Mac Flecknoe Research Articles

:Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792

:<i>Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792</i>

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer

Reviewed by: Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 by Thomas Keymer Doyeeta Majumder Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820. By Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. xv+323 pp. £26.49. ISBN 978–0–19–874449–8. Thomas Keymerʼs monograph is a wide-ranging, incisive survey of the libellous literature occasioned and disciplined by the punitive practice of pillorying during the long eighteenth century in England (and Ireland). It shows how the 'unique combination of disgrace and danger' (p. 5) symbolized by the pillory led to the cultivation of literary strategies of indirection and ambiguity by the English writers of the period bookended by the Stuart Restoration and the official abolition of pillorying. This spectacular form of punishment paradoxically, as Keymer demonstrates, also often backfired on the authorities and became a radical 'festival of fourth estate defiance' (p. 5), as mobs were as likely to murder the pilloried as to exalt and cheer them. As such, pillorying itself, in terms of its outcomes, becomes as indeterminate as the politically encoded texts it prosecuted. The book takes up the study of political encoding in literary texts where Annabel Pattersonʼs ground-breaking study of censorship in early modern England had left it (Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)). The events described are under the constant shadow of the pillorying and brutal mutilation of radical parliamentarian William Prynne ordered by the Star Chamber court in 1634. For more than a hundred years after, references to ear amputation haunt the works of polemicists; even if actual mutilation had ceased to be prescribed by the court, the threat of mob violence was a real one. Chapter 1 takes up the career of John Dryden and his ruses of indirection as the turbulent milieu he inhabited underwent one radical regime change after the other. Plausible deniability becomes the leitmotif not just of Drydenʼs work, but of the publications of all the others who write in the shadow of the pillory. From his early pro-Royalist poem in Lachrymae Musarum (1649) to panegyrics to Cromwell, and from a veiled critique of Charles II in Mac Flecknoe to the anti-Whig Duke of Guise, Keymer shows how dissent is encoded even into the works of the 'literary mouthpiece of Stuart monarchy' (p. 27). Chapter 2 begins with the end of the 'enabling discipline' of the Licensing Act in 1695 (p. 22), which, contrary to Voltaireʼs naive faith in English freedom of speech, was precisely what engendered the crypto-antinomian creativity of English poets. Pre-publication restraints made way for a sudden proliferation of post-publication punishment, which was far more insidious and disorderly, often meted out to booksellers and printers more than authors for bringing sedition into the public sphere (a chilling parallel to the present as authoritarian governments have started prosecuting Twitter for providing [End Page 286] a platform to 'sedition'). The central figures here are Pope and Defoe—the latter being the only canonical author actually to be pilloried, for his pamphlet Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), and the formerʼs Dunciad revealing the shifting lines between libel and counter-libel. In Chapter 3 we see that with the threat of physical harm dwindling, the pillory becomes 'promotional as much as punitive' (p. 178) and booksellers often use it as an opportunity to advertise their wares.The unpopularity of the Hanoverian Succession ensures a surge of sympathy for libellers. Walpoleʼs Stage Licensing Act (1737), another crucial legal intervention in this history, leads to the prolonged face-off between Walpole and Fielding. The final chapter is on the effects of the cessation of censorship on Romantic poetry, and also the schism between the 'transcendental' (p. 285) category of imaginative literature and Realpolitik, rendering redundant strategies of political encoding. A final legislation, in this era of burgeoning print capitalism, leads to the loss of intellectual copyright (and therefore income for the authors and sellers) for radical texts such as Queen Mab, Wat Tyler, and Don Juan. The study derives a substantial part of its vitality from...

An Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Main Frame of Dryden’s Literary Criticism

John Dryden, a great poet of the 17th century English literature, has left a tremendous stamp in literary criticism with his An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), an essay that includes a frame of his literary output. Providing such important aspects for literary criticism like ideas about plays and poetry, Dryden works on the elaboration of Englishness in literature. He claims that it is high time contemporary English authors and critics elevated their literature above that of the ancients and the French. By stressing on the importance of rhyme in poesy, Dryden argues that English plays are better than those in France because they have richer plot and livelier characters. This study will focus on Dryden’s Essay and the frame of literary criticism that this Essay puts forward. It will also analyse Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667), All for Love (1677), “Mac Flecknoe” (1678-79), and Absolom and Achitophel (1681) in terms of these works’ reflection of the Essay’s main outline. The study will conclude that what Dryden comes with in his Essay is the precise and clear picture of his talent as a poet and literary critic.

