist Shimei into the midst of his disciples.
Dryden’s
representative of the lower class is Corah, who stands for Titus Oates, the
weaver’s son who was the archwitness of the Popish Plot. Dryden portrays him
with dripping sarcasm:
His
Memory, miraculously great,
Could
Plots, exceeding mans belief, repeat;
Which,
therefore cannot be accounted Lies,
For
humane Wit could never such devise.
If
Shimei perverts the words of Scripture for his interest, Corah perverts words
in the very citadel of justice, where oaths are supposed to guarantee the
truth. Indeed, all of Dryden’s villains assault the social logos through
disloyalty, hypocrisy, and perjury, thus challenging the underwriting divine
Logos.
In
addition to discrediting his opponents thus, Dryden discredits their political
theory. Achitophel’s articulation of Lockean theory—“the People have a Right
Supreme / To make their Kings; for Kings are made for them. / All Empire is no
more than Pow’r in Trust”—is belied by his own ambition for power. But Dryden
appears to take his theory seriously and to approach the question moderately.
Rejecting the position of absolute monarchy, Dryden equally rejects the
position of social-contract theorists who argue that the people can take their
bond back, a secession resulting, for Dryden, in Hobbist political instability:
If
they may Give and Take when e’r they please,
Not
Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)
But
Government it self at length must fall
To
Natures state; where all have Right to all.
Purloining
Locke’s own concept of prudence, Dryden then asks in his most conciliatory
mode, “Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make, / What Prudent men a
setled Throne woud shake?” While Dryden appears to be adopting a Burkean conservatism
based on the weight of tradition—as is obvious from all the references to God’s
involvement in anointing and supporting kings throughout the poem—the
grammatical uncertainty of the first line images forth the political anarchy
that would ensue if anyone but God—lords, commoners, kings themselves, by
tampering with succession—were to make a king.
Dryden
then proceeds to portray the king’s friends as a loyal group of peers, bishops,
judges, and even the former speaker of the (now rebellious) House of Commons.
The greatest wielder of words in the poem is David himself, who comes forward
finally to vindicate his power and position. Weary of abuse despite his wonted
clemency and long-suffering, David insists that even if he has only a part of
government, the part belongs to him, cannot be attenuated by any other part,
and is “to Rule.” Dryden endows his speech with magisterial authority:
Without
my Leave a future King to choose,
Infers
a Right the Present to Depose:
True,
they Petition me t’approve their Choise,
But
Esau’s Hands suite ill with Jacob’s Voice.
David
becomes more aggressive as he progresses:
What
then is left but with a Jealous Eye
To
guard the Small remains of Royalty?
The
Law shall still direct my peacefull Sway,
And
the same Law teach Rebels to Obey.
Thus
Dryden stakes out for David/Charles a middle ground between extremes of
arbitrary or anarchic rule. He insists on the king’s lawful prerogative granted
by the unwritten constitution and forming part of a balanced system of
government. The other parts of that balance have threatened the very Ark of the
Covenant, and so David himself now threatens, “Law they require, let Law then
shew her Face,” for “Lawfull Pow’r is still Superiour found.” So David will
punish the transgressors, who will actually devour themselves by turning
against each other. Dryden closes the poem by underwriting David’s words with
the Word of God: “He said. Th’Almighty, nodding, gave Consent: / And Peals of
Thunder shook the Firmament.” Dryden’s final touch, then, is a kind of
apotheosis: David and God become one: “And willing Nations knew their Lawfull
Lord.”
Absalom
and Achitophel was a celebration of Charles’s triumph over his foes in the
Exclusion Crisis. As it was published in November 1681, Shaftesbury was on trial
for treason. But that triumph seemed short-lived, for Shaftesbury, to Dryden
the archconspirator, got off scot-free, and his supporters cast a medal in his
honor. Early in 1682 Dryden published another attack on Shaftesbury and his
followers, The Medall. A Satyre against Sedition. The controlling fiction of
the poem is the two sides of the medal, one with a portrait of Shaftesbury, the
other with a portrait of the City of London. Again portraying Shaftesbury’s
political inconstancy as a function of inconstancy of character, Dryden says
sardonically of the medal, “Cou’d it have form’d his ever-changing Will, / The
various Piece had tir’d the Graver’s Skill.” Dryden traces him through his
tortuous twists of allegiance until his final revelation of the “fiend” within.
