"The Amendment of Vices": John Dryden's Satires

Once hailed as the towering literary figure of the Restoration age, John Dryden is little known now by the general reader.  Let's take care of that with a close look at his most enduring works, the poetical satires Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel.

Mac Flecknoe text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44181/mac-flecknoe

Absalom and Achitophel text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44172/absalom-and-achitophel 

Mea culpa:  At one point in this episode, I make reference to Dryden's "tasteless" satiric attacks.  I know, of course, that I should have said "distasteful."  I am dreadfully embarrassed by this mistake and I sincerely apologize to all listeners who were horrified and offended at my imbecilic misuse of the noble English tongue.  I vow to do better.

Transcript

“The true end of Satyre, is the amendment of Vices by correction.”  So says John Dryden, and so say we all!  Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  Today, we’re finally going to break into the work of John Dryden, whom some critics have called the “commanding literary figure of the last four decades of the seventeenth century.”  That’s a giant claim, given the fact that Milton was kicking about. But I’ve referred to Dryden on several occasions in the past few episodes without getting around to actually discussing him with you all.  And there seems to have been something of a gravitational pull in those episodes, one idea leading to another, trailing away from poor Mr. Dryden.

But, like Ben Kenobi on the Death Star catwalk, I am disabling the tractor beam and finally giving the good John D. his due.  Now, if you’d like to give this show its due, please click the “support the show” button on the episode page to make a financial contribution.  Every little bit helps keep the mic hot and the cat fed.  I really appreciate anything you can give.  Thanks so much!

So, I started this episode with a quote from Dryden about the purpose of satire, which he says is to correct vice.  We’ve dealt with many writers who sought to amend personal or institutional waywardness with the witty bon mot, but Dryden’s reputation really rests upon this genre.  To be sure, he wrote in many modes – the first decades of his career were devoted to the stage, and we’ll have a look at one of his plays next time.  He was also, as Samuel Johnson was happy to note, the father of English criticism, and, with Johnson himself and Sir Philip Sidney, makes up the core triumvirate of that genre.  He was a great translator, and his work in this realm made classical texts accessible to those who had no Latin or Greek.  He also wrote occasional poems – though we don’t know what they were the rest of time.  Arf, arf.  

Sadly, for being such a monumental figure in his own time, poor John is not much read nowadays.  He hardly features in undergraduate English programs at all, and relatively rarely in graduate courses.  There are probably many reasons for his fade into relative obscurity: the expansion of the literary canon being probably the most pertinent.  As we recognize the achievements and influence of more writers, and as more modern writers contribute to literature in English, so members of the old club must be given their cards – we’ve so little time to read so much.  Additionally, though, I think Dryden’s influence has faded because much of his verse is so time-bound.  It is really of its historical moment and it has difficulty transcending it in the way his fellow Johns Donne and Milton were able to.  But, apart from some plays, what still gets Dryden a toehold in the anthologies are his political satires and we’ll look at the two most famous today: Mac Flecknoe from the late 1670s and Absalom and Achitophel from 1681.

I think it best if we organize our discussion from the ridiculous to the sublime, so we’ll start with Mac Flecknoe.   We may think public feuds between the great and good a particular phenomenon of our age of celebrity, accelerated by social media.  I’d rather not date this episode by referring to “of the moment beefs,” but some that seem to have some place in public memory include Kanye and Taylor, Donald and Rosie, Drake and Kendrick.  But while the modern bickering of the hyper-privileged feels ubiquitous because of its frequency and accessibility, it is not, in fact, endemic to our own times.  In fact, it goes back millennia.  But in all that time, hardly anyone reached the bitchy peaks Dryden scaled in Mac Flecknoe.

In the days of King Charles the Sequel, there lived two poet-playwrights, and despite occasional differences and professional rivalries, they were generally on good terms.  Until one day, the poets found themselves on opposing sides of a literary argument, predominantly about the work of old Ben Jonson.  That festered into arguments about the nature and vehicle of comedy, the value of rhyme in drama, and accusations of plagiarism.  Thereupon, the first poet, Thomas Shadwell, who fancied himself the heir to Big Ben, wrote a scurrilous attack on the second, the star of today’s show, John Dryden, who answered with the subject of our discussion, Mac Flecknoe.

