John Dryden and His Readers: 1700 0367404524, 9780367404529

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John Dryden and His Readers: 1700

Dryden at the end of his life was admired, perhaps even beloved, by many in England, and his greatest skill over his long career—his controlled detachment—uniquely positioned him to write of both history and politics in 1700. His narrative poetry was popular among Whigs and Tories, women and men, Ancients and Moderns, and his imitations suggest historical connections between the War of the Roses, the Civil War, and the Revolution of 1688. All of these events combined easily in the minds of Dryden’s contemporaries, and his fables, fraught with conflicted loyalties and family strife, not unlike a nation divided, may have caught and compelled his readers in a way that was different from that of other miscellanies: Dryden may have articulated in beautiful verse the emotions of many in the midst of enormous historical change. Fables is a pivotal cultural text urging national unity through its embrace of competing voices. Winifred Ernst teaches literature at the University of San Francisco. She has published articles and written reviews on John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Cervantes in Studies in Philology, Hispanic Enlightenment, Restoration, and Modern Language Review. Her research interests include reader reception, Restoration and eighteenth-century satire, early modern innovation in historical fiction, marginalia, and the borrowing and bartering of allusions across continents and centuries.

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Freedom and Censorship in Early Modern English Literature Edited by Sophie Chiari The Early Modern Grotesque English Sources and Documents 1500–1700 Liam Semler Intricate Movements Experimental Thinking and Human Analogies in Sidney and Spenser Bradley Davin Tuggle Milton and the New Scientific Age Poetry, Science, Fiction Catherine G. Martin Dissent and Authority in Early Modern Ireland The English Problem from Bale to Shakespeare Jane Yeang Chui Wong Royalists and Royalism in 17th-Century Literature Exploring Abraham Cowley Edited by Philip Major Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation Reading through the Spirit David Ainsworth Lacan, Foucault, and the Malleable Subject in Early Modern English Utopian Literature Dan Mills John Dryden and His Readers: 1700 Winifred Ernst For a complete list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Renaissance-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/ SE0537

John Dryden and His Readers: 1700

Winifred Ernst

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Winifred Ernst to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40452-9(hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85909-1(ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is written in honor of Thomas A. Stumpf, whose scholarship and teaching combine wit with wisdom and sharp intellect with good humor, and who is nothing if not a good friend.

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1

viii 1

Histories and Concordia Discors in Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque

31

2

Persuasion, Force, and Alternatives to Force

71

3

Mary, Monarchy, and Dryden’s Female Readers

103

4

Shakespeare as Dryden’s Afflatus

153

5

Detachment and Involvement in Artistry and Good Government

186

Conclusion

218

Bibliography Index

225 239

Acknowledgements

I’d like to acknowledge the generosity I’ve experienced in the field of Renaissance and Restoration studies, beginning with the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, especially Tom Stumpf, Reid Barbour, and Jessica Wolfe, whose commitment to their students and their scholarship set a high bar for academia. And I haven’t been disappointed. So many scholars have been generous with their time, their opinions, and their knowledge by way of correspondence and conversation—thanks especially to Taylor Corse, John Jordan, Jayne Lewis, Alan Roper, and Tobias Wolff, who have become my friends. I’m also appreciative for the exchange of ideas, the challenging feedback, and the collegial encouragement from many others: Regulus Allen, Anna Battigelli, Dianne Dugaw, Maximillian E. Novak, Steven Pincus, Tom Reinert, Cedric Reverand, John Richetti, John Sitter, Philip Smallwood, John Allen Stevenson, James Thompson, Howard Weinbrot, and James Anderson Winn. I’d like to thank my family, first and especially Chris, Madeleine, and Wilson, as well as those in Arkansas, those scattered from coast to coast, and those who live in memory: the support I’ve felt has been immense. Many thanks also to Studies in Philology, which published an earlier version of Chapter 2 under the title “Marriage, Force, and Alternatives to Force in John Dryden’s Fables” (111.1, Winter 2014: 163–94).

Introduction

Madam, The Ladies of the Town have infected you at a distance: they are all of your Opinion; & like my last Book of Poems, better than any thing they have formerly seen of mine. I always thought my Verses to my Cousin Driden were the best of the whole; & to my comfort the Town thinks them so. —Dryden to Mrs. Seward, April 11, 1700 Dryden’s last letter gives the impression of a play just letting out, with “The Ladies of the Town” offering their applause, and with their approbation reaching into the countryside as they send letters to friends and relatives after the evening. It actually records Dryden’s pleasure over the initial reception of Fables, the creative achievement of an experienced dramatist and eloquent poet who is alert to his audience and nation. More and more of the English felt they shared a national identity by the close of the century, largely because of networks established through post, travel by carriage, and patronage of coffee houses. Many participated in national discussions and paid attention to the Continental balance of power, and many were reading Dryden.1 His was a mind “to which every understanding was proud to be associated, and of which everyone solicited the regard,” and as late as 1700 he continued to preside over Will’s Coffee-house, where the 12-year-old Alexander Pope sought a glimpse of him.2 Dryden was attuned to his audiences: he shaped Shakespeare plays to suit Restoration tastes early in his career, and during his highly anticipated Virgil translation (1697) in the last years of his life, he managed a burgeoning subscriber list that comprised prominent Williamites and Roman Catholics, men and women, those in the country and those in the city. 3 Fables (1700), written as the culmination of a lifelong interest in politics and poetry, is an eleventh-hour series of generic experiments that blur not only fiction with topical reference, and translation and adaptation with originality, but also the implicit construction of an English literary tradition with authorial self-fashioning. This is a gift that he offers to his readers:  Dryden wrote  Fables at  a  time  when a shared

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sense of national unity was coalescing, even as the polarities of the past century continued to thwart political unity, and Fables is a key text urging national unity through its embrace of competing voices. Dryden’s Preface focuses equally on authors and their readers, and Alexander Pope may borrow from Dryden when he associates the ability to move an audience with the fire of Homer: “that unequalled fire and rapture which is so forcible in Homer, that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads him . . . the reader is hurried out of himself by the force of the poet’s imagination, and turns in one place to a hearer, in another to a spectator.”4 Dryden’s Preface brings to our attention this same fire in Homer, to which he also is attracted: I will only draw this Inference, That the Action of Homer being more full of Vigour than that of Virgil, according to the temper of the Writer, is of consequence more pleasing to the Reader. One warms you by Degrees; the other sets you on fire all at once, and never intermits his Heat. . . . You never cool while you read Homer, not even in the Second Book, (a graceful Flattery to his Countrymen;) but he hastens from the Ships, and concludes not that Book till he has made you an Amends by the violent playing of a new Machine. From thence he hurries on his Action with Variety of Events, and ends it in less Compass than Two Months. This Vehemence of his, I confess, is more suitable to my Temper. (Preface to the Fables, 219–33) If Dryden believes that “the Grecian is more according to my Genius, than the Latin poet” (158–9), Pope agrees with him, and he associates Homeric fire with the Dryden of Fables and the artistic power of Timotheus in “Alexander’s Feast”: Hear how Timotheus’ vary’d Lays surprise, And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise! While, at each Change, the Son of Lybian Jove Now burns with Glory, and then melts with Love; Now his fierce Eyes with sparkling Fury glow; Now Sighs steal out, and Tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like Turns of Nature found, And the World’s Victor stood subdu’d by Sound! The Pow’rs of Musick all our Hearts allow; And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now. Avoid Extreams; and shun the Fault of such, Who still are pleas’d too little, or too much. (Essay on Criticism 384–5) One of Dryden’s closest readers, Pope highlights Dryden as the author of stories that move the passions, yet he simultaneously aligns him with

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the practice of moderation: “Avoid Extreams.” Unlike Timotheus, who, after subduing Alexander, next provokes him to besiege a town, Dryden as poet aims neither to foment a war nor to fuel the resentment of Jacobites. Pope’s phrase “melts with Love” evokes Dryden’s Timotheus (“For pity melts the mind to love”), but it also recalls Dryden’s Character of a Good Parson who moves his parishioners from fear to love—“Love, like Heat, / Exhales the Soul sublime”—and from sin to submission—“when the milder Beams of Mercy play, / He melts, and throws his cumb’rous Cloak away” (32–3; 36–7). Hardly a miscellany that glorifies war, Dryden’s Fables and Dryden himself may be aligned with another storyteller in Fables, the legendary Numa of Rome, who tames “A Salvage Nation with soft Arts of Peace.”5 John Wallace’s book Destiny His Choice assesses the national mindset of loyalism in 1649 in a way that is helpful, I think, for a characterization of the conflicted 1690s and for what I will argue is Dryden’s pluralism and comprehensiveness in Fables: “the number of men who thought of themselves as moderate and peace-loving was yet larger than anyone has supposed.”6 Loyalism took hold because so many men and women believed “that civil war was the greatest tragedy that could befall the country, and peace the greatest good.”7 This motivation is aligned with Dryden: another civil war as late as the 1690s would be the greatest tragedy, and peace the greatest good, even if with that peace comes the costs of disappointment and compromised principles. Ideological purists like Cromwell or Milton do not possess the same flexibility as the loyalist defined by Wallace, nor do their entrenched viewpoints necessarily mean that they are more religious or more virtuous men. Dryden does possess such flexibility. This fits with the Fables’s back and forth motion between competing and equally appealing ideals, which Cedric Reverand calls “a host of possibilities for civilizable mankind . . . all of which vie against limitations, failures that Dryden presents persuasively as equal parts of the human scene.”8 Fables is filled with equally attractive if competing options, and Dryden refuses to argue one-sidedly. Placed alongside the peaceful and spiritual characters like Numa and the good parson, we find not only a powerful secular Timotheus but also others who, like Dryden, relish the earthiness of the human experience. William Cowper, while recommending Fables to a friend’s son, also warned the friend that “Dryden has written few things that are not blotted here and there with an unchaste allusion, so that you must pick his way for him, lest he should tread in the dirt.”9 Dryden offers Ovidian love and Chaucerian wit while recognizing Ovid’s cleverness and Chaucer’s authenticity. He gives us the revenge of Achilles, the peace of Numa, the sexual ecstasy of Sigismonda, and the piety of the good parson, yet the idea that in 1700 Dryden may be exercising even-handedness has never been explored, and there are many instances of it beginning with the Preface, where his allusion to Chaucer’s decision to serve Henry IV invokes for readers their shared memory of a successful usurpation

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that benefited England. Dryden balances this memory against the good parson’s private decision to remain faithful to Richard II. When he examines Chaucer’s role in politics—“he was poet” to Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV—he provokes unanswered questions about the legality of Henry IV’s rule and demonstrates that those questions are still relevant with respect to William III, but he also reminds readers that even the Plantagenets were never free from wars over power.10 Dryden addresses the delicacy of Chaucer’s position while he emphasizes the illegitimate act of Henry IV, who was valiant and wise, but who nonetheless “claim’d by succession” a crown that was not “rightfully” his.11 Henry IV and Edward III often were used as justification for the Revolution of 1688, yet William III frequently was compared to Cromwell, too, especially in satirical verse. Dryden’s stories within Fables suggest historical connections that begin with the Wars of the Roses and connect to the Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, and the polemics of the 1690s—stories the English knew well, the earliest ones most memorably through the eyes of another nationally acclaimed poet: Shakespeare.12 All of these events combined easily in the minds of Dryden’s contemporaries, and his Fables, fraught with conflicted loyalties and family strife—not unlike a nation divided—may have caught and compelled his readers in a way that was different from other miscellanies of the time: Dryden may have articulated, in beautiful verse, the emotions of many in the midst of enormous historical change.13 Dryden’s deep ambivalence in the final decade of his life was part of a national trend. 14 There was the core group of Anglicans who supported James’s mandates out of loyalty to the king, though those same subjects had enforced the anti-Catholic penal laws as recently as 1684 in loyalty to Charles II. Anglican bishops famously opposed first James II and next William III, claiming reasons of conscience. There were men like the Earl of Abingdon (for whom Dryden later wrote Eleonora) who, despite his staunch royalist position, was the first peer to welcome William III at Exeter, yet who quickly voiced dissent at the proposition that James II had “abdicated” the throne. These examples reinforce my suggestion that Dryden’s ambivalence was shared by many and that neither Catholicism nor loyalty restricted Dryden to a Procrustean response to current events, though both must have informed his opinions through the reigns of both James II and William III. Dryden was part of a religious community that cared deeply about contemporary politics yet approached current events with varying perspectives and convictions. He belonged to a party that also was fragmented in its beliefs.15 Dryden reflects these conflicts because the nation, for all its divisiveness, shares them. John Dennis makes clear this connection that readers felt toward Dryden: For all who are at present concern’d for their Countrey’s Honour, hearken more after your Preparatives, than those for the next Campaigne. These last may possibly turn to our confusion, so uncertain

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5

are the Events of War; but we know that whatever you undertake must prove Glorious to England.16 Dennis’s Williamite metaphors describe a whole nation of readers devoted to Dryden. Dryden’s audience was diverse, and his exuberance over the success of Fables was well founded. Barbara Benedict, in Making the Modern Reader, accounts for this popularity by placing Dryden at the center of the miscellany tradition, which allowed for the diversity of opinion that an emerging modern audience sought: “Dryden became a poet with a popular draw unlike any previously seen in literature.”17 She also points out that “women provide[d] the appetite for miscellaneous literature.”18 Paddy Bullard reinforces Benedict when he notes that the “high profile” Dryden miscellanies comprised “consensual and cross-party selection[s] of authors” in the midst of a genre developed primarily by Whigs.19 Fables, Ancient and Modern accommodates both ancients and moderns and reaches many audiences, “selling classicism as contemporary fiction,”20 providing access through translation and modernization in a native language that was a unifying force,21 and fearlessly declaring a preference for Homer (associated with ancients) after modernizing Virgil who, astonishingly, was associated with moderns because he was less modern than Homer.22 Dryden’s commitment in Fables to accessibility does not mean abandoning allusive complexity for a simpler style, but rather providing literature in English that addresses Whigs and Tories, Jacobites and Williamites, male and female readers. Even if Dryden, unlike Addison, did not simplify his poetry in order to seek to include a new audience, as Johnson noted when contrasting the criticism of Addison and Dryden, and even if he always included scraps of Latin and Greek in his prose, his narratives were fresh, accessible, and immediate. Dryden highlights Chaucer’s “Byas towards the Opinions of Wickliff,” the cleric who was denounced as a heretic for translating the Bible into the vernacular—and Dryden does something similar when he makes hidden texts more accessible through translations like Fables. His preface and his poems are cosmopolitan in their European sensibilities, yet thick with allusions to Milton and Shakespeare. Benedict shows that miscellanies “provided a space, if only symbolically, for the productions of all members of society.”23 They were celebrated as a feast of variety and a “cultural community of reading.”24 And Johnson wrote that “Of Dryden’s work it was said by Pope, that he could select . . . better specimens of every mode of poetry than any other English writer could supply.”25 Perhaps out of all his works, Fables provides the most perspectives and emotions. Though taking a step back from the fables reveals patterns and themes that have political and historical application, and this will be a primary focus for the chapters in this book, the characters and their stories are compelling on their own. There is a sense that both of these perspectives, a detached one that reveals patterns and a personal one that draws readers in, are important to Dryden. Likewise, they may have been equally

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Introduction

important to his contemporaries. J. Paul Hunter exposes the 1690s as a moment in which the English were wrestling not only with the political and philosophical ramifications of a century of upheaval but also with new ideas on multiple literary fronts: ancient and modern ways of approaching all fields of learning, an explosion of new readers (1600– 1675) who were settling into second and third generations without classical educations, a literary gap where epic had ended but before the novel had begun, and a new appreciation and hunger for a history that felt immediate and applicable. Dryden’s narrative poetry and translations, I suggest, spoke to many of these reader interests. These interests included a modern one in Shakespeare, and a female one in the combination of public and private subject matter in a miscellany. Dryden’s miscellany includes a shrewd look at both the flaws and the strengths of a line of Stuart monarchs, including William and Mary and an England that they have transformed. These political matters provide an occasion (or perhaps a starting point) for further exploration of those deeper issues whose manifestations are manifold and particularly important in the development of a narrative, politics being only one. In assessing the connections and evaluating the careers of past and present monarchs and their subjects, Dryden draws on several themes, particularly the tensions between family and individual, love and war, persuasion and force, involvement and detachment. He places these experiences within stories that also belong to larger historical trajectories and that nevertheless are alert to current changing contexts in 1700, so that his readers sense the personal and the historical simultaneously. Hunter places Dryden’s “reasoned perspective on how old values could be transformed and reborn” squarely between the predilections of ancients and moderns, and this middle ground is relevant to the history Dryden is examining through narrative.26 Sharon Achinstein demonstrates that Milton and other revolutionary writers sought to expand and train their audiences through a proliferation of pamphlets that shaped and controlled reader interpretations, but Dryden creates an entirely different relationship between author and reader. Anna Battigelli writes that “by questioning the political application of typology, Dryden was, in fact, questioning a standard mode of political engagement.”27 Judith Sloman persuasively demonstrates Dryden’s increasing sophistication as he refined his concept of a unified miscellany that culminated in Fables, and I’m suggesting he also refined his mode of historical address in a movement toward comprehensiveness rather than polemic.28 Like its constant shifting among different patterns of allusion and imagery, the many dualities, unto contradictions, at play in Fables make it representative of the literate modernity that it helped to forge in a highly charged and deeply uncertain political context. Dryden’s purview is one of a national poet at the end of his life, and he reveals through narrative poetry what it meant to experience the revolution from the personal, political and the poetical vantage points of an

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exceptional mind. Experiencing the Civil War, the Restoration, and the Revolution of 1688 may have been singularly English, but these events influenced the continent and the future of western culture. This places Dryden’s keen observations in a dramatic moment in history. Dryden at the end of his life was admired, perhaps even beloved, by many in England, and his greatest skill over his long career—his controlled detachment— uniquely positioned him to write of both history and politics in 1700.

Reasons for a Change in Poetical Direction To suggest that Dryden, who suffered for his choices from 1685 forward, was willing to consider both the merits and flaws of William III and Mary II as rulers of England requires a repositioning of critical perspective.29 Critics readily acknowledge that the Dryden of the 1690s is not writing from the same vantage point as the poet laureate who wrote Absalom and Achitophel: his conversion, James II’s flight to France, Dryden’s obvious loyalty as a nonjuror, and the caution he may have exercised in light of William III’s accession and a populist surge in anti-Catholicism all certainly contributed to this change in tone. But England evolved over the final 15 years of Dryden’s life, and Dryden’s options as a loyalist may have evolved, too. Even if his principles remained the same (and we don’t know all of them), the sequence of events continued to change the context in which he lived. I’d like to propose the possibility that the assassination plot of 1696, which caused a shift in politics throughout England, may have given Dryden reason to reassess his position toward William III, thereby aligning him more closely to the majority opinion than he (or we) might have anticipated. William and England finally had begun to make progress in the war against France in 1695, after years of multiple disappointments; the recapture of Namur was the decisive turning point on the field and in national opinion. And even if the English had grown accustomed to war and taxes they were weary of both and ready for peace.30 However, in 1696 Louis XIV secretly stood ready with troops to support James II in retaking the English crown. Sir George Barclay, a former army officer, was sent by James to plan the revolt, but when Barclay realized this approach wasn’t feasible, he moved forward with an assassination plot which, once discovered, unleashed loyalty for William and fervent nationalism across the country. The Jacobites had established a war-leaning party in France with its eyes on England, and English solidarity in the attempt’s aftermath indicates that nearly all of the English were abhorrent of an assassination.31 Whether or not Dryden approved of England’s participation in wars on the continent, it is hard to imagine his allegiance to a cause at a moment when its champions had planned a regicide. Steven Pincus shows that after 1688, but especially after 1696, Tories—and Dryden—were faced with two unpalatable options: another civil war in order to restore James II and a stringently centralized state

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thereafter, or William III—an illegitimate but more competent king—and a limited monarchy committed to containing France.32 James II’s absolutist policies, and the inevitable civil war should he return, proved the least palatable for most. William III, despite being a royalist himself, provided the alternative vision of a system balanced between Parliament and ruler that England had not achieved through Cromwell and that they did not, in the end, find in Charles II or James II, either, but that constitutionalists like Clarendon had sought to establish at the Restoration, as evidenced in the creation of Elizabeth I as a national symbol of unity and precedent for moderation.33 Clarendon, whom Dryden admired, called Cromwell and his supporters “the violent party,” and this ultimately is what caused him to move from parliamentarian to royalist. Likewise, Dryden may have experienced a shift in mind after the assassination plot. Louis XIV had become the usurper in pamphlets, and the plot was viewed as a foreign attack that nearly succeeded. Servitude to the French was contrasted with English liberty.34 “Louis XIV had violated the rights of English men and women. William and Mary raised a wildly popular nationalist sword, not a religious crusading one.”35 William III, therefore, was a war-like king who paradoxically had established domestic stability, freedom of the press, and who consented to laws that granted a parliamentarian voice—the same voice that, with the help of John Driden of Chesterton—Dryden’s patriot in Fables—opposed a standing army. In light of the hawkish jingoism that surged after the assassination attempt of 1696, Dryden may be attempting to moderate the tenor of contemporary political debates: Why shou’d we tempt the doubtful Dye agen? In Wars renew’d, uncertain of Success, Sure of a Share, as Umpires of the Peace. A Patriot, both the King and Country serves; Prerogative, and Privilege preserves. (To John Driden of Chesterton 168–72) After the 1696 assassination plot, Association rolls were drawn up first in the House of Commons, next in the House of Lords, and finally across the country, so that nearly every man aged 16–60 was offered a chance to sign the rolls that made it explicit that William was rightful and lawful king. These Association rolls, the sheer size and scope of which attest to the democratization, centralization, and popular participation in the state, forced the English to take sides: “It was impossible for someone to believe that William was merely de facto king and sign the association.”36 The wording precluded the flexibility of earlier oaths where those signing could believe that William III was king de facto and James II king de jure; this is why 20 per cent ultimately still refused to sign, despite

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public pressures to do so. Whether or not they agreed with James II, nonjurors ultimately could not swear an oath of allegiance to William III because they already had sworn themselves to James II—it was a marriage between king and people. This national tension had been apparent from the Convention Parliament of 1689 forward. Even if Dryden consistently defends his own position and constancy as a nonjuror, he seems to make a case for toleration and individual conscience in both religion and in politics, which were tenets of the Revolution. In 1693, John Dennis casts Dryden as the true voice and patriot of England in the surprising political analogy that merges Dryden’s literary abilities with England’s military prowess. It’s worth another look, because Dryden’s response demonstrates his constancy in principle, his open-minded temperament, and his sense of balance. Dennis wrote: For all who are at present concern’d for their Countrey’s Honour, hearken more after your Preparatives, than those for the next Campaigne. These last may possibly turn to our confusion, so uncertain are the Events of War; but we know that whatever you undertake must prove Glorious to England.37 Dryden’s response makes use of the policy of toleration that was so popular with Williamites, and implies that Association rolls are an obstacle to this cherished principle: For my Principles of Religion, I will not justifie them to you. I know yours are far different. For the same Reason I shall say nothing of my Principles of State. I believe you in yours follow the Dictates of Your Reason as I in mine do those of my Conscience. If I thought my self in an Error, I would retract it.38 Dryden sets up a division between “Reason” and “Conscience” that provides for mutual respect if permanent disagreement: reasons can be practical, self-interested, raisons d’état, but conscience must always be disinterested and altruistic. He also makes explicit his willingness to re-evaluate a situation, or in other words, to change his mind. It is an active form of moderation. Likewise, while Dryden’s insistence in his last letters that he cannot go back on the Cause for which he has suffered is described in confessional terms (if he leaves the Catholic church, he does not know where he will turn), many other Catholics nevertheless were able to sign the Association rolls with a clear conscience, and Dryden’s own sons, who were living in Rome, seem to have urged their father to reconsider his stance.39 Dryden responds, tellingly, that he will do his “duty and suffer for God’s sake, being assured beforehand, never to be rewarded, though the times should alter.”40 He does not suffer for the sake

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of James II, and he does not expect to be rewarded by him, either, should fortunes change. Likewise, perhaps the “Reason” to which he refers in his letter to Dennis is a tacit acknowledgement that though conscience was at stake, those opposed to James II had reason to be offended. Looking back, there is evidence that James II had made Dryden uneasy even when he was the king that Dryden felt bound to defend.41 Father Petre, James’s Jesuit advisor, was a divisive figure among English Catholics as well as with the population at large, and Dryden takes a satirical stand against him in The Hind and the Panther (1687). Furthermore, the Catholic church, as represented by the hind, is not imperialist or absolutist, the traits for which Louis XIV and James II had gained reputations. In the poem, the first man innocently becomes the first earthly king in Eden before the fall: The god-head took a deep consid’ring space: And, to distinguish man from all the rest, Unlock’d the sacred treasures of his breast: And mercy mix’d with reason did impart; One to his head, the other to his heart: Reason to rule, but mercy to forgive: The first is law, the last prerogative. (The Hind and the Panther: The First Part, 256–62) Dryden’s poem about Catholicism and English politics connects “Reason” with “law” and redefines the usual meaning of “prerogative” by aligning it with “mercy.” Despite national anxiety over the succession, when Charles II did die in 1685, James had rushed from his brother’s deathbed to declare that he would defend the English church, laws and people with dedication and love, and in return his subjects sent official addresses from all parts of England with avowed support of their new monarch, completing, it seems to me, an exchange that is a symbolic enactment of the coronation contract. But this relationship changed dramatically as James asserted royal power and traditional forms of prerogative. Dryden contrasts the gentleness of the Hind, or of Pan, with monarchical power: He charm’d their eyes; &, for they lov’d, they fear’d. Not arm’d with horns of arbitrary might, Or claws to seize their furry spoils in fight, Or with increase of feet t’ o’ertake ‘em in their flight. Of easie shape, and pliant ev’ry way; Confessing still the softness of his clay, And kind as kings upon their coronation day. (HP First Part, 265–71)

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The civilizing qualities of this first king sound more like David, or the good parson, or Numa, or Orpheus (all of whom appear in Fables), and do not mirror the public perception of James II as ruler, except for the fleeting fortuitous embrace of king and people at his coronation. Pamphlets that debated whether Adam or Nimrod was first king were everywhere during the precarious years of 1679–82, and in 1687 Dryden matches his own imagery of The Hind and the Panther against the metaphors his readers would know well from the days of the Exclusion Crisis:42 His kingdom o’er his kindred world began: Till knowledge misappply’ed, misunderstood, And pride of Empire sour’d his balmy bloud. Then, first rebelling, his own stamp he coins; The murth’rer Cain was latent in his loins, And bloud began its first and loudest cry For diff’ring worship of the Deity. Thus persecution rose, and farther space Produc’d the mighty hunter of his race. (HP First Part 275–83) Dryden gives a history of the church, but it coincides with the political history of kings and nation—at least through the lens of political pamphlets.43 The “mighty hunter” Nimrod is nothing like the Pan with whom he is compared: Not so the blessed Pan his flock encreas’d, Content to fold ‘em from the famish’d beast: Mild were his laws; the Sheep and harmless Hind Were never of the persecuting kind. (HP First Part 284–7) This description of Pan and the Catholic church is not one of a public and imperial king, and it doesn’t reflect recent historical interpretations of James’s policies at the time of The Hind and the Panther. Instead, this seems to be another reminder to James of the model to which he should adhere; a model quite unlike Louis XIV. By 1688, James had established an army modeled after Louis XIV’s, and soldiers were quartered in all parts of the country: they were a burden and they were violent. Censorship and surveillance were widespread, and the king systematically replaced his Privy Council members who disagreed with him over the repeal the Test Acts. James also began “closeting” members of both Houses of Parliament; personal interviews during which the king pressured them to accept his toleration policies. He next dissolved Parliament altogether and began working toward the election of members who would support his efforts to repeal the Penal

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Laws and the Test Acts. He sent regulators throughout the country to interrogate local officials as well, purging town corporations, commissions of the peace, and county lieutenants throughout the nation, quintupling the numbers of replacements that occurred at the Restoration in 1662–63. Surveillance was an affront to communication even at the level of the coffee house, where agents were sent to listen in: “In Former times / Conversation was no crime” is banter typical of contemporary satire.44 There are many examples of tyrants in Poems on the Affairs of State, and while Jacobites and Williamites both use this symbol to their advantages (both William and James are cast as the tyrant Tarquin), Louis and James are the most frequent. Literature after the Revolution suggests that the lingering emotional response to James’s rule ran deep and cast him as a threat to English liberty. The popular pamphlet An Account of Denmark (1693) summarized sentiments abounding in many tracts when it depicted the downfall of Denmark to French absolutism as the danger all European nations faced—if England did not defend other nations, she would be the next victim.45 At risk was English liberty (through French enslavement), prosperity (through policies that would impoverish the nation) and peace (through Louis XIV’s universal monarchy that would require a permanent state of militarization). The tenor of these urgent pleas match the plight of Boadicea, an historical heroine who took on legendary status through the playhouses, ballads and periodicals from the 1690s through to the reign of Queen Anne. Charles Hopkins’s play Boadicea (1697)—a tragedy that recounts the British warrior-queen’s efforts to liberate her country (Dryden mentions it to Mrs. Steward as a resounding success)—spoke to central concerns about a just rebellion/ revolution. Though a Jacobite could have made the case that James II, intent on liberating his England, was the Boadicea in the popular play of 1697, scholarship indicates that the majority likely felt otherwise. In fact, it may not even have been the viewpoint for the majority of English Catholics. Gabriel Glickman provides a knowledgeable study regarding the ideologically diverse views of English Catholics at the time of the Revolution, and another assessment divides Catholic beliefs into two categories: those who looked to the pope in Rome (and opposed the absolutist Catholicism of James II and Louis XIV) and those who relished James’s reforms in spite of the pope’s disapproval.46 And though he never retracts his loyalty to “the Cause,” Dryden does take care to point out in 1696 that his son’s play, The Husband His Own Cuckold (produced in London with the support of Williamites William Congreve and Sir Robert Howard), was written during his son’s sojourn in Italy—and pointedly not in France.47 Dryden makes this casual reference to Italy in the midst of his vigorous and self-assured satire against the dullness of most playwrights and many clerics, and though the appeal for his son is apologetic in tone, the satire is not. While appearing to be inconsequential, the comment establishes distance from James’s court at St. Germain.

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The memory of James’s rule, the fear of tyranny, and the defiant protection of English liberty continues to appear in literature for at least another 50 years. Howard Weinbrot demonstrates persuasively that Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1742) remained concerned with James II’s reign and the English conscience, which needed to defend its choice to overthrow a king. Weinbrot quotes the 1689 Declaration of Rights and its opposition to James’s “pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal.”48 He then returns to Pamela Exalted: Mr. B “makes a body think a Wife should not have the least Will of her own. He sets up a dispensing Power, in short, altho’ he knows, that that Doctrine once cost a Prince his Crown” (PE: 313). By citing both the dispensing power and the loss of James’s crown Pamela declares her resistance to political and to marital tyranny. She will take the parliamentary and Williamite revolution-option if necessary.49 Dryden isn’t writing in 1742, when convictions nevertheless remained white hot, but rather he is writing in the contemporary midst of this rich context of conflicting loyalties across religion, politics, and the various personal convictions of each of his readers. As these forces and fears took hold of England, beginning with James’s divisive rule and concluding with his alignment to Louis XIV and the Jacobite party’s plans for an assassination, they may have fostered a change in tone in Dryden’s poetry.

Dryden’s Address to His Readers Though Dryden once was the public voice for the Stuarts, his poetry has moved to a more private register. His influence continues to grow, yet he refrains from overt political statements and chooses not to take a stand in the highly contentious debate on ancient and modern learning, despite Joseph Levine’s speculation that “if there was one man in England who might have been expected to pronounce upon the rival claims of the ancients and moderns and thereby settle the issue, it was surely John Dryden.”50 He writes Fables, Ancient and Modern, his most popular work for the next 200 years, by exploring complex concerns that he shared with all of his readers, diverse as they were. J. Paul Hunter points out that didacticism was so prevalent that “every gesture was suspected by partisans of a different stripe,” and this strident nature was indicative of a crisis of culture, of “partisans wracked with doubts of their own.”51 Dryden responds to this crisis by rising above polemic. His efforts at even-handedness still fully engage political, historical and literary concerns, yet he will never reveal his thoughts as fully as he did in The Hind and the Panther, surely because it would be ineffective and impractical to do so, but also because Dryden is concerned with domestic peace. His

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quiet character of the good parson contrasts with his public satirical verse of headier days and provides insight to his method and his opinions: Much to himself he thought; but little spoke: And, Undepriv’d, his Benefice forsook. (Character of a Good Parson 125–6) Dryden’s good parson keeps his thoughts to himself. He appears to embody the moral advice that Dryden’s layman offers doubters in Religio Laici (1682): “But Common quiet is Mankind’s concern” (450). Through the good parson Dryden also poses the same religious and rational questions as in Absalom and Achitophel, yet even here, in the poem that justifies the stance of a nonjuror, he offers more than one perspective: He took the time when Richard was depos’d: And High and Low, with happy Harry clos’d. This Prince, tho’ great in Arms, the Priest withstood: Near tho’ he was, yet not the next of Blood. Had Richard unconstrain’d, resign’d the Throne; A King can give no more than is his own: The Title stood entail’d, had Richard had a Son. (Good Parson 108–14) The last line changes the argument in Absalom and Achitophel: like Richard II, Charles II didn’t have a son, and the legitimacy of James III was a point of dispute that justified the invitation to William. Dryden did not subscribe to the warming pan theories that suggested Queen Mary of Modena smuggled in someone else’s son just before declaring the birth of James III, but his artistic choice here adds ambiguity rather than clarity to the situation. It also suggests that James II did not have the prerogative to flee to France any more than his people had the right to overthrow him. As for William III and his supporters, the act of invitation was imperative: Conquest, an odious Name, was laid aside, Where all submitted; none the Battle try’d. (Good Parson 115–16) The next lines of The Character of a Good Parson question passive obedience (attacked over and again in the Allegiance controversy of 1688–89) even as they cast a cynical pall over the alternative, which was political resistance: The senseless Plea of Right by Providence, Was, by a flatt’ring Priest, invented since:

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And lasts no longer than the present sway; But justifies the next who comes in play. The People’s Right remains; let those who dare Dispute their Pow’r, when they the Judges are. He join’d not in their Choice; because he knew Worse might, and often did from Change ensue. (Good Parson 117–24) These lines satirize the political motivations for both divine right and for the privilege of Parliament in the ongoing historical struggle that traces at least as far back as the Civil War if not all the way back to the Magna Carta. In the concluding couplet, the good parson’s final decision is based on practical experience rather than on religious principles, yet he comes to the opposite conclusion as the Williamite bishops of the Church of England, who cast their lots with the Revolution. “It was on the general right of nations and the particular laws of England that the Williamite bishops founded their justification for resistance. Though deeply religious men, their justification of resistance was political, not religious.”52 Dryden turns these political convictions on their heads with his parson’s own pragmatism: “Worse might, and often did from Change ensue.” This pragmatism, of course, belies the matter of conscience—Fables offers both. This, too, may speak to its staying power as a compelling suite of poems. If we return to the Preface, we see an authoritative Dryden who marshals his literary predecessors in the service of his last great work, doing so with the balanced discernment of a mature poet at the height of his powers. It is exactly as he says it is: “What Judgment I had, increases rather than diminishes; . . . I have so long studied and practis’d both, that they are grown into a Habit, and become familiar to me” (Preface 101, 102; 105–7). Dryden parcels out these judgments while at the same time making gestures to the court and public opinion: “But the Readers are the Jury; and their Privilege remains entire to decide according to the Merits of the Cause: Or, if they please to bring it to another Hearing, before some other Court” (Preface 61–64). It would be tempting to view all of these comments as sardonic, particularly in light of the quip that readers may change their courts at whim. However, we know from his letters that Dryden cares very much about Fables’s reception.53 He emphasizes a concern that his readers receive all information in a fair light, so that they are equipped to judge for themselves: “I desire not the Reader should take my Word; and therefore I will set two of their Discourses on the same Subject, in the same Light, for every Man to judge betwixt them” (Preface 684–6); and as another example “Let the Reader weigh them both; and if he thinks me partial to Chaucer, tis in him to right Boccace” (Preface 705–7). Dryden’s choice to include Thomas Speght’s 1598 version of Chaucer, making it easy to compare it to his own, seems consonant with

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an expectation that his readers will notice his additions, and he includes as his esteemed readers his fellow poet Abraham Cowley and his fellow critic the Earl of Leicester (dedicatee of Dryden’s play Don Sebastian), “other Judges” whom Dryden respects but with whom he differs when appraising the beauties of Chaucer. He converges political and poetical meanings and metaphors consistently throughout his career, and the Preface is no exception: I dare not advance my Opinion against the Judgment of so great an Author: But I think it fair, however, to leave the Decision to the Publick: Mr. Cowley was too modest to set up for a Dictatour. (Preface 559–62) These addresses to the reader, again, place Dryden within emerging modes of literary address. Hunter showcases John Dunton, editor of The Athenian Mercury, at the forefront of the modern incorporation of readers into questions and answers in print, which proved to be an “instant and sustained success,” and through which many prominent men were participants in the give and take: the Marquis of Halifax, the Duke of Ormond, Sir Thomas Pope Blount, and Sir William Temple among them. Benedict, meanwhile, notes The Athenian’s explicit attention to its female readers, in its dedications to them as discerning readers (“If Ladies, you approve”) and most notably in its “discovering” in 1704 “the secret letters sent the Athenian society by the most ingenious ladies of the three kingdoms.”54 Benedict asserts that this “explodes the fiction of a purely male literary club” by placing “female responses into the very middle of this male culture.”55 Dryden places himself in the middle of this modern audience and innovation, as his Preface makes clear in its back and forth address. And in 1691 The Athenian itself calls Dryden “the best satirist, the best everything else except the best Christian, and the best religion for a poet.”56 Dryden is not in hiding after the Revolution of 1688 but rather in the spotlight almost immediately with the successful play Don Sebastian (1689), and he collaborates with artists to create experimental pieces like the semi-operatic King Arthur (which received Mary II’s approbation). He delves into the work of translation, and his Works of Virgil were the pride of the nation. He is the leader of the new genre of miscellany, the tenor of which women readers influence, and where he collaborates with many Whig writers.57 He corresponds with Elizabeth Thomas and other younger writers whose art he encourages and supports, and he remains the talk of the coffeehouses throughout. All this is to say no more, perhaps, than that Dryden remained a public figure even after he was no longer the spokesperson for a government or a political party, and that his release from the partisanship required of a poet laureate provided an opportunity for the kind of impartial historical evaluation that is at the center of his

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final work. Dryden renders contemporary “historically or geographically remote” figures from Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, not unlike the earlier creations of “an Elizabethan Hamlet and a Restoration Achitophel.”58 Some of the imitations and original poems are meditative, while others are irreverent, but they all speak to concerns that Dryden considered throughout his career, both literary and political, and they provide incisive if subtle perspectives on the context surrounding the Revolution. Dryden in 1700, I believe, still is concerned with preserving common quiet and preventing civil war. Perhaps Dryden aims to move his many readers toward a peaceful resolution as they wrestle with the consequences of an historic decision that affects them on personal and moral terms.59 Fables does take stock of the multiple and varied versions of peace; very few of these iterations provide harmony, many involve compromise, and others point to transformations that either escape or avoid war entirely. With domestic peace as a guiding principle, Dryden is willing to acknowledge even a usurper’s contribution to that principle, and he turns, weary but still engaged, toward the future reign of Anne.

Literary Criticism There have been more than 350 years of Dryden appreciation, enmity, and criticism, and this book builds on the erudite work of many scholars. Alan Roper’s Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms remains, for me, the seminal work that explains Dryden’s poetry and processes over his lifetime, and James Anderson Winn’s thorough biography provides invaluable reference material and reflections.60 Cedric Reverand is the only critic to treat Fables in its entirety, and many of the foundational principles behind his reading continue to resonate: that, as early as Britannia Rediviva (1688), Dryden “had begun to see that the rightful monarch might not be the right monarch” (213); that Dryden had come to the conclusion that “peace and stability would not occur through the true succession, but on the contrary, would ultimately be achieved thanks to a foreign, usurping, warlike king” (215); that Dryden works through these ambiguities in Fables; and that Dryden offers competing “systems of value” throughout his last miscellany. Reverand believes Dryden offers these only to unravel them (5); and that this final poetic mode reflects “Dryden’s moral bind” (217).61 While I agree that Dryden in Fables sometimes offers with one hand what he takes with the other, I build on Reverand’s valuable work to present a Dryden who has come to terms with the complexities that surround him, who reflects the ambiguities of his readers because he shares them, who is working through different versions of history for his contemporaries, and who is engaged with many of the changes occurring around him, including a growing appreciation for Shakespeare as well as an appreciation for women readers.

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The pioneering work of Judith Sloman, as she examines the progression of Dryden’s translations and miscellanies that grow more unified with each publication, has been another anchor for this current study. Similarly, this book benefits from the work of David Hopkins, Paul Hammond, Taylor Corse, Tanya Caldwell, Earl Miner, and William Frost, whose extensive research on Dryden’s retrieval of the past illuminates Dryden’s delicate interweaving of literary allusions, ideas, and predecessors.62 Equally important are the perspectives of Barbara Benedict, J. Paul Hunter, and Noelle Gallagher, whose research on modern readers offer indicators for the long-term appeal of Fables, and Joseph Levine’s careful placement of Dryden between ancient and modern modes of thought.63 Anna Battigelli, David Gelineau, Paul Hammond, Phillip Harth, Richard Kroll, and Alan Roper pay specific attention to Dryden’s readers, and I am grateful for their research.64 Most recently, Geremy Carnes has demonstrated Dryden’s effort to influence the Protestant majority’s perception of the English Catholic community, and John West asserts Dryden’s ability to engage a nonconformist audience.65 There are multiple lines of scholarship regarding Dryden’s literary works in the 90s, those years coinciding not only with the end of Dryden’s life but also with a major transformation in his confessional identity, political status, and literary investments. For Earl Miner, Dryden renders moral but not political allegories in his Fables.66 Like Judith Sloman, David Gelineau, and Geremy Carnes, Miner believes Dryden’s primary literary concern at this point in his life is with the divine and the Catholic faith.67 Unlike Miner, David Bywaters asserts that Dryden was still very much involved in politics, but that he elevates the literary above the political in order to reassert his authority after the Revolution of 1688.68 David Hopkins dovetails with Earl Miner’s focus on Dryden’s later work as apolitical, and asserts that Dryden’s exclusive concern is his relationship with the authors he translates.69 Though Paul Hammond maintains that Dryden’s primary interest is in universal truths, his analysis of Dryden’s Aeneid focuses on the idea of Dryden as an exile, which Miner had utilized previously; Taylor Corse’s work on Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, and Dryden’s coming to terms with disappointment, is aligned with Hammond and Miner on this theme.70 Howard Erskine-Hill admires the dedication of Hopkins and Hammond to Dryden’s artistry, particularly as editors of the Longman’s Edition of the Poems of Dryden, yet he feels the need to point out that Dryden’s involvement in contemporary affairs does not disparage his art: He could draw on the great classics, allude to major contemporary affairs without lapsing into bald parallel or allegory, and at one and the same time plumb the depths of moral and religious psychology through dramatic expression. .  .  . classical awareness and political awareness are not mutually exclusive and are not at odds with one another.71

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This eloquent assessment makes sense to me as a touchstone for approaching Dryden’s later work. Ann Cotterill and Steven Zwicker maintain that marginalization is evident throughout Fables. For Zwicker, digression in the 1690s allowed Dryden to “acknowledge—and then to embrace . . . the casual and inevitable drift of all things towards dissolution.”72 Decay and disappointment are key to Zwicker’s interpretation of Fables, though he believes Dryden took comfort in dissolution in Of the Pythagorean Philosophy. Cotterill believes Dryden expresses his marginalized state through his use of the feminine and through digression.73 There is a long list of esteemed scholars who tend to see Dryden’s post-revolutionary work as veiled but definitely polemic: David Gelineau, James Anderson Winn, Cedric Reverand, Ann Cotterill, David Bywaters, Steven Zwicker, Abigail Williams, Tanya Caldwell, Lisa Zunshine, among many others.74 Sean Walsh’s essay agrees that some of the passages in Fables are aimed against William and his court, yet he writes that rather than an amalgamation of Jacobite “potshots,” Dryden’s “late work is oppositional, and it can be read . . . as showing more sympathy for both republicanism and deism than one might expect.”75 My own reading suggests that Dryden’s meditations on English politics are shrewd but not always anti-Williamite; I’m not convinced that the tyrants and standing armies in Fables always are directed at the current monarch. For example, Dryden’s emotional tyrants don’t mirror William’s dispassionate methods, and Charles II and James II also created political crises when they attempted to secure standing armies, most notably in 1679– 82. The commentary on “Character of Polybius and his Writings” (1693), written by A. E. Wallace Maurer and Alan Roper, aligns more closely with the controlled detachment I find in Fables: “[Character of Polybius] comments flexibly and dispassionately upon forms of government, a subject so often treated in everyday politics with reductive partisanship . . . It exemplifies Dryden’s power, even when hurried, to instruct, by encouraging his countrymen—whether Jacobites or Whigs—to apply Polybius’s principle of disinterested scrutiny and thereby to know the good and the bad in themselves.”76 Finally, John Barnard and David Hopkins point to his ability in his last decade to rise above political differences when collaborating on literary endeavors, and Adam Rounce, Cedric Reverand, Upali Amarasinghe, and Barbara Benedict outline Dryden’s contemporary popularity, which stretched into the next 200 years.77 The foundational research that I’ve been describing allows me to speculate about Fables in some new ways. First, as mentioned, I’ve stepped away from the common assumption that Dryden always takes an antiWilliamite stance. Dryden seems to be pioneering a new approach to history through narrative poetry; one that exercises detachment in examining the varying perspectives and opinions even if he also acknowledges that he is personally involved. He isn’t pushing an agenda with a didactic

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history of good and bad (a practice that would continue for another century), and he does not place before us a narrative that mourns James specifically or that urges his readers to mobilize for his return. He may have an opinion, he may provide multiple compelling personal histories or demonstrate unsettling patterns, but he also provides broad perspectives, sometimes resonant with history and sometimes highly experimental in a modernization of narrative purpose.

Chapter Outline Chapter 1 links Palamon and Arcite with The Secular Masque, as both manage the concordia discors motif in the service of an end of life perspective, allowing for literary and historical retrospection and the framing of extremes and ideals through iterations of Venus, Mars, Diana, and Chronos. This strategy enables Dryden to present recent tumultuous events within the context of monarchical historical patterns and the literary shaping of those patterns through Chaucer and through Denham. Dryden’s forging of a unified English literary history that shapes English political history speaks to the harmonizing ambitions of concordia discors and Dryden’s abiding concern for domestic peace and stability. Chronos in The Secular Masque is poignant even as Momus is perfectly detached, and Theseus provides the concordia discors model of an ideal monarch even as he reveals human doubts and concerns. Nestor, who appears in other fables, takes his place in this chapter because he interweaves patterns of history with personal experience for his audience, paralleling Dryden’s intentions toward his readers. Dryden’s project of working through / coordinating alternative models of history allows the rapidly aging poet to leave it behind him and to join that literary and cosmopolitan community of his forebears, all at the dawning of a new century. In Chapter 2, Venus and Mars take the form of consent/persuasion and force, often expressed through the shocking collision of marriage and rape across four fables: The Wife of Bath Her Tale, Cymon and Iphigenia, Ovid XII, and Theodore and Honoria. The fables promote the compromise in a marriage, sometimes analogous to the relationship between monarch and people. In opposition to that marriage, the extreme violence of rape, sometimes analogous to usurpation and civil war, plays a critical role in the historical and political address that Dryden shapes for his readers. Again, the reader experiences the fear and the horror of the stories on a personal level, most particularly in Theodore and Honoria (a fable with staying power for readers through to the 19th century). Again, as Dryden articulates a pattern that has affected England through the Civil Wars and the Revolution of 1688, he exercises a detached scrutiny quite unlike the contemporary uses of historical precedent as he modernizes this form of inquiry. Under the cover of fiction, the author is able to

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negotiate competing ideas about monarchy and Parliament that grip the nation, and he willingly engages the possibility that the Revolution of 1688 is a painful but necessary corrective that avoids the even more painful experience of another civil war. Dryden’s underlying influence, therefore, takes seriously both Royalist and Whig concerns, and in so doing creates a literature for a diverse national audience. Chapter 3 considers Dryden’s meditations on a specific monarch, Mary, and selects out the female forces at work in Dryden’s Fables, filled as it is with female protagonists whose compelling personal histories have social and political application to Mary II and to the national emotional history he is charting. It also responds to his own women readers, who were drawn to Dryden’s elegies and to the combination of public and private discourse that his miscellanies provide. 78 Dryden presents mixed forms of religious terminology, and therefore engages language that could reflect both the Catholic and the Protestant courts of Mary of Modena and Mary II, again providing harmony in difference, unifying a diverse readership, and perhaps contributing to Fables’s stamina well into the 19th century. Dryden’s poetry is so amenable to multiple audiences that Whig writers like Daniel Defoe and William Walsh borrow extensively from Eleonora when writing eulogies for Mary II. Chapter 4 examines Shakespeare’s influence on Dryden. If women and Whigs were reading Dryden, they also were reading Shakespeare, as Ann Thompson, Sasha Roberts, and Maximillian Novak demonstrate. 79 John Dryden was reading Shakespeare, too, and his unique position as a Tory and nonjuror among prominent Whigs who admired Shakespeare is an indication of his independent mind. In light of the fact that Fables was Dryden’s last major work, and that he may have sensed as much, imitating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest—the two plays that emphasize Shakespeare’s “fairy kind of writing” and frame the beginning and end of his career—may have been a profoundly satisfying endeavor, forward-looking as it prepares the way for affectivist criticism and Addison’s Spectator series on the pleasures of the imagination, and retrospective in that Dryden had modernized Shakespeare for the Restoration stage. When Dryden moves Shakespeare from stage to page, he restores in his later poems the magic, the poignant tones, and the disciplined forgiveness—especially of Prospero—that he had edited out of his on-stage productions. He also creates another opportunity for end-of-life writing, which includes a beautiful masque for England in a macabre flourishing of the imagination and a meditation on art that reinforces a powerful connection with authors and transcends time altogether, all the while tapping into a diverse world of readers that includes modern Whigs as well as women. The final chapter examines Dryden’s artistic focus on detachment and involvement. This focus allows him to produce the Fables that is resonant with literary forebears, with history, and with personal experience,

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yet that also is experimental in its comprehension of multiple perspectives, and in the implicit suggestion that a combination of detachment and involvement in civic affairs may be the only way forward. The intertwining of compelling personal narratives with larger social ideas anticipates emergent interests and concerns, and Dryden leaves in his last great poetical work a literary legacy for modern and ancient readers alike.

Notes 1. The subscription-based Virgil project was successful for Dryden: he had numerous patrons and protectors, including Princess Anne. Many were supporters of the king, and many made contributions in order to secure a dedication inscribed on the illustrated plates. Several of his older plays were running again in the 1690s, among them The Indian Emperour, Tyrannick Love, Oedipus, The Spanish Fryar, and All for Love (See James Winn, John Dryden and his World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, 478). From 1689 to 1700, Dryden also wrote four new plays, one opera, translations of Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, multiple dedications, literary criticism, and original poems, in addition to the ambitious projects of translating the Works of Virgil and producing Fables. Poetasters still satirized him, as they always had, and Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) directed many of its accusations at Dryden, but these affronts do not seem to have diminished Dryden’s popularity in the theater or his reputation as England’s preeminent poet. Dryden was no longer poet laureate, but he had hardly retired, and he was widely appreciated. Donald Bond, ed. The Spectator, 5 Vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), illustrates the phenomenon of Addison’s Spectator spreading across the land only 11 years after the Fables publication, and the infrastructure of network communication was in place long before that. Addison refers frequently and often explicitly to Dryden throughout the Spectators, as Bond’s index indicates, and Addison refers expressly to Dryden’s popularity among readers in Spectator 512, indicating that Londoners, at the very least, had been reading Dryden for some time. 2. See Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), originally published in 1905; “Dryden” vol. 1, 417; “Pope” vol. 3, 87. 3. The Works of John Dryden, eds. Edward Niles Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., Alan Roper and Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2000), hereafter called Works. For the list of Virgil subscribers, see Works 6, eds. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (1987), 872n. 4. Alexander Pope, “Preface to the Iliad of Homer,” in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack et al., vol. 7 (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 4. Pope further develops this metaphor of Homer’s fire, and subsequent literary critics have taken Pope’s image and directed it back to the fire in Dryden’s poetry. The Twickenham editors cite three examples of this borrowing and transposing of the fire metaphor back to Dryden, one of which refers to The Flower and the Leaf, also in Fables: “The Flower and the Leaf . . . is a singularly pure and magical piece of pageantry in rhyme-royal . . . its wheels have caught fire, and glowing masses of fresh detail are swept into the race” (Mark Van Doren, John Dryden [1920], ch. 7 [3rd ed. 1946, p.  227]), qtd. in Poems of Alexander Pope 7: 4.

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5. Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, 716. In Works 7, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (2000). 6. John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 11. 7. Ibid. 8. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 126. 9. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, eds. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), 2: 10–11. 10. “[Chaucer] was employ’d abroad, and favor’d by Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, and was Poet, as I suppose, to all Three of them. In Richard’s Time, I doubt, he was a little dipt in the Rebellion of the Commons; and being Brother-in-Law to John of Ghant, it was no wonder if he follow’d the fortunes of that Family; and was well with Henry the Fourth when he had depos’d his Predecessor. Neither is it to be admir’d, that Henry, who was a wise as well as a valiant Prince, who claim’d by Succession, and was sensible that his Title was not sound, but was rightfully in Mortimer, who had married the Heir of York; it was not to be admir’d, I say, if that great Politician should be pleas’d to have the greatest Wit of those Times in his Interests, and to be the Trumpet of his Praises” (Works 7: 35). 11. Ibid. 12. See Maximillian E. Novak, “The Politics of Shakespeare Criticism in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century,” ELH 88.1 (Spring 2014): 115–42, for robust evidence that Shakespeare was widely read in the 1690s. 13. Richard Kroll, in The Material World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), notes Dryden’s ability to articulate English concerns as early as 1667 with the poem To Charleton: “The poem invokes in order not to identify or conflate, but to differentiate the terms of knowledge—for example, in the roll of scientific and political worthies—and this becomes a textual or hermeneutical anticipation to a Restoration insistence on the exclusion of tyranny from society, politics and science” (35). Dryden was involved with England’s history on political as well as imaginative terms, and while he moves English literature forward in vibrant ways, he has experienced historical change along with his country in all of its painful iterations. According to Kroll, “In Dryden, that linearity [of reading] stands for the normal, sequential processes of history, which it is both immoral and impolitic to ignore or suppress” (324). This sounds a lot like Of the Pythagorean Philosophy in Fables, and it also sounds like the “evolution” Howard Weinbrot defines as a compromise of religious principles in Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013): “England chose collectively, painfully, and partially, to evolve rather than to self-destruct” (2). When Dryden evokes ghosts through legends and fables, he touches on the fears from recent history and the still present dangers of submerging those shared experiences, but he also presents the dangers of holding on to them too tightly. 14. Cedric Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The Fables (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013); Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Penguin, 2006); Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 15. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009). 16. John Dennis to Dryden, Letter 29, January 1693, in The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942), 94.

24

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Introduction See Paul Trolander and Zeynap Tenger, Sociable Criticism in England 1625– 1725 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), especially chapter 7, for a discussion on Dennis’s circulation of these letters as a way of establishing his own credentials with well-known wits. This circulation further reinforced the reputations of the writers Dryden, Wycherley, and Congreve. Dennis’s design behind the correspondence involved publication from the start. As to Dryden’s approach toward his letters when writing acquaintances or fans like Dennis, men of letters had expected their correspondence to become public at least as early as Erasmus and More, but this awareness of reality doesn’t mean Dryden cultivated his persona through his letters; in fact, Paul Hammond shows he did not even bother to collect his poetry, much less his letters, for such a purpose. See Paul Hammond, “The Circulation of Dryden’s Poetry,” in Critical Essays on John Dryden, ed. James A. Winn (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997), 48–72. Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 99. Ibid., 119. Paddy Bullard, “Digital Editing and the Eighteenth-Century Text: Works, Archives, and Miscellanies,” Eighteenth-Century Life 36.3 (Fall 2012): 57–80, quotations on 62 and 64. Benedict, 104. Ibid., 90. Joseph Levine, Between the Ancients and Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 100. Benedict, 5. Ibid., 9. Johnson, Lives 2: 469. For illuminating studies of Dryden’s attention to his literary forebears and the literary richness of his imitations, see: David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity: English Poets and the Classics, from Shakespeare to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Earl Miner, “Ovid Reformed: Issues of Ovid, Fables, Morals, and the Second Epic in Fables Ancient and Modern,” in Literary Transmission and Authority, eds. Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Taylor Corse, Dryden’s Aeneid (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991); and William Frost, John Dryden: Dramatist, Satirist, Translator (New York: AMS Press, 1988). J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 1990), 98. Anna Battigelli, “Dryden’s Angry Readers,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, eds. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002): 261–81, quotation on 273. Judith Sloman, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985). I will review the literary criticism toward the end of the introduction. See Craig Rose, England in the 1690s (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 121–43. See Ibid.; Steven Pincus, 1688; and Stephen Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650–1702 (New York: Harcourt, 1966), for the English nationalism that took hold after the assassination attempt. For convincing scholarship that English fears were well-founded regarding Jacobite intentions to incite a war, see John Childs, “The Abortive Invasion of 1692”

Introduction

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

25

and Howard Erskine-Hill, “John, First Lord Caryll of Durford, and the Caryll Papers,” in The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites, eds. Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (London: Hambledon Press, 1995). Childs outlines the French interest in either an invasion of England or the fomentation of an English Civil War in order to strengthen France’s prospects in wars across Europe (65), and Erskine-Hill demonstrates through the Caryll’s papers that the restoration of James II or James III could only be achieved through war (85). See also Edward Gregg, “France, Rome and the Exiled Stuarts,” in A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718, ed. Edward Corp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Gregg writes that Jacobite support continued to wane in England after James II’s 1693 Declaration made promises that William III already had enacted. After the assassination plot in 1696, “even men who had served as active Jacobite agents abjured their formal loyalties” (49). See Pincus, 476. See B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). See also John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88–109 and 122–8 for the history of Clarendon’s shaping of Elizabeth as a model of via media for the nation. Clarendon’s version of Elizabeth, and Charles II as her heir, “appealed to the large segment of the political nation that imagined itself fending off the threat of tyranny on the right and of republicanism on the left” (126–7). Pincus, 451–2. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 467–73; quotation on 470. John Dennis to Dryden, Letter 29, January 1693, 94. Dryden to Dennis, Letter 31, March 1693/94, 73. Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 67, November 7, 1699, 123. See also Letter 70 to Steward, Nov. 26, 1699, 129. Tony Claydon and W.A. Speck, William and Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) assert that the Tories had been won over by way of Mary’s cheerfulness and good governance even earlier than 1696: “Mary’s achievement was to have reconciled the bulk of the Tories to the revolution of 1688” (141). Dryden to sons, Letter 47, 1697, 93. Dorax finds himself bound in a similar way in Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1690), when he rebukes Benducar for urging rebellion: He [the Emperor] trusts us both; mark that, shall we betray him? A Master who reposes Life and Empire On our fidelity: I grant he is a Tyrant, That hated name my nature most abhors; . . . . But, while he trusts me, ‘twere so base a part To fawn and yet betray, I shou’d be hiss’d And whoop’d in Hell for that Ingratitude. (2.1.288–91; 296–8).

42. For the common use of Eden in debates regarding constitutional theory, see Alan Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), 108–10. See Ibid., 112–13 for Dryden’s application of these metaphors to The Hind and the Panther, “where the patterns of just monarchy and tyranny, of religious tolerance and intolerance are traced through an account of the Creation, the Fall, and its consequences” (112). See also Jayne Lewis, The

26

43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Introduction English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a probing study of The Hind and the Panther within its context of the genre of fable, its ambiguities, and its capacity to supply “a figurative language uniquely suitable to a modern England desperately in need of material signs that can mediate reactively between opposing sides” (105). Lewis asserts that Dryden is aware of the emergence, even in 1685, of “the foundation of a new cultural order. That order will endure as long as it can accommodate differences in a process of continual revision” (120). Highlighting Cain is a telling choice of detail, since Cain would have inherited Adam’s rule if one were to follow a strict hereditary line, and he therefore was used as part of the argument against theories of divine right. Qtd. in Pincus, 153. Pincus has shown that as the post grew more efficient it also grew to be an effective means of surveillance (150–1). An Account of Denmark (1693) circulated widely—by 1700 there were 13 editions in multiple languages, and in the first months of 1693, Londoners alone purchased 6,000 copies (Pincus, 358–63, especially 358). Account was written by Whig Robert Molesworth, and Pincus persuasively places it within a context of mainstream rather than marginalized Whig publications. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community, and Pincus, 1688, chapter 5. Stephen Baxter goes so far as to call him “the hero of the papist subjects” when he outlines the reasons for William III’s popularity in Ireland and Parliament’s subsequent interest in 1699 to reduce his powers there (375). The play was dedicated to the prominent Williamite Sir Robert Howard (Dryden’s brother in-law). Congreve (also a Williamite) and Howard both assisted with its promotion. Dryden himself wrote the prologue, epilogue, and preface, and prepared it for production in London. Howard D. Weinbrot, “Historical Criticism, the Reclamation of Codes, and Repairs to Literary History: The Examples of Fielding and Richardson.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, Los Angeles, CA, March 2015. See also the subsequent article of the same title in Eighteenth-Century Life 41.3 (2017): 57–88. Ibid. Levine, Between the Ancients and Moderns, 35. Hunter, Before Novels, 241. Pincus, 416. For a full examination of the ways in which religious freedoms were framed within the context of the political terms of civil society, see 401–34. His letters convey a genuine pleasure over the approbation of “The Town” and of the more selective readers John Driden and Mrs. Steward. He concludes the previously discussed passage with deference to Driden: “& He which pleases me most, is of the same Judgment as appears by the noble present he has sent me.” Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 75, April 11, 1700, 135. Hunter, 13. Benedict, 112–13. Qtd. in Michael West, Dryden and Enthusiasm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 169. West cites The Athenian Mercury, 5.1, December 1, 1691. Miscellany Poems (1684), Sylvae (1685), Translations from Juvenal and Persius (1692), Examen Poeticum (1693), Fables (1700). Alan Roper, Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), quotations on 87 and 89. Reverand points out that there were at least a dozen editions of Fables in the eighteenth century, and that Fables was the “work by which Dryden was once the best known, the work for which he was once most admired” (3), and lists

Introduction

27

numerous examples as evidence. See also Upali Amarasinghe, Dryden and Pope in the Early Nineteenth Century: A Study of Changing Literary Taste, 1800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), whose extensive work Reverand also cites. Dryden’s own letters, to which I refer, indicate his pleasure over the reception of the poems in Fables, from esteemed friends such as John Driden of Chesterton and Mrs. Steward to “The Ladies of the Town” just after its publication, who “are all of Your Opinion; & like my last Book of Poems, better than any thing they have formerly seen of mine” (Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 75, April 11, 1700). 60. Alan Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965) and James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987). 61. Reverand begins by noting the appreciation for Fables: from Congreve and Pope, to Wordsworth, to Mark Van Doren, to Earl Miner who, like Sir Walter Scott, equates Dryden’s poetical prowess with that of Milton in Paradise Lost (2–3). He provides a thorough bibliography of critical works through 1988, including: the anti-heroic nature of Dryden’s later work as viewed by Michael West in “Dryden’s Ambivalence as a Translator of Heroic Themes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1973): 347–66, Judith Sloman in “The Structure of Dryden’s Fables,” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (1968), and Derek Hughes in Dryden’s Heroic Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981); Dryden’s resignation to England as a fallen state after the Revolution of 1688 as argued by Steven Zwicker in Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); the argument posited by Judith Sloman and Earl Miner that Dryden’s Fables progressed toward Christian ideals in Judith Sloman, “An Interpretation of Dryden’s Fables,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4 (1970/71): 199–211, in Earl Miner, Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), and in Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Fujimura’s insistence that Dryden’s experience after 1688 both tainted his Christian piety and forced him in the direction of more personal themes in “Autobiography in Dryden’s Later Work,” Restoration 8 (1984): 17–29 and in “The Personal Element in Dryden’s Poetry,” PMLA 89 (1974): 1007–23; Garrison’s examination of private fires that destroy civilization and public fires that protect it in “The Universe of Dryden’s Fables,” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 409–23; and many others whose work is particularly focused on one fable or another. Judith Sloman’s, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), was one of the first scholars to consider the work as a whole, rather than as a miscellany of translations. Reverand uses her as a primary source yet disagrees with many of her arguments. 62. Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity; Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome; Taylor Corse, Dryden’s Aeneid: The English Virgil (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991); Taylor Corse, “Dryden and Milton in ‘the Cock and the Fox’,” Milton Quarterly 27.3 (October 1993), and “Dryden’s Vegetarian Philosopher: Pythagoras,” Eighteenth-Century Life 34.1 (Winter 2010): 1–28; Tanya Caldwell, “John Dryden and John Denham,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46.1 (Spring 2004); Tanya Caldwell, Time to Begin Anew. Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000); Miner, “Ovid Reformed: Issues of Ovid, Fables, Morals, and the Second Epic in Fables Ancient and Modern.” As one example of the beautiful work of these scholars that demonstrate Dryden’s affinity for the authors he translates, Paul Hammond writes that Dryden captures Lucretius’s “satirical didacticism,” Virgil’s “combination

28

63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69.