On
the other hand, Dryden addresses “London, thou great Emporium of our Isle”
again in a lamentory mode, and one cannot help remembering his praise of the
city in Annus Mirabilis as the emporium of England’s imperialist trade. As in
Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden spares the virtuous Londoners from blame, but he
stridently attacks the “Fool and Knave” who corruptly misdirect the city’s
great energies. Here one sees as plainly as anywhere Dryden’s fear of and
contempt for the rising middle class that couched its political ambitions in
religious rhetoric:
In
Gospel phrase their Chapmen they betray:
Their
Shops are Dens, the Buyer is their Prey.
The
Knack of Trades is living on the Spoyl;
They
boast, ev’n when each other they beguile.
Customes
to steal is such a trivial thing,
That
‘tis their Charter, to defraud their King.
Dryden
has perceived the inherent danger of bourgeois individualism and incipient
capitalism: the selfish, predatory accumulation of wealth by means of fraud and
tax evasion. These are descendants of the Commonwealth’s men who murdered a
previous king and who are still bent on the destruction not only of “Kings” but
of “Kingly Pow’r” per se.
In
both sections of the poem, Dryden satirizes (this time he does not pretend to
rational debate) the political theory of the Whigs. In both he reduces
republican theory to a version of might makes right, here applied to the
concept of majority rule, “The Most have right, the wrong is in the Few”:
Almighty
Crowd, thou shorten’st all dispute;
Pow’r
is thy Essence; Wit thy Attribute!
Nor
Faith nor Reason make thee at a stay,
Thou
leapst o’r all eternal truths, in thy Pindarique way!
The
wit in these lines resides not only in the brilliant imitative spillover of the
concluding alexandrine but also in the mock theology: as in the disputes over
whether God’s will or his reason be his primary essence, Dryden follows his
sarcastic reference to the crowd as “Almighty” with a pseudovoluntarist
position, reducing reason or “Wit” to a mere “Attribute.” But, as he had
suggested early in his writing,
If
Sovereign Right by Sovereign Pow’r they scan,
The
same bold Maxime holds in God and Man:
God
were not safe, his Thunder cou’d they shun
He
shou’d be forc’d to crown another Son.
The
marvelous irony of the last line works especially well when one reads from the
caesura of the penultimate line through the enjambment to fall hard upon the
reversed iamb of the last line: the implication is that even He would be
forced, like Charles, to declare another son his legitimate heir. The pun on
crown, referring to Christ’s crown of thorns, is savage.
The
best—because, perhaps, the most prophetic—parts of the poem are the early
series of analogies to political majority rule and the later series of images
of clipping of the royal power until the monarch is purely ceremonial—as indeed
he/she became after the revolution Dryden so desperately feared. Dryden mocks
the notion that majority rule is stable, citing historical examples of mistakes
resulting in the deaths of heroes, among them Socrates. As he comes closer to
his own time, he wickedly asserts, “Crowds err not, though to both extremes
they run; / To kill the Father, and recall the Son.” His most scathing
indictment of this creeping relativism occurs in the following lines:
Some
think the Fools were most, as times went then;
But
now the World’s o’r stock’d with prudent men.
The
common Cry is ev’n Religion’s Test;
The
Turk’s is, at Constantinople, best;
Idols
in India, Popery at Rome;
And
our own Worship onely true at home:
And
true, but for the time; ‘tis hard to know
How
long we please it shall continue so.
This
side to day, and that to morrow burns;
So
all are God-a’mighties in their turns.
Instead
of mythologizing the political theory he defends, Dryden attempts to justify it
on pragmatic grounds, that their British forefathers attempted to avoid
factional civil war by securing peaceful succession of both power and property
through primogeniture. God has already tried us, Dryden argues, by giving the
republicans what they wanted during the Commonwealth, and look what happened.
And he predicts a similar cannibalistic civil war if Shaftesbury and his
cronies succeed, for all will want a piece of the power, and none will be
constrained by law. His concluding prophecy seems a bitter wish-fulfillment:
Thus
inborn Broyles the Factions wou’d ingage,
Or
Wars of Exil’d Heirs, or Foreign Rage,
Till
halting Vengeance overtook our Age:
And
our wild Labours, wearied into Rest,
Reclin’d
us on a rightfull Monarch’s Breast.