The title, of course, means “son of Flecknoe.”  Richard Flecknoe was a priest and rather dreadful poet whose greatest contribution to English verse was his death in 1677.   In the poem, Dryden casts him as the king of a debased literary culture who has named Thomas Shadwell as the heir to the throne.  To accomplish this, Dryden employs the devices of the “mock epic,” a type of verse in which the lowly, the venal, the trivial are rendered in the lofty, grand verse of the epic.  The satiric point is made in the gap between subject and style.  The meter, obviously, will be heroic couplets.  Here are the first two:

All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:

This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young

Was call'd to empire, and had govern'd long.

Right, so the stately meter, the grand pronouncement, and the allusion to the Emperor Augustus: all entirely out of proportion to Richard Flecknoe’s life and work.  Later, Flecknoe compares himself to John the Baptist: “Even I, a dunce of more renown than they, / Was sent before but to prepare thy way.”  Shadwell is such an awful poet that Flecknoe is not fit to fasten the strap of his sandal.

Dryden also employs bathos – that’s bathos, with a “B” – to mock heroic effect.   Bathos is a word which here means an effect of anticlimax created by a lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.   So, for example, there are a couple of references to the anointing in a coronation ceremony.  In the first, Flecknoe reflects upon Shadwell’s destiny: 

Here stopt the good old sire; and wept for joy

In silent raptures of the hopeful boy.

All arguments, but most his plays, persuade,

That for anointed dullness he was made.

Right, so we expect the final line to read something like “anointed majesty” or “greatness” or something, but Dryden undercuts that expectation by the trivializing “dullness.”  

In another passage, Shadwell’s triumph as the new king of crap poetry is compared to Hannibal swearing his oath against Rome:

As Hannibal did to the altars come,

Sworn by his sire a mortal foe to Rome;

So Shadwell swore, nor should his vow be vain,

That he till death true dullness would maintain;

And in his father's right, and realm's defence,

Ne'er to have peace with wit, nor truce with sense.

The king himself the sacred unction made,

As king by office, and as priest by trade.

So, Shadwell will be anointed with the “unction,” or the sacramental oil used in a coronation, after his oath to be the enemy of wit and sense, and always be a champion of the aforementioned dullness.

So that’s the one mode of Dryden’s mockery in Mac Flecknoe.  The mock epic in which style ill-suits subject.  But Dryden is not all lofty sentiments uttered with tongue firmly in cheek.  There are some rather personal and scatalogical attacks here.  To start, everyone knows that Dryden is going after Thomas Shadwell.  Now, for the first couple of years, this poem circulated privately as a manuscript – wasn’t published until 1682, I think.  When it was, however, the name Shadwell does not appear in the poem – though it often does in modern editions.  Rather, Dryden writes “Sh” and then a blank.  It’s a coy, snarky little move.  Not uncommon to hide an identity in public writing at the time, but the way Dryden does it actually calls more attention to the target.  We’re talking about a poet whose name begins with “Sh” and is two syllables long (needs to fit the meter, yeah?).   It actually fixes the victim’s name more firmly in the reader’s mind, while perhaps offering the author plausible deniability in any potential libel action.

We’re also treated to some poop jokes – always a favorite.  As Shadwell sails the Thames in his royal barge,

from shore to shore

The treble squeaks for fear, the basses roar:

Echoes from Pissing-Alley, Shadwell call,

And Shadwell they resound from Aston Hall.

About thy boat the little fishes throng,

As at the morning toast, that floats along.

“Toast” here is the floaters of raw sewage that little fish feed upon, not caring about or even noticing the difference between a turd and Shadwell.  During the coronation procession, he is cheered by “neglected authors,” the “martyrs of pies and relics of the bum.”  So the cheering crowds are bad writers, and their works – books that did not sell – have ended up at bakers’ shops or in the privies.  I cannot imagine that book leaves are as soft and absorbent as one might wish.  These are Shadwell’s people.