Introduction of melancholy and reverence,” and Ovid’s “perpetual wit and delight in paradox” (208). Benedict, Making the Modern Reader; Hunter, Before Novels; Noelle Gallagher, Historical Literatures: Writing about the Past in England, 1660–1740 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns; and Ibid., The Battle of the Books (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Anna Battigelli, “Dryden’s Angry Readers”; David Gelineau, “Adorned with Labour’d Art: The Intricate Unity of Dryden’s Fables,” Modern Philology 106.1 (2008) and “Dryden’s ‘Cymon and Iphiginia’: The Vigour of the Worse Prevailing,” Studies in Philology 102.2 (Spring 2005); Kroll, The Material World, esp. 35 and 324; Alan Roper, “Who’s Who in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’?,” Huntington Library Quarterly John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany 63.1–2 (2000): 98–138; Hammond, “The Circulation of Dryden’s Poetry,” and Phillip Harth, “Dryden’s Public Voices,” in Critical Essays on John Dryden, ed. James A. Winn (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997). Geremy Carnes, The Papist Represented: Literature and the English Catholic Community, 1688–1791 (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2017); John West, John Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Miner, “Ovid Reformed.” David Gelineau revisits the concept of unity in Fables in “‘Adorn’d with Labour’d Art:’ The Intricate Unity of Dryden’s Fables,” where he reviews the work of others who have asserted that Dryden denies unity in Fables: Paul Hammond, John Dryden: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991); David Bywaters, “The Problem of Dryden’s Fables,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1992); Steven Zwicker, “Dryden and the Dissolution of Things,” John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, eds. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). Gelineau believes that Dryden aligns meaningless violence and materialism with William III, and then counters it with divine love, creation and Catholicism. Though Reverand, like Gelineau, interprets Fables as an integrated whole rather than an arbitrary selection for a miscellany, Gelineau disputes Reverend’s assertion regarding Dryden’s ambivalence. According to Bywaters, Dryden reaches out to Williamite opposition in the country, and undermines William’s reign with a constant focus on anti-martial themes. David Hopkins, “Dryden and His Contemporaries,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, eds. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005): 55–67; quotation on 65. See also David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity, 113–29 and 238–49, where Hopkins traces Dryden’s views about translation from Ovid’s Epistles (1680) through Fables (1700). Hopkins uses the term “transfusion” as a key to Dryden’s translations, which he describes as “acts of simultaneous selfsurrender and self-discovery so extraordinary as to seem almost the work of some higher power .  .  . destruction, despair, and decay are constantly counterpointed by rebirth and hope” (249) Hopkins acknowledges and appreciates Reverand’s work, but warns against placing too much weight on any architectural organization of Fables. Vinton Dearing, editor of Works 7 agrees. Tom Mason, “Dryden’s Cock and the Fox and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Translation and Literature 16 (Spring 2007): 1–28, aligns himself with Hopkins and Hammond on this larger point, and details the degree to which Dryden does and doesn’t remain true to Chaucer in a line-by-line

Introduction

70.

71. 72.

73.

29

and phrase-by-phrase fashion. He addresses religious issues such as predestination, but in an apolitical manner. See also Paul Hammond, “The Interplay of Past and Present in Dryden’s ‘Palamon and Arcite’,” The Seventeenth Century 23.1 (2008); Taylor Corse suggests that Pythagoras is “a melancholy reminder of the human limitations that beset even the best of teachers, including Dryden’s Pythagoras . . . who tried to reform the “Ill Customs” (682) of his age” in “Dryden’s Vegetarian Philosopher: Pythagoras,” (22). Christopher D’Addairio also builds on the idea of Dryden as “internal exile,” yet insists that more important than the emphasis on Dryden’s covert Jacobite arguments is “his turn to classical translation as a retreat into the comforts of a distant literary past.” “Dryden and the Historiography of Exile: Milton and Virgil in Dryden’s Late Period,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 553–74. James Winn’s essays on Fables continue the thread of Dryden’s Jacobite frustration, nostalgia for a lost cause, and his close relationship with the poets he translates. See, as examples, “Past and Present in Dryden’s Fables,” John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany: Huntington Library Quarterly 63.1–2 (2000): 157–74, and “‘According to my Genius’: Dryden’s Translation of ‘the First Book of Homer’,” John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, eds. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000): 264–81. Howard Erskine-Hill, “Dryden’s Drama: A Revaluation,” John Dryden: His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, eds. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004): 52–64, quotation on 62–3. Steven Zwicker, “Dryden and the Dissolution of Things: The Decay of Structures in Dryden’s Later Writing,” John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, eds. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000): 308–29, quotation on 309. Jane Ohlmeyer and Steven Zwicker’s subsequent analysis of Dryden’s relationship with the House of Ormond aligns Dryden’s own disappointment over the broken Stuart line with the Duchess of Ormond’s personal misfortune of losing her only son and heir, combined with her loneliness while the Duke was away at war. See Jane Ohlmeyer and Steven Zwicker, “John Dryden, the House of Ormond, and the Politics of Anglo-Irish Patronage,” The Historical Journal 49.3 (2006): 677–706. Zwicker provides evidence of a personal affection and friendship between Dryden and the Duchess of Ormond. Reverand connects the themes of lineage with Dryden’s personal life and concerns for his own descendants in “John Dryden: Personal Concerns of the Impersonal Poet,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 13 (2006): 3–21. Ann Cotterill, “‘Rebekah’s Heir’: Dryden’s Late Mystery of Geneology,” John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany, the Huntington Library Quarterly 63.1–2 (2000): 201–26. Cotterill’s article explores several lineages in Fables: that of recusant Catholic families in England to which Elizabeth Dryden belongs; the Duchess of Ormond’s Plantagenet ancestry that Cotterill asserts is in opposition to the war-like nature of the descendants of the duke; and the poetic line of succession of which Dryden claims a part. She defines the act of writing elegies as a ritual for Dryden that involves burying the feminine: the weak, soft, and diseased symbolic of his position as a poet whose politics have been marginalized. He reasserts the vigorous and fruitful in John Driden of Chesterton, and thereby secures his rightful place at the end of his life, and reclaims control over his own story. In her subsequent contribution to the 2004 Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, Cotterill views Fables as an “exuberantly unsentimental vision” that responds to Jeremy Collier’s view

30

74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

Introduction of a reformed civil society; a movement that William and Mary supported. See Ann Cotterill, “Dryden’s Fables and the Judgment of Art,” Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. Steven Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 259–79, quotation on 277. Christopher D’Addario, “Dryden and the Historiography of Exile: Milton and Virgil in Dryden’s Late Period,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67.4 (2004): 553–74, supplies a succinct list of the articles that focused on Dryden’s Jacobitism in the translations of the 1690s: Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94–100; Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry, 177–205; Thomas Fujimura, “Dryden’s Virgil: Translation as Autobiography,” Studies in Philology 80 (1983): 67–83; Zwicker and Bywaters, “Politics and Translation: The English Tacitus of 1698,” Huntington Library Quarterly 52 (1989): 319–46; Kirk Combe, “Clandestine Protest against William III in Dryden’s Translations of Juvenal and Persius,” Modern Philology 87 (1989): 36–50; Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 201–15. William J. Cameron refutes Dryden’s Jacobitism in “Dryden’s Jacobitism,” in Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches, ed. Harold Love (London: Methuen, 1972): 277–308. Ann Cotterill, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Digression: Dryden’s Discourse of Satire,” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 464–95, believes Dryden used digression in Discourse Concerning Satire as a means of emasculating Dorset, aiming Juvenalian satire at William, and reasserting his own rightful authority and masculinity. James Winn, “Past and Present in Dryden’s Fables,” John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany: Huntington Library Quarterly 63.1–2 (2000): 157–74, highlights Dryden’s steadfast loyalty to the Stuart throne that takes the form of covert Jacobitism, though his recent biography of Queen Anne suggests Dryden may have looked forward to her reign as a reconciliation of opposing principal forces in England, combining a chosen monarch with a rightful heir to the throne in James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne, Patroness of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Reverand, in John Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, ties his examples of anti-heroic and anti-war strains, which he believes are countered by partial ideals, to the resentment Dryden holds toward William and his policies. Sean Walsh, “‘Our Lineal Descents and Clans’: Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern and Cultural Politics in the 1690s,” John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany: Huntington Library Quarterly 63.1–2 (2000). Works 20: 326. John Barnard, “Early expectations of Dryden’s Translation of Virgil (1697) on the Continent,” The Review of English Studies 50 (1991); David Hopkins, “Charles Montague, George Stepney, and Dryden’s Metamorphoses,” The Review of English Studies 51.201 (2000). See Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 108–13; 119, and Naomi Tadmor, “‘In the Even My Wife Read to Me’: Women, Reading, and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, eds. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds., Women Reading Shakespeare 1660– 1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 1–7.

1

Histories and Concordia Discors in Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque

A miscellany naturally presents multiple voices and often competing points of view, a context that lends itself well to concordia discors. In Fables, Dryden begins with Palamon and Arcite where Arthurian legend coincides with Plantagenet mythology, surely familiar tropes for an English audience. Yet the concordia discors at the center of this fable not only expresses the traits of an ideal monarch, but it also symbolizes mixed government, Pythagorean change, and, just as importantly, the back-andforth motion of complicated ideas and variegated emotions in the midst of a dramatic historical shift. Theseus, at the conclusion of Palamon and Arcite, frames this paradox for his subjects and audience within a cosmological order on personal terms, balancing the grief they feel for Arcite’s death with the joy of Palamon’s marriage: “As jarring Notes in Harmony conclude.”1 Fables, published in March of 1700, was Dryden’s last major work, and The Secular Masque, his last smaller piece, played in May—Dryden died on the third night, and his son attended in his stead.2 Palamon and Arcite is a narrative and modernization of Chaucer, and The Secular Masque a concise masque with mythological figures, yet Dryden pairs them with his use of concordia discors. Venus/Mars and Diana/Chronos play prominent roles in both works, and each of these figures supplies a rich and varied iconology that also connects them with royalty from the days of Chaucer and Edward III through to William and Mary.3 If the traits of an ideal king traditionally have been expressed in terms of concordia discors and the balance between Mars and Venus, there also is a pattern of alternating extremes when kings fall short of that harmony. This alternation brings balance to the cosmos if it also causes human pain.4 Edward III is an ideal king in the English imagination of 1700, as is Theseus in Palamon and Arcite. Other kings, both Plantagenets and Stuarts, fall short of this ideal, and instead tend to exhibit traits of either Mars or Venus. Concordia discors merges with the Renaissance notion that opposite elements—fire and water—must be balanced but cannot collide. Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst, where the miser of one generation produces a profligate in the next, is one example of this notion

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Histories and Concordia Discors

of alternation, and Mary Clarke’s almanac, from which Swift quotes in his introduction to The Battle of the Books, puts these cyclical extremes in political terms: “War Begets Poverty, / Poverty Peace, / Peace maketh Riches flow, / (Fate ne’er doth cease:) / Riches produceth Pride, / Pride is War’s ground, / War begets Poverty, &c. / (The World) goes round.”5 Studying Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque in tandem provides us with new information regarding Dryden’s opinions at the end of his career: placing the Stuarts, including William and Mary, next to the Plantagenets reveals in Dryden’s Fables a mode of detached observation that has not been acknowledged or examined. Dryden’s verse attracted a wide readership: Barbara Benedict writes that Dryden had become a “living classic,”6 and this reputation was further reinforced with the successful Virgil translation of 1697. In Fables, he makes use of his following to subtly craft a new version of history. Yet this intentional forging of a unified English literary history that shapes English political history is not a foundational maneuver in the creation of a hegemonic empire—James Winn, Cedric Reverand, Michael West, and others have demonstrated Dryden’s distaste for brute strength, military heroism and violence, and Fables itself is proof of his cosmopolitan appreciation of literatures—but rather it is a skillful attempt at unity through a history that comprehends the polarities dividing the nation. One example includes the fight between the ancients and the moderns: Joseph Levine writes that “we shall find Whigs and Tories, Protestants and Catholics, republicans and nonjurors, and nearly everyone else on both sides of the argument.”7 Fables comprehends both; even the title Fables, Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, and Chaucer, with Original Poems by Mr. Dryden deliberately bridges the querelle. Levine places at the center of this heated debate a race to create a national history during the years 1695–99, each version championing or denying the antiquity of Parliament and independent rights of subjects, either relying on narrative or insisting on modern methods of scholarship, from Wotton (a modern and a Whig) to Temple (an ancient and a Whig) and from Richard Brady (an absolutist and a modern) to James Tyrrell (a republican and a modern).8 All of these historians selected facts and styles to serve their partisan interests. Beginning with Sir Walter Ralegh, the royal historiographer would emphasize “historical precedents to legitimize current events and treaties” and Dryden produced “The History of the League” (1684) within such a context of royal propaganda, though even then “the collision of Dryden’s skeptical with Maimbourg’s dogmatic mind was to complicate Dryden’s task as translator.”9 But by the time he reaches Fables, Dryden is shaping something else. He places the contemporary polarities within a shared history of Plantagenets, literary forebears, and a shared understanding of concordia discors, paradoxically moving his readers away from another round of dissensions and civil wars that would parallel the history of that earlier royal family. Dryden also proposes the idea of

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a less than perfect past that militates against nostalgia even as it simultaneously mourns the flight of the mythical Astraea, and perhaps recognizes that she never really had a chance. In assessing the connections and evaluating the careers of past and present monarchs, Dryden assumes the Janus-like role of both the sage and the satirist who looks backward and forward. He forges a shared history through narrative (a classical mode) and fiction (moving toward the proto-novel) that is even-handed by way of multiple perspectives, and by so doing pioneers a new mode of historical address. Dryden, at the end of his life with both the vulnerability of age and the urbanity of experience, poised as he is between two centuries, finds in Nestor a convenient parallel; a storyteller who illuminates the historical relevance of current events for his audience. The philosophical voice found in Theseus’s final speech of Palamon and Arcite, and Momus’s satirical review of the century in The Secular Masque, may present oppositional perspectives of the poet whose project of working through and coordinating alternative models of history allows the rapidly aging poet to leave it behind him. It also reinforces the harmonizing ambitions of concordia discors in an effort to influence domestic peace.

Edward III and Concordia Discors: Common Ideals Across English Politics For Dryden’s contemporaries, allusions to the Plantagenets in Palamon and Arcite may have seemed quite natural; they even may have expected it. Chaucer remained closely connected to the reign of Edward III in the English imagination of 1700, as Dryden’s Preface to the Fables demonstrates.10 Just as importantly, contemporary writers conjured Plantagenet kings like Edward III and Henry IV to justify the Revolution of 1688 (and Dryden employed such an allusion himself to interesting ends in “To Congreve” in 1693). The 17th century was a moment of Edwardian fervor, and an era where opposing political forces claimed the legend for themselves—before the Williamite appropriations, Charles I had fashioned himself after the legendary king, and Joshua Barnes had dedicated an Edwardian biography to James II just before the Revolution.11 As another example, Sir Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother in-law and occasional literary collaborator, dedicated his History of the Reigns of Edward [II] and Richard II (1690) to King William III.12 Howard’s conclusion parallels Edward I and III with William III, and his contrast between great and tyrannical kings relies on an appreciation of concordia discors. Edward III is a combination of love and force, and his magisterial behavior embodies this ideal. Indecorous extremes illustrate the tyrannical behavior of Edward II and Richard II (and therefore of Charles II and James II): they were “submissive when oppos’d, and fierce when submitted to . . . abus’d the Tenderness of others . . . never forgiving, where they had opportunity to punish . . . neither had Power nor Design to conquer

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Enemies, but used both to overcome their Friends.”13 Dryden takes Howard’s depiction of Edwards I and III and repurposes it for his version of Theseus; Theseus appears “A Chief, who more in Feats of Arms excell’d / The Rising nor the Setting Sun beheld” (Palamon and Arcite I.3–4). Only a few lines later, women beg his help in burying their lords and in defeating Creon, and Theseus displays the balance to his fierceness: “The Prince was touch’d, his Tears began to flow, / And, as his tender Heart would break in two, / He sigh’d; . . . He would not cease, till he reveng’d their Wrongs” (I.93–5; 102). Thus, Theseus does as Edward did: “grew fierce by Opposition, and gentle by Submission.”14 Likewise, Howard’s Edward is “Mighty enough to conquer Enemies, and Powerful enough to forgive those [they] conquer’d.”15 Theseus further embodies this ideal when he spares Palamon and Arcite from death after the victory at Thebes, even though they were the nephews of the conquered tyrant. Later, when Theseus discovers the banished Arcite and Palamon, he is poised to sentence them to death, like Howard’s Edward (“nor suffer’d any abused Mercy unrevenged”), but Hippolyta intercedes on their behalves, and he relents. The concordia discors within Theseus involves the ability to dispense justice as well as compassion and to exercise power by bestowing mercy.16 Dryden’s most imaginative works often build on analogies that pre-exist in the minds of his readers, and Palamon and Arcite provides a romantic backdrop that easily echoes the legendary reputation of Edward III and the Plantagenets within the commonly held beliefs of harmony in contrarieties.17 While concordia discors has been an important and constructive approach to Alexander Pope’s poetry, it seldom has been applied to Dryden. Earl Wasserman outlines its history: The doctrine of concordia discors is at least as ancient as Pythagoras and Heraclitus, and had a remarkably vital history thereafter. It is to be found in Plato, Empedocles, Cicero, Horace, Seneca, Plutarch, Ovid, .  .  . among many others .  .  . it recurs frequently among the Church fathers and spread widely in the Renaissance and thereafter. . . . very early the Pythagorean theory of the musical and celestial harmony of discords was assimilated into the doctrine. . . . perhaps one of the most explicit transfers of the doctrine to the political order appears in a passage from Cicero. . . . [this came to be] the cosmic rationale for England’s parliamentary monarchy and the model for the ideal attributes of the king of such a mixed state: the political harmony arising from the conflict of monarch and populace is but an imitation of the cosmic harmony produced by the clash of the opposing elements. (53–5) Wasserman continues by giving examples from Halifax, Pym and after them Davenant, all of whom use concordia discors to explain England’s

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governmental and political structures. Like the legendary figure of Edward III, this principle was amenable to all parties, and Dryden leverages their universal appeal. Perhaps even more importantly for Dryden than Howard’s version of balance is the precedent found in Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill that compares Charles I to Edward III, particularly in light of Tanya Caldwell’s scholarship that has demonstrated Denham’s contemporary prominence as well as his specific influence on Dryden.18 Though Dryden does not give Denham the same attention as Chaucer in Fables, it’s easy to see similarities between Dryden and Denham at the ends of their tenures: both wrote for kings who lost their kingdoms, both continued to write and revise their works after dramatic national changes had impacted them personally, and both utilized metaphors of concordia discors as they assessed the successes and failures of English monarchs and their subjects.19 Cooper’s Hill leans heavily on the historical line of English kings, and places Charles I within that context. Denham also conflates the vocations and destinies of kings and poets, a subject Dryden engages in many phases of his career, not least in Fables. As Wasserman demonstrated, Denham’s Windsor Castle still houses Mars and Venus during the days of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. The battlement towers of Windsor combine with the fertile valley, an expression of the harmony between Charles and Henrietta Maria as Mars and Venus within the castle. They repeat the ideal combination of Edward III and Queen Philippa, who lived in the same royal dwelling.20 Dryden’s depiction of Theseus in Palamon and Arcite also utilizes imagery from Denham’s version of Edward III, reinforcing the currency of Venus and Mars as a metaphor for balanced variety and for a successful monarch or a happy political state: “In Scythia with the Warriour Queen he strove, / Whom first by Force he conquer’d, then by Love; / . . . With Honour to his home let Theseus ride, / With Love to Friend, and Fortune for his Guide, / And his victorious Army at his Side” (Palamon and Arcite I.7–8; 11–13).21 The tradition of Mars and Venus as the metaphor for concordia discors goes back to Hesiod and is directly referenced by Alexander Ross in 1653.22 Plutarch established one of the first precedents for this metaphor as the perfection of civic order,23 and through this lens Denham’s scenes at St. Paul’s and at Chertsey become, according to Wasserman, “the failure of a concordia discors between monarch and populace.”24 In Palamon and Arcite, Theseus is described as the ideal combination of love with force, no less so for marrying an Amazon, perhaps echoing Shakespeare’s use of the same with Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.25 By contrast, The Secular Masque is an illustration of extremities, which also is integral to Denham’s understanding of English history in Cooper’s Hill, as evidenced when he charts historical extremes in terms of prerogative and privilege: the rising tyranny of King John resulted in the barons’s revolt and the “extortion” of the Magna Carta; growing insubordination resulted eventually in the tyranny of Henry VIII,

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which over time brought about another correction in the extreme when Puritan subjects beheaded Charles I.26 Denham and Dryden both advocate for the harmony and stability of moderation over the undesirable alternative of extreme positions, and both recognize that, in English history, the pattern of extremes is more common. 27 Edward III is the exception to this swinging pendulum, and before Palamon and Arcite Dryden had alluded to him in Britannia Rediviva (1688) and in “To Congreve” (1693). In Britannia Rediviva, he compares James III to Edward III’s son Edward the Black Prince because both were born on Trinity Sunday at Windsor.28 In “To Congreve,” Dryden’s Edward III maintains his mythical status, but he puts the image to new use by conflating kings and poets and by reminding his audience that Edward III deposed the incompetent Edward II, who was his father: Thus when the State one Edward did depose; A Greater Edward in his room arose. But now, not I, but Poetry is curst; For Tom the Second reigns like Tom the first. (“To Congreve” 45–8) Instead of Congreve, England is left with Thomas Shadwell and Thomas Rhymer. Focusing on the poet laureate and historiographer thinly veils the allusion to the usurpation that caused the poetical upset, yet the passage also might be read as favorable to William III, since Edward II’s overthrow was necessary. The lines suggest that the political kingdom has fared better than the poetical one. Though Edward III’s reputation as the ideal king continued unshaken, his progeny brought about the Wars of the Roses: the battle for royal power within the Plantagenet family fought throughout the country for generations. Dryden’s Emilia,29 in her homage to the first day of May, makes herself a garland of those roses that ultimately were combined in the marriage of Henry VII at the conclusion of the lengthy war: And thrust among the Thorns her Lilly Hand To draw the Rose, and ev’ry Rose she drew, She shook the Stalk, and brush’d away the Dew: Then party-colour’d Flow’rs of white and red She wove, to make a Garland for her Head. (I.192–6) Chaucer illustrates his Emily with white and red imagery, but the roses are Dryden’s addition, and he refers to the red and white roses of York and Lancaster again in his poem to the Duchess of Ormond that introduces Palamon and Arcite: “O Daughter of the Rose, whose Cheeks unite / The diff’ring Titles of the Red and White” (“To the Dutchess”

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151–2). Dryden’s Arcite enters the great tournament with a red banner, “The bloody Colours of his Patron God” (III.561), and Palamon’s is “All Maiden White” (III.565). The pageantry of processions in Dryden’s version of the tournament and the feasts and revelry beforehand match the magnificence with which Edward III hosted tournaments and feasts as ongoing memorials to the victories at Crécy and Calais, the point at which both the idea of English bravery and Edward III’s reputation were transformed at home and abroad.30 Upon his return from these battles in France, the king provided detailed personal instructions regarding the circular arena that was to be built at Windsor for jousting tournaments, equipped with seating and dining space for spectators, much like the stadium that Theseus constructs for the tournament between Palamon and Arcite: the very stadium where “The beauteous Form of Fight / Is chang’d, and War appears a grizly Sight” (PA 3.593–4).31 Dryden extends the description of romance dispelled by war for 26 lines. Additionally, at Edward III’s final feast of St. George, just before his death, he knighted his two grandsons, Richard of Bordeaux and Henry of Bolingbroke, rivals who would claim the throne through him, admitting them into the Order of the Garter and unwittingly setting the stage for the wars ahead.32 Palamon and Arcite are cousins, as were Richard II and Henry IV, and it is worth remembering Shakespeare’s indelible portraits since the historical kings are in the minds of Dryden’s contemporaries as precedent and justification for William III’s reign, and since Dryden discusses Shakespeare’s version of them in The Grounds of Criticism (1679). Richard II, imprisoned and petulant, abused his talent for rhetoric, a characteristic that bears resemblance to art and civilization, and relevance to Alma Venus the creator, or to Venus, the mother of Aeneas who founded Rome. Shakespeare’s Henry IV lacked the sense of form and ceremony requisite of a great king and leader but was a man of integrity and action and a competent ruler who was loyal to England. He was known as a great warrior. The oblique comparison resonates with the alternation theories of history that suggest an extremity in the personality of a monarch is harmful to the state and must be balanced by yet another extremity in character. Palamon is intelligent but self-absorbed and insubordinate, particularly before he sees Emily; sorrow over his imprisonment makes him “With walking giddy, and with thinking tir’d” (PA I.227). While this is where Richard II’s story ends, Palamon eventually finds a nobler outlet for his talents. He is eloquent when addressing Venus, and it is presumed that he will be equally persuasive with Emily. Arcite, on the other hand, complains to Mars that he is “The Fool of Love, unpractis’d to persuade; / And want[s] the soothing Arts that catch the Fair” (PA III.326–7). Shakespeare makes sense of English history for his audience, and Dryden establishes a similar role for Chaucer in the Preface, where he ties The Canterbury Tales to all traits English: he “has taken into the Compass of his Canterbury Tales the various Manners and Humours (as

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we now call them) of the whole English Nation, in his Age”; and again: “We have our Fore-fathers and Great Grand-dames all before us, as they were in Chaucer’s Days” (470–2; 493–4). It becomes a natural progression, then, for Dryden to compare Chaucer’s Emily (with roses red and white) and the Duchess of Ormond with Joan of Kent, the Fair Maid after whom Edward III named the Order of the Garter.33 Joan of Kent later became the wife of Edward III’s son (Edward the Black Prince), she was a Plantagenet in her own right as granddaughter to Edward I, and she was Queen Regent when Richard II was a boy.34 Dryden’s millennial poem “To the Dutchess” introduces Palamon and Arcite and amplifies the duchess’s Plantagenet ancestry through the Beaufort side of her family, descendants of John of Gaunt, himself a son of Edward III, an advisor to Richard II and the father of Henry IV:35 Thus, after length of Ages, she returns, Restor’d in you, and the same Place adorns; Or you perform her Office in the Sphere, Born of her Blood, and make a new Platonick Year. (“To the Dutchess” 26–9) The duchess’s blood and that of Joan of Kent are the same, and their family is inextricable from the history of England.36 Dryden also directly links Chaucer with John of Gaunt, with Plantagenet monarchs, and with the rebellion at the heart of the plot around which readers remember these legendary figures: [Chaucer] was employ’d abroad and favour’d by Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, and was Poet, as I suppose, to all Three of them. In Richard’s time, I doubt, he was a little dipt in the Rebellion of the Commons; and being Brother-In-Law to John of Ghant, it was no wonder if he follow’d the Fortunes of that Family; and was well with Henry the Fourth, when he had depos’d his Predecessor. (Preface to the Fables, 394–401)37 By abstaining from judgment on Chaucer, he obliquely does the same for contemporaries who “follow’d the Fortunes” of the winning king. By connecting the duchess with both Emily and Joan of Kent (and perhaps Queen Philippa), by calling the duke “a Palamon,” by reminding us of the Ormond family lineage, and by linking Chaucer himself to the specters of the same monarchs, Dryden intends his version of Palamon and Arcite to evoke the romantic yet imperfect story of English royalty and its followers—sometimes self-absorbed, sometimes Machiavellian, sometimes majestic, and often warring—beginning with Edward III.38 Dryden

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may intend his readers to see in Roman profiles the line of English royalty as well: [S]ome of the noblest Roman Families retain’d a resemblance of their Ancestry, not only in their Shapes and Features, but also in their Manners, their Qualities, and the distinguishing Characters of their Minds: Some Lines were noted for a stern, rigid Virtue, salvage, haughty, parcimonious, and unpopular: others were more sweet, and affable; made of a more pliant Past, humble, courteous, and obliging; studious of doing charitable Offices, and diffusive of the Goods which they enjoy’d. The last of these is the proper and indelible Character of your Grace’s family. (“Dedication to the Duke,” 36–45) This would be in keeping with the English connection to the Trojans and the establishment of Rome (one reason why Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid became a source of national pride).39 These family lines may be divided into two parties, one which seems more partial to Mars, “noted for a stern, rigid Virtue, salvage, haughty, parcimonious and unpopular,” and one which resembles Venus, “of a more pliant Past.” If Theseus personifies the ideal of concordia discors, Palamon and Arcite, like the nobility in Livy’s history, represent two family lines that reflect the temperaments of Venus and Mars. To extrapolate further, if Theseus echoes a version of Edward III, and Palamon and Arcite the subsequent Plantagenets who fought for Emily and England for the next few hundred years, they also represent the ancestors of the Stuarts, and it becomes possible to explore Palamon and Arcite as a reflection of general historical patterns that Dryden believed were still pertinent to English politics in 1700. Palamon and Arcite represent two very different habits of mind, and these same habits of mind might be seen in politics as well as in love. They even may be seen in such kings as Charles II and James II. Palamon worships Venus, and one might argue that Charles II does too. A Mars-like James can be seen in many phases, whether as lord high admiral, or as the king who wielded his policies with wrath and inflexibility, or as the French ally who would have benefited from the assassination attempt of 1696, had it succeeded. Though the final two of these examples expose his inadequacy, he is a military figure all the same. William also was Mars-like, and lacked any eloquence that one might attribute to a devotee of Venus (his utter loss of composure at Mary’s death is a compelling portrait of a lover, but an inarticulate one). Arcite is no philosopher, and perhaps from Dryden’s perspective he fails as a lover too. Yet his behavior is highly esteemed among those around him, and he would be honorable in every respect except for the glaring details that he is not honest with Theseus and that he breaks his lifelong bond with Palamon. One might offer a

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similar critique of William, honorable in many respects (disciplined leader on the battlefield and, when on the throne, focused on issues of state rather than courtly entertainment) but for the glaring usurpation. If we survey all of the Stuart monarchs, a pattern of alternation appears that coincides with the pattern of alternating gods in The Secular Masque. “James [I]’s innate political shrewdness and flexibility enabled him to ride out political storms in a way that was later characteristic of Charles II.”40 Charles I was viewed as “unapproachable and . . . uncommunicative,”41 while his father was known for being “open,” “accessible,” and for allowing “free flow of ideas within his court. One was known for his extreme positions, and the other for his spirit of compromise.”42 James II’s inflexibility resembled his father’s, completing the pattern: James I (Venus), Charles I (Mars), Charles II (Venus), and James II (Mars). The Secular Masque adds Diana to alternating forces that embody the Stuarts, and it has long been assumed that Diana represents the age of James I, as he was king at the beginning of the century, before the Civil War. He also loved the hunt.43 While the masque is least critical of Diana, she embodies the “Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time” that is a gentler version of the characterizations put forward by James I’s enemies. This depiction of Diana is unusual in that it lacks the sternness, not to mention force, normally associated with the warrior virgin. She appears almost like another version of a soft and smiling Venus, making it possible to associate her with the peace-loving James I. According to Fiona Donovan and Lisa Rosenthal, Peter Paul Rubens reinforces the possibility that James I was associated with Peace, if not Venus, and Charles I with Mars.44 Peace and Wisdom are combined in the ceiling of the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, where James I is at the center in The Peaceful Reign of King James (1632–4), and where he gestures to Peace and Plenty while Minerva banishes rebellion.45 Commissioned by Charles I, who sat on the throne beneath it and who presented himself as the martial counterpart to his father (the Rubens portrait of Charles as St. George is one example), the panels depict and protect James I’s reputation for maintaining a peaceful reign and good government.46 Venus, Mars, and Cupid (1630) and Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (ca. 1629–30) were painted while Rubens was in England on diplomatic missions, and Minerva Protects Pax from Mars (or War and Peace) was a gift from Rubens to Charles I, which Donovan interprets as Rubens’s final appeal to Charles I for peace, and in which Mars and Venus are integral to the design. 47 Venus and Pax are in the same pudica pose in both works, and both are nursing, creating an image of abundance. Pax is nude like Venus, though traditionally she would have been draped.48 In Mars there is an allegory for Charles I. In Venus, Mars, and Cupid, Mars is disarmed and submissive to both Venus and to his own role as father, yet he remains outside the bond between Venus and Cupid as mother and child:

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[Mars is] unable to convincingly complete an idyllic family group. What is uncertain in [Venus, Mars, and Cupid] appears resolved in War and Peace, where Mars is no longer admitted, however awkwardly, into the circuit of maternal pleasures but is vigorously cast out so that the legitimate paternal position is shifted to the inscribed viewer [Charles I]. At the same time, Rubens fashions both the benign and destructive Mars figures with strikingly similar facial features and expressions as they are both separate from, but focused on, the woman and child. In the allegory for Charles Mars thus combines the longings of the benign father and the threats of the destructive one.49 Thus, Rubens provides another precedent for considering Stuart monarchs in terms of Venus and Mars with Charles I’s blessing. He also provides several iterations on themes that combine Venus with Peace, Peace with Wisdom, and even Venus with Wisdom in a complimentary association with Athena. While Minerva protects the Venus-like figure of Peace in both War and Peace and in the ceiling panel at Whitehall Palace, Venus herself represents literature and the arts in The Horrors of War (1637), where the destruction caused by Mars, when he is led by Alecto, is in direct opposition to creative and peaceful forces. Rubens articulates this representation in a letter to Justus Sustermans, dated March 12, 1638: The principal figure is Mars, who has left the open temple of Janus (which in time of peace, according to Roman custom, remained closed) and rushes forth with shield and bloodstained sword, threatening the people with great disaster. He pays little heed to Venus, his mistress. . . . From the other side, Mars is dragged forward by the Fury Alecto, with a torch in her hand. . . . There is also a mother with her child in her arms, indicating that fecundity, procreation, and charity are thwarted by War, which corrupts and destroys everything. . . . I believe, if I remember rightly, that you will find on the ground under the feet of Mars a book as well as a drawing on paper, to imply that he treads underfoot all the arts and letters.50 The divisions between Mars and Venus apply to Dryden’s use of these deities in both Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque, and they are an unwelcome alternative to the concordia discors in Theseus. While Denham classified Charles I as Mars, Dryden depicts Charles II in Absalom and Achitophel as the mild patriarch who is capable of ruling with a stronger hand when necessary (325–6), and James II is “The Militant” in Threnodia Augustalis; Dryden also warns him against “Resistless Force” that would render a “Lame, Imperfect Deity” in Britannia Rediviva. According to poets, artists, and historians, Venus’s mildness is preferable to Mars’s war-like strategies, at least when embodied by the Stuarts.51

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For those who favored William and Mary, the royal couple was concordia discors personified. George Stepney used Denham’s pairing of Venus and Mars in his eulogy “A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of her Late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary” (1695), which Dryden may have corrected:52 Grace and mild mercy best in her were shown, In him the rougher vertues of the throne, Of justice she at home the ballance held, Abroad, Oppression by his sword was quelled The emblems of the Lion and the Dove The God of battle, and the queen of love Did in their happy nuptials well agree Like Mars, he led our armies out, and she With smiles presided o’re her native sea. Such too their Meetings, when our Monarch came With Laurels loaden, and immortal Fame, As when the God on Haemus quits his Arms Softning his Toyls in Cytherea’s Charms. (51–63) In a depiction reminiscent of Rubens’s Venus, Mars, and Cupid painting, Stepney portrays the disarming of Mars as a move toward harmony rather than a surrender to the temptations of sensuality. That Stepney has drawn on these precedents in his public eulogy for the queen demonstrates their currency. Placing the alternating extremes of The Secular Masque within such a tradition of concordia discors, and alongside the harmonious depiction of Theseus, presents a striking contrast.

Dryden’s Pairing of Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque In light of Stepney’s version of concordia discors that William and Mary embodied before her death, and matched against the backdrop of Matthew Prior’s Williamite panegyric Carmen Saeculare that was published on New Year’s Day, Dryden’s The Secular Masque, a satirical review of the Stuarts whom he is expected to defend, may have heartily surprised and amused his audience.53 Unlike the works that render Mars with Venus as a decorous version of concordia discors, The Secular Masque presents Venus, Mars, and Diana as incompatible and undesirable extremes. So do the temples dedicated to the same deities in Palamon and Arcite. When Venus and Mars are combined, it is not harmonious but deadly, as the temple of Mars attests: “Soft smiling, and

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demurely looking down, / But hid the dagger underneath the gown: / Th’assassinating wife, the household fiend” (PA II.565–7). When they appear alone, they are equally malevolent. The “rich carvings” and “portraitures” (PA II.468) in Venus’s temple portray “scalding tears” (PA II.476), “Jealousy suffus’d, with jaundice in her eyes” (PA II.487), “Sorceries” (PA II.482), “And all the mighty names by love undone” (PA II.504). “And all around were nuptial bonds, the ties / Of love’s assurance, and a train of lies, / That, made in lust, conclude in perjuries” (PA II.477–9). The concluding line for this description, “And lovers all betray, and are betray’d” (PA II.510), is quite similar to Momus’s condemnation that “Thy Lovers were all untrue” in the masque (SM 467– 510). The depiction of Venus herself is lovely, and that beyond measure. In this vein, Palamon seems to address Alma Venus of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura: “All nature is thy province, life thy care; / Thou mad’st the world, and dost the world repair” (PA III.143–4). Venus casts herself similarly in The Secular Masque: “Nature is my kindly care; / Mars destroys, and I repair” (SM 74–5), where Dryden uses the same rhymes in the two works, pairing “care” with “repair.”54 Likewise, any glorious or righteous aspects of the god Mars are relegated to the descriptions of Theseus. The temple itself is another matter. In contrast to Diana’s “sylvan scene with various greens” (PA II.619), Mars’s landscape is one where “A cake of scurf lies baking on the ground, / And prickly stubs, instead of trees, are found; / Or woods with knots and knares deform’d and old” (PA II.534–6). Instead of heroes, there are the “secret felons” (PA II.560), “Hypocrisy” (PA II.564), “And, far the blackest there, the traitor-friend” (PA II.568). The temple’s illustrations in Palamon and Arcite forecast those in the masque: “Unpunish’d Rapine, and a waste of war; . . . And all with blood bespread the holy lawn”(PA II.570–2) becomes “The sprightly green / In Woodland-Walks, no more is seen; / The sprightly Green, has drunk the Tyrian Dye” (SM 54–6); “The city to the soldier’s rage resign’d; / Successless wars, and poverty behind” (PA II.560–87) is repeated with “Thy Wars brought nothing about” (SM 94) in the masque. Diana is preferable in both works: the narrator of Palamon and Arcite, “tir’d with deformities of death” (PA II.618), turns from Mars to describe Diana’s temple. Momus in The Secular Masque wishes for the same, though the order of the gods is reversed: “Better the World were fast asleep, / Than kept awake by thee” (SM 65–6). 55 Despite these foreboding images, green stained to red is not sinister, but godlike, when Theseus marches into Thebes to overturn the tyrant and bury the bodies of the great: Where in an argent field the God of War Was drawn triumphant on his iron car; Red was his sword, and shield, and whole attire,

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Histories and Concordia Discors And all the godhead seem’d to glow with fire; Ev’n the ground glitter’d where the standard flew, And the green grass was dyed to sanguine hue. (I.109–14)

In The Secular Masque, Mars justifies himself with regal imagery similar in tone to the description of Theseus: Mars. Inspire the vocal brass, inspire; The world is past its infant age: Arms and honor, Arms and honor, Set the martial mind on fire, And kindle manly rage. (45–50) While Theseus incorporates the righteous aspect of Mars into kingship, he is capable of participating in the purity of Diana’s hunt as well, and is able to do so even after his many wars. In Theseus this appears; whose youthful joy Was beasts of chase in forests to destroy: This gentle knight, inspir’d by jolly May, Forsook his easy couch at early day, And to the wood and wilds pursued his way. Beside him rode Hippolyta the queen, And Emily attir’d in lively green, With horns, and hounds, and all the tuneful cry, To hunt a royal hart within the covert nigh; And as he follow’d Mars before, so now He serves the goddess of the silver bow. (PA II.222–32) His “youthful joy” is like the “Age . . . in its Prime” (SM 6). Momus’s condemnations of a “Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time” (SM 40), along with “Thy Chase had a Beast in View” (SM 93), lose a bit of their sting when applied to a king like Theseus. This is no unthinking, idle, or naïve king. Rather, Theseus is a ruler who understands the appropriate roles for each season, and he performs them without apology. Pope, in Windsor Forest, makes the hunt an alternative to war, as well as, in some ways, an extension of it. The portrayal of the hunt as a crux between peace and war is relevant to Dryden’s depiction of Theseus, who is able to return to peaceful pursuits after fighting in Thebes. The passage is similar to Diana’s own depiction of herself in the masque:

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With Horns and with Hounds I waken the Day, And hye to my Woodland walks away; — With shouting and hooting we pierce thro’ the Sky; And Eccho turns Hunter, and doubles the Cry. (SM 27–8; 33–4) It is worth noting that when Theseus follows Diana, Mars still is recognized: “And as he follow’d Mars before, / so now He serves the goddess of the silver bow” (PA II.231–2). The king’s beloved Hippolyta, an ex-Amazon, accompanies him as they celebrate the rites of “jolly May” (PA II.224). Theseus maintains perfect balance of the opposing forces of Venus/Mars, not only by marrying an Amazon but also by demonstrating throughout the fable that he is capable of compassion as well as war. In this passage, he also echoes the idea of a youthful Diana, rendering an image that is nothing if not harmonious. He is a Mars capable of mercy and compromise, and a Venus capable of vigor and statecraft. Pure forces are always deadly for humans, and Theseus tempers and commingles them as great leaders should. While it is easy to see how the traits of Venus might temper the choler of a devotee of Mars, Theseus also provides an example of how the traits of Mars might restrain the infatuation of a devotee of Venus. He has managed to integrate his private love for Hippolyta into a public role with public responsibilities. This may be the reason that he requires Palamon and Arcite to assemble an army of 100 men, rather than allowing them to settle the dispute privately. They are, after all, princes, and therefore in training for the most public of roles. Admittedly in the prime of youth and in the thick of jealous love, neither Palamon nor Arcite is as successful as their sovereign in the achievement of concordia discors. Love and war are combined with these royal cousins to ill ends; once great warriors and friends in the days of Thebes, now enemies over their love for Emily. In a striking contrast to Theseus’s public decorum, when Palamon and Arcite fight as private persons Dryden compares them to boars with “frothy jaws” (II.204–5), and they face one another with “dumb surliness” (II.192). This unsuccessful combination of Mars and Venus manifests itself again when Palamon blames their discord entirely on Arcite, but Palamon also swore fidelity to his cousin, and both have become the figure in Mars’s temple, “far the blackest there, the traitor friend”;56 a sorry portrait of friendship sundered, reinforced further if they represent two habits of mind in England. Symbolic deities are common and often simpler in masques, but Dryden’s deities remain elusive regarding any allegorical intentions. There are two methods for approaching the presentation of the gods in The Secular Masque: the first is to assume that the progression of time is a

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linear one and that each age represents one monarch, or one period of the century. The second is to interpret “Changes” in line 25 as “exchanges” or alternations, which would be neither cyclical nor linear but a balance of extremes. However, Chronos’s role in the masque is distinct from the roles of Diana, Venus, and Mars. As Time, he is a medium by which the other monarchical personalities may be judged, which makes it difficult for him to represent William, as he might in a strictly sequential reading of the deities as monarchs. Since Chronos (commonly spelled Cronos) is both the ruler of the golden age as well as a dark figure associated with crime and sickness, he provides a link to both the “Bad Times” to which Momus refers and to the age of Diana which, though not the golden age, still is the first and most felicitous age of the masque. This would support a cyclical view of time.57 The primary articles regarding The Secular Masque date to 1962 (Alan Roper) and 2000 (Lisa Zunshine). Both essays demonstrate Dryden’s attention to time and history.58 Roper acknowledges the theory that Scott first proposed, that the gods were sequential representations of the monarchs, yet suggests that each of the Stuarts also could be said to possess the attributes of Venus, Mars, or Diana. He focuses on Dryden’s craft in many of the details in the masque, including his parallels to Hesiod’s five ages in Works and Days and his precision with hunting terms like “in view” and “course” (where Roper examines Bruce Dearing’s note about the same).59 Dryden’s work is satirical in direct contrast to Horace’s tradition of Carmen Saeculare and to Matthew Prior’s panegyric of the same name, which celebrates William and passes over the previous Stuarts. Roper is the first to suggest that cyclical time may begin “a New” or “anew—to go through the whole foolish, frivolous process again,” but that regardless the golden age eventually would devolve to iron.60 Zunshine’s article contests the general understanding that The Secular Masque parallels gods and goddesses with Stuart monarchs, and it argues instead that Dryden capitalizes on the formulaic expectations of millennial writing and the imagery of the Platonic year in order to disguise his hopes for a new age and James II’s return. She therefore disagrees with the possibility that the poet’s voice resonates at times with Momus or with Chronos (she quotes James Winn and Douglas Canfield as examples of this line of thought).61 Zunshine views the multiplicity in the masque, the refusal to create an explicit allegory, and the competing sequences of time, which she categorizes as “the change-and-goal linear one and the anti-teleological circular one,” as evidence of subversion and disguise. My own reading also takes an extended interest in varying patterns of time, yet the associations of the deities with English monarchy are essential in the pairing of the masque with Palamon and Arcite as meditations on concordia discors. Chronos and Diana as age and youth demonstrate another layer of these historical reworkings. In many ways, I also agree with Paul Hammond’s assessment of Palamon and Arcite when he writes:

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“Translation, for Dryden, was reciprocal, a mutual rendering of past and present, the weaving of a text which looked both ways” (142).62 When conceiving of Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque as two texts that look “both ways” and also at each other, it is useful to think of Momus’s trivial and dismissive tone as the contrast to Theseus’s more reflective one, adding another layer of the concordia discors discussed thus far. Works concurs that the alternation, linear and cyclical approaches coexist within the masque. This seems appropriate in light of the similarities that historians find across all of the Stuart reigns: all were confronted with decisions about war and plagued with debt; all were accused of tyranny; all suffered assassination attempts, all were able to recover lost royal prerogatives as a result of those attempts (excluding Charles I); and religion caused nearly insurmountable tensions for all of the Stuart monarchs, including William and Mary. Despite the intensity of the arguments and efforts on either “side” at any point in time, the cycles continued even after being interrupted by something as devastating as the Civil War: “The Fools are only thinner, / With all our Cost and Care; / But neither side a winner, / For Things are as they were” (67–70). Cycles from this perspective are not of the millennial sort articulated in praise of the duchess. As a play designed to reflect the court and its kings and queens, it is plausible that one facet of the masque could be, as Scott first proposed, a sequential reflection through the age: Diana comes first to represent Elizabeth I and James I, Venus (Charles II) repairs what Mars (Charles I) has destroyed (75), and James II, if Mars-like in other respects, at least supported Dryden’s art in the spirit of Venus, and James’s habit of extramarital affairs coincides with that of his predecessor as well.63 This reading leads us to the end of the age of the legitimate Stuarts, but not the end of the century. It doesn’t take into account William III nor Mary II, and it belies all of James II’s Mars-like attributes. It also misrepresents the complicated nature of Charles I, who leveraged his patronage of the arts in order to promulgate an image of himself as the heroic prince and godly warrior, and whose beautification of the church was central to the conflicts from which the civil war would erupt, reminding us of the violent combination of Venus and Mars as depicted in Mars’s temple.64 These complexities force the deities to represent more than one monarch. While there are similarities between Diana and Astraea in Palamon and Arcite and the shared images of Diana in the two works reflect one another in many ways, Diana is more enigmatic in The Secular Masque.65 Hers is the “Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time” (40), casting a different light on the concept of innocence. “Thy Chase had a Beast in View” is one of Momus’s condemnations, yet Theseus’s hunt in Palamon and Arcite is portrayed as chaste (i.e., moderate and disciplined) and

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regal. Emily also prays for a chaste life: “And only make the Beasts of Chace my Prey!” (III.247). To say “a beast rather than a man” puts hunting in an exemplary light. To say “only a beast after all” denigrates it. This back and forth between the two works reinforces Bruce Dearing’s reminder that the word “beast” was a neutral term in 1700, and furthers my own assertion that Dryden exploits the potential for double readings.66 If The Secular Masque represents ages of England, then a peaceful Diana would come before the Civil War, as did Elizabeth I and James I. Yet if the masque also is cyclical, then William III is Diana with a difference. He was a monarch passionately devoted to hunting, and he would evoke images of discipline rather than the decadence of “Laughing” and “Quaffing” times. A William-like Diana also would anticipate war, the subsequent god in the masque. William, without a doubt, exemplifies the attributes that Mars represents. Cyclical beginnings reinforce Janus’s role who traditionally remembers as well as anticipates, who is the gatekeeper for both the old and new saecula, and who in Dryden’s masque opens the curtains as the controller of beginnings (and who is the namesake for the month of January). Janus continues to connect The Secular Masque to Palamon and Arcite by way of iconology when Theseus commissions gates, built as entrances to the battleground and dedicated to the three gods (ianua means “gate(s)” in Latin). Chaucer’s version possesses the gates, but only in Dryden do Mars’s jangle in answer to Arcite’s prayers: “The bolted Gates flew open at the blast, / The Storm rush’d in; and Arcite stood aghast” (3.361–2). At the Roman Temple of Janus the gates were open in times of war (and closed during peaceful reigns, most notably that of Numa, a figure in Fables). The icon of historical consciousness seems an appropriate god for Dryden to include in his masque that reflects on the last century and in his fable that resonates with Plantagenet legends, some of them peaceful and many of them warring.

Dryden, Diana, and Chronos In several instances, Diana opposes both Mars and Venus in Palamon and Arcite and in The Secular Masque. Her youth and innocence, in addition to her primary connection to the hunt, is consistent in Dryden’s representation of her in both works. She contrasts with Chronos, who is aged in both tales, whose wisdom is effective in at least one of the works, and whose experience is worldly if world-weary. In Palamon and Arcite, Diana represents a tenuous state of purity that bears comparison to Astraea. While Palamon and Arcite is one of the last pieces that Dryden writes, Astraea Redux (1660) begins Dryden’s career as myth-creator for the Stuarts, where he quotes Virgil’s eclogues: “Now the maiden [Astraea] returns; now Saturn reigns again.”67 When Emily’s prayer to remain a maiden is denied, Dryden uses the green to red image for the

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second of three times, tying the fable to the line in The Secular Masque “The Sprightly Green, has drunk the Tyrian Dye” (SM 56). In the case of the denied prayer, it is the flame for Diana that changes: “And as the Brands were green, so dropp’d the Dew, / Infected as it fell with Sweat of Sanguin Hue” (PA III.259–60). The first use of green to red is the moment that Theseus marches in and conquers Thebes: “And the green Grass was dy’d to sanguine Hue” (PA I.114). The second is the moment that Emily’s “Brands” change from green to “Sanguin Hue.” The last is during the great battle: “Out spins the streaming Blood, and dies the Ground” (PA III.604). Though in the case of Emily, green to red seems to be a progression from Diana to Venus rather than Diana to Mars, in all three examples there is a movement away from the innocence that Diana can represent. Like Astraea vanquished by violence and greed, Diana disappears from her temple once Mars and Venus have superseded her. “Farewell, she said, and vanish’d from the Place” (PA III.281). After this, Diana does not reappear in the fable. Furthermore, Arcite and Palamon, though they vacillate in extremes between Mars and Venus, never display the attributes of Diana. She doesn’t appear in the debate between the gods, and she is absent on the subsequent battlefield. Her departure is permanent, despite the happy ending.68 Dryden’s perspective would have shifted between 1660 and 1699, and Diana’s disappearance may symbolize such a change. At the time of the Restoration, Dryden had hoped Charles II would become a king like Theseus, when really he was more like Palamon, a prince who grew into a hero but who could not summon Astraea. Dryden no longer expects Astraea as he did in 1660. Certainly Palamon and Arcite does not. The best that can be hoped for is the kind of worldly wisdom of hearing, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “The still, sad music of humanity.”69 Janus, Chronos, and Momus of The Secular Masque may represent Dryden’s own perspectives regarding the follies of Zeus’s children: that of remembering and anticipating (Janus), enduring (Chronos), and satirizing (Momus). Chronos orchestrates the performance, aligning him with Janus and Momus as an observer, like Dryden himself. Yet Chronos is unique in that Momus and Janus also observe, direct, and judge him, and he is an actor who is inextricable from the pageant. Likewise, Dryden is inseparable from the Stuarts, for whom and about whom he wrote.70 If the Stuarts are personified in the masque, it makes sense that there would be parallels to their poet. While Chronos of The Secular Masque has been compared to William III, Dryden’s depiction of Cronos (also called Saturn) in Palamon and Arcite is a likelier critique of William as an unsavory leader for England. In The Secular Masque, Chronos is tired and ready to give up the load of humankind. It is his sequential place as the final god who speaks, not his symbolism as time, and not his personification as beleaguered, that casts

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him with the William we expect Dryden to hate, though historians have pointed to these very characteristics in William after years of fighting with Parliament and most especially after the death of Mary. The Cronos of Palamon and Arcite is another matter. Once Palamon prays to Venus and Arcite to Mars, the two gods pursue their cases: “Jove was for Venus; but he fear’d his Wife” (379). He leaves it to Cronos to settle the dispute. Cronos rises from his “Leaden Throne” as arbiter. He’s no hero, nor does he cast himself as such: Wide is my Course, nor turn I to my Place Till length of Time, and move with tardy Pace. Man feels me, when I press th’Etherial Plains, My Hand is heavy, and the Wound remains. Mine is the Shipwreck, in a Watry Sign; And in an Earthy, the dark Dungeon mine. Cold shivering Agues, melancholy Care, And bitter blasting Winds, and poison’d Air, Are mine, and willful Death, resulting from Despair. The throttling Quinsey ‘tis my Star appoints, And Rheumatisms I send to rack the Joints: When Churls rebel against their Native Prince, I arm their Hands, and furnish the Pretence; And housing in the Lion’s hateful Sign, Bought Senates, and deserting Troops are mine. Mine is the privy Pois’ning, I command Unkindly Seasons, and ungrateful Land. By me Kings Palaces are push’d to Ground, And Miners, crush’d beneath their Mines are found. ‘Twas I slew Samson, when the Pillar’d Hall Fell down, and crush’d the Many with the Fall. My Looking is the Sire of Pestilence, That sweeps at once the People and the Prince. (III.397–419)71 This is a description worthy of the leader of leaden times, and Dryden expands the extent to which Cronos curses man with the agues of age (a nod to Chronos of The Secular Masque, perhaps). Most pertinent to William is Cronos’s role in overturning a “Native Prince,” one of Dryden’s additions. However, these lines also could refer to the Civil War and the chaos of the overflowing river that Denham puts forth in his final version of Cooper’s Hill. Palaces and other royal property, such as Charles I’s collection of art, certainly were “push’d to Ground,” and Windsor and the Banqueting House especially fell into disrepair. Cronos, however, is multifaceted in this tale, and in the next line he becomes the soothing grandfather who placates the goddess of Love and the god of War:

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Now weep no more, but trust thy Grandsire’s Art; Mars shall be pleas’d, and thou perform thy Part. ‘Tis ill, though diff’rent your Complexions are, The Family of Heav’n for Men should war. Th’ Expedient pleas’d, where neither lost his Right: Mars had the Day, and Venus had the Night. The Management they left to Cronos care; Now turn we to th’ Effect, and sing the War. (III.420–7)72 He outlasts Diana who already has vanished and whose innocence seems to have left her powerless over Venus and Mars. His age is in direct contrast to Diana’s innocence and youth, and his experience makes him more powerful and more skilled than either Mars or Venus in the “management” of men and gods. Dryden describes him thus: Though sparing of his Grace, to Mischief bent, He seldom does a Good with good Intent. Wayward, but wise; by long Experience taught To please both Parties, for ill Ends, he sought: For this Advantage Age from Youth has won, As not to be outridden, though outrun. (PA III.383–8)73 He shrewdly brings peace to the war among the gods, and his machinations secure the happy ending in Palamon and Arcite. If this is a critique of William, then perhaps Dryden grudgingly recognizes the value in a ruler who, in 1700, has finally brought stability to England. Yet once again, this passage merely suggests similarities with the current issues. William III, though aged with illnesses and experienced since boyhood with managing and even controlling self-interested and powerful parties, was not an old king. He was 39 at the time of the Revolution of 1688, and 50 when Palamon and Arcite was published: he was nearly 20 years younger than Dryden. In fact, Dryden may embody his own version of Cronos: “For this Advantage Age from Youth has won, / As not to be outridden, though outrun.” Art, “not to be outridden,” versus Action, “though outrun,” may refer to the experience/art of Dryden and the youth/action of others in this enigmatic line. By contrast, there is something about Chronos in The Secular Masque that compels the reader’s sympathy: Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my freight, And leave the world behind. I could not bear another year The load of humankind. (SM 7–12)

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Though he is the metaphorical representation of time, Chronos strikes the most poignant and therefore the most human chords in the masque. His situation, as aged and as missing the age of Venus, is part of what makes his voice sound like a reflection of the old poet. The Secular Masque, however, is not an image of everyman and his siblings, and the characters are the royal family of gods and goddesses. Dryden is accustomed to greatness in subject matter and often felt that his own fate and even his personality were intertwined with those for whom he wrote.74 Like the monarchs he represented, Dryden’s private actions were thrust into the public light, his conversion being only one such palpable example.75 If Dryden as Momus is judging the follies of some of the Stuart sons and daughters, he may be judging the different phases of his own career as well. Astraea Redux represents Dryden’s youthful, exuberant hopes at the Restoration. While satire admittedly is a type of warfare, for most of Dryden’s life he abhorred the real wars and was opposed to those of William. Perhaps “Better the world were fast asleep, / than kept awake by thee” (65–6) is a judgment on his own complicity in the second and third Dutch wars, and his celebration of them in Annus Mirabilis and Amboyna. James Winn has speculated that the Age of Venus in The Secular Masque reflects Dryden’s success in the theatre during the years of Charles II’s court. If this places her a bit late in the sequence as the last of the gods to speak, we might remember that Dryden translated Virgil’s Pastorals in his “great Clymacterique,” as he termed it, and hoped his experience, while at odds with the subject matter, would allow him to have “wrong’d [Virgil] less.”76 Like Chronos, Dryden is nothing if not weary in 1699. Likewise, all of the monarchs, taken as one, may have tried and exemplified the enthusiasms and obsessions represented by these deities, as perhaps so did Dryden, but serializing them is more difficult than first appears. Dryden’s cycle also bears some resemblance to Livy or Machiavelli: 1) youthful vigor and innocence; 2) martial valor or world-beating in one form or another; 3) pleasure-seeking, perhaps even decadence; concluding with 4) decline; and finally, a new beginning. If The Secular Masque is about both kings and poets, a comparison of the poet and his final king in the review of the century seems inevitable. Dryden identified personally with Charles II—as a father, as a persecuted persona, as a lover of an actress, as a lover of plays and playwriting— and he attempted in good faith to identify, perhaps unsuccessfully, with James II as well.77 There also were parallels between Dryden and William III: they each had only one mistress yet afterwards were faithful husbands (though one was a faithful widow); they both seem to have had deep and lasting companionship with their wives, and for both this seems to have happened after a phase when they were not close at all.78 The health of both men suffered in the 1690s because of the same ailments of gout and debilitating pains in their legs. Neither was viewed as lively or witty company in person (though Dryden obviously is the wittier writer

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of the two); neither was comfortable at court. That Dryden identified so intensely with Charles II provokes the possibility that he at least examined the ways in which he was not like his Dutch monarch. However, both of these suppositions about Dryden, that he may have seen himself reflected in the follies of the deities of the masque and that he may have recognized similarities between himself and the monarch he could only oppose, are true in quite general terms. That certain passages regarding Cronos in Palamon and Arcite and Chronos in The Secular Masque allude to William III yet also resemble Dryden is evidence that Dryden is working with many issues at once, that poetry and kingship are among them, and that the overlap of images and ideas are capacious and complex rather than rigid or restricted—Dryden’s versions are the opposite of the partisan dogma of the contemporary histories and of the novels that would soon follow.79 Yet the absence of dogmatism isn’t the absence of opinion: the young Dryden served and celebrated Stuart kings, but the old Dryden is in a position to judge them.

Theseus and Momus The difference in tone between the two pieces is worth considering, and the figures of Theseus and Momus seem to control the general tenor of each. Theseus is earnest and wise; Momus, derisive and satirical. A combination of the two produces something closer to Dryden’s truth than either could accomplish alone, and they reflect the tension that Dryden experienced at the end of his life while England navigated the bumpy terrain of a usurpation that established constitutional monarchy over a belief in divine right and that immersed England in expensive wars on the continent requiring the sacrifice of thousands of soldiers, but that nevertheless steered England toward the domestic stability that Dryden valued. Chronos is a good point of departure for the expression of this tension. Momus takes one look at the crimes of the world that Chronos’s load represents, and says “’Tis better to Laugh than to Cry” (SM 20). While Theseus of Palamon and Arcite also talks of fatigue and death, he does so in the context of a contentedness and a belief that all things have their place and purpose, a very different philosophy from that of Momus. If Dryden’s last works move both sequentially and cyclically, and The Secular Masque reads as a coda to Fables while Palamon and Arcite, the opening narrative, also could be read “anew” after finishing The Secular Masque, then Theseus’s reply to Momus’s quip could be the following: “What then remains, but after past annoy, / To take the good vicissitude of joy? / To thank the gracious gods for what they give, / Possess our souls, and while we live, to live?” (PA III.1111–14). Dryden may intend the truth to reside not in the tone of one work or the other but rather in the combination of both, “As jarring notes in harmony conclude” (PA III.1118).

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If Theseus presents a reflective resignation toward change in his final speech, he also represents Dryden’s earlier millennial perspective toward the restoration of the Stuarts. Yet if Astraea disappears, and if Momus dismisses the Stuarts, Dryden’s purpose as their poet becomes tenuous: Theseus himself, who shou’d have cheer’d the Grief Of others, wanted now the same Relief. Old Aegeus only could revive his Son, Who various Changes of the World had known; And strange Vicissitudes of Humane Fate. (875–9) Both Theseus and Old Aegeus sound a bit like Dryden. When Aegeus counsels his son Theseus, he may also offer serenity to a poet concerned with legacy: Good after Ill, and, after Pain, Delight; Alternate, like the Scenes of Day and Night. Since ev’ry Man who lives, is born to die, And none can boast sincere Felicity. With equal Mind, what happens, let us bear, Nor joy nor grieve too much for Things beyond our Care. Like Pilgrims, to th’appointed Place we tend; The World’s an Inn, and Death the Journeys End. Ev’n Kings but play; and when their Part is done, Some other, worse or better, mount the Throne. With Words like these the Crowd was satisfi ’d, And so they would have been, had Theseus dy’d. (III.881–92) One reading of this passage is that Dryden recognized that he had put too much hope in the return of a legitimate king, and that he must learn not to react too strongly to usurpation by an illegitimate one. Monarchs will “alternate” between Arcite or Palamon like “day and night,” the crowd will cheer for whoever is on the throne, and still there will be “good after ill” and delight after pain. An artist, a subject, and even a king has his part to play, but remains a part of the whole and is both great and inconsequential. Aegeus’s speech leans against a more satirical version of the same sentiments via Jacques’s stages of man in As You Like It, similar in tone to the urbanity of The Secular Masque, but this is not the version Dryden chooses for Theseus’s counselor. Dryden considers carefully the role of the artist in Palamon and Arcite and explores the tension between art and action, as he had throughout his career.80 Palamon and Arcite assumes the grandness of an epic, with valiant warriors fighting for both knights, yet they are battling on a field

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that has been erected as a glorious theater, commissioned by Theseus. Dryden’s combination of heroism with romance resonates with contemporary depictions of Edward III, whose chroniclers firmly established his reputation as chivalrous knight and warrior king and confirmed his lavish expenses for celebrating St. George’s Day with feasts and tournaments. Though Edward III was known for his statesmanship, this is only steps away from statecraft, and Edward knew how to capitalize on a moment such as the victories of Crécy and Calais, out of which he created the ongoing memorials of tournaments and the Order of the Garter.81 Dryden incorporates both concepts in the fable: after the epic-like passages that describe the beauty of the props for the battle (the temples and gates for Mars, Venus, and Diana, with the battlefield perfectly raised so that the spectators will have good seats), Dryden concludes: Theseus beheld the Fanes of ev’ry God, And thought his mighty Cost was well bestow’d: So Princes now their Poets should regard; But few can write, and fewer can reward. The Theater thus rais’d, the Lists enclos’d, And all with vast Magnificence dispos’d, We leave the Monarch pleas’d, and haste to bring The Knights to combate, and their Arms to sing. (II.659–66) Theseus has created a ritual in which hundreds of men will battle to decide the fates of three: Emily, Arcite, and Palamon. Though William III is satirized for his lack of regard for poets, the description of the battle that ensues demonstrates the chasm that can exist between romance and reality: They look anew: The beauteous Form of Fight Is chang’d, and War appears a grizly Sight. Two Troops in fair Array one Moment show’d, The next, a Field with fallen Bodies strow’d: —Hauberks and Helms are hew’d with many a Wound; Out spins the streaming Blood, and dies the Ground. (III.593–6; 603–4) Art’s “vast magnificence” can mask the destruction that Dryden exposes in these passages. Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil presents another moment where Dryden pursues the paradox of art as truth and art designed as truth. Aeneas’s reaction to the mural in Dido’s palace

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demonstrates vitality: “What first Aeneas in this place beheld, / Reviv’d his Courage, and his Fear expel’d.”82 He weeps, and calls out to Priam, as if the man were present, not the painting: “Devouring what he saw so well design’d; / And with an empty Picture fed his Mind” (I.651–2). The mural “revives” Aeneas, yet it seems unlikely that Dryden would add the word “empty” to his translation if he had written it at the time of Astraea Redux.