If
as at the end of Absalom and Achitophel Dryden is again collapsing both earthly
and heavenly monarch together, his vision has progressed from apotheosis to
apocalypse, the ultimate curse of the satirist.
In
the immediate aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden continued to attack the
Stuarts’ enemies. He contributed satiric portraits of old nemeses now openly
Whiggish, Settle and Shadwell, to a sequel to Absalom and Achitophel, written
mostly by another young protégé, Nahum Tate. He contributed politically
satirical prologues and epilogues to several plays. He wrote another play with
Nathaniel Lee, The Duke of Guise (1682), which exploited the analogy between
current events and those in France a century before; he wrote a Vindication of
that play (1683); and in 1684 he translated Louis Maimbourg’s History of the
League, the source of most of his knowledge of that French analogue. The
stridency of Dryden’s tone increases proportionally to the growing strength of
the Stuart position, especially after the discovery in the summer of 1683 of
the Rye House Plot, an alleged plan to assassinate Charles and James and foment
a radical revolution based in London.
In
the midst of this political activity Dryden published another major poem on an
apparently radically different topic, Religio Laici or a Laymans Faith (1682).
The poem is a response to another French work, recently translated by a friend
of his into English as A Critical History of the Old Testament (1682). The
original was by a French priest, Richard Simon, and employed emerging modern
methods of scholarship to examine the biblical text, its errors and
contradictions. Dryden’s response is essentially a declaration of faith in the
few fundamental truths of Christianity that are “uncorrupt, sufficient, clear,
intire, / In all things which our needfull Faith require,” among them such
doctrines as Original Sin and its consequences, especially death and the loss
of heaven; the Incarnation of Christ; His Redemption and the consequent
justification for the sin of Adam by means of the imputed righteousness of
Christ extended to mankind.
Dryden
had not really made a radical departure from his concurrent political poems,
however. His attempt to steer a middle way between what he calls “Extreme[s]”
concerning the issue of tradition in biblical interpretation is really a
political stance, a proto-Burkean conservatism:
’Tis
some Relief, that points not clearly known,
Without
much hazard may be let alone:
And,
after hearing what our Church can say,
If
still our Reason runs another way,
That
private Reason ‘tis more Just to curb,
Than
by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.
For
points obscure are of small use to learn:
But
Common quiet is Mankind’s concern.
The
extremes he attacks in the religious sphere are the same he has been attacking
in the political: Catholics and Dissenters, the Catholics especially for their
gnostic priesthood, the Dissenters for their pernicious doctrine of individual
interpretation, which leads ultimately to the kind of political instability,
disturbance of the “Peace,” and loss of “Common quiet” detailed above. Dryden
would have sided with Edmund Burke against the French Revolution, and he would
have been appalled by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
By
1685, with the publication of Sylvae, a poetical miscellany, Dryden had become
a major translator, having turned his hand to Ovid and Virgil as early as 1680
(Ovid’s Epistles) and adding more Ovid and Theocritus in 1684 (Miscellany
Poems) and then especially Lucretius and Horace in 1685 (Sylvae). Dryden also
apparently polished William Soames’s translation of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s
Art of Poetry (1684) and contributed a dedication and life of Plutarch to a new
edition of Plutarchs Lives (1683). While he would return to and memorably
refine his versifying of Virgil in the next decade, among these early
translations most notable are his deft handling of libertine psychology in
Ovid’s epistles, especially the incestuous “Canace to Macareus"; his
inspired if somber rendition of Lucretius’s atheistic arguments against fear of
death; and his dextrous attempt at Pindarics in Horace’s Ode 3.29. In these
poems Dryden engages in some of his most experimental prosody. That Dryden was
occupied with issues of translation is evidenced not only by his preface to
Sylvae but also by his panegyric “To the Earl of Roscomon, on his Excellent
Essay on Translated Verse,” prefaced to the edition of that essay in 1684.
Dryden’s poem celebrates translation as an imperialist act whereby Greece,
Rome, Italy, France, and now England appropriate the best from the countries
they have (ostensibly) superseded.