Satire in Dryden's “Mac Flecknoe”: A Double-edged Weapon of Private Satisfaction and Political Attack

Satire in Dryden's “Mac Flecknoe”: A Double-edged Weapon of Private Satisfaction and Political Attack

Dullness, “Mac Flecknoe,” the Shem Chapter, and Finnegans Wake

Dullness, “Mac Flecknoe,” the Shem Chapter, and Finnegans Wake

Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden ed. by Steven N. Zwicker

70 tioned, notably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Rycaut, George Sandys, Thomas Smith, Richard Knolles, and others. But many travel books that have a much larger presence in EnglishMiddle East history, such as John Chardin ’s Travels in Persia and the East (1686), Jean Thevenot’s Travels into the Levant (1687) (both of these read by Lady Mary while preparing for her sojourn in Turkey), and Aaron Hill’s notorious Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709), go untreated. His arbitrary selection ‘‘retell[s] these journeys.’’ He has produced a partly scholarly monograph with extensive bibliography , with a personal memoir of his own impressions guided by these four seventeenth-century accounts. (One chapter relates the life of an early female visitor , Anne Lady Glover, the ambassador ’s wife, and a forerunner of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu). For example, traveler Biddulph remarks that on his way to Damascus, he stayed in the bustling town of An’nabk at the Sinan Pasha Kahn (inn), which Mr. MacLean informs us is exactly the same today: ‘‘From the street entrance a covered stairway on the left leads from the street to upstairs rooms, while straight ahead opens onto a cloistered courtyard from which, on the right, a small immaculately kept mosque boasts a fine blue dome.’’ The travelers admired as well as condemned Turkish mores, religion, and government policies. Mr. MacLean is ambivalent about ‘‘Orientalism’’ as interpreted by Edward Said and his followers . Early English travelers were not the vanguard of an imperial European policy of conquest: ‘‘Far from perceiving the Ottoman Empire to be an orientalizing space awaiting Western penetration and dominance, Blount argues that understanding the great Eastern empire required European visitors to put aside received opinion well in advance of setting out.’’ Mr. Maclean does not say so, but these were exactly the thoughts of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu when she came to Constantinople in 1716. He glosses over her enlightened travel letters, the exception being her undressing episode in the female hama (public bath), in but one paragraph. Another weakness lies in the selection of travelers. Other observers were not so kind to Turkish ruthless militarism, an unindustrious elite, sequestration of women, slavery, pederasty, and strangling rivals. Although these four writers do not provide the full picture, for the nonspecialist, nevertheless, this retelling supports the Enlightenment project. Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. Steven N. Zwicker. Cambridge : Cambridge, 2004. Pp. xiv ⫹ 300. $65; £23.99 (paper). This collection of fifteen essays offers a lively, informative introduction to the literary techniques, politics, and character of one of England’s greatest poets. Ronald Paulson illuminates Dryden’s satires as works that were shaped by the poet’s reaction to libertine wit. When Rochester and Buckingham disputed the poet’s qualification for ‘‘practicing wit,’’ due to his lower than aristocratic social class, Dryden shot back with Mac Flecknoe , a supremely witty poem that embodies the Christian definition of evil as the absence of good—including the absence of the real. In Absalom and Achitophel , Dryden again mocked libertine wit, now ‘‘politicized’’ by Whigs and linked to bigotry, and in The Medal he 71 took up ‘‘Juvenalian denunciation’’ to show the Whigs as having locked themselves in an unreal world like Mac Flecknoe ’s kingdom. Mr. Paulson also finds Juvenal in Religio Laici, and in the post1688 works, such as Eleanora, where Dryden’s satire turns to elegy. Two essays illustrate that Dryden’s use of ancient Roman poetry was highly original. Paul Davis claims that Dryden created a ‘‘nuanced and radical’’ interplay of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Dryden ’s subtlety and daring were beyond imitation and the unique culture he ‘‘invented ’’ ended with him. Mr. Davis finds a topsy-turvy Augustanism in Mac Flecknoe and a rift between Restoration reality and Augustan ideal in Absalom and Achitophel. Like Mr. Davis, Anne Cotterill emphasizes Dryden’s independence , such as in the way he imitates Plutarch and Montaigne in their ‘‘wandering ways of reading, thinking, and writing.’’ Instead of ‘‘preconceived ideas of beauty and morality as organizing principles for art,’’ she explains, Dryden offers ‘‘the passionate mind and temper of the mature poet.’’ The Fables are an ‘‘exuberantly unsentimental...