Dryden as National Poet and Historian Dryden’s artistry seems intent on shaping in his readers an awareness of history’s imperfections even as it draws on traditions such as Edward III and concordia discors to promote unity and peace. His version of Nestor in The Twelfth Book of Ovid his Metamorphoses is one of a narrator who is aware of his own involvement in the history he will assess, and he may indicate the role Dryden intends to play in his last work of art. Outside the walls of Troy, Nestor tells stories to the Greek warriors. He connects the histories of Caeneus and Cygnus to Achilles’s feats that day in battle, foreshadows Achilles’s death, creates a palimpsest with the battles between the Lapiths / Centaurs and the Greeks / Trojans, and he carefully omits Hercules, who was at the heart of the war against the centaurs. Tlepolemus, Hercules’s son, confronts Nestor, and Nestor responds: The Pylian Prince Sigh’d ere he spoke; then made this proud Defense: My former Woes, in long Oblivion drown’d, I would have lost; but you renew the Wound: Better to pass him o’er, than to relate The Cause I have your mighty Sire to hate. (Ovid XII, 713–18) He recounts Hercules’s cruelty toward Nestor’s family and brothers (whom Hercules murdered) and then concludes his response to Tlepolemus: Now, brave Commander of the Rhodian Seas, What Praise is due from me to Hercules? Silence is all the Vengeance I decree For my slain Brothers; but ‘tis Peace with thee. Thus with a flowing Tongue old Nestor spoke. (Ovid XII, 757–61) Dryden had used images of Hercules before for James II in both Threnodia Augustalis and Britannia Rediviva, yet William’s propagandists appropriated Hercules for James’s usurper, thereby reintroducing the

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concept of force as the ultimate justification for William’s kingship (as it was for Cromwell) but simultaneously complicating it since William leveraged Hercules in order to move away from the anti-Catholic rhetoric of William as Protestant-deliverer; Dryden likely noticed this shift, and it adds an element of persuasion to the king’s portrait.83 Yet as usurper, William is like Hercules, who destroyed Nestor’s family. He has destroyed a part of England’s history, tradition, and the very line of kings that Dryden held dear.84 Dryden’s line “Better to pass him o’er” recalls a stanza in Matthew Prior’s Carmen Saeculare: JANUS, mighty Deity, Be kind; . . . Finding some of STUART’S Race Unhappy, pass Their Annals by, No harsh Reflection let Remembrance raise: Forbear to mention, what Thou canst not praise. (101–2;104–7) Roper points out that Dryden’s masque fills in what Prior’s passes over (a review of the Stuarts), and Dryden’s Nestor passes over the hero that may parallel Prior’s. Prior later requests: “Janus, be to William just, / To future History his Actions trust, / Bid her with peculiar Care, / Trace every Toil, and mention ev’ry war.” Prior makes clear that heroes need praise, and Dryden’s vengeance on William, like Nestor’s on Hercules, is silence rather than satire. Likewise, Dryden was censured for silence on the occasion of Mary II’s death, that silence becoming all the more conspicuous among the 50–60 eulogies in her honor.85 In the fable, Nestor concedes that others had reason to admire Hercules, and he extends this concession across four lines of poetry: His Fame has fill’d the World, and reach’d the Sky; (Which, Oh, I wish with Truth, I cou’d deny!) We praise not Hector; though his Name, we know Is great in Arms; ‘tis hard to praise a Foe. (Ovid XII, 719–22) Through Nestor, Dryden makes a similar concession regarding William III, a monarch he could only oppose. Achilles, Dryden tells us, “great in Homer, still . . . lives, / And equal to himself, himself survives” (818–19). Hercules, thanks to Nestor, all but disappears, but the cycles of violence and revenge also end. Forgetting, rather than reviving nostalgia or stoking resentment, becomes a willful act that moves the country forward. Yet Nestor’s peace offering to Tlepolemus begs the question: to whom is Dryden offering the laurel? William III doted on Anne’s son, who

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outlived Dryden, and Prince William provided hopes for a peaceful succession. Yet peace with a frail boy wouldn’t invoke the pain that Nestor expresses. Perhaps Prior’s masque offers a clue: it includes comparisons of William to Theseus, to Hercules, to comets and meteors as he traces history from Rome to the current monarch of England, and as such it provides precisely the sort of Protestant providential history that Abigail Williams says Dryden opposes.86 Tlepolemus wants a version of history that sings praises of Hercules, as Prior and others had requested of Dryden for William. Dryden declines and offers them something he believes is better. Through his imitation of Ovid XII, Dryden introduces the idea that every action has its consequence. In Ovid XII, there is a neutrality in the sequence of events leading to Achilles’s death, where Nestor’s foreshadowing indicates that Achilles’s heroic actions are the seeds of his own demise, just as the love of Peleus and Thetis creates the warring Achilles. As a counterpoint, Hercules’s intentional cruelty against Nestor’s innocent family results in a loss of glory, equivalent in many ways to a loss of immortality when Nestor omits him entirely from the battle scene. The Christian and classical ideas of consequence collide. This collision is important if it is meant to have implications for William III: he either is an agent responsible for his actions (as in the Christian tradition), or he merely plays his part in the unfolding of history (as in the classical tradition). Dryden recognizes these incompatible yet coexistent interpretations of Hercules and Achilles in Fables, and in Amphitryon (1690) Dryden’s Hercules symbolizes the classical rather than the Christian attitude. Hercules is part of Jupiter’s long view of history and simultaneously the result of complete upheaval in the marriage of Amphitryon and his wife Alcmena. In Amphitryon, Hercules does not initiate the upheaval; it is Jupiter who controls the unfolding of events and usurps Amphitryon’s place as husband. This distinguishes him from the Hercules whose actions cause Nestor’s resentment in Ovid XII. Nestor brings together the past, present, and future for his audience, and his history is compelling. Dryden seems to be working through versions of histories in his imitations, and the work of several critics lends context to such an experimentation. Dryden’s Fables may embody the change Hunter notes in attitudes toward history after the Civil War in England: “History was alive, it told you about difference, it told you who you were by telling you where you had been, and it was becoming popular to read and popular to write.”87 Palamon’s frustration, that of being in love with Emily though imprisoned, and Arcite’s predicament when he is set free but forced out of the very country where Emily lives; and most of all Emily’s fluctuating fortunes when she first prays to Diana, next is reconciled to marriage, then grieves Arcite’s death and finally weds Palamon—all epitomize what Hammond believes is the primary attraction of the poem for Dryden, and perhaps it is the personal and

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contemporary element that draws in his readers as well: “the problem of man living in a world beyond his control, where prayers to the gods may be answered in uncertain, or unexpected, or unwelcome ways, and where the gods themselves quarrel over who is to rule.”88 Theseus, in contrast to Palamon, provides “perspective narratives in which some larger philosophical or ideological sense was used to comprehend details and events and rescue them from fragmentation and randomness,” one of the aspects of novels that Hunter says had begun to attract readers.89 Noelle Gallagher maintains that there was a narrow “divide between the topical and the historical” and that readers were interested in “recent occurrences as well as past ages, living figures as well as heroes long-deceased.”90 Hunter likewise demonstrates that Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, published after Dryden had died, propelled forward a new sort of history with “insistent analysis that made a continuous narrative of past and present, . . . his willingness to mix personal narration with cultural analysis meant that historiography became at once more complex and more immediate.”91 Hume continued to move forward this “developing modern sense of history.”92 Dryden, meanwhile, also combines large themes with personal reflections, but unlike Clarendon’s single-minded point of view he includes multiple perspectives of characters who feel the personal burden of historical change, creating an even-handed tone that is at once personal and detached. The self-consciousness, the vicarious perspective-taking, and the young protagonists in the apparently retrospective Palamon and Arcite all point forward, toward a phase where “narrative and fiction had begun to define—had begun to be—the modes of the future. Interiority and scope had plainly become necessary to their effectiveness.”93 The masque, by contrast, places distance between the audience, Chronos’s burdens, and the other gods’s follies by way of dismissive satire and tightly spun wit; one could hardly go to war over loyalty to one of these gods or another. Dryden is tapping into what soon will become a fascination for readers with personal and national histories and with an intertwining of the two. Through Fables, Dryden assumes a voice like Nestor’s—one that is wise and authoritative as he illuminates the historical relevance of current events for his audience, but one that also is self-conscious as he recognizes his own participation in the complex and imperfect world that surrounds him. Like Nestor, he pulls multiple and varying voices together, and his carefully orchestrated Fables creates a lasting monument that charts England’s historical and emotional changes, making sense of it all with concordia discors and alternating extremes.

Notes 1. PA III. 1118. 2. Works, vol. 16, ed. Vinton A. Dearing (1996), 419.

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3. See Malcolm Bull, The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1968); and Fiona Donovan, Rubens in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) for multiple examples of royal appropriation of these gods from 1300 to 1700, both in England and on the continent. 4. See Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959). See also Brendan O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), especially 132–3n, 160–1n, and 165–76 for an explication of Denham’s hypotheses on the patterns of English history, as expressed in the “A” and “B” versions of Cooper’s Hill. 5. O Hehir makes these connections on 167–9, and links this alternation theory in Renaissance thought with a Pythagorean table of opposites. Dryden’s Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, also in Fables, certainly demonstrates alternation in the form of change. 6. Benedict, 99. 7. Levine, Battle of the Books, 6. 8. Ibid., especially 273–414. 9. See Alan Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 29; quotation in Works, vol. 18, eds. Alan Roper and Vinton Dearing (1974), 456. See Works 18 commentary on “The History of the League,” especially pages 428–34, for an examination of the uses of history by Dryden and his contemporaries, and for an analogy of three types of history to the three forms of translation that Dryden outlines in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), indicating that Dryden thinks of history and translation in similar ways. 10. Works 7: 394–401. 11. See, for example: W. Mark Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 1, chapters 11 and 12, and pages 297–8 of chapter 10; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Edward III,” ed. W.M. Ormrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Donovan, Rubens and England, 74–6, shows that Charles I commissioned a portrait by Rubens that cast him as St. George, an image synonymous with Edward III and the Order of the Garter (and Denham alludes to this same Rubens portrait in Cooper’s Hill). See also O Hehir, 119n and Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1974), 296n. See also lines 109–10 and 281–2 of the 1668 version of the poem. Edward III ordered all knights of the Order to bear the shield at all times, and Peter Heylyn’s True Historie of St. George placed portraits of Edward III and Charles I side by side in its frontispiece, with the inscriptions “Institut Edwardus” and “Adornavit Carolus” (O Hehir, 119n). Likewise, only months before the Revolution of 1688, Joshua Barnes dedicated The Historie of that most Victorious Monarch Edward III (1688) to James II: “Whose inclinations to Military Honour, and whose Princely Love and respect to Learning, do render you as gracious at home, and as terrible abroad, as King Edward was in his days.” Joshua Barnes, “The Dedication,” in The History of that most Victorious Monarch Edward III (Cambridge: John Hayes, 1688). Edward III’s own chroniclers consistently referred to him as “The Honorable” in comparison to “The Tyrant” Phillippe VI of France, and the nation was said to have mourned deeply and collectively at his death after more than five decades of a legendary and stable rule, while Richard II’s chroniclers nostalgically longed for his legendary predecessor, “the golden age of the golden king” (Ormrod, Edward III, 586). Edward III himself fashioned his reign as an incarnation of Arthur, and his intention to re-create an Arthurian round table after the

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12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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victories of Crécy and Calais eventually found expression in the Order of the Garter. His kingship was marked by a strict adherence to the code of chivalry, and he restored Windsor Castle to reinforce these connections: “Thus were the contemporary allusions to Edward’s role as the new Arthur given tangible and permanent expression.” Ormrod, “Edward III,” DNB. Sir Robert Howard, “The Dedication,” The History of the Reigns of Edward and Richard II with Reflections, and Characters of Their Main Chief Ministers and Favourites: As Also, a Comparison between Those Princes Edward and Richard the Second, with Edward the First, and Edward the Third (London: F. Colins for Thomas Fox, . . . 1690). Howard, 177–8. Ibid., 177. Ibid. Concordia discors as embodied in Theseus can be viewed as the ideal of political moderation. See Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) for a reading that suggests the use of moderation was a disguise for extreme partisanship and polemical arguments. Zwicker asserts that the semblance of civility was critical in order to maintain the fragile peace at the Restoration, and thus required subterfuge. Yet Zwicker also briefly suggests that there is a different tone in Dryden’s Fables: “Dryden was no longer defending political programs; there were, however, ideals to record and crimes that would not be forgotten” (159). “With Donne we are aware of a new individual experience suggesting general relevance; with Dryden we respond to an original reworking or re-creation of matters of established general relevance” (Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 20). See Caldwell, “John Dryden and John Denham,” 49–72, and O Hehir, 36–7. See also Howard’s poem The Dewell of the Staggs, and O Hehir’s demonstration of Howard’s indebtedness to Cooper’s Hill on 7, 13, 112n, 154n, 271n. Denham was considered one of the great English poets at the publication of Fables, and Dryden acknowledges him in the Preface. It is true that, like Dryden and Denham, Cowley and Waller also were working with translation, poetical turns, refining English poetry, an established line of poets, and moderation in politics, and both wrote panegyrics that subjected their work to parody or satire, but Denham’s poetry offers Dryden more to work with at this point in his life. Though Dryden places Denham with Waller, and ultimately Cowley, in Discourse Concerning Satire, he also devotes attention to a theory of translation that is similar to that of Denham in the Discourse and in practice by way of Fables, and Samuel Johnson points to Denham’s influence on Dryden’s translation of Virgil. It makes sense that Denham’s imagery of Venus/Mars would be useful to Dryden—they both are working with historical, political, mythical contexts—Denham in  Cooper’s Hill  and Dryden in  Fables,  particularly with  Palamon and Arcite  and the dedicatory poem to Lady Mary Somerset. Dryden’s opinions of Cowley in  Sylvae  and  Discourse Concerning Satire indicate that he no longer finds him to be a useful model in 1685 or in 1693, and Dryden doesn’t find what he is looking for in Waller’s poetry, either, according to  Discourse Concerning Satire. In Preface to the Fables he distinguishes Waller-Fairfax as one of the “Lineal Descents and Clans” and Chaucer-Spencer-Milton as another and aligns himself with the latter. Dryden also points out that he respectfully disagrees with Cowley’s low opinion of Chaucer. For further examples of the ways that Dryden’s and Cowley’s poetics and politics diverged, see Winn, Dryden and his World, 107 and 256.

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20. O Hehir, 184–5. 21. Edward III and Queen Philippa also embodied these ideals: the queen often accompanied the king on his military campaigns (along with their many young children), and she reigned in his stead when he was in France. The English knew Philippa as the queen who delivered the conquered Scottish king, David II, to her husband while he was fighting battles in France, and Denham alludes to her strength as well as beauty—see the 1668 version’s lines on Philippa: “She to thy triumph led one Captive King, And brought that son, which did the second bring. Then didst thou found that Order (whither love Or victory thy Royal thoughts did move)” (81–4) O Hehir writes that the Black Prince captured Jean le Bon, King of France. Philippa is supposed to have brought David II of Scotland to her husband and son in France. Lines 83–4 refer to the founding of the Order after Calais and Crécy, and the myth (rejected for its accuracy but nevertheless still current in 1700) that the king named the Order after Joan of Kent, whose undergarment fell during a ball honoring the two victories (O Hehir, 116 and 142–3). The line “whither love or victory” may allude to these legends. Most sources agree that the garter symbolized a combination of both victory and amity. For further biographical information, including the legend of Joan of Kent’s garter, see Works 7: 631. See also Ormrod, Edward III, 387 and “Edward III” and “Joan of Kent,” DNB. The following lines of Dryden’s poem to the Duchess also present a potential allusion to Queen Philippa: If Chaucer by the best Idea wrought, And Poets can divine each other’s Thought, The fairest Nymph before his Eyes he set; And then the fairest was Plantagenet; Who three contending Princes made her Prize, And rul’d the Rival-Nations with her Eyes; Who left Immortal Trophies of her Fame, And to the Noblest Order gave the Name. (15–18) While drawing an elegant analogy to the beautiful and mystical Joan of Kent, Dryden may simultaneously refer to Queen Philippa herself who, as noted, “hosted” two captive kings, that of Scotland and that of France, and held them for ransom. For a dissenting point of view regarding the standard reading that Dryden refers to Joan of Kent, see Cedric Reverand, “Dryden’s ‘To the Duchess of Ormond’: Identifying Her Plantagenet Predecessor,” Notes and Queries (March 2017): 57–60. 22. I cannot improve on Wasserman’s note: “Hyginus, VI, 148; Hesiod, Theogony, 937, 975; Lactanius on Statius’ Thebiad, I, 288; Lactanius, Divine Institutes, I, xvii; Eustathius on Homer’s Iliad, XXI, 416. See further, Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Arts of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 163–4. Alexander Ross (Mystagogus Poeticus) explained that Harmonia was born of Mars and Venus because ‘the two chief props of a kingdome are Mars and Venus, warre and propagation, and these two live in harmony and order.’ In his commentary on Benivieni’s sonnet (trans. By Thomas Stanley in his History of Philosophy) Pico supported the claim that beauty is ‘the union of contraries, a friendly enmity, a disagreeing concord’ and ‘cannot subsist without contrariety’ by

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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the myth of Mars and Venus: ‘she curbs and moderates him, this temperament allaies the strife betwixt these contraries. And in Astrologie, Venus is plac’d next Mars, to check his destructive influence’ (I, V)” (Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassical and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), 58n. “In his life of Pelopidas, for example, Plutarch saw in the myth the principle of civic order: the Thebans did well, he wrote, to make Harmony, the daughter of Mars and Venus, their tutelary deity, since where force and courage (Mars) are joined with gracefulness and winning behavior (Venus) a harmony ensues that combines all the elements of society in perfect consonance and order. In his treatise on Isis and Osiris he interpreted the birth of Harmonia from Venus and Mars as a symbolic expression of all the ancient dualisms, Heraclitean, Empedoclean, and Pythagorean: harmony is the balance of the creative and destructive powers. And similarly the unknown author of De Vita et Poesi Homeri found in the myth the whole Empedoclean doctrine of the cosmic order born of the clash of opposing elements. (Plutarchi Opera, ed. Dübner (Paris, 1876), v, 127)” (Quoted in Wasserman, 59n). Wasserman, 64–5. Shakespeare’s Theseus and Hippolyta emphasize the concordia discors of the hunt in terms of cosmological music and harmony. Hippolyta describes the perfect hunt thus: “Never did I hear / Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves / The skies, the fountains, every region near / Seem all one mutual cry. I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder” (4.1.114–18). O Hehir, 132. For Denham, Dryden, and Howard, excess and extremes can have the opposite effect of concordia discors. His lamentations over Henry VIII’s crimes emphasize a disordered universal state: “Is there no temperate region can be known / Betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone? / Could we not wake from that lethargic dream / But to be restless in a worse extreme?/ And for that lethargy was there no cure / But to be cast into a calenture?” (139–44). Dryden uses similar language and imagery of polarized, rather than complementary, extremes in The Secular Masque. Momus notes the difference between the ages of Diana and Mars thus: “Better the world were fast asleep, than kept awake by thee” (65). The “Changes of this Age” involve the following: “Plenty, Peace, and Pleasure fly; / The Sprightly Green / In WoodlandWalks, no more is seen; / The Sprightly Green, has drunk the Tyrian Dye” (53–6). Harmony, the daughter of Mars and Venus, and the promise offered through the mythology of Edward III, does not make an appearance in the masque of 1700. Britannia Rediviva: A Poem on the Prince, Born on the 10th of June, 1688, Works, vol. 3, eds. Earl Miner and Vinton Dearing (1969), 134–9. Dryden uses “Emilia” and “Emily” interchangeably throughout the poem. See Ormrod, Edward III, 293. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 573. See Alan Roper’s explication of the poem that “may be considered Dryden’s most successful attempt at formal verse panegyric upon a person of elevated rank,” Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 113; 113–24. In re-reading his book recently, I see that I have absorbed and am indebted to Roper’s interpretation throughout my own. See note 21. Dryden connects the poem with Palamon and Arcite from the title forward: “To Her Grace the Dutchess of ORMOND, With the following poem of Palamon and Arcite, FROM CHAUCER” (Works 7: 48n). For studies regarding

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36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

Histories and Concordia Discors the Ormond genealogy, see James Winn, “Past and Present in Dryden’s Fables” as well as Jane Olmeyer and Steven Zwicker, “John Dryden, the House of Ormond, and the Politics of Anglo-Irish Patronage,” The Historical Journal 49.3 (2006). See note 21. Dryden demonstrates with multiple details, en passant, his knowledge of the lore surrounding Edward III. Two examples follow immediately after the quoted passage, when Dryden mentions both Wycliffe and Langland: “As for the Religion of our poet, he seems to have some little Byas towards the Opinion of Wickliff, after John of Gaunt his Patron; somewhat of which appears in the Tale of Piers Plowman” (Preface to Fables, Works 7: 411–13). Ormrod writes that Edward III’s tenuous employment of Wycliffe, and John of Gaunt’s shrewd use of Wycliffe’s sermons, were used in Dryden’s time to prove that Edward III was a proto-protestant (Edward III, 592). Langland’s Piers Plowman “dips” itself into politics that favor John of Gaunt and Edward III when it disparages the Machiavellian consort of Edward III, Alice Perrers, in the shape of Lady Meed, and portrays a corrupt House of Commons (See Ormrod Edward III, 465, 571, and 587 for the historical reputation of Langland’s work). See note 21 regarding the Duchess of Ormond’s connections to Edward III. At yet another legendary banquet, Edward III sat between his two royal prisoners, thereby creating an image of three contending princes (Ormrod, Edward III, 387). The Duke of Ormond, to whom Dryden dedicates Fables, served William III, and his father and grandfather served the Stuarts before William. The duke’s ancestry, like that of William III, traces to William I of Nassau and Orange. See “James Butler,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Perhaps most pertinent is the reference in Works 7: 606–7n, that points to the duke’s ability to trace his ancestry to Edward I, to which Dryden alludes as “one of the most Ancient, most Conspicuous, and most Deserving Families in Europe” (“Dedication,” Works 7: 18). See James Winn, John Dryden and His World, 475, for the translation as a source of national pride. Joshua Barnes includes statesmen in his History of Edward III (1688), as does Dryden in his dedication of Fables. Barnes explains his own choice to do so: “Especially since not a few are still remaining, derived from those famous ancestors, whose minds may be more strongly affected with due incentives of honour, when they shall understand by what methods their Forefathers attain’d such Estates or Titles, which they now as worthily enjoy” (“The Dedication”). Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: England 1603–1714, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, 2003), 152. Ibid., 158. Ibid. In comparison, James I was seen by some, not least by himself, as a philosopher king, and known for his love of the arts (as evidenced by his support of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones), and by his own publications like The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), still referenced in Dryden’s time; for the energetic exchange of ideas not strictly abiding with his own, and for his shrewd flexibility in creatively navigating the opposing inclinations of his subjects. On the other hand, some of his contemporaries viewed his wisdom as false, his faithfulness to his wife as an illusion, and his attraction to young, beautiful men as loathsome. See Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–1714 (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 69. Additionally, there are reports of his manners that display anything but the panache that might be associated with a devotee of the finer pleasures of civilization. Works 16: 434n notes Sir Anthony Weldon’s published report of James I’s unseemly

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43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

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table manners, wine running out of his mouth, unwashed hands and all. However, many of the uncomplimentary versions of James I were written by anti-Stuarts. In fact, the DNB states that James’ reputation began to change with the writings of Whig historians in the 1690s, and that the “wisest fool in Christendom” was not a phrase that Henry IV of France coined regarding James I, but one that Anthony Weldon fabricated. See commentary in Works 16: 424n, 432n. Diana also represents Elizabeth I for many of the same reasons, including the Queen’s own intentional efforts to be classified as Diana-like during her reign. Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 101, links Rubens’s The Temple of Janus to The Peaceful Reign of James I in the Banqueting Hall through similar iconology of Peace as abundance in the two works. The Temple of Janus depicts the fury of War escaping through the open gates. For an image of Whitehall ceiling, see Charles Scribner, Rubens (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1989). “Entering the great hall from the north, the Caroline visitor—most likely a courtier or a foreign envoy—would have glimpsed the throne directly ahead where Charles I sat in state. On the ceiling above the throne, he would have seen the Peaceful Reign of James I” (Donovan, 97). Thus, Charles I presents himself as linked to his peaceful father and also to the hero St. George. Denham presents the king as an embodiment of both temperaments. Charles II and James II must have received guests under the same Peaceful Reign of James I. See Lisa Rosenthal, Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Rubens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Plate II. See also Donovan, Rubens and England, 73–4. Donovan and Rosenthal both credit Anthony Hughes for the observation that abundance and fortune become interchangeable with peace in an image of woman and child with a cornucopia. See Donovan, 73 and Rosenthal, 48. Rosenthal, 50. Quoted in Scribner, Rubens, 122. Though the frontispiece of Fables may have been under Tonson’s direction, and it seems unlikely that Dryden would have liked it, nevertheless Dryden is aligned in it with Venus. See Works 7: 49 for the frontispiece of the second edition of Fables (1713). In the illustration, Dryden is in the guise of Venus herself. He holds a book of his own fables in one hand and a quill in the other, but looks away from the book and instead toward the mirror Cupid holds for him, perhaps in imitation of the Venus-like figure in Jans Bruegel I’s Allegory of Sight and Smell (1618). In the frontispiece, the reflection from the mirror takes the shape of a light beam, directing the eye upwards, toward cherubs holding the works of Chaucer and Ovid (in the Bruegel painting, there also is a shaft of light that leads the eye toward other paintings above). Other cherubs are below, one holding the works of Boccaccio, with a book of Homer just hidden beneath him. This same cherub also is holding a theater mask. (In the Bruegel painting, there is a telescope at the feet of the Venus-like figure.) The frontispiece does not imitate Brueghel’s use of the Dutch genre of picturesque accretion—in this case, of flowers and other paintings—, leaving perhaps only the intellectual and spiritual insights for which they are a metaphor. The body of the Dryden/Venus figure is masculine, apart from the exposed breasts and female hair. Many of Rubens’s figures in the Banqueting Hall ceiling likewise are noted for androgynous qualities (See Donovan, 124–36). The frontispiece seems to indicate the confluence of a number of themes: concordia discors in male/female attributes, the pairing of Venus/Minerva with literature/

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52.

53.

54. 55.

Histories and Concordia Discors peacefulness/fertility/abundance (the translations are coupled with cherubs as the author’s children), and a familiarity with contemporary depictions of Venus, Pax, Minerva, and Mars in the visual arts, especially in artists such as Bruegel I and Rubens. See Lisa Rosenthal, “Venus’s Milk and the Temptations of Allegory in Otto Van Veen’s Allegory of Temptation,” in Early Modern Visual Allegory: Embodying Meaning, eds. Christelle Baskins and Lisa Rosenthal (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), for an examination of Allegory of Sight and Smell within the context of the traditions of Venus and Minerva. George Stepney, A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of Her Late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1695). See the note in Early English Books Online regarding Dryden’s potential assistance. See also Winn, John Dryden and his World, 477 and 623n. Roper, “Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque,’” in MLQ 23 (1962): 29–40, points to Prior’s panegyric. He notes that Ben Jonson used deities in court masques to praise his monarchs, and that the masque is “both antisecular and antimasque” (39). Dryden criticizes monarchs yet maintains the expectation of a pending golden age: “It is in the continual play against the audience’s expectations that the humor resides” (39). Roper, in “Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque,’” 32, also notes en passant this repetition and the comparison to Alma Venus. Dryden makes use of this laziness versus activity polarity, in terms of the ages of Saturn and Mars, and the age of Charles II, in Astraea Redux: Some lazy ages, lost in sleep and ease, No action leave to busy chronicles: Such, whose supine felicity but makes In story chasms, in epoches mistakes: O’er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down, Till with his silent sickle they are mown. Such is not Charles his too too active age, Which, govern’d by the wild distemper’d rage Of some black star infecting all the skies, Made him at his own cost like Adam wise. (105–14) Caldwell, “John Dryden and John Denham,” 61, points out that Dryden borrowed this image in Astraea Redux from the 1642 version of Cooper’s Hill: Then did Religion in a lazy Cell, In emptie, ayrie contemplations dwell; And like the blocke, unmoved lay: but ours, As much too active, like the Storke devours. (169–72)

56. These quotes may allude to another anecdote surrounding Edward III. After the victories of Crécy and Calais, Edward III had a wild boar sent from France to Windsor every year for feasting. See Ormrod, Edward III, 282. Dryden also included Meleager and Atalanta in Fables, where a boar hunt is at the center of a struggle for monarchical prerogative. Portraying Palamon and Arcite dishonorably as wild boars in a personal feud adds an interesting layer to the potential allusion. Additionally, Edward III carefully cultivated a close-knit family, the members of whom had sworn loyalty to him and to one another, including their united promise that Richard II would succeed his grandfather. The familial overthrow was a betrayal of those vows, just as Palamon and Arcite have betrayed their brotherly friendship to one another. See Ormrod, Edward III, 574, 599, and earlier, throughout ch. 15.

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57. Roper, “Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque,’” 40. 58. Alan Roper, “Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque’,” Modern Language Quarterly 23 (1962): 29–40; Lisa Zunshine, “The Politics of Eschatological Prophecy and Dryden’s 1700 ‘The Secular Masque’,” The Eighteenth Century 41.3, ‘Tis Good the Old Age Is Out: Eighteenth Century Millennialism’ 41.3 (Fall 2000), 185–203. 59. See also Bruce Dearing, “Some Views of a Beast,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1956): 326–9. Dearing called the masque a “sprightly divertissement with a satirical sting,” reminded us that “beast” was a neutral term in 1700, and concludes that “James [I] was a monarch too exclusively preoccupied with the hunt, and perhaps an unsporting hunter as well” (329). Roper examines the evidence and surmises that rather than unsporting, James I likely was incompetent. 60. Roper, “Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque,’” 40. 61. James Winn, John Dryden and His World, 510–12. Winn points out the fatigue Dryden feels as reflected in Chronos, the poignant notes of missing Venus (and younger days) as an old man, and the satirical quip regarding Venus’s untrue loves and promiscuity that also are reminiscent of the heady phase of the Restoration stage. See also J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 179, where Canfield refers to the last stanza of the masque as “the voice of the ex-laureate himself in the year of his death.” 62. Paul Hammond, “The Interplay of Past and Present in Dryden’s ‘Palamon and Arcite’,” The Seventeenth Century 23.1 (Spring 2008): 142–59, suggests that in Palamon and Arcite Dryden emphasizes the concepts of fortune, chance, and fate, and integrates the classical, medieval, and contemporary worlds within the same fable. He details Dryden’s precision when depicting Mars, Venus, and Diana, though he does not connect it to concordia discors or to The Secular Masque. Hammond does demonstrate Dryden’s integration of Catholic imagery in the temple of Diana, and of the Puritan terminology “Grace” through Theseus, though Dryden reshapes and reclaims the concept of “Grace” from extreme dogmatism. Theseus reflects on liberty, normally a Whiggish term that Dryden reclaims for all of his readers. This careful research reinforces the evidence that Dryden is addressing a wide and diverse audience in these last works. 63. Sir Walter Scott was the first to suggest a sequential reading of the masque, in The Works of John Dryden: Illustrated with notes, historical, critical, and explanatory, and a life of the author, ed. Sir Walter Scott, 18 vols. (London: Printed for William Miller, 1808). 64. Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 21–34, especially 26. 65. See The Secular Masque 33, 25, 27, 29–30; Palamon and Arcite II.229, II.232, II.646–7, II.649. 66. Bruce Dearing, “Some Views of a Beast,” 329. 67. Works, vol. 1, Edward Niles Hooker and H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., eds. (1956), 219n. While Dryden appropriates Astraea for the Restoration, the propaganda that surrounded Elizabeth I equated her with both Diana and Astraea. See Collinson, “Elizabeth I,” DNB. 68. James Garrison notes that Eleonora’s “Astraea-like flight signifies the advent of a new iron age” in Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 195. 69. Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 91. 70. James Winn in particular has examined closely this aspect of Dryden’s work and character in John Dryden and his World.

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71. Compare to Chaucer: “My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne, Hath more power than wot any man. Myn is the drenching in the see so wan; Myn is the prison in the derke cote; Myn is the strangling and hanging by the throte, The murmure and the cherles rebelling, The groyning, and the pryvee empoysoning: I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun Whyl I dwelle in the signe of the Leoun. Myn is the ruine of the hye halles, The falling of the toures and of the walles Upon the mynour or the carpenter. I slow Sampsoun, shaking the piler; And myne be the maladyes colde, The derke tresons, and the castes olde; My loking is the fader of pestilence. (1596–1611) 72. Chaucer’s version: Now weep namore, I shal doon diligence That Palamon, that is thyn owene knight, Shal have his lady, as thou hast him hight. Though Mars shal helpe his knight, yet nathelees Bitwixe yow ther moot be som tyme peese, Al be ye nought of o complexioun, That causeth al day swich divisioun. I am thyn aiel redy at thy wille; Weep thou namore, I wol thy lust fulfille.” (1612–1620) 73. Chaucer: And right anon swich stryf ther is bigonne, For thilke graunting, in the hevene above, Bitwixe Venus, the goddesse of love, And Mars, the sterne god armipotente, That Jupiter was bisy it to stente; Til that the pale Saturnus the colde, That knew so manye of aventures olde, Fond in his olde experience an art, That he ful sone hath plesed every part. As sooth is sayd, elde hath greet avantage; In elde is both widom and usage; Men may the olde at-renne, and noght at-rede. Saturne anon, to stinten stryfe and drede, Al be it that it is again his kynde, Of al this stryf he gan remedie fynde. (1580–1594) 74. Winn, John Dryden and His World. 75. Scott writes: Of the numerous satires, libels, songs, parodies, and pasquinades, which solemnized the downfall of Popery and of James, Dryden had not only some exclusively dedicated to his case, but engaged a portion, more or

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less, of almost every one which appeared. Scarce Father Petre, or the Papal envoy Adda, themselves, were more distinguished, by these lampoons, than the poet-laureate. (Scott, Works 1: 293) 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

Works, vol. 5, William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing, eds. (1987): 4. Winn, John Dryden and His World, 410–12. See Baxter, William III and Winn, John Dryden and His World. Hunter believes that the “culture’s pervasive taste for instruction” “affect[ed] a whole culture for more than a century,” and this attraction to didacticism may be explained by the “Flaws, limits and insecurities [that] there surely were in the hundred years of revolutions, aborted revolutions, diverted successions, and human and intellectual migrations that came in the wake of parliamentary reform, regicide, and Puritan cleansing” (241). He sees this thread of didacticism in novels as “vestiges of simplicity that embarrass modern readers” (239). Dryden seems to be a century ahead of his time. He addressed this tension in earlier poems: Astraea Redux (1660) and Threnodia Augustalis (1685) are two examples at two distinct moments for both the poet and the nation. Ormrod, Edward III, 591. See especially Ormrod’s chapter 11, “For Arthur and St. George.” Works 5: 1.632–3. See Rose, 27. James Winn addresses Dryden’s use of Hercules and Atlas in Threnodia Augustalis (John Dryden and His World, 408). James D. Garrison examines Dryden’s evolution of the use of Hercules as a metaphor in Threnodia Augustalis, Britannia Rediviva, and finally in Amphitryon (“Dryden and the Birth of Hercules,” Studies in Philology 77 [1980]: 180–201). Reverand asserts that, in The First Book of Homer’s Iliad, the interchange between Nestor and Agamemnon is similar to Dryden’s advice to James II in Britannia Rediviva, when he warned him against “boundless pow’r” (341) and “Resistless Force” (349). Reverand points out that neither James nor Agamemnon listened (Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 16–17). Reverand’s remarks regarding Hercules and Nestor in Ovid XII are provocative but very brief: “One might add that in avenging himself on a heroic figure while maintaining that he is taking no vengeance, Nestor also manages to accomplish what Dryden seems to accomplish in his incessant attacks upon William III throughout Fables”. (Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 27)

Nestor/Hercules certainly is a pivotal relationship that parallels Dryden’s relationship with William III. I would add that Dryden’s opinions in Fables about William III are complex, and they are not always “attacks.” Judith Sloman’s remarks regarding the same issue are puzzling: “When we read . . . that Nestor decided not to praise Hercules because Hercules was his personal enemy, we quickly recognize the parallel with Dryden’s treatment of William and note that Dryden is admitting a possible error in judgment” (192). Nestor doesn’t admit an error in judgment, however. 85. Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714, ed. George DeF. Lord, 7 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963–75), hereafter cited as POAS. For historical information regarding Mary’s eulogies, see POAS 5, ed. William J. Cameron (1971), 442. 86. Abigail Williams, “The Politics of Providence in Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern,” Translation and Literature 17.1 (Spring 2008): 1–20, quotation on 5. Though I disagree that Dryden’s intentions always are anti-Williamite, I

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87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Histories and Concordia Discors absolutely agree that Fables obscures simplified solutions. Interestingly, William III also made efforts to distance himself from the anti-Catholic providential Protestant version of history. See Williams’ incisive analysis: “Fables, like other post-Revolutionary works, call into question what [Dryden] sees as a spurious identification of particular providences, and the determinism of contemporary views of history which reduced experience to a simplistic parable” (5). Hunter, 340. Hammond, 146; 151. Hunter, 87. Gallagher, 2. Hunter, 340. Ibid. Ibid., 22.

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Persuasion, Force, and Alternatives to Force

Venus and Mars represent concordia discors in marriage, in politics, and in cosmic order, and marriage is a readily available metaphor for the relationship between ruler and subject.1 The clash of persuasion/consent and force, however, often specified as marriage and rape in The Wife of Bath Her Tale, Ovid XII, Cymon and Iphigenia, and Theodore and Honoria, is startling, all the more so as a female-male paradigm in opposition to concordia discors.2 Dryden’s choice to repeat it four times, in strikingly different iterations, merits consideration. Dryden engages the personal stories of both love and weddings and force and rape, and he connects them to the political concerns regarding usurpation and divine right, pertinent not only to the Revolution of 1688 but also to a larger and longer look backward at English history. These patterns are a mode of political commentary and historical address. The following pages consider the narratives of these fables that reveal few if any Jacobite sympathies: sometimes they portray the horrors of civil war, sometimes they satirize irreverently the ongoing struggle between Parliament and monarch, and sometimes they even wryly appreciate the talents of William III who successfully avoided another civil war during the Revolution of 1688. Paired with Dryden’s willingness to assess William from a detached point of view is the stark vulnerability exposed by a rape, underscored further by its concurrence with a wedding feast. This private violence impinging on public forms points to the personal and emotional trauma of historical and political upheaval. Marriage is at the heart of the political discourse that compared the state to a family. This image of stability is important: it stands in contrast to the effects on a state when the coronation day contract between king and people is sundered. But marriage also is the foundation of a network of complicated relationships, and the family itself is a political unit and the nucleus of social order. Two works categorized the generally held beliefs regarding family, patriarchal reign, and divine right: Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha and James I’s (then James VI’s) The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598). “Like James, Filmer simply codified commonly held

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views about the origins of kingship . . . analogizing them to the powers granted Adam to rule his family.”3 The “family was frequently compared to ‘a little commonwealth’ in which the structures and obligations of governance replicated in miniature those of the nation at large.”4 Filmer’s Patriarcha, written originally in the 1620s, was republished and recycled in various formats during the years 1679–1682 to support the royalist justification of divine right against proponents of exclusion, and there were counter republications of Algernon Sidney’s Discourses and James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha, promoted by those fearful of popery and tyranny.5 Because propaganda from royalists and Whigs during this time made free use of these theories, the terms were familiar to many who had never read the original treatises. “The politics of paradise provided ready material for discussing the constitution of England.”6 Similar analogies grew in number and strength. The royalist support for absolute monarchy appeared to some to be so extreme that it “suggested to republicans that monarchy was one of the (more lamentable) consequences of the Fall. The first king was not Adam, in or out of Eden, but Nimrod, who set the pattern for all subsequent monarchy by tyrannously arrogating to himself authority over neighboring family groups.”7 In contrast, royalists felt that “One result of the Fall was to introduce in subject Eve and her descendants an element of perverse obtuseness, and coercion inevitably became necessary from time to time.”8 A dichotomy emerged between two views of Adam and Eve; Adam was either the absolute ruler, with Eve embodying the wifely submissiveness appropriate for a subject to her king, or he co-ruled with his partner, Eve. This became a well-known analogy of the relationship between the king and Parliament during the Exclusion Crisis.9 In neither reading, however, was the relationship between Adam and Eve founded on rape. While family and kingship were interchangeable in political ideology throughout the Stuart century, the problem of succession and the threat of usurpation also were part of that equation. The story of James VI/I provides an apt example. It was a great relief to all of England that, upon the death of Elizabeth I with no clear successor in place, the king of Scotland’s ascension to the English throne was a peaceful one. James I confirmed this peaceful arrangement to his Parliament: “What God hath conjoined, let no man separate. I am the husband, and the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body.”10 James I reinforces the tradition of courtship, a form of persuasion, that anticipates a resolution in harmony, peace, and marriage. Since Homer’s Iliad, a wedding feast has symbolized this harmony that is both political and personal. The city that represents a state at peace in Achilles’s shield features weddings and the celebratory processions that accompany them. The wedding party moves through the marketplace past a public and orderly trial, and the combination epitomizes a productive, civil society.11 But if marriage conveyed a perfectly ordered state, rape, by

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way of stark contrast, represented what happens to the state in times of upheaval. James I may have successfully avoided the use of this metaphor, but the research of Susan Owen, Toni Bowers, and Jennifer Airey outline its prevalence during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum, the popish plot and the exclusion crisis, and again after the Revolution of 1688. Used interchangeably by opposing parties, the intentions usually were to “evince feelings of political impotence, hatred, or fear.”12 Poems on the Affairs of State offers multiple examples of shallow cleverness that use rapio (seizure, kidnapping, and seduction) as a symbol for the usurpation of James II and also for James’s lechery toward his subjects, though Dryden’s use of raptus differs in its emphasis on the violence that the witty squibs neglect.13 Diane Wolfthal demonstrates that while rape imagery in early modern visual arts “shows a broad range in tone and meaning,” rape imagery in war was rarely glamorized, was “generally sympathetic to the victim and critical of her assailant,” and “[did] not sanitize the rape, but rather [made] clear its horror.”14 This fits with the horror in Theodore and Honoria, in Cymon and Iphigenia, and in Ovid XII, and there is no doubt that a crime has occurred in The Wife of Bath Her Tale. Boadicea, a popular play by Charles Hopkins that Dryden mentions in a letter of 1699, leverages emotional power in the story of the national folk hero and historical queen who, after she was flogged and her daughters were raped, led an army against the Roman Empire whose soldiers were the perpetrators. The rape of Lucrece was another well-known example of sexual violence involving the tyrant Tarquin and causing a just rebellion. There also was the rape of the Sabine women who ultimately were caught, literally, in the midst of a civil war involving their fathers and husbands. All three stories were emotional lightning rods for contemporary politics.15 For Dryden, “rape” includes the idea of raptus, or theft, often in terms of seizure or kidnapping. Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is another contemporary use of the term.16 There are two political applications for England with regards to raptus in Fables. One is the idea of usurpation, an image that becomes complicated when, as is the case in some of the fables, the woman is complicit in a seizure that does not include sexual violence. Achitophel’s memorable advice to Absalom, “Commit a pleasing rape upon the crown,” points to this sort of complication (e.g., the voters elect Hitler as Chancellor). The other political application is the large-scale violence of war as depicted in the civil war between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, where Dryden describes the mass seizure of women at the wedding thus: “An Image of a taken Town express’d” (317). Civil war is the means by which usurpation often takes place, as was the case for Oliver Cromwell. The Revolution of 1688 provides an exception to their causal relationship (William III provided the opportunity for James II to flee rather than fight, which he did). Even so, when Dryden’s stories involve persuasion/marriage and force/rape, he

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invokes the presence of both historical events, and sometimes he offers a comparison.

The Wife of Bath Her Tale The royalist view of a political marriage, then, defended Adam (King) as absolute monarch, with Eve as Parliament, or representative of his subjects. She was not a slave, but she was not allowed to usurp his power, even if he were drunk, incompetent, or tyrannical (and it was argued that these were exceptional instances in any case).17 The republican view was that if the husband displayed any of these fatal flaws, then Eve, as mother, had all rights and even a duty to rule in her husband’s stead. This argument was based on the idea that either Eve should have as much authority as Adam over her children/subjects, since the maternal bond is stronger than the paternal one, or she should simply be in charge herself.18 What is surprising, then, about The Wife of Bath Her Tale is that Dryden assumes the voice, via translation, of the witty woman. The Wife of Bath, who likes to speak for all women, can be thought of as Eve, who often symbolizes all women and who also represented Parliament in the contemporary political debates.19 As such, Dryden’s version of The Wife of Bath Her Tale is worth a closer look. The Wife of Bath Her Tale presents the enlightenment of a degenerate knight and ends in marriage, harmony, and order. It begins with a seizure in which the woman is decidedly not complicit—unlike the thefts of Helen of Troy and of Cymon’s Iphigenia that did not include sexual violence. The rape in The Wife of Bath Her Tale is a violent action that eventually is settled by adjudication in a public court. The queen, the head of that court, enjoins the knight to learn what it is that women really want, a task that involves approaching them as a suppliant. Though the knight receives a dispensation from death, he feels punished when he is forced to marry the old woman who helped him, and the strength of this antipathy is an indication of how much he has left to learn. The real turning point comes after the wedding, when the knight submits to the wife’s persuasive argument and asks her to choose his fate for him: Sore sigh’d the Knight, who this long Sermon heard, At length considering all, his Heart he chear’d: And thus reply’d, My Lady, and my Wife, To your wise Conduct I resign my Life: Choose you for me, for well you understand The future Good and Ill, on either Hand: But if an humble Husband may request, Provide, and order all Things for the best;

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Yours be the Care to profit, and to please: And let your Subject-Servant take his Ease. Then thus in Peace, quoth she, concludes the Strife, Since I am turn’d the Husband, you the Wife: The Matrimonial Victory is mine, Which having fairly gain’d, I will resign; Forgive, if I have said, or done amiss, And seal the Bargain with a Friendly Kiss: I promis’d you but one Content to share, But now I will become both Good, and Fair. No Nuptial Quarrel shall disturb your Ease, The Business of my Life shall be to please. (509–28) The knight has learned at last to do what he did not do in the rape: he subordinates his own wishes and desires to the woman’s. He has become the submissive husband, and the wife, in winning, also submits. (The line—“Since I am turn’d the Husband, you the Wife”—is not in Chaucer.) There is an earnest tone that wins out over the worldly banter of the Wife of Bath, which nevertheless cannot be denied, especially since Dryden delights in it. The knight calls himself the wife’s “Subject-Servant” and casts himself as the wife. Dryden uses the political discourse that compares husband to king and adds contemporary relevance to the tale of Midas’s wife who cannot keep a secret, by adding to Chaucer’s version the following lines that explain why Midas must hide his big ears: For fear the People have ‘em in the Wind, Who long ago were neither Dumb nor Blind; Nor apt to think from Heav’n their Title springs, Since Jove and Mars left off begetting Kings. (161–4) In a matter of two lines, the divine right of kings has lost all gravitas, those lines being written by a poet who remained loyal to such a theory at great cost to himself. Dryden is allowing himself to have some fun by straying from ideological purity. Meanwhile, the wife delivers a lengthy diatribe on inner worth, and the knight is nearly in tears over the reality that his wife is old and ugly. She lectures him on the worthlessness of an aristocratic bloodline, and he laments that his own noble race will now degenerate with his progeny. These details wittily contort contemporary events: Mary II was widely recognized as a beauty, and cried for a day and a half after the wedding over the ugliness and age of

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her new husband.20 William III, on the other hand, was a noble snob. His own lineage was one of the purest in Europe at the time, and he had been raised to believe in its importance. “In William’s eyes Mary was the next thing to a housemaid, since her mother had been not only a commoner but one of the Princess Royal’s servants.”21 It was well known, however, that after years of marriage the two grew close and became the model of unity as husband and wife. The analogy, then, is both political (king married to Parliament) and personal (William married to Mary, though of course they also are king and queen), and the tone paradoxically is both earnest and satirical. According to the Wife of Bath, the secret to marital bliss is the revelation of what all women want: “Soveraignty.”22 The knight explains how women’s sovereignty works: “A blunt plain Truth, the Sex aspires to sway, / You to rule all; while we, like Slaves, obey” (279 and 285–6). The knight, who originally takes a young girl by force, must first submit to the authority of the court of law and then again in the private negotiation with his wife regarding who will “govern.” “Soveraignty” is an overtly political term, and Dryden is working with the idea of Adam and Eve as the original paradigm of the relationship between the monarch and his state. “Slave” was equally polemical, and connoted the abuse of patriarchy that results in tyranny. Dryden reverses the gender roles of tyrant and slave: according to the knight, the woman (Parliament) rules and the man (king) obeys. Further, he inverts Edmund Bohun’s preface to Filmer’s Patriarcha: But then supposing the Woman should happen to be the stronger of the two . . . [Tyrrell] leaves the Women at liberty to fight for the Mastery, and if they can get it, they have our Author’s opinion for the defence of this Usurpation, but not a tittle of reason to back it. (b5) The battle between the sexes, then, is used in the political rhetoric that canvassed a topic that was dear to Dryden, that of the relationship between English subjects and their kings. The Wife of Bath’s version of that battle, replete with force as well as submission, creates an insightful parallel to the political discussion, and provides an irreverent review of the power struggle between men and women as well as between king and Parliament. The Wife of Bath would have taken the side of the woman in the political debate, and Bohun’s reductive and defensive argument would have been no match for her wit. However, it would require the gullibility of Chanticleer to believe that English politics could end as happily as the union of the knight with his wife, if only the king would defer all decisions to the wisdom of his Parliament. The Wife of Bath’s conclusion adds to this satirical strand. While James I set himself up as the ideal bridegroom for his bride the state, in actuality

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the “marriage” often was tempest-tossed. The Wife of Bath, speaking in her own voice at the end, reminds us that real marriages are not the same as in romances: And their first Love continu’d to the last: One Sun-shine was their Life; no Cloud between; Nor ever was a kinder Couple seen. And so may all our Lives like their’s be led; Heav’n send the Maids young Husbands, fresh in Bed: May Widows Wed as often as they can, And ever for the better change their Man. And some devouring Plague pursue their Lives, Who will not well be govern’d by their Wives. (538–46) The final vision in The Wife of Bath Her Tale of the bride and groom in perfect harmony stands in contrast to the circumstances of real marriage as well as real politics. Part of Dryden’s decision to include The Wife of Bath Her Tale seems to be a reminder that the political allegory of husband and wife to king and Parliament has its limitations (as does romance), though neither royalist Bohun nor republican Tyrrell concedes such a point. One blind spot of the theoretical argument is that, even in Tyrrell’s summary of this ongoing debate in his Bibliotheca Politica, published as late as 1694, Eve never becomes a parallel to Mary as a counterpart to William. This is despite the multiple terms of Mary’s rule in William’s absence, the clear relationship that William and Mary have in terms of overseeing the country as co-rulers, and despite their common image of an ideal couple that embodied the perfect harmony of male and female attributes and roles. Particularly in the royalist tracts written by Filmer and Bohun, the authors with whom one might expect Dryden to agree, very little time is spent on the differences between a family and a state, two examples being the passion between husband and wife and the bond between parent and child. (In fact, Bohun denies that there is any difference at all between king/subject and father/child relationships.) Dryden explores these complications at length in Absalom and Achitophel, though the focus is exclusively on parent/child rather than on spouse/spouse. In Fables, Dryden examines both. The Fables are fuller and richer than the tracts that were so popular at the time, and cannot be compartmentalized in the way that a political allegory can make all of its characters correspond to the argument’s position. The example of deep companionship between Baucis and Philemon, for instance, also included in Fables, could never be applied to the relationship between a king and his Parliament, though the couple’s habits might be compared to the simplicity that William and Mary preferred in

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their daily lives. The Wife of Bath Her Tale includes King Arthur and the “Female Parliament” (83) collaborating harmoniously. The rapist is tried in a public court, and there is an official sentence that decrees a peaceful conclusion, as symbolized by the wedding. However, the conflict between husband and wife finally is resolved by sex, an utterly private form of harmony that would be difficult to play out in a political analogy. So, husband and wife may be reconciled, but king and Parliament remain polarized. Dryden’s fable recognizes this tension, primarily because this and the other poems have psychological interest independent of any political analogy that they also invoke. However, this tension may also suggest that Dryden finds both royalist and Whig arguments to be rigid and incomplete. Persuasion/consent, not force, is the key to reconciliation in The Wife of Bath Her Tale. The knight isn’t exactly adept at convincing others: he either uses force or he relents. It is the old woman who persuades the knight to consent, and as a result both get what they want. The ending is manifestly unrealistic, and the harmony it advertises works like the subversive moral sometimes found in the genre of fable: it undercuts the argument that all will end well precisely because it is unbelievable.23 Yet at the same time, the heart of the fable, the idea that the knight in power must learn to listen, resonates with the reader, perhaps because Dryden takes it seriously.

Cymon and Iphigenia In contrast to The Wife of Bath Her Tale stands Cymon and Iphigenia, where Cymon triumphs through the use of force, and persuasion is subordinate to this force. As the complications to the story unfold, Dryden provokes troubling questions regarding patriarchy and usurpation that apply to the Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, and even the Wars of the Roses, suggesting historical problems in England that are persistent and repetitive. The political overtones of Cymon and Iphigenia therefore are not exclusively an expression of Dryden’s disappointment over the radical disruption of the Stuart monarchy, but also an authoritative look backward at English history. The male-female representation of a king and his country again comes into play, and Cymon and Iphigenia provide another version of that relationship. Rhodes, personified as the abandoned and ruined republic, further develops and complicates the analogy, combining personal themes (Cymon’s love for Iphigenia) with public ones (Cymon’s and Lysimachus’s violent departure from Rhodes). Though we assume Cymon was persuasive in his interactions with Iphigenia and also with Lysimachus, Cymon acts decisively and forcefully in war, and he wins as a result. Love, as expressed in courtship and marriage, is all the more startling when found in a character like Cymon. Cymon and Iphigenia begins as

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a story of a primitive figure who, awakened by love, learns the arts of refinement. Ultimately, however, Cymon and Iphigenia is about the violation of a wedding feast. As readers, we first sympathize and identify with Cymon’s awakening, and we are drawn to the idea that his love for Iphigenia will move him from solitude to love, and from love to society. Love becomes social whenever there’s a wedding, indeed whenever either of the lovers is seen as part of a family. This identification renders his choices to kidnap Iphigenia, first from the ship taking her to Rhodes (where her betrothed awaits) and again from her wedding reception, all the more shocking, and it exposes love as a source of chaos rather than orderly creation (though readers of Homer will respond that this has happened before). That he joins forces with Lysimachus, the elected viceroy for Rhodes who secretly solicits Cymon’s assistance in the kidnapping, further emphasizes the political overtones of the story and deepens the realization that the devastation is both personal and societal. The image of the wedding party, strewn with bodies in the wake of Cymon’s and Lysimachus’s departure with the stolen brides, is an illustration of public order disrupted and violated by private passions. While there are numerous patriarchal (and often tyrannical) figures in Fables, Cymon and Iphigenia is a fable where a vacuum in authority has a significant impact on the story. Cymon’s father plays a markedly peripheral role in the formation of his son, and whether Cymon chooses to be a “country clown” or a well-dressed, cultivated heir is left entirely up to Cymon. It is no accident that a crucial element, conscience, is missing in his self-education. The fathers of Iphigenia and her betrothed are not central figures either, and as a result, it is Cymon who controls the plot.24 Rhodes itself further demonstrates this lack of parental presence, since Lysimachus is the elected magistrate, not the father/king. This fable is astonishing in the audacity of both Lysimachus and Cymon, and readers are meant to bridle when all ends happily for them. It is useful to place the fable next to the attitudes of some on the Continent that viewed England as a rogue nation after Charles I’s execution and Cromwell’s assumption of power. A primary reason that the conflict between king and Parliament escalated to civil war was that there was a “vacuum of power” beginning in the first six months of the Long Parliament: Charles I needed Parliament to provide supply in order to repel the Scottish rebellion, but he could not press his priorities until Parliament had initiated its grievances: “But Parliament was not an institution designed to initiate. Its conventional leaders were the king’s servants.”25 It was in this vacuum of power that men like John Pym were able to become such powerful leaders, and it was this same vacuum that caused escalation to war to occur so rapidly. As late as November 1640, no one understood the consequences of the brewing contentions: “There was as yet no inkling that the nation was on the brink of civil war or that Parliament and crown would become separate

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institutions in opposition to each other.”26 It was a surprise akin to that of the Lapiths and the Centaurs (Ovid XII) at the moment of the rape that caused a war. At the same time, there is a personal element to the portrait of Cymon who, though born into nobility, chooses to be a country clown. “Oliver’s contemporaries later liked to emphasize the contrast between the simple country gentleman, and back-bencher of 1640–42, and the uncrowned king of 1654–8.”27 Cromwell wore poorly tailored suits and gave the appearance of being rather backwards, even though he was wealthy and well-connected, and he slowly and methodically positioned himself for power and control. Many references within Cymon and Iphigenia resonate with issues that go back to the Civil War, and these echoes are due, in part, to the connection between the Civil War and the Revolution of 1688. Cromwell and William III often were compared with each other as usurpers of the crown. According to Poems on the Affairs of State, of all the tactics used by his opponents, that of comparing William III with Cromwell “was most capable of stirring prejudice against the new monarch.”28 There are numerous satires that interchange “O. P.” (Oliver the Protector) with “P. O.” (Prince of Orange).29 One of the most prominent examples of the comparison is in the Jacobite poem “On the Late Metamorphosis of an Old Picture of Oliver Cromwell’s into a New Picture of King William: The Head Changed, the Hieroglyphics Remaining” (1690).30 It is so effective because it is based on an actual portrait of Cromwell (The Embleme of Englands Distraction, 1658) that was used by Williamites to create a version of William III in 1690, in which they kept the same title and symbols (down to the very armor in which Cromwell was dressed) and changed only the face of Cromwell with that of William III: Whether the graver did by this intend Oliver’s shape with King William’s head to mend, Or grace King William’s head with Cromwell’s body, If I can guess his meaning I’m a noddy. Howe’er I pity Cromwell. Thirty year And more are past since he did disappear. Now, after all this time, ‘tis hard to be Thus executed in effigie— This is a punishment he never dreaded; What did his Highness thus to be beheaded? Perhaps the artist thinks to get a name By showing us how two may be the same. If so, he’s gained his point, for he’s a witch That suddenly can tell one which is which!31

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A crowd studies the two portraits side by side and hazards guesses as to who the two men are: “You all shoot wide, my masters,” says another. “He in the wig is neither son nor brother, But a late conqueror of different fame. Sirs, pull off all your hats, and hear his name! ‘Tis good King William. See Rome trampled down. See his victorious sword thrust through the crown. See his triumphant foot on papist’s necks. See Salus Populi Suprema Lex. See Magna Charta. Can all this agree With any man but Oliver and he?”32 In both versions of The Embleme of Englands Distraction, Cromwell and William III are presented as England’s deliverer. Propaganda that suggested a divine element to each of the usurpations tied the two periods of history together as well. However, there are obvious distinctions between the Civil War and the Revolution of 1688, just as Dryden connects but also distinguishes the violence at the two wedding feasts when he includes both Cymon and Iphigenia and Ovid XII in Fables. Cymon’s kidnapping is premeditated, and Iphigenia welcomes him. The Centaurs, by comparison, represent something more visceral, and certainly unplanned, in the rape that turns a wedding into war. This element of surprise and chaos aligns Ovid XII with the emotions and strife of the Civil War.33 There is something about Cymon’s single-minded focus, determination, and success that resembles the exploits and realpolitik of King William, but Cromwell had a similar strategic temperament.34 Cymon is dedicated to any plan that will work, and both William III’s and Cromwell’s politics and wars had similar reputations.35 Cymon does not shy from war or violence when it is necessary, but unlike the Centaurs he is in control and does not make use of violence gratuitously. For example, Cymon agrees immediately to the violent scheme at the wedding banquet in order to take back Iphigenia. Earlier, however, in his takeover of the ship, he sets free the Rhodians once they no longer stand between him and his love.36 Cymon and Iphigenia also involves naval prowess, a strength that both Holland and England shared, and relevant to William’s arrival and the Revolution. The idea of a disrupted wedding dovetails with a disrupted line of succession. These details do not create one-for-one parallels, but they do suggest links to English history and reinforce the possibility that in Fables, Dryden is interested in historical patterns. If husband and wife symbolize a king and his state, then Iphigenia’s inner turmoil may reflect on the English conscience. Dryden’s contemporaries

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worried that the Great Fire and Plague of 1666 were punishment for having executed the king. Their ancestors worried that they had brought the Wars of the Roses onto themselves as a result of switching allegiances from Richard II to Henry IV (another forceful and decisive usurper). Due in part to these same sorts of concerns in 1688, the English spent much time and attention on the legal documentation that declared James II’s overthrow an “abdication” and Mary II’s ascent legitimate. Iphigenia, if she shares a similar angst while her ship is caught in a tempest, does not make the English plight seem very heroic: Sad Iphigene to Womanish Complaints Adds pious Pray’rs, and wearies all the Saints; Ev’n, if she could, her Love she would repent, But since she cannot, dreads the Punishment: Her forfeit Faith, and Pasimond betray’d, Are ever present, and her Crime upbraid. She blames herself, nor blames her Lover less, Augments her Anger as her Fears increase; From her own Back the Burden would remove, And lays the Load on his ungovern’d Love, Which interposing durst in Heav’n’s despight Invade, and violate another’s Right: The Pow’rs incens’d awhile deferr’d his Pain, And made him Master of his Vows in vain: But soon they punish’d his presumptuous Pride; That for his daring Enterprize she dy’d, Who rather not resisted, than comply’d. (Cymon and Iphigenia, 349–65) Iphigenia’s emotions mirror in some ways the English response to consequences of history, and Cymon’s the part that William plays in it. Dryden presents an Iphigenia who would happily blame her destruction on Cymon rather than concede that she may share the burden. Cymon’s is the “ungovern’d Love, / Which interposing durst, in Heav’n’s despite, / Invade and violate another’s Right.” Cymon steals Iphigenia once, and she is retrieved and he is captured. While imprisoned, he plans and executes the second successful kidnapping. The plot creates a repetition of events that obliquely alludes to the theft of the crown from the Stuart line once, and yet again. Iphigenia’s anguish in the tempest also may parallel that of the Rhodians after the devastation of the violence at the wedding, particularly since the Rhodians are an example of a people who eschewed patriarchy in favor of another form of government: “Lysimachus, who rul’d the

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Rhodian state, / was then by choice their annual magistrate” (437–8). It is this elected ruler who betrays and abandons the nation: What should the People do, when left alone? The Governor, and Government are gone: The publick Wealth to Foreign Parts convey’d; Some Troops disbanded, and the rest unpaid. Rhodes is the Soveraign of the Sea no more; Their Ships unrigg’d, and spent their Naval Store; They neither could defend, nor can pursue, But grind their Teeth, and cast a helpless view. (615–22) On the one hand, this passage could illustrate what happens when a people awards power to a popularly elected governor: “annual magistrate” suggests a temporary state of loyalty that stands in contrast to the idea of a divinely appointed king and the generations of duty to God and country. After Charles I was executed, the nobility vacated all governmental posts as an expression of loyalty to the crown. Those posts were filled by inexperienced republicans, unlike those before them who came from families with centuries of service in those same positions of leadership. (The Duke of Ormond, as Dryden notes in the dedicatory letter addressed to him in Fables, holds the office that his father and grandfather had held before him.) Lines 615 to 622 evoke this sense of a vacuum. However, it also evokes a sense of abandonment, or abdication, the battle cry leveled at James II, though he certainly was not elected. Whether it was the people who were untrue or the patriarch, the nation loses. No longer a viable power, Rhodes now can only “grind [its] Teeth, and cast a helpless view” (622). The rape has left the island in shambles. The moral to the fable is unsettling, and it is the inverse of a Rhodes that loses everything: Cymon takes what isn’t his; Iphigenia is complicit in her own kidnapping; and the couple prospers and lives happily ever after: Jove’s Isle they seek; nor Jove denies his Coast. In safety landed on the Candian Shore, With generous Wines their Spirits they restore; There Cymon with his Rhodian Friend resides, Both Court, and Wed at once the willing Brides. A War ensues, the Cretans own their Cause, Stiff to defend their hospitable Laws: Both Parties lose by turns; and neither wins, ‘Till Peace propounded by a Truce begins. The Kindred of the Slain forgive the Deed,

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Using a fable that provokes the issues, without allegorizing the history, allows Dryden to provide two conclusions to two stories, and leaves the reader to ponder whether the current situation in England mirrors the plight of Rhodes, or the victory of Cymon and Iphigenia. Yet if each goes home and is reassimilated, we might also conclude that the final state of both nations will not be so bad, even if at the cost of political principle. The spirit of reconciliation must be prepared to ignore the principles at the heart of a war. Charles II’s Act of Oblivion, where he pardoned nearly everyone involved in the Civil War, may be an example of this spirit of reconciliation. Oliver’s sons and Richard Cromwell were unharmed, and “the constitution, and the structure of society and government, continued on its way apparently untouched by the traumatic events of the 1640s and 1650s.”37 Parliament kept many gains, but royal prerogative also was reasserted, and its powers reinforced. These compromises, part of the peace, were painful ones for both sides. Cymon and Iphigenia is the final fable of Dryden’s compilation, and its conclusion has some components that are the inverse to that of the first fable, Palamon and Arcite, which is Dryden’s version of The Knight’s Tale.38 Nothing in the conclusion of Cymon and Iphigenia is noble, where almost every action that Theseus directs in the first fable connotes nobility. Palamon and Arcite fight a sanctioned battle for Emily’s hand. Cymon kidnaps the bride, kills the groom, and causes a war between two nations afterward. Though Arcite is the winner, peace continues after his death, and there is a period of mourning before Palamon and Emily are joined in marriage. As for Cymon, many wars follow, until weariness results in peace. There is a period of exile to show respect to the dead, after which the couple lives happily ever after. That Palamon and Arcite is the first fable and Cymon and Iphigenia the last suggests a triumph of realpolitik over chivalry which could be applied to William’s reign. This happily ever after problem presents a complication with the symbolism inherent in marriage. Normally, marriage represents an element of prudence, of looking forward. Love’s passion, like that found within Cymon, is usually at odds with such prudence, and Dryden suggests as much when Cymon kidnaps Iphigenia the first time: “Who now exults but Cymon in his Mind? / Vain hopes, and empty Joys of human Kind, / Proud of the present, to the future blind!” (322–4). Yet this is Cymon’s only moment of imprudence when it comes to pursuing Iphigenia, and the fable declares that all becomes well in the end. The idea of consequence, important to The Wife of Bath Her Tale, is absent in Cymon and Iphigenia. Palamon and Arcite begins and ends with a wedding, and

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society follows a pattern regulated by public ritual and law, which are guided by Theseus and Hippolyta as king and queen. The same is true for The Wife of Bath Her Tale. These parameters of social order simply do not exist in Cymon and Iphigenia, but Cymon still wins. This may apply more accurately to Cromwell than to William, in light of Cromwell’s force—and regicide—in comparison to the negotiations of the Convention Parliament that led to the terms of William’s reign and avoided civil war. Nevertheless, like the initials “O. P.” and “P. O.” from the contemporary poems, a resemblance remains despite the differences. Despite his amplification of conflicted and raw emotions, Dryden still resists the didacticism one might expect in a narrative form moving closer to a proto-novel. Anna Battigelli argues that “Dryden’s willingness to elicit his readers’s interpretive difficulties signals his interest in creating a reading experience in which readers are forced to sense alternative opinions without the guidance of authorial judgment,” and though she writes with The Conquest of Granada and Absalom and Achitophel in mind, this sense of Dryden’s relationship with his readers applies, I believe, to Fables.39 She differs in this regard from David Gelineau, who views Dryden’s relationship with his readers in Cymon and Iphigenia as Baroque in method, where Dryden asserts authority over the interpretation.40 In light of the multiple and contradictory readings of Fables, Battigelli’s argument is more persuasive, all the more so when compared to Sharon Achinstein’s research on the widening audience that pamphleteers addressed in the 1640s: “the rhetorical effects of the civil war period had very real consequences for individuals, parties, and institutions, and these consequences may be read in the blood spilled on the battle fields and in the villages and in the thousands of pages of writing they penned with ferocity and verve.”41 This is the very blood-spilling Dryden would want to avoid during such polemical times. All the same, rape and marriage in Fables as political emblems are irrefutably emotional ones, and they point to the source of what’s troubling for Dryden about usurpation, especially when the new king is a competent, or even a great one.