In
1684 Dryden also published what many consider his best elegiac poem, “To the
Memory of Mr. Oldham.” Dryden’s praise is doubly generous: first, he honors
this kindred spirit in satire as having arrived at the goal and won the prize,
that is, honor in the field of satire per se, before himself; second, Dryden
laments Oldham’s early death but insists that longer time would have added
nothing to Oldham’s wit and verse but metrical regularity and “the dull sweets
of Rime”—like those of Dryden himself in his satires and indeed in this poem.
The poem, like the early elegy to Hastings, closes with no metaphysical
consolation, but with these grim, haunting lines:
Once
more, hail and farewel; farewel thou young,
But
ah too short, Marcellus of our Tongue;
Thy
Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound;
But
Fate and gloomy Night encompass thee around.
Dryden’s
next major poetic task was another unpleasant one, another elegy, this time for
Charles II, who died in February 1685. As poet laureate and historiographer
royal, Dryden had to produce an official, public elegy, one that lamented the
deceased king, praised his accomplishments, and underwrote the transition to a
new king, around whom swirled such tempests of controversy. For some time
Dryden had been preparing an opera to celebrate Charles II, one that was
finally produced in late 1685 as Albion and Albanius. In it he continued the
metrical experimentations of his translations. Relying on this metrical virtuosity,
Dryden produced Threnodia Augustalis: A Funeral-Pindarique Poem Sacred to the
Happy Memory of King Charles II (1685).
Dryden
draws a scene of pathos designed to extract pity and loyalty from even the most
recalcitrant of his audience, especially in the light of his rehearsal of
Charles’s mild temper, forgiveness, and contributions to an English renascence
of both arts and trade after the havoc wreaked by “Rebellion” and “Faction.”
Dryden portrays Charles’s greatest contribution as his intrepid support of the
principle of legitimate succession. In imitative rhythms Dryden delineates the
progress of this principle down through British history:
Succession, of a long Descent,
Which Chastly in the Channells ran,
And
from our Demi-gods began,
Equal
almost to Time in its extent,
Through
Hazzards numberless and great,
Thou
hast deriv’d this mighty Blessing down,
And
fixt the fairest Gemm that decks th’Imperial Crown.
That
succession, Dryden insists, falls upon Charles’s brother, whether the
Opposition likes it or not, and he deserves it because of his unswerving
devotion to the “plighted vows” of loyalty. In a desperate wish fulfillment,
Dryden pretends to prophesy, “with a distant view, I see / Th’amended Vows of
English Loyalty”—a vision that he once again transforms into the prosperity of
British imperialism in the wake of its “Conquering Navy,” which, under James,
will reduce the oceans of the world to acknowledging their rightful “Lord.” In
the finale of Albion and Albanius, Dryden would try again to rally the nation
behind this theme. Amid the final chorus, “Fame rises out of the middle of the
Stage, standing on a Globe; on which is the Arms of England.” The epilogue
concludes a crescendo of appeals to trust with the following version of the
myth of human word-as-bond underwritten by the Divine Word:
He
Plights his Faith; and we believe him just
His
Honour is to Promise, ours to Trust.
Thus
Britain’s Basis on a Word is laid,
As
by a Word the World it self was made.
On
his deathbed, Charles II declared his conversion to Catholicism, and his
Catholic brother James succeeded to the throne, issuing some “Royal Papers”
detailing not only Charles’s but James’s first wife’s Catholic faith.
Meanwhile, Dryden himself converted, and he was ordered to defend those Royal
Papers, which he did in a pamphlet exchange with prominent Anglican bishop
Edward Stillingfleet. Apparently Dryden felt obliged to publish another
philosophical poem, documenting his own confession of faith and answering his
earlier Religio Laici. The result was The Hind and the Panther (1687), Dryden’s
longest original poem. Ever since, he has been attacked for insincerity and
opportunism. James Anderson Winn, Dryden’s modern biographer, argues that from
the time of his relationship with the Howards, Dryden was intimately connected
with Catholic recusants, one of whom was a prominent cardinal, and one of whom
may have been his own wife. His sons were Catholic, and the youngest was
studying to be a priest. So his conversion may have taken place over a long
period of time. And he himself argues persuasively in the third part of The
Hind and the Panther that he really stood little to gain and far more to lose
by becoming Catholic, mostly because up until that time the aging James had no
son, and his new duchess, Maria Beatrice, had lost several babies: the throne
would revert to a Protestant upon his death.