Nor does Dryden shy away from tasteless personal attacks.  Shadwell was a man of rotund proportions, and Dryden gets in with the fat jokes: “his goodly fabric fills the eye” and “a tun of man in thy large bulk is writ.”  As a gentleman of some size myself, I confess this stings.  Furthermore, as Shadwell was of Irish extraction, Dryden exploits popular stereotypes of the Irish as barbaric, dull-witted, and slovenly.  With a name like McDonough, I too feel this barb.  Alas. Dryden also makes a dig at Shadwell’s substance use disorder: “His temples last with poppies were o'er spread, / That nodding seem'd to consecrate his head.”  So, instead of wearing a laurel wreath, as great poets do, Shadwell wears poppies, a dig at the soporific quality of his verse as well as his addiction to opium.  I am not addicted to opium, but I do have a six a week taco habit that gives me the shakes.

While with Mac Flecknoe Dryden could employ the mock heroic, since celebrity feuds and literary arguments have stakes lower than a worm’s expectations, the political circumstances that prompted his masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel, demanded greater tact and a satiric voice tempered by a more earnest feeling heroic style.  He wrote the poem, it is surmised, in hopes of influencing a grand jury to convict the Earl of Shaftesbury of high treason.  

So . . . here’s what happened.  Once upon a time, King Charles II flitted about like a tumescent bumblebee, pollinating all the pretty flowers of the kingdom.  All the pretty flowers except for the lonely flower in his own garden.  He hardly pollinated that one at all, and even when he did, no new flowers grew.  But from all the other pretty flowers, new buds and shoots burst forth in all their plenty.  This made everyone at the hive nervous, because should the king ever die, there was no new king sprung from his own garden.  Instead, there was only the king’s brother, James Duke of York, and he was a Catholic bee!  Protestant bees did not want to be ruled by a Catholic bee, and they were afraid their hive would have to become Catholic, too.  They were very agitated by Charles’ sharing honey with the French king bee, Louis XIV.  

Remember the Popish Plot?  I think I talked about it in the Hudibras episode – wait, no: Pilgrim’s Progress.  In 1678, a defrocked clergyman named Titus Oates started distributing some alternative facts, claiming there was a massive Catholic conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and put James on the throne. All untrue, of course, but nonetheless believable because people, sadly, believe anything that really makes them angry. The hysteria that followed saw innocent Catholics executed and Parliament whipped into a frenzy.

Radical Parliamentarians, led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, demanded that James be barred from the succession altogether. Twice they tried to pass the Exclusion Bill: no Catholic, no matter his place in line, could sit on the throne. This would end the sacred principle of hereditary monarchy!  Wait, we got an idea — maybe Charles’s illegitimate but Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth. . . . ?

The political nation split into camps. The Whigs, as they came to be known, pushed exclusion. They saw themselves as defenders of Protestantism and parliamentary liberty. On the other side were the Tories, who defended hereditary right and the authority of the Crown, warning that to interfere was to invite another round of bloodshed like the 1640s.

Charles, meanwhile, got his stinger out, dissolving Parliament not once, not twice, but three times to stop the Exclusion Bill. At one point, he even moved Parliament to Oxford, away from the London mobs who supported the Whigs. And when the bill was reintroduced? He dissolved it again.  Remember that Charles was in good with his cousin, Louis XIV of France. Louis ponied up the dough, which meant Charles could rule without Parliament. By 1681, the Exclusion Crisis was over. Charles had outmaneuvered his opponents.

James remained heir. And when Charles pollinated his last in 1685, he became King James II.

But you know the unsettling thing about some conspiracy theories?  Sometimes, beneath the tinfoil hat paranoia, there’s a kernel of reality: the fears of the Whigs weren’t entirely misplaced. James really did advance a Catholic agenda: suspending the Test Acts, issuing the Declaration of Indulgence, having a son, so within a few years, he was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  We’ve covered those bits in other episodes.

Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  Many ministers and pamphleteers had noticed that the drama surrounding Charles, Monmouth, Shaftesbury, and James bore more than a few resemblances to the Biblical story of King David and the rebellion of his son Absalom from the book of Second Samuel. It’s one of the most dramatic episodes in the Hebrew Bible — part family tragedy, part political thriller.

King David’s son Absalom is a fine figure of a man: handsome, charming, hair to make Vidal Sassoon viridescent with envy. But he harbors some deep resentments. Years earlier, when Absalom’s sister Tamar was assaulted by their half-brother Amnon, David failed to punish the crime. Absalom took matters into his own hands, killing Amnon, then fleeing into exile. When he returned to Jerusalem, his relationship with David was, shall we say, strained as baby food.

Especially since Absalom became an Iron Age influencer. He hung out at the city gates, listening to disputes: a champion of justice with the common touch. Slowly but surely, says the sacred text, he “stole the hearts of the men of Israel.”

Then Absalom declared himself king at Hebron, which made family dinners unspeakably awkward. The rebellion spread quickly, and David — caught off guard — made the agonizing decision to flee Jerusalem with his loyal followers rather than risk the city’s destruction.

Ahithophel, David’s most trusted counselor, whose advice was like “inquiring at the oracle of God,” betrayed David and joined the hirsute hooligan.  Ahithophel’s support gave the rebellion credibility.  Unleash shock and awe on David before he can regroup, then – and here’s a rather curious political strategy – rape your father’s concubines on the palace roof.  That’ll show Israel who the real man is.  

Like a bro, Absalom followed the second piece of advice, but when it came to the swift military strike, he balked. Then a double agent – Hushai the Archite, secretly loyal to David — suggested a different plan: don’t be in such a hurry, son, take it easy.  Get all of Israel together, and crush David in a grand, decisive campaign. Absalom, no doubt exhausted after the rooftop, liked that idea better.  That hesitation was fatal. David rallies his men and smashes his son in the forest of Ephraim. In hectic flight, Absalom’s long hair tangles in the branches of an oak, leaving him dangling helplessly. Despite David’s explicit order to “deal gently” with his son, Joab, David’s commander, kills him.  I don’t feel too bad about that, actually.

David, of course, feels terrible about it.  This is the famous: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”  Ahithophel hangs himself in despair.  And no one lived happily ever after.

Whew! OK.  Now we have the context for John Dryden’s poem.  He uses, of course, heroic couplets to layer the Biblical tale over the Exclusion Crisis.  Well, there are a few occasions when he inserts iambic pentameter tercets – three rhymes in a row: gives a sense of increasing drama and tension.  I hadn’t read Absalom and Achitophel for years until coming back to it for this episode and I must say how impressed I am at the elaborateness of Dryden’s allegory.  I mean, there are the obvious players: King David is King Charles, Absalom is the Duke of Monmouth, and Achitophel is the Earl of Shaftesbury.  But Dryden plunges on: Zimri is the  Duke of Buckingham; Shimei is Slingsby Bethel or other radical Whigs; Corah is Titus Oates, the inventor of the “Popish Plot’: and Phaleg is Sir William Bedloe.  Israel is, obviously, England.  The Jebusites are Catholics, the Sanhedrin is Parliament, Egypt is France, Tyrus is Holland.  And so on and so on.

As I mentioned earlier, Dryden needs a very deft hand to pull off this political allegory.  Can’t be too mocking, because he’s dealing with the king and the most powerful men in the country.  Can’t make Absalom/Monmouth a villain because Charles does love him.  Dryden notes his predicament in a prefatory note “To the Reader,” saying, “The violent on both sides will condemn the character of Absalom as either too favorably or too hardly drawn.”  Also need to present a somewhat objective case for credibility, but you can’t lean too much on, for instance, King Charles’ evident foibles: a bit indolent and indulgent, neglects his wife, sprays his DNA everywhere but where he should.  Touchy stuff, that.  Dryden has to play rather cool.

To do so, he opens the poem with some rather ironic, detached mimicry:

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man, on many, multipli'd his kind,

Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd:

When Nature prompted, and no Law deni'd

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves: and, wide as his command,

Scatter'd his Maker's image through the land.