Ovid XII Ovid XII differs from Cymon and Iphigenia by introducing Nestor the storyteller—and by implication Dryden the storyteller—as an element in this conflict between force and persuasion.42 After all, the tale-teller, the poet, is the ultimate persuader, and his most forceful weapon is the sentence. Cymon’s strategic violence ironically bears some resemblance to Nestor’s artistic management of passions in Ovid XII. There also are distinctions. Though Cymon may be as distanced, calculating, and careful as Nestor, he has no disinterested audience to persuade, but only the very interested Iphigenia and Lysimachus, and he need not depend upon words alone.43

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While Nestor cannot control the violence, he is able to place it within a context that reveals patterns of history. The fable’s most salient impressions are those of violence and chaos at Perithous’s wedding feast, despite the many layers of stories and generations that revolve around it. It begins elsewhere, however, with a love-lorn Aesacus, and then moves swiftly to Aesacus’s brother Paris, “author of the war, / Which, for the Spartan queen, the Grecians drew / T’avenge the rape, and Asia to subdue” (6–8). Through meandering connections typical of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the thread reaches the battle in which Achilles conquered Cygnus, and all of the stories that Nestor ties to it. The fable provides both the beginning and end to the Trojan War, as well as the end of Achilles, caused by Poseidon who revenges the death of Cygnus. Within this rich context that layers one story onto the next in Ovid XII, the violence at the Lapithean wedding feast remains most central to the tale. The past can be more palpable than the present, and this sense that the rape overtakes everything else makes it all the more plausible that Dryden intended to connect it to an historical event as devastating as the Civil War in England. A wedding at which there is a rape and a subsequent war is a description which fits both the conflict between Lapiths and Centaurs (also a civil war) as well as the epic conflict between Greece and Troy, the backdrop against which Nestor tells the story. The calculating Cymon is perhaps a William figure, but there is no such William figure in Ovid XII—unless it is the artist himself, who provides the only form of persuasion available in such a context of mindless violence. David Hopkins asserts that Dryden’s precision and distance in his artistic elocution allows “the sheer arbitrariness and inconsequentiality” of the combat to come forward.44 Dryden evokes the darkest moment for God’s angels in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, when they resort to throwing mountains. The Centaurs begin by using holy relics as weapons (341–4), but the Lapiths are the first to uproot trees, and the Centaurs follow suit. Monychus rallies his half-beast brothers in the conclusion of Nestor’s story: “Whole Mountains throw / With Woods at once, and bury [Caeneus] below” (669–70). Dryden must have intended his readers to remember Milton’s uprooted mountains: “From thir foundations loos’ning to and fro / They pluckt the seated Hills with all thir load, / Rocks, Waters, Woods, and by the shaggy tops / Uplifting bore them in thir hands.”45 His graphic depiction could be an illustration of Milton’s line “War seem’d a civil Game / To this uproar.”46 If Dryden intended for his readers to recognize his allusions and elaborations, then the violence in his translation of Ovid XII is not gratuitous but instead underscores the violence of civil wars.47 Much of the commentary on Ovid’s original has either criticized Ovid or come to believe that Ovid is satirizing heroism (and Nestor’s unnecessary glamorization of that heroism). For Dryden’s contemporary

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readers who could compare the original to the imitation, they likely appreciated Dryden’s reincarnation of the younger Seneca’s pueriles ineptiae into Ovid’s “Boyisms” that Dryden highlights in the Preface.48 They also may have recognized what Hopkins views as Dryden’s “sophistication and control .  .  . quite incompatible with neurotic or depraved blood-lust.”49 Dryden’s audience was much wider than those who were classically trained, however, and Paradise Lost may have been the better known work over the original Ovid for other readers. Book 6 is at the center of Paradise Lost, thematically as well as literally. Ovid XII is at the thematic center of Fables and is translated in full. Reverand, West and Hopkins demonstrate the ways Dryden exploits Ovid’s lengthy passages of violence; Reverand and West believe the battle becomes grotesque parody, following the canonical interpretation by Brooks Otis of the original Ovid, and Hopkins believes Dryden’s version emphasizes artistic precision that allows for a more comprehensive view above the fray.50 But no one has considered that Dryden’s exploitation of Ovid’s gruesome and indiscriminate violence may serve as a reminder and a warning against a repetition of England’s Civil War, which violently pitted the king against parliament, which was at the center of both the century and of English politics, and which powerfully shaped the choices made by the English from that point forward, including their invitation to William III. Within the confines of this fable, Dryden’s art and Nestor’s narration are the sole ordering principles against the chaos. The peaceful symbolism in a wedding stands against the violence of war, and in Ovid XII there is the ironic inclusio of two centaurs: Hylonome and Cyllarus. Their love is gentle but fiercely loyal. They endeavor to please one another in all things, and they share a love of the hunt that is in stark contrast to the war in which they find themselves and in which they die violently. Perhaps like Antony and Cleopatra, this is a love without any sense of a need for civic order, and its freedom from political experience dooms it. Dryden presents this same conundrum of a love story combined with something inappropriate in Cymon and Iphigenia. The Trojan War is another example of this strange tension, though we don’t always think of Helen and Paris as a love story. The depiction of Hylonome and Cyllarus saves the centaurs from the stigma of complete brutality. It means, perhaps, that we can’t stigmatize the entire race, yet it in no way mitigates the brutality of what the Centaurs have done. What it does show is the powerlessness, even the irrelevance of love in the face of civil uproar. It also introduces the idea of a virtuous individual fighting for a bad cause and the even larger theme of private virtue in the service of public injustice and usurpation. In a strange way, the very imperfection of Cymon’s and Iphigenia’s

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love gives it a chance to survive. A Machiavel like Cymon is necessary in order to avoid a war like the one in Ovid XII. Unlike Cymon and Iphigenia, Hylonome and Cyllarus are too perfect to survive in the midst of war. The love story is surprising in the midst of the violence, and Dryden’s allusions suggest he may have intended a parallel to William and Mary. In the George Sandys translation of Ovid, Hylonome is dressed in “The skinnes of beasts, such as were choice and rare.”51 Dryden’s version, however, is royal: “The Scarf of Furs, that hung below her Side / Was Ermin, or the Panther’s spotted Pride; / Spoils of no common Beast” (Ovid XII, 552–4). According to William Cameron, “panther” signified the Church of England from “The Hind and the Panther” forward.52 Furthermore, Mary II had established herself as the Church of England’s protector during her reign, as every panegyrist and satirist acknowledged. While the centaurs already were an exemplary couple in Ovid, Dryden embellishes Hylonome’s Amazonian qualities, and she becomes Cyllarus’s equal in the hunt as well as in love (Ovid’s Hylonome does not participate in the sylvan chase).53 Likewise, as William’s regent when he was at war, Mary was his equal. She faithfully followed William’s course, and he trusted her with his policies.54 Dryden’s attention to the nobler qualities of the centaur pair, if they are meant as a parallel to the king and queen, becomes an exercise in detachment for the artist. This detachment allows Dryden to connect with readers of varying opinions in a way that is similar to Homer: Homer’s epic similes are drawn from the traditions he shares with his audience, and the audience in turn “understand[s] the significance of his choices and appreciate[s] subtle variations.”55 Dryden admires the centaurs in the headnote to Ovid XII, and calls their “loves and death . . . wonderfully moving” (“Connection to the End of the Eleventh Book,” 16–17). At the same time, this paradox is a wry and ironic comment on the part of the poet. Like Cyllarus and Hylonome, William and Mary were cast as the ideal husband and wife, yet Cyllarus and Hylonome were among the very violators of another married couple, and William and Mary were jointly engaged in violating the marriage between monarch and state. Dryden’s orchestration of the political analogies, and of the larger questions that this and other fables provoke, parallels Nestor’s role in Ovid XII. For example, Nestor’s combination of the two impermeable characters, Caeneus and Cygnus, exposes a misplaced confidence in physical strength. Both are convinced that nothing can happen to them. Achilles supposedly had this impermeability, too. This reliance on force is central to what happens at the wedding feasts in both Cymon and Iphigenia and Ovid XII, the connection of which is Dryden’s, as the third layer of three artists who narrate stories: first Nestor, then Ovid, and finally Dryden. Nestor provides a counterbalance to physical strength with a different sort of power that is akin to literary force, and at the same time

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aligns Nestor closely with the skills of persuasion. At this point in his life, Nestor has no physical force left, much less illusions about invulnerability. His power is in illuminating or darkening the characters and connections in the stories he tells. Consider Caeneus and Cygnus as the obverse of what Achilles represents: invulnerability and impregnability versus irresistible force. Both examples are in the realm of force and power. Art and love represent potential though not entirely successful alternatives, both of them founded on rhetoric. Nestor’s art is more successful than Hylonome’s and Cyllarus’s love because it doesn’t ignore or try to transcend public events. What Dryden may be forced to acknowledge is that William practices the art of politics, an art that includes force—as in Theodore and Honoria.

Theodore and Honoria With Theodore and Honoria, Dryden seems to return to the validation of love by force that characterizes Cymon and Iphigenia, but with significant differences. Dryden, and Theodore, presents to us the violent pursuit of a helpless woman, an image that is shocking in and of itself, then made triply so, first by the realization that the relationship began as a courtship, second by the knowledge that this is Theodore’s relative who is the demon, and finally in the revelation that Theodore himself is capable of using the violence to his advantage in his own courtship of Honoria. The violence that becomes part of Theodore’s courtship culminates in the wedding he has sought for so long. While there is not a literal rape, and Theodore stands apart from the ghost’s violence, the ghost brandishes a “naked Sword” (repeated in lines 122 and 274), and the action revolves around a seizure: And now th’infernal Minister advanc’d, Seiz’d the due Victim, and with Fury launch’d Her Back, and piercing thro’ her inmost Heart, Drew backward, as before, th’offending part. (300–3) Dryden makes use of the connection between “seizure” and the Latin word raptus in the above description. When this horrific scene repeats itself, it interrupts a sumptuous banquet held by Theodore for Honoria, ostensibly in concession to her refusal to wed. Thus, Dryden provides another iteration of a rape that collides with a wedding feast. At the onset of the story, “Theodore the Brave” represents the best of all men: “With Gifts of Fortune, and of Nature bless’d, / The foremost Place for Wealth and Honour held, / And all in Feats of Chivalry excell’d” (6–8). Spurned again and again by Honoria, Theodore begins “Wasting at once his Life, and his Estate” (42) and retires to the country. While

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wandering alone through the woods to nurse his melancholia, he witnesses the ghost of his cousin hunt that cousin’s beloved, and Theodore uproots a pine tree to defend her, evoking the Lapithean defense against the Centaur who grabbed the bride. The “Fiend” (215) then warns Theodore to stand back, and thus “[forbids] the War” between the two knights (134).56 When Nestor retells the story of the war between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, his listeners relive it with him. Similarly, the ghosts of the past in Theodore and Honoria are imminently present. Like Cymon, Theodore also experiences an awakening, though the awakening has nothing to do with falling in love, but rather with learning how to manage his love. For Theodore, this awakening translates into a change from involvement without perspective to a judicious distance that enables him to control his own fate as well as that of Honoria. Again, applying the male-female representation of a king and his country proves useful. One might expect the sort of awakening Theodore experiences to be desirable for both kings and artists alike: a movement from self-absorption to an eye for a larger trajectory. No longer immersed in his own self-pity, Theodore arranges the aforementioned feast in honor of Honoria and her family, and the dinner is set in the exact place where the ghosts will return. Theodore’s cold calculation in presenting the scene to the banquet party is powerfully persuasive, and Honoria becomes totally complicit, willing to do anything to avoid the prophetic nightmare. Her fear extends to the guests, which Dryden emphasizes with an alexandrine: “For conscience rung th’alarm, and made the case their own” (314). Without using force himself, Theodore effectively scares Honoria and her family into agreeing to a marriage, thereby avoiding the fate he believes would have been his as well as Honoria’s. At the banquet, Theodore is the master of ceremonies, and like Prospero he can be a harsh one. But Theodore also possesses innate chivalric impulses, as evidenced by his initial response to the ghosts. Thus, while Theodore’s “[artful] [contrivance]” (260) to manipulate Honoria and the guests is reprehensible and a violation of hospitality, it stands in stark contrast to the violated hospitality at the banquet in Ovid XII, and it produces a future that certainly is preferable to that of the ghosts. There can be no doubt that Theodore and Honoria is about a hunt, and one need only place Theodore’s hunt next to the “Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time” of Dryden’s The Secular Masque to prove the infinite flexibility of hunting as an emblem, with innocence at one end of that continuum and brutality at the other.57 The hunt often has represented a cheerful, energetic event that reflects involvement or youthful passion. Even in Palamon and Arcite, there is an energetic youthfulness in the hunt in which Theseus partakes, and the frequent motif of this royal sport in Fables and The Secular Masque may be a reminder that William III was fond of the chase. Theodore and Honoria, by contrast, provides a particularly savage example. However, the ghostly hunt enforces a reconciliation

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in the marriage between Honoria and Theodore. Marriage was critical to the Revolution of 1688 as well: without his marriage to Mary II, William III would not have been invited to take James II’s crown, his Declaration would not have been persuasive, and his forces would have met with English resistance. William’s marriage to Mary made possible a peaceful usurpation and freedom from civil war. Likewise, marriage is the alternative to violence in Theodore and Honoria. The hunt represents a degree of passionate involvement in the drama that precludes any ability to base decisions on a balance between emotion and reason, as illustrated in the reactions of Honoria and the guests. On the one hand, the English have been haunted by their fears of civil war and popish tyranny. On the other, William III’s carefully planned propaganda, distributed clandestinely in addition to his Declaration, warned England that they would find themselves at the cusp of civil war once again if they allowed the Stuarts to provide a Catholic successor in James III. William, as a Protestant, could protect and deliver England from that potential terror. Like Theodore’s éclaircissement and subsequent machinations, the Revolution of 1688 was an historical moment when force was as important as persuasion. While the takeover may have been bloodless, and while many Englishmen were involved in William III’s plans, Lisa Jardine proves that a show of force was key to William’s arrival and subsequent success: From the very start, the Dutch fleet achieved its key strategic aim, creating an unforgettable spectacle, inducing a feeling of shock and awe in onlookers on either shore. The iconic image of its offensive sortie into the English Channel was commemorated in countless contemporary paintings and engravings, still to be found today, on display or in store, in galleries on both sides of the Narrow Seas. As the seventeenth-century armada made its way along the Channel, crowds gathered on the clifftops of the south of England to watch it pass. It was reported that the procession of ships had taken six hours to clear the ‘straits’. . . . William’s plan was that this spectacular floating combination of forces and resources should avoid naval engagement at all costs.58 Likewise, one could argue that Theodore presents a “show” of violence to persuade Honoria and the banquet guests. However important the image of force was to William’s project, he placed equal emphasis on persuasion. In drafting the Declaration, William III enlisted Dutch and English emissaries as well as numerous members of the English expatriate community. Prior to landing, 60,000 copies of the Declaration were printed surreptitiously and kept in utmost secrecy, though there was knowledge that the copies existed, and there is evidence that James II and his court were desperate to find one. The pamphlets were concealed in key locations in

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England and Scotland and authorized for simultaneous release once William left Holland.59 By no means an effort directed solely at the English, the Declaration was widely dispersed across the Continent, and there were 21 editions printed in four languages in 1688. Copies were handed directly to all ambassadors at The Hague, excluding ministers of England and France.60 Despite this careful preparation, William III’s fleet carried, among its other emergency provisions such as boots, guns, and bombs, a printing press and enough printing paper for a substantial distribution across England.61 Jardine posits that this propaganda was so effective that it colors how the Revolution is perceived even today. The Declaration was a persuasive argument that many were willing to believe at the time and that was difficult to dismantle afterward: “William’s assault on English sovereignty is represented as an entirely reasonable intervention by one well-intentioned party in support of the fundamental rights of the English people.”62 There is something different in Theodore and Honoria from what happens in the other stories, something that more closely approximates what actually happened in the Revolution of 1688, though the story is couched entirely in terms of a private love. The only fable that doesn’t explicitly address public events is the one that most closely approximates the politics of 1688. Though Theodore threatens force, it will not come from him, but from some avenging fury. This echoes William III’s strategy, who built up his militia precisely in the hopes that he would not have to use it. His propaganda presented William as the solution to, not the source of, potential violence. In reaction to their own fears regarding James II as well as James III, the English nobility invited the invasion. William III arrived on English shores flanked by military support and marched to London to claim the crown.

Dryden’s Readers When we look to Dryden’s readers, we may begin with Dryden himself as a reader who, in his preface to the historical poem Annus Mirabilis, admires Ovid’s “concernment” of character and Virgil’s “masterly .  .  . strokes”: Though [Virgil] describes his Dido well and naturally, in the violence of her passions, yet he must yield in that to the Myrrha. . . . the Althea of Ovid; for, as great an admirer of him as I am, I must acknowledge, that, if I see not more of their Souls then I see of Dido’s, at least I have a greater concernment for them. . . . But when Action or Persons are to be describ’d, when any such Image is to be set before us, how bold, how masterly are the strokes of Virgil! . . . the words wherewith he describes them are so excellent, that it might be well appli’d to him which was said by Ovid, Materiam superabat opus: . . . and while

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we read him, we sit, as in a Play, beholding the Scenes of what he represents.63 Though this chapter has focused to a large degree on the artistic precision that Dryden employs to describe the “Action” that results in startling patterns of persuasion and force and their historical and political applications, Dryden is no less intent on developing “concernment”: Myrrha and Althea, mentioned in the quote, take prominent roles in Fables, and readers experience the internal conflict of many of his characters. Judith Sloman writes that women readers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, especially admired Sigismonda and the female narrator in The Flower and the Leaf, to be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 (Sloman notes that women readers disagreed with the notion that Sigismonda’s sexuality “coarsened” the heroine).64 Sloman believes Dryden improves on Ovid’s own skills regarding character development, especially with female characters, beginning with his departure from Ovid’s hypnotic tone. In comparing the women in “Canace to Macareus,” “Helen to Paris,” and “Dido to Aeneas,” Sloman shows how Dryden modernizes, familiarizes, and differentiates these characters’ responses to the ways their fates have unfolded, while at the same time “creating an image of history in which human consciousness grows in awareness without freeing the individual from the prison of his or her emotions. History is at once progressive and cyclical.”65 Of the four fables discussed in this chapter, the Wife of Bath’s tone is pervasive, and the old woman of the same tale persuasive, but the greatest achievements in “concernment” or psychological depth occur with Iphigenia, discussed previously, and now with Honoria, where an individual’s horror reverberates through the fable to the guests and finally to a broad cultural fear of national proportions regarding the prospect of experiencing and enduring another civil war; empathy with the hunted female ghost invokes these fears. David Gelineau incisively depicts the sensation of a palimpsest of audiences in Theodore and Honoria: “As readers of Fables we have been exposed to these images of violence, just as Theodore has been and Honoria will be.”66 Despite the immediacy of the fable to the context of the 1690s, it simultaneously taps into a growing affinity for narrative that eventually would find expression in the novel and in the gothic, making that future reading experience all the more gripping since its source touched on realistic fears. Upali Amarashinghe shows that Dryden’s popularity remained at its zenith as late as 1790 and continued through the 19th century, and Theodore and Honoria was one of the most admired pieces. Scott, Wordsworth and Hallam refer specifically to the “tinglings of terror” and the “pathetic effect” of Theodore and Honoria, with Scott declaring specific passages as the most popular among all classes of readers.67 Dryden seems to have achieved what Christina Lupton says would later appeal to William Godwin—that

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is, “the concrete advantages of a book’s ability to lay out a whole truth before people are ready to hear it.”68 Similarly, it seems relevant to point out that in Dryden’s comparison of Ovid and Virgil that prefaced Annus Mirabilis, Dryden the reader first sees in Ovid the souls of his characters and next sees the “Soul of the Poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his Pictures” in Virgil. In these references there is Dryden’s potential return in 1700 to his preface of a national historical poem with the intention of innovating a new sort of historical fiction in his Fables; one that revitalizes the soul of classical authors and their characters by way of their relevance to the portrayal of real fear in the 1690s, all the while propelling Dryden toward a future iteration of “transfusion” in another time with other readers and other authors.69 Though taking a step back from the fables reveals patterns and themes that have theoretical application, readers experience a “[great] concernment” for the stories and characters as well (there are more examples in the forthcoming chapters). Likewise, historical patterns continue to come back to parallels with the Revolution of 1688 and the Civil War, suggesting that while Dryden is placing his own experiences within a larger and longer horizon, he explores at length the events that have affected him most personally and most profoundly. The startling collision of rape/force with marriage/persuasion/consent across four poems in Fables reveals some of Dryden’s thoughts about politics and history at the end of his life. It should not surprise us that he does not provide a one-sided view of the sort demanded by partisan royalists or Whigs, particularly since he had long since been relieved of such obligations. The Wife of Bath Her Tale demonstrates that Dryden has not lost his sense of levity since 1688, and he uses wit and irreverence to probe questions in which he is deeply invested. Its conclusion suggests that force is not always most effective, and the case for persuasion is made through a knight who must learn to listen. Furthermore, a wedding and a public court system ensure stability, consequence, and social order. These same parameters of social order are utterly absent in Cymon and Iphigenia. Cymon uses calculated force that works, and his victory is coupled with the magistrate’s choice to abandon his people, yet these self-serving actions result in eventual domestic peace. Ovid XII is the consummate example of the chaos of war with sexual violence as its source. Lapithean force is justified, as a means not only of revenge and protection but also as the only way to reinstate social order. It also is horrifying, and requires the skill of a poet or storyteller to place it within the context of historical patterns. Finally, Theodore and Honoria proves that the menace of force can be efficient and effective. Though the machinations involved in acquiring such stability are unsavory and unsettling, they nevertheless secure a peaceful ending without the actual use of force. All four fables involve force and persuasion, public and private interests,

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and male–female paradigms of power that can be compared to a king and his subjects. All four also end peacefully, strangely enough, but it is the means by which that peace is gained that varies. Force and persuasion/consent are oppositional in nature, yet the relationship between a king and his subjects seems to require a paradoxical combination of the two, adding another version of the contemporary use of concordia discors.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Studies in Philology. See Winifred Ernst, “Marriage, Force, and Alternatives to Force in John Dryden’s Fables,” Studies in Philology 111.1 (Winter 2014): 163–94. 2. As is the case with many threads throughout Fables, there also are other poems that enrich and complicate the themes of persuasion and force: The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, The First Book of Homer’s Ilias, and To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden, of Chesterton are three. Though Ajax represents force and Ulysses, persuasion, there is no male-female pattern. Similarly, the tension between Agamemnon and Achilles is the primary concern in The First Book of Homer’s Ilias, rather than that between Agamemnon and Briseis or Briseis and Achilles. There also is no wedding. To John Driden of Chesterton addresses male/female struggles and Driden’s abstention from them, but there is neither a rape nor a wedding. 3. Kishlansky, 35. See also King James I, Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I, eds. James Craigie and Alexander Law (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982); Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or, the Natural Power of Kings by the Learned Sir Robert Filmer, Baronet; to Which Is Added a Preface to the Reader in Which This Piece Is Vindicated from the Cavils and Misconstructions of the Author of a Book Stiled Patriarcha Non Monarcha, and Also a Conclusion or Postscript by Edmund Bohun, Esq. (London, 1685). 4. Kishlansky, 11. 5. Alan Roper, Dryden’s Poetical Kingdoms (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965), 110. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 108. Nimrod was a central polemical figure in the debate, with Filmer referencing him as a king who usurped lands from his neighbors. Filmer’s opponents attacked the author’s neutrality toward that usurpation and argued that an elective monarchy should be preferable to usurpation. See Edmund Bohun, “Preface to the Reader,” in Patriarcha, ed. Robert Filmer (R. Chiswell, W. Hensman, M. Gilliflower, and G. Wells, 1685), c2–3. Bohun defends Filmer and rebuts Tyrrell. 8. Roper, Dryden’s Poetical Kingdoms, 108. 9. See Ibid., 129, for the persuasive assertion that the political analogy regarding Adam as monarch and Eve as parliament is applicable to the image of Adam and Eve as wrestlers in Dryden’s To John Driden of Chesterton. Wasserman places Dryden’s much earlier Epistle to Charleton within the context of Denmark as a symbol of elective monarchy, England’s parliamentary structure traced back to Saxon history and its Germanic liberty-loving roots, and Dryden’s own “[assumption that] England will enjoy in the Stuarts a balance between monarchy by divine right and the elective monarchy Denmark once shared with all Germanic peoples” (Subtler Language, 26). If we take these two poems, one in 1660 and the other in 1700, it seems that balance between

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10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Persuasion, Force, and Alternatives to Force parliament and monarch was a consistent concern for Dryden throughout his career. James I, King of England, The Kings Maiesties Speech, as it was deliuered by him in the vpper house of the Parliament, to the Lords spirituall and temporall, and to the knights, citizens and burgesses there assembled, on Munday the 19. Day of March 1603, being the first day of this present Parliament, and the first Parliament of His Maiesties raigne (London, 1604), B2. Homer, The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), bk.18. Susan Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jennifer L. Airey, The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), quotation on 8. During the Civil Wars and Interregnum, Irish Catholic rebels and restless Cavaliers were portrayed as rapists in propaganda (Airey, 7–8). At the Restoration, the rapists became the regicides (Airey 21). By the time of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the increase in depictions of sexual violence onstage corresponded with the rise in political unrest, as Owen demonstrates in her analysis of sexual violence on stage during this period (Owen, 175). After the Revolution of 1688, both Whigs and Tories used rape in propaganda pamphlets: Tories tied rape to rebellion and usurpation, and Whigs linked rape with tyranny. See also Toni Bowers, who traces the prevalent thread of force versus seduction (not marriage) through prose that integrates the personal and political meanings of those stories. For the history of rape law, see Frances Ferguson’s “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” Representations Special Issue: Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy 20 (Autumn 1987): 88–112. See POAS, 5, for several examples of the satirical use of rape as a metaphor for usurpation: “If a wily Dutch boor for a rape on a girl / Was hanged by the law’s approbation, / Then what does he merit that buggers an Earl / And ravishes the whole nation?” (POAS 5.153n). James II is cast as a rape victim in one squib: “And made a mere whore, by a vote of our state / ‘Cause she freely her maidenhood did abdicate (POAS 5.59). “The Vindication” (1688) impersonates Marlborough, and in it James is both ravished by Marlborough himself “What if to seize the king I had designed?” and ravisher of Charles Sedley’s daughter, James’s mistress: “But Sedley has some color for his treason:/ A daughter ravished without any reason./ Good-natured man, his is most strangely blessed; / His daughter’s honor is his worhsip’s jest. / And she, to keep her father’s humor up, / Drinks to the Dutch with orange in her cup” (POAS 5.82). Cameron explains the line “father’s humor” thus: “His most famous jest was that he was as civil as James II; James had made his daughter a countess, but by his vote in the Conventions Parliament Sedley had made James’ daughter a queen.” Similarly, POAS also illustrates the satirical contemporary use of raptus as kidnapping, especially with regards to James II’s loss of the crown: there are several satires that refer to the prelate (the Bishop of Compton) who kidnaps one daughter, Anne, and who steals the other, Mary (POAS 5: 120–3). Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The Heroic Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), quotations on 180; 60; 62. For Lucrece, see Airey, The Politics of Rape, 21–6. For Boadicea as an important national symbol, see Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649– 1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), especially 57 and 78. Barash also cites the poem Exultationis

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Carmen (1660), where England becomes the nymph bride who is ravished by the Civil War (42). She asserts that the masque Callisto (1675) connects the future queen Mary to the chaste Elizabeth, indicating a reign that will be free from violent assaults on monarchs that were associated with civil wars and their aftermaths (46). The Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds. A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879) offers the following two definitions for raptus: “a carrying off by force” and “a carrying off, robbing, plundering, especially of persons.” See Bohun, “Preface to the Reader,” in the 1685 edition of Filmer’s Patriarcha. All subsequent references to Bohun’s “Preface” will be cited parenthetically within the text. See also James Tyrrell, Patriarcha Non Monarcha the Patriarch Unmonarch’d: Being Observations on a Late Treatise and Divers Other Miscellanies, Published under the Name of Sir Robert Filmer, Baronet: In Which the Falseness of Those Opinions That Would Make Monarchy Jure Divino Are Laid Open, and the True Principles of Government and Property (Especially in Our Kingdom) Asserted / by a Lover of Truth and of His Country (London, 1681). See James Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica: Or an Enquiry into the Ancient Constitution of the English Government Both in Respect to the Just Extent of Regal Power, and the Rights and Liberties of the Subject: Wherein All the Chief Arguments, as Well against, as for the Late Revolution, Are Impartially Represented, and Considered, in Thirteen Dialogues. Collected out of the Best Authors, as Well Antient as Modern: To Which Is Added an Alphabetical Index to the Whole Work (London, 1694). See Bohun: “. . . to show any other Original of Paternal Father than Adam over Eve, who indeed was as the first subject, so the Representative of all that followed, and it reaches not only to all her Daughters in relation to their husbands, but to all them in relation to their Fathers, and to her sons too . . . For if a priority of being gave Adam a power over his wife, it gave him much more so over his children” (b5). Claydon and Speck, William and Mary, 108. Baxter, William III, 145. Baxter also examines Mary II’s reaction to her betrothal. This term also is Chaucerian. For further reading on the genre of fable, see Mark Loveridge, A History of Augustan Fable (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); and Miner, “Ovid Reformed,” 79–120. Incidentally, William III never met his father, since William II died before he was born, and as a result he was managing powerful and political adversaries (beginning with his English mother and Dutch grandmother) from an early age. See Baxter, especially chapter 1. Kishlansky, 141–2. Ibid., 141. Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 61–7, quotation on 62. POAS 5: 149. POAS 5: 147 provides numerous examples. Ibid. See also Craig Rose, ch. 8. POAS 5: 149, 1–14. Ibid. 5: 149, 38–47.

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33. Though Christopher Hill indicates that the brutality, when Cromwell initiates it, is certainly not unplanned; he conducted six months of military preparation before setting out to subdue Ireland (Hill, God’s Englishman, 115). 34. See Hill, God’s Englishman for many examples of Cromwell’s shrewdness, strategic violence, and pragmatism. Of the Irish campaign, Hill writes that Cromwell had determined that: “Ireland must be suppressed as swiftly, decisively and cheaply as possible” (114). Like Cymon and like William III, Cromwell was taciturn, and found that listening to others while revealing little could be used strategically to his advantage (194). 35. “Cromwell was no intellectual: the cast of his mind was practical, pragmatic, never doctrinaire” (Hill, God’s Englishman, 194). 36. Cromwell forbade pillaging in Ireland, and the rule was enforceable because his soldiers were paid and fed (Hill, God’s Englishman, 116). 37. J.P. Kenyon, The Civil Wars of England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1988), 229–42, quotation on 239. 38. See Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 53, where he observes that Lysimachus and Cymon, who move from love to force that causes war, represent the opposite of Theseus, who moved from force to love/peace when marrying Hippolyta. 39. Battigelli, “John Dryden’s Angry Readers,” 263. 40. David Gelineau, “Cymon and Iphigenia: The Vigour of the Worse Prevailing,” Studies in Philology 102.2 (Spring 2005): 210–33. 41. Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), quotation on 25. 42. Dryden makes a point of Cymon’s nativity on the island Cyprus, also the birthplace of Venus, and the departure point for Cymon’s Mars-like mission. Likewise, Diana makes two appearances in Cymon and Iphigenia. Iphigenia first appears, nymph-like and bathing, when Cymon finds her, similar to Actaeon’s encounter with the virgin huntress, but with different results. It also echoes the archetype of pastoral songs, particularly those of the rougher sort, a tradition whose rusticity fits nicely with Cymon’s character. Iphigenia also evokes the daughter of Agamemnon, who was chosen as a sacrifice to Diana because of her purity, and whose story appears at the beginning of Ovid XII. 43. See chapter 8 of David Hopkins’ Conversing with Antiquity for an invaluable review of the critical interpretations of book 12 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as a thoughtful analysis of Dryden’s choices as translator. I was particularly struck by Hopkins’s assessment of Dryden’s choices that place emphasis on artistic management: “The version clearly demonstrates Dryden’s sense of sophistication and control exercised by Ovid throughout book 12, a control quite incompatible with neurotic or depraved blood-lust” (209). My own reading also argues for an emphasis on artistic management of the passions combined simultaneously with committed participation. 44. David Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity, 219. 45. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957), 6.642–5. Milton and Dryden both draw on the classical trope of Jupiter throwing mountains on top of the Titans. Cf. also Pope’s Essay on Man. 46. Milton, Paradise Lost, 6.667–8. 47. Take, for example, the violence in the first days of the Revolution. John Aubrey describes it like this: “the multitude .  .  . proceeded from place to place, pulling down and burning Popish chapels and mass houses, carrying the images and crosses in triumph” (qtd. in Pincus, 259). Pincus has paid close attention to the initial chaos that occurred as England moved forward

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with its invitation to William III to assume the throne and to replace James II, and Dryden in 1700 expands the original Ovidian text of The Twelfth Book of Metamorphoses (part of Fables) to emphasize violence against sacred objects, not unlike the destruction that Aubrey records: Bold Amycus, from the robb’d Vestry brings The Chalices of Heav’n; and holy Things Of precious Weight: A Sconce, that hung on high, With Tapers fill’d, to light the Sacristy, Torn from the Cord, with his unhallow’d Hand He threw amid the Lapythaean Band. (342–7) A few passages later, Dryden augments the sacrilegious anarchy of the Centaur Gryneus: . . . The Gods, he cry’d, Have with their holy Trade, our Hands supply’d: Why use we not their Gifts? Then from the Floor An Altar-Stone he heav’d, with all the Load it bore: Altar and Altars freight together flew, Where thickest throng’d the Lapythaean Crew. (363–8) When compared with George Sandys’ version, Dryden’s emphasis on the religious articles is striking: Next, Gryneus stood; his lookes with vengeance swell: Serves this, said he, for nothing? Therewith rais’d Aloft a mighty altar: as it blaz’d, Among the Lapithites his burden threw . . . (B3)

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

These details may mirror the initial chaos of the Revolution, and yet the sustained story of Ovid XII (translated in its entirety) illustrates an unplanned and visceral reaction that resembles more closely the Civil War, whose specter loomed over the carefully orchestrated Revolution, even if both—the Revolution and the specter of war—ultimately established domestic peace and stability. Hopkins brings forward this connection on 203 and 206. Hopkins, 209. Cedric Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 24–35; Michael West, “Dryden’s Ambivalence as a Translator of Heroic Themes,” Costerus 7 (1973); and Hopkins, 203–37. George Sandys, ed., Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished: Oxford 1632 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 408. POAS 5: 498. Sandys’s and Dryden’s versions of this passage are distinct. Sandys translates as follows: and ware The skinnes of beasts, such as were choice and rare Which flowing from her shoulder crosse her brest, Vaile her left side. Both equal love possest: Together on the shady mountains stray In woods and hollow caves together lay

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Persuasion, Force, and Alternatives to Force Then to the palace of the Lapithite Together came; and now together fight. (Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished, 408) Dryden’s version is as follows: The Scarf of Furs, that hung below her Side, Was Ermin, or the Panther’s spotted Pride; Spoils of no common Beast. With equal Flame They lov’d: Their Sylvan Pleasures were the same: All Day they hunted: And, when Day expir’d, Together to some shady Cave retir’d: Invited to the Nuptials, both repair: And Side by Side, they both ingage in War. (Ovid XII, 552–9) The Loeb Latin and translation are as follows: nec nisi quae deceant electarumque ferarum aut umero aut lateri praetendat vellera laevo. par amor est illis: errant in montibus una, antra simul subeunt; et tum Lapitheia tecta intrarant pariter, pariter fera bella gerebant[.]

[Nor would she wear on shoulder or left side aught but becoming garments, skins of well-chosen beasts. They both felt equal love. Together they would wander on the mountain-sides, together rest within the caves. On this occasion also they had come together to the palace of the Lapithae, and were waging fierce battle side by side.] (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2 vols., trans. F.J. Miller. [Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library Harvard University Press, 1984], 2.12.414–18). 54. Baxter, 279. 55. William C. Scott, The Artistry of the Homeric Simile (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2009), 108. 56. A close reading reveals that the rape in The Wife of Bath Her Tale mirrors the violence in Theodore and Honoria. At the beginning of The Wife of Bath Her Tale, Dryden echoes an ephemeral vision of “fiends” in a strikingly different tone from the one quoted, as he satirizes a lecherous parson in the country: “From Fiends and Imps he sets the Village free, / There haunts not any Incubus, but He” (40–1). Chaucer’s deviant knight appears in this very countryside, and first spies his target from “behind” (53), just as Guido Cavalcanti’s ghost approaches (and pierces) his prey from the back, also in the woods. Both men are on horse, both maidens on foot. The Wife of Bath’s knight possesses an “amorous Eye” (51), “full of Youthful Fire” (55). Theodore’s fiend “with flashing flames his ardent eyes were fill’d” (121). The Wife of Bath’s knight attacks, and the private violence quickly enters a public realm: By Force accomplish’d his obscene Desire: This done away he rode, not unespy’d, For swarming at his Back the Country cry’d; And once in view they never lost the Sight, But seiz’d, and pinion’d brought to court the Knight. (56–60) As might be expected, however, The Wife of Bath Her Tale immediately rewrites the situation: the knight rapist becomes the one who is “seiz’d” and

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“pinion’d.” In Theodore and Honoria, the dinner guests witness the fiend knight, and the predatory nightmare becomes a public crime. “The country” witnesses the rape in The Wife of Bath Her Tale, creating king-subject analogies from the very start of the poem. In Theodore and Honoria, the threat of future repetitive violence is avoided when Honoria agrees to a wedding, the traditional symbol of harmony and peace. The Wife of Bath Her Tale finds resolution in an orderly court of law, a version of persuasion, which ultimately decrees a wedding as well. 57. Works 16: 40. The theme of hunting in Dryden’s Fables has been addressed by several scholars. Most have showcased To John Driden of Chesterton as the singular exception to a primarily negative view toward hunting. Rachel Miller concentrates on the theme of tyranny and uncontrolled passion as it relates to the hunt in Dryden’s Fables. See her “Regal Hunting: Dryden’s Influence on Windsor Forest,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 13 (1979): 169–88. According to Miller, To John Driden of Chesterton is the primary exception to this rule in Fables, but she believes that “the image of the hunt is supplanted by a peaceful strife: Dryden’s hopes for trade and naval supremacy” (184). Eric Rothstein argues that it is primarily a negative ambivalence with which the hunt is treated in poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. His thesis also points out the common comparison of political tyranny with tyrannical hunting and the converse parallel of the noble huntsman who symbolizes British liberty. See his “Discordia Non Concors: The Motif of Hunting in Eighteenth Century Verse,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 83 (1984): 330–54. Rothstein highlights To John Driden of Chesterton as one of the exceptions to a tradition of negative ambiguity, since Dryden tempers the “cruelty and pathos” involved in hunting and because Driden is unequivocally a hero in the poem (337). Like Rothstein, Jay Levine highlights Dryden’s parallel of Driden’s love of hunting with his dutiful observance of law and order. Levine believes that Dryden intentionally created the possibility of interpreting James II and William III, interchangeably, as kings on the “slipp’ry thrones” in To John Driden of Chesterton. See his “John Dryden’s Epistle to John Driden,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63 (1964): 460. It seems to me that any discussion regarding the emblem of the hunt must acknowledge Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest, where the hunt, though not innocent, still is an image of peace set against the horrors of war. The public presence and prominence of such a poem make it hard to believe that peaceful interpretations of the hunt were exceptions or anomalies in an otherwise uniformly negative view toward the sport, especially since the ambiguity goes back to Virgil’s Georgics. See Pope: The shady Empire shall retain no Trace Of War or Blood, but in the Sylvan Chase, The Trumpets sleep, while cheerful Horns are blown, And Arms employ’d on Birds and Beasts alone. (Windsor Forest, 371–4) 58. Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 8–9. 59. Ibid., 29. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 9. 62. Ibid., 35. 63. Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666, “An Account of the ensuing Poem, in a Letter to the Honorable, Sir Robert Howard.” Works 1: 54–5.

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64. Sloman, 224n. Sloman points out that Sir Walter Scott and Mark Van Doren both felt that Dryden had denigrated Sigismonda in his depiction of her. 65. Sloman, 59–63; quotation on 63. 66. See David Gelineau, “Adorned with Labour’d Art: The Intricate Unity of Dryden’s Fables,” Modern Philology 106.1 (2008). I disagree, however, that Dryden portrays Theodore as an allegory of rightful king (James II) to whom England/Honoria should be drawn, or that Honoria is “a figure symbolically associated with an arrogant and violent Williamite England” (51). This interpretation disregards Theodore’s Machiavellian use of the specter of violence that, to my mind, is at the heart of the fable. 67. Upali Amarasinghe, Dryden and Pope in the Early Nineteenth Century, 1–72; quotations on 24. J. Paul Hunter’s assessment regarding a new hunger for the mysterious may also be at play here: “But if the new science made the defeat of magic and superstition ultimately inevitable, it also heightened the taste for wonder and made people cherish whatever record they could find that confirmed uncertainty and mystery” (Hunter, 209). He estimates that readers most wanted “to participate in the tradition of wonder” during the years 1680–1720, with “wonder” at its apogee in 1710 (215–16). Dryden attends to interior scope with Honoria’s fears, and the protagonists are young, both of these being components that attracted readers. 68. Christina Lupton, Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 147. 69. Works 7: 41. “Transfusion” becomes an important concept for Dryden in the cosmological community of poets. See Hopkins, Conversing with Antiquity, chapter 9, for an insightful examination of Dryden’s translation theory in 1699–1700: “For Dryden, the process whereby a modern poet can discover a congeniality or identity of soul with several illustrious predecessors from the distant past, in acts of simultaneous self-surrender and self-discovery which seem almost the work of some larger power or Fate, are analogous with, or illustrative of, mysterious processes of nature, in which, in a perpetual cycle of annihilation and renewal, destruction, despair, and decay are constantly counterpointed by rebirth and hope” (249).

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While Mars and Venus constitute the idyllic emblem of an harmonious marriage and state, with rape and usurpation as the frequent political aberration from that harmony, the idea of the perfect pair becomes more complex once children and other relationships are introduced. Fables contains many happily married—and childless—couples: Ceyx and Alcyone, Baucis and Philemon, and Cyllarus and Hylonome, to name three. The examples Dryden provides of parent-child relationships are more troublesome: Tancred-Sigismonda and Althea-Meleager are two that contradict assumptions we might be tempted to make about Dryden’s thoughts regarding lineal descent, destabilizing the seemingly settled trope of the father/child allegory of a patriarchal state and divine right. Dryden distinguishes between relationships that are freely chosen, or democratic, and relationships that are dictated by blood, as between a parent and child, and his willingness to include these tortured stories of the parent bond gone wrong demonstrates his flexibility as he continues to probe the meaning behind the Revolution of 1688 and its role in England’s future. 1 Mary’s reign presents the paradox of a loving wife, a childless mother, and an undutiful daughter, at a time when the analogy of nation as family was a literal one. The issue of family is important not just because Mary is a textbook case of the conflict between loyalty to parent and loyalty to spouse, and not just because the whole question of political legitimacy is bound up with families and dynasties, but because the family itself is a political unit, and the nucleus of social order. Dryden focuses in Fables on the stresses and strains of familial relations, and Althea and Sigismonda are two elaborations of this dramatic focus, while Atalanta, Emily, and Hylonome are at the centers of family narratives but have little control over their own destinies; perhaps they share this similarity with Mary II. Dryden had observed the young Mary’s tearful resistance at her betrothal, while her uncle the king made ribald jokes and her father sulked in silence. Because they were his uncles and Charles had been involved in William’s early education and upbringing, William naturally expected largesse at the nuptials, along with an improvement in Dutch-English negotiations—neither was forthcoming. Nevertheless,

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James stayed in Holland during the Exclusion Crisis and sent William to England as his emissary and defense. James later identified this as William III’s initial moment of betrayal, followed by Mary’s and Anne’s decisions to join their husbands against their father, so that the Revolution of 1688 overturned a family in addition to England’s policy of succession. These were political and familial burdens that Mary shared with Anne. Dryden and Mary II, meanwhile, may seem an unlikely pair, but both experienced deep ambivalence in the last decade of their lives. This same ambivalence registers in a number of national events. There was the core group of Anglicans who supported James’s mandates as king, even though they had enforced Charles II’s penal laws as recently as 1684. There were the bishops who first opposed James II and next William III, claiming reasons of conscience. The Earl of Abingdon, who later commissioned Dryden’s poem Eleonora, provides another telling case in point. As Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire 1674–1687, Charles II had selected him to oversee the retrial of Stephen College in 1681. Yet despite such royalist credentials he lost the Lord Lieutenancy under James because he could not agree to the “Three Questions” regarding toleration.2 He was the first peer to rally William III at Exeter, but he soon disagreed with William III over the terms “abdication” and “vacant throne” (he kept the lieutenancy in spite of this dissent).3 These examples reinforce my suggestion that Dryden’s ambivalence, or perhaps his loyalism, was shared by many, including the queen herself who was at the heart of the conflict. It seems to me that Mary’s life experiences, from her childhood at court to her dutiful sternness as a monarch, play a significant role in Fables, as does Dryden’s attention to the interests of a readership that included many women. The Wife of Bath, Honoria, Iphigenia, Emilia, Hippolyta, Sigismonda, Althea, Atalanta, Mary Frampton, and Lady Mary Somerset all are part of Fables. Killigrew and Eleonora also play a role in the development of multiple female forces in Dryden’s later works, and they may bring into focus a comparison of Mary of Modena and Mary II. It is worthwhile to look at all of these themes in concert; doing so enriches Carol Barash’s evidence that women poets established their presence by announcing their affinity with Dryden and their affiliation with female monarchs. Barash singles out the works by Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Elstob, Mary, Lady Chudleigh, Sarah Fye Egerton, and Mary Astell, and demonstrates the ways in which these women merged their poetic visions with a queen’s authority (in these cases, it was Mary of Modena or Anne).4 Meanwhile, Dryden refers to “The Ladies of the Town” with regards to his own Fables and his genuine pleasure over their welcome reception. He writes to his esteemed cousin, Mrs. Steward: “they are all of your Opinion; & like my last Book of Poems, better than any thing

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they have formerly seen of mine”; he addresses female readers in the Preface and expresses his interest in accessibility through the translations themselves, and this openness was not lost on his female contemporaries.5 Ann Cotterill details the warmth and admiration that women readers and poets alike felt toward Dryden and highlights his support of Behn; he included her in his 1680 translation of Ovid’s Epistles and praised her work in its preface, and he wrote a prologue and epilogue for her posthumous production of The Widow Ranter (1690).6 Dryden corresponded with Elizabeth Thomas and understood the rising differences in reader preferences between Behn and Philips; he recommended Mary, Lady Chudleigh’s poetry to Tonson, Wycherley, and Walsh; he produced some of the best translations of classical authors and he cared about accessibility; he knew Madeleine de Scudéry’s work, used her as a source for at least one of his plays, and referred to her translations of Chaucer in his litany of artists in the Preface to the Fables as a means of reestablishing Chaucer’s reputation (thereby simultaneously reestablishing de Scudéry’s reputation after Boileau had maligned her); he wrote to his cousin Mrs. Steward as a confidante who, “being a poetesse [herself],” shared his interests in poetry and in politics;7 and finally, once enterred, he received the approbation of nine women poets, diverse in religion, class, and choice of genre, who commemorated his death with the publication Nine Muses—a collection of poems that eulogized the former Poet Laureate while publicly announcing a community of women poets.8 All of this aligns with changes that were occurring across the country. In the years 1695–1702, there was a surge in discussion around women’s interests such as marriage, divorce, and education, and more women were known as writers. The woman warrior appeared again and again in ballads throughout the 1690s, perhaps in anticipation of the next queen, including two popular plays by Charles Hopkins whose protagonists were Amazonian and one of whom was the historical English queen Boadicea (Dryden mentions both plays in his letters).9 This convergence of the literary and political with female material in Fables has not been discussed in other critical works, yet it correlates with the theses of Barbara Benedict, Naomi Tadmor, and others that public life and political questions interested women and that this interest was integrated with their reading habits.10 It also reinforces my suggestion that Dryden was alert to many of the extraordinary changes occurring around him and that he was willing to engage their significance. Dryden’s attention to Mary II as woman and queen, and all of the familial and political issues she both grapples with and represents, combined with his own popularity with female poets and a newly feminized readership, may have facilitated a deeper range of emotions in his Fables, which he put to use in portrayals of the personal experience of historical and political patterns.

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The Oresteia and the Stuarts The earliest in-depth exploration of the familial combined with the political and sexual may be Aeschylus’s Oresteia. It is a story about a dramatic transition in government where neither familial duty nor absolute monarchy is sufficient. From the beginning of the trilogy, a dichotomy forms between the needs of a king/state and the domestic emotional reality of a mother/child. Iphigenia, even though she is Agamemnon’s daughter, must be sacrificed to appease the gods and put wind in Greek sails because Agamemnon needs to go to war (also part of Ovid XII in Fables). Afterward, Clytemnestra takes a lover while Agamemnon is away, then kills Agamemnon upon his heroic return from the Trojan War. Apollo commands Orestes to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother, and once done the Furies torment him for violating those biological ties. Apollo as messenger of Zeus represents absolute monarchy, while the Furies represent blind justice through filial piety. Athena provides a third option, democracy. The Athenian trial, where Orestes’s fate is decided, is a version of persuasion, since each side (both the Furies and Apollo) must appeal to the jury. Though Apollo represents the force of Zeus and absolute monarchy in the Oresteia, he also is an agent of civilization, as evidenced by his association with building roads. The Furies represent a primordial source of familial justice based not on reason but on loyalty and revenge, constraining humans to follow birth ties against all other instincts. Apollo argues with the Furies that conjugal ties are as sacred as the filial, and he warns against any sacrilegious disrespect of the union between Zeus and Hera. Athena stands apart from both the sexual bonds of husband and wife and the blood relationships that the Furies represent, since she neither is a mother nor has one. She believes in persuasion but is willing to back it up with force. When Athena breaks the tie in favor of Orestes, she offers the Furies a home in Athens and a place of veneration. The Furies agree to live among those who follow Zeus, and Athena replaces force with persuasion, since she redeems Orestes even as she charms the Furies into accepting her offer instead of cursing her land with infertility. There is a reconciliation of forces that have fiercely opposed one another throughout the Oresteia: male with female, force with persuasion, civilization with primitivism, light with dark. The curse of the House of Atreus is broken, and the play ends with a procession of Athenians who bear torches as they march through the darkness: the light of Apollo reconciled with the darkness of the Furies. The torment that the Furies symbolize is relevant to the Stuarts and goes as far back as Mary, Queen of Scots, and James VI/I. According to Jayne Lewis, Mary as murdered mother queen haunted the English imagination from Elizabeth I forward, including the son who ruled as king of Scotland when her subjects forced her to abdicate, but who venerated her in death once he was established as king of England.11 Stuart familial

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angst continued after the Restoration as well, as discussed above. There is evidence that the playhouses of 1699 leveraged a link between the Stuarts and the Oresteia mythology. Dryden’s Letters 70 and 71 mention two plays, Achilles, or Iphigenia in Aulis at Betterton’s (by Abel Bowyer) and Iphigenia a Tragedy at Drury Lane (by John Dennis) that ran in December of that year: “Both Iphigenias have been playd with bad Success; & being both acted, one against the other, in the same week, clashd together, like two rotten ships, which cou’d not endure the shock; & sunk to rights.”12 Bowyer’s Iphigenia is resolute in her determination to be a sacrifice for her father, loyal to parent/king to the death, and she is rewarded for this loyalty when a slave reveals herself as another royal Iphigenia who, in love with Achilles (who is betrothed to Agamemnon’s Iphigenia), sacrifices herself to the gods in despair and saves the heroine. In Dennis’s opposing play, the Greeks unknowingly sacrifice a veiled slave (neither royal nor named Iphigenia) instead of the princess, and Iphigenia flees to a remote island to live in hiding. Dennis’s Agamemnon is a tyrannical father king, and the queen who hosts the fugitive princess also is a tyrant. The queen commands Iphigenia to choose one of two newly arrived strangers as a sacrifice to the gods, but Iphigenia refuses to obey this amoral demand; she becomes the example of a just rebellion. Dennis’s Orestes and Pylades are the two “strangers” scheduled to be sacrificed—the siblings Iphigenia and Orestes have been separated for so long that they do not recognize one another. The two friends use rallying cries of “Life” and “Liberty,” while there are many lines that allude to the curse of Tantalus that continues to haunt Iphigenia. Dennis’s preface also connects England’s fate to the ideals of friendship (presumably over family). Bowyer’s play defends loyalty to James II as father king, and Dennis’s expresses loyalty to English liberty over a tyrant king. Both involve a daughter named Iphigenia who is caught in the middle of a family curse. Mary II, unlike Clytemnestra, never had a daughter whose life and happiness were dispensed for the state, but in light of her betrothal story one might argue that Mary herself was sacrificed by Charles II for England. Both of these plays indicate that the English felt the Oresteia was relevant to the current royal drama. According to Dryden, both were poorly received, perhaps because their bald analogies ignored the complex emotions involved in such a dramatic aberration from the changing of the guard. Through Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Aeschylus suggests that the needs of king and state are at odds with the needs of mother and child, and in the case of the Stuarts the political needs often trumped the personal ones. As for the political theory regarding struggles within the family unit, James Tyrrell and Edmund Bohun led the debate regarding Adam’s sons and daughters, asking biblical questions to prove or disprove the legitimacy of succession by divine right and the powers of Parliament. Many of Dryden’s fables address similar issues, but Dryden allows them

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to unfold as stories with their own idiosyncrasies, and therefore proposes difficulties to the pat political theories proffered from both sides, all the while maintaining a close intuitive connection to the concerns of his readers, who were a mixed audience of varying political persuasions, accustomed to contradiction and ambivalence, and interested in histories or narratives of young protagonists who display interiority.13

Sigismonda and Guiscardo Sigismonda and Guiscardo presents a heroine who steadfastly preserves her wedding vows and who, in doing so, disobeys her father. In the fable, Sigismonda becomes a widow as a young woman, and her father is reluctant to let her remarry. She secretly weds Guiscardo, his esteemed servant. When Tancred discovers them together, he exacts revenge first by killing Guiscardo and next by delivering the heart to his daughter. Sigismonda remains unapologetic to the end, stoically defends her marriage, and defies her father. Certainly there is a parallel issue with Mary II, whom one satirist called “too bad a daughter and too good a wife.”14 Edmund Bohun’s rebuttal of James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681), in his introduction to the 1685 republication of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, indicates there also is a parallel in contemporary political theory. He writes of Tyrrell: Our Author has another Whimsey: That if Parents are to be trusted with this absolute power over their children because of the natural affection they are always supposed to bear them: then Princes ought not to be trusted with it, since none but Parents themselves can have this natural affection toward their children. (c) Bohun believes a divinely appointed king would treat his subjects as lovingly as a father his children, and this love would check an abuse of absolute power. Tyrrell and others vehemently disagree. Standing apart from both of these arguments is Sigismonda and Guiscardo, where a king cannot demonstrate that loving bond even to his own daughter once she disobeys him. Elsewhere, Bohun extends the paradigm of a daughter who owes piety to her father under any circumstance, but also to her husband.15 Sigismonda and Guiscardo complicates this straightforward duty to parent and husband (as did Tyrrell’s response to the political argument), and through Sigismonda Dryden may point out the incestuous discrepancy in applying a patriarchal paradigm to husband and wife— how can Eve (or her daughters after her) be both wife and daughter to the same ruler?16 For Judith Sloman and Taylor Corse, the intimations of incest in Sigismonda and Guiscardo parallel the corrosive quality of the absolute power of Tancred.17

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Sigismonda’s tragedy resonates with the story of Mary II, caught in the uncomfortable suspense between the incommensurate roles of daughter to one dynasty and wife to its rival, and this turmoil is amplified further in yet another parallel to the English subject. Tancred laments: What Pains a Parent and a Prince can find To punish an Offence of this degenerate Kind. As I have lov’d, and yet I love thee more Than ever Father lov’d a Child before; So, that Indulgence draws me to forgive: Nature, that gave thee Life, would have thee live. But, as a Publick Parent of the State, My Justice, and thy Crime, requires thy Fate. (352–9) Tancred defines his pains as parent and prince as a deep love, “more / Than ever Father lov’d a Child before.” But his acts are tyrannical rather than slow to punish or quick to forgive. The delivery of Guiscardo’s heart to his daughter stands in the face of his tearful protestations and indicates that Tancred is ruled by many complicated passions; perhaps a king who was not her father would have been more forgiving and more just. Tancred’s absolutism parallels that of Agamemnon as established by Zeus, and since he is above the law there will be no repercussion for his version of justice. But Tancred’s bond to Sigismonda also is a natural one: “Nature, that gave thee Life, would have thee live” (357). This natural bond, rather than engendering tenderness or constraint provokes something like irrational fury, and the absence of law in Sigismonda and Guiscardo is even more striking when compared to the law by which David governs in Absalom and Achitophel. David as father excuses Absalom for as long as he possibly can, but finally he must move forward as a king and replace “native mercy” with “law.” This reluctant enforcement of public law contrasts with Tancred’s whim as law. Sigismonda protests: What have I done in this, deserving Blame? State-Laws may alter: Nature’s are the same; Those are usurp’d on helpless Woman-kind, Made without our Consent, and wanting Pow’r to bind. (417–20) “Consent” is a political word for many of Dryden’s contemporary readers: Corse writes that this word “makes her a good Lockean,” and Daniel Defoe, in his political poem De Jure Divino (1706), provides another example: a monarch “only holds a Government / That rules a People by their own Consent.”18 This is the rallying cry of a parliamentarian

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dedicated to liberty, a commitment that hardened in the years leading up to the Civil War and continued through the century.19 Thus, the contest of wills and the movement from cooperation to tyranny is illustrated in the struggle between Tancred and his daughter, yet David’s rejoinder to Whiggish arguments made during the Exclusion Crisis would be a pertinent response to Sigismonda, if someone more reasonable or credible than Tancred were to offer it: If those who gave the Scepter, could not tye By their own deed their own Posterity, How then could Adam bind his future Race? How could his forfeit on mankind take place? Or how could heavenly Justice damn us all, Who ne’er consented to our Fathers fall? (Absalom and Achitophel 769–74) “Consent” from this perspective does not wield the same power as it does with Sigismonda. Absalom and Achitophel explores the delicate balance between the just arguments on either side of the debate, ultimately coming down on the side of the monarchy. Sigismonda and Guiscardo adds weight to the argument Dryden had opposed because Sigismonda, though perhaps in the wrong in some instances, is the heroine that Dryden admires. Tancred’s speeches reflect the arguments for king as father, and Sigismonda’s the right to resist repression (and to choose her own husband). It is the context—a fable by Boccaccio—within which these elements unfold that make them so intriguing, and make original, perhaps, and certainly more human, the arguments that had been used for the entire century regarding prerogative and privilege. From the fable’s very beginning, Sigismonda subverts the unreasonable constraints that this patriarchy has placed on her liberty. Because she knows her father will not allow her to remarry, she flirts with Guiscardo clandestinely, albeit in front of the entire court, when she tosses him a “hollow cane”: “Take it, she said; and when your Needs require / This little Brand will serve to light your Fire.” Inside are instructions for their secret marriage and subsequent liaison, and Dryden reuses the word “brand” that symbolized both Meleager’s life and his death by his mother’s hands in the fable Meleager and Atalanta, another dramatic example of the Furies among families (to be discussed shortly). Sigismonda appears here as a woman who is self-aware and willing to take risks. Dryden points out that she tosses the brand to her lover while sitting beside her father, where she “held the Place of Queen” (line 78), as if she were the wife and not the daughter. This necessarily adds force to the distorted emotions within the tale, and reinforces a palimpsest of political rhetoric layered onto the roles of queen/Eve/Parliament/subject/daughter.