Anti-Colonist Discourse, Tragicomedy, and the "American" Behn

Anti-Colonist Discourse, Tragicomedy, and the "American" Behn Adam R. Beach Recent critical discussion of The WiddowRanterhas been nearly silent .on the prologue and epilogue that John Dryden authored for the posthumous production oftheplayin 1689.1 HighlightingDryden's prologue forces two salient but little-discussed issues to the fore: the specific mixed-plot form and function of Behn's tragicomedy and the blanket dismissals of colonial American society that were widely circulated in England and forcefullyespousedbymany ofBehn's fellow Royalist playwrights . Writing to an already hostile audience, many of whom would share Dryden's scorn of English colonials, Behn takes advantage of the mixed tragicomedic form to outline an attractive,complex colonial society , but this positive depiction had little appeal to her contemporaries and expresses what continued to be a minority view in England far into the eighteenth century.2 Ultimately,hervision ofcolonial life is trumped on the stage by Dryden's friend Thomas Southerne and his highly successful and more traditional split-plot tragicomedy Oroonoko (1695), which,throughout its hundreds ofperformances, reinstates the image of a hopelesslydepraved colonial world that Behn had contested in her own drama. In his prologue, Dryden reveals that he considers Virginia to be just another "Foreign Shore" (2), and perhaps the most disagreeable one, amongthe manytobe imaginativelyre-createdontheRestoration stage.3 Thus, neither the production problems reported by"G. J." in the dedicatory letter to the 1690 printed edition, nor the fact that it was staged during the distractions of William's campaign in Ireland, tell the complete story of 77ie WiddowRanter's quickexit from both the theater and, until recently,English theatrical history.Alongwith theprologue,Dryden's 213 214Comparative Drama scattered remarks about the American colonies illuminate the resistance that any production ofBehn's play,however well done,would have faced in 1689. One glimpse of Dryden's views can be found in Mac Flecknoe (1682), in which he geographicallylocates Shadwell's empire ofdullness in die followingmanner:"[F]rom Irelandlethim reign / To farrBarbadoes on the Western main."4 Situating the Atlantic colonial world as a social and cultural backwater, Dryden here expresses a somewhatjocular wish that Shadwell would remove,or perhaps be forcibly removed,to either of these locations as recompense forhis literaryoffenses.5 This equation of the empire of dullness and the English Atlantic casually reveals a set of prejudices that finds a decidedly more vehement articulation in a brief passage in The Hind and the Panther (1685): Here let my sorrow give my satyr place, To raise new blushes on my British race; Our sayling ships like common shoars we use, And through our distant colonies diffuse The draughts of Dungeons, and the stench of stews; Whom, when their home-bred honesty is lost, We disembogue on some far Indian coast: Thieves, Pandars, Palliards, sins of ev'ry sort, Those are the manufactures we export; And these the Missionaires our zeal has made: For, with my countrey's pardon be it said, Religion is the least of all our trade.6 This wholesale critique ofcolonial society is enhanced by the use of the term "common shore," which originally meant a particular area in a waterway employed as a public sewer and, by the time ofthis poem, was also a common slangterm forprostitutes.7Thepassage draws upon both senses of the term: the colonies are dumping grounds for undesirables, who are figured as the feces of the English national body, many among them from malodorous "stews" or brothels. The mere imagining of the various effluvia literally and figuratively discharged by English colonial society sparks avisceral disgust in the poet,which suggests that his colonial slur of Shadwell was probably not as jocular as it seemed. Significantly, Dryden's disparagement emerges in a short, shameful aside in his long religious poem, and the poet "blushes" while contemplating what his nation has wrought in America. The digressive gesture Adam R. Beach215 of condemnation flashes up in Dryden's work and powerfully illuminates a wider rhetorical landscape ofcastigation that should inform our reading ofboth The WiddowRanterand much ofthe colonial literature of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. The contours of this landscape become clearer when we recognize that Dryden's scatological figuring ofAmerica as England's chamber...

"Murther, By a Specious Name": Absalom and Achitophel's Poetics of Sacrificial Surrogacy

