Eighteenth-Century Responses to Dryden's Fables

Abstract

Implicit in much recent critical attention to Dryden's translations is a sense of restoring these works to the centrality within Dryden's oeuvre that readers accorded them during the century and more following his death in 1700. Evidence that eighteenth-century readers thought at least as highly of Dryden's translations as of his earlier satiric and public poems is plentiful, given the frequency with which all aspects of his work are quoted and discussed in commentaries, novels, plays, and poems.1 Within this mass of material, the present essay will look at some necessarily selective examples of how Dryden's last collection of translations (and some original poems), the Fables Ancient and Modern of 1700, functions as a reference point in the works of other writers. Frequent citation of the words of one of the most popular and widely read of recent English writers in the decades following his death is, of course, only to be expected; my interest lies rather in those instances where there is a marked engagement with the Fables within a critical or creative work. On such occasions the particular use made of Dryden's words, and an awareness of their provenance, will be significant for the reader of their new setting. However, whereas in some instances the interweaving of Drydenian allusions shows great sophistication, in others, as is so often the case with self-conscious literary imitations, the