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Similar to Sigismonda’s flirtatious behavior at court, Mary displayed a combination of willfulness with gaiety at her coronation when the country expected sobriety if not contrition.20 And just before the Revolution, Mary scandalously attended the theater on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution.21 These instances were proof to some that Mary was reckless and irresponsible, though there are other depictions of her reserve, particularly on her deathbed, drawing one more resemblance between the real queen and the stoic Sigismonda who also was dry-eyed at death.22 And more frequent than the image of the blithe beauty was that of the dutiful Mary who felt obliged to protect both her rightful place as queen (believing the prince’s birth to be suppositious) and the Church of England (endangered by the policies of her father). In Dryden’s fable, Sigismonda’s actions and motives can be viewed as heroic or self-serving or both, and scholars have elaborated on these interpretations (though no one has connected her with Mary II).23 Mary’s subjects may have found themselves facing a similar difficulty in reconciling the irreconcilable: a virtuous queen who was a usurper. Certainly they continued to debate and defend their own choices with regards to loyalty to James II or to William III. As princess, Dryden’s stoic heroine looks back on the softer days when Tancred sanctioned a life of “pleasure unrestrain’d”; Sigismonda’s retrospective speech bears a resemblance to James Winn’s depiction of Mary’s and Anne’s childhoods, where extravagant masques and libertine behavior surrounded them:24 My tender Age in Luxury was train’d, With idle Ease and Pageants entertain’d; My Hours my own, my Pleasures unrestrain’d. So bred, no wonder if I took the Bent That seem’d ev’n warranted by thy Consent; For, when the Father is too fondly kind, Such Seeds he sows, such Harvest shall he find. (Sigismonda and Guiscardo 436–2) The same argument could be made about that other indulgent relationship between David and Absalom: With secret Joy, indulgent David view’d His Youthful Image in his Son renew’d: To all his wishes Nothing he deny’d, And made the charming Annabel his Bride. What faults he had (for who from faults is free?) His Father coud not, or he woud not see. Some warm excesses, which the Law forbore, Were constru’d Youth that purg’d by boyling o’r:

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This critique of Charles II recalls a memory of Edward III: his liberality toward all of his children supposedly laid the groundwork for the struggle for power between the Houses of York and Lancaster, and Dryden’s contemporary Edmund Bohun had leveraged this precedent as a warning: when princes give their subjects too much liberty, those subjects become fearless in the face of their father and rise up in anarchy.25 The repetition of this indulgent image reinforces the comparison between Tancred and David and the likelihood that Dryden is measuring the monarchy of Sigismonda and Guiscardo against that in Absalom and Achitophel. If this is a covert analysis of James II, it is not an endorsement. Theseus, who might be called the ideal monarch of the Fables, is, like Tancred, an absolute ruler, but he stands in contrast to Tancred’s actions. His relationship with Hippolyta is measured. He has no children and therefore is disconnected from those natural passions watched over by the Furies. The forms and ceremonies of judgment in Palamon and Arcite also serve to mitigate the arbitrary will of the monarch, and Theseus listens to the counsel of his wife and subjects. As a result he chooses to be merciful to Palamon and Arcite rather than to proceed with the prescribed death sentences as punishment for Palamon’s escape and Arcite’s return from exile. All of his decisions are public, and everyone is aware of the dispensation that the two knights receive. Curse on th’unpard’ning Prince, whom Tears can draw To no Remorse; who rules by Lions Law; And deaf to Pray’rs, by no Submission bow’d, Rends all alike; the Penitent and Proud: (PA II.344–7) Where Theseus supplies a model for monarchy, Tancred illustrates the monarch turned tyrant. Because they are stories, and not one-for-one political allegories, Dryden is free to speculate about absolute monarchy gone awry. It seems that the presence of paternal passions in one, and the absence in the other, is a factor in the overall equation: Tancred’s passion precludes the rational and deliberative actions of which Theseus is capable. In addition to broader themes of good governance, Dryden depicts characteristics that align not only Sigismonda with Mary II but also Tancred with James II. Tancred begins as a valiant and majestic prince, and certainly the Duke of York was an icon for English bravery. For some, James II later became a symbol of arbitrary power and unrelenting rule. His methods were far-reaching and provoked widespread reaction: in two years, James replaced 2,000 protestants with Catholics in Ireland and

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England, fomenting a widespread fear of tyranny and popery. His execution of 300 Monmouth supporters was shocking and viewed as extreme. “While a nobler monarch might have tempered justice with mercy, and a gentler one might have sooner slaked his thirst for blood, Monmouth’s rebels were traitors and executed for treason.”26 Though there are obvious differences, Dryden’s portrait of Tancred suggests a similar transformation from hero to tyrant: While Norman Tancred in Salerno reign’d, The Title of a Gracious Prince he gain’d; Till turn’d a Tyrant in his latter Days, He lost the Lustre of his former Praise; And from the bright Meridian where he stood, Descending, dipp’d his Hands in Lovers’ Blood. (1–6) The “Lover’s Blood” is appropriately ambiguous in that it doesn’t name the lovers. There is coercion in Sigismonda’s relationship with her father; in her relationship with Guiscardo, there is choice. It has been a commonly held view that the multiple tyrants in Fables serve as commentary on the Dutch king. In some cases, this may be true. However, in this particular fable, there are not many parallels to William III. The first obstacle in comparing William III to Tancred lies in the heart of Tancred’s tyranny—his role as a father. William III crossed the ocean from one country to take the throne in another, bringing with him the culture and language of his own home. As such, he could hardly be considered a metaphorical father to all of England. Furthermore, it was well known throughout Europe that William III was unable to have children. Nor can William’s cool control be compared to Tancred’s undisciplined passion. Dryden may be exploring opposing contemporary opinions regarding Mary II in the fable, but the tyrant in Sigismonda and Guiscardo has more in common with her father than with her husband.27 In the royalist theoretical tracts, the daughter still is in the wrong for rebelling against the king, yet if she obeys him, she wrongs her husband. The moral to the fable, which follows this patriarchal order yet ignores the complications that the story produces, falls flat: Thus she for Disobedience justly dy’d; The Sire was justly punish’d for his Pride: The Youth, least guilty, suffer’d for th’Offence Of Duty violated to his Prince; Who late repenting of his cruel Deed, One common Sepulcher for both decreed; Intomb’d the wretched Pair in Royal State, And on their Monument inscrib’d their Fate. (750–7)

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Dryden’s conclusion to the fable follows the party line of Filmer and Bohun on the surface, yet the reader’s and Dryden’s sympathies remain with Sigismonda: Dryden connects Sigismonda’s suicide with Hylonome’s, which Dryden qualifies as “wonderfully moving.”28 Furthermore, Sigismonda’s persuasive political arguments fall within the sphere of women’s issues, every bit as urgent to many of his contemporaries, as Mary Astell makes clear (1700): “How much so ever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny” (Some Reflections Upon Marriage 29).29 Judith Sloman compares Sigismonda’s speeches to the “language of Restoration feminism” (143), and I agree that Dryden responds to a readership for whom political debates mattered deeply on multiple levels. Mary Clarke, a Whig, wrote to her husband in April of 1690 that “the men do such little good” that once William left for Ireland, Queen Mary “will certainly have a parliament of women and see if they will agree better.”30 There is something similar in Sigismonda’s resolute temperament, echoed in the Wife of Bath’s female parliament and in Hippolyta’s counsel to Theseus (which she provides as leader of her “bright Quire”). Corse demonstrates that Boccaccio’s tale had always generated feminist debates: 15th-century Italian humanists fell into “pro-Ghismonda” and “pro-Tancredi” camps with regards to the limits of parental authority, autocratic rule, female desire, and subjugation of women.31 It seems clear that Dryden is choosing fables that evoke passionate responses and internalize the polarities of the contemporary English experience. Sigismonda valiantly justifies her love for Guiscardo and claims she looked through her father’s eyes to find a worthy subject for her love. From this perspective, she balances filial with conjugal piety, something not even the most adroit political theorists could reconcile in the 1690s, and Tancred’s reaction to the marriage appears even more cruel and tyrannical. Athena’s third option in the Oresteia, in form of a public trial and the need for persuasion, is not forthcoming in Sigismonda and Guiscardo. But if we look from Mary to her sister, England’s anticipation and idealization of Anne as the future queen meant a potential reconciliation of the parliamentary choice of a monarch with the traditional hereditary line.

Meleager and Atalanta Betrayal between parent and child is at the heart of Meleager and Atalanta, and Aeschylus’s Chorus remembers Althea, queen and mother, by name. When the prince is born, the Furies toss a burning brand into the fire and tell Althea that her son will die when the fire consumes it. She jumps from her bed, quenches the flame, and locks away the log. Years later, Althea learns first that Meleager has killed the boar that was plaguing the nation and next that he has killed her brothers. Inner furies

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torment her—loyalties first to her son, next to her brothers, and finally to her father. She returns the brand to the fire, and Meleager dies. In direct contrast to the secret anguish of the mother and to the unseen fire that kills her son, the hunt to kill the boar is a public event where everyone goes after the beast that has ravaged the country. Meleager succeeds in the kill and offers the prize to Atalanta, his new love, who was the first to strike the boar with her arrow. His uncles are jealous: All envy’d; but the Thestian Brethren show’d The least Respect, and thus they vent their Spleen aloud: Lay down those honour’d Spoils, nor think to share, Weak Woman as thou art, the Prize of War: Ours is the Title, thine a foreign Claim, Since Meleagros from our Lineage came. Trust not thy Beauty; but restore the Prize, Which he, besotted on that Face and Eyes, Would rend from us: At this, inflam’d with Spite, From her they snatch the Gift, from him the Givers Right. But soon th’impatient Prince his Fauchion drew, And cry’d, Ye Robbers of another’s Due, Now learn the Diff’rence, at your proper Cost, Betwixt true Valour, and an empty Boast. (Meleager and Atalanta 222–35) Dryden makes clear that rightful ownership is at stake: “Ours is the Title, thine a foreign Claim.” The argument for lineage doesn’t fare well when the misogynistic uncles insist on it, and they look even worse when Dryden gives them the line that connects them to his metaphor for usurpation. “From her they snatch the Gift, from him the Givers Right.” While this seizure is only obliquely sexual, the seizure connotes rapio, and the male-female tension is central to the confrontation. While Tancred, a tyrant, claimed a “Father’s privilege,” expropriating for himself the term normally associated with the rights of subjects—Meleager, a future king, protects unflinchingly his prerogative, his new love, and his potential progeny. Atalanta is modest but quite capable: they are the only two who strike the boar successfully. Mary often displayed strength, particularly in her ability to fill a king’s role in her husband’s absence, and she was both young and beautiful, striking a parallel between her skills and attributes with those of Atalanta. Atalanta, a competent warrior who remains in the shadows of Meleager’s actions as prince, may mirror Mary’s choice to cede her right as queen to her husband. Meleager claims his prerogative as future monarch, yet he also claims the right of merit, since it is he who killed the boar. William and Mary claim the right of lineage leading up to the Revolution of 1688, but both also held strong convictions about

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their rightful place in England. Mary II believed that she was saving both the Church of England and her own right to the crown. William III was protecting his place in line, behind his wife, to inherit the throne, and he was protecting Holland from England’s foreign policy, which bolstered Louis XIV. There is no question that the “Thestian Brethren” provoke revulsion, yet Meleager still killed his uncles, and Mary still overthrew her father. Yet if these are meditations on Mary, the narratives also make her human. Althea’s torment, as Meleager’s mother who ultimately kills her son, is central to the fable. Her lament extends for 77 lines and portrays Althea as a pitiable character controlled by conflicting loyalties.32 While Althea and Mary II come down on opposite sides of loyalty to father versus husband, the intensity of the fable illuminates the heightened emotions involved in choices often made within royal families, most recently among the Stuarts and especially with regards to Mary II, whose diary is filled with guilt over her decision.33 With Althea, the irony is intensified even further—while she is pitiable because she seems to be controlled by the dictates of her Furies, she nevertheless has absolute power over the life of Meleager. There also is the competent Atalanta who bears comparison to the capable queen. Comparisons in Fables are rarely exact parallels, but the similarities between fable and fact enrich our understanding of the human anguish that was involved in the saga for the crown. Meleager and Atalanta provokes the argument that nephews and uncles often come to blows when contending for the crown. In Patriarcha non Monarcha (1681), James Tyrrell writes of King John and King Arthur: And where no Power could intervene, it was decided by War, and sometimes single combats, which Historians mention to have been waged between uncles and nephews contending for the principality . . . where the succession of the empire is not settled by such lawes or customs, it lies continually liable to be disputed between the sons or grandsons of the last prince, nor can ever be decided but by the sword. (55) In this and in his subsequent Bibliotecha Politica (1694), Tyrrell writes at length against the feasibility of legitimate descent. He gives historical precedents to show over and again that succession is not straightforward and that it never has been. In Bibliotecha Politica, Freeman, the persona representing republican views, reasons that conflicts over succession began as early as Cain, who “forfeited” his inheritance after murdering Abel, an allusion to the legalese that facilitated James II’s overthrow: So then here is a Forfeiture, and an Abdication of this Divine Right of Succession in the very first Descent; whereas indeed I supposed,

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that this Divine Right had been at least as unforfeitable as the Crown of England. (67)34 Meleager’s uncles represent the inevitable envy and power struggle that requires the violence described by Tyrrell. While the uncles defend their proximity to the crown, Althea likewise is critically aware that her decision will end the royal line: Let the whole Household in one Ruine fall, And may Diana’s Curse o’ertake us all. Shall Fate to happy Oeneus still allow One Son, while Thestius stands depriv’d of two? (301–4) ** Perish this impious, this detested Son; Perish his Sire, and perish I withal; And let the Houses Heir and the hop’d Kingdom fall. (319–21) Central to the burning brand is primogeniture and the theme of the heirless royal family not only in William and Mary but also in the two monarchs before them. Dryden’s poetry equates the red brand with the line of succession: “And that, while thus preserv’d, preserv’d her heir” (264). The upheaval that occurs privately also has an enormous impact on the nation. The boar in Meleager and Atalanta ravages the crops and destroys the peace, and a tension exists between this public event and the secret struggle in Althea’s bedroom, where she ultimately decides to kill her son. Her decision will affect the nation as thoroughly as had the plague of the beast: “But Cynthia now had all her Fury spent, / Not with less Ruine than a Race, content” (395).35

Lady Mary Somerset Butler, or the Du(t)chess of Ormond(e) If Sigismonda, Althea, and Atalanta resonate with Mary’s personal and political choices, the Duchess of Ormond shares the queen’s name, and we might look again to the dedicatory poem for royal imagery that emphasizes the Plantagenet status of Lady Mary Somerset, who appears twice more at the beginning of both Palamon and Arcite and Cymon and Iphigenia—two poems whose narratives are the inverse of one another, one centered in chivalry, the other in realpolitik, neither perfect. Beginning with the dedications of Fables to the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, Dryden emphasizes the similarities that may be found in the generations of both families. The first sentences addressed to the duke simultaneously

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praise the man himself and express deference to his father and grandfather, to whom Dryden had dedicated other works: “Tho’ I am very short of the age of Nestor, yet I have liv’d to a third Generation of your House; and by your Grace’s Favour am admitted still to hold from you by the same Tenure” (“Dedication to the Duke” 17). These generations of kings, queens, and legendary figures in Fables also are pertinent to Dryden’s use of the platonic year in “To Her Grace the Dutchess”: As when the Stars, in their Etherial Race, At length have roll’d around the Liquid Space, At certain Periods they resume their Place, From the same Point of Heav’n their Course advance, And move in Measures of their former Dance; Thus, after length of Ages, she returns, Restor’d in you, and the same Place adorns; Or you perform her Office in the Sphere, Born of her Blood, and make a new Platonick Year. (“To the Dutchess” 21–9) According to the New English Dictionary, the Platonic year is “A cycle imagined by some ancient astronomers, in which the heavenly bodies were supposed to go through all their possible movements and return to their original relative positions (after which, according to some, all events would recur in the same order as before).”36 In this passage, Dryden is referring to Joan of Kent, who is “restor’d” in the later Plantagenet, Lady Mary Somerset, Duchess of Ormond.37 Mary Somerset’s father was the first Duke of Beaufort, and a descendent of John de Beaufort, who was the illegitimate son of John of Gaunt. The Beaufort line of Plantagenets was the same as that of Henry VII and therefore of the Tudors and the Stuarts.38 Joan of Kent was married to Edward the Black Prince, a descendant herself of Edward I, and mother to Richard II. When Dryden addresses the duchess in the passage, it is within this rich context of the Plantagenet family and of the Tudors and Stuarts, who are their descendants. She represents English royalty, and she is a miraculous return to greatness. Yet there are other patterns that have recurred among the English royalty, and the betrayals within the Stuart family are no different from the fight for power among the Plantagenets. What is said of Henry IV could be said about William III: one king rules like the next, and the current fight for power resembles those prior to it. In “To the Dutchess,” Dryden compares Emily in Palamon and Arcite to both the duchess and the legendary Joan of Kent (11–14), and in so doing he makes direct references to Edward III and the Plantagenet “race divine” (30). The duke and duchess become the future king and queen of Thebes: “A Palamon in him, in you an Emily” (39). The duke’s ancestral line is as important as that of the duchess. It is one of the oldest in Europe, and he shares a Dutch heritage with William III: The duke and the king

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had the same great-grandfather, William I of Nassau and Orange. This parallel fits nicely with the current hope that Ormond would receive the vice-royalty in Ireland, such as his father and his grandfather had received before him. Both husband and wife, therefore, are reincarnations of their ancestors and represent simultaneously service to and generations of royalty. William III, it should be pointed out, is also part of English royalty in his own right, not only as consort to Mary II. His mother was sister to both James II and Charles II, daughter to Charles I. The ancestral lines of the duke and duchess encourage us to consider the patterns that they may represent. Both William III and the Duke of Ormond are known for their military bravery. The dedication to the duke presents his magnanimity as a counterpart to his force and loyalty, but Joan of Kent and the Duchess of Ormond present another counterpart in the larger work of Fables; they are known for their beauty and, by implication, their gentleness. In the poem, the duchess is harbinger of the duke’s arrival to Ireland: Hibernia, prostrate at Your Feet, ador’d, In You, the Pledge of her expected Lord; Due to her Isle; a venerable Name; His Father and his Grandsire known to Fame: Aw’d by that House, accustom’d to command, The sturdy Kerns in due Subjection stand; Nor hear the Reins in any Foreign Hand. (53–9) Ireland greets Mary Somerset in expectation of her husband, the Duke of Ormond, “For Venus is the promise of the sun” (63). Alan Roper was the first to assert both that the sun is allegory for the king and that the arrival of the duke and duchess presents a stark contrast to the royal couple in England.39 It also seems possible that the duchess could represent, rather than counter, the image of the queen. Mary II legitimated William III. She also allowed England to consent to a Dutchman as its king, since she was a Stuart; therefore, they did not “hear the reins in any foreign hand.”40 “That house” that commands awe could be applied to the House of Orange, to which William III’s “father and his grandsire” were the most recent cornerstones before him. It also could be applied to the Stuarts, descendants of the Plantagenets, the family to which William and Mary both belonged. Dryden’s use of Joan of Kent and Mary Somerset is interesting in light of similarities they share with Mary II: Like Her, of equal Kindred to the Throne, You keep her Conquests, and extend your own: (“To the Dutchess” 19–20) **

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Like Joan of Kent in the poem, Mary II is “of equal kindred to the throne,” second in line to inherit it after James’s newborn son. According to Dryden, the duchess “performs” the “office” of Joan of Kent. Mary II “performs” the “office” of English queen, as Elizabeth I did before her. She also could be said to “perform” an “office” similar to that of Joan of Kent, who as mother to King Richard was involved in advising her son in national affairs. Likewise, Mary II certainly was involved in the government of her husband and held parliament during his lengthy absences, when he was on the continent and in the battlefield. If Lady Mary Somerset’s lineage is meant to allude to the Stuarts as well as the Tudors and the Plantagenets in this poem, these allusions add a particularly bittersweet irony to the image of the dove sent forth from the ark. Charles II was the “royal dove” in the Prologue to The Unhappy Favourite (1682): When first the Ark was Landed on the Shore, And Heaven had vow’d to curse the Ground no more, ** The Dove was sent to View the Waves Decrease, And first brought back to Man the Pledge of Peace: ‘Tis needless to apply when those appear Who bring the Olive, and who Plant it here. ** The Ark is open’d to dismiss the Train, And People with a better Race the Plain. (1–2; 5–8; 11–12) Compare the similar images in “To the Dutchess”: The Waste of Civil Wars, their Towns destroy’d, Pales unhonor’d, Ceres unemploy’d, Were all forgot; and one Triumphant Day Wip’d all the Tears of three Campaigns away. Blood, Rapines, Massacres, were cheaply bought, So mighty Recompense Your Beauty brought.

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As when the Dove returning, bore the Mark Of Earth restor’d to the long-lab’ring Ark, The Relics of Mankind, secure of Rest, Op’d ev’ry Window to receive the Guest, And the fair Bearer of the Message bless’d; (64–74) Rather than an olive branch and promise of peace, Mary Somerset brings beauty as a peaceful emblem, “so mighty recompense” that blood and massacres as payment are a bargain. In “To the Dutchess,” Dryden recalls the wars in Ireland, battle histories her family would know well: the first Duke of Ormond was lord lieutenant for Charles I at the time of the Cromwellian massacres at Drogheda and Wexword, and the second Duke of Ormond, to whom Dryden dedicates Fables, first voted against “abdication” of James II but, once all was decided, fought for William in the Battle of the Boyne. But the Civil War was brutal for all of England, not just the Irish, and perhaps Dryden is implying that England has forgotten too quickly the price of executing their king,“so cheaply bought,” in its willingness to overthrow the monarchy again in exchange for Mary II and the promise of a Protestant England. Noah and his family are “the relics of mankind” in the later poem, rather than the “better race,” as Dryden characterizes those who arrive with Charles. If Mary II replaces Lady Mary Somerset and England Ireland in this metaphor, she assures “rest” for England’s future, but the “relics of mankind” are weary, and in light of the Prologue from 1682, this is a diminished conclusion, rather than a hopeful beginning.41 It must be remembered, however, that at the time of Prologue to the Unhappy Favourite, the period of hopeful beginnings already had passed, and the earlier poem also contains images of “civil broils,” with a warning not to allow their recurrence. Though the date of Charles II’s attendance of the play for which the prologue was written is uncertain, it is possible that it was shortly after his return from the Oxford Parliament, and certainly it was in the midst of the Exclusion Crisis. Political turmoil again is described in terms of a storm, and it suits the temperament of the nation: Must England still the Scene of Changes be, Tost and Tempestuous like our Ambient Sea? Must still our Weather and our Wills agree? (18–20) ** What Civil Broils have cost we knew too well, Oh let it be enough that once we fell,

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In this passage, there is no indication of anything “cheaply bought.” The image of the dove goes back to the Restoration, and the Prologue shows us how close England has come to shattering all those early hopes, as Dryden had expressed them in Astraea Redux. If Mary’s beauty, or Protestantism, brought peace, it is likely that Dryden considered it to have been purchased at great cost. This deliberate layering of images from past poems to add meaning to a present work is characteristic of Dryden’s writing. It also is an example of artistic detachment, to combine past and present poetry in order to reflect a meaningful historical pattern. A final image of rebellion links Prologue to the Unhappy Favourite and “To the Dutchess.” In the Prologue dedicated to King Charles, we read: “Our land’s an Eden” (27). “All that our monarch would for us ordain / Is but t’injoy the blessings of his reign” (25–6). This line, in turn, echoes Absalom and Achitophel: Achitophel, grown weary to possess A lawfull Fame, and lazy Happiness; Disdain’d the Golden fruit to gather free, And lent the Croud his Arm to shake the Tree. (200–3) It must be pointed out that the tragic protagonist in The Unhappy Favourite was the Earl of Essex, the would-be usurper of Elizabeth I. The earl’s troubles began with a failed commission in Ireland, where he served in the same position that the Duke of Ormond sought, and in which his forefathers served. The application of the historical play, first performed in 1682, to the troubles of the Exclusion Crisis, is obvious enough. Dryden may be using this same material to create political meaning in “To the Dutchess.” If Lady Mary Somerset represents Mary II in “To the Dutchess,” the content of the play about rebellion adds further significance to Dryden’s description of the duchess’s illness in those same terms, particularly since smallpox was considered by many to be Mary II’s punishment for her rebellion against her father.42 The trope of comparing physical health to the health of the state was a common one: Now past the Danger, let the Learn’d begin Th’ Enquiry, where Disease could enter in; **

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Which of the Four Ingredients could rebel; And where, imprison’d in so sweet a Cage, A Soul might well be pleas’d to pass an Age. (“To the Dutchess” 111–12; 117–19) Dryden follows these passages with the often quoted allusion to William III’s request for a standing army, thereby further suggesting a parallel between the duchess’s illness and the body politic: A Subject in his Prince may claim a Right, Nor suffer him with Strength impair’d to fight; Till Force returns, his Ardour we restrain, And curb his Warlike Wish to cross the Main. (“To the Dutchess” 107–10) Charles’s subjects do not know how to enjoy the Eden he has provided, and something within Mary Somerset has rebelled against her “faultless frame,” and denied itself the pleasure of “so sweet a cage.” Rebellion is the common thread. Lady Mary Somerset’s lack of a son and Dryden’s explicit references to her missing heir create another parallel to Mary II.43 So does the elaborate metaphor about needlework. Mary II’s childlessness and her smallpox were considered punishments by God.44 Dryden’s compliment in the poem, which compares the duchess’s art to that of Penelope and Dido, cements her heroic status.45 Likewise, Mary II also was known for her love of needlework, and satirists used the image of the queen’s embroidery against her husband when he lost all composure after her death. The first burlesque of George Stepney’s elegy for the queen included this passage: Sure Death’s a Jacobite that thus bewitches; His soul wears petticoats, and hers the breeches. Alas! Alas! we’ve erred in our commanders: Will should have knotted, and Moll gone for Flanders. (POAS 5: 445) Allusions to Helen of Troy and epic warfare throughout “To the Dutchess” make clear the extent to which the duchess is an embodiment of political themes. Dryden begins by comparing Chaucer to Homer and Virgil: “He match’d their beauties, where they most excel; / Of love sung better, and of arms as well” (5–6). He then transitions into a comparison of the duchess with Joan of Kent, but the beauty to whom he refers could also be Helen: . . . behold, What Pow’r the Charms of Beauty had of old;

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These eyes “rul’d the rival nations,” and “three contending princes made her prize” (15–16). The duchess here evokes thoughts of beauty first, but also of war, power and rebellion. This is reinforced by the comparison in the first lines of the poem to Emily, who also is an emblem of beauty and the cause of war and rebellion. Penelope’s knitting and unknitting sets the stage for the slaughter to come in Homer and in Virgil, “Elisa’s” encounter with Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, is a portrayal of deception that brings about her personal and political demise, while “old imperial dames” and “fair Elisa” evoke an image of the powerful queen Dido and, perhaps, Elizabeth. Dryden’s letter to the duchess, dated “The first day of winter, 1698,” makes even more explicit what already was clear in the poem. Dryden combines the personal with the historical, and connects the duchess not only with her Plantagenet ancestry but also with William of Orange: What Ireland was before your coming Thither I cannot tell, but I am sure you have brought over one manufacture thither which is not of the growth of the country, and that is beauty. But at the same time, you have impoverished your Native Land by taking more away than you have left behind. We Jacobites have no more reason to thank you than we have our present King who has enriched Holland with the wealth of England. If this be all the effect of his going over the water for a whole Summer together and of your Graces leaving us for a much longer time, we have reason to complain if not of both, yet at least of one of you for the Sun has never Shone on us since you went into Eclipse on Ireland, and if we have another Such a yeare we shall have a famine of Beauty as well as Bread, for if the last be the Staff of Life to the rest of the World the first is so to the Nation of Poets; who feed only at the eyes.46 In the letter, Mary Somerset’s “beauty” refers first to her physical appearance, and secondly to her appreciation of the arts, specifically Dryden’s poetry. When she goes to Ireland, she takes both versions of beauty with her. Dryden parallels her departure with that of William III to Holland, who takes with him the “wealth of England” in more ways than one when he “crosses the water for a whole Summer together.” That Dryden frames William’s departure in the form of a lover’s complaint to the duchess flatters both of them. The duchess, who gave Dryden £500 for the poem he wrote in her honor, is both “Beauty” and “Bread” to the poet, though he makes it clear that he prefers her company to her financial support. William represents, in part, the “Bread” of the nation, and Dryden’s

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compliment to the duchess implies that William’s presence and absence correlates with England’s abundance or “famine.” In his opening address, Dryden complains that the duchess’s decisions have affected him personally, yet he further compliments her in his assumption that her actions have an impact on history, though he pretends to expect her to care more about him, as represented by “the poor English,” than any sort of large trajectory: But you Plantagenets never think of these mean Concernments; the whole race of you have been given to make voyages into the Holy Land to Conquer Infidells or at least to Subdue France without caring what becomes of your naturall subjects the poor English.47 Edward I was the Plantagenet who took part in the Crusades as prince of England. While he was away, his father, King Henry III, died, and England waited for two years for Edward I to return and assume the throne. Edward III, as explored in Chapter 1, led efforts to “subdue France.” William’s wars aimed to do the same. By creating these patterns that connect Lady Mary Somerset to the Plantagenets, to Charles II, and to themes of power and usurpation that were relevant to both the Plantagenets and to the Stuarts, Dryden addresses through the duchess the issues that were at the heart of William and Mary’s reign: for many, the king and queen were symbols of usurpation and rebellion; for others, they were harbingers of stability, and ultimately peace. These patterns are an example of the distance Dryden is able to enforce on his own perspective. At one level, “To the Dutchess” is a gallant piece of flattery to a patroness, but Dryden was incapable, at least in Fables, of writing such a piece without connecting this unpromising material with some of the burning political issues of his own time, and then seeing those questions in terms of a much larger pattern of English history. A hack could write the flattery. It took a major poet to situate it in such a context. Like Numa, who sees in himself a continuation of the great heroes Helenus and Aeneas, or like the Nestor who weaves together past, present and future for his audience, Dryden is creating a palimpsest of English greatness and bravery, but also of power and betrayal. And by perceiving these patterns in all their subtlety and writing of them as evenhandedly as he does, Dryden has transcended both satire and panegyric without sacrificing personal concern or patriotism.

Dryden’s Marys The century brought forth many formidable English queens, and those specific to Dryden’s England certainly held sway. By the end of her life, for example, Mary II had won over not only Whigs like Mary Clarke but also the majority of Tories, and while many English were attracted to her

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cheerfulness, her beauty, her devotion to the Church of England, and her dedication to domestic virtues, Mary’s firmness of mind and her ability to rule also were widely admired.48 In a similar admiration for matriarchal strength, when Anne visited Bath following her coronation, she was greeted by throngs of women dressed as Amazons.49 Susanna Centlivre even declared that Anne was the greatest of three English queens (Boadicea, Elizabeth, and Anne) because Anne “shook the man that aim’d at Universal Sway.”50 Meanwhile, Maria Beatrice in St. Germain cultivated an intellectual coterie of women at court, of which Dryden seems to have been aware when he mentions Madame de Scudéry as translator of Chaucer into French—though there is no evidence that she actually did this, there is evidence that Mary of Modena’s court translated de Scudéry into English—and Dryden himself used de Scudéry’s histories as a source for at least one (perhaps several) of his early plays.51 Dryden’s later poetry incorporates these royal figures into his thoughts on politics, religion, and art, and his poems To Anne Killigrew and Eleonora are part of these meditations as they reflect contemporary moments within the reigns of Mary of Modena and Mary II. The first poem sets a precedent for and a connection to the second. Eleonora presents us with an heroic poem that incorporates mixed forms of religious terminology, further reinforcing the possibility that Dryden intentionally engages language that could reflect both the Catholic and Protestant courts, and Eleonora’s “pattern” is one that both Daniel Defoe and William Walsh apply to Mary II in their public eulogies for the queen. Both of these aspects of Eleonora speak to Dryden’s resonance with readers in the 1690s and the similar stamina of Fables that reached far into the 18th century. Finally, Monument to a Fair Lady, written in memory of the death of another Mary, implicitly compares the pristine portrait of a completely private life with the inevitable imperfections that accompany experience, whether in the life of a satirist or the life of a queen.52

To Anne Killigrew Dryden’s ode To Anne Killigrew acknowledges her as the familial legacy of her father (through Pythagorean-like transfusion and through her own reading of her father’s books); alludes to her as literary legacy of Katherine Philips (who herself was a well-known poet, was compared to Sappho, and was eulogized by Cowley after she, like Killigrew, died of smallpox); creates parallel imagery of her beauty with that of Queen Mary of Modena; pairs the “Warlike Mind” of James II (in her portrait of him) with Killigrew’s “Warlike Brother on the Seas”; compares her artistic conquests to the dangerous military ambitions of Louis XIV; creates the strange metaphor of Killigrew as a fireball; calls Killigrew’s own poetic imagery of Noah’s Ark “strange” in a work she presented to the queen; and places her in the sky among the Pleiades. The poem’s

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comprehensive imagery demonstrates that this is no ordinary eulogy, and it sets a precedent so that we may expect to find within Dryden’s elegies political and artistic concerns a royal parallel within a private life.53 Such a combination would have interested not only Dryden but also his miscellany readers. Barbara Benedict writes that “by bridging the political and personal discourse these compendia offered identification with public life through reading.”54 Though To Killigrew and Eleonora are not part of any miscellany, women were interested in the elegies, satires, and ballads that miscellanies often provided, and To Killigrew and Eleonora bridge these multiple interests. Deborah Kennedy even suggests Dryden’s popularity with women was due in part to his elegy To Killigrew.55 Furthermore, because the publishers of these genres were concerned with garnering a wide market, the pieces in a miscellany were meant to “mediate” between audiences and authors, both prompting a formation of a canon and reflecting the desires of the readers.56 Killigrew’s art in Dryden’s poem is intertwined with her dedication to James II and Mary of Modena. After 1688, Mary of Modena would preside over an exiled court dedicated to reading, translating and acting, all of which empowered the women who surrounded her on intellectual terms in the face of scarce resources—there was not even enough food to eat.57 Before her exile, she also was a dedicated patron of the arts within England, and she and Henrietta Maria were linked in the English imagination by art that exerted royal influence and by a devotion to Catholicism.58 Louis XIV also centralized the country’s art by housing it in Versailles, where it symbolized and reflected the monarch’s power.59 Considering both the English fears that James II was emulating the tyrant across the water and James’s own disregard for the dangers inherent in this public image disaster, Dryden’s choice to insert an allusion to Louis XIV’s European conquest is unexpected. Dryden creates a surprising transition from the queen to a metaphor of a “Ball of fire” which he transposes onto Killigrew: “Still with a greater Blaze she shone, / And her bright Soul broke out on ev’ry side. / What next she had design’d Heaven only knows, / To such Immod’rate Growth her Conquest rose, / That Fate alone its Progress could oppose” (VII.144–8). These lines are tied so closely to the preceding ones about the queen that it seems Dryden fears fate will put an end to the immoderate conquests of James and Mary of Modena, expressing, as Wheeler notes, a “fundamental uncertainty . . . about the future of the king, of the nation, of Dryden himself.”60 No less surprising is Dryden’s choice of the word “Assizes” in the last stanza of the poem. The title page of Anne Killigrew’s Poems, with Dryden’s ode as a preface, is dated September 30, 1685. The timing coincides with the Bloody Assizes after the Monmouth Rebellion that took place between August 26 and September 23. James II’s revenge, involving more than 1,400 death sentences, shocked the nation. After the Assize in Taunton, the hanged remains of 144 of the convicted were displayed

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throughout the county as a warning. Such recent contemporary events make the following passage all the more vivid: The Judging God shall close the Book of Fate; And there the last Assizes keep, For those who Wake, and those who Sleep; When ratling Bones together fly, From the four Corners of the Skie, When Sinews o’re the Skeletons are spread, Those cloath’d with Flesh, and Life inspires the Dead; (181–7) The poem moves quickly to “Sacred Poets” who will rise before all others to meet the heavens, but “ratling Bones” and “Skeletons . . . spread” invoke a memory of a different sort of dead, perhaps more like the rebels whose remains were strewn so disrespectfully (or like the body of Hector after his duel with Achilles). We have no evidence that Dryden’s “Judging God” would come to the same conclusions as James’s Assizes; Dryden’s advice to James II in both Britannia Redeviva and Threnodia Augustalis favors mercy over force. While “ratling Bones together fly,” Killigrew rises lark-like: The Sacred Poets first shall hear the Sound, And formost from the Tomb shall bound: For they are cover’d with the lightest Ground And streight, with in-born Vigour, on the Wing, Like mounting Larkes, to the New Morning sing. There Thou, Sweet Saint, before the Quire shalt go, As Harbinger of Heav’n, the Way to show, The Way which thou so well hast learn’d below. (X.188–95) Richetti calls this passage “the terrific spectacle of the Last Judgment” in an “overtly Christian” poem (Reverand also refers to Dryden’s recent conversion when remarking on this imagery).61 The rapid transition from one image to the next may suggest that there is little difference between the souls of rebels and those of royals in the eyes of God, and that grace is offered to both. This suggestion is further reinforced in Fables by Nestor’s description of the metamorphosis of Caeneus and of Cygnus in Ovid XII, who also turn to birds: I saw it too: With golden Feathers bright: Nor e’re before, beheld so strange a Sight: Whom Mopsus viewing, as it soar’d around Our Troop, and heard the Pinions rattling Sound,

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All hail he cry’d, thy Countries Grace and Love; Once first of Men below; now first of Birds above. (694–9) Dryden recalls the close juxtaposition of “ratling bones” with “The Sacred Poets first shall hear the Sound, / And formost from the Tomb shall bound” when he describes Caeneus’s “Pinions rattling Sound” and Mopsus’s ave atque vale.62 Looking ahead to Ceyx and Alcyone in Fables, Dryden’s development of Alcyone—that of a bird whose “short excursions tries” as she bids farewell to her dead husband—deepens the association of poetic flights with poignant death that is at the heart of the imagery of Killigrew’s poetic soul taking flight. Philip Smallwood has noted that Alexander Pope draws from this same metaphor and imagery when he mourns the loss of his friend and fellow poet William Walsh.63 In the cases of Ovid XII and Ceyx and Alcyone in Fables, the souls of both military heroes and lovers rise in flight. The images in To Anne Killigrew had established something similar—perhaps a common compassion for all the dead on both sides of a rebellion or a war. When Nestor links the death of Caeneus, killed by brutal centaurs, and Cygnus, killed by heroic Achilles, he reinforces such a possibility. This combines Dryden’s classical and Christian imagery and transcends polemical hatred with a communal commemoration in a poem Richetti calls “a wonder of tonal balance in which extravagant panegyric and baroque sublimity interact productively with neoclassical clarity and conversational ease.”64

Eleonora If we compare the uncertainty of metaphors in the poem for Anne Killigrew with the monarchs to whom she is linked in the poem, it becomes reasonable, if surprising, to look for unexpected parallels between Eleonora and Mary II. My intention is not to contradict the common reading that Eleonora is a singular source of virtue “in this bad age” but rather to complicate that reading by adding to the discussion the ambiguities I believe Dryden creates, beginning with the possibility of pairing Killigrew and Eleonora with the female monarchs to whom their families were loyal and continuing with an examination of the imagery and allusions in each poem in light of such a pairing. Eleonora (1692) was written for the Earl of Abingdon after his wife had died, and his choices of allegiance during critical moments of the Revolution were dramatically different from those of Dryden. These differences are an important part of the story. Appointed Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire 1674–1687 and again after James’s exile, James Bertie (later the Earl of Abingdon) was at the head of consolidated royalist power and was asked in the summer of 1681 to assemble the jury and to oversee the retrial of Stephen College, who had been accused of treason.65 The first

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trial had been thrown out by a largely Whig grand jury in Middlesex, and Bertie oversaw the second, which, though the jurists had been carefully chosen, proved riddled with many obstacles. Deliberations continued until nearly 3  am and finally produced a guilty verdict. This critical proceeding was a precursor to Shaftesbury’s trial, and Bertie received the earldom as a result. In light of the Bloody Assizes, it is noteworthy that Stephen College was allowed an hour’s debate with the sheriff before execution, that he was certified dead before being dismembered, that Charles II rescinded the order to display his head, and that his body was returned to the family for a proper burial. If Dryden’s To Killigrew intentionally evokes ghosts from the Bloody Assizes, he surely was aware of Bertie’s involvement in a more merciful response to an earlier traitor. This awareness reminds us that Dryden observed many changes over the course of his lifetime, and his esteem for the Earl of Abingdon by 1692 would have been shaped by multiple events in which the earl was involved, both large and small, over the decades. Given such impeccable royalist credentials, it is powerfully telling that Bertie played a significant role in James’s overthrow. Finding he was unable to agree to James II’s earnest “Three Questions” in a personal conversation with the king, Abingdon lost the Lord Lieutenancy in 1687.66 He subsequently offered aid to the fellows of Magdalen College, actions which destabilized the once firm stronghold of royalists in Oxford.67 Abingdon was the first peer to rally to William at Exeter and the first Tory grandee to do so.68 The Bertie influence spread across the counties of Lincolnshire, Wiltshire, and Berkshire, and Berkshire was part of William’s anticipated route to London. Abingdon even briefly aligned himself with the Lovelace family—longtime rivals for local power of opposing politics, who earlier had been implicated in the Rye House Plot—in order to bring William to England. Once William initiated negotiations in London, Abingdon quickly was disillusioned and expressed his disappointment and dismay first over the controversial terms “abdication” and “vacant throne” and next over the Comprehension Bill. He addressed his doubts over these proceedings to William III in person but nevertheless kept his lieutenancy (restored to him after the Revolution) until his death in 1699. Given the earl’s political involvement and history and his ability to maintain his roles of power and influence after the Revolution, he and Dryden must have had some sort of mutual understanding, or Dryden could not have written the following in the dedication: For my Comfort they are but Englishmen, and as such, if they Think Ill of me to Day, they are inconstant enough, to Think Well of me to Morrow. (14–16) Apparently Dryden recognized the constancy in Abingdon’s decisions, reinforcing the claim John Wallace made years ago regarding the “importance

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of the loyalist spirit as an expression of the centre of moderation in seventeenth-century politics.”69 Yet Dryden clearly is frustrated with current events if he is not frustrated with Abingdon, and the contemporary public judgment on the Duke of Marlborough and others like him resonates with Dryden’s commentary on inconstancy. The early months of 1692 (Luttrell’s copy of Eleonora is dated 7 March) precipitated Marlborough’s troubles with William and Mary when he initiated a bill in Parliament that would bar all non-English from serving in the military. Marlborough had remained an unpopular figure since the Revolution: many English who supported the invitation to William nevertheless hated Marlborough for his own version of personal treachery, since it was well known that he had dined with James II just before defecting.70 Marlborough’s realpolitik seemed to represent a quality of opportunism that many English exhibited and many others despised. From a distance, it becomes difficult to ascertain which English were considered opportunists and which were considered loyalists, but there seems to have been a rare consensus regarding this longstanding English general. Mary II, unlike Marlborough, had continued to gain in popularity among her subjects, and her buoyant and cheerful disposition contrasted with that of her husband.71 Her reputation for largesse and charity had been established as early as 1685 in Holland, and her morning routine of prayer upon return to England was widely known and admired.72 She founded charities for orphans and widows, and she asked William to establish schools for the poor in Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne.73 As early as the winter of 1688/89, the satire The Ladies Address to the Queen begs Mary to stop devoting so much time to state affairs and to please encourage the poor court, who were now desperate for love intrigues.74 Personal attacks on Mary were rare after the first year of the Revolution, despite her many months each year as Queen Regnant.75 Like To Killigrew, Eleonora integrates royal imagery and political commentary in an elegy for a private person. Killigrew’s service to the court as well as her artistic aspirations provided a natural liaison for such material, and Dryden connects Eleonora to Killigrew as an artist en passant by utilizing the phrase “matchless Eleonora,” a term normally associated with Katherine Philips, or “matchless Orinda,” the poet to whom Dryden compared Killigrew.76 Eleonora’s true connections to royalty, however, are her noble virtues, and Dryden creates a picture of a devoted wife, mother, and friend who has left behind the grieving hearts of each. Dryden makes clear that the poem is a “pattern” of virtue rather than a personal portrait of a woman he did not know, and the distance is noteworthy, especially if we glance again at the combination of intimacy and admiration with public themes in the poem to the duchess. Anne Barbeau Gardiner makes the important point that Eleonora is a pattern of “public virtue, not female virtue.”77 Both Gardiner and Miner focus on the religious elements of the poem: the conflation of Biblical allusions, imagery of the trinity, and the attention to charity in serving the poor.

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Gardiner’s, Miner’s, and Donald R. Benson’s arguments are in agreement with those of James D. Garrison regarding the public form for a private person, as well as the recognition that “the tension in the poem between the symbol of Dryden’s ideals, Eleonora, and the actual world culminates in her fortunate escape to heaven.”78 Dryden underscores Eleonora’s heroic parameters—“Her Vertue, not her Vertues let us call, / For one Heroick comprehends ‘em all” (146–7). His extended attention toward Eleonora’s soul, her friendship, and her conversation makes use of Madeleine de Scudéry’s reshaping of heroic nature to fit the conversation of friendship and the civilizing order of love: Dryden modeled Maiden Queen (1667) on de Scudéry’s Le Cyrus and he writes of her with familiarity in the Preface to the Fables.79 Dryden’s allusions to Eleonora’s soul also connects the poem to the imagery in To Killigrew: Then wonder not to see this Soul extend The bounds, and seek some other self, a Friend As swelling seas to gentle Rivers glide, To seek repose and empty out the Tide; So this full Soul in narrow limits pent, Unable to contain her, sought a vent, To issue out, and in some friendly breast Discharge her Treasures, and securely rest, T’unbosom all the secrets of her Heart, Take good advice, but better to impart. For ‘tis the bliss of Friendship’s holy state To mix their Minds, and to communicate. (Eleonora 240–51) Dryden’s attention to Killigrew is heroic as well, highlighting the “Noble Vigour” in her verse, her strength of mind, and the combination of stoicism with love in the lines “Each Test, and ev’ry Light, her Muse will bear, / Though Epictetus with his Lamp were there. / Ev’n Love (for Love sometimes her Muse exprest) / Was but a Lambent-flame which play’d about her Brest” (81–4). His imagery with regards to her soul, however, is fierce rather than steady: “Still with a greater Blaze she shone, / And her bright Soul broke out on ev’ry side” (144–5) immediately follows the comparison of her Genius to a “Ball of fire the further thrown” (143) that Sir Walter Scott found unappealing.80 The metaphors of the soul in the two poems are striking in their differences: one soul is of comet-like proportions, while the other flows calmly and assuredly, “As swelling Seas to gentle Rivers glide” (242), and seeks “the bliss of Friendship’s holy state / To mix their Minds, and to communicate” (250–1), the even exchange of advice and confidences. When Eleonora’s virtue is compared to the stars, she is nothing less than the Milky Way: “One, as a Constellation is but

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one; / Though ‘tis a Train of Stars, that, rolling on, / Rise in their turn, and in the Zodiack run” (148–50). To Killigrew, though ostensibly a panegyric for a poet who supported Mary of Modena (and James II), and whose connection to the court is central to the poem, poses puzzling metaphors that cast doubt rather than confidence on the future. Eleonora, ostensibly a poem whose very praise satirizes the English affairs of state, including the usurper Mary (and William), nevertheless exerts a stability that is absent in the ode to Anne Killigrew. If Dryden is judging the two queens through imagery in To Killigrew and Eleonora, the steadiness of the latter’s soul seems preferable to the fiery nature of the former, though it’s true that Dryden’s interest in genius and his predilection for Homer over Virgil in Fables present obstacles to such a simple interpretation, as does the bright flash of anger in the “rage / Unsafely just” that ripples just beneath the surface of the measured poem and that threatens to “break loose on this bad Age.” On the other hand, the months leading up to the publication of Eleonora coincide with Dryden’s production of King Arthur that ran December–January of 1691–2 with Mary II’s approbation (and with her express attendance on Christmas Eve), Dryden refers to the Duchess of Monmouth as one of his longtime patrons in King Arthur’s dedication, and the Earl of Abingdon certainly was in King William’s good favors. This elusive quality is recognized as a characteristic in Dryden’s last decade of writing, and the poems mentioned here are no exception. Eleonora presents us with mixed forms of religious terminology, further reinforcing the possibility that Dryden intentionally engages pluralistic language that addresses both the Catholic and the Protestant courts: there is the “holy state” of friendship; “Thy Reliques” (373); “Offices of Heaven” (130); “Sacred Hymns” (121) and singing (128),81 which are countered by latitudinarian concepts (Eleonora’s “zeal” and her unwillingness to waste a minute).82 Dryden calls our attention to the mix: Such her Devotion was, as might give rules Of Speculation, to disputing Schools; ** That pious heat may mod’rately prevail, And we be warm’d, but not be scorch’d with zeal. (106–7; 110–1) Relevant to this are Paul Hammond’s remarks on the concept of “Grace” in Palamon and Arcite, where Theseus as king transforms the Puritan tenet into mercy and forgiveness for all and where the temple of Diana embodies Catholic liturgical rituals.83 He notes the same crossing of boundaries when it comes to “liberty” as embodied in Theseus, normally a Whiggish term, but reinstated by Dryden as part of “the law of nature, and the gift

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of heaven.”84 Dryden seems to span these religious and political divides intentionally in both Palamon and Arcite and in Eleonora. It seems relevant to consider not only the blend of iconography in Eleonora of the two forms of worship that each queen defended but also the parallel attributes of the two queens beyond the poems themselves: both were known for their beauty, both were devoted to the poor (there are many stories of Mary d’Este’s loyalty to the impoverished train that followed her to France, as well as to the soldiers who arrived from Scotland and Ireland), and both were devoted to the Church and to the causes of their husbands, though these last similarities also were sources of distinct differences for obvious reasons. One was known for a steady hand and a manly mind when she ruled in her husband’s place, and one was passionately loyal to her exiled husband’s cause and her son’s right as heir (a cause that, by 1692, meant a willingness to foment civil war in England).85 Mary of Modena commanded a following both during her reign in England and after her exile, and she was known for her Catholic devotion and for creating a convent-like sanctuary for women’s intellectual and artistic endeavors.86 Likewise, many eulogies for Mary II emphasized her saint-like virtue and created an image of her as moral guide and mother of the nation. This aligned her in many ways with Elizabeth I and placed her in competition with the Mariolatry that had surrounded Mary of Modena.87 One elegy to Mary II serves as example to this phenomenon: And as She Piously looks every where, The Blessed Virgin, first salutes her there. Two Marias now in Heav’n are seen, The Blessed VIRGIN and the Blessed QUEEN.88 The author of this poem has ousted Mary of Modena from the heavens as well as from England. Dryden’s poem appears to be aware of this phenomenon, but he does not appear compelled to come down on one side or the other. He may reach out to Mary II even as he continues to acknowledge Mary of Modena, in the same way he continues to acknowledge the Duchess of Monmouth in his dedication to Halifax that prefaces the play King Arthur. Dryden’s intentional spanning of religious terminology and practices, allowing Eleonora to peacefully comprehend a divisive source of pain in England, likely extended the numbers of readers for whom the imagery would resonate, not only in 1692 but also into the next century, and perhaps forged an opening for Catholicism to sit comfortably in the mix. Geremy Carnes asserts that Dryden “[defends] the public reputation of the Catholic community” in Don Sebastian, and Michael West demonstrates Dryden’s influence on Whigs and nonconformists in his recent

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suggestion that there are more “cross currents” across “partisan allegiances” during this time than we have recognized.89 Dryden’s stature and popularity as national poet was such that borrowing from him may have been irresistible. In 1701, William Croft composed a birthday ode for Princess Anne that was sung at a public celebration and included the following stanza: In her brave offspring still she’ll live, Nor must she bless our age alone; But to succeeding ages give, Heirs to her virtues, and the throne.90 Croft’s passage, written on a birthday occasion but in the wake of the still recent death of Anne’s son, is reminiscent of Dryden’s poem to the duchess (published just one year prior), through whom the Plantagenets return “after length of Ages,” and where Dryden addresses Lady Mary Somerset’s heirless state with great tenderness: All other Parts of Pious Duty done, You owe your Ormond nothing but a Son: To fill in future Times his Father’s Place, And wear the Garter of his Mother’s Race. (“To the Dutchess,” 165–8) James Winn describes Dryden’s works as “national treasure[s]” for his contemporaries, where each publication was an important occasion, and POAS is filled with imitations of Dryden in the satires of the 1690s.91 Perhaps it was an equally common practice to borrow from him for royal imagery and patriotic inspiration. With Eleonora, the distance that Dryden creates between himself and his subject, and the public tone and image of virtue that it connotes, is so amenable to readers that eulogists like Daniel Defoe, a nonconformist, and William Walsh, a Whig, borrow from Dryden’s pattern in order to create one for Mary II only a couple of years later. Though Dryden could not control these expropriations, the elevation and translation of Eleonora’s heroic attributes to the beloved queen may have increased Abingdon’s pleasure over the original commemorative poem written in honor of his wife. Dryden introduces his own elegy in this way: And therefore it was, that I once intended to have call’d this Poem, the Pattern. . . . and Eleonora is still the Pattern of Charity, Devotion, and Humility; of the best Wife, the best Mother, and the best of Friends. (9–14)

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Her traits as “best Mother” incorporate her care for “Such multitudes she fed, she cloath’d, she nurst” (my italics, 22), extending her children to the English poor.92 Dryden invokes images of a nation in her motherhood: “Anchises look’d not with so pleas’d a Face / In numb’ring o’er his future Roman Race” (197–8). Defoe picks up on both the “pattern” and the mother imagery and mirrors Dryden’s examples of Eleonora when he describes Mary II’s charity: “When so many mouths have been fed, and Backs cloth’d by her Majesty’s Royal Bounty,” (my italics) and “to make her Life a Pattern to Womankind, as well as to the cottage as to the Court.”93 Defoe develops the idea that Mary II was at home with “humbler” tasks of “common domestic housewifery” and “the poor Needle” (65), aligning Mary (and by proxy William) with a model of protestant bourgeois virtues, and he may borrow his “cottage [to] Court” imagery from Dryden as well: The Souls of Friends, like Kings in Progress are; Still in their own, though from the Pallace far: Thus her Friend’s Heart her Country Dwelling was, A Sweet Retirement to a courser place: Where Pomp and Ceremonies enter’d not, Where Greatness was shut out, and Buis’ness well forgot. (Eleonora 257–62) This well-known passage evokes the majestic yet humble hospitality similar to Virgil’s Evander, elevating the virtue in the friendship Eleonora provides and receives, which Defoe succinctly incorporates into a line that describes Mary’s royal humility as a “Pattern to Womankind, as well as to the cottage as to the court.” Defoe further links Mary II with Eleonora in the traits of a good friend: Wife so tender, that all her sex might take a Pattern from a princess so gracious, mistress so obliging, companion so cheerful (wherever she vouchsafed her Friendship and Conversation). (Defoe 64) Defoe’s description of Mary as tender wife, obliging princess/mistress (host), and cheerful friend in conversation bears a comparison to the following lines in Eleonora: So, She was all a Sweet; ** No single Virtue we cou’d most commend; Whether the Wife, the Mother, or the Friend. (Eleonora 158;160–1)

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Mary’s own reputation provided for Defoe’s remarks on her cheerfulness, though he notes her “majesty . . . temper’d with Easiness and sweetness” as well. William Walsh, too, draws from Eleonora in A Funeral Elegy Upon the Death of the Queen by placing her in the same exemplary terms: Her Sex a Pattern of a Spotless Life The King a Friend, a Partner, and a Wife.94 Dryden’s Eleonora “gave glimpses of her Glorious Mind” (281), she managed their immense estate with care and calm, her “Works of Mercy were a part of Rest” (119), and “unemploy’d no Minute slipt away” (286). Walsh’s poem about Mary depicts a modest room where the two “debated Europe’s Fate” as great minds might, and where Mary also modeled virtuous simplicity by her industrious diversions: There she would sit, and pass the lingring Day! Not in Luxurious Follies of the Court Reading, or Work, Her idlest Hours divert.95 These lines also recall Defoe’s “Pattern to Womankind, as well as to the cottage as to the court,” further reinforcing Dryden’s own “pattern” as well as his depiction of Eleonora’s “Country Dwelling” in a friend’s heart, “Where Pomp and Ceremonies enter’d not” (259; 261). There are other echoes in the two later poems. See Dryden: The Nation felt it, in th’extremest parts; With eyes o’reflowing, and with bleeding hearts: But most the Poor, whom daily she supply’d (Eleonora 12–14) Defoe uses the same juxtaposition of grief especially among the poor: but in all the wet eyes and sad hearts . . . infinite number of her poor pensioners, and other objects of her Royal Charity, amongst whom, to her never-dying Honour, she distributed 30,000 per annum all out of her own Revenue. (Defoe 80) Likewise, Dryden’s Eleonora also gave so much “That she, her self, might fear her wanting first” (23). Dryden, in lines 12–51, extends further the imagery of Eleonora’s assistance to the poor, and their loss at her death being that of both bread and light. He then highlights in detail Eleonora’s devotional practices. Walsh’s own lines regarding Mary II’s charity aren’t

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quite as majestic as Dryden’s, but they still extend over 16 lines. Next, Walsh follows with another lengthy passage regarding Mary II’s devotion to the church. Both poems emphasize religious moderation, and indeed Mary II had a reputation for resisting all forms of enthusiasm, for minimizing differences between church rituals, and for including the tenet of charity (often associated with Catholic practices) in her version of Protestantism.96 See Dryden’s characterization of Eleonora: Such her Devotion was, as might give rules Of Speculation, to disputing Schools; And teach us equally the Scales to hold Betwixt the two Extremes of hot and cold; That pious heat may mod’rately prevail And be warm’d but not to be scorched with zeal. (106–11) Walsh borrows from Dryden: Not Zeal like theirs that sets the World in Flames; Where that and Barb’rous Rage by diff’rent Names Express the Self-same thing, She better knew What milder Path Religion should persue. (5) Walsh’s choice to include the word “rage,” however, is surprising, since he clearly has been expropriating from Eleonora where Dryden applies that word to himself so memorably. Walsh expects that his readers will recognize the connection—Eleonora is a poem whose lines are well known to a national audience.97 Dryden’s elaboration of Eleonora as the model of subject-king relationships may actually reflect Mary’s wifely devotion to William, even as it also provokes a sharp remonstrance over the disobedience involved in James’s overthrow: Love and Obedience to her Lord she bore, She much obey’d him, but she lov’d him more. (176–7) So Subjects love just kings, or so they shou’d. Nor was it with Ingratitude return’d; (181–2) Yet it is questionable whether Dryden believed James II was a “just king,” and certainly the Earl of Abingdon did not believe as much, since he assisted with James’s overthrow. One of Dryden’s gifts is his talent for

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tendentious implications, and William was portrayed as “just” in pamphlets and poetry more frequently than was his predecessor. Defoe picks up the theme of “ingratitude” (line 82) as his own battle cry against English subjects in The True-Born Englishman (1701). Marlborough, in the months prior to the publication of Eleonora, was suspected of engaging St. Germain even as he served William, and it was well known he had done the same but in the reverse in 1688. Dryden’s sensibilities as a poet may have indulged the double irony that lines like these created.

The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady According to most accounts, the nation grieved for Mary II in the ways Dryden had envisioned public mourning for Eleonora: The Nation felt it, in th’extremest parts; With eyes o’reflowing, and with bleeding hearts: But most the Poor, whome daily she supply’d. (12–14) Dryden refused to write an elegy for Mary II, though the editors of Early English Books Online believe he may have had a hand in correcting the eulogy George Stepney wrote in her honor (examined in Chapter 1). Fables nevertheless contains its own elegy, The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, written for yet another Mary, last name Frampton. If Fables incorporates a historical assessment of contemporary England, as I believe that it does, a glance at Mary II’s funeral becomes necessary. At the time of her death, 70 Pindarics, elegies, and poems were published in English, Latin and Dutch, and 36 funeral sermons were read; authors included both Dissenters and High Churchmen.98 These tributes significantly outnumber the approximately 25 elegies at the deaths of William III, Anne, and even Charles II.99 In addition to the creation of Mary II as a chaste model of virtue, a scattering of satires did appear, one of which aptly called her “too bad a daughter and too good a wife,” though many more satirized those around Mary, such as fops who could resume their focus on fashion after her death and, most prevalently, William’s immoderate grief matched against her manly equanimity.100 Unlike To Killigrew or Eleonora, however, the elegy for Mary Frampton is decidedly private: she is not an artist among the court, and Dryden’s verse does not incorporate regal or political commentary, other than perhaps the reference to Mary Frampton as “the Sun eclips’d” (13), since the sun is such a prominent allegory for royalty. Mary Frampton lived such a private life that she had not even participated in the public ritual of marriage: “For Marriage, tho’ it sullies not, it dies” (20). Anne Killigrew may have been unmarried, but she also was a member of court and an artist for the most public figures in the nation; thus Dryden’s poem involves her

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in parallel imagery of James II and Mary of Modena. Yet just as we saw that Dryden connected To Killigrew and Eleonora with phrases such as “Matchless Eleonora” and descriptions of the two women’s souls, he also connects Eleonora with Monument. Both women are patterns of perfection, both arrive to Heaven with ease, and Dryden devotes extended passages to their familiarity with celestial realms. Monument uses the word “Picture” that in Eleonora announced Dryden’s satirical edge: “Where ev’n to draw the Picture of thy Mind, / Is Satyr on the most of Humane Kind” (Eleonora 365–6). In Monument, it becomes: “So faultless was the Frame, as if the Whole / Had been an Emanation of the Soul; / . . . And like a Picture shone, in Glass Anneal’d” (9–10;12). The Monument of Mary Frampton echoes the exemplary virtues of chastity, strength of mind, and charity that Mary II’s eulogists claimed for the queen, yet it emphasizes the purity of a virgin that no realistic portrait of the queen could truthfully convey, though other lines in the private poem do resonate with Mary II. Dryden begins with: Below this Marble Monument, is laid All that Heavn’ wants of this Celestial Maid. (Monument 1–2) The physical separation of soul from body resembles the contemporary reference of the unified royal couple separating into two souls at Mary’s death: Heaven could not spare us both, but leaves us one.101 In Eleonora, the earl loses all of her soul to heaven: “When he to Heav’n entirely must restore / That Love, that Heart, where he went halves before” (189–90). Likewise, in Monument Dryden capitalizes on the traits of a firmness of mind, a worth above most women, and humility, all of which became part of Mary II’s reputation, all of which were incorporated into Defoe’s biography, and all of which Dryden combines eloquently as reflections of Mary Frampton: High tho’ her Wit, yet Humble was her Mind; As if she cou’d not, or she wou’d not find How much her Worth transcended all her Kind. (21–3) Both Mary II and Mary Frampton had a reputation for piety and for prayer. After Mary II’s death, the diaries that Mary had not destroyed became available. Dryden may have been aware of her dismay over her changed prayer routine upon arriving to England: she used to go to

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“public prayers four times a day” in Holland, but in England “[she] hardly [has] the leisure to go twice.”102 He seems to play with this motif gently, not spitefully, and combines it with Mary II’s well-known dedication to her charities in his portrait of Mary Frampton: So Pious, as she had no time to spare For human Thoughts, but was confin’d to Pray’r: Yet in such Charities she pass’d the Day, ‘Twas wond’rous how she found an Hour to Pray: (28–31) In yet another comparison, Dryden ties Eleonora’s steady soul with Mary Frampton’s calm one: “A Soul so calm, it knew not Ebbs or Flows, / Which Passion cou’d but curl; not discompose” (32–3). This steady state creates a poignant parallel to Mary II’s soul, since she had studiously refrained from showing anything other than unqualified support for her husband at the Revolution, to the point of appearing cheerfully unaffected at the coronation. It was only after her death when her memoirs became available that the English learned of her anguish regarding the historical decision to oust her father. The dignified triplet that closes the poem is straightforward praise meant for Mary Frampton, but it is a pointed one if there is an indirect comparison to Mary II: A Female Softness, with a manly Mind: A Daughter duteous, and a Sister kind: In Sickness patient, and in Death resign’d. (34–6) Line 35 extolls admirable qualities in Mary Frampton that the queen could not claim, but these shortfalls are couched between two lines that convey the heroic traits which almost all of England bestowed on Mary II. The distance between the private Mary Frampton and the public Mary II suggests a wistfulness not unlike the difference between John Driden the statesman and John Dryden the satirist, or later, in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope’s sense of the ideal life that was so different from his own. If Dryden has created a “Picture” in Mary Frampton that could never truly fit Mary II, there is the possibility that that he also is pointing to the unrealistic praises of elegies and biographies that painted her image in faultless and chaste terms and that paralleled those of Elizabeth I, despite the fact that Mary II ruled over England as a team with her husband and their marriage was the very crux that legitimated their reign. However, it’s also plausible that Dryden, while sincere in his praise for Mary Frampton, suggests with this “Picture” that very few adults, much less political monarchs or public poets, can aspire to live maiden-like lives,

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Dryden least of all. Dryden says as much in his letter to the aspiring poet Elizabeth Thomas: ‘Tis an unprofitable Art, to those who profess it; but you . . . always avoiding (as I know you will) the Licenses which Mrs. Behn allowed herself, of writing loosely, and giving (if I may have leave to say so) some Scandal to the Modesty of her Sex. I confess, I am last Man who ought, in Justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a Libertine in most of my Poems.103 Dryden’s judgment against Behn is half-hearted in its simultaneous self-implication.104 Fables presents readers with many compelling female figures from the Wife of Bath to Sigismonda, including maidens, old women, Amazons, feminist Whigs, women of royal stature, and goddesses. There are echoes of multiple Marys—Lady Mary Somerset, Mary Frampton, Mary of Modena, Mary II—and there are other figures like Sigismonda, Althea, Atalanta, and Eleonora, who reinforce those same echoes in a variety of ways. There are contented childless couples and fraught parent-child relationships, there are bird-like souls of a royal couple and of a couple of soldiers from opposing parties, and there are tributes to prayers and piety that intermingle both Catholic and Protestant terminology. Dryden explores public issues through female figures, including his elegies, and these choices were popular with women readers: Benedict insists that reading offered women a way to participate in the public sphere, and Mary Clarke, Mary Astell, Mrs. Steward, and, later, Mary Wollstonecraft corroborate her point of view, as do the women poets who identify with Dryden and with female monarchs. With Mary II at the heart of public issues after 1688, it makes sense that she plays a prominent if covert role in Fables, where Dryden reveals a compassionate perspective toward her even if his public stance remains a silent one.

Notes 1. As for the political theory regarding struggles within the family unit, James Tyrrell and Edmund Bohun led the debate regarding the line of succession: did Seth inherit the title as ruler since Cain killed Abel, or should Abel’s sons inherit it, or if Abel had only daughters, was the eldest even eligible; was Eve the rightful heir after the death of her husband; does Cain’s wife remain loyal to Cain as her husband or to Adam as her father; and so on and so on. These questions were used to prove or disprove the legitimacy of succession by divine right, whether or not parliament had as much right to rule as its king, and whether parliament was justified in choosing one king over another. See Filmer, Patriarcha, or, the Natural Power of Kings by the Learned Sir Robert Filmer, Baronet; Edmund Bohun, Preface to Patriarcha (Ibid.); Tyrrell, Patriarcha Non Monarcha the Patriarch Unmonarch’d; Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica.

