"Rome's Other Hope": Charles, Monmouth, and James in the Summer of 1676

Abstract

“Rome’s other hope”: Charles, Monmouth, and James in the Summer of 1676 Patrick J. Daly Jr. Your Lordship [Earl of Mulgrave] has one particular reason to promote this undertaking [Dryden’s proposed epic poem], because you were the first who gave me the opportunity of discoursing it to his Majesty [Charles II] and his Royal Highness [James Stuart]; They were then pleased both to commend the design and to encourage it by their commands. But the unsettledness of my condition has hitherto put a stop to my thoughts concerning it. As I am no successor to Homer in his wit, so neither do I desire to be in his poverty. I can make no rhapsodies, nor go a-begging at the Graecian doors, while I sing the praises of their ancestors. The times of Vergil please me better, because he had an Augustus for his patron. And to draw the allegory nearer you, I am sure I shall not want a Maecenas with him. ‘Tis for your Lordship to stir up that remembrance in His Majesty, which his many avocations of business have caused him, I fear, to lay aside. —John Dryden to his patron, John Sheffield, the Earl of Mulgrave, in the Dedicatory Epistle to the published version of Aureng-Zebe, written in February 1676 1 Until David Vieth’s ground-breaking research established the summer of 1676 as the actual composition date of Mac Flecknoe, the poem had long been approached as a product of the Exclusion Crisis (1679–82), a far different period from the relative calm of the mid-1670s. 2 With the new date, however, and with a greater understanding of 1676 as a year in which Dryden was experiencing significant financial distress, a few recent studies have placed Mac Flecknoe in a somewhat larger context than previously considered. James Winn, for instance, suggests that while the “immediate occasion” for Mac Flecknoe was Shadwell’s “false picture of a well-fed Laureate” in the Preface to the printed edition of The Virtuoso, published in July 1676, Rochester’s anonymous but well-circulated attack against Dryden in “An Allusion to Horace” (1674–75) also helped to motivate the poem. 3 In a more recent study that takes up where Winn left off, Kirk Combe examines Mac Flecknoe as a comprehensive rejoinder to Rochester for his contemptuous remarks about Dryden throughout the 1670s, including those in “An Allusion to Horace”; although Shadwell remains the “satiric ground [End Page 655] zero” of Mac Flecknoe, the poem also inflicts “considerable collateral damage to Rochester,” and Combe demonstrates this by showing that the kind of criticism lodged against Shadwell in the poem itself coincides with similar criticism by Dryden against Rochester written immediately before and after Mac Flecknoe. 4 Both Winn and Combe concede that a fierce retribution against Shadwell remains the poem’s primary catalyst, though they convincingly argue that the laureate’s deep resentment against Rochester and other errant members of the aristocratic culture strongly resonates throughout the poem. While much of the poem’s elusive motivation has finally been identified—we now have a better idea of why Mac Flecknoe was written—far less has been said about how this motivation affected the actual composition of the poem. In fact, we still know nothing about the unusual way in which the poem was written. It is clear that Dryden ironically engages a coronation motif to celebrate the crowning of Thomas Shadwell. Yet, unable to account for the way Dryden casts this motif in the poem itself, we still find ourselves saying, as Earl Miner has, that the poem’s “basic structure” is “somehow bound up in the pervasive imagery of coronation.” 5 It is not just the overall attenuated quality of Mac Flecknoe that deserves some explanation, but also the tension between the poem’s purported narrative base and the prevailing dramatic mode comprised of King Flecknoe’s two speeches. Apparent to most readers, this structural complexity is still ignored by critics who have approached Mac Flecknoe as earlier commentators did, as a narrative poem deeply influenced by Boileau’s mock-heroic method in Le Lutrin. Even those recent critics who offer an alternative portrait of...