Shadwell in Acrostic Land: The Reversible Meaning of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

Abstract

Shadwell in AcrosticLand: The ReversibleMeaning ofDryden’s Mac Flecknoe DAVID M. VIETH We need a new way to read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe. My thesis is that Dryden wrote his poem as a work of the Absurd in the twentieth* century sense, and that we go wrong if we do not read it that way. As an “absurdist” work, Mac Flecknoe was not alone in its time. Among the many analogues are Butler’s Hudibras, Buckingham’s The Rehear­ sal, Rochester’s poems, and Swift’s Tale ofa Tub. Nor was this kind of “absurdist” writing new during the Restoration period. Behind “Father Fleckno ” Buckingham’s Mr. Bayes, Swift’s “modern” author, and Rochester’s “fine lady” in Artemisia to Chloe stands the figure of Stultitia in the Encomium Moriae of Erasmus.1 Strange things have happened to Mac Flecknoe during the past three decades. When I began teaching shortly after World War II, Mac Flecknoe virtually taught itself. Students in sophomore survey courses willingly agreed that the poem was very funny and that it demolishes Thomas Shadwell. As the years passed, however, and stu* dents were encouraged to read closely for such things as imagery, they found Mac Flecknoe progressively more difficult and less amus* 503 504 / DAVID M. VIETH ing. Today, I encounter entire classes, including graduate students, for whom the poem is a puzzle and not at all funny. My experience is paralleled in the academic publication on Mac Flecknoe during the same years. Between the two World Wars, the relatively meager publication dealt with scholarly matters such as when Dryden wrote Mac Flecknoe and what event or events occa­ sioned the poem.2 After World War II, however, although scholars continued to ask such questions as what Richard Flecknoe might have done to annoy Dryden,3 the really significant effort went into a search for image-patterns and systems of allusions that were assumed to give the poem “organic unity.”4 By the mid-1960s—roughly the time of the unfortunate demise of the New Criticism—the discoveries resulting from this close reading began to engender feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration. The image-patterns and systems of allusions, while undeniably present in Dryden’s text, had multiplied to the point where the poem became almost unreadable and certainly not very amusing.5 This widespread sense of frustration spawned two extreme reac­ tions, which might be termed the “solemn” and the “facetious.” The “solemn” school of criticism has tended to drive New-Critical ap­ proaches into the ground—inventing, for instance, the notion of an “anti-poet” whom Dryden grimly satirizes in Mac Flecknoe as the arch-enemy of true “Augustan” values. The critical enterprise, as these “solemn” people see it, is to turn the anti-poet” upside-down and inside out in order to define Dryden’s positives.6 Not explained is why, if we want to know Dryden’s positives, we do not go to the di­ rect statements of values he was never reluctant to provide in volumi­ nous prefaces and dedications. Taking an opposite tack, the “face­ tious” school has de-emphasized the more intricate imagery and allu­ sions, concentrating instead upon what might be called Dryden’s sewage symbolism, his manure metaphor, or as one critic put it, his “fecal vision.”7 Another critic protests that because we have been mesmerized by “Sh---- ” (the abbreviation used in the textus receptus), we have underestimated the true character of Shadwell as a Restora­ tion dramatist. The complaint is justified, but most of us continue to find Shadwell less fascinating than “Sh---- .”8 Despite their self-conscious diffidence, or defensive brashness, or Reversible Meaning in Mac Flecknoe / 505 occasional lack of a sure touch, the “facetious” critics constitute a healthy rebellion against the misdirected ingenuity of the “solemn” school. Our knowledge of images and allusions in Mac Flecknoe has indeed enlarged to the point where no reader could take in all of them in terms of the self-contained, self-referential unity demanded by the New Criticism. Mac Flecknoe must be read differently—as a version of the Absurd, I contend. Its structure, instead of being “closed” and autonomous, is “open” and centrifugal. It expands...