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2. The “Three Questions” were as follows: was he willing to repeal the Penal Laws and Test Acts, would he assist in the electing of members who would repeal them and would he support James’s Declaration of the Liberty of Conscience. 3. See Robin Eagles, “Unnatural Allies? The Oxfordshire Elite from the Exclusion Crisis to the Overthrow of James II,” Parliamentary History 26.3 (2007): 346–65. This insightful essay details the political turns in Oxfordshire with regards to the Bertie family and their influence. 4. Barash, 253. 5. Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 75, Thursday, April the 11th, 1700, 135–6. See also Works 7: 26. 6. Ann Cotterill, “Manly Strength with Modern Softness: Dryden and the Mentoring of Women Writers,” in Mentoring in the Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, ed. Anthony W. Lee (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010): 25–50. 7. Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 59, March the 4th, 1698/99, 113. 8. Delarivier Manley, ed., The Nine Muses, Or, Poems Written by Nine Severall Ladies Upon the death of the late Famous John Dryden, Esq. (London: Richard Basset, 1700). For more information regarding the literary networks that involved these women, see Paul Trolander, Literary Sociability in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012); Rebecca Mills, “To Both Patroness and Friend: Patronage, Friendship, and Protofeminism in the Life of Elizabeth Thomas,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 38 (2009): 62–89; Dianne Dugaw, “Sapphic Self-Fashioning in the Baroque Era: Women’s Petrarchan Parody in English and Spanish,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 127–60; Margaret J.M. Ezell, ed., The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 2012); Harriette Andreadis, “Reconfiguring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire,” SEL 46.3 (Summer 2006): 523–42; and Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Organized by Delarivier Manley, these women authors were of varied backgrounds and political persuasions. Barash writes that these women “used Dryden’s death as an occasion to assert new rules about poetic order and the importance of women’s voices in empowering male poets” (257). Laura Runge, in “Beauty and Gallantry: A Model of Polite Conversation Revisited,” Eighteenth Century Life 25.1 (Winter 2001): 43–63, demonstrates that gallantry in the time of Dryden often mirrored an expectation that the king would refine the public by example, and gender played less of a role, though she demonstrates that by the time Addison was writing the Spectators, women were seen to inspire refinement in men (and surprisingly he misapplies Dryden’s Cymon and Iphigenia as his literary example, without acknowledging the fable’s conclusion). 9. See Barash, 216; Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 48; Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 67, November 7, 1699, 124. 10. Naomi Tadmor demonstrates that 18th century women reading are engaged, sustained, and interested in intellectual and social debates, thereby qualifying stereotypical “conceptions of femininity.” See Tadmor, “‘In the even my wife read to me’; quotation on 174. I cite Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, and Deborah Kennedy, “Dryden’s Sweet Saint: The Killigrew Ode in the Survey Course,” in Approaches to Teaching John Dryden, eds. Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine (New York: Modern Language

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

Mary, Monarchy, and Dryden’s Female Readers Association, 2013), later in the chapter during my discussion of the political interest in To Anne Killigrew and Eleonora. Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary, Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). See also Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots: A Brief History with Documents (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999). Dryden to Mrs. Steward, Letter 71, Thursday, Dec. the 14th, 1699, 130–1. But see Hunter, 22 for readers’ appetites for interiority, 87 for their interest in young protagonists, and 339–45 for the developing interest in histories. POAS 5: 430. “To show any other Original of Paternal Father than Adam over Eve, who indeed was as the first subject, so the Representative of all that followed, and it reaches not only to all her Daughters in relation to their husbands, but to all them in relation to . . . both their Father and their eldest brother after his decease” (Preface to Patriarcha b5). James Tyrrell’s Bibliotheca Politica (1694) creates two personae who summarize all the points made by both sides since Filmer’s Patriarcha was first circulated in the 1620s, demonstrating an urge to review the argument as late as the mid-1690s: the debate still is very much alive when Dryden is working on Fables. Bohun and Tyrell debate the roles of power of Adam’s sons and daughters: did Seth inherit the title as ruler since Cain killed Abel; does Cain’s wife remain loyal to Cain as her husband or to Adam as her father; and so on and so on. These questions were used to prove or disprove the legitimacy of succession by divine right, whether or not parliament had as much right to rule as its king, and whether parliament was justified in choosing one king over another. “Incest in Fables is a metaphor for the sickness of the tyrant-subject relationship” (Sloman, 48). In a paper delivered to ASECS in 2013, titled “Paternal Authority and Filial Obedience in the Fifteenth Century Florence and Seventeenth Century England: The Case of Ghismonda,” Taylor Corse explores Dryden’s amplification of incestuous interest in the fable, pointing out that Tancred reluctantly submits to Sigismonda’s first marriage only because his vassals insisted on it for reasons of “Publick Decency” (line 19), and that Dryden alludes to Milton’s character Sin who is both daughter and lover to Satan. Dryden’s lines “The Cavern only to her Father known, / By him was to his Darling-Daughter shown” (121–2) echo Milton’s Sin, who calls herself “thy daughter thy darling” (Paradise Lost 2.870). Corse also quotes John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) in several places to show its relevance to Dryden’s interest in mixed government and his condemnation of tyranny in this fable. Specific to incest is Locke’s definition of tyranny: “the exercise of power beyond right” where the tyrant concerns himself only with “the satisfaction of his own ambition, revenge, covetousness, or any irregular passion” (Locke sec. 100, p. 100). Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino: a Satyr: in Twelve Books (London, 1706); quotation on Book 9, 220. Kishlansky classifies those opposed to Charles I in this way: “Parliamentarians fought for true religion and liberty .  .  . Their fundamental principle was consent—an ingrained belief in the cooperation between subject and sovereign that maintained the delicate balance between prerogatives and liberties. Without consent, monarchy became tyranny and free men became slaves” (151). Lois G. Schwoerer, “The Queen as Regent and Patron,” in The Age of William III & Mary II: Power, Politics, and Patronage 1688–1702; A Reference

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21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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Encyclopedia and Exhibition Catalogue, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin and Martha Hamilton-Phillips (Williamsburg: College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1989). Baxter, 201. Dryden’s Sigismonda also bears some resemblance to the plot turns involving Shakespeare’s Juliet: true love, a secret marriage, unabashed sexuality within a marriage, stoicism as the protagonist grows from girl to heroine in defiance of her father (though Sigismonda is not a girl but a woman her father treats as a girl), and finally a tragic ending. See Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 101–16, for an in-depth analysis of the “two Sigismondas,” and the critical heritage regarding Dryden’s version of her. Reverand maintains that Dryden purposely created a Sigismonda who was neither heroic nor self-serving, but both. For Reverend, the irreconcilable versions of Sigismonda are another example of Dryden’s ambivalence in Fables. See James Winn, Queen Anne, especially chapter 1 on the extravagant masques in which the princesses and their friends acted, and the “worldly” behavior “on display in their philandering uncle’s court” (7). Bohun, “Preface to the Reader,” c10. Kishlansky, 271–5; quotation on 271. See also See Steven Pincus, 1688 and Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration. And yet Dryden refuses to create simple parallels. Despite all arrows pointing to a father tyrant in the fable, he reminds us that Tancred is “Norman”; an epithet often connected to William the Conqueror and, by proxy, William III. Williamites embraced the “Great Norman” and Jacobites denigrated him as a tyrant. William Temple compared William I to William III favorably (Levine, The Battle of the Books, 299). Freeborn Englishmen never willingly submitted to the “Norman yoke” (Sambrook 89). See also Taylor Corse (“Paternal Authority,” ASECS 2013), where he writes: “The ‘Norman Yoke’ was in fact a common rallying cry among people of varying political persuasions: from radical republicans like Gerrard Winstanley, Whig thinkers like Algernon Sidney and John Locke, to Tory apologists like Jonathan Swift and Henry Bolingbroke, all of whom praised the virtues of mixed government, in which power was shared by monarch, parliament, and the people. Writers often spoke angrily about ‘Norman bondage,’ ‘Norman slavery,’ and ‘tyrannical Norman government’ (Hill 75, 83, 81).” Another connection to contemporary politics are Tancred’s private guards, who secretly serve the king and who kill Guiscardo; others have duly noted that William was denied personal guards and a standing army at the time Dryden was writing Fables. Dryden’s argument against Tancred’s guards is similar to parliament’s reasoning against the requests not only of William but of Charles I, Charles II, and James II for a standing army. With William, the debate is a public one, and the reason for the request is to guard against the frailties of the Treaty of Ryswick. Similarly, Dryden makes public his opposition to that request in his poem To John Driden of Chesterton. With Charles II, the arrangements were clandestine. Ralph Montagu leaked information in 1678 that the court was in the midst of secret negotiations for French subsidies at the same time that Danby was attempting to persuade parliament to fund a standing army. This was the moment when a standing army became a symbol of tyranny: “Thus did the Popish Plot meld into the Exclusion Crisis and popery give way to arbitrary rule” (Kishlansky, 254). Works 7: 406, 688n.

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29. Many thanks to Taylor Corse for bringing Mary Astell’s quote to my attention. 30. For Mary Clarke, see Pincus, 298. 31. Corse develops this connection in “Paternal Authority and Filial Obedience in the Fifteenth Century Florence and Seventeenth Century England: The Case of Ghismonda,” (ASECS 2013). See also David Marsh, “Boccaccio in the Quattrocento: Manetti’s Dialogues in Symposio,” Renaissance Quarterly 33.3 (Autumn 1980): 337–50. 32. About 15 more than Sandys. 33. James Winn, Queen Anne, suggests that “the currently urgent question of loyalty is at the heart of Don Sebastian, “which had been a fundamental problem for Mary, Anne, and many others during the reign of James II and the ensuing revolution” (165). 34. Dryden also refers to Cain in The Hind and the Panther, when he describes Adam: “Then, first rebelling, his own stamp he coins; / The murth’rer Cain was latent in his loins” (I.278–9). 35. Otis Brooks, in Ovid as Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 325–30, detects censure of Atalanta and Meleager in the original Ovid, but Dryden’s imitation doesn’t perpetuate this censure. Brooks points out that, in the original, Meleager’s attachment to Atalanta is condemned by Cupid, Atalanta is punished by Venus for ingratitude, and Hercules is set up as the ideal against the undeserving Meleager. Interestingly, Dryden has not included any of these details in his imitation. 36. Quotation in George R. Noyes, ed., The Poetical Works of Dryden: Cambridge Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 1027. 37. See note 21, Chapter 1. 38. The Stuarts also trace their ancestry back to Henry VII, since Margaret Tudor, daughter to Henry VII and sister to Henry VIII, married James IV of Scotland. 39. Roper, Dryden’s Poetical Kingdoms, 119. Several scholars have written about the royal imagery and lineage that Dryden emphasizes with regards to the duke and duchess. Jane Ohlmeyer and Steven Zwicker, in “John Dryden, The House of Ormond, and the Politics of Anglo-Irish Patronage,” provide evidence of a personal affection and friendship between Dryden and the Duchess or Ormond, and align Dryden’s own disappointment over the broken Stuart line with the Duchess’s personal misfortune of losing her only son and heir, combined with her loneliness while the Duke was away at war. Ann Cotterill believes the Duchess’ Plantagenet ancestry is in opposition to the war-like nature of the Duke. See “‘Rebekah’s Heir’: Dryden’s Late Mystery of Geneology,” John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany, the Huntington Library Quarter Quarterly 63.1–2 (2000): 201–26. Reverand connects the themes of lineage with Dryden’s personal life and concerns for his own descendants in “John Dryden: Personal Concerns of the Impersonal Poet,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 13 (2006): 3–21. James Winn, John Dryden and His World, 502–3, traces echoes in this poem to the dedication to Anne Hyde, Mary II’s mother and the first duchess of York, that prefaced Annus Mirabililis. Where the Duchess of York was compared to a phoenix, the Duchess of Ormond becomes a dove, further tying her imagery to the Queens Catharine of Braganza and Maria Beatrice. 40. Works points out that Dryden took this line from Georgics I, 514: neque audit currus habenas. Augustus, adopted son of Julius, is the one who can make the horse hear the reins, and who can end the strife of war. Augustus is the adopted, not the biological, son. William III is son-in-law to James II.

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The fact that Mary II was James II’s oldest child, and the presumed heir for years, prior to the birth of James III, was the justification for asking William III to assume the throne. 41. Dryden also reshapes his own images of Charles II in Astraea Redux to fit lines about Lady Mary Somerset Butler in “To her Grace the Dutchess.” First, Portunus safeguards both (cf. Astraea Redux, 120–4 and “To the Dutchess,” 48–50). Additionally, the land of England rises to meet Charles II in one poem, and Ireland greets Mary Somerset in the other: Behold th’approaching cliffes of Albion; It is no longer Motion cheats your view, As you meet it, the Land approacheth you. The Land returns, and in the white it wears The marks of penitence and sorrow bears. (Astreaea Redux, 251–5) ~~ The Land, if not restrain’d, had met Your Way, Projected out a Neck, and jutted to the Sea. (“To the Duchess,” 51–2)

42. 43. 44. 45.

In Astraea Redux, England rushes to its king in penitence. In “To the Dutchess,” the land would meet her if it weren’t restrained, despite her beloved status. POAS 5: 439. See note 41. Rose, 45. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 124. See Dryden: All is Your Lord’s alone; ev’n absent, He Employs the Care of Chast Penelope. For him Your curious Needle paints the Flow’rs: Such Works of Old Imperial Dames were taught; Such, for Ascanius, fair Elisa wrought. (“To the Dutchess” 157–62)

46. Dryden, Letter 56, The first day of Winter, 1698, 107–8. See also Works 7: 629. 47. Ibid. 48. For Mary’s achievement in winning over the Tories, see Tony Claydon and W.A. Speck, William and Mary, 130–41: “Mary’s achievement was to have reconciled the bulk of the Tories to the revolution of 1688” (141). Speck offers a telling example of the ways in which Mary won English hearts: when the Earl of Ailesbury was jailed as a Jacobite in July of 1690, he could not pay his bail and his wife petitioned Mary II on his behalf. Mary responded by inviting the Earl to join her in a game of cards, then sent him home (131). For Mary Clarke, see Pincus, 298. 49. Barash, 228. 50. Ibid. 51. See Barash for insightful evaluations of women’s poetry during this time frame, including the coterie surrounding Mary of Modena, first in England and afterwards in France, and the magisterial masques and intellectual coterie she was able to foster for women of the exiled court, even in the face of extreme poverty and near starvation.

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52. My reading is at odds with Ann Cotterill’s in “’Rebekah’s Heir’: Dryden’s Late Mystery of Geneology,” where she defines the act of writing elegies as a ritual for Dryden that involves burying the feminine: the weak, soft, and diseased symbolic of his position as a poet whose politics have been marginalized. In this reading, Dryden reasserts the vigorous and fruitful in John Driden of Chesterton, and thereby secures his rightful place at the end of his life, and reclaims control over his own story. Our interpretations are at odds in three distinct places. First, the women Dryden writes about often demonstrate attributes of strength, and he admires them. Second, Benedict’s research indicates that the interests of women readers, who were attracted to elegies, satire, and ballads, informed Dryden’s choice of elegy as well as family choices to commission him. Third, Dryden’s poetry indicates an engagement and a tenderness even if it also utilizes the artistic detachment of an accomplished poet, and he shapes poems that also involve a female readership and female concerns, interested as they were in major political debates and conflicts (Both Benedict and Tadmor point out this interest). James Winn’s reading of Dryden’s poem “To the Dutchess” (John Dryden and His World, 502–3) also seems to contrast with that of Anne Cotterill. Winn demonstrates that Dryden ties Mary Somerset’s arrival to Ireland with an “image of magic fertility” that “reverses the bleak picture of fallow fields . . . in the translation of the first Georgic” and believes Dryden’s “closing lines urge the Duchess, already mother of three daughters, to produce a son to carry on the Ormonde line; that gentle injunction to human fertility stands in marked contrast to the violent myth by which Timotheus claims divine lineage for Alexander.” 53. David Wheeler, “Beyond Art: Reading Dryden’s ‘Anne Killigrew’ in Its Political Moment,” South Central Review 15.2 (Summer 1998): 1–15, provides an excellent review and context for scholarship on the poem, including: assessments of Killigrew’s own art with regards to Dryden’s appraisal of it (some believe he was sincere and others ironic); Dryden’s attention to artistic concerns that transcend the specific occasion of a young artist’s death; and Wheeler’s own examination of the political context for the poem, where unqualified royalist prerogative is untenable (9), where Dryden highlights a Pythagorean connection from father to daughter (7), and where the “popular, emotional issue was religious, the real issue was the relative supremacy of the monarchy or Parliament and the proper form of government” (8). Wheeler’s arguments make sense to me. For Dryden as ironic poet, see: David M. Vieth, “Irony in Dryden’s Ode to Anne Killigrew,” Studies in Philology 62 (1965); and C. Anderson Silber, “Nymphs and Satyrs: Poet, Readers, and Irony in Dryden’s Ode to Anne Killigrew,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 14 (1985). For Dryden’s use of the elegy to celebrate large artistic concerns, see: Robert Daly, “Dryden’s Ode to Anne Killigrew and the Communal Works of Poets,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18 (1976–77), and John Richetti, “The Portrayal of Women in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature,” What Manner of Woman: Essays in English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York University Press, 1977). For sympathetic readings that believe Dryden takes Killigrew and her art seriously, see Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and EighteenthCentury Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); and Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 361–2. Each aspect of the poem listed also has been remarked upon in Works 3, ed. Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing (1969), and has become part of the

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54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

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general understanding. Recent articles by John Richetti, Cedric Reverand and Deborah Kennedy in Jane Lewis and Lisa Zunshine, eds., Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden (New York: Modern Language Association, 2013) deepen our understanding of the Killigrew poem by building on these same foundations. Richetti emphasizes “the terrific spectacle of the Last Judgment that we are being treated to,” and closes with: “The Killigrew ode, in short, is a wonder of tonal balance in which extravagant panegyric and baroque sublimity interact productively with neoclassical clarity and conversational ease” (52). Benedict, 108. Barash, 257; Benedict, 119; Deborah Kennedy, “Dryden’s Sweet Saint: The Killigrew Ode in the Survey Course,” in Approaches to Teaching John Dryden, eds. Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine (New York: Modern Language Association, 2013), 56. See also Naomi Tadmor, “‘In the even my wife read to me,’” quotation on 174. Ibid., 4. See Barash, Chapter 4, who details the rituals of the exiled court. Ibid. 16; 30–40; 153; 175. For more on Henrietta Maria’s reputation in England, see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See Anne E. Duggan, Salonnieres, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 45. Wheeler, “Beyond Art,” 13. I agree with Wheeler on this point. Wheeler also writes that the “popular, emotional issue was religious, the real issue was the relative supremacy of the monarchy or Parliament and the proper form of government” (8). Richetti, “Reading Dryden’s Verse: Generic Control in the Killigrew Ode and Oldham Elegy,” in Approaches to Teaching John Dryden, quotations on 52 and 48. Reverand, “Dryden the Elegist: ‘To the Memory of Mr. Oldham’ and ‘to the Pious Memory of . . . Anne Killigrew’,” in Approaches to Teaching John Dryden, quotation on 41. James Winn was the first to note Dryden’s use of the charged word “Assizes”: We may detect faint traces of his response to the rebellion in [To Anne Killigrew]. . . . But when the Killigrew ode moves beyond its immediate occasion, Dryden’s attention is not primarily fixed on political issues; instead, the poem reflects his urgent interest in the morality of art, an interest rekindled by the example of Anne Killigrew herself. (Winn, Johns Dryden and His World, 417).

63. See Philip Smallwood, “Pope’s ‘Short Excursions’ and Dryden: An Unrecorded Borrowing,” Notes and Queries 26.6 (1979): 540–1. 64. Richetti, “Reading Dryden’s Verse,” 52. 65. See note 3. 66. In 1687–88, three quarters of town corporations, commissions of the peace and county lieutenants lost their placements after being unable to answer James II’s “Three Questions” in the affirmative: Were they willing to repeal the Penal Laws and Test Acts, would they assist in the electing of members who would repeal them, and would they support James’s Declaration of the Liberty of Conscience. 67. See Eagles, 358. James II had ordered that the fellows of Magdalen College appoint as president his chosen candidate, a recently converted Catholic who had been accused of making immoral and sexual advances on a “fair

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

Mary, Monarchy, and Dryden’s Female Readers lady” (Pincus, 1688, 175). When the fellows appointed someone else, James installed his choice anyway and removed all of the fellows, replacing them with Catholics appointees. Eagles, 360. Wallace, 8. See James Winn, Queen Anne, 166. See note 50. Melinda Zook, Protestantism, Politics and Women in Britain 1660–1714 (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2013), 141; 152. Ibid., 152. POAS 5: 346. POAS 5: 56. Dryden uses this nickname for Philips in a letter to Elizabeth Thomas (Dryden to Elizabeth Thomas, Letter 68, 125). In the same letter, he demonstrates his awareness of de Scudéry’s nom de plume as Sappho. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “Dryden’s ‘Eleonora’: Passion for the Public Good as a Sign of the Divine Presence,” Studies in Philology 84.1 (Winter 1987): 95–118; quotation on 97. James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 194. See also Earl Miner, Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 206–7; and Donald R. Benson, “Platonism and Neoclassic Metaphor: Dryden’s Eleonora and Donne’s Anniversaries,” Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 340–56. Duggan, 14. de Scudéry’s picture of heroism was ridiculed by Boileau in Les Héros de Roman, where 6 out of the 11 “heroes” he satirized were derived from her Histories, and afterwards both de Scudéry and her protagonists were objects of ridicule (Duggan, 122–3). Though Dryden compliments Boileau in Discourse Concerning Satire, a letter from Dennis to Dryden conveys his confidence that through Dryden the English will overthrow Boileau and Racine. By taking her seriously in the Preface, and by alluding to news regarding her French translation of Chaucer, Dryden reestablishes the reputations of both Chaucer and his French translator. Works 3: 323n. See Scott: “But I cannot admire, with many critics, the comparison of the progress of genius to the explosion of a sky-rocket” (Works of John Dryden now first collected 11: 103). Winn, Queen Anne, 157. Mary II replaced songs with spoken liturgy and banned instruments from chapel. Zook, Protestantism, 129. Hammond, “Interplay of Past and Present,” 153. Ibid. See also Works 7: 105, where Palamon introduces Arcite to Theseus when they are caught fighting: “Arcite of Thebes is he; they mortal Foe, / On whome they Grace did Liberty bestow” (PA II: 274–5). Hammond explicates lines 265–93 to demonstrate Dryden’s pluralistic use of the terms “Liberty” and “Grace.” See John Childs, “The Abortive Invasion of 1692,” in The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (London: Hambledon Press, 1995). Barash, 134–54. See Ibid., 213–14. See also Melinda Zook, “The Shocking Death of Mary II: Gender and Political Crisis in Late Stuart England,” The British Scholar 1 (2008): 21–36, Ibid., Protestantism. J.D., A Pindarique Ode: Humbly Offer’d to the Ever-Blessed Memory of our Late Gracious Sovereign Lady Queen Mary (London, 1694), 10. Qtd. in Barash, 214.

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89. Michael West, Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 179. West explores at length the various modes of influence of Dryden on Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John Dennis, and even Shaftesbury. See especially 170–9. 90. Qtd. in Winn, Queen Anne, 261. 91. Ibid., 168. 92. Gardiner, 96–107. 93. Daniel Defoe, The Life of that incomparable princess, Mary, our late sovereign lady of ever blessed memory who departed from this life, at her royal pallace at Kensington, the 28th of December, 1694 (London: Daniel Dring, 1695); 63, 65. Many thanks to James Winn for alerting me to this biography. 94. William Walsh, A funeral elegy upon the death of the Queen addrest to the Marquess of Normanby (London: Jacob Tonson, 1695), page 4. Walsh and Dryden were friends and correspondents 1691–93. 95. Ibid., page 9. 96. Zook, Protestantism, 129; 153. 97. And dares to sing thy Praises, in a Clime Where Vice triumphs, and Vertue is a Crime: Where ev’n to draw the Picture of thy Mind, Is Satyr on the most of Humane Kind: Take it, while yet ‘tis Praise; before my rage Unsafely just, break loose on this bad Age. (Eleonora 363–8) Walsh turns “rage” into an opportunity to highlight Mary’s state projects of reform, which Walsh contrasts with James’s “corrupt” priests and appointments in the church. Because Walsh and Dryden corresponded amicably through 1693, it also is surprising to find a couplet that seems aimed directly at Dryden’s silence when Mary died (since many of Dryden’s enemies disparaged him for not writing a eulogy on the occasion): When Sorrow is become the Public Test ‘Tis he who grieves the most, that writes the best. ** Her Foes (if any Foes to her cou’d live) An injur’d Princess ready to forgive. (Walsh 3; 4)

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Perhaps because he knew there were so many close readers of Dryden, Walsh felt a need to distinguish their politics. Zook, Protestantism, 153. Ibid., 156. POAS 5: 430; 430–50. See also Defoe, The Life, on “that constant Tranquility and Composure of Mind attended her through her whole sickness” (73). A Poem on the Death of the Queen by a Gentlewoman of Quality (1695). Qtd. in Zook, 35. Ibid., 151. Zook suggests that Mary II expected the diaries would be published upon her death, and Defoe’s biography suggests that many had incorporated her now public memoirs into their impressions of the Queen. Dryden to Elizabeth Thomas, Letter 69, 127. The letter probably was written around November of 1699 (Ward, 186n). Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing, 178; 197, indicates that a divide between appreciation of Behn the “sinner” and Philips “the saint” was apparent by the publication of Anne Finch’s poetry in 1714, but

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Mary, Monarchy, and Dryden’s Female Readers Dryden’s letter suggests that he, at least, was aware of this distinction as early as 1699. Dryden places Thomas as an heir to Katherine Philips, who herself was considered the heir to Madeleine de Scudéry, and he mentions Philips as “Orinda” even as he alludes to Scudéry/“Sappho” and as he pens Thomas as “Corinna” (submitting to her request for a name). See Dryden to Elizabeth Thomas, Letter 68, 125. See also Barash, 35, for Philips’ reputation as the heir to Scudéry. See Anne McWhir, “Elizabeth Thomas and the Two Corinnas: Giving the Woman Writer a Bad Name,” ELH 62.1 (Spring 1995): 105–9, for a different interpretation of Dryden’s intentions in his letters to Thomas.

4

Shakespeare as Dryden’s Afflatus

If women and Whigs were reading Dryden, they also were reading Shakespeare, as was John Dryden himself. Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts quote Lewis Theobald in 1726, who claims Shakespeare was pervasive in all book collections no matter how small, and that “there is Scarce a Poet, that our English tongue boasts of who is more the Subject of the Ladies’s Reading”; the editors outline a general consensus among women who, though by no means monolithic in their opinions, nevertheless agreed that “Shakespeare had a special insight into female psychology.”1 Maximillian Novak writes that “by 1715, Shakespeare had already assumed the role of the national poet and an incomparable genius.”2 According to Novak, critical appreciation for Shakespeare during this time period corresponded roughly along political lines but with exceptions that included Dryden; his attention to Shakespeare placed him in the company of Charles Sedley, Nicholas Rowe, Sir Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison—all Whigs.3 Those who valued Shakespeare’s native genius also tended to value accessibility (an important theme for Dryden throughout Fables). And while Jayne Lewis insightfully reminds us that the “four-way debate of his Essay on Dramatick Poesie was surely more natural to [Dryden] than the dogmatism and the single-minded certainty” of other methods, Howard Weinbrot points out that Dryden nevertheless sets up Neander as defender of Shakespeare with “an audience well-prepared to accept his argument.”4 Neander may speak for Dryden when he says that Shakespeare was “the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive Soul.”5 Meanwhile, Steven Zwicker has examined a late portrait of Dryden by James Maubert, painted between 1695 and 1700, that places him among the ancient and modern greats by way of his books— stacked near his elbow are Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Montaigne, with a special emphasis on Shakespeare which is open and leans against the rest.6 This suggests a contemporary awareness of Dryden’s admiration for the playwright who preceded him in a portrait that conveys “the life of a laureate who was deeply conversant, deeply identified, with the

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literature of Greece and Rome, with European letters, and of course with Shakespeare’s works that were for Dryden the crowning achievement of the former age.”7 Shakespeare’s legacy was caught in the debate regarding ancient and modern learning, and Neander establishes Shakespeare as the English Homer, thereby continuing Dryden’s accommodation of both ancient and modern authors by combining them.8 Yet the question remains as to why Dryden never mentions Shakespeare by name in the Preface, despite the fact that, throughout Fables, he draws from the Tudor mythology established by Shakespeare’s history tetralogies; who, in The Cock and the Fox, elaborates dreams into a defense of poetry while drawing from imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest; who, in Ceyx and Alcyone, creates a tender but devastating reflection of Prospero’s keen control in a fable whose characters seem to lose everything until the final moment of transformation; and who, in The Flower and the Leaf, develops a masque built on images from English poetry that perhaps is meant as a parting gift to England, paralleling Prospero’s betrothal gift to Miranda.9 Perhaps Shakespeare criticism was too politically charged as modern and Whig-leaning, and an explicit reference to him would distract from Dryden’s intentions to produce a multivocal and even-handed miscellany.10 Perhaps acknowledging his indebtedness to Shakespeare would expose Dryden’s own love of verse too intimately for a man who would never again reveal himself as he did in The Hind and the Panther, or perhaps he simply borrowed freely from Shakespeare just as Pope would borrow freely from Dryden. Whatever the reason for the omission of the name, Shakespeare is one of his constant companions as Dryden builds the house where he had “intended but a Lodge” (8). When Dryden opens the Preface with, “Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand” (1–3), his lighthearted and selfdeprecating banter may refer not only to the cost of his labor but also to the cost placed on the very “faculties of [his] Soul” (99). Fables was an important work for Dryden, and Shakespeare’s influence is evident in Dryden’s approach to dreams, to the force of the imagination, and to the process of writing in which the poet “alters his Mind as the work proceeds” (4–5). The figure of Prospero also is a good point of comparison to Dryden as author of Fables, beginning with his authoritative literary command in the Preface, and continuing with his focus throughout Fables on the practice and perfection of his own art. His temperament resembles Prospero as well. Dryden judges sharply with the ending of Cymon and Iphigenia, but characters like John Driden of Chesterton point to participation rather than cynical detachment, and in Nestor we have the example of disciplined forgiveness. In light of the fact that Fables was Dryden’s last major work, and that he may have sensed as much, imitating A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest—the

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two plays that emphasize Shakespeare’s “fairy kind of writing” and that frame the beginning and end of his career—may have been a profoundly satisfying endeavor, forward-looking as it prepares the way for affectivist criticism and Addison’s Spectator series on the pleasures of the imagination, and retrospective in that Dryden had modernized Shakespeare for the Restoration stage. Even at the end of his life, Dryden continues to reshape and reiterate formal units of thought and reference, no less so in his allusions to Shakespeare. That Shakespeare’s presence is both invisible and ubiquitous in Fables indicates that this flexibility and creativity are fundamental to Dryden’s temperament; he remains faithful foremost to his religious choices, at great cost, but there are other ideas he is willing to revisit and to modify even if his principles remain consistent. The convergence of political and literary alliances with regards to Shakespeare criticism, and Dryden’s unique position as a Tory and nonjuror among Shakespeare’s prominent admirers, demonstrates to me a committed mind that participates fully in the literary and political world it inhabits, but that is independent and discerning if also politically astute. When Dryden moves Shakespeare from stage to page he finds room in his later poems for elements of Shakespeare that he did not include in his official adaptations for the theater. He also creates another opportunity for end of life writing in a macabre flourishing of the imagination and a meditation on art that reinforces a powerful connection with authors and transcends time altogether, all the while tapping into a diverse world of readers that includes modern Whigs as well as women. If Dryden’s women readers also are Shakespeare’s closest readers of the age, as Theobald later insists, they may have glimpsed a more intimate Dryden than did his other contemporaries.

The “Pleasures of the Imagination” If Michael Dobson gives us every indication that Shakespeare on the Restoration stage was associated with contemporary political questions and that Dryden’s adaptations often were at the center of such engagement, Joseph Addison’s combination of Dryden with Shakespeare in the Spectators indicates Dryden’s and Shakespeare’s shared artistic concerns.11 William Youngren reminds us that 1693–7 were the years that Dryden encouraged the young Addison to contribute to Dryden’s miscellany Examen Poeticum (1693) and to write the essay that prefaced Dryden’s translation of the Georgics, Addison’s first sketch of affectivist criticism that developed into what we now know as the “Pleasures of the Imagination” papers.12 Influenced by Locke’s Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, these Spectators mark a shift from Renaissance/Restoration terminology, where poetic example was placed above precept, toward something much more dynamic: “the effect of literature on the mind as a process that takes place through time as the reader reads.”13 Though the

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Essay on the Georgics uses the old pre-Lockean terminology, Dryden’s King Arthur (1691) explores Locke’s concepts with the blind Emmeline, and Addison’s Spectator 512 applies his new aesthetic theories to Absalom and Achitophel:14 It is no wonder therefore that on such occasions, when the mind is thus pleased with itself, and amused with its own Discoveries, that it is highly delighted with the writing which is the occasion of it. For this reason Absalom and Achitophel was one of the most popular poems that ever appeared in English. (Spectator 5: 318)15 The idea that reading influenced the imagination over time, rather than all at once like a painting, and that the mind could be filled with images may have Lockean and Addisonian roots, but it also opens Dryden’s Preface to the Fables, where the poet “alters his Mind as the work proceeds,” and Addison articulates his affectivist ideas as he combines images from both Shakespeare and Dryden in Spectators 63 and 419.16 Beginning with 63, Addison sums up his earlier papers concerning true and false wit by putting them in a dream whereby “regiments” of art go to battle against one another. Dryden’s “mild Anagram” and members of “Acrostick Land” from the days of Mac Flecknoe are, as we might expect, on the side of false wit. This battle bears some resemblance to The Flower and the Leaf in Fables, another dream in which art takes to the battlefield. At the conclusion of the dream, the god of wit offers a quiver of truth to Mr. Spectator, much like the Lady/fairy who stops to speak with the maiden in Dryden’s poem about the virtues of the lasting leaf over the transitory flower. Relevant to these visions, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is known for its force of artistic imagination as seen in dreams, and Prospero’s betrothal masque for Miranda and Ferdinand represents higher forms of beauty similar to the quality of true wit in Dryden’s The Flower and the Leaf and in Addison’s Spectator 63. In Spectator 419, Addison makes these connections between authors even more explicit by quoting Dryden’s preface to King Arthur, where Dryden praises Shakespeare’s “Fairy Kind of Writing,” and where Dryden suggests that his imitation of Shakespeare’s “Airy and Earthy Spirits” earned him the approbation of the Duchess of Monmouth: There is a kind of Writing, wherein the Poet quite loses sight of Nature, and entertains his Reader’s Imagination with the Characters and Actions of such Persons as have many of them no Existence, but what he bestows on them. Such are Fairies, Witches, Magicians, Demons, and departed Spirits. This Mr. Dryden calls the Fairie way of Writing, which is, indeed, more difficult than any other that depends

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on the Poet’s Fancy, because he has no Pattern to follow in it, and must work altogether out of his own Invention. (Spectator 3:570)17 The Tempest is where we find the airy and earthy spirits Ariel and Caliban, magicians and monsters. Shakespeare uses these monsters to elaborate a “pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader . . . They bring up into our Memory the Stories we have heard in our Childhood, and favour those secret Terrors and Apprehensions to which the Mind of Man is naturally subject” (Spectator 3:571). Addison articulates in prose a passage from Dryden’s The Cock and the Fox: And many monstrous Forms in sleep we see, That neither were, nor are, nor e’er can be. Sometimes, forgotten Things long cast behind Rush forward in the Brain, and come to mind. The Nurses Legends are for Truths receiv’d, And the Man dreams but what the Boy believ’d. (331–6) These reflections, not found in Chaucer, entertain imagination as a temporal process for the reader (who in this case is also the poet) “in considering the effect of literature on the mind as a process that takes place through time as the reader reads.”18 This is the new Lockean perspective that distinguishes Renaissance/Restoration critical theory from a more complex view of the reader’s imagination that Addison largely is responsible for establishing and that continues through the 18th century. Shakespeare’s fairies, dreams, and monsters become a symbol of the power of that art. In Spectator 279, Addison writes that “it shows a greater Genius in Shakespear to have drawn his Calyban, than his Hotspur or Julius Caesar: The one was to be supplied out of his own Imagination, where as the other might have been formed upon Tradition, History and Observation” (Spectator 2:586–7). Addison may have borrowed these ideas from Dryden’s preface to The State of Innocence, where he explains that “those things which delight all Ages, must have been an imitation of Nature,” yet defends “Poetical Fictions . . . some of them are things quite out of Nature. . . . such whereof we can have no notion.”19 The first, then, would be the characters Addison says are drawn from history or tradition (Shakespeare, like Homer, was known for presenting authentic versions of nature). The second, Dryden and Addison concur, may be found in Shakespeare’s imaginary beings, which Dryden defines thus: “of this nature are Fairies, Pigmies, and the extraordinary effects of Magick; for ‘tis still an imitation, though of other mens fancies: and thus are Shakespear’s Tempest, his Midsummer nights Dream, and Ben Johnson’s Masque of Witches to be defended.”20 When Addison points

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to Shakespeare’s power of the imagination, he repeats what Dryden had written in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy: I will instance but one, to show the copiousness of [Shakespeare’s] Invention; ‘tis that of Caliban, or the Monster in the Tempest. He seems there to have created a person which is not in Nature, a boldness which at first sight would appear intolerable: for he makes him a Species of himself, . . . in all things he is distinguish’d from other mortals.21 Considering Dryden’s own characterization of airy and earthy spirits as figments of the imagination, Dryden’s “many monstrous Forms in sleep we see” may be a nod toward both Caliban and the metamorphosed Bottom, the latter of whom cannot say aloud what he thought he was (“The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man / hath not heard, . . . what / my dream was” [4.1.211–12; 213–14]) and whom Oberon calls a monster: “And then I will her charmed eye release / From monster’s view, and all things shall be peace” (3.2.376–7). Likewise, we have fairies in King Arthur, The Flower and the Leaf, and The Wife of Bath Her Tale. Yet the monster that continues to disturb the readers’s imagination is Caliban, and he may claim a hold on the modern sensibilities even more profoundly than does Hamlet for many reasons, not the least of which are questions revolving around the history and exercise of power. For Dryden and for Shakespeare, these questions include the power of art. Stephen Greenblatt carefully traces the English language as a mechanism for power in colonialism; the concept of language as the distinction between barbarism and civil society bears a parallel to Prospero and Caliban, where we have the “European whose entire source of power is his library and a savage who had no speech at all before the European’s arrival.”22 Greenblatt believes that Prospero’s line “this thing of darkness, I Acknowledge mine” is, indeed, an acknowledgement—one of “moral responsibility” and a “deep, if entirely unsentimental bond” between the two.23 Greenblatt sees the simultaneous difference and resemblance between Prospero and Caliban as an aesthetic experiment in both power and language: “It is as if [Shakespeare] were testing our capacity to sustain metaphor.”24 Likewise, Trinculo’s speech when he first encounters Caliban merges these metaphors of power and art, and his speculation on whether he is “man or fish” coincides with Horace’s description of poetic monstrosity: If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here and now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favoured with a private view, refrain from laughing?25

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The “ugly fish” as illustrated in Caliban is sharper than Horace’s monsterlike poem that provokes laughter in Ars Poetica; a laughter that seems more in tune with the courtly mockery of Bottom and his play. Caliban paradoxically embodies the idea of a failed artistic creation even as he reflects the artist’s ingenious powers, while simultaneously coming to life as a character unto himself—a character who is enslaved after he attempts a rape, but who also speaks in verse and recognizes the beauty of Ariel’s songs, was the original inhabitant of the island, and thinks Stephano and Trinculo are sent to torment him with their very bad singing. If The Tempest embodies more bitterness than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the later play also contains more judgment, forgiveness and, when the time is right, a willingness to relinquish control. There is a sharpness to Dryden in Fables that has the potential for vengeance, but it coincides more accurately with the steely discipline required for forgiveness. Princess Anne’s references to her Dutch brother-in-law William III as “Mr. Caliban” and “the Dutch abortion” suggest that both the political allegory of Caliban as a dangerous potential usurper and the metaphor for failed artistic creation were contemporary ones.26 Images of Achitophel focus on usurpation and creation gone awry as well. When writing The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), Shakespeare’s Caliban fascinated Dryden because of the artist’s ability to create a character who, despite being an invention not of nature, was nevertheless credible. At this point in his criticism, he reveals no sympathy for Shakespeare’s character, but rather an appreciation for the artist’s craft in creating him: Whether or no [Caliban’s] Generation can be defended, I leave to Philosophy; but of this I am certain, that the Poet has most judiciously furnish’d him with a person, a Language, and a character, which will suit him, both by Fathers and Mothers side: he has all the discontents, and malice of a Witch, and of a Devil; . . . in all things he is distinguish’d from other mortals.27 Such a character appraisal does not acknowledge the “deep, if entirely unsentimental bond” between Prospero and Caliban, but by 1681 Dryden begins to explore an idea similar to Greenblatt’s in his portrait of Achitophel: Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally’d; And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide: Else, why should he, with Wealth and Honour blest, Refuse his Age the needful hours of Rest? Punish a Body which he could not please; Bankrupt of Life, yet Prodigal of Ease? And all to leave, what with his Toyl he won,

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Shakespeare as Dryden’s Afflatus To that unfeather’d, two Leg’d thing, a Son: Got, while his Soul did hudled Notions try; And born a shapeless Lump, like Anarchy. (163–72)

Here, Dryden recognizes in Achitophel’s failure a dangerous precipice for all “Great Wits,” including ambitious artists like himself, whose fates are separated by “thin Partitions.” In Fables, Dryden remains keenly aware of the narrow divide between imagination that captures the emotional power on one side, and failure to do so on the other: “And many monstrous Forms in sleep we see, / That neither were, nor are, nor e’er can be” is a few steps away from Horace’s warning: “such pictures would be a book, whose idle fancies shall be shaped like a sick man’s dreams, so that neither head nor foot can be assigned to a single shape.”28 This, in turn, evokes Mercutio’s thoughts on dreams, where he reflects beauty in imagination even as he rejects it: True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy Which is as thin of substance as the air, And more inconstant than the wind. (Romeo and Juliet 1.4.96–100) Dryden picks this up in Chanticleer’s defense of dreams. Early in The Cock and the Fox, Chanticleer awakes from a vision that offers a premonition regarding his impending danger: he soon will find himself in the mouth of Reynard the fox. Pertelote admonishes him for his cowardliness and suggests he add some fiber to his diet to cut down on the nightmares. Chanticleer defends himself and his own dreams when he quotes a nonbelieving sailor who disregards a warning and instead follows Mercury (if not Mercutio): His friend smil’d scornful, and with proud contempt. Rejects as idle what his Fellow dreamt. Stay, who will stay: For me no Fears restrains, Who follow Mercury the God of Gain: Let each Man do as to his Fancy seems, I wait not I, till you have better Dreams. (The Cock and the Fox 319–24) Taylor Corse writes that when Chanticleer tells us the sailor dies because he is scornful of dreams, the passage amounts to nothing less than “a defense of poetry.”29 Pertelote’s ridiculous medical remedies for Chanticleer’s prescient dream, and Chanticleer’s self-important examples of the

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power in dreams just before he struts forward with a complete disregard for those dreams, ironically add to this defense. If Dryden and Addison use dreams, fairies, and monsters from Shakespeare to develop their sensibilities regarding the reader’s imagination, and if a non-belief in dreams is dangerous business, it still must be pointed out that The Cock and the Fox also draws from A Midsummer Night’s Dream where the four lovers are not sure whether they dream or wake after their most strange evening in the woods. When they emerge righted, it is without wisdom or revelation. And this is exactly what Oberon intends: “When they next wake, all this derision / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision” (3.3.370–1). Their situation fits another couplet in The Cock and the Fox: Dreams are but Interludes, which Fancy makes; When Monarch-Reason sleeps, this Mimick wakes: (325–6) Dryden referred to Shakespeare himself in terms of monarchy in the Prologue to The Tempest (“He Monarch-like gave those his subjects law”), and the next lines in The Cock and the Fox resonate with themes in the original plays: Light Fumes are merry, grosser Fumes are sad; Both are the reasonable Soul run mad: (The Cock and the Fox 329–30) Compare Dryden’s verse to that of Shakespeare’s, when Prospero addresses the “charm’d” party, just before he reveals himself to them as the Duke of Milan: The charm dissolves apace, And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clearer reason. (The Tempest 5.1.64–8) Dryden’s “fumes” encompass both Mercutio’s theory that dreams reflect the person who imagines them and Prospero’s metaphor for clouded reasoning. This brings us back to Dryden and childhood dreams as the metaphor for the artist’s imagination, and in The Cock and the Fox there is a bittersweet tone of both regret and forgiveness in Dryden’s lines: Sometimes, forgotten Things long cast behind Rush forward in the Brain, and come to mind.

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Locke’s theories that led to affectivist criticism in literature become important for Dryden’s expectations for the reader and the poet, but they also allow Dryden the man to contemplate his life’s experiences and to orchestrate them into a meaningful work of art. In this way he is like Prospero. Articles by Taylor Corse, Tom Mason, and Charles Hinnant have shown that while the ideas in The Cock and the Fox span the literary, religious, and the political, the tone usually is lighthearted.30 Perhaps the fable’s combination of material that was both entertaining and compelling speaks to its longevity; Mason indicates that its staying power and popularity continued through the 18th century, “Johnson’s being the single published statement of dissent.”31 For Chaucer, Chanticleer provided an opportunity for self-deprecatory appraisals of artistic talents, as Stephen Manning has shown, and Shakespeare makes similar allusions to Chanticleer, first by way of the mockery of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and second as an untuned counterpart to Ariel in The Tempest.32 Therefore, Chanticleer creates one more link between Shakespeare and Dryden. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the court characters laugh after Snug reassures the “gentle hearts” of the audience that he is not, in fact, a real lion: LYSANDER: This lion is a very fox for his valor. THESEUS: True; and a goose for his discretion. DEMETRIUS: Not so, my lord; for his valor cannot

carry his discretion, and the fox carries the goose. THESEUS: His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valor; for the goose carries not the fox. It is well; leave it to his discretion, and let us listen to the Moon. (5.1.231–7) The cock is the goose chased by the fox, and Snug the Lion is both. Theseus calls Snug “a very gentle beast,” while the nun’s priest calls Chanticleer “this gentil cock” in both Chaucer and Dryden. Following this thread is Thisby’s complaint as she looks on the dead Pyramus, rendered ridiculous by its misaligned use of courtly comparison: These lily lips This cherry nose, These yellow cowslip cheeks (5.1.330–2)

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It recalls Chaucer’s own hyperbolic description of a chicken: His comb was redder than the fyn coral, And batailled as it were a castel wal; His byle was blak, and as the jeet it shoon; Lyk asure were his legges and his toon; His nayles whitter than the lylye flour, And lyk the burned gold was his colour. (2859–64) If we move from the mechanicals in the early play to the Orphean abilities of Ariel in the final one, we find that Chanticleer provides a discordant “burthen” or counterpart to the “sweet sprites”: [Burthen, dispersedly, within.] Bow-wow. Hark, hark, I hear The strain of strutting chanticleer: Cry [within]. Cock a-diddle-dow. (1.2.382–7) Likewise, Antonio and Sebastian mock Gonzalo’s rhetoric with a metaphor of Chanticleer: GONZALO: Well, I have done. But yet— SEBASTIAN: He will be talking. ANTONIO: Which, of he or Adrian, for a good wager, first begins to crow? SEBASTIAN: The old cock. ANTONIO: The cock’rel. SEBASTIAN: Done. The wager? ANTONIO: A laughter. SEBASTIAN: A match!

(2.1.26–34) Old cock (Gonzalo) and cock’rel (Adrian) appear foolish in their attempts at eloquence, yet we don’t love Sebastian or Antonio any better for pointing it out. Gonzalo may be wise in spite of himself, as was, paradoxically, Bottom,33 and the court in the later play is more sinister than that of the earlier one, but the scenes still reflect a self-deprecatory antidote to self-importance in art by an artist who nevertheless takes himself seriously. Dryden’s The Cock and the Fox indicates that Dryden was a careful reader of both Shakespeare and Chaucer when it picks up Shakespeare’s use of Chanticleer as an artist who is like Bottom: we delight in him despite his deficits. And indeed Reverand points out that Dryden may

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have cast himself as Chanticleer’s father, in which case Dryden pokes fun at himself and at his vocation as a poet:34 So sweetly wou’d he wake the Winter-day, That Matrons to the Church mistook their way, And thought they heard the merry Organ play. And he to raise his Voice with artful Care, (What will not Beaux attempt to please the Fair?) On Tiptoe stood to sing with greater Strength, And stretch’d his comely Neck at all the length: And while he pain’d his Voice to pierce the Skies, As Saints in Raptures use, would shut his Eyes, That the sound striving through the narrow Throat, His winking might avail, to mend the Note. By this, in Song, he never had his Peer, From sweet Cecilia down to Chanticleer. (620–32) Notice the neck that resonates with Horace’s description of the laughable monster and other gestures and contortions that render ridiculous this chorister. Yet even in this light-hearted poem, it remains difficult to pin Dryden down, as evidenced in the more enigmatic stanza with regards to art that can be poetical and Machiavellian simultaneously: Ye Princes rais’d by Poets to the Gods, And Alexander’d up in lying Odes, Believe not ev’ry flatt’ring Knave’s report, There’s many a Reynard lurking in the Court; And he shall be receiv’d with more regard And list’ned to, than modest Truth is heard. (659–64) Since Dryden was the author of poems on St. Cecilia, Chanticleer, and Alexander, all within Fables, he is both fox and goose, as was Snug the Lion. Dryden remains as crafty as Cronos and as garrulous as the aging Nestor, who remembers saving himself from a boar by climbing up a tree in Meleager and Atalanta. This adds relevance to the humor in Chanticleer’s own hard-earned wisdom as he responds to Reynard’s request for peace from the safety of a high limb: A Peace with all my Soul, said Chanticleer; But with your Favour, I will treat it here: And least the Truce with Treason should be mixt, ‘Tis my concern to have the Tree betwixt. (806–9)

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Dryden had both political and poetical enemies, and he had made amends with many though not all of them by 1700. Nevertheless, one couldn’t expect Dryden to treat personal or national reconciliations—after multiple iterations of “Truce with Treason”—with naïve carelessness, however effortless and self-deprecatory these passages appear. Likewise, his movements in and out of dreams, imagination, and the power and peril of true art versus over-confidence in artistic abilities almost seem to be private meditations in the midst of a widely publicized final miscellany of translations, hidden as they are in an argument between Pertelote and Chanticleer. Emily Anderson’s research focuses on later decades in the 18th century and on performative Shakespeare, rather than the experience of reading him, but her insights regarding Shakespeare’s role as “the means by which anxieties about obsolescence could be both focused and redressed” are fascinating when compared to Shakespeare’s influence on Dryden in Fables, where he does not mention Shakespeare and where he certainly does not lean into Shakespeare’s reputation in order to ensure his own legacy.35 If Shakespeare was part of a “cultural response to loss caught up in a lost king, lost years of interregnum, and the loss of precivil war figures like Shakespeare who could be lost,” Dryden either is confident that his allusions will be recognized or is not terribly concerned with obsolescence in this last work. Rather he is reconciled to past, present, and future, including and transcending physical death.

The Enchanted Island Seth Lobis begins with The Tempest when he charts a history of the 17thcentury understanding of sympathy: “The world of The Tempest . . . is a sympathetic animal” (1).36 Lobis demonstrates that Prospero moves from cosmological order (sympathy with the universe and magic) to a human order (interpersonal and moral sympathy between humans), and he measures other significant 17th-century works against this framework: Dryden-Davenant’s version of The Tempest (or The Enchanted Island) places the magic in Shakespeare and not Prospero, for example, and is an example of what has come to be known as the disenchantment of the world. The Dryden-Davenant changes in the 1667 version of the play strip Prospero of the very complexity that is relevant to Dryden’s art in 1700, but the Dryden of 1667 shared very few concerns with a Prospero who experiences anger, disappointment and regret before orchestrating a reconciliation. He was at the beginning of his career, writing the heroic Annus Mirabilis. Though it simplified or unified Shakespeare’s original, Dryden’s craftsmanship in the 1667 revision nevertheless led to a successful work for Restoration theater-goers. The Enchanted Island certainly shows a willingness to experiment, perhaps not only to suit the tastes of the audience but to suit Dryden’s sensibilities as well.37 Characters are added: there is the son Hippolito who has never seen a woman, and

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Miranda also has a sister named Dorinda. Sexual longings, expressed naturally and without art in these innocent characters, create a comic effect. Similarly, Trinculo and Stefano become sailors with additional companions that add to the comedy, and there is no real danger or threat of usurpation as in the original. Michael Dobson and Katharine Eisaman Maus demonstrate the political exigencies involved; neither Dryden nor his audience were interested in Prospero as a mysterious or absolute ruler, which had become as untenable then as it still is today.38 Hobbes’s state of nature is prevalent, as Hippolito’s polygamist urges demonstrate, as well as the other lovers’ responses to Hippolito—Miranda innocently asks Ferdinand to love Hippolito, then follows orders from Prospero to tend to Hippolito herself, but subsequently becomes jealous of Dorinda who has appealed to Ferdinand on behalf of Hippolito. The farcical sequence of events could be said to reflect a version of the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, yet the Dryden-Davenant play demonstrates a Hobbesian principle—interactions between young people degenerate quickly when there are no societal rules or restraints. What begins as a silly brawl ends in near death for Hippolito, suggesting that Dryden-Davenant recognized A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet as a pair much like we do, one comic and one tragic; “So quick bright things come to confusion” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.149). In summary, Novak and Guffey as editors write that The Enchanted Island possesses “more wit, more love, more mirth, and, in the sense of mechanical plotting, more art. Shakespeare’s ‘insubstantial pageant’ reminding us that ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’ is gone. But once we accept the idea that Dryden and Davenant have created a tragicomedy in the Restoration mode, we can appreciate just how good some of their verse is . . . and that the play itself is both moving and comic.”39 The difference in Dryden’s borrowings in The Enchanted Island and Fables is significant. In one, Prospero has no control over his own emotions or the actions of his children, much less the cosmos, and in the other, the power of dreams and imagination are intricately connected to “Shakespearean themes of forgiveness, grace, and redemption.”40 Of course one is meant for the stage during the early and lively days of the Restoration, and the other is a collection of verse narratives in 1700, after both the Revolution of 1688 and the wars on the continent have taken place. Eisaman Maus believes that Prospero’s loss of power, and its transference to Ariel, is a critical element in the Restoration version of the play: “In an era where the Stuart mythology seemed increasingly inappropriate, as well as indispensable, the average Restoration playgoer must have been keenly—even painfully—sensitive to the various claims of competing ideologies,” accounting for its compelling draw, which Dobson says ran well into the 19th century.41 Similarly, Dryden in 1700 as dramatist and poet of a wide audience possesses a sympathy with his readers that echoes Lobis’s description of Prospero in a sympathetic universe: his works are attuned to their passions. This is at the heart of my argument that Dryden

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created compelling fables that spoke to the ambivalence and contradictory emotions that many of his readers experienced during the last 15 years of the century. If the omissions of 1667 reappear in the imitations of 1700, Dryden’s attention to his own audience/readers remains consistent throughout (a trait Shakespeare would have appreciated), as does his willingness both to experiment with and to be changed by Shakespeare’s art.42 There is a difference in decades as well as genre between The Enchanted Island and Fables. “[Dryden and Davenant] deliberately avoid the kind of organic unity to be found in Shakespeare. Comic and tragic themes are tied together not by metaphoric relationships but by turns of plot.”43 These were choices made by successful dramatists who understood the demands of a Restoration audience, but Dryden’s approach to translation involves tuning his own poetry to the genius of the original author, and this approach also pleases Dryden and compels his audience. Corse shows that Dryden’s “additions to Virgil, rather than the result of some mechanical operation, are part of an organic process.”44 Similarly, When Dryden draws from Shakespeare in his later translations, he seems to do so in ways that fit this process of imitation, thereby making it possible to take seriously the idea that Dryden has The Tempest in mind while writing the Fables, where Dryden leverages his predecessor’s self-conscious illustration of power in art and politics in the shadow of Orpheus— themes that fit well with the ironies, subtleties, paradoxes, and complexities that lie at the heart of Fables.

Wandering Paths, Loss, and End-of-Life Writing Dryden’s use of wandering paths is one example of the ways that Shakespeare’s artistic influence weaves its way through several of Dryden’s works, changing as it does with each iteration. These paths often involve some sort of human loss. With the semi-operatic production King Arthur, the borrowing is based on “turns of plot”; Arthur’s company wanders back and forth through bog and marsh between Philidel and Grimbald, and it’s difficult to tell truth from deception.45 The translations offer something more subtle. First notice Dryden’s lines in the Virgil translation, when Aeneas remembers losing Creusa: I tread my former Tracks: through Night explore Each Passage, ev’ry Street I cross’d before. (2.1022–3) He circles back to this imagery when Nisus desperately searches for Euryalus: Again He ventures back: And treads the Mazes of his former track. (9.531–2)

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Corse writes that “these parallel scenes reinforce each other: Nisus is as desperately determined as Aeneas to redeem the time and rescue his companion; both men fail, and their failures offer an instructive contrast.”46 Within this translation of Virgil, Dryden may also imitate Shakespeare’s careful repetition of “mazes trod” in The Tempest. First, Gonzalo uses the term at the moment when he is lost and expects neither reunion nor reconciliation: By’r lakin, I can go no further, sir, My old bones aches. Here’s a maze trod indeed Through forth-rights and meanders! (3.3.1–3) Alonso echoes this passage when he wonders at the various groups who have been lost then found again at the end of The Tempest: This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod, And there is in this business more than nature Was ever conduct of. Some oracle Must rectify our knowledge. (5.1.242–5) Though Alonso transforms this image into one of grace, Dryden picks up Gonzalo’s earlier temporary state of despair after the party meets Ariel’s Harpies, when Gonzalo chases his friends for fear they will harm themselves; finally he is transfixed, grieving. Dryden necessarily deepens the poignancy of Gonzalo’s temporary state when he articulates permanent loss in The Aeneid by way of the same wandering metaphor. He may borrow from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well. Dryden draws from Spenser and Milton in his description of Nisus’s death (and Pope in turn draws from Dryden’s passage when translating Homer):47 Down fell the beauteous Youth; the yawning Wound Gush’d out a Purple Stream, and stain’d the Ground. His snowy Neck reclines upon his Breast, Like a fair Flow’r by the keen Share oppress’d: Like a white Poppy sinking on the Plain, Whose heavy Head is overcharg’d with Rain. (9.579–84) Even if Virgil draws from Catullus and from Homer, and Dryden from Spenser and Milton, it still seems that Dryden might also draw from Shakespeare when Oberon describes “Cupid all arm’d”: A certain aim he took At a fair vestal throned by [the] west,

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And loos’d his love-shaft smartly from his bow, As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts; — Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell. It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness. (2.1.157–60; 165–8) Dryden’s purple stain and depiction of Nisus as a white flower seems to come from this passage. Shakespeare’s love in idleness and Dryden’s translation of Virgil together qualify the image of an unmarked life in the elegy The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady (Chapter 3), where “Marriage, tho’ it sullies not, it dies” (20). Dryden’s “stain’d . . . Ground” in the Virgil imitation and the dye in Monument may draw from a line of Gonzalo’s in The Tempest: “That our many garments, being (as they were) / drench’d in the sea, hold notwithstanding their fresh- / ness and glosses, being rather new dy’d than stain’d / with salt water” (2.1.62–5). In this borrowing, mixing and remaking of imagery we find an intermingling of love, pain, and death. With Monument, there is a standing apart from all of those human complexities, and her faultless and steadfast purity presents an entirely different sort of loss.48 These poignant meditations take on further significance in Dryden’s imitation Ceyx and Alcyone.

Ceyx and Alcyone Pythagoras possesses an Orphean power to civilize, and Numa turns from meditative sermons toward the government of Rome. Prospero may present us with another version of these commitments to return and participate, but Ceyx and Alcyone’s conclusion resembles more closely the flight of his epilogue: And my ending is despair, Unless I be reliev’d by prayer, Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free. (15–20) Dryden tells readers in the headnote that Ceyx and Alcyone are king and queen of Trachin in Thessaly, haunted by family curses and driven to sea in order to ask for forgiveness: Both the Husband and the Wife lov’d each other with an entire Affection. Daedalion, the Elder Brother of Ceyx (whom he succeeded)

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Prospero may have mastered in the end his inner storm that paralleled the tempest, but no one saves Ceyx from the storm that swallows him (and Alcyone had warned him it would be this way). We read detailed passages about the violence of the waves, during which “Art fails, and Courage falls, no Succour near” (175). Dryden depicts the same fear felt in the first scene of The Tempest, and emphasizes a monarch’s powerlessness over the winds: “Ev’n he who late a Scepter did command / Now grasps a floating Fragment in his Hand” (210–11). Ceyx also is a king, and his own last thoughts allude to Prospero’s tempest: “From Pray’rs to Wishes he descends at last: / That his dead Body wafted to the Sands, / Might have its Burial from her Friendly Hands” (219–21), evoking Ariel’s comforting lines “Come unto these yellow sands / And then take hands” (1.2.375–6). Ferdinand’s grief when “Sitting on a bank, / Weeping again the King my father’s wrack” articulates the pain Alcyone feels as she looks out to the sea for her husband that she now knows is dead. Her lament “And Me without my Self the Seas have drown’d” (424) stands out against Gonzalo’s words of reconciliation: in one voyage Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis, And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves, When no man was his own. (5.1.208–13) Works notes that Dryden-Davenant had deleted this speech from their version of The Tempest to make room for slapstick comedy that fit the taste of the time. Dryden has reinserted it here and captured its poignancy without the felicitous resolution. The only magus figures here are gods, beginning with Juno who, annoyed with Alcyone’s prayers, sends a dream by proxy that will advise Alcyone of Ceyx’s death. This description of dreams is hardly less damning than Mercutio’s: About his Head fantastic Visions fly, Which various Images of Things supply, And mock their Forms; the Leaves on Trees not more, Nor bearded Ears in Fields, nor Sands upon the Shore. (296–9)

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The barren trees and bearded ears echo Sonnet 12, the sands upon the shore evoke Sonnet 60, and we hear Shakespeare’s time warning us with its tick tock in the meter (except in line 297, which appears as varied as the imagination in dreams). Juno’s messenger “brush’d” the dreams away like cobwebs so she could send Morpheus to Alcyone, who would play Ceyx’s ghost in a vision; the lie that will tell the truth. Alcyone goes to the shore: Twas morning; to the Port she takes her way, And stands upon the Margin of the Sea: That Place, that very Spot of Ground she sought, Or thither by her Destiny was brought, Where last he stood. (437–41) Dryden’s lines about Alcyone echo Juno’s appearance in Prospero’s: Masque: the Queen o’ th’ sky, Whose wat’ry arch and messenger am I, Bids thee leave these, and with her sovereign Grace, Here on this grass-plot, in this very place, To come and sport. (4.1.70–4) It is at this point that Juno, an image of benevolence created by Prospero, “descends in her car” to “this grass-plot, in this very place,” and a beautiful masque unfolds as a bountiful and loving work of art by a father for a daughter in a betrothal celebration. Golding’s translation of Ovid Metamorphoses 10 also uses the phrase “in that same place” in the passage where Orpheus sat down, tuned his strings and charmed the trees. Alcyone’s experience subverts the imagery of this locus amoenus when she goes to “That Place, that very spot of ground,” and Ceyx’s corpse returns to her. It’s a desolate response, it seems, to Shakespeare and to the power of Orpheus, until the loving couple turns to birds. Alcyone is the first to change, and as a bird she kisses the dead Ceyx, bringing about a second miraculous and magical transformation not unlike that of Pygmalion and his statue. Birds are associated with Orpheus, as was Ariel, and Ceyx and Alcyone are set free. Theirs is not a symbol of reconciliation in newly wedded couples, nor do they return to participate like the aging Prospero, but rather they experience a complete alteration. And though the circumstances seemed grim, Ceyx’s prayers in fact were answered: his prayer “That his dead Body wafted to the Sands, / Might have its Burial in her Friendly Hands” (220–1) becomes “Her Hair, her Vest, and stooping to the Sands / About his Neck she cast

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her trembling Hands” (466–7), where Dryden uses the same rhyme to indicate the prayers’s fulfillment (and repeats once again Ariel’s original “sands/hands” couplet). This reconciliation, however, involves a farewell to human form. The Tempest has been recognized as a play devoted to artistry that may have served as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage and to his beloved Ovid. Dryden’s Fables also is a last work, and his couplet about Alcyone, in a miscellany whose preface articulates a majestic poetic statement, changes yet again into an important metaphor for Alexander Pope in An Essay on Criticism (1709), where he eulogizes Walsh, his recently deceased friend and poetic mentor, with the lyrical image of Alcyone’s flight.49 Dryden writes: Headlong from hence to plunge her self she springs, But shoots along supported by her Wings, A Bird new-made about the Banks she plies, Not far from Shore; and short Excursions tries. (Ceyx and Alcyone 472–5) Pope’s elegiac lines follow: The Muse, whose early Voice you taught to Sing, Prescrib’d her Heights, and prun’d her tender Wing, (Her Guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, But in low Numbers short Excursions tries. (735–8) Pope, while alluding to Alcyone in his simultaneous commitment to poetry and tribute to his dead friend, may have recognized not only a potential farewell from Dryden but also the “tender wings” in Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, where Dryden refers to the regenerative phoenix: An Infant-Phoenix from the former springs His Father’s Heir, and from his tender Wings Shakes off his Parent Dust, his Method he pursues, And the same Lease of Life on the same Terms renews. (7: 600–3) Considering Dryden’s attention to the transmigration of literary souls that marks a line of great poets in the Preface, Dryden may be refining the image he began in the 1667 Prologue to The Tempest: So, from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day Springs up and buds a new reviving Play. (3–4)

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Though Dryden seems to avoid whatever polemical discussion Shakespeare would provoke in literary politics, he does not shy from integrating political questions of kingship into Ceyx and Alcyone, thereby creating another central concern in common with The Tempest. As childless monarchs, where descent most certainly is of consequence, Ceyx and Alcyone present a movement away from the snare of embroiled relationships. When Alcyone begs Ceyx not to embark on his fateful journey, she describes the winds over which her father rules in political terms: Nor let false Hopes to trust betray thy Mind, Because my Sire in Caves constrains the Wind, Can with a Breath their clam’rous Rage appease, They fear his Whistle, and forsake the Seas; Not so, for, once indulg’d, they sweep the Main; Deaf to the Call, or, hearing, hear in vain; (29–34) . . . I know them well, and mark’d their rude Comport, While yet a Child, within my Father’s Court: In times of Tempest they command alone, And he but sits precarious on the Throne: (41–4) Mary II, it must be remembered, witnessed many political winds as a child. As Alcyone had feared, the winds create an uncontrollable chaos that conquers Ceyx. This storm is described in terms of political warfare: In this Confusion while their Work they ply, The Winds augment the Winter of the Sky, And wage intestine Wars; the suff’ring Seas Are toss’d, and mingled as their Tyrants please. The Master wou’d command, but in despair Of Safety, stands amaz’d with stupid Care, Nor what to bid, or what forbid he knows, Th’ungovern’d Tempest to such Fury grows: Vain is his Force, and vainer is his Skill; With such a Concourse comes the Flood of Ill: (111–20) The “fury” of the winds against Ceyx in the current tempest is as uncontrollable as the “clam’rous rage” that Alcyone observed as a child in court. The birds they become are those who create the halcyon days; they provide the calm in the storms for all seafarers, at least until the eggs have hatched. It now becomes relevant to look at Dryden’s play King Arthur

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(1691), where the masque-like ending begins with “the British Ocean in a Storm” and where, once King Aeolus (Alcyone’s father) dispels the winds, “The Scene opens, and discovers a calm Sea”; the grand spectacle that forecasts harmony and harvest follows and closes the opera. And Aeolus finally will do the same for Alcyone once she is a bird: They bill, they tread; Alcyone compress’d, Sev’n Days sits brooding on her floating Nest: A wintry Queen: Her Sire at length is kind, Calms ev’ry Storm, and hushes ev’ry Wind; Prepares his Empire for his Daughter’s Ease, And for his hatching Nephews smooths the Seas. (494–9) This moment of peace from tempestuous winds is relevant to the temporary political peace as a result of the Treaty of Ryswick (1697). Like the halcyon days in the poem, the peace in England would be brief, and Dryden expresses his doubts in its duration in To John Driden of Chesterton, where he highlights the logical problem created by William’s confidence in the Peace of Ryswick combined with his request for a standing army: “The peace both parties want is like to last: / Which if secure, securely we may trade; / Or, not secure, should never have been made” (143–5).50 Yet however temporary the peace would turn out to be, they were halcyon days all the same, and they occurred during William and Mary’s reign. And in fact, Daniel Defoe refers to this image of Halcyon twice in his biography of Mary II (the same biography where he transcribes parts of Eleonora—see Chapter 3). He first uses the image when he describes a Dutch arch under which the newlyweds walk upon their entrance to Holland, which Defoe translates: “What Halcyon Ayrs this Royal Hymen Sings! The Olive-Branch of Peace her Dowry she brings” (Defoe 28). Defoe concludes with a poem, Threnodium Britannicum, and lines again refer to halcyon days: Thus hush’d in Smiles laid down to endless Rest Her dying Bed a perfect Halcion Nest. (Defoe 94) Dryden’s willingness to engage this contemporary iconography demonstrates extraordinary discipline in a heartfelt wish for England’s peaceful future.