One can see Dryden aping Whiggish anti-Catholicism, yet he’s also implying that monogamy is unnatural, the imposition of prudish, ambitious clerics.  And despite the loftiness of diction, syntax, and meter, it’s a pretty funny passage, even in the most school-boyish way.  David vigorously imparting his warmth all over the place, firehosing God’s image abroad in the land.  It’s as if Milton is writing graffiti on a toilet wall.

Speaking of Blind John, Dryden, especially in his depiction of the false counselor Achitophel, mimics that byzantine Miltonic syntax.  Absalom has just spent 60 lines feeling sorry for himself and, setting up Achitophel’s response, Dryden writes:

Him staggering so when Hell's dire agent found,

While fainting virtue scarce maintain'd her ground,

He pours fresh forces in, and thus replies

And then we get the reply.  But that sentence – well, I was going to say almost lampoons Milton’s style, but then again, sometimes Milton himself seems to lampoon his own style.  It’s like Jack Nicholson always seems to be doing a Jack Nicholson impression.  Or John Wayne.  Can’t watch his movies anymore because they always seem to be parodies of John Wayne movies.  Anyway.  I think Dryden pulls this little stunt occasionally 1) for a knowing laugh from the cognoscenti; and 2) because we’re supposed to hear echoes of Satan tempting Eve in Paradise Lost.  One almost can’t help, perhaps even without the mimicry, hearing Achitophel as a less charming or convincing Satan.

Absalom’s speech, the one that precedes that line, is an interesting portrait of humility and ambition.  He begins in praise of his father, his divine right and compassionate justice:

And what pretence have I

To take up arms for public liberty?

My Father governs with unquestion'd right;

The Faith's defender, and mankind's delight:

Good, gracious, just, observant of the laws;

And Heav'n by wonders has espous'd his cause.

Whom has he wrong'd in all his peaceful reign?

Who sues for justice to his throne in vain?

What millions has he pardon'd of his foes,

Whom just revenge did to his wrath expose?

Mild, easy, humble, studious of our good;

Inclin'd to mercy, and averse from blood.

I also hear echoes of Macbeth and Brutus’ struggles with their consciences.  But then Absalom moves from a consideration of his father to one of his fate:

Yet oh that Fate, propitiously inclin'd,

Had rais'd my birth, or had debas'd my mind;

To my large soul, not all her treasure lent,

And then betray'd it to a mean descent.

Here, he laments that his birth has placed him in the worst possible position: Fate should have either made him legitimate so he could rightfully inherit the throne, or made him too dull or small-spirited to even desire it.   Dryden plays a bit with the Biblical source, as there Absalom is a legitimate heir.  But he needs to show Absalom/Monmouth as sympathetic and conflicted. He isn’t naturally a rebel — he’s caught between his gifts, which make him seem destined for greatness, and his illegitimacy, which blocks him. This makes him vulnerable to the persuasion of Achitophel/Shaftesbury, who tempts him into rebellion.

That temptation comes straight out of the political philosophers – Locke and Hobbes – that we looked at in episode 90.  Achitophel begins by inverting Absalom’s speech, making David’s virtues appear to be weaknesses: “Not that your father's mildness I contemn; / But manly force becomes the diadem.”  David is too compassionate, too merciful, too mild.  This makes the people restless and anxious: “But when should people strive their bonds to break, / If not when kings are negligent or weak?”  Nice use of slant rhyme there to emphasize the disjointed nature of David’s power.  He then invokes a republican ideal: “the people have a right supreme / To make their kings; for kings are made for them.”  Straight outta Locke’s Second Treatise: the monarch holds power in public trust, and if that trust is breached, rebellion is permissible, if not compulsory.  We get a touch of Hobbes: “self-defence is Nature's eldest law.” He also invokes a utilitarian principle, one that his audience would recognize from the High Priest Caiaphas’s speech in the Gospel of St. John: “Better one suffer, than a nation grieve.”  The allusion is dense: Dryden compares David (who is the avatar for King Charles) to his pseudo-descendent Jesus, thereby linking all three as savior-types who are betrayed by evil machinations.  So Achitophel launches a multi-pronged attack on Absalom’s conflicted vulnerability.

