Otherwordly John Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays by Jack Armistead (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Otherwordly John Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays by Jack Armistead Taylor Corse Armistead, Jack. Otherwordly John Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. 187 pp. In Otherworldly John Dryden, Jack Armistead examines the “occult sensibility” (8) that Dryden displays throughout his long career as a poet and dramatist. Armistead does not discuss otherworldly language and phenomena in all of Dryden’s works; instead, he wisely limits his discussion to an analysis of selected plays (mainly the serious ones such as The Indian Queen, Tyrannic Love, The Conquest of Granada, Aureng-Zebe, All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and King Arthur) and selected original poems (such as Heroique Stanzas, Annus Mirabilis, Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, Threnodia Augustalis, the Killigrew Ode, “To Sir Godfrey Kneller,” and The Secular Masque). The guiding principle for his selection seems to be works in which the presence of supernatural material (in the form of angels, witches, ghosts, daemons, spirits, magic, alchemy, astrology, providence, dreams, divination, prophesy, providence, and so on) is substantive rather than occasional and intermittent. Above all, Armistead is interested in examining works in which the supernatural serves as a “sort of meta-commentary on the main actions or themes” (9). This is a fruitful approach that illuminates an important dimension of Dryden’s work often overlooked, or simply ignored, in scholarly studies and critical appraisals of the poems and plays. Armistead discerns an over-arching pattern in this regard. In the period before the death of Charles II in 1685, Dryden felt fairly confident that he or some of his [End Page 200] fictional characters “had the power to detect and cooperate with the natural operations of providence” (45). Thus Cromwell in Heroique Stanzas, Cortez in The Indian Emperour, General Monck in Astraea Redux, Charles II in Annus Mirabilis, Ariel in The Tempest, and Almahide in The Conquest of Granada employ a “natural magic in tune with the new science” (55) of the era and its leading intellectuals (Henry More, Joseph Glanville, Robert Boyle, Walter Charleton). The most metaphysically complex of all these early works is undoubtedly Tyrannic Love with its host of Pagan and Christian characters and their various belief systems. Armistead offers a more nuanced and judicious reading of this play than any of its distinguished commentators (King, Novak, Barbeau, Gardiner, and Hughes), thanks largely to his careful consideration of the religious and philosophic systems that were fashionable during the Restoration. In the 1660s, Dryden appears to have been optimistic that the “higher magic of Christian love can transform both individual and nations” (76). Armistead observes a growing skepticism along with a reduction of occult power in many works from the next decade, including Aureng-Zebe, The State of Innocence, and All for Love. One of his strongest chapters, however, is devoted to explicating a supernatural dimension that seldom gets treated in studies of All for Love: namely, Egyptology. Convincingly, in my view, Armistead shows that Dryden’s great tragedy is suffused with the cultural history of Egypt and Rome in surprisingly subtle ways. As he puts it, “To Restoration readers immersed in contemporary Egyptian lore, the cultural conflict of central interest in All for Love is not one between Cleopatra’s Egypt and Ocatavian’s Rome. It is the one between the pristine values of an older Egypt and Rome, on the one hand, and those of the later, pre-Christian Egypt and imperial Rome, on the other” (95). The priest-poet Serapion is the character who links together the different, opposing perspectives of the play, and Armistead rightly sees Serapion as a choric figure—a kind of “empirical visionary” (100). It is worth noting that Aubrey Williams, in an essay he wrote some thirty years ago, discussed the role of Serapion in very similar terms. Otherworldly John Dryden is full of fascinating insights about various works. For instance, Armistead notes that Dryden presents the contest between radical Whigs and Tory loyalists in Absalom and Achitophel as a “competition between rival forms of magic” (114), a tendency that carries over to The Medall, where Shaftesbury and company are depicted as “diabolical magicians” (115) whose machinations prove...