The Flower and the Leaf Immediately following Ceyx and Alcyone in Fables is The Flower and the Leaf, and it may provide in Fables not only the purity of Prospero’s

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masque (omitted in The Enchanted Island) but also the locus amoenus that Ceyx’s death denied in the previous fable. John Demaray describes the inner world of Prospero as projected through his magic from the sea storm forward, and the masque becomes an expression of “profound imaginative delight at the impending bounteous marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda.”51 If we compare the enchanted ground in The Flower and the Leaf to Cupid’s broken bows of the unpublished The Lady’s Song in 1691, we see just how much control Dryden exerts over his natural disappointment. And if it also mirrors Prospero’s “profound imaginative delight,” it may articulate Dryden’s best and purest wishes for England and perhaps it also is a farewell to poetry, though he is no more naïve than the magus of Shakespeare’s creation, as his other fables make clear. There are echoes of both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest in Dryden’s masque-like version of this poem that he subtitles “A Vision.” It begins as the story of an innocent maiden who sets out at sunrise to celebrate the first day of May. Her “Fancy” leads her to a beautiful Grove, where Dryden borrows from Spenser and Milton in addition to Chaucer, and it ends with a moral about art that lasts and art that doesn’t. The “dew” in both plays that seems to symbolize art is mentioned three times in Dryden’s poem. Where there were naiads and reapers in Prospero’s masque there are nymphs and knights here. Instead of Ceres, Juno, and Iris, we have Diana, Flora, and the nine great worthies, and Dryden begins with Alma Venus and a lyrical narrative of creation: Where Venus from her Orb descends in Show’res To glad the Ground, and paint the Fields with Flow’rs: When first the tender Blades of Grass appear, And Buds that yet the blast of Eurus fear, Stand at the door of Life; and doubt to cloath the Year; Till gentle Heat, and soft repeated Rains, Make green Blood to dance within their Veins. (5–11) Dryden evokes the green to red imagery here that he used in Palamon and Arcite when referring to Emilia in the temple of Diana. The Emilialike maiden who cannot sleep also repeats the “care/repair” couplet we already have seen as the connection between the Venus of Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque:52 Much Joy had dry’d away the balmy Dew: Seas wou’d be Pools, without the brushing Air, To curl the Waves; and sure some little Care Should weary Nature so, to make her want repair. (29–32)

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The rhyme concludes imagery that moves from the dew of the morning, to the life-giving air that moves over the water, to the ocean waves that once brought forth the goddess herself. Next, the speaker “Pass’d out in open Air, preventing Day, / And sought a goodly Grove as Fancy led my way” (36–7) where oaks are lined, “Their branching Arms in Air with equal space” (42), and these sweeping images are complimented with short, quick gestures in “The painted Birds, Companions of the Spring, / Hopping from Spray to Spray, were heard to sing; / Both Eyes and Ears receiv’d a like Delight, / Enchanting Musick, and a charming Sight” (46–9). This is Philomel’s grove, and Dryden picks up the imagery of “mazes” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest again, though here it is not a maze that leads nowhere, as in the plays, or to permanent loss, as with Aeneas in Dryden’s translation, but rather it brings the maiden into an “arbour” and “sacred Receptacle of the Wood”: . . . I took the way, Which through a Path, but scarcely printed, lay; In narrow Mazes oft it seem’d to meet, And look’d, as lightly press’d, by Fairy Feet. Wandring I walk’d along, for still methought To some strange End so strange a Path was wrought: At last it led me where an Arbour stood, The sacred Receptacle of the Wood: This Place unmark’d though oft I walk’d the Green, In all my Progress I had never seen: (54–62) The artistry in “This Place” is akin to nature: That Nature seem’d to vary the Delight And satisfy’d at once the Smell and Sight The Master Work-man of the Bow’r was known Through Fairy-Lands, and built for Oberon. Who twining Leaves with such Proportion drew, They rose by Measure, and by Rule they grew —For none but Hands divine could work so well. (76–81; 83) This evokes the legacy of art, including the bowers in works by Spenser, Jonson, and Shakespeare, encompassed together “in this place.” The chastity it articulates is more like the controlled art in The Tempest (and Ferdinand’s and Miranda’s vows) than the chaotic love in A Midsummer

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Night’s Dream, and “They rose by Measure” sounds like the art of Prospero: “The cloud-capped tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself” that next “Leave[s] not a rack behind.” Dryden, as he did in Ceyx and Alcyone, evokes an image of Ferdinand sitting on a bank when he first hears Ariel; the maiden sits on a bank (Dryden underscores this fact by repeating it over two lines) while listening to the nightingale sing: On the green Bank I sat, and listen’d long; (Sitting was more convenient for the Song!) Nor till her Lay was ended could I move, But wish’d to dwell for ever in the Grove. (132–5) Where Ceyx and Alcyone drew from Ferdinand’s grief, Dryden transforms Ferdinand’s experience here into one of pure joy. Dryden mentions the spot of ground again a few lines down, in a passage that reveals just how important poetry has been to the aging lyricist and satirist: My Sight, and Smell, and Hearing were employ’d, And all three Senses in full Gust enjoy’d: And what alone did all the rest surpass, The sweet Possession of the Fairy Place Single, and conscious to my Self alone, Of Pleasures to th’excluded World unknown Pleasures which no where else, were to be found, And all Elysium in a spot of Ground. (138–45) Shakespeare’s (and Plato’s in Phaedrus) use of “this very place” is restored to its joyous and sublime context, unlike Ceyx’s corpse just before its miraculous metamorphosis. Dryden leads the Miranda-like speaker through the dream sequence. First, she arrives: That (now the Dew with Spangles deck’d the Ground) A sweeter spot of Earth was never found. (92–3) She next experiences the divinity of the Orphic tradition while listening to the nightingale: And I so ravish’d with her heavnly Note I stood intranc’d, and had not room for Thought. (118–9)

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Further, the animals respond as they should to Orphic beauty, though here the song is sung by Diana: The Fawns came scudding from the Groves to hear And all the bending Forest lent an Ear. (195–6) If there was a break in the masque in Ceyx and Alcyone that nevertheless led to a miraculous transformation, Dryden here dedicates an entire fable to a masque perfect in its completeness, where the “fairy show” fully unfolds in a sustained procession that includes a reconciliation between two queens, reframing perhaps Dryden’s memorable rivalry between the two felines where the panther accepts a meal from the hind: “And with a Lenten sallad cool’d her bloud” (III.27). The Flower and the Leaf represents genuine harmony: “The Queen in white Array before her Band, / Saluting, took her Rival by the Hand” (397–8) and “Then sought green Salads which they bad ‘em eat, / A Sovereign Remedy for inward Heat” (421–2). There is a bountiful feast in the forest, where seats appear suddenly for the large train: “The vanquish’d Party with the Victors join’d, / Nor wanted sweet Discourse, the Banquet of the Mind” (431–2). But no fiends disturb this feast as they did in Theodore and Honoria; this is an artistic tour de force devoid of all satire. The Flower and the Leaf concludes with an earnest portrait of the Nine Worthies (of which King Arthur is only one among three Christians, three Pagans, and three Jews), a stalwart Diana of Chastity, and “Knights of Love, who never broke their Vow”: Firm to their plighted Faith, and ever free From Fears and fickle Chance, and Jealousy, The Lords and Ladies, who the Woodbine bear, As true as Tristam, and Isotta were. (523–6) Here we have Dryden’s hopes for England in an image of faithfulness through decorous manifestations of Mars, Diana, and Venus that is quite unlike their depictions in Palamon and Arcite and in The Secular Masque. Even though there is no trace of satire in this tribute, a darkness remains in the description of the fairy life, reminiscent as it is of Puck’s description. Compare Dryden’s passage in The Flower and the Leaf: Fair Daughter know That what you saw, was all a Fairy Show: And all those airy Shapes you now behold Were human Bodies once, and cloath’d with earthly Mold: Our Souls not yet prepar’d for upper Light,

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Till Doomsday wander in the Shades of Night; This only Holiday of all the Year, We priviledg’d in Sun-shine may appear: With Songs and Dance we celebrate the Day, And with due Honours usher in the May. At other Times we reign by Night alone, And posting through the Skies pursue the Moon: But when the Morn arises, none are found; For cruel Demogorgon walks the round, And if he finds a Fairy lag in Light, He drives the Wretch before; and lashes into Night. (480–95) Dryden has changed Puck’s speech, filled with ghosts “wand’ring here and there,” who “willfully themselves exile from light”: For Night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger, At whose approach, ghosts, wand’ring here and there, Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all, That in crossways and floods have burial, Already to their wormy beds are gone. For fear lest day should look their shames upon, They willfully themselves exile from light, And must for aye consort with black-brow’d Night. (3.2.379–87) In both works, these passages provide a glimmer of something darker and slightly dangerous, if still beautiful. Dryden’s version may even provide a glimpse of Purgatory. The harmony of the bow against the strings of the lyre, and its counterpart in the bow and arrows of both Cupid and Diana, is an apt image for bringing together the material in this chapter. The bow and arrows are a form of concordia discors related to Orpheus: While the arrow flies and hits blindly like passion, the bow, held steadily in its place, is used with a seeing eye; and because its strength resides in its tension, it is a symbol of restraint. A bow without arrow, and an arrow without bow, are clearly of no possible use; but combined they impart energy to each other, and illustrate that ‘harmony in discord’ which Pico defined as the essence of pulchritudo.53 Theseus’s hunt and hounds make him Diana-like as he comments on their musical harmony in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, striking a common chord with the Theseus in Palamon and Arcite.54 In The Lady’s Song,

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Cupid “Has broken his Bow, and extinguish’d his Fires” in anger over the banishment of Pan and Syrinx. In The Flower and the Leaf, the bow becomes a symbol of valor connected with the laurel and those who wear it, including the knights of the Order of the Garter, who are followers of Diana. Their temples wreath’d with leafs, that still renew; For deathless laurel is the victor’s due. Who bear the bows were knights in Arthur’s reign, Twelve they, and twelve the peers of Charlemagne; For bows the strength of brawny arms imply, Emblems of valor and of victory. Behold an order yet of newer date, Doubling their number, equal in their state; Our England’s ornament, the crown’s defense, In battle brave, protectors of their prince; Unchang’d by fortune, to their sovereign true, For which their manly legs are bound with blue. These, of the Garter call’d, of faith unstain’d, In fighting fields the laurel have obtain’d, And well repaid those honors which they gain’d. (540–54) Strung bows are symbols of loyalty to England, not broken ones. The valor now lies in those who take them up, presumably in defense of the peace that fills the grove. Men like the Duke of Ormond, for whom it is assumed the addition was written, who served James and who now serve William, and who, as Dryden emphasizes in the dedication, once served in war and now serve in peace. Strung bows also absorb the symbolism of concordia discors, of poetry, and of the Orphic and Ovidian traditions that Dryden shares with Shakespeare. Dryden embraces the miscellany tradition that is more aligned with Shakespeare than with French or Tory literary sensibilities, and he restores the irony, subtleties, and complexities of The Tempest that he had omitted as a playwright. In Fables as in The Tempest, art coincides with politics coincides with reconciliation and spiritual metamorphoses of the highest forms, in a final work that Dryden may have known was his last.

Notes 1. Thompson and Roberts, eds., Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900, quotations on 1 and 4, show that women’s writing about Shakespeare has been “discovered in autobiographies, theatre criticism, books for a general readership, club records, popularisations, adaptations, and perhaps above all, periodicals” (7). See also Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restor’d, v–vi, quoted in Thompson and Roberts on page 1.

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2. See Novak, “The Politics of Shakespeare Criticism in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century,” 115–42, quotation on 116. 3. Novak’s article explores three points relating to Shakespeare’s reputation 1660–1715: “The First has to do with the mixing of literary criticism and politics; the second with aesthetics as it applied to an appreciation of Shakespeare; the third with the reading and knowledge of Shakespeare during this time span” (116). 4. See Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., Enchanted Ground: Reimagining Dryden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in Association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Anderson Clark Memorial Library, 2004), quotation on 9. See also Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 165–91; quotation on 181. 5. Works 17: 55. 6. Steven Zwicker, “Imagining a Literary Life: Dryden dwells among the Moderns and the Ancients,” The Cambridge Quarterly 47.2 (June 2018): 99–115. 7. Ibid., quotation on 115. 8. See Levine, Between the Ancients and Moderns, 79 and Battle of the Books, 131. Levine shows that Shakespeare continued to be the sticking point between moderns and ancients, because he excelled the ancients in many respects and yet no modern would put him forward to vie with Homer. Meanwhile, Neander says: “Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare” (Works 17: 58). See also Weinbrot: “However unfashionable Shakespeare might be, he is Neander’s paradigm of national English drama that is great in spite of its errors” (186). 9. For Dryden’s indebtedness to Milton and for the focus on dreams as a defense of poetry, see Taylor Corse, “Dryden and Milton in ‘The Cock and the Fox’,” Milton Quarterly 27.3 (October 1993): 109–18. 10. Novak, “Politics of Shakespeare Criticism,” 120. 11. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Dobson shows that Shakespeare on stage was closely associated with contemporary political questions, points out that Richard II and 1 Henry IV were successful on stage as early as 1680 and 1699, and shows that Shakespeare was being “praised for his timeless ability to move the heart even as his plays [were] being re-written for immediate polemical ends” (20 and 64). He asserts that the Dryden-Davenant The Tempest was “profoundly engaged with competing claims of Divine Right Royalism and contractualism, albeit through its familial underpinnings of both,” and that, similarly, Dryden placed “emphasis on the innocent Cressida to deflect from issues of loyalty and kingship” (43 and 76). 12. See William H. Youngren, “Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Modern Philology 79.3 (February 1982): 267–83, for Addison’s affectivist criticism and his influence on changes in the aesthetic sensibility. See C.H. Salter, “Dryden and Addison,” Modern Language Review 69.1 (January 1974): 29–39, for Addison’s indebtedness to Dryden’s literary criticism, including his essays on the pleasures of the imagination. 13. Youngren, 274. 14. For Dryden’s use of Locke in his conception of Emmeline, see Works 16: 316n. 15. For all references to Spectators, see The Spectator (hereafter Spectator), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

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16. Spectator 1: 270–4; 3: 570–3. See Roper, “Who’s Who in Absalom and Achitophel?” regarding the contemporary readers’ experience of Absalom and Achitophel, which bolsters the idea that affectivist criticism articulated a common occurrence for readers of this poem. 17. Kevin Pask, The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 65, notes that Addison quotes Jeremy Collier’s phrase when he attacks Dryden rather than quoting Dryden himself: Dryden’s phrase was “that fairy kind of writing” and Collier’s “that fairy way of writing.” However, Addison does use Dryden’s word “kind” at the beginning of the passage. 18. Youngren, 274. 19. Works, vol. 12 ed. Vinton A. Dearing (1994): 94. 20. “The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence,” Works 12: 95. See also Charles Martindale and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) for a comparison of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Shakespeare’s imitation of Ovid, and his use of fairies and magic as an expression of artistic power. 21. Works 13: 239–40. 22. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 32. 23. Ibid., 36. 24. Ibid. 25. Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. H.R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 451. The Latin is as follows: “Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam iungere si velit, et varias inducere plumas undique collatis membris, ut turpiter atrum desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne, spectatum admissi risum teneatis, amici?” 26. See Winn, Queen Anne, 163, for her use of “Mr. Caliban” and “Monster” when referencing her brother in-law. See Hester W. Chapman, Mary II Queen of England (Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1976), 141 for the epithet “Dutch abortion.” Princess Anne’s references do not acknowledge Caliban as the original inhabitant of the island. 27. Works 13: 240. 28. Horace, 451. 29. See Taylor Corse, “Dryden and Milton,’” especially 112–14. 30. See Taylor Corse, “Dryden and Milton,” Tom Mason, “Dryden’s Cock and the Fox and Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Translation and Literature 16 (Spring 2007): 1–28; and Charles Hinnant, “Dryden’s Gallic Rooster,” Studies in Philology 65 (July 1968): 647–56. Mason emphasizes the staying power of this fable, enjoyed as it was through the 18th century, its literary indebtedness, its attention to 17th century questions of faith, its adaptation of Chaucer that is “essentially continuous and endlessly mutable” (26), and Dryden’s “supreme felicity [in] having it both ways” (26). Corse, in an earlier article, also speaks to the fable’s literary indebtedness, especially to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and its particular attention to the religious question of predestination versus free will. Dryden’s choice to include verses concerning predestination versus free will in The Cock and the Fox is another example of contemporary topics that add to the tenor of Fables to which so many responded, and it is yet another reminder that he often is working with many ideas at once. Eighty percent of the general commentary after the 1696 assassination attempt eschewed passive obedience in favor of political resistance, and framed the political argument in religious terms—God expected men to act, and this expectation justified the Revolution (Pincus, 454). Dryden’s Nun’s Priest expands

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31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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considerably on Chaucer’s original debate regarding predestination and free will; he takes seriously these questions of faith, examining the value of each, then subverts his thread of argument with: “If he could make such Agents wholly free, / I not dispute; the Point’s too high for me” (542–3). He closes as Chaucer does: “The Tale I tell is only of a Cock” (553). Predestination (a Calvinist doctrine) and passive obedience (an Anglo-Catholic one) both lead to a kind of quietism that contradicts the action required by supporters of the Revolution. Bishops appointed by William and Mary advocated free will: “[God] has promised that his grace shall attend and promote our honest endeavours, but gives no ground to the idle and negligent to hope for his help, who will make no use of their natural powers derived from him for their own preservation.” (John Moore, A Sermon Preach’d before the King [1696], qtd. in Pincus, 416). Dryden’s Nun’s Priest offers several lines of ratiocination, then undercuts them. This is not to say Dryden doesn’t take the subject matter seriously; The Cock and the Fox is “a thoughtful and searching recognition, in the comic mode, of epic material that engaged Dryden’s fullest attention.” (Corse, “Dryden and Milton,” 117). Yet Dryden treats these matters with the urbanity that has become his signature. Note his satirical illustration of Pertolote’s sexual submissiveness to Chanticleer, placing it parallel to the philosophy and practice of passive obedience: “Resolv’d the passive Doctrin to fulfil / Tho’ loath: And let him work his wicked Will” (73–4). Hinnant writes: “‘Passive doctrine’ in this context suggests not merely marital obedience but also the seventeenth-century notion of the divinity of kings” (640). Hinnant demonstrates the ancestry of Dryden’s Chanticleer, who is a descendent of the Gallic brothers Brennus and Belinus, the “legendary tyrants who conquered Europe” (651), and draws on evidence from medals and contemporary cartoons that consistently depict Louis XIV, who looms large, as a cock. Dryden’s portrayal of Pertelote as compliant if uninterested is a witty and irreverent take on weighty contemporary topics, and his palimpsest of Chanticleer that appears to be Louis XIV in one moment (cf. Hinnant), and Dryden the next (cf. Reverand), are similar in tone: “The satire is in the incorporation of these allusions—urbane, discreet, generalized, joking—in the context of the original poem” (Hinnant, 656). Since Louis XIV often was depicted as a cock in medals and other Nine Years’ War propaganda, and his sexual dalliances were both legendary and ridiculed, Dryden’s decision to make Chanticleer’s ancestors the Gallic tyrant kings adds to the comic similarities between the Roi de Soleil and the self-absorbed tyrant of the barnyard. If we move from the mock of The Cock and the Fox to the heroic of Sigismonda and Guiscardo, we find Sigismonda faced with a choice between obedience to a tyrannical father (Tancred) or to her newlywed husband (Guiscardo), placing passive obedience in a more dramatic light, and not to the benefit of that doctrine. Mason, 4. Stephen Manning, “Fabular Jangling and Poetic Vision in ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’,” South Atlantic Review 52.1 (January 1987): 3–16. Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), and Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966) have established the ways that Gonzalo presents an ideal vision of the world and yet can also be ridiculous and unrealistic. Likewise, these scholars have demonstrated Bottom’s unwitting ability in spite of his clownish nature. See Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 161. Emily Hodgson Anderson, Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), quotations on 8.

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36. Seth Lobis, in The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). Shaftesbury is an example of a belief in both cosmic and human/moral sympathy, Milton is an example of the cosmic and human sympathy that was sundered by the fall, and Hume “exposes and explodes” ideas of moral and natural sympathy altogether. One pattern of responses that emerged was the idea that as intellectual uncertainty over cosmic sympathy rose, a corresponding reliance on human sympathy rose with it. Newton, however, offered gravity as proof of natural/cosmic sympathy. Lobis’s research demonstrates a back and forth rhythm in the human understanding of sympathy. From my perspective, Dryden’s Fables seems to offer yet another approach to sympathy that is distinct from his 1667 version of The Tempest: his Prime Mover is not necessarily in sympathy with human particularities (or sorrows), and yet Dryden’s is not an Epicurean outlook, either. Dryden’s placement of large historical movements alongside the personal experience of those movements indicates that there is a cosmic order, but that sometimes humans and our passions are in its way. However, Dryden as dramatist and poet of a wide audience possesses a sympathy with his readers: his works are attuned to those passions. This is at the heart of my argument that Dryden created compelling fables that spoke to the ambivalence and contradictory emotions that many of his English readers experienced during the last 15 years of the century. 37. See Works, vol. 10, eds. Maximillian E. Novak and George R. Guffey (1970): 319–43. See also Novak, in “The Politics of Shakespeare,” where he traces the idea of adaptation as a method for improving Shakespeare, demonstrating this tendency as a Tory-leaning aesthetic. But see also Dryden’s opinions regarding his emendations of Chaucer: “I found I had a Soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same Studies. Another Poet, in another Age, may take the same Liberty with my Writings” (Works 7: 40). 38. See Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest,” in Critical Essays on John Dryden, ed. James A. Winn (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997). Eisaman Maus and Dobson believe that Prospero’s loss of power, and its transference to Ariel, suggests that the Stuart mythology was “increasingly inappropriate even if it also was indispensable”, and that the “various claims of competing ideologies” accounts for the compelling draw of the play (see Eisaman Maus, 85–7), which Dobson says ran well into the 19th century (Dobson, 43). 39. Works 10: 343n. 40. Ibid., 340n. 41. Eisaman Maus, 85–67 and Dobson, 43. 42. John Shanahan, “The Dryden-Davenant Tempest, Wonder Production, and the State of Natural Philosophy in 1667,” The Eighteenth Century, 54.1 (Spring 2013), sees the Dryden-Davenant version as an example of experimentation that mirrors the values and aspirations of the Royal Society and contemporary interpretations of natural philosophy. He writes that The Enchanted Island was an “emotionally moving drama of enchantment” for its contemporary audience, and he believes that Dryden/Davenant were working with “multiperspectival protocols of the new science” even as they worked on a political plane to “manage memories of the preceding two decades” (91). 43. Works, 10: 329n. 44. Corse, Dryden’s Aeneid, 15.

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45. See ibid., for Dryden’s borrowings from Spenser and Milton. For Milton’s borrowings from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, see for examples: Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, 1–2; Alwin Thaler, Shakespeare’s Silences (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1929); and John M. Major, “Comus and The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10.2 (Spring 1959). When Pope imitates Dryden, he is part of this established practice of re-creating another poet’s lines, and Dryden himself anticipates that another poet in another age will take his lines and make them new. Cf. Preface to Fables, Works 7: 40. 46. See Corse, Dryden’s Aeneid, 103–4, for an elucidation of Dryden’s delicate translation that picks up this subtle thread in Virgil. My own ideas in this section build on his. 47. Corse, Dryden’s Aeneid, 104–7. 48. Works 7: 905n cites Noyes, who connected this line with John Donne’s Funerall Elegie, though we have seen just how closely Dryden can follow multiple authors simultaneously. Furthermore, subsequent scholarship has suggested that the Donne poem should be attributed to Shakespeare, lending plausibility to my idea that Dryden uses the line from the poem, but to purposes more aligned with the meaning behind the words of Gonzalo. See Richard Abrams, “W[illiam] S[hakespeare]’s ‘Funeral Elegy’ and the Turn from the Theatrical,” SEL 36 (1996): 435–60. See also Donald W. Foster, Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), and “A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]’s Best-Speaking Witnesses,” PMLA 111 (1996): 1080–105. 49. See note 64, Chapter 3. Philip Smallwood, “Pope’s ‘Short Excursions’ and Dryden: an Unrecorded Borrowing,” Notes and Queries 26.6 (1979): 540–1. 50. “The year 1697 closed with the celebration of the Peace of Ryswick, ending the Nine Years’ War with France. The Thanksgiving Day in London was 2 December. The next day King William opened his fourth parliament with a speech in which he voiced his conviction that England needed a standing army to guarantee its freedom from further wars. Parliament, however, insisted on major reductions in the land forces, and on 2 February 1699 the king signed an act limiting the army in England to 7000 men, all to be native Englishmen, so that the king had to disband his Dutch guards” (Works 7: 576). 51. John Demaray, Shakespeare and the Spectacles of Strangeness: The Tempest and the Transformation of Renaissance Theatrical Forms (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 105. 52. All nature is thy province, life thy care; / Thou mads’t the world, and does the world repair” (III.143–4) in Palamon and Arcite becomes “Nature is my kindly care; / Mars destroys, and I repair” (74–5) in The Secular Masque. 53. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 78. 54. See John Hollander, “Musica Mundana and Twelfth Night,” in Sound and Poetry, English Institute Essays 1956, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957): 55–82, but especially 63–70 for the exposition on concordia discors in musica humana.

5

Detachment and Involvement in Artistry and Good Government

“Some Estates are held in England, by paying a Fine at the change of every Lord.” This is the first sentence that Dryden writes as a preamble to his final literary statement, Fables Ancient and Modern. It is the opening to his dedication to the Duke of Ormond. While he pays double taxes to the current government, the “tender” referred to here is of the sort he used to pay the court, and which he certainly paid at the changing of the guard between Charles II and James II: ’Tis true, that by delaying the Payment of my last Fine, when it was due by your Grace’s Accession to the Titles, and Patrimonies of your House, I may seem in rigour of Law to have made a forfeiture of my Claim, yet my Heart has always been devoted to your Service; And since you have been graciously pleas’d, by your permission of this Address, to accept the tender of my Duty, ’tis not yet too late to lay these Poems at your Feet.1 Throughout Volume V of Poems on Affairs of State 1688–1697, William Cameron, its editor, notes Dryden’s silence in this era regarding William and Mary while others scribbled away, some well enough, but always in the poet’s shadow. James Anderson Winn uses Dryden’s own words as evidence to assert his opinion that this was indeed Dryden’s choice, and speculates that Dorset extended an offer to Dryden to keep the laureateship if he would forswear his Catholicism.2 Dryden, like James II, was on the wrong side of “the rigor of the law,” and he suggests that his silence may have given the appearance of retirement. However, at the time of this dedication, Dryden’s recent translation of Virgil was viewed as a matter of national pride with generous subscribers who were of mixed political persuasions, and European correspondence indicates that those on the continent also anticipated its publication.3 Men like Pope, Garth, Congreve, and Wharton were of the opinion that Dryden’s last works were his best, especially the Fables.4 Dryden’s translation of Virgil and Fables are the major components of this final phase in his life and literary career, and the passage at the start of this chapter involves the first words of

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Dryden’s final literary statement. Dryden, it seems, is reclaiming his rightful place as the poet of England. But Dryden returns to claim his estate with a different tone, and with different works. Fables arguably is deeply involved in its own times, while at the same time it is Dryden’s most detached work. Consistent with all of the phases of Dryden’s writing, much of the work in Fables has political relevance. In To John Driden of Chesterton, the poet stands, with his cousin Driden, as a symbol of patriotism and steadfastness to England: “Betwixt the prince and parliament we stand” (175). But Dryden’s choice of authors (Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer) is not a particularly political one. Absent are the satirists (Horace, Persius, and Juvenal) that might have served as a springboard, had Dryden wanted to write the sort of political poetry he wrote from 1679 to 1684. Yet the absence of the satirists should not be taken as detachment from politics: Dryden was aware that he was expected either to compliment or to criticize William and Mary; sometimes he does both, and sometimes he does neither. The pattern of compliment and critique was not a new one for Dryden, as Absalom and Achitophel demonstrates: he is committed politically and morally as a satirist, but it is an involvement that includes discernment and judgment. As an author of narrative poetry, Dryden also is attached to his characters. The stories in Fables have psychological interest and stand on their own, independent of political allegory. When he allows their situations to reflect on current political situations, that reflection becomes another layer of the artist’s involvement: he cares about the characters themselves, and he cares about English politics, and sometimes he addresses both in the same fable. When Dryden takes a long view of history, as he does in Palamon and Arcite and in The Secular Masque, that long view shows artistic detachment. It also provides another vehicle by which to assess contemporary events. Even if Dryden did not openly seek to include new audiences, as Johnson pointed out when comparing the criticism of Addison to Dryden, new audiences nevertheless were drawn to him, and his particular talents of writing “perspective narratives in which some larger philosophical or ideological sense was used to comprehend details and events”—increased the popularity of his miscellanies.5 Dryden exercises control and detachment in part through devoted attention to the details of his craft. The focus on artistry is a form of discipline, and with Fables Dryden combines art that takes the general view that “Mankind is ever the same” with art dedicated to the intricate details involved in depicting the “Variety of Game springing up before [him]” (Preface 497–8; 490). He combines universality with variety, and the historical perspective with a unique and personal life. An historical pattern can take shape as a consequential chain of events, but Dryden’s Fables often concern themselves equally with the impact those events have had on the characters. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” possesses this same quality of involvement and detachment, where Leda’s rape as personal

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tragedy is also the source of the Trojan War and murder of Agamemnon, and we are invited to look at both aspects. Dryden’s Amphitryon (1690) also addresses this personal involvement and historical scope, where the devastation of Alcmena’s violated marriage led to the birth of godlike Hercules. Both the immediate and historical ramifications of Zeus’s desire are central to the play, as is the not so covert allusion to William III throughout the work.6 Nestor, as both character, narrator, and advisor, must be rationally detached yet fully committed, and therefore his situation is similar to that of Athena’s in the Oresteia, who must find that third ordering alternative. Athena incorporates the dictates of Olympos, the Furies, and democracy within the gates of the same city, in a reconciliation of darkness with light. She provides a rational mind that is similar to detachment, with the wisdom of experience, yet she and her city are very much involved: the Furies will curse her land with infertility if she does not succeed in the compromise. Peace and prosperity are at stake, and out of this familial curse and tragedy, in which Orestes is both caught and from which he is driven, a new alternative emerges. Fables includes the Ovidian concern for connections that continue through time, and from which characters can never fully escape, as we saw in Ovid XII. Of the Pythagorean Philosophy presents a similar sense of inescapable sequences. Numa seeks out Pythagoras in Crotona, whose founder was driven by the gods to leave his nation (and therefore to break a law that would incur punishment by death). Like Orestes, he is caught between two irreconcilable forces. Like Orestes, his fate is saved by white pebbles thrown into an urn, or a vote in his favor. Like the story in Athens, the results are the emergence of something new. In this case, a city is built, Pythagoras later makes his home there, and Numa makes a pilgrimage: “These Precepts by the Samian Sage were taught, / Which Godlike Numa to the Sabines brought / And thence transferr’d to Rome, by Gift his own: / A willing People, and an offer’d Throne” (711–14). Rome seeks out Numa; he is not king by means of biological succession. This philosophical prince who abhors violence to the point of vegetarianism bears no resemblance to William III the hunter nor William III the defender of Europe, but Numa still offers a new model. Perhaps Dryden is suggesting that England also must find another way. The fight between Agamemnon and Achilles in The First Book of Homer’s Ilias presents an iteration of the old way. Dryden uses charged political language in this fight between king and powerful subject. Achilles accuses: “Advanc’d to Sovereign Sway, for better Ends / Than thus like abject Slaves to treat thy Friends” (227–8) and concludes: “Better at home my ill-paid Pains to mourn, / Than from an Equal here sustain the publick Scorn” (255–6). He assumes equality with Agamemnon, similar perhaps to parliamentarians in England. Agamemnon responds: “Debates, Dissentions, Uproars are thy Joy; / Provok’d without Offence, and practis’d

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to destroy” (265–6), and concludes like a tyrant: “This Hand shall ravish thy pretended Right. / Briseis shall be mine, and thou shalt see, / What odds of awful Pow’r I have on thee: / That others at thy cost may learn the diff’rence of degree” (280–3). Athena commands Achilles to restrain from force, and Nestor steps in to persuade the rivals in the presence of the council: With Reas’ning mild, their Madness to compose: Words, sweet as Hony, from his Mouth distill’d; Two Centuries already he fulfill’d And now began the third; unbroken yet Once fam’d for Courage; still in Council great. (362–6) He counsels, above all else, peace: What worse, he said, can Argos undergo, What can more gratify the Phrygian Foe, Than these distemper’d Heats? If both the Lights Of Greece their private Int’rest disunites! (368–71) Nestor, like Athena in the Oresteia, attempts to reconcile the two opposing forces by recommending concessions to each, but unlike Athena he is unsuccessful. Rather than reconciliation the debate forecasts future rounds of vengeance and violent division: “the Council broke; / And all their grave Consults dissolv’d in Smoke. / The Royal Youth retir’d, on Vengeance bent, / Patroclus follow’d silent to his Tent” (425–8). Nestor’s age and experience dictate his role as diplomat rather than warrior. For Dryden, years of political retirement may have enforced a distance that was not possible during the earlier Stuart reigns, and Nestor’s role is an attractive one, as Dryden makes clear in his dedication to the Duke of Ormond: “Tho’ I am very short of the Age of Nestor, yet I have liv’d to a third Generation of your House; and by your Grace’s Favour am admitted still to hold from you by the same Tenure” (7–9). Dryden is not predicting another Athens in either Fables or The Secular Masque, but as he recreates in his fables a version of English politics rife with familial and partisan tumultuous cycles, it becomes evident that a third option only is available through an appropriate combination of detachment and involvement, another iteration of concordia discors. He reclaims his place as national poet and offers readers a way forward that is peaceful, without vengeance, but full of compromise. It’s not clear that they will take it, but he offers it all the same. We can speak of three kinds of detachment. The first is artistic rhetorical control, and the second its personal counterpart of emotional

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restraint and self-discipline. The third is philosophical detachment, which Theseus and Numa possess, and is counter-balanced in the same figures with an ideal type of involvement, expressed through compassion and commitment when managing national or personal affairs. John Driden of Chesterton is another example of this ideal balance. Though he is not a philosophical man, Driden is at once detached from the business of the city and the turmoil of marriage and family, yet involved with social and political duties. He is a chaste and disciplined model of detachment or disinterestedness, but he also is deeply involved in parliamentary politics as well as in the running of his own estate, and this participation is a moral virtue. Other prominent figures in Fables demonstrate a decided lack of this requisite balance, important for both the discernment of a king and the craft of an artist; Tancred (Sigismonda and Guiscardo) and Ajax (The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses) are two. The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses demonstrates what happens when emotional and artistic detachment break down. As early as 1679, Dryden had entertained the importance of the interchange between Ajax and Ulysses in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His exposition of it in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, as preface to Troilus and Cressida, pits Ajax against Ulysses as representing two forms of artistry: ‘Tis necessary therefore for a Poet, who would concern an Audience by describing of a Passion, first to prepare it, and not to rush upon it all at once. Ovid has judiciously shown the difference of these two ways, in the speeches of Ajax and Ulysses: Ajax from the very beginning breaks out into his exclamations, and is swearing by his Maker—Agimus proh Jupiter inquit. Ulysses on the contrary, prepares his Audience with all the submissiveness he can practice, & all the calmness of a reasonable man; he found his Judges in a tranquility of spirit, and therefore set out leasurely and softly with ‘em, till he had warm’d em by degrees; and then he began to mend his pace, and to draw them along with his own impetuousness: yet so managing his breath, that it might not fail him at his need, and reserving his utmost proofs of ability even to the last. The success you see was answerable; for the crowd only applauded the speech of Ajax;— Vulgique secutum ultima murmur erat:—but the Judges awarded the prize for which they contended to Ulysses—Mota manus Procerum est, et quid facundia possit/Tum patuit, fortisque viri tulit arma Disertus.7 Though two decades have passed between this criticism and his Fables, Dryden’s translation of the heroes’s speeches reflects his earlier opinion of them. Dryden portrays Ajax as he says Ovid did. He blusters about without control in spite of the composed order of his audience:

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The Chiefs were set, the Soldiers crown’d the Field: To these the Master of the sevenfold Shield, Upstarted fierce: and, kindled with Disdain Eager to speak, unable to contain His boiling Rage, he rowl’d his Eyes around The Shore, and Grecian Gallies hall’d a-ground. Then, stretching out his Hands, “O Jove, he cry’d, Must then our Cause before the Fleet be try’d? (The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, 1–8) Though they are not entirely without effect, Ajax’s arguments are blunt, selfish, and bullying. An act that might have been viewed as heroic, Ajax saving Ulysses, is tainted by Ajax’s own telling of it. After making clear that Ulysses had been “forsaken” by everyone else, Ajax recounts how he was saved: With my broad Buckler hid him from the Foe; (Ev’n the Shield trembled as he lay below;) And from impending Fate the Coward freed: Good Heav’n forgive me for so bad a Deed! If still he will persist, and urge the Strife, First let him give me back his forfeit Life: (115–20) Such an heroic deed narrated by a more judicious character would evoke admiration for the hero who has performed it, but Ajax’s account of his own bravery strips the act of its heroism because it seems petty and self-centered. In another example of his utter lack of judgment, he unwittingly conjures up an image of Ulysses himself among the Trojans, rescuing both Achilles’s body and his armor: What farther need for Words our Right to scan? My Arguments are Deeds, let Action speak the Man! Since from a Champion’s Arms the Strife arose, So cast the glorious Prize amid the Foes: Then send us to redeem both Arms and Shield, And let him wear who wins ‘em in the Field. (191–6) Ajax’s rhetorical ineptitude has awarded the shield to Ulysses, who already has done exactly what Ajax suggests, except that Ajax proposes rescuing the armor as a contest, whereas Ulysses recovered it and Achilles’s body when both were in imminent danger. Ajax not only reminds his audience of Ulysses’s valor but also imprudently suggests that the Greeks risk losing the “glorious prize” by throwing it to the Trojans for the sole purpose

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of a competition between himself and Ulysses in the midst of a grisly battle. Ulysses responds with the appropriate gravity, grief, and determination expected of a hero: Why am I forc’d to name that fatal Day, That snatch’d the Prop and Pride of Greece away? I saw Pelides sink, with pious Grief, And ran in vain, alas, to his Relief; For the brave Soul was fled: Full of my Friend I rush’d amid the War his Relicks to defend: Nor ceas’d my Toil till I redeem’d the Prey, And, loaded with Achilles, march’d away: Those Arms, which on these Shoulders then I bore, ‘T is just you to these shoulders should restore. (435–44) True to his own criticism in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, Dryden emphasizes the fact that everything Ulysses says and does is perfectly executed: “Action his words, and words his action grace” (The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses 204). Ajax accuses Ulysses of lying, but Ulysses frames it as persuasive wit, used by him for “the common cause”: This only I request, that neither He May gain, by being what he seems to be, A stupid Thing, nor I may lose the Prize, By having Sense, which Heav’n to him denies: Since, great or small, the Talent I enjoy’d Was ever in the common Cause employ’d: Nor let my Wit, and wonted Eloquence Which often has been us’d in your Defense And in my own, this only time be brought To bear against my self, and deem’d a Fault. Make not a Crime, where Nature made it none; For ev’ry Man may freely use his own. (215–26) As Ulysses takes apart Ajax’s accusations, he makes transparent his use of wit in each of his heroic acts, and by showing his audience how his wit has worked for them, he persuades them that they cannot fight in the future without him. The judges vote in his favor: Thus Conduct won the Prize, when Courage fail’d, And Eloquence o’er brutal Force prevail’d. (591–2)

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The contrast between Dryden’s and Sandys’s translation is striking: The chiefs were mov’d. Here words approv’d their charmes: And Eloquence from Valour wins those armes. (Sandys, 432) Dryden’s Ulysses still is calculating, but that very calculation makes for an exemplary character and superb artist. Ulysses’s judgment is contrasted with Ajax’s lack of it, his perfect control with Ajax’s “unmaster’d” passions (595). Ulysses also represents complete public engagement; he is conscious of his audience and of himself as a rhetorician who is performing for that audience. While he is rhetorically detached in this role, he also is both self-confident and public-spirited. Dryden’s use of Ajax and Ulysses shows that the craft of the artist is similar to the discernment of a king. While Ajax’s position exposes Ulysses as polished rather than ingenuous, Dryden’s focus is on control and mental acuity, and he admires the artistry in Ulysses’s performance. Ajax certainly is committed, but is powerless to see any perspective but his own, and therefore is ineffective and even detrimental to his own cause. Ajax’s words echo Dryden’s in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy: Great is the Prize demanded, I confess, But such an abject Rival makes it less; That Gift, those Honours, he but hop’d to gain Can leave no room for Ajax to be vain: Losing he wins, because his Name will be Ennobled by Defeat, who durst contend with me. (Speeches 23–8) This last couplet is taken from Dryden’s Preface to Troilus and Cressida / The Grounds of Criticism, where he quotes Longinus, “concerning Plato’s imitation of Homer”: We ought not to regard a good imitation as theft; but as a beautifull Idea of him who undertakes to imitate, by forming himself on the invention and the work of another man; for he enters into the lists like a new wrestler, to dispute the prize with the former Champion. . . . we combat for Victory with a Hero, and are not without glory even in our overthrow. (Works 13:228) The argument is gallant in The Grounds of Criticism, yet appropriately clumsy as Ajax’s boast, and the repetition of the same metaphor in the

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two works confirms that Dryden still is working with his ideas on artistry as he had expressed them in The Grounds of Criticism: all which errors proceed from want of Judgment in the Poet, and from being unskill’d in the Principles of Moral Philosophy. Nothing is more frequent in a Fanciful Writer, than to foil himself by not managing his strength: therefore, as in a Wrestler, there is first requir’d some measure of force, a well-knit body, and active Limbs, without which all instructions would be vain; yet, these being granted, if he want the skill which is necessary to a Wrestler, he shall make but small advantage of his natural robustuousness; So in a Poet, his inborn vehemence and force of spirit, will only run him out of breath the sooner, if it be not supported by the help of Art. (13:241) Dryden extends his metaphor of the artist as wrestler throughout The Grounds of Criticism, and it is relevant to The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses and also to Fables as a whole because it brings to the forefront Dryden’s belief in the requisite combination of the involvement of force with the detachment of art. It is no accident that wrestling was one of the contests Odysseus entered during the funeral games of Patroklos. Art, in this context, is a skill akin to Ulysses’s control and judgment, his ability to “manage” his own passions as well as those of his audience. It is a metaphor that combines the force of action with a collected mind and skilled detachment. Yet discernment in action and words is as important in a king as it is in an artist, and Dryden reminds us that this is not just a forensic contest but “strife betwixt contending kings” (Ovid XII 821). The contrast between Ulysses and Ajax, therefore, is a contrast between one who is an effective orator and a competent king and one who is not. Ulysses and Ajax represent opposing examples of artistry within heroic and epic traditions. Anyone familiar with the story of Ulysses would know that he demonstrates perfect control, from the Sirens to the Cyclops. Ajax’s mad suicide represents the opposite. They are artists and kings, but they also are human beings, and Dryden feels and creates in his audience both sympathy and admiration for the contestants. It is useful to compare Dryden’s opinions regarding Shakespeare’s management of the passions in Richard II, also in The Grounds of Criticism, with Dryden’s own depiction of Ajax’s defeat in Fables: the painting of [Richard II’s defeat] is so lively, and the words so moving, that I have scarce read anything comparable to it, in any other language. Suppose you have seen already the fortunate Usurper passing through the crowd, and follow’d by the shouts and acclamations of the people; and now behold King Richard entring upon the

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Scene: consider the wretchedness of his condition, and his carriage in it, and refrain from pitty if you can. (13:246)8 Dryden as artist is involved with Shakespeare’s characters, but he maintains distance in order to judge them, and he replicates what he admires in Shakespeare with his imitation of Ovid’s Ajax and Ulysses. Henry Bolingbroke’s control versus Richard II’s rhetorical self-indulgence is analogous to the kinds of control in the figures of Ulysses and Ajax, and Dryden depicts Ulysses’s just victory. His performance is impeccable, and he resembles Dryden’s assessment of Henry of Bolingbroke’s success in the passage (13:246). In turn, Ajax commands compassion and pity in the way Dryden has described Shakespeare’s Richard II: He who cou’d often, and alone withstand The Foe, the Fire, and Jove’s own partial Hand, Now cannot his unmaster’d Grief sustain, But yields to Rage, to Madness, and Disdain; Then snatching out his Fauchion, Thou, said he, Art mine; Ulysses lays no claim to Thee. O often try’d, and ever trusty Sword, Now do thy last kind Office to thy Lord: (Speeches 593–600) The difference in tone in the Sandys translation is clear from the first couplet: He who alone, Jove, Hector, sword and fire So oft sustaind; yields to one stroke of ire. (Sandys 432) The Sandys translation is harsher in its judgment on both heroes. The Grounds of Criticism demonstrates the artistic prowess of Ovid and Shakespeare in their versions of Ajax / Ulysses and Richard II / Henry IV, and we have seen that these pairs of kings also bear political relevance for Dryden, since Dryden capitalizes on the contemporary comparison of Henry IV to William III, and Richard II to James II, in the Preface to the Fables.9 The case of Ajax and Ulysses is less direct in its political applicability, but equally pertinent. William was well known for his cold calculation and for his success as a military strategist as well as a soldier. The lack of discernment that Ajax displays bears some resemblance to James II’s reputation for stubbornness and dogged loyalty to his Catholic policies, despite the clear indications that these policies would not be successful. The pathos toward Ajax that Dryden invokes resonates with the English sympathy toward their king once he is deposed, particularly after

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he is mistaken for a Jesuit and stripped and searched in his first attempt to leave England. Upon his return to Whitehall, James II was met by cheering crowds, and court that day was full. This outpouring of support was possible precisely because James II was no longer in power.10 The rise of Ulysses and the fall of Ajax resonate with contemporary politics and passions. As poet laureate, Dryden certainly was involved in politics at the time of James’s downfall. In The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses, Dryden chose to create compassion for Ajax as a fallen hero. He also emphasized what he found to be distasteful in Ajax, requiring even more skill to render him sympathetic in his defeat. It is clear that Dryden identifies with Ulysses, yet if Ajax and Ulysses are two versions of the artist as rhetorician, one wonders whether Dryden discerns in past works such as The Medal and The Hind and the Panther moments when Dryden, like Ajax, was unable to enforce distance between himself and his subject. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the source for the rhetorical joust between Ajax and Ulysses, but they also contend for the prize in a wrestling match in Book 23 of the Iliad. Wrestling necessarily is a game that requires intense physical involvement: the bodies of Ajax and Odysseus are literally entangled, their sweat is intermingled and their bodies are red with welts from the match. Odysseus is the crafty athlete and Ajax the giant, though Achilles ends the game in a draw. If wrestling is one emblem of involvement and marriage another of participation, Dryden creates a less felicitous image of both combined with Adam and Eve in To John Driden of Chesterton where the participants are decidedly too involved: “How cou’d He stand, when put to double Pain, / He must a Weaker than himself sustain? / Each might have stood perhaps; but each alone; / Two Wrestlers help to pull each other down” (27–30). Though the wrestlers in To John Driden of Chesterton apply specifically to Adam and Eve, Roper shows that wrestling can serve as an image of partisan wrangling as well as of marital discord, and the couple easily could represent king and Parliament, especially in light of the contemporary debates between royalists and Whigs regarding Adam and Eve as co-rulers or as king and subject.11 Driden’s abstention from this form of “wrestling” points to his freedom from domestic entanglements and to his ability to rise above party politics when reaching a decision. His detachment allows him to be a better judge and a better parliamentarian. Though he does not marry he is by no means a cynic. Driden’s love of country and political courage are examples of his commitment and participation. His actions are the counterpart to his cousin’s rhetoric, and his public life mirrors the kind of involvement and detachment required of an artist. Dryden incorporates two opposing genres of artistic involvement, satire and panegyric, in a poem that praises detached discernment. He also sets Driden apart from himself since his cousin does not possess the same penchant for an irresistible quip. Dryden’s potentially misogynistic lines allude to his particular talent in satire: “Not that my Verse wou’d

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blemish all the Fair; / But yet, if some be Bad, ‘tis Wisdom to beware.”12 This predilection for satire is one that he does not share with his cousin, who requested that Dryden omit from the poem “a satire against the Dutch valour, in the late warr,” against which Driden took “Exception.”13 Dryden includes in this poem attacks on two inferior translators who have stolen his literary ideas and attempted to steal his glory: But Maurus sweeps whole Parishes, and Peoples ev’ry Grave; And no more Mercy to Mankind will use, Than when he robb’d and murder’d Maro’s Muse. Wou’dst thou be soon dispatch’d, and perish whole? Trust Maurus with thy Life, and M-lb-rn with thy Soul. (83–7) “Maurus” is Sir Richard Blackmore, Pope’s “everlasting Blackmore,”14 who wrote the epic poems Prince Arthur (1695) and King Arthur (1697).15 This invective resides in the “memorial of my principles to all posterity,”16 a poem which is a panegyric, and it is as if Dryden just can’t resist leveling his inferior rivals. The jibe harks back to Dryden’s uncharitable yet witty dig at Tom Sternhold while writing in the persona of the plain good layman in Religio Laici. Yet To John Driden of Chesterton may also record Dryden’s own desires for a movement away from the entanglements of praise and blame, toward the final stanza where he and Driden stand together, detached from less noble pursuits such as partisan politics. At the time of Fables, Dryden has been freed from the partisan commitment that is inherent in the role and loyalties required of a poet laureate. His cousin’s stance as an independent Whig affords him the same freedom. When Dryden aligns himself with his cousin, it is to place both of them in a tradition of patriotism that is strengthened by common principles rather than family interests. Their common purpose is distinct from a blind devotion to the Stuarts as a family, as well. They are brothers in spirit, like Dryden and Oldham in “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684), or Dryden and Congreve in “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve” (1693). The emphasis on Driden’s unmarried state as an emblem of his independence and freedom to follow his principles makes possible the image of an untainted and altruistic family bond between Driden and Dryden. In Fables, the poet has highlighted in Numa, John Driden, and the good parson three childless and wifeless examples of ideal leadership. These men seem to demonstrate that public figures govern more effectively and more virtuously when unencumbered by the strains of familial relations. But other poems in Fables make the point that if one is married and does have children, cool detachment is not always a virtue. Unruffled distance is not necessarily a good thing when applied to a relationship between a father and a daughter, for example. Ulysses’s ability to persuade

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Agamemnon to offer up his daughter is unsettling, both in Ulysses’s pride at the feat accomplished, and in Agamemnon’s acquiescence to the recommendation. By contrast, the whole purpose of The Odyssey is how to return home, and Ulysses’s wife, son, and dog are remote from the illustrations of Ulysses that Dryden chooses and that demonstrate perfect control. This is not to imply that passionate devotion to a daughter is an unmixed virtue. If Agamemnon is culpably remote, Tancred (Sigismonda and Guiscardo) is an example of overly involved fatherly love. Family and politics, it seems, function best when kept apart. A tyrant both as king and father, Tancred refuses to let Sigismonda marry, then punishes her cruelly when she takes matters into her own hands. Yet family is at the heart of succession, and therefore an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. And the family is, as we have seen, the most common metaphor of the political unit. This is a conundrum that Dryden continues to engage in many parts of the Fables. Family and childlessness are forms of involvement and detachment, and both have great impact on the stories Dryden has narrated. Though poems are sometimes compared to children in the Renaissance, literary legacy does not involve the same irrational passions as progeny, and Theseus, Numa and the good parson also are artists. Kings are artists in their roles as founders, statesmen, and strategists, but Theseus and Numa also are poets in rhetoric or song. If Numa aims at enlightenment, the good parson brings “his audience” closer to salvation: For, letting down the golden Chain from high, He drew his Audience upward to the Sky: And oft, with holy Hymns, he charm’d their Ears: (A Musick more melodious than the Spheres.) For David left him, when he went to rest, His Lyre; and after him, he sung the best. (Character of a Good Parson 19–24) David traditionally is the Biblical ideal of a poet. Dryden shapes the relationship between David and the good parson in a manner similar to the metempsychosis that Numa describes in Of The Pythagorean Philosophy, combining philosophical detachment with artistic legacy. He also ties the good parson to Orpheus, whose song and lyre, passed down from Apollo, “charm’d [the] ears” of even the trees, rivers, and spirits. The good parson draws his audience upward, a movement that echoes Orpheus’s ability to draw Eurydice out of the underworld. One is a Christian ideal, and the other a classical one, but still they mirror one another. The good parson, Theseus, and Numa possess artistic discernment that allows for engagement and detachment simultaneously. Even if the good parson’s “holy hymns” are “more melodious than the spheres,”

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he is definitively involved in the daily ministering to his humble flock. Likewise, as a human being, Theseus is more emotionally and less pedagogically involved when he grieves deeply over the death of Arcite. But as artist and rhetorician, he expounds on how “The Cause and Spring of Motion, from above / Hung down on Earth the Golden Chain of Love” (Palamon and Arcite III.1024–5). He makes sense of the events by framing for his subjects the marriage of Emily and Palamon within the context of his grief for Arcite, and as part of his acknowledgement of a larger cosmological purpose. Numa presents another combination of the cosmological with the concrete purpose of a king as governor and teacher. Timotheus and Alexander (Alexander’s Feast) provide a stark contrast to Dryden and Driden in the matter of artistic detachment and passionate involvement, and there could hardly be a greater difference between the royal Theseus and the imperial Alexander. In the poem, Timotheus’s music invokes and controls the passions in the monarch, the last being wrath, and Alexander marches off to burn a city as the poem concludes. Timotheus’s detachment demonstrates that exquisite art and perfect control of the passions can be amoral. Pygmalion (Pygmalion and the Statue), on the other hand, who creates a perfect statue and falls in love with his creation, provides an example of complete loss of detachment in an artist, and familial involvement more aptly defined as obsession. Alexander’s Feast, like To John Driden of Chesterton, emphasizes the correlation between politics and art. Dryden’s first St. Cecilia’s Day poem “established the principle that the odes should give the composers a full opportunity to express the varied emotions music could display and arouse.”17 Alexander’s Feast has been described in similar terms for obvious reasons. The characters Alexander and Timotheus complicate a simple exposition of the ability of music to stir emotions. Unlike the figures in To John Driden of Chesterton, power is of major consequence to both Timotheus and to Alexander, where both artist and king are placed above the rest. Alexander is “Aloft in awful State” (3), and Timotheus is “plac’d on high / Amid the tuneful Quire” (20–1). This is in contrast to Driden’s humility, reflected by his partial retirement in the country, and his return to the city for the sole purpose of serving the common good. Neither Timotheus nor Alexander is concerned with the common good, and both are self-absorbed, though to different degrees. Timotheus wants to incite and control emotions in the “God-like Heroe” (4) and in the “valiant Peers” (6), and Alexander wants to experience and act out, unrestrained, every passion that Timotheus can create. Alexander willingly loses himself in the ecstasy of sensations. He weeps for Darius because it brings pleasure, and his sorrow stands in contrast perhaps to Aeneas’s genuine remorse over the death of Lausus, King Mezentius’s son who saved the tyrant father from Aeneas’s fatal blow. Timotheus relishes the power he exerts over his illustrious “crowd” (35); he creates power for

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its own sake, the pleasure of which allows him to maintain disciplined control over the elements of his art and the whims of his audience: whims of force that burn a city. Timotheus’s creation is a public one. The “Heroe” and “valiant Peers” surrender individual choice and become mob-like, and there is danger in the power of the poet brought to bear on a public forum. Again, Timotheus exhibits the perfect detachment and skill that any artist would aspire to, yet with no moral core or sense of order, and therefore he paradoxically is a force of anarchy—he puts Orphean powers to diabolical use. Similarly, Alexander, though a king, represents a lawlessness that puts his pleasure and emotion first, and displays a sinister narcissism compared to the qualities that should exist in a king: a concern for the common good and the skilled detachment that allows a king to make decisions that are best for the nation. Roper has shown that Alexander’s Feast pointedly avoids a parallel between William III and Alexander the Great, despite its publication date so near celebrations around the Treaty of Ryswick, and despite the topical reference in To John Driden of Chesterton that does create a parallel between Alexander’s defeat of Darius and William’s defeat of Louis XIV.18 The difference lies in the explicit inclusion of Darius’s death in Alexander’s Feast, which stands in contrast to the still living James II and prevents a one-for-one parallel. To John Driden of Chesterton ends the allusion just before the death, permitting a more probable comparison. There are other discrepancies: William III, unlike the Alexander of the poem, lost emotional control only once; at the death of his wife. Likewise, Dryden’s art has a moral dimension and Timotheus’s does not.19 Yet if Dryden deliberately obfuscates simple parallels, he nevertheless writes poetry that resonates with his contemporaries and their experience of recent events: Alexander’s Feast undercuts the heroism of war. It also emphasizes the dark, magical powers of art that might be admired but must be resisted. Dryden may see Timotheus’s power as a temptation, not unlike Prospero’s alignment with, and disciplined separation from, the magic of Medea, and a comparison offers an apt reflection of the intentions in Dryden’s poem, beginning as it does with Timotheus and ending with St. Cecilia. Before Prospero abjures his art in the well-known speech that imitates yet diverges from Medea’s in Metamorphoses, “it is celebrated in a passage of breathtaking virtuosity.”20 Dryden’s poem has been characterized in similar terms.21 Dryden, in turn, recounts the reception of Alexander’s Feast in a letter: “I am glad to heare from all Hands, that my Ode is esteemd the best of all my poetry, by all the Town: I thought so my self when I writ it but being old, I mistrusted my own Judgment.”22 Alexander and Timotheus represent separate manifestations of king and artist, and Driden and Dryden also are such a pair. Pygmalion, on the other hand, is prince and artist in one. There is absolutely no distance between Pygmalion and his art. His interests are purely private, though he

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was born a prince, and his emotions are as intense as those of Alexander. He initially maintains a chaste life, not out of discipline or moderation, but out of passionate “loathing” toward “all Womankind” (Pygmalion and the Statue 1–2). His sculpture is as moving as Timotheus’s music, but he becomes both audience and artist, a danger that never tempted the controlled musician. “Art hid with Art, so well perform’d the Cheat, / It caught the Carver with his own Deceit: / He knows ‘tis Madness, yet he must adore, / And still the more he knows it, loves the more” (Pygmalion and the Statue 17–20). Pygmalion courts his own creation in a love that could only be termed an obsession, and the progression is neither natural nor according to the appropriate rituals. Pygmalion in effect creates his nameless love, “wake[s]” the “image” with a kiss (94), then marries the statue in her first moments of animate life: she “view’d at once the Light and Lover, with surprise” (95). The kiss consecrates simultaneously her humanity and the private marriage. Metaphorically speaking, he is father (as creator) and husband in one person, as is Cinyrus (Cinyrus and Myrrha) without the metaphor. Furthermore, Pygmalion is a prince who has no thoughts of the public sphere, and his only interests are those that meet his private desires. At the conclusion of the fable, Ovid and Dryden remind their readers that there is a public element missing. The newborn becomes a king: To crown their Bliss, a lovely Boy was born; Paphos his Name, who grown to Manhood, wall’d The City Paphos, from the Founder call’d. (99–101) Dryden embellishes this conclusion, adding the details of Paphos walling the city, and calling Paphos a “Founder.” Paphos is not only a public figure but a warrior who builds a fortress to keep others out. It is a public parallel to the private life of his father, mirroring the isolation Pygmalion creates with his lover. There is no indication whether Paphos is a good or bad king. Neither is there any indication that Pygmalion’s personal and indulgent fantasy has caused harm to anyone else, despite the apparent disregard for the common good. In the short term, in fact, it seems to have produced a happy and prosperous family: “So bless’d the Bed, such Fruitfulness convey’d, / . . . To crown their Bliss, a lovely Boy was born” (98, 100). But it is missing the same moral element that doesn’t exist in Timotheus, either. Ultimately, within two generations Pygmalion’s inward focus leads to King Cinyrus and his daughter Myrrha. Fables such as Sigismonda and Guiscardo and Meleager and Atalanta indicate that the order imposed by blood relations is not sufficient when ruling a nation. A patriarch cannot rely solely upon ties based on private affection, and a public element is critical to rational rule. If there were any doubt regarding the need for a public component, the case of