Biographers
will never ascertain just why Dryden converted, and critics will probably
always accuse him of being an opportunist. But there is a logic to his
conversion if one studies his works. They are preoccupied with the need for
political stability and the concomitant necessity of loyalty to de jure
monarchs, whose titles are inherited through primogenitive patrilinearity. As
Dryden shifted from his early optimism concerning Britain’s future as an
expansionist imperial power to his defensive posture with regard to the
principle of succession amid threats of civil war, his own loyalty to James and
to unbroken succession grew stronger. It appears that the more he examined his
Religio Laici position, the more he came to doubt the Church of England’s claim
to authority. By the time he wrote The Hind and the Panther the analogy between
church and state was ironclad. Only Catholicism can trace its origins in
unbroken succession back to the primitive church; Anglicanism dates from Henry
VIII’s break with Rome (a break that occurred for dubious reasons at that,
Dryden argues throughout). And without a final arbiter in doctrinal matters, no
church can claim authority: “Because no disobedience can ensue, / Where no
submission to a Judge is due.” Dryden’s fears of political anarchy are
reflected in his fears of doctrinal anarchy, especially where the Protestant
theory of individual interpretation of the Bible obtains. Thus it should come
as no surprise that he would finally swear allegiance to Rome. Moreover,
Dryden’s religious theory of infallibility as residing in both pope and General
Council can be seen as homologous to his political theory of a government balanced
between king and Parliament. And his religious theory of authority based upon
historical priority can be seen as homologous to not just a political but an
economic theory of succession: “An old possession stands, till Elder quitts the
claim” is as true for power and property as it is for the True Church. The
problematics of the transmission of the Savior’s “Testament” are developed in
terms of homology to a contested will, precisely because an unerring guide is
needed in both religious and sociopolitical realms. Dryden has the Catholic
Hind assert to the Anglican Panther, “For that which must direct the whole,
must be / Bound in one bond of faith and unity”: both church and state need one
leader, to whom his subjects are bound by word-as-bond. In language that
expresses Dryden’s merged religious and political theory, the Hind concludes
triumphantly that “the mother church … with unrivall’d claim ascends the
throne.
Not
only Dryden’s theory but also his very fable mingles political with religious.
All along the poem seems to have a dual raison d’être: to explain Dryden’s
conversion but also to achieve an alliance between Catholics and Anglicans
against the Dissenters. Dryden’s antipathy to the latter is essentially
political: their theory of individual interpretation leads to not only
religious but political anarchy.
Finally
the ending—and perhaps the real import—of Dryden’s poem is secular. The
Catholic Hind finally despairs of an accommodation with the Anglican Panther. In vatic style Dryden
offers an optimistic, wish-fulfillment prophecy of Catholic hegemony over an
Anglican establishment ungrateful ultimately to James’s new policy of religious
tolerance. But it is as if he could not sustain the optimism. Instead he tacked
on a dire prophecy of the advent, at the death of James, of the “Usurper,”
William of Orange. There is no final apotheosis, no final apocalypse, no final
justice. The “Glorious” Revolution that did occur almost immediately forever
destroyed Dryden’s faith in a fulfillment of his religious/political vision in
his own lifetime. Instead, he moved to the margins of the new order to carry on
his critique.
In
the meantime, the one event Catholics desired most occurred: James and his
queen had a son in June 1688. Of course, it was the one event most feared by
the Protestants. Almost as Dryden had prophesied, the Protestants invited
William and Mary to become cosovereigns, and James fled the country. In
Britannia Rediviva (1688) Dryden’s celebration of the prince seems strained,
almost hysterical. He desperately prays that England be spared another civil
war: “Here stop the Current of the sanguine flood, / Require not, Gracious God,
thy Martyrs Blood.” Yet he cautions the Catholic (potential) martyrs, “Nor yet
conclude all fiery Trials past, / For Heav’n will exercise us to the last.” And
all he can praise at the end is no new order but James’s “Justice”—darling
attribute of God himself—and James’s stoic endurance of whatever “Fortune” and
“Fate” will bring. James Garrison seems right when he argues that Dryden has
run out of enabling myth to sustain the Stuarts.
