“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

Abstract

Many scholars, and most students, of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature will only ever encounter John Dennis’s name in a footnote to Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711) or The Dunciad (1728). And this is a shame. Dennis had a varied career as a dramatist, poet, critic, translator, and projector that spanned nearly five decades, earned him some contemporary esteem, and brought him in close contact with such luminaries as Pope, Joseph Addison, and Richard Steele. As the six essays in “The Achievements of John Dennis,” a Special Feature of 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, clearly demonstrate, Dennis’s critical and political positions may not always suit current taste, but what he had to say—and how he said it—is still worthy of consideration.Claude Willan’s introductory essay provides a useful overview of Dennis’s career and reputation. In Willan’s estimation, and in that of all the contributors to the Special Feature, Dennis is not the backward-looking, nit-picking pedant Pope made him out to be in his Essay on Criticism, but rather an overly ambitious reformer, who sought to develop an all-encompassing system of aesthetics that stressed how poetry and drama could serve religion and the state. Willan argues that, following the model of Isaac Newton, Dennis’s achievement is his conception of a system of aesthetics, a “cosmology” of art, nature, and the state that “offers a way to understand the very ontology of post-1688 Britain.” This perspective allows Willan to address Dennis’s achievement while also explaining why his writing might seem unpalatable to readers of today. Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Dennis’s reply in Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody, call’d An Essay upon Criticism (1711) is not about winners and losers but, rather, two writers’ fundamental disagreement about the role of art and criticism in society. In The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), Dennis’s preference for Sophocles’ Oedipus over Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is not an old-fashioned longing for the past, but a rejection of Shakespeare’s—and, as exemplified later in his Remarks upon Cato (1713), the modern English stage’s—lack of moral utility. The irregularity of Shakespeare’s and Addison’s characters and plots is not just artistically flawed; it is, to Dennis, potentially dangerous to the state. The “mathematical plainness” of Dennis’s prose, a style of writing promoted by the Royal Society, and also realized in the projectors of the early eighteenth century, is, for Willan, admittedly an impediment for the modern reader. As exemplified in An Essay on the Navy (1702)—one of three pamphlets devoted to reforming the Royal Navy—Dennis had a tendency “to systematize where no system exists, or where such a system continues to escape his grasp.” While Willan laments the “woeful insufficiency” of Dennis’s “taxonomic gifts,” he nevertheless identifies some merit in Dennis’s art of projecting—using scientific method to solve perhaps unsolvable problems. Willan’s brief overview of Dennis’s impact on later writers is a highlight of his article and probably makes the best case for why Dennis’s writing is worth studying today. Dennis’s theory of poetry, his criticism, his praise of John Milton, and, above all, his interest in the sublime, had a major impact on canonical writers of the period, such as Samuel Johnson and David Hume.In “‘A Separate Ministry’: Dennis, Drury Lane, and Opposition Politics,” Daniel Gustafson seeks to correct the misrepresentation of Dennis as an old-fashioned and elitist critic by reconsidering his defense of The Invader of His Country (premiere 11 November 1719), his unsuccessful adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in the context of contemporary political rhetoric. In the dedication to Invader, The Characters and Conduct of Sir John Edgar (1720), and his private correspondence reproduced in Original Letters (1721), Dennis placed blame for the play’s failure directly on the managers of Drury Lane, particularly Colley Cibber and the patentee Steele, a display that modern scholars, following Edward Niles Hooker, have typically dismissed as “unhealthy vindictive” and sour grapes. In his well-argued and nicely detailed essay, Gustafson reveals that, in couching his attack on Cibber and Steele in pro-ministry rhetoric used to condemn the schism within the Whig party occasioned by the opposition politics of Robert Walpole and Charles Townshend, Dennis elevates his grievances with Drury Lane beyond personal disappointment. Rejecting Dennis’s arguments merely as “xenophobic, elitist, and antisocial”—which they admittedly are—is to miss what they say about contemporary cultural politics and how they function as a “cultural extension of a historically pertinent development of Whig ministry ideology in the face of intraparty schism and increasing class mobility.”Of all the essays in the Special Feature, James Horowitz’s “‘Naked Majesty’: The Occasional Sublime and Miltonic Whig History of John Dennis, Poet” probably does the best job of defining Dennis’s contemporary and posthumous artistic achievement—in this case, specifically as a poet. Horowitz begins by pointing out that, of Dennis’s contemporaries, only Richard Blackmore and Daniel Defoe produced more original verse. And yet Dennis’s poetry has been almost entirely neglected. Horowitz corrects this oversight by considering the poetry Dennis deemed worthy enough to be included, along with his prized criticism and drama, in his Select Works (1718). While the bulk of the poems collected in Select Works are topical and public panegyrics admittedly not to post-Romantic taste, Horowitz surveys them collectively as a self-contained historical fable, a “Whig history in verse” “unprecedented in scale.” Because the poetry in Select Works spans Dennis’s career from 1692 to 1714, the first volume reads like “a refresher course on the top news stories and poetic occasions of the preceding three decades.” Horowitz is primarily interested in what makes Dennis unique as a writer of political verse: the scale and cohesiveness of his historical narrative and, in particular, his indebtedness to Milton as a poetic model. Dennis embraced not only Milton’s use of blank verse but also the poet’s phrases, figurative language, narrative episodes, and even his characters. Across the poems in Select Works, Dennis uses Miltonic allusions to celebrate a procession of Protestant heroes: William III; John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough; and George I. From The Monument (1702) to Britannia Triumphans (1704) and The Battle of Ramillia (1706) to On the Accession of King George (1714), Dennis presents himself as a “Miltonic Whig historian.” Scholars have long admired Dennis’s contributions to the early history of Milton criticism. Horowitz’s essay argues persuasively that Dennis should also be credited with popularizing Milton as a poet worth imitating.Philip S. Palmer’s “Anatomy of a Pan: John Dennis’s Annotated Copy of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur” draws our attention to “one of the earliest surviving textual archives in the history of English literary criticism”: Dennis’s manuscript annotations in a copy of the second edition of Blackmore’s Prince Arthur An Heroick Poem (1695) housed at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (UCLA). Using internal and paleographic evidence, Palmer first makes the case for Dennis’s authorship of the marginalia—it is not John Dryden, as a penciled notation suggests, or an unknown reader who simply copied Dennis’s print criticism of Blackmore’s epic into their copy of the text. Palmer then considers what Dennis’s manuscript commentary might tell us about the critic’s process as he transformed his private impressions of Blackmore’s epic into the published commentary of Remarks On a Book entituled, Prince Arthur (1696). Palmer encourages us to read Dennis’s manuscript notes, not merely as a rough draft of his printed criticism, but as “an intriguingly hybrid text—one that exists between categories of print and manuscript, published and unpublished, public and private.” Contrary to his reputation as an acerbic pedant, Dennis could, in manuscript, be brief, biting, sometimes appreciative—and even funny. For example, “Marginally adjacent to a description of Satan and the fallen angels in book 3 of Prince Arthur—‘Confounded, and amaz’d they sink, and all / Heav’n’s Plagues, and Wrath, pursu’d them in their Fall’— Dennis wrote, ‘Milton! ah how changd, how faln,’ thus wittily reimagining the line in Paradise Lost book 1 (‘If thou beest he—but Oh how fallen! how changed / From him’) as a cutting remark on Blackmore’s poem.” Dennis’s marginal commentary on Prince Arthur represents an exciting archival discovery and the insights it provides help to elucidate our understanding of Dennis’s approach to criticism toward the beginning of his career. Palmer concludes by helpfully providing a link for scholars to access the digital facsimile of the marked-up volume online.Pat Rogers’s “My Enemy’s Enemy: Dennis, Pope, and Edmund Curll” is a lively narrative survey of Curll’s “sometimes hidden” role in provoking, instigating, and perpetuating the literary feud between Dennis and Pope. Rogers focuses on three well-known skirmishes between Dennis and Pope to consider what Curll’s involvement might reveal. For Pope’s opening assault on Dennis in An Essay on Criticism and Dennis’s response in his Reflections, Curll was initially only a spectator. But Rogers suggests that Curll clearly recognized the market potential of a literary controversy involving two high-profile authors. For the remainder of his career, Curll displayed a keen skill for keeping the literary skirmishes between Dennis, Pope, and others in the public eye through a wide variety of print strategies available to him as a publisher. Willingly or otherwise, Dennis became an active participant in Curll’s onslaughts against Pope and his allies, most notably with A True Character of Mr. Pope, and his Writings (1716). Rogers