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Cinyrus and Myrrha, where the daughter secretly has sex with the father, makes that point even clearer. A public element as represented by Athens in the Oresteia is often difficult to achieve in parent-child relationships, and the absence of impressive or attractive parent-child relationships in Fables is remarkable. The unenviable Cinyrus is the grandson of Pygmalion and the “statue” (she never receives a name), the subject of the preceding fable in both Dryden’s miscellany and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and there is secrecy and privacy to Pygmalion’s love story. The marriage seems to reorder the relationship until the fate of Cinyrus indicates that some cycles are as unavoidable as that of Orestes. For Orestes, a public element exists even at the moment when he kills his mother, since his friend Pylades is present and counsels him to follow the order of the gods. A third option, one that provides detachment, is necessary to break the cycle in Cinyrus and Myrrha, but none is proffered. Myrrha, like Pygmalion, is turned inward by her obsession for her father. Pygmalion loves his own creation, and Myrrha her own creator. It is elementary to point out that one type of love is appropriate for a father and the other for a husband, but Myrrha cannot sufficiently free herself from passion to make the distinction. “Our Kindred-Blood debars a better Tie; / He might be nearer, were he not so nigh. / Eyes and their Objects never must unite, / Some Distance is requir’d to help the Sight” (Cinyrus and Myrrha 72–5). The characters who are governed by their passions do not recognize external laws or social order: Myrrha makes her well-known argument against both sacred and natural laws, Alexander rules by passionate whim, and Timotheus incites amoral chaos as he exercises complete control over the passions of others. Though it is without the same societal impact, when Pygmalion becomes a lover, he abdicates his role as a discerning artist. By contrast, Theseus and John Driden, steadfast and disciplined, underscore the lack of control in others. Driden enforces laws because they are integral to a civil, peaceful society, and Theseus is the ideal embodiment of hierarchical order and the king-to-subject paradigm. Baucis and Philemon perhaps are a private counterpart to John Driden, and a foil to Pygmalion’s narcissistic private life. Like John Driden, they do not have an excess of anything: not food or drink, and certainly not passion, but they do relish sharing what they have. Unlike Pygmalion’s self-absorption, the happy couple follows an order external to their marital vows that commands generous hospitality. Though their lives are completely private, they behave with reverence toward the laws and religion that order the world outside their humble home. Distinct from the other fables, the protagonists live ordinary lives. They are retired, and do not have a vocation like that of the good parson, where they might have been role models on a local level, nor do they stand in opposition to august kings, which Dryden’s parson does as well. Yet they unwittingly serve the gods. Their story provides a message that the most ordinary acts

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can be of great consequence, and offer the model of a private life that, while not publicly involved in matters of state, does not abdicate civic responsibility, either. Dryden is a private man, aging like Baucis and Philemon, and he also is historical chronicler and national poet. His care and attention to Baucis emphasizes the value of an individual life even while most of his other fables feature illustrious figures. Clearly, Horace’s vivere bene parvo and even Virgil’s Old Corycian are part of Dryden’s depiction of Baucis and Philemon. One difference is the marital dimension, unusual in the tradition and unusual in Dryden. Another difference is his reference back to the heady days of the playwright in 1677 when he wrote the prologue for All for Love, his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: But, as the Rich, when tir’d with daily Feasts, For change, become their next poor Tenants Ghests; Drink hearty Draughts of Ale, from plain brown Bowls, And snatch the homely Rasher from the Coals: So you, retiring from much better Cheer, For once, may venture to do penance here. And since that plenteous Autumn now is past, Whose Grapes and Peaches have Indulg’d your taste, Take in good part from our poor Poets boord, Such rivell’d Fruits as Winter can afford. (Prologue to All for Love, 31–40) The Dryden of 1677 self-consciously styles his offerings as winter fruit in comparison to the grapes and peaches of the Elizabethan age, but these “rivell’d” offerings transform to a banquet in Dryden’s winter years when he returns to this image again in Baucis and Philemon, and the humble hosts serve much greater guests than “the Rich.” Jupiter and Mercury are disguised as strangers, and Baucis gets to work to serve them dinner. She “rakes the Load of Ashes from the Hearth, and spreads abroad / The living Coals” (48–50), and carefully and artfully prepares the meal, served in “Beechen bowls; and these were shining clean, / Vernish’d with Wax without, and lin’d within” (104–5). What begins with a small bit of bacon rind, not unlike the “homely Rasher from the coals” in the prologue, metamorphoses into an inviting table of food and drink: All these in Earthen Ware were serv’d to Board; And next in place, an Earthen Pitcher stor’d, With Liquor of the best the Cottage cou’d afford. (99–101) The “Board” is replete with “autumnal cornels . . . Plums, Apples, Nuts, and of their Wintry Store, / Dry Figs, and Grapes, and wrinkl’d Dates

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were set” (113–4). Dryden claims his own “plenteous Autumn” that had belonged to the age preceding him, and his dried fruits become part of an abundant “Country-Banquet” that is a covert allegory for his own art. The modest fare, by miracle of the gods, grows to a rich feast: Mean time the Beechen Bowls went round, and still Though often empty’d, were observ’d to fill; Fill’d without Hands, and of their own accord Ran without Feet, and danc’d about the Board. (122–5) Dryden in 1700 is willing to live a private life and to make decisions that suit his private conscience, yet even if his public role has changed he still does not turn away from his civic duty as England’s poet, though he’s also willing to add self-deprecating humor. But Baucis and Philemon have many layers that add to the project of the Fables. Though Baucis and Philemon are married, they have no children. This secures them from the furies potentially involved in parentchild relationships, yet it places them between the detachment that chastity can represent and the involvement of family. Baucis and Philemon exhibit a measured devotion to one another, and passion does not create an obstacle to their companionship. There also is no mention of bloodlines, partly because of their social class but also because of the sense of completion that they embody as a couple. Though they are distinguished by conjugal harmony, which implies a balance that is both physical and spiritual, their marriage is capable of transcendence. This may be largely a function of their age, but nevertheless it is a quality that Dryden admires, and it is a version of engagement that is not tainted by selfish motivation or irrational passion. In this way they parallel Driden and not the satirist. Though peace in Fables often is connected to a childless, unmarried, and therefore disinterested party as with the magistrate John Driden, the case of Ceyx and Alcyone is different; Aeolus calms the seas in order to raise a family, albeit a family of kingfishers. This is a version of peace that would coincide with a productive society and progeny that parallels depictions of peace as envisioned by Peter Paul Rubens. However, there are not many places in Fables where there is a stable or satisfying peace, and even in Ceyx and Alcyone there is merely the brief respite from tempests. Additionally, peace and harmony often go together, but they are not always the same thing. In Rome, the gates of Janus were closed only during the reigns of Augustus and Numa, yet the two rulers provided two different versions of peace; Augustus achieved peace through war, as does Theseus in Thebes at the beginning of Palamon and Arcite. Stability may be found in a well-crafted work of art or in a well-managed state, but Dryden highlights Numa, who embraces change, not stability. (Though it is true that Numa’s laws are by their nature stable.) Additionally, Dryden

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juxtaposes weddings, emblems of peace and harmony, with the wars that follow them, as in Ovid XII and in Cymon and Iphigenia. Yet even these war-torn stories end peaceably, though we as readers are not necessarily at peace with their conclusions. Ovid XII ends with three consecutive versions of peace: in Nestor’s story, Caeneus is covered with rocks by the Centaurs, but turns to a golden bird and escapes, after which the Lapiths end the war by chasing off the Centaurs; Tlelopemus resents Nestor’s omission of his father Hercules in the story, and Nestor justifies his silence while emphasizing “’tis peace with thee” (760); after Achilles’s death, which concludes Ovid XII, Ajax and Ulysses prepare for a debate rather than a fight, through which they will attempt to persuade the court that one or the other merits Pelides’s armour. All three versions of peace are indicative of a disciplined emotional detachment, either on the part of the artist or of one of the characters. None are harmonious resolutions. Peace as it is presented in Cymon and Iphigenia is even more troubling, as I will discuss shortly. Peace and harmony rarely coincide in Fables, but they do not contradict each other, either, in the way that harmony and tragedy certainly do. As it is with Ceyx and Alcyone, Dryden chooses many fables that, though they contain stories that are tragic, provide resolutions that escape the utter destruction of that genre. However, a reader may also follow the thread of personal tragedy in Fables, as in the characters of Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Ajax, and Cyllarus and Hylonome. Dryden presents his readers with a multitude of complex and multi-layered patterns, each fable adding another shade of meaning to the others. Some of these patterns have ramifications for Dryden’s interpretation of history as a context within which to view contemporary politics, and others recognize and empathize with both sorrow and redemption on a personal level. All reflect Dryden’s own artistic commitment to a balance between detachment and involvement. One form of escape from tragedy is a metamorphosis from hero to bird, as is the case for Meleager’s sisters (Meleager and Atalanta), for Ceyx and Alcyone, and for the characters that Nestor connects in Ovid XII (Aesacus, Cygnus, Cainis/Caeneus, and finally Nestor’s own brother, though his brother did not, in fact, escape).23 Particularly pertinent to the stories of Meleager’s sisters and of Ceyx and Alcyone is the need to step away from familial tragedies. While they lose the power that they might have had as heroes and kings and queens, there is a redemptive quality in their flight away from the family ties that plagued them. But of course when we move from mythological figures to historical ones, the dialectic between politics and family becomes more complex and more resistant to the generic simplifications of romance and fable. Take, for example, the issue of childlessness. More pertinent to Mary II and William III is the potential comparison of their lack of an heir to that of the duchess in “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond”: “You owe your Ormond nothing

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but a son;/To fill in future times his father’s place, / And wear the garter of his mother’s race” (165–7).24 Mary II and William III were the most recent examples of Stuarts without progeny at the publication of Fables; Anne, tragically, would follow as the next. But as early as June of 1679, it was reported throughout Europe that William III could never have children. While this was distressing personally, it increased his political leverage when seeking allies for both domestic and international policies. Without the concern for his heirs’s future, he could and did spend his political authority freely, in order to promote a European balance of power and to defend Holland. Metamorphosing into a bird is not an option for the duchess, who would not, at any rate, have been consoled by such a transformation. Without the hoped for heir, the duke and duchess are denied a noble legacy in its traditional form. However, Dryden creates in his portrait of the duchess the millennial image of an even more myth-laden bird than the kingfisher: the regenerative phoenix. The Plantagenets, ancestors to the duchess, are reborn in her, but it is a spiritual rather than biological continuity that matters most: “Thus, after length of ages, she returns, / Restor’d in you, and the same place adorns; / Or you perform her office in the sphere, / Born of her blood, and make a new Platonic year” (26–9). The duchess assumes the power and the grace of Joan of Kent, and the duchess’s own greatness likewise will be remembered for generations because Dryden has illuminated her for them. Furthermore, her spiritual legacy will lead to no Wars of the Roses. Through the poem, the duchess’s legacy becomes her influence on England. Like the duke and duchess, if a king and queen are to live on in their works, rather than their progeny, they need an artist to record those works. Achilles, Dryden shows us, had Homer: And now, the Terror of the Trojan Field, The Grecian Honour, Ornament, and Shield, High on a Pile th’Unconquer’d Chief is plac’d; The God that arm’d him first, consum’d at last. Of all the Mighty Man, the small Remains A little Urn, and scarcely fill’d, contains. Yet, great in Homer, still Achilles lives; And equal to himself, himself survives. (Ovid XII 812–19) John Driden, and the Duke and Duchess of Ormond, had Dryden. One represents a true patriot and is a parliamentarian, and the other two are depicted in terms of royal iconology. Despite his willingness to evaluate the roles of William and Mary as individuals and within English historical patterns, Dryden refuses to be the royal poet for the heirless monarchs. There are strong indications that he admires Mary, and wryly appreciates

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William’s talents, but he finds a way to remark on her legacy and his without a public address to either. Their reign, ironically, has received less historical attention than others. In Fables, the relationship between poets and kings remains a tight one. In this instance, that relationship centers on the importance of legacy to both. Forms of descent preserve some kind of individual or even corporate identity in the midst of change and decay, and Dryden explores several of these forms in Fables. First, there is literary survival, for an artist as well as a hero. Second, there is literal, biological descent, important for its political, legal, and dynastic impact on families and states. Third, there also is the analogous idea of spiritual descent, which Dryden expresses in terms of his relationship to the literary minds before him, and which the duchess embodies in his illustration of the transmigration of the Fair Maid of Kent’s soul into that of Lady Mary Somerset. Of The Pythagorean Philosophy addresses the legacy of artist and king simultaneously. First, Dryden embraces Numa’s metempsychosis as a form of spiritual lineal descent when Dryden refers to the poets who have come before him. Second, Numa and Pythagoras are nearly interchangeable in the fable, tying Numa to Orpheus, since the Orphic and Pythagorean traditions are so closely related. In both Metamorphoses and Fables, Orpheus as character also is narrator in Book 10 (and the parts of Book 10 in Fables, Pygmalion and the Statue and Cinyrus and Myrrha), and Numa sings of Pythagoras in Book 15. Ovid and Dryden add two more layers of artists to this palimpsest. While Numa is a poet of divine vocation, he also becomes a king who was chosen by a council: A King is sought to guide the growing State, One able to support the Publick Weight, And fill the Throne where Romulus had sate. Renown, which oft bespeaks the Publick Voice, Had recommended Numa to their choice. (1–5) Though Numa is chosen by the people, it is as if God conveys wisdom through him, who receives it first through Pythagoras: The Crowd with silent Admiration stand And heard him, as they heard their God’s Command; While he discours’d of Heav’ns mysterious Laws, The World’s Original, and Nature’s Cause; (87–90) Numa’s authority comes from a source that is higher than biological succession; he has been chosen as teacher and as king not because his father was so before him, but because it was a divinely inspired vocation.

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Dryden puts a great deal of care into the idea of the spiritual lineal descent of poets in Fables as well, and again, that descent is not based on a bloodline, but genius: “For the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet.”25 It is this genius that affords Dryden the prerogative to speak for Chaucer, just as Dryden presumes the poets after him will carefully amend Dryden’s own works. It is a spiritual affinity that is perfected by judgment and free from irrational family passions: I have not ty’d myself to a Literal Translation; but have often omitted what I judg’d unnecessary, or not of Dignity enough to appear in the Company of better Thoughts. I have presum’d farther in some Places, and added somewhat of my own where I thought my Author was deficient, and had not given his Thoughts their true Lustre, for want of Words in the Beginning of our Language. And to this I was the more embolden’d, because (if I may be permitted to say it of my self) I found I had a Soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same Studies. Another Poet, in another Age, may take the same Liberty with my Writings. (Preface to the Fables 40) It is in this context of genius moving from one generation to the next that Dryden writes the well-known passage of the descent of poets: Spencer more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus’d into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease. Milton has acknowledg’d to me, that Spencer was his Original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own, that he deriv’d the Harmony of his Numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloign, which was turn’d into English by Mr. Fairfax. (25) The transmigration of the poetic soul is an iteration of the mystical phoenix in Of The Pythagorean Philosophy, who “shakes off his Parent Dust” and assumes his father’s place in reverence, but also with authority: All these receive their Birth from other Things; But from himself the Phoenix only springs: Self-born, begotten by the Parent Flame In which he burn’d, another and the same; ** An Infant-Phoenix from the former springs His Father’s Heir, and from his tender Wings Shakes off his Parent Dust, his Method he pursues,

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And the same Lease of Life on the same Terms renews. When grown to Manhood he begins his reign, And with stiff Pinions can his Flight sustain, He lightens of its Load, the Tree that bore His Father’s Royal Sepulcher before, And his own Cradle: This with pious Care Plac’d on his Back, he cuts the buxome Air, Seeks the Sun’s City, and his sacred Church, And decently lays down his Burden in the Porch. (578–81; 592–611) In this passage, Dryden’s version ties the phoenix to filial piety, and the image of the phoenix carrying his father’s sepulcher on his back echoes Aeneas’s devotion when he carries his aging father out of burning Troy. This, in turn, leads us back to questions of kingship. Aeneas, not one of Priam’s sons, is chosen to build the next Troy. Considering the paramount importance that biological succession plays in the transfer of power from one king to the next, and in the political justifications for that transfer, it is intriguing to look at the emphasis that Of The Pythagorean Philosophy places on alternatives to hereditary lines. Numa, whose authority as future king does not rely on rightful succession, uses himself as an example of the transmigration of souls: “Ev’n I, who these mysterious Truths declare, Was once Euphorbus in the Trojan War; My Name and Lineage I remember well, And how in Fight by Sparta’s King I fell ** Then, Death, so call’d, is but old Matter dress’d In some new Figure, and a vary’d Vest: (231–4; 237–8) This same transformation could be applied to the Fables themselves: they are “but old Matter dress’d / In some new Figure, and a vary’d Vest.” Numa, like Dryden, is using art to make sense of the world for others: Nations and Empires flourish, and decay, By turns command, and in their turns obey; Time softens hardy People, Time again Hardens to War a soft, unwarlike Train. (626–9) Change is the one constant, Numa counsels. But even with the death of one form there is birth of another, as with Troy and Rome. Numa’s soul

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is part of that legacy, the vision of which was passed down from Helenus to Aeneas, in an exchange that crossed the breach between the living and the underworld.26 The fable puts forward a king who is both “Gods anointed, and mans appointed”:27 Which Godlike Numa to the Sabines brought, And thence transferr’d to Rome, by Gift his own: A willing People, and an offer’d Throne. (712–4) The irony, of which Dryden most certainly was aware, in this example of perfect harmony is that it is exactly this version of history that William’s supporters would write when recounting the events leading up to the Revolution of 1688. However, a king with Numa’s character, well-versed and charismatic, God’s appointed and people anointed, could also apply to Charles II’s Restoration.28 Yet the fable does not seem to weigh the benefits of one king, and the deficits of another. It takes on a philosophical distance. Change must have been the one constant in the span of Dryden’s lifetime.29 His ability to bring his readers up close to the characters he presents, and then to help his readers stand back and view the patterns over time, is a key element to Fables. It also may have been an important key for Dryden himself as he neared the end of his life and reviewed “What Changes in this Age have been” (The Secular Masque 25). Dryden’s choice to include Of the Pythagorean Philosophy emphasizes the distance an artist must impose on himself in order to recognize historical patterns. We have seen the equal attention Dryden gives to the individual characters in Fables, and the emotional involvement that those stories require of him as an artist. Dryden’s care for the duchess’s health demonstrates a simultaneous concern for the personal and the historical perspective: Rest here a while, Your Lustre to restore, That they may see You as You shone before: For yet, th’ Eclipse not wholly past, You wade Thro’ some Remains, and Dimness of a Shade. A Subject in his Prince may claim a Right, Nor suffer him with Strength impair’d to fight; Till Force returns, his Ardour we restrain, And curb his Warlike Wish to cross the Main. (“To the Dutchess” 103–10) These lines possess a genuine concern for the duchess and her health as well as a reminder that princes are beholden to their subjects. Though

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on the surface these lines refer to the duchess’s return voyage to Ireland, Dryden also probably refers to William III in the phrase “A subject in his prince”: it is time to reign in the “ardor” of William’s wars, till England’s “force returns.” England is as tired as the duchess, and she must recover. And in fact, so is the king, the health of whom doctors debated intensely in 1699 until William, fed up, left for Holland and prescribed for himself a regimen of outdoor exercise.30 Even as Dryden counsels against military preparations and standing armies in both To the Dutchess and To John Driden of Chesterton, he appeals to the health of the king as well as to a personality trait that aligns William with John Driden and with the traditional English yeoman. The poet himself also is aging, recovering from illness, and tired. The century is coming to a close as well, and The Secular Masque presents images of the cyclical nature of time. Weary, weary of my weight, Let me, let me drop my Freight, And leave the World behind. I could not bear Another Year The Load of Human-kind. ** ‘Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin A New. (7–12; 90–1) Dryden the poet will not be beginning anew and will not have the enthusiasm for new beginnings that he had when he wrote Astraea Redux. Momus’s quip in The Secular Masque that “things are as they were” (70) seems more pertinent to the poet’s perspective in 1700 than any new beginnings. In the same vein, Theseus begins his second speech with language reminiscent of Chronos in The Secular Masque: “So Men oppress’d, when weary of their Breath, / Throw off the Burden, and suborn their Death” (Palamon and Arcite 3.1038–9). These lines are Dryden’s additions and not found in Chaucer, and they reflect Dryden’s weariness. Again, in Dryden’s translation of Lucretius, Great Nature defines life thus: “run the round again, the round I ran before.”31 Dryden’s Theseus supplies a gentler version of the cycles of life than does Great Nature: We more or less of his Perfection share. But by a long Descent, th’Etherial Fire Corrupts; and Forms, the mortal Part, expire: As he withdraws his Vertue, so they pass, And the same Matter makes another Mass:

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Theseus concludes in a similar tone: “What then remains, but, after past Annoy, / To take the good Vicissitude of Joy? / To thank the gracious Gods for what they give, / Possess our Souls, and while we live, to live?” (3.1111–3). While they are consonant with Chaucer’s meaning, these lines are Dryden’s embellishments. Theseus addresses the end of an individual life, yet the state-like images (“Monarch Oak,” “Supreme in State”) are Dryden’s, not Chaucer’s. Conversely, the primary subject of The Secular Masque, as the title suggests, is the end of an era. That this happens to correspond with the end of the poet’s life is what gives it the richness and complexity that underlies the surface simplicity of the masque. Part of the detachment Dryden explores, then, is not only one that is necessary when cultivating peace but also part of the philosophical ordering of one’s mortal life before leaving it. Numa also spans the “ages” of time that appear in The Secular Masque, and he addresses the physical change that is part of the traditional notion of concordia discors: That Forms are chang’d I grant; that nothing can Continue in the Figure it began: The Golden Age, to Silver was debas’d: To Copper that; our Mettal came at last. The Face of Places, and their Forms, decay; And that is solid Earth, that once was Sea: Seas in their turn retreating from the Shore, Make solid Land, what Ocean was before. (Of the Pythagorean Philosophy 398–405) This passage provides two very different kinds of change: the one is an example of decay, and the other of cycles. Dryden betrays his reluctance at times to recognize the inevitability of change that is distasteful to him, yet that he can no more influence than the movement from sea to earth to sea again. Time, if not Chronos, also is part of Of The Pythagorean Philosophy, where it is broken down and divided into minutes. Doing so enables us to see the motion more easily:

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For Time no more than Streams, is at a stay: The flying Hour is ever on her way; And as the Fountain still supplies her store, The Wave behind impels the Wave before; Thus in successive Course the Minutes run, And urge their Predecessor Minutes on, Still moving, ever new: For former Things Are set aside, like abdicated Kings: And every moment alters what is done, And innovates some Act till then unknown. (Of the Pythagorean Philosophy 268–77) Minutes have predecessors and successors, perhaps implying that “abdicated Kings” are equally small, or equally anonymous, in the expanse of history. Yet even if kings are as small as minutes, they have consequence in the history of an individual life, and in the life of a specific nation. This recalls Aegeus’s speech in Palamon and Arcite: “Ev’n Kings but play; and when their Part is done, Some other, worse or better, mount the Throne” (III.89–90). As he did in Ceyx and Alcyone, Dryden again echoes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60: “Like as the waves make towards the pibbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end” (1–2). “Our minutes” are dearly beloved, but as small as those in Dryden’s imitation. The sonnet lays out a general sequence by which all humans are subject to decay: “And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow” (11). Shakespeare’s final couplet articulates tension between the personal and the universal: “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, / Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand” (13–14). In Dryden’s Fables, Numa provides the acknowledgement that, in the end, each human life is one of a multitude of others, all of which flow through the same phases of time. Dryden’s poems to the duchess and to John Driden, like Shakespeare’s “verse” in Sonnet 60, assert that poetry and individual worth can be more than momentarily important. So does Of the Pythagorean Philosophy: “And every moment alters what is done, / And innovates some Act till then unknown.” Perhaps, when counted in minutes, change is innovative, and dangerous, as “abdicated Kings” implies. But when change is as large as centuries, its impact is gradual and inevitable. In one sense, Of The Pythagorean Philosophy counsels against attachment to people or ideals, since all things change and become the opposite of what they were. In another, every moment of every individual is of great consequence. Dryden does not cede the power of the individual storyteller, nor does he let go of the poet’s impact on his world. The artist, whether he is Dryden or Numa, must be involved enough to believe in his own importance, but detached enough to see the patterns of history, of which he is a part, and to make sense of them for his audience. In Of

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the Pythagorean Philosophy, Numa’s soul may be transcendent, and his mind may be lost in Pythagorean metempsychosis, but he remains a distinctly Roman king and patriot. Likewise, Dryden participates in a community of poets who recognize and articulate universal themes relevant to history, literature, and human emotions, but he also cares deeply about the here and now of England and English politics. Dryden’s use of time as expressed in the numerous works cited in this section reflects his recognition of the contradictory yet equally important individual and historical perspectives. Even his concept of cycles varies, from the near millennialism of To the Dutchess, through the Lucretian perspective in Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, to the almost Ecclesiasteslike weariness of The Secular Masque. Dryden portrays to his readers the truth in each of them despite their mutual contradictions. Each of these historical analogies, cycles, or patterns can be seen only from a perspective of learned detachment. It is perhaps as much the scholar as the artist who is involved in the articulation of them. Each has a very specific historical and political application in Dryden’s own time, but Dryden’s very use of analogies encourages his readers to recognize a larger scope as well. Shakespeare’s plays interpret history as an inevitable cycle of events: punishment must be endured before the subsequent Tudors and England can prosper. Dryden is provoking some of the same questions, though without a sense of resolution, in his arrangement of patterns as they apply to the Stuarts. His final fable, Cymon and Iphigenia, seems inapposite to Shakespeare’s history plays. It contains no overt allusions to English history, but it plays a prominent role as the final fable, and its conclusion seems like a cruel parody of all expressions of peace and harmony in Fables prior to it. At the start of the tale, readers identify with Cymon, but that identification grows less and less as the story unfolds, until it disappears entirely. Dryden has taken his audience through a detailed story of Cymon’s flourishing under the influence of love, and of the disastrous consequences of that growth gone awry and of the bloody war in the midst of a wedding feast. He then steps back and concludes with the economy he credits Ovid in Book XII: In safety landed on the Candian Shore, With generous Wines their Spirits they restore: There Cymon with his Rhodian Friend resides; Both Court, and Wed at once the willing Brides. A War ensues, the Cretans own their Cause, Stiff to defend their hospitable Laws: Both Parties lose by turns; and neither wins, ‘Till Peace propounded by a Truce begins. The Kindred of the Slain forgive the Deed, But a short Exile must for Show precede;

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The Term expir’d, from Candia they remove; And happy each at Home, enjoys his Love. (Cymon and Iphigenia 629–40) The distance created by the conclusion is by no stretch of the imagination “philosophical.” There is instead a cynicism and almost an emotional anesthesia. Peace, it seems, requires forgetting, even by “the kindred of the slain.” The same was required of Nestor after Hercules murdered his siblings, but with Nestor it was possible to see his reconciliation with the future, if not the past, in his relationship with Tlelopemus, and it also is possible that Dryden looks forward to Anne.32 Peace, in this instance, certainly is not golden, and perhaps is due to weariness, but nevertheless it still is peace. It is possible that this is a peace like the Peace of Ryswick, reached only after all sides have lost and no one wins. Typical of a fable, the moral belies the actual sentiment of the story. “And happy each at Home, enjoys his Love” sounds like a fairy tale ending, but this peace is the sort that comes after the sorrowful acknowledgement that a truce, however painful, is better than an endless cycle of revenge. Perhaps this is the only version of peace that’s possible.

Notes 1. “Dedication to the Duke,” Works, 7: 17; 20–6. 2. Winn, John Dryden and His World, 434. 3. See Scott, Dryden, 1: 321; Barnard, “Early Expectations of Dryden’s Translation of Virgil (1697) on the Continent,” 196–204. 4. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 1–5. 5. Hunter, 87. 6. James D. Garrison, “Dryden and the Birth of Hercules,” Studies in Philology 77.2 (Spring, 1980): 180–201, points to specific satirical allusions to the fallen state of England after the Revolution of 1688, one of which is the analogy between Jupiter-Alcmena-Amphitryon and William III (false Amphitryon)-James II (true Amphitryon)-England (Alcmena as wife and subject). 7. Works, vol. 13, eds. Maximillian E. Novak, George R. Guffey, Alan Roper (1984), 242–3. 8. J.P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in Kingship (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958), indicates that during James II’s final weeks as king of England, he was reading the histories of Richard II and Henry VI and comparing their cruel fates to his (180). 9. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 170. 10. Baxter, 245. 11. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 124–35. 12. To John Driden of Chesterton, 31–2. Reverand, Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 61–8, asserts that Driden’s bachelorhood and self-sufficiency counterbalance the Duchess’s image of a motherly and restorative force. Driden’s lack of love and potential misogyny are what make him a “partial ideal,” and the Duchess’s illness makes her incomplete and incapable of providing a redemptive

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

Detachment and Involvement ideal as well. Reverand also points out that the Duchess provides a “profeminist” version of a woman, and that Driden provides the opposite, which may be true. The misogyny and sworn bachelorhood would align Driden with Orpheus, who hovers in the shadows of Fables as the narrator-artist of the fables that Dryden pulls from Ovid. However, it seems to me that the misogyny in the image of Adam and Eve is either a reflection of Dryden’s own opinions, rather than an intentional flaw that Dryden created for Driden’s character, or Dryden is doing something new with the worn out belief that women are the source of all evil. I prefer to believe that Dryden is innovative with this image, and that misogyny serves intentionally either as reductive satire, in contrast to the ideal in his cousin, or as a satirical emblem of the ongoing struggle for power between King and Parliament, as Alan Roper asserts (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 128–9). Dryden to the Right Honourable Charles Montague, Letter 65, October 1699, 120. The Dunciad Variorum: Book II, 290 (1728). In the Preface, Dryden asserts that Dryden himself “drew the Plan of an Epick Poem on King Arthur” in Discourse Concerning Satire, from which Blackmore “plainly took his Hint” (Preface 7: 772–83). Milbourne translated parts of Virgil in 1687, and attacked Dryden’s later translation (Works 7: 626). Additionally, they are bad poets. Dryden to Montague, Letter 65, October 1699, 120. See Works 7: 558. Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, 8–9. Winn, John Dryden and His World, 493–5. Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, 23. James Winn’s assessment as both a Dryden scholar and an accomplished musician, bears repeating: “Like the first ode of 1687, this one is a virtuoso performance” (John Dryden and His World, 493). Dryden to Tonson, Letter 50, December 1697, 98. As we saw previously, Anne Killigrew’s soul flits upward, bird-like, in imagery that Dryden recreates for Ceyx and Alcyone. See note 40, Chapter 3. Works 7: 28. Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, 630–67. The Aphorismes of the Kingdome (1642), Qted. in Wasserman, The Subtler Language, 23. Wasserman outlines the debate regarding the source of the monarch’s authority at the time of the Restoration, and demonstrates Dryden’s use of this debate in “To Charleton” (1663). See Wasserman, 15–33. Reverand also compares Numa to William III and to Charles II. According to Reverand, Numa is “heaven-sent, rather than recently arrived from Holland,” and William should be more peace-loving, like Numa. Reverand then segues to show that Charles II’s reign also fell short of a Numa-like ideal: “The properly empowered Numa who gives laws to lust, then, also serves as an ideal monarch contrasted against none other than the properly restored David/Charles, whose blatant promiscuity suggests that lust gives laws to him” (Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode, 171). Reverand’s chapter 6 provides an insightful examination of the theme of change in Fables. Both Reverand and Sloman begin by comparing Theseus and Pythagoras as philosophers on this subject: for Theseus, change contrasts with the stable, unchanging First Mover, and Pythagoras focuses on change itself, regardless of its source. Reverand then continues with an analogy of Pythagoras as a Cartesian philosophy, and Theseus as representative of an English reaction to it. Inherent in the theme of change is whether that change

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is regenerative, degenerative, or merely neutral, and Reverand gives examples where Theseus’s and Pythagoras’s views converge and diverge on this topic, depending on the passage under scrutiny. Reverand asserts that Pythagoras encompasses both of these perspectives on change, and that it “presents on a philosophical plane the same clash of apparently irreconcilable positions that [Reverand has] argued pervade Fables” (183). I agree that the theme of change is central to Fables, and I also agree that what Dryden gives with one hand, he takes with the other. I am not sure that Pythagoras ties up all irreconcilable pieces of Fables so neatly, however, and I do not see evidence that Numa embraces certain kinds of hunting, or certain kinds of conquests, as Reverand suggests (168–69; 181–3). In this one regard, Numa and Driden are in opposition to one another, though they both are attractive ideals in Fables and share multiple similarities. 30. James Vernon wrote that he hoped the king’s health would improve while “out of their hands,” meaning out of the doctors’ hands. For this anecdote, see Henri Ven Der Zee and Barbara Ven Der Zee, William and Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 459. 31. This line is quite similar to that of the hare in To John Driden of Chesterton, the “Emblem of Humane Life, who runs the Round” (63). 32. Even William III had high hopes for the succession plan in the Duke of Gloucester, whom he cherished according to all accounts, and on whose 7th birthday in 1696, the king personally awarded him the blue garter of England. See James Winn’s remarks regarding Dryden’s hopes in Anne and in her son in Queen Anne, 219–22.

Conclusion

Peace, then, is an ambiguous and even contradictory concept within Fables. There is the peace of Cymon and Iphigenia, a peace that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with weariness. There is Rubens’s version of peace as represented by a reconciliation of Venus and Mars, a passionate love that ties opposing forces in harmony. The Secular Masque presents Diana as the symbol of a peaceful beginning, and Palamon and Arcite equates Diana with Emily’s innocence. But Diana vanishes (and a fleeting sense of peace along with her) with the prospect of marriage that Emily at first wants to avoid. Likewise, the establishment of a structured tourney to decide Emily’s fate is presented as an orderly alternative to the passionate and reckless duel between Palamon and Arcite, but the tournament itself does not involve harmony, though her marriage to Palamon, after the Astraea-like Diana vanishes, does. These varying versions of peace correlate with Melissa Schoenberger’s recent research showcasing Dryden and other poets who build on the idea from Virgil that peace is hard work, that “war and peace exist only as mutable versions of one another,” and that in fact peace often was conceived in negative terms as a “state of war prevented.”1 She asserts that translating, imitating, and borrowing from the Georgics suited poets like Dryden “who refused to partake in the myth of golden-age peace and plenty, but who were nevertheless committed to envisioning peaceable ways of life, and especially the processes whereby these peaceable ways persist.”2 Craig Rose’s collection of contemporary accounts corroborates that there were at least a few discerning individuals who viewed peace in these realistic rather than golden terms. By the year 1697, with no bullion and no trade, skepticism over the Peace of Ryswick was overpowered by relief and joy, as evidenced by wild celebrations. James Vernon, Undersecretary of State, also was relieved, but was unsettled by the celebrations. “Perhaps Vernon was aware of one rather unpalatable truth: no amount of rejoicing could altogether obscure the fact that a massive expenditure of blood and treasure had produced precious little wool for England.”3 This is reminiscent, I think, of the passages in Dryden’s millennial poem to the duchess:

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The Waste of Civil Wars, their Towns destroy’d, Pales unhonour’d, Ceres unemploy’d, Were all forgot; and on Triumphant Day Wip’d all the Tears of three Campaigns away. Blood, Rapines, Massacres, were cheaply bought (64–8) Dryden smoothes the edge of these lines by concluding the passage with a sincere compliment to the duchess, who is his friend: “So mighty Recompense Your Beauty brought” (69). Numa’s philosophical approach contrasts with the active nature of John Driden of Chesterton, an emblem of the peaceful magistrate in the country, and Numa will not even admit that level of violence that is part of the life of the hunting squire. It is with peace as it is with many themes in Fables: Dryden embodies a method whereby he introduces one idea first, and then follows by presenting an opposing but equally attractive idea. This opposition throughout Fables could cause the work to appear fragmented and contradictory, yet this structure of contrarieties also is a fruit of Dryden’s experience, creating an intimacy with a reader who could be described as modern—one who, after living through a sufficient number of changes, realizes it is possible to see a truth and a countertruth simultaneously. Benedict’s work on miscellany describes the “middle of the road ideology of a form that, from its inception in a period of cultural turmoil, rejected univocal partisanship.”4 She places Dryden at the center of this tradition of literature that intentionally comprehended mixed audiences “recently rent by civil and religious differences.”5 The anthologies appealed to readers by asking for their judgment in comparing one piece to another, one translation to another. They added translations from Greek and Latin, appealing to an Anglican reader who could judge the original with the translation, and combined them with “parables, prose, and allegory” that drew in latitudinarians. Dryden’s authority as editor and poet was attractive to all audiences, and these compendia were in conversation with the readers; many of those readers were women, some of them part of “a newly self-conscious audience . . . invited to engage in governmental and literary politics.”6 Dedications would address the ladies’s approval, and the elegy, ballad, satire, and translations that interested these women often appeared in the most successful of miscellanies.7 English, as the native language, was the unifying quality. The mixing of audiences and genres perfectly positions the miscellany to offer oppositional voices and truths that are not simple. A poet as experienced as Dryden would be capable of displaying the hunt as an emblem of peace as well as a symbol that stands in opposition to that same peace. As such, a straightforward view, like that of Ajax in opposition to Ulysses, simply isn’t good enough.

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Dryden proffers millennial rebirth with repeated images of rebellion, lineal descent in opposition to divine election, historical destiny matched against personal tragedy. By 1700, Dryden had lived through the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Revolution of 1688. His poetry reflected his thoughts through each of them. Fables’s evocation of complexity reflects a central feature of Dryden’s temperament, and this complexity in turn reflects the age in which Dryden is living and the audience he addresses. Dryden’s vision increasingly militates against simple partisanship, but it leads neither to credulity, nor cynicism, nor quietism. There are accidents and other events that happen against his will, but Dryden does make sense of it all, and turns it into a miscellany and a masque. Like Theseus in Palamon and Arcite, Dryden is above the fray in The Secular Masque. There is a rollicking meter, almost, and there is no all-embracing vision, but no bitter disappointment, either, at least when compared to Fables. In Fables, however, we feel many passions. Even Palamon conveys bitter disappointment mixed with lovesickness, and the audience feels the tragedy of Arcite’s death, and perhaps even the helplessness of Emilia, who has no choice in anything as the fable unfolds. Even though there are images of redemption and reconciliation throughout Fables, beginning with the millennial duchess and the satisfying conclusion of Palamon and Arcite, and including stories like that of Baucis and Philemon and Ceyx and Alcyone, Dryden still chooses to end with Cymon and Iphigenia. Cymon’s story takes all of the movement in Fables toward a philosophical detachment, and turns it inside out: he is detached from the tradition and responsibility that comes with an awareness of history and consequence, but the conclusion suggests that Cymon and Iphigenia will prosper as happily as did Palamon and Emily before them. To reinforce this uncomfortable parallel, Dryden addresses the duchess at the beginning of Cymon and Iphigenia, as he did in the more extended dedication prior to Palamon and Arcite.8 What is disturbing, then, becomes simultaneously reassuring, because immediately following the final fable are the Chaucer narratives in their original form, beginning with The Knight’s Tale. The direct address to the duchess in Cymon and Iphigenia, followed by Chaucer’s original, brings Fables back, full circle, to its beginning lines that compare the duchess to Emily in Palamon and Arcite. All three of these gestures create a cyclical movement that mitigates the cynicism we might feel after reading Cymon’s story, and at the same time further complicates a reading of the Chaucer imitation. As we have seen, Dryden praises the duchess for her beauty. At the time of publication, Fables also was praised foremost for its beauty, and at first glance, the collection of imitations can appear to be an amalgamation of love stories. Ending with translations, as Shakespeare ended with romance in The Tempest, is one layer of Dryden’s final statement. Both romance and imitation are forms of reconciliation and community.

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Dryden aligns himself with Shakespeare, and with the artists he imitates, thereby allowing Dryden to evade his own decay by joining a community of artistic immortality. Under the cover of Fables, however, Dryden also is free to speculate about issues that he could not let go: the topics addressed in Absalom and Achitophel are just as important to him when he writes Fables. But Dryden will not reveal his flexibility and earnest reflection again as freely as he did in The Hind and the Panther, where he reexamined his initial position in Religio Laici, and laid bare his personal reflections on Catholicism. In Fables, Dryden follows the threads of detachment and involvement, of passion, of family, of spiritual metempsychosis, and of the ramifications of the successful overthrow achieved by William and Mary, through stories that create an historical trajectory through a modern model of multiple perspectives. But he explores all of these things covertly, through fables and myths, and he doesn’t have to come down on one side or the other. In fact, he may even have viewed it as a patriotic duty to not resolve complex conundrums, but rather to cultivate peace through multiplicity. Battigelli writes that “Dryden had recognized the emergence of a growing reading public for whom the public sphere was shaped increasingly through print controversy, and he designed his work so as to immerse his readers in that controversy and familiarize them with alternate points of view.”9 And this was the very mode his miscellany readers sought; a “cornucopia of mixed fruit” that “offered identification with public life through reading.”10 By supplying the “mixed corn” of Johnson’s dictionary, and multiple perspectives, Dryden makes it more difficult for his readers to remain bent on one cause to the death; the kind of conviction that provokes civil war. Phillip Harth once wrote that, for Dryden, “changing conditions require different remedies, as well as different strategies to recommend them.”11 Miscellany may be one antidote to civil disquiet, one strategy that contributes to the avoidance of war. Dryden opens the Preface with a sense of achievement: Tis with a Poet, as with a Man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes, in casting up the Cost beforehand: But, generally speaking, he is mistaken in his Account, and reckons short of the Expence he first intended: He alters his Mind as the Work proceeds, and will have this or that Convenience more, of which he had not thought when he began. So it has hapned to me; I have built a House, where I intended but a Lodge: Yet with better Success than a certain Nobleman, who beginning with Dog-kennel, never liv’d to finish the Palace he had contriv’d. (Works 7: 24) This opening is an allusion to Luke 14:25–32, worth quoting here to show how Dryden has extended and upended the original parable in

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order to demonstrate his satisfaction over the choices he has made in his literary career and in his religious life (the allusion refers to the lines following the bracketed introduction): [Now large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.] For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.”12 Dryden seems to say that he did not estimate correctly the cost on his soul, as “with a Poet, as with a Man”; both parts of his life cost more than he had reckoned, and both have been more fruitful than he anticipated. His sacrifice in staying faithful to his church did not in the end damage his poetical success; he built a House where he intended but a Lodge. The advice that kings should seek peace because it is practical is a convenient conclusion to the parable that Dryden’s readers in 1700 surely recognized more quickly than his readers of today. That Dryden would allude to such a provocative parable, where it is impossible to come away with only one reading, is telling as well. And it is just like Dryden that he can’t resist adding the mischievous dig at a “certain Nobleman,” perhaps the Duke of Buckingham, who ended less successfully than he.13 It appears that Dryden finished Fables before February of 1700, and wrote The Secular Masque for John Vanbrugh’s version of The Pilgrim shortly thereafter.14 Dryden died on the third night. A review of Dryden’s final letters and state of mind reveals a man who still was very much involved in his own personal affairs: he writes to Mrs. Steward about Fables and about trips with his son, illness, gifts of food and friendship, concerns for other friends and family members. He corresponds with Elizabeth Thomas and Charles Montague and keeps up with the playhouse, including two plays about Iphigenia and one about Boadicea. Political and literary discussions are rarely absent, though they aren’t bitter, even when the news is bad. In Letter 74, he expresses grief and disappointment that “they have made a breach in the Magna Carta; for which God forgive them” after the House of Commons approves statutes that will strip Catholics of their property.

Conclusion

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In Letter 75, his last extant correspondence written to Mrs. Steward a couple of weeks before he died, he opens with his pleasure over “The Ladies of the Town” who believe, as does Mrs. Steward, that Fables is his best work yet. He worries that the king and the lords “have given up the Cause” to the House of Commons, confesses that neither he, nor his wife, nor his son Charles are well, and advises Mrs. Steward that The Secular Masque will open for his good friend’s play shortly. He ends with a jovial reminder that he would not refuse a gift of bacon, an apology for a letter poorly written in ill health, a tender salute, and a wish for her company. Dryden was not a malcontent at the end of his career, but neither was he waiting for Astraea. He had made amends with old enemies such as Matthew Prior, whose lampoon of The Hind and the Panther had cost Dryden and for which he suffered, but he satirizes other enemies even in the “memorial of [his] Principles to all Posterity.” What Fables seems to reveal is an equal concern for the historical and the personal, for the importance of passion, and for the requisite discipline of detachment. Dryden showcases John Driden of Chesterton and Sigismonda, Theseus and Numa, and ends with Cymon, yet concludes once more with Chaucer’s originals and yet again with The Secular Masque. This combination is an obstacle to all urges to tie up Fables in any sort of tidy way. Yet he provides us with a complete work of art that transfers ideas from fable to fable and illustrates a dynamic relationship of mutual adaptation between Fables and—to cite the Shakespeare of The Tempest—a less than brave new world.

Notes 1. Melissa Schoenberger, Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650–1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2019), quotations on 11 and 5. 2. Ibid., 10. 3. Rose, 143. 4. Benedict, 91. 5. Ibid. For Dryden at the center of the miscellany genre, see 91–108. Quotation on 5. 6. Ibid., 110. 7. Ibid., 119. 8. We’ve seen already the many ways Dryden connects the Duchess of Ormond with Emily in Palamon and Arcite. Dryden concludes the poeta loquitur of Cymon and Iphigenia with the following tribute: Ormond, the first, and all the Fair may find In this one Legend, to their Fame design’d, When Beauty fires the Blood, how Love exalts the Mind. (39–41) But for the genuine warmth in correspondence between Dryden and the Duchess, these lines preceding the story of Cymon would seem to change to irony all of the lines written in praise of the Duchess. However, both the

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Conclusion Noyes edition and Works confirm that the general reputations of both the Duke and Duchess of Ormond correlate with Dryden’s emphasis on their moral virtues. See also Scott: “The character [of the Duke of Ormond] was not exaggerated” (Quoted in Noyes, 1024). Battigelli, 277. Benedict, 9 and 108. Phillip Harth, “Dryden’s Public Voices,” in Critical Essays on John Dryden, ed. James A. Winn. (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1997): 104–22; 122. Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Containing Old and New Testaments (New York: American Bible Society, 1989). See Works 7: 611n for the note on the Duke of Buckingham. “On 11 April 1700 Dryden wrote to his cousin Mrs. Steward, ‘Within this month there will be playd for my profit, an old play of Fletchers, call’d the Pilgrim, corrected by my good friend Mr Vanbrook [John Vanbrugh]; to which I have added A New Masque, & am to write a New Prologue & Epilogue.’ We may guess that he did not begin The Secular Masque, as it came to be titled, or his fourth contribution to the play, the Song of a Scholar and His Mistress, until he had finished work on his Fables. Fables was in press in mid-December 1699 and still in press at the turn of the year; it was advertised for sale in the Flying Post of 5–7 March 1700, though Dryden did not receive copies until the 12th. To judge by the signatures in the first edition, the preface to Fables was printed last. At its end it counterattacks Sir Richard Blackmore, but without mentioning his Paraphrase of Job, which was advertised in the London Gazette of 29 February–4 March 1699/1700. Because Dryden denigrates Blackmore’s Job in the prologue he wrote for The Pilgrim, we may conclude that he had finished with Fables before the end of February. Perhaps we may also conclude, then, that he wrote all his contributions to The Pilgrim in 1700” (16: 419).

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Index

abdication 82, 104, 121, 130, 213 absolute monarchy 106 Achinstein, Sharon 6, 85 Act of Oblivion 84 Adam and Eve 72, 73, 107–8, 142n1, 196; see also family; marriage Addison, Joseph 153, 154–5; “Pleasures of the Imagination” papers 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 160–1 Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and the Stuart monarchy 106–8 Airey, Jennifer 73 Amarasinghe, Upali 19 Anderson, Emily 165 Anglican Church 4 art 158; metaphors of in Shakespeare 158–9; and politics 180 artistic rhetorical control, in The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses 190–3, 194 assassination plot of 1696 7, 8 Astell, Mary 104, 114, 142 Barash, Carol 104 Barclay, Sir George 7 Barker, Jane 104 Barnard, John 19 Barnes, Joshua 33 Battigelli, Anna 6, 18, 85, 221 Behn, Aphra 104, 105, 142 Benedict, Barbara 5, 16, 18, 19, 32, 105, 127, 219 Benson, Donald R. 132 Bertie, James, Earl of Abingdon 104, 129–30, 131, 133, 135, 138 biological descent 207, 209 Blackmore, Sir Richard 197 Bloody Assizes 127–8, 130 Boadicea 12, 73, 96, 105, 126, 222

Boccaccio, Giovanni 110, 114; Theodore and Honoria 20 Bohun, Edmund 76, 77, 107, 108, 114 Bourbon, Louis XIV, King of France 7, 11, 12, 13, 116, 127 Bowers, Toni 73 Bowyer, Abel 107 Brady, Richard 32 Bullard, Paddy 5 Bywaters, David 18, 19 Caldwell, Tanya 18, 19, 35 Cameron, William 186 Carnes, Geremy 18 Catholic church 10, 12, 126, 127; religious terminology in Eleonora 133–5 Centlivre, Susanna 126 change 212–13, 216–17n29 Charles I, King of England 35, 41, 111 Charles II, King of England 8, 14, 19, 49, 104, 107, 112, 120; Act of Oblivion 84 Chaucer, Geoffrey 3–4, 5, 15, 20, 35, 36, 105, 126, 208; The Canterbury Tales 37–38; The Knight’s Tale 84; The Wife of Bath Her Tale 74 childlessness 123, 198, 205 Chronos 20, 31, 46, 48–53, 59, 211–12 Church of England 15, 88, 111, 116, 126 Churchill, John, 1st Duke of Marlborough 131 Civil War 7, 15, 50, 73, 78, 80, 81, 86, 87, 94, 110; Act of Oblivion 84 Clarke, Mary 114, 142 condordia discors 20, 31, 32, 33, 34, 61n16, 63n27, 95, 179, 189, 212,

240

Index

218; Chronos 49–52; Cooper’s Hill 35, 36; detachment and involvement 189; Diana 48–9; Dryden’s pairing of Palamon and Arcite and The Secular Masque 42–48; and Edward III 33–42; George Stepney 42; the hunt 48–49, 63n25, 90, 101n57, 114–15, 179–80; Palamon and Arcite 36–7, 38, 39; peace/war 215; The Twelfth Book of Ovid his Metamorphoses 57–59; Venus and Mars 31, 35, 39, 71, 178; see also marriage conscience, and reason 9, 10 “consent” 109–110 Corse, Taylor 18, 160, 162 Cotterill, Ann 19, 105 courtship 72, 78–79; Theodore and Honoria 89–90 Cowley, Abraham 15, 61n19 Cowper, William 3 Croft, William 135 Cromwell, Oliver 3, 4, 8, 73, 80; comparison to William III 80–1, 85 Cromwell, Richard 84 D’avenant, William, The Tempest 165–7 de Scudéry, Madeleine 105, 126, 132 Defoe, Daniel 21, 126, 135, 136; De Jure Divino 109–110; Threnodium Britannicum 174; The True-Born Englishman 139 deities: Diana 48–9; in The Secular Mask 45–6 Demaray, John 175 Denham, Sir John 20, 41, 42, 61n19; Cooper’s Hill 35, 36, 50 Dennis, John 4, 9, 10, 107 descent 207; biological 209; spiritual 208, 209 d’Este, Mary Beatrice, Queen consort of England (as ‘Mary of Modena’) 21, 126, 127, 133, 134, 140 detachment 21–2, 188, 213–14, 220–1; emotional restraint 190, 205; and involvement 189; philosophical 190, 198–9, 200, 201; rhetorical control 189–90; The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses 190–2, 193, 194–5 Diana 51; condordia discors 48–9 divine right 53, 71, 72, 75, 83, 103, 115, 142n1, 144n16, 183n30 Dobson, Michael 166

Donovan, Fiona 40 Driden, John 141, 148n52, 154–5, 190, 199, 206, 211, 219 Dryden, John 7, 9, 16, 21, 22, 42, 114–7, 188; Absalom and Achitophel 7, 14, 41, 77, 110, 111–2; Aeneid 18; Alexander’s Feast 199–200, 201; ambivalence of 104, 167; Amphitryon 58, 188; To Anne Killigrew 126, 127–9; Annus Mirabilus 92–3, 94; artistic involvement 196; Astraea Redux 48, 49, 52, 55–6, 121, 211; Britannia Rediviva 17, 41, 56–7, 128; Ceyx and Alcyone 154, 169–74; The Character of a Good Parson 14–15; The Cock and the Fox 154, 157, 160, 161, 162, 164; comparison to Prospero 154–5; Cymon and Iphigenia 78–85, 94; detachment 188; Don Sebastian 16; Eleonora 126, 129–39; emotional detachment 205; emotional involvement 210–11; Examen Poeticum 155; Fables, Ancient and Modern 2, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 160, 167; female readers 104–5, 148n52, 155; The First Book of Homer’s Ilias 188–9; The Flower and the Leaf 154, 156, 174–80; green to red imagery 48–9; The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy 37, 158, 159, 190, 192, 193, 194, 194–5; The Hind and the Panther 10, 11, 13, 154, 220–1, 223; The Husband His Own Cuckold 12; involvement in politics 196; To John Driden of Chesterton 174, 196, 197, 200; The Lady’s Song 175; literary criticism 17–20; Maiden Queen 132; Meleager and Atalanta 164; miscellanies 219–20; Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady 126, 139–42, 168; as national poet and historian 56–9; Ovid XII 94; Palamon and Arcite 84–85, 175–6; personal involvement 187–8; philosophical detachment of 198–9; Poems on the Affairs of State 12; Preface to the Fables 2, 15–16, 33, 105, 132, 154, 156, 221–22; Prologue to The Unhappy Favourite 120–21, 121, 122; Of the Pythagorean Philosophy 19, 172,

Index 188, 198; Religio Laici 14, 220–1; satire 196–7; The Secular Masque 20, 31, 32, 33, 35, 40, 41, 44, 189; Sigismonda and Guiscardo 108–14; The Tempest 165–7; Theodore and Honoria 89–92, 93; Threnodia Augustalis 56–7, 128; translations 104, 105, 167, 168, 186–7; turns of plot 167–8; The Twelfth Book of Ovid his Metamorphoses 56, 57–9; Virgil project 22n1; The Wife of Bath Her Tale 74–8, 93, 94; and William III 52–3; Works of Virgil 16; see also Fables, Ancient and Modern (Dryden); The Secular Masque (Dryden) 45, 48, 53, 54, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222, 223 Dunton, John 16 Egerton, Sarah Fye 104 Eisaman Maus, Katharine 166 elegies 21, 127, 139, 141, 148n52 Eleonora, religious moderation 138 Elstob, Elizabeth 104 England: Civil Wars 73; Exclusion Crisis 104, 110; Tests Act 11, 12; see also Civil War; Restoration Erskine-Hill, Howard 18–19 Exclusion Crisis 104, 110, 122, 220 fables 84 Fables, Ancient and Modern (Dryden) 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 31, 77, 93, 94, 129, 154, 186–7, 189, 197, 220; Ceyx and Alcyone 169–74, 213; Cinyrus and Myrrha 202–3; The Cock and the Fox 162, 163, 164, 182–3n30; condordia discors 31, 32, 33, 37; couples 103; Cymon and Iphigenia 78–85, 94, 117, 214–15, 220; The Flower and the Leaf 174–80, 178; frontispiece 65–6n51; imagination 160; marriage in 205; Meleager and Atalanta 114–17, 164; Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady 139–42, 168; Palamon and Arcite 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 53–4, 54–5, 59, 117, 175–6, 179–80, 187, 213, 218; parent-child relationships 103, 201–2, 204; peace/war 218; poetking relationship 207; politics in 187; Preface to the Fables 2, 15–16,

241

33, 105, 132, 154, 156, 221–2; Of the Pythagorean Philosophy 172, 210, 212, 213, 214; The Secular Masque 187; Sigismonda and Guiscardo 108–14; The Speeches of Ajax and Ulysses 190–2, 193; Theseus 112; translations 220–1; see also condordia discors family 71–2, 103, 104, 142n1, 197–8, 204; To Anne Killigrew 127–9; incest 144n17; Meleager and Atalanta 116–17; Sigismonda and Guiscardo 108–14; see also monarchies; parent-child relationships Filmer, Robert 114; Patriarcha 71–2, 76, 108 force 71, 93, 95n2; Aeschylus’s Oresteia 106–8; Cymon and Iphigenia 78–85; Ovid XII 85–9; and politics 89; rape 72, 73; raptus 73–4, 89–90; in Theodore and Honoria 89–92; The Wife of Bath Her Tale 74–8 Frampton, Mary, Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady 139–42 Frost, William 18 Furies, the 106–8, 110 Gallagher, Noelle 18, 59 Gardiner, Anne Barbeau 131 Gelineau, David 18, 19, 85, 93 Glickman, Gabriel 12 Greenblatt, Stephen 158 Hammond, Paul 18, 46–7, 58–9 harmony 103, 210; see also condordia discors Harth, Phillip 18, 221 Henry IV, King of England 38, 82 Hinnant, Charles 162 Homer 2, 153, 168; The Odyssey 198; similes 88 Hopkins, Charles 105; Boadicea 12, 73 Hopkins, David 18, 19, 86 Horace 153; Ars Poetica 159 Howard, Sir Robert, History of the Reigns of Edward [II] and Richard II 33–4 Hume, David 59 Hunter, J. Paul 6, 13, 18, 58 husband and wife see marriage Hyde, Edward, 1st Earl of Clarendon 8; History of the Rebellion 59

242

Index

incest 144n17 involvement 21–2, 220–1; see also detachment Jardine, Lisa 91–2 Killigrew, Anne 104, 139–40 Kroll, Richard 18 Levine, Joseph 13, 18, 32 Lewis, Jaye 106, 153 Lobis, Seth 165 Locke, John 157, 162; Essay Concerning the Human Understanding 155 loyalism 3, 7, 146n33 Lupton, Christina 93–4 male-female paradigm 71, 77, 78, 90, 95, 105, 106, 115; in Meleager and Atalanta 115–17; see also marriage marriage 71, 74, 205, 218; Cymon and Iphigenia 78–85; Ovid XII 85–89; Sigismonda and Guiscardo 108–14; in Theodore and Honoria 90–2; The Wife of Bath Her Tale 74–8 Mason, Tom 162 masques 45–6, 154, 175 Maubert, James 153 Maurer, A. E. Wallace 19 metaphors: of art 158–9, 159; artist as wrestler 193–4; in Eleonora 129–30; in The Hind and the Panther 11; incest 144n17; marriage 71; needlework 123; rape 72–3; of the soul 132–3, 140, 141; Venus and Mars 35; see also condordia discors Milton, John 3, 5, 6, 86, 168, 175; Paradise Lost 87 Miner, Earl 18 Minerva Protects Pax from Mars 40–1 miscellanies 31, 105, 127, 154, 180, 187, 219, 220 monarchies 109–10, 112; abdication 82, 104; and Aeschylus’s Oresteia 106–8; and childlessness 205–6; divine right 53; see also divine right; family; Plantagenets; Stuart monarchy Nimrod 72, 95n7 Nine Muses 105 Novak, Maximillian 21, 153, 166

“On the Late Metamorphosis of an Old Picture of Oliver Cromwell’s into a New Picture of King William: The Head Changed, the Hieroglyphics Remaining” 80–1 Owen, Susan 73 Peter Paul Rubens: Minerva Protects Pax from Mars 40–1; The Peaceful Reign of King James 40; Venus, Mars, and Cupid 40 pamphlets 6, 8, 11, 139; An Account of Denmark 12, 26n45 parent-child relationships 197–8, 201–2, 204; in Fables 103; Meleager and Atalanta 114–17; Sigismonda and Guiscardo 108–14 Parliament 79–80 peace 3, 7, 12, 17, 32, 40, 44, 48, 51, 56–8, 72, 78, 84, 87, 94, 101, 117, 121, 125, 134, 205, 215, 218; condordia discors 40–41; John Driden of Chesterton 219; see also condordia discors; force persuasion 77, 93, 95n2; courtship 72; see also force philosophical detachment 190, 198–9, 200, 201 phoenix 208–9 physical health: comparison to the health of the state 122–3 piety 106, 108, 114, 140, 142, 209 Pincus, Steven 7 Plantagenet, Edward, King of England (as ‘Edward I’) 34, 125 Plantagenet, Edward, King of England (as ‘Edward II’) 36 Plantagenet, Edward, King of England (as ‘Edward III’) 31, 34, 55, 62n21, 112; and concordia discors 33–42 Plantagenets 32, 33, 38, 39, 117–24, 135, 206 Platonic year 118, 206 Plutarch 35 poet-king relationship 200, 203, 207, 211–13, 220 politics 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 18, 88, 122–4, 126, 154–5, 165, 188–9; and art 180; in Ceyx and Alcyone 173–4; and concordia discors 34, 39; in Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest 166; Dryden’s involvement

Index in 196; in Fables 187; force 89; see also force; marriage Pym, John 79 Raleigh, Sir Walter 32 rape 72, 86, 96n12, 100–1n56, 103; Theodore and Honoria 90; see also force; marriage rapio 73, 115 raptus 73, 89–90 reason: and conscience 9, 10; and law 10 religious terminology, in Eleonora 133–4, 135 Restoration 7, 21, 49, 107, 220 Reverand, Cedric 3, 17, 19, 32, 163–4 Revolution of 1688 7, 12, 16, 20, 21, 33, 71, 73, 80, 91, 94, 103, 115–16, 129–30, 131, 220 Richard II, King of England 38, 82 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela in her Exalted Condition 13 Richetti, John 128 Roberts, Sasha 21, 153 Roper, Alan 18, 19, 22, 25–8, 46, 57, 119, 200; Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 17 Rose, Craig 218 Rosenthal, Lisa 40 Ross, Alexander 35 Rounce, Adam 19 Rowe, Nicholas 153 royalists 72, 73 Rubens, Peter Paul 40, 41 Sandys, George 88 satire 135, 178, 187, 215–216n12; Dryden’s predilection for 196–7; in Eleonora 133; of Mary II 139; in Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady 140 Sedley, Charles 153 seizure 115 Shakespeare, William 4, 5, 6, 17, 21, 153, 154, 220–1, 223; DrydenDavenant version of The Tempest 165–7; imaginary beings 157–8; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 21, 35, 154–5, 156, 159, 161, 162, 163, 175, 176, 177, 179–80; Sonnet 12 171; Sonnet 60 171, 213; The Tempest 21, 154–5, 157, 159, 161, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177; As You Like It 54

243

Sidney, Algernon, Discourses 72 Sidney, Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester 15 Sloman, Judith 6, 18, 93, 114 Smallwood, Philip 129 Somerset, Mary, Duchess of Ormond117–15 soul, the 222; metaphors 132–3, 140, 141; transmigration of 208–9, 210 sovereignty 76 Speght, Thomas 15–16 Spenser, Edmund 175, 176 spiritual descent 207, 208, 209 Steele, Sir Richard 153 Stepney, George 139; “A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of her Late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary” 42 Stuart, Anne, Queen of England 12 Stuart, James I, King of England 47, 73; The True Law of Free Monarchies 71–2 Stuart, James II, King of England 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 33, 40, 56, 104, 112–13, 127, 140, 195, 196 Stuart, Mary II, Queen of England 7, 21, 47, 75–6, 82, 91, 103, 107, 111, 116, 117, 119, 125–6, 126, 131, 136, 173; and concordia discors 42; condordia discors 44; tributes 139 Stuart monarchy 31, 32, 39, 48, 78, 91, 118; and Aeschylus’s Oresteia 106–8; divine right 53; pattern of alternation in 40, 41, 47; see also condordia discors Sustermans, Justus 41 Swift, Jonathan, The Battle of the Books 32 Tadmor, Naomi 105 Temple, Sir William 16 The Athenian Mercury 16 The Embleme of Englands Distraction 80–1 Theobald, Lewis 153 Thomas, Elizabeth 105, 142 Thompson, Ann 21, 153 time: and change 212–13, 216–17n29; cyclical nature of 211, 214 “transfusion” 94, 102n69 transmigration of the soul 208–9, 210 Treaty of Ryswick (1697) 174, 200, 218

244

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trial of Stephen College 129–30 Tudor, Elizabeth I, Queen of England 8, 47, 107, 141 tyrants 12, 33, 73, 91, 103, 113, 198; Nimrod 72 Tyrell, James 32, 107; Bibliotheca Politica 77, 116–17; Patriarcha non Monarcha 72, 108, 116 usurpation 73, 87, 103, 125 Venus and Mars 71, 103, 178, 218; condordia discors 31, 35, 39, 42–3, 45, 46, 47, 48–9; Fables, Ancient and Modern 1; and the Stuart monarchy 40, 41; see also condordia discors; see also Peter Paul Rubens Vernon, James 218 Virgil 94, 153, 168 Wallace, John 130; Destiny His Choice 3; see also loyalism Walsh, Sean 19 Walsh, William 21, 126, 129, 135; A Funeral Elegy Upon the Death of the Queen 137, 138 Wars of the Roses 36, 82, 206 Wasserman, Earl 34 wedding feast 71, 72–3; in Cymon and Iphigenia 79, 81, 87; in Ovid XII 86; in Theodore and Honoria 90

Weinbrot, Howard 13, 153 West, John 18 West, Michael 32 Whigs 5, 19, 21, 32, 72, 94, 125, 134, 153 William III, King of England, Scotland and Ireland 7, 8, 9, 14, 36, 37, 40, 46, 47, 48, 57, 71, 76, 91, 103–4, 116, 117, 119, 120, 130, 131, 159, 188, 195; comparison to Oliver Cromwell 80–1, 85; and concordia discors 42; Declaration 91–2; parallels to Dryden 52–3 Williams, Abigail 57 Will’s Coffee-house 1 Winn, James Anderson 17, 19, 32, 52, 135, 186 Wolfthal, Diane 73 Wollstonecraft, Mary 93, 142 Works: Pope, Alexander 1, 2, 3, 129, 154, 172; condordia discors 34; Epistle to Arbuthnot 141; Epistle to Bathurst 31; The Rape of the Lock 73; Windsor Forest 44 Works: Prior, Matthew, Carmen Saeculare 42, 46, 57 Yeats, William Butler 187–8 Youngren, William 155 Zunshine, Lisa 19, 46 Zwicker, Steven 19, 153