In
a famous passage in The Hind and the Panther, Dryden assumes the posture of one
who has humbled his ambitious desire for fame. Almost self-pityingly he writes
of his (eventual) loss of his offices of poet laureate and historiographer
royal, as well as the income that was supposed to go with them:
‘Tis
nothing thou hast giv’n, then add thy tears
For
a long race of unrepenting years:
‘Tis
nothing yet; yet all thou hast to give,
Then
add those may-be years thou hast to live.
Yet
nothing still: then poor, and naked come,
Thy
father will receive his unthrift home,
And
thy blest Saviour’s bloud discharge the mighty sum.
At
some level Dryden may have believed that, but immediately after the revolution
he began to write again for the stage, partly to make money but also partly to
assert himself: his talent, even as his nemesis Shadwell was made the new poet
laureate; his spirit amid the storm of political conflict; his worth and thus
his justifiable fame. Moreover, though the Hind claims to “discipline” her son,
Dryden, “Whose uncheck’d fury to revenge wou’d run,” Dryden could not control
his Jacobitical rage, which broke out in his later works in various satiric
fashions.
In
subtler ways Dryden inculcated his Jacobitism into King Arthur (1691), an opera
that celebrates Britain’s resistance to foreign invaders, and Love Triumphant
(1694), his final play, a tragicomedy featuring a prince who rebels against his
father and against the incest taboo, and concluding with a nonresolution to the
issues because the prince turns out to be unrelated to either father or sister
(by implication, Mary Stuart is still her father’s daughter and a usurper).
Dryden also inculcated Jacobitism into a series of prologues and epilogues,
prose works, and especially brilliant new translations, most notably selected
satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), his Virgil (1697), and Fables Ancient
and Modern (1700).
Most
of the work of his last years was in translation, apparently as a way of
achieving a modicum of political and economic. He returned to favorites, such
as Ovid, Virgil, and Homer, and added Boccaccio and Chaucer. Especially
noteworthy is the malleability of Dryden’s heroic couplets. In the Aeneis, for
example, he occasionally opens up the couplet rather than, like Pope, closing
it virtually all the time. He spices couplets with triplets, masculine with
feminine endings. He is a past master at the enjambment and particularly of
metric variation in the first hemistich. He is also a master weaver of motif,
as in the leitmotiv of labor in the Aeneis, a Virgilian key word and concept he
variously translates as Labour and Toyl—sometimes adding to the Virgilian
original and always emphasizing the need to build a kingdom on hard work, as
opposed to the easy gains in Carthage. He also embellishes the original with
lines such as the following, which emphasize the emerging theme of
self-reliance in his final works: Dryden’s Sybil praises Aeneas as being
“secure of Soul, unbent with Woes” and advises him, “The more thy Fortune
frowns, the more oppose.” Dryden’s Aeneas answers, in lines that expand on the
original:
no Terror to my view,
No
frightful Face of Danger can be new.
Inur’d
to suffer, and resolv’d to dare,
The
Fates, without my Pow’r, shall be without my Care.
Dryden’s
Aeneas, then, must learn—like Cleomenes before him and Dryden’s “Honour’d
Kinsman,” John Driden of Chesterton, after him in Dryden’s canon—to stand fixed
on his own firm center. Aeneas’s boast seems Dryden’s own.
Meanwhile,
Dryden continued to write excellent occasional verse, from prologues and
epilogues to elegies to verse epistles. Eleonora (1692), a commissioned elegy,
was originally to be entitled “The Pattern,” and Dryden indeed makes the
countess a pattern of Christian piety and charity, as well as of aristocratic
wife and motherhood.
In
“To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve” (1694), as in his elegy on Oldham, Dryden
assumes a magnanimous pose, answering, as it were, his mock-panegyric Mac
Flecknoe with a genuine panegyric, featuring this time a legitimate succession.
Dryden’s laurels should descend to Congreve, representative of a new generation
of dramatic poets, but they have been intercepted, “For Tom the Second reigns
like Tom the first,” that is, Tom Rymer has succeeded Tom Shadwell as
historiographer royal (not poet laureate). Nevertheless, Dryden prophesies,
Thou
shalt be seen,
(Tho’
with some short Parenthesis between:)
High
on the Throne of Wit; and seated there,
Not
mine (that’s little) but thy Lawrel wear.
Though
never actually poet laureate, Congreve certainly rose “high on a throne of his
own labors rear’d,” for he became for centuries considered the premier
Restoration comedic playwright.