"MURTHER, BY A SPECIOUS NAME": ABSALOMAND ACHITOPHEVS POETICS OF SACRIFICIAL SURROGACY Gary Ernst Roger's State University d; ,uring the late 1670's and early '80s, English political satirists 'participated in the endeavors of the rival factions, Dissenter or Whig and Royalist or Tory, to effect judicial violence. While juries condemned and the hangman executed Catholics as traitors during the Popish Plot persecution, John Oldham suggests in the "Prologue' to his Satires upon the Jesuits that he writes to stoke the mass hatred fueling the slayings (2: 19-22). Such animosity powered this initial Dissenter effort to exclude Charles II's Catholic brother, James Stuart, Duke ofYork, from the throne, and left more than two hundred dead.' And Dryden's vituperative response to the striking of a medal to celebrate the grand jury's dismissal of high treason charges against Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, The Medall (pointedly subtitledA Satire againstSedition) seems to have a clear purpose of inciting Royalists to redouble their efforts to dispatch the opposition leadertothe gallows.2 Judicial slayings ofthis kind are perhaps not surprising in these years ofcrisis and fear. Dissenters like Oldham believed that English Catholics plotted to assassinate Charles, put James on the throne, martyr Protestants with the help of foreign Catholic armies, and destroy both the Protestantfaith and English culture itself; Royalists, on the other hand, saw as ever-looming Dissenter insurrection and another catastrophic civil war to take away their property, power, and perhaps the ' For studies ofthe Plot in this political context, see Miller 169-82; Jones 197-217; Greaves 5-32, and Kenyon's complete volume. 2 Harth studies The Medall as an example of Tory propaganda against the Whigs and supportive of Royal efforts to deliver the earl to the gallows (161-9). 62Gary Ernst life ofthe king.3 Duringthe bloodshed ushering in the two party system, the fatal goals ofsatirists seem quite realistic—and indeed may have been so. Thejudicial persecution ofCatholics consumed victims until the fervorthat Oldham labors to feed burnt out; and, in November 1682, eight months after The Medall found its first audience, Shaftesbury, accused by the crown of new treasons, went into hiding soon to flee England in mortal terror of successful Royalist prosecution. The greatest political satire of this turbulent period, Absalom and Achitophel, responds directly to the recent efforts of Charles's beloved, eldest natural son, the Protestant James Scott, Duke of Monmouth—now "Fir'd with near possession of a Crown " (684)—to displace York in the line of succession. The satire revolves around a depiction ofMonmouth's "War in Masquerade," his recenttour through the west ofEngland to gauge and gain support (682-725). Despite the factthatthe satire clearly posits the threat of national catastrophe, it hardly seems at first as intent upon the death ofthis target as either The Medall or Oldham's Satires seem oftheirs. But, to be sure, it is, although Dryden—committed firstly to York and secondly to king4—carefully conceals both his methods and his intentions against Charles's son. For the purpose ofleading his audience to imitate his attack and carry it from the printed page into the world of action and the courts, he conceives apoetics ofsacrifice that screens his hostilities toward Monmouth from the eyes ofthe very persons he undertakes to mobilized. By appropriating for his satire the cultural phenomenon defined by René Girard as the "scapegoat" or "sacrificial mechanism,"5 Dryden arouses and 3 According to Kenyon, in late 1678, the Commons' inflammatory speeches and addresses to the king gave the impression in the House of Lords that the members of the Commons "seemed intent on fighting the Civil Wars all over again" (129) 4 For a fuller discussion ofDryden's commitmentto York, see McFadden 91, 111 -202; Winn 243-75, and Erskine-Hill 22-5. Daly argues that Mac Flecknoe, written some three years before the beginning ofthe Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, is an oblique but sustained attack upon Monmouth, a result ofthe laureate's concerns about the king's bestowals ofpower upon Monmouth and the possibility ofthe bastard's eventual succession (655-76). For another discussion that focuses upon Dryden's targeting ofMonmouth m Absalom and Achitophel...

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

“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...

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

"High on a Throne of His Own Labours Rear'd": "Mac Flecknoe", Jeremiad and Cultural Myth

Previous articleNext article No Access"High on a Throne of His Own Labours Rear'd": "Mac Flecknoe", Jeremiad and Cultural MythMargery A. KingsleyMargery A. Kingsley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 93, Number 3Feb., 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/392322 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Toni Morrison's Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking

Attempts to define Toni Morrison's novel Sula are as numerous as they are diverse. The text has been read as black woman's epic, study of female friendship, an antiwar novel, fable, an exploration of the feminine psyche, and a prime postmodernist text.! If one were to single out one particular interpretation and argue that were somehow superior, somehow right while the others were wrong, that person would fall into the trap of binary thinking is also what Morrison's text is about. Deborah E. McDowell explains further: The narrative [Sula] insistently blurs and confuses . . . binary oppositions. It glories in paradox and ambiguity beginning with the prologue that describes the setting, the Bottom, situated spatially in the top. We enter new world here, world where we never get to the bottom of things, world that demands shift from an either/or orientation to one that is both/and, full of shifts and contradictions. (80) In my own attempt to describe Sula, will expand upon McDowell's thesis and argue that the novel may also be read as an extended satire on binary (reductive, cliched) thinking. Because satire is notoriously imprecise term, clarification of its usage in this is appropriate. The traditional definition of satire as didactic art form was articulated by Horace in the first century B.C., restated and amplified by Dryden at the close of the seventeenth century, and upheld by several prominent theorists in the first half of the twentieth century.(2) In fact, as recently as 1985 Linda Hutcheon argued that parody should not be confused with satire, which is extra-mural (social, moral) in its ameliorative aim to hold up to ridicule the vices and follies of mankind, with an eye to their (43). Dryden's Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of (1693) has largely been responsible for this view of satire. As Dustin Griffin explains, Our reigning notion of satire as moral art and as carefully constructed and unified contrast between and virtue finds its fullest and most influential presentation in Dryden's essay (15). According to Dryden, Satire is kind of Poetry . . . invented for the purging of our Minds; in Humane Vices, Ignorance, and Errors, and all things besides . . . are severely Reprehended (77). This definition highlights two related points deserve attention. First, Dryden's theory of satire as correction and reformation clearly fails to describe his own satiric practice; and, second, is intended to describe only formal verse (or Roman) satire and not Menippean (or Varronian) satire. Regarding the first point, Edgar Johnson aptly notes that it is hard to detect any reformatory zeal in Mac Flecknoe and the booby-trap denouement of its coronation scene (4). The same may be said about the satires of Horace, who argues that his goal is to laugh men out of their follies - thus drawing attention to the moral aspect of his satire - but, as Griffin notes, Satire, as Horace practices it, is considerably more diverse than laughter at (8). In fact, contrary to what the satirist may claim in defense of his or her work, the satirist's primary aim has generally been to upset our conventional literary and moral expectations - not to validate them. Moreover, as John R. Clark argues, rather than attacking folly and vice, Satiric plots regularly dramatize the triumph of folly or vice (51). We need only recall the end of Gulliver's Travels - where Gulliver converses with his horses - or the conclusion of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue I - where Vice triumphs with great pageantry - to recognize the validity of this statement.(3) Furthermore, is significant that Dryden's theory is intended to describe only formal verse satire (as practiced by Horace, Juvenal, and Persius), and not Menippean satire. Like Quintillian before him and many theorists after him, Dryden draws clear distinction between the two satiric traditions - privileging the Roman tradition of verse satire established by Lucilius (second century B. …

HORACE AND MILTON IN MAC FLECKNOE

Journal Article HORACE AND MILTON IN MAC FLECKNOE Get access JAMES OGDEN JAMES OGDEN University College of WalesAberystwyth Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 36, Issue 1, March 1989, Pages 50-a–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/36-1-50a Published: 01 March 1989

Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe

Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe

The Bench and the Pulpit: Conflicting Elements in the Augustan Apology for Satire

Augustan theorists of satire treat their subject in a characteristically binary manner: the model is either Juvenal or Horace; the mode is either tragic or comic and the style either high or low; the object is either vice or folly; the subject is either specific or general. Such inquiries, of course, are no different in kind from the sort of analyses we find of other art forms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Decisions about models and modes, object and subject fulfill the conventional moral and aesthetic responsibilities of a neoclassical critic. One additional question posed by Augustan writers, however, is not so conventional-is satire legal or illegal? More than any other literary form, satire raises questions about libel and censorship, and Augustan critics integrate a knowledge of Roman and English law in their examinations of the history and merit of satire.' Dryden and Addison are apt subjects for a study of the Augustan theory of satire, for a host of reasons: both write a great deal of satire, and about satire at great length; each represents an extreme in the practice of satire; both share a characteristically legal vocabulary. In other words, while Dryden and Addison advocate diametrically opposed styles of satire, each employs the language of the law to support his position. Dryden is an apologist for personal satire, a fitting posture for the poet whose Mac Flecknoe is a masterpiece of ad hominem scurrility. His defense of personal satire emerges from his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), Dryden's scholarly preface to his own translations of Juvenal and Persius. In this essay, Dryden establishes a civic, collectivist rationale for the art form he has mastered. Personal satire, he argues, is justified, because in punishing malefactors it functions as an adjunct to the secular court system:

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

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...

Dryden's Mac Flecknoe and the Example of Duffett's Burlesque Dramas

Dryden's Mac Flecknoe and the Example of Duffett's Burlesque Dramas

Sh—and Shakespeare in Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

Sh—and Shakespeare in Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

A Shakespearean Backdrop for Dryden's Mac Flecknoe?

A Shakespearean Backdrop for Dryden's Mac Flecknoe?