As the thick plottens, Dryden breaks into the narrative to expound upon his own political philosophy.  At line 759 – “What shall we think?” – begins a meditation on the necessity of government, particularly monarchical government.  He argues that monarchy is natural, God-ordained, and superior, and that hereditary succession ensures stability.  Therefore, subjects should not meddle with succession or rebel against lawful kings.  Of course, kings must govern justly, but their authority ultimately comes from God, not from the people.

Let’s stick a pin in that for a second.  I want to turn back to some details from Dryden’s life that, I think, cast an interesting light on this passage.  Dryden was often accused, by contemporaries and later by scholars, as being, as the saying goes, “without bottom.”  That is, he didn’t really seem to believe in anything and would change his loyalties and opinions according to the needs of his career.  He launched that career in 1659 with a poem called Heroic Stanzas to mourn the death of Oliver Cromwell.  A year later, with the Stuart restoration, he sprinkled laudatory poems on Charles, the Lord Chancellor, the Duchess of York.  He got all google-eyed about the Royal Society and the Royal Navy.  Such strategic suck-uppery paid off in an appointment as Poet Laureate in 1667.  And when James II replaced Charles on the throne, Dryden converted to Catholicism.

Now, it would be easy to accuse John Dryden of inconstancy, and it’s easy because it really looks true.  But as I read along, and thought about it, what struck me was that maybe Dryden was constant, loyal to, a deeper political principle than any particular ideology.  Throughout Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden’s deepest anxieties seem to be about chaos, disorder.  He sees stability as the chief purpose of government, regardless of whatever transient form that government might take.  He calls anarchy a “shapeless lump” that can shake “the pillars of public safety.”  He fears “arbitrary sway” that employs its power “‘gainst form and order.”  He warns against demagoguery and populism: “pity never ceases to be shown / To him who makes the people’s wrongs his own.”  And in the sermonizing passage, he asks what prudent man would shake the throne, for 

To change foundations, cast the frame anew,

Is work for rebels who base ends pursue:

At once divine and human laws control;

And mend the parts by ruin of the whole.

Now, I do not pretend to know anything about Dryden’s beliefs, ethics, or motivations, but what is revealed in the poem tells me that he is essentially conservative in the preservationist sense of the term.  Change is dangerous and should be carefully considered.  What I see, actually, is what I fancy is a more accurate reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince.  While he has been much maligned, especially in the popular imagination and has developed a new following in the online “manosphere” for his ostensibly hardbitten amorality, more careful readers note that Machiavelli did not advise the prince to seek power for power’s sake, or for any narcissistic aggrandizement.  Rather, Machiavelli advised an amoral realpolitik in the pursuit of state stability.  That was the “end” for which the “means” are justified (though he never said that, yeah?).  Stability, order, continuity.  At the fundamental level, that seems to be what Dryden values, even if the details and mechanisms may differ.

In the end, Absalom and Achitophel failed in its immediate purpose.  Shaftesbury was acquitted by the Whiggish jury and, in the fullness of time, James II was deposed by Parliament in William and Mary’s “Bloodless Revolution.”  Refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance to Billy the Orange, Dryden lost his Poet Laureateship to, yes, Thomas Shadwell, and his desperate financial situation necessitated he turn to translation to keep body and soul together.

OK, well, groovy.  We’ve done a bit to give John Dryden some well-deserved publicity.  Next time we’ll look at some of his dramatic writing – something to look forward to.  Till then, if you’d take a moment to post a 5-star review of the show on your listening platform, I’d love it.  The algorithm loves it.  Helps other folks find the show.  Thanks!  Also, feel free to drop me a line through text, email, or message.  Click that “support the show” button!  Cat’s hungry!  Thanks for stopping by again, folks, I appreciate your time and attention.  Talk to you in a couple.