In
1697 Dryden took time out from his other chores to pen one of the greatest odes
in the English language, Alexander’s Feast; Or The Power of Musique. He had
written a less remarkable poem on the subject a decade earlier. The original
setting by the composer Jeremiah Clarke has been lost, but George Frideric
Handel’s magnificent setting of 1736 exists, and anyone who has ever heard it
must marvel at the incredible virtuosity on the parts of both poet and
musician. As has been often noted, the poem is a celebration of the power of
art. The musician Timotheus modulates Alexander the Great through several
moods, manipulating him with sure hand. Not only is Timotheus the real hero,
but Alexander is shown, as in Dryden’s friend Nathaniel Lee’s portrait of him
in his The Rival Queens (1677), to be the victim of his own reckless passions,
from his pride in his quasi-divinity to his proverbial drunkenness, to his
martial vanity followed immediately by pity for the vanquished foe, to his
destructive amorousness, and finally to pointless, destructive vengeance. Some critics
have seen an implied critique of William III in the poem, and the pitiable
portrait of the vanquished Darius, “Deserted at his utmost Need, / By those his
former Bounty fed,” would certainly have reminded Dryden’s audience of the
deserted James II. But the poem is a paean to the triumph of art over all
military power, over all rulers with delusions of divinity.
Dryden
ended his life in squabbles with his publisher and in bitterness over his own
fate and that of not only his king but the principle of succession he had
fought so hard to defend. He concluded his career with a contribution to a
revision of John Fletcher’s Pilgrim. His prologue continues his attack, begun
in “To my Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden” on the latest of his detractors, Sir
Richard Blackmore and Luke Milbourne, poetaster and quack doctor, and the
epilogue continues his ongoing attack against self-righteous Puritans who
attack the stage and the age in general. But his best contribution is a fitting
epitaph, both for himself and his century. Dryden portrays Momus, the god of
mockery, showing up at a celebration of the century. Momus’s comments are
devastating, as he attacks the god or goddess associated with each third of the
century. To Diana, patroness of the early Stuarts, Momus comments, “Thy Chase
had a Beast in View”; to Mars, patron of the Interregnum, “Thy Wars brought
nothing about”; to Venus, patroness of the later Stuarts, “Thy Lovers were all
untrue.” This last is perhaps his most devastating statement, for it refers not
only to the licentious loves of Charles’s time but to James’s subjects’
infidelity. No wonder the expiring poet would with his last breath sing, “‘Tis
well an Old Age is out, / And time to begin a New.” Dryden meant not only the
century itself but his own old age. He could only hope that he was on his way
to a new life, one free from the strife and disappointment of this life, one
appreciative of the celestial strains of his great poetry.
Death
Dryden
died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho,
before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later. He was
the subject of poetic eulogies, such as Luctus Brittannici: or the Tears of the
British Muses; for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700), and The Nine Muses.
A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Dryden at 43 Gerrard Street in
London's Chinatown. He lived at 137 Long Acre from 1682 to 1686 and at 43
Gerrard Street from 1686 until his death.
In
his will, he left The George Inn at Northampton to trustees, to form a school
for the children of the poor of the town. This became John Dryden's School,
later The Orange School.
Reputation
and influence
Dryden
was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. He established the
heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful
satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays
with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the form. In his
poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate
to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as "the master of the middle
style"—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th
century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his
death was evident in the elegies written about him. Dryden's heroic couplet
became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. Alexander Pope was heavily
influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally
influenced by Dryden and Pope. Pope famously praised Dryden's versification in
his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to join / The
varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy
divine." Samuel Johnson summed up the general attitude with his remark
that "the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator
of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the
sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His poems were very
widely read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
and Johnson's essays.
Johnson
also noted, however, that "He is, therefore, with all his variety of
excellence, not often pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of
effusions purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity
gave him no pleasure." Readers in the first half of the 18th century did
not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of
sensibility a fault.
One
of the first attacks on Dryden's reputation was by William Wordsworth, who
complained that Dryden's descriptions of natural objects in his translations
from Virgil were much inferior to the originals. However, several of
Wordsworth's contemporaries, such as George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and Walter
Scott (who edited Dryden's works), were still keen admirers of Dryden. Besides,
Wordsworth did admire many of Dryden's poems, and his famous "Intimations
of Immortality" ode owes something stylistically to Dryden's
"Alexander's Feast". John Keats admired the Fables, and imitated them
in his poem Lamia. Later 19th-century writers had little use for verse satire,
Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of
our prose". He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury, and was
a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett's, but the next major
poet to take an interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was
"the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth
century", and that "we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a
hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden." However, in
the same essay, Eliot accused Dryden of having a "commonplace mind".