argues that in A Further Account of the most Deplorable Condition of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller (1716), Pope cemented Dennis’s connection to Curll by enlisting him as one of the publisher’s troops, effectively demoting “Dennis from leading critic and cultural commentator to that of an obscure hack inhabiting some lower rung in the authorial chain of being.” The final, and best-known, episode among Pope, Dennis, and Curll culminated in The Dunciad, where the damaging association between Dennis and Curll was immortalized: in the mock epic, Dennis had become merely a cast member in “the mythological Grub Street opera that Pope was constructing around the operations of book trade operators like Curll.” Rogers concludes that, while there were certainly other writers Curll could have enlisted in his literary feuds that might have borne him even more fruit, Dennis was an especially good controversialist because of what he represented: “Dennis mattered because, as scholars have increasingly recognized, he devised a coherent vision of national identity.” This is about as close as Rogers’s essay comes to articulating Dennis’s “achievement”: throughout the essay, Dennis is, more often than not, outwitted by Pope and played by Curll. But Rogers’s narrative summary is a good refresher for those who know the skirmishes involving Dennis, Pope, and Curll and a helpful introduction to those new to the terrain.Sarah B. Stein’s “Ovid Made English: Dennis’s Translation of The Passion of Byblis” provides a fresh perspective on a little-studied aspect of Dennis’s career: his contribution to theories of translation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Stein does so by closely considering Dennis’s translation of Ovid’s version of Byblis’s story from Book IX of Metamorphoses in the context of Dennis’s prefatory pronouncements, his updating of the poem, and his broader career as a translator and literary critic. As Dennis quickly states in his Preface, he was drawn to Ovid’s poem by its passion. But, as Stein argues, therein lay the problem: Dennis’s late seventeenth-century sensibilities required that he rein in the very passion that encouraged him to translate the poem in the first place. This struggle defines Dennis’s approach to translation: “Dennis uses translation both to express the passion and enthusiasm of the literature and to tame the dangerous nature of this passion.” Dennis makes three major changes to Ovid’s take on Byblis. To conform the poem to contemporary morality, Dennis portrays Byblis as “a Lady, a Virgin, and a Woman of Honor.” Interestingly, Dennis amplifies the passion of one speech that he found lacking in “Fury”—Byblis’s speech after receiving Caunus’s reply. In Ovid, this passage is spoken in “Allegory,” which Dennis finds improbable. Dennis’s most dramatic change is his reworking of Byblis’s metamorphosis: instead of being given eternal life, Dennis’s Byblis simply dies. In each case, Stein reads Dennis’s “anxious” Preface and his poem closely, teasing out every possibility for what it might tell us about Dennis’s thoughts on translation, his relationship to Ovid and the poem’s protagonist, and also to John Oldham, who had translated the poem in 1681. The tensions encountered in trying to reconcile the Roman poet and his subject matter to late seventeenth-century morality encouraged Dennis, Stein concludes, to turn his attention to translating religious texts. Stein’s readings seemed, to me, occasionally a little strained and some of the many threads of her argument were more compelling than others. But her essay clearly demonstrates the value of exploring Dennis’s role as a translator in greater detail.Read individually and collectively, the six essays on “The Achievements of John Dennis” make a strong case for reconsidering Dennis as an important and influential figure in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English literary, critical, theoretical, and political cultures. Indeed, much more should be made of Dennis as an early admirer and promoter of Shakespeare and Milton. Associating Dennis’s name with writers he helped to introduce into the canon, rather than tethering him to his detractors, seems, to me, perhaps the best way to assert his relevance as a writer worth studying. That said, as the essays in the Special Feature suggest, both overtly and implicitly, Dennis is an author whose writing is difficult to appreciate on its own merits: his plays, poems, criticism, and translations are best understood when they are considered in their original (primarily political) context or pitted against writers of greater stature and talent. In this regard, the essays in this collection provide graduate students and scholars with plenty of ideas and inspiration for future research on Dennis and his achievements. These essays encouraged me to go to Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online to consult, for example, Dennis’s The Passion of Byblis and Select Works in their original. If all readers of this Special Feature are similarly inclined, that’s a step in the right direction.