The Politics of Providence in Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern

Abstract

The politics of Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) are at once transparent and obscure. These poems speak the idiom of late seventeenth-century political debate, introducing into, or simply discovering in the fictions of Chaucer, Ovid, Homer, and Boccaccio, the language and concepts of patriotism, abdication, passive obedience, arbitrary power, and political flattery. They seem to invite political reading on account of their subject matter itself – their narratives of tyrants, wronged parents and children, dynastic disputes, and usurpation. Moreover, they have been shown to incorporate numerous topical reflections on contemporary political issues: there are clear allusions to the standing army debates in Sigismonda and Guiscardo and Cymon and Iphigenia; to contemporary controversy over moral reformation and satire on Puritanism in The Cock and the Fox. Yet although the seventeenth century, and the 1690s in particular, saw an outpouring of explicitly political fables, Dryden's translations frustrate the application of sustained political allegory, as numerous critics have found.1 They offer contradictory signals: so, for example, we are invited to identify the conquering Theseus at the beginning of Palamon and Arcite as a type of William III, but by the end of the translation he has become a stoic figure offering a humanist consolation on loss and love.2 The collection as a whole tends to deny us the consistent political allegory that it invites us to make through its vocabulary and topical allusion.3