Critical interest in Dryden has increased recently, but, as a relatively
straightforward writer (William Empson, another modern admirer of Dryden,
compared his "flat" use of language with Donne's interest in the
"echoes and recesses of words"), his work has not occasioned as much
interest as Andrew Marvell's, John Donne's or Pope's.
Dryden
is believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not
end in prepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions. Dryden
created the proscription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected
to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase, "the bodies that those souls were frighted
from," though he did not provide the rationale for his preference. Dryden
often translated his writing into Latin, to check whether his writing was
concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language
with which to compare; then Dryden translated his writing back to English
according to Latin-grammar usage. As Latin does not have sentences ending in
prepositions, Dryden may have applied Latin grammar to English, thus forming
the rule of no sentence-ending prepositions, subsequently adopted by other
writers.
The
phrase "blaze of glory" is believed to have originated in Dryden's
1686 poem The Hind and the Panther, referring to the throne of God as a
"blaze of glory that forbids the sight."
Selected
works
Dramatic
works
Dates
given are (acted/published) and unless otherwise noted are taken from Scott's
edition.
The
Wild Gallant, a Comedy (1663/1669) , The Rival Ladies, a Tragi-Comedy
(1663/1664) , The Indian Queen, a Tragedy (1664/1665) , The Indian Emperor, or
the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665/) , Secret Love, or the Maiden
Queen (1667/) , Sir Martin Mar-all, or the Feigned Innocence, a Comedy
(1667/1668) , The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, a Comedy (1667/1670), an
adaptation with William D'Avenant of Shakespeare's The Tempest , An Evening's
Love, or the Mock Astrologer, a Comedy (1668/1668)
Tyrannick
Love, or the Royal Martyr, a Tragedy (1668 or 1669/1670)
Almanzor
and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, a Tragedy, Part I
& Part II (1669 or 1670/1672) , Marriage-a-la-Mode, a Comedy (1673/1673) , The
Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, a Comedy (1672/1673) , Amboyna; or the
Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, a Tragedy (1673/1673) . The
Mistaken Husband (comedy) (1674/1675) , The State of Innocence, and Fall of
Man, an Opera (/1674)
Aureng-Zebe,
a Tragedy (1676/1676) , All for Love, or the World Well Lost, a Tragedy
(1678/1678) , Limberham, or the Kind Keeper, a Comedy (/1678)
Oedipus,
a Tragedy (1678 or 1679/1679), an adaptation with Nathaniel Lee of Sophocles'
Oedipus , Troilus and Cressida, or Truth found too late, a Tragedy (/1679) , The
Spanish Friar, or the Double Discovery (1681 or 1682/) , The Duke of Guise, a
Tragedy (1682/1683) with Nathaniel Lee , Albion and Albanius, an Opera
(1685/1685) , Don Sebastian, a Tragedy (1690/1690)
, Amphitryon, or the Two Sosias, a Comedy
(1690/1690) , King Arthur, or the British Worthy, a Dramatic Opera (1691/1691)
, Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero, a Tragedy (1692/1692) , Love Triumphant, or
Nature will prevail, a Tragedy (1693 or 1694/1693 or 1694) , The Secular Masque
(1700/1700)
Other
works
Astraea
Redux, 1660 ,Annus Mirabilis (poem), 1667 , An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668
, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681, Mac Flecknoe, 1682, The Medal, 1682 , Religio
Laici, 1682 , To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 1684 , Threnodia Augustalis, 1685 , The
Hind and the Panther, 1687 , A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687 , Britannia
Rediviva, 1688, written to mark the birth of James, Prince of Wales. ,Epigram
on Milton, 1688 , Creator Spirit, by whose aid, 1690. Translation of Rabanus
Maurus' Veni Creator Spiritus , The Works of Virgil, 1697 , Alexander's Feast,
1697 , Fables, Ancient and Modern, 1700 ,
Palamon and Arcite , The Art of Satire
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