John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany || "Our Lineal Descents and Clans": Dryden's "Fables Ancient...

"Our Lineal Descents and Clans": Dryden's "Fables Ancient and Modern" and Cultural Politicsin the 1690sAuthor(s): Sean WalshSource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 1/2, John Dryden: A TercentenaryMiscellany (2000), pp. 175-200Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817869 .

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"Our Lineal Descents and Clans":

Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern and Cultural Politics in the 169os

SEAN WALSH

D ̂ ""^k ryden's final volume of poetry, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), is often viewed as a dignified, wise farewell, a mature and mellow set of reflections on change, permanence, life, and love that acknowledges

the fluidity of things in its own shifts of perspective from tale to tale. It is seen, somewhat sentimentally, as an old man's book, spiked with a few political barbs

by an old Jacobite at the expense of King William's government. Dryden is un-

questionably concerned with the grand themes, and it is difficult to isolate stable positions in the play of translated voices or in the ambiguities of his digressive original poems. This view of the volume fails to recognize, however, that the work is a product of the 169os and of a culture that was undergoing tumultuous

change, and does not acknowledge Dryden's position in that culture. Over the

preceding forty years he had been not only one of the most astute commentators on literature and political matters but also, among figures in the public arena, the one most committed to finding new ways of talking about what surrounded him-from the appropriations of his opponents' discourse in Annus Mirabilis,

through the multiple ironies and figurative experiments of Threnodia Augustalis, to the exploitation of translation as a form of subversive expression in his Virgil and Juvenal. Dryden remained near the center of literary culture through the end of the century, and Fables carries forward his experimental, political line.

The Dedication and Preface initiate this discovery of ways to pose and cri-

tique the problems of Williamite culture. There Dryden plays with notions of

genealogy and succession in order to create a line for himself, one that is osten-

tatiously apolitical while actually engaging in politically motivated appropriation at every turn. He affiliates himself with Milton, who among poets had

perhaps the most contentious reputation during the 169os, and makes this radical his ancestor, stepping outside politics while drawing the political into his ar-

gument. In writing on Chaucer, he again seems to set politics aside but in fact uses his medieval predecessor to figure his own situation in a political register. In the actual translations of Chaucer and Boccaccio in the volume, the notions of

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S EAN WALSH

genealogy and inheritance become peculiarly charged, transformed to express the non-heritability of virtue, an argument that becomes entwined, in both "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "Sigismonda and Guiscardo," with reflections on the poet's relationship to history and the roots of political power. In these poems the limits of perceiving Dryden merely as Stuart loyalist and Catholic become evident, while the subtlety of his late thought on culture and politics emerges. This complexity provides, of itself, a critique of the Whig creation of poetic genealogy and its self-aggrandizing providential history, a major feature of the new literary culture that surrounds him.

In short, the achievement of Fables is not simply in its mature and over-

arching reflections on life and love. Dryden's quest for new forms of literary and cultural argument continues, driven by his broad understanding of how works and figures are embedded in their historical circumstances. Fables is a nuanced examination of the culture that surrounds it and, more broadly, an embodiment of the complexity of cultural contest in a vexed decade.

In the choice of patron for the volume-as with epistles to Congreve, Kneller, and the Huguenot Motteux before-political lines are disarmingly crossed. Here, Dryden apparently attaches himself to an ideal to effect criticism of a divided,

partisan period and to urge a different value: the stance of impartiality as re-

flecting political and cultural acumen. The recipient of Fables is the duke of Ormonde, who supported William

from his arrival in England and fought alongside him in the Irish and Con- tinental campaigns. Dryden had largely, after 1688, taken patrons who were en-

tirely sympathetic to his own position: for example, Radcliffe (to whom Examen Poeticum was dedicated), who came from a significant recusant family and whose faith left him outside public life; and the earl of Chesterfield, the recipient of the

Georgicks, who, after retiring from public life at the Revolution Settlement refused to take Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance when called to the House of Lords in 1696. Some loyalists had moved into the opposition, such as Halifax, who had been forced out of office in 1690 after having led pro-Williamites in the Convention Parliament. Dryden associates himself with power in the dedication to Dorset of his 1693 translations of Juvenal and Persius, but the choice of Ormonde as a patron initially seems to embrace the very martial culture that

Dryden undercuts throughout Fables. Ormonde was a military leader and hero and his connection to William himself was a close one; the two were cousins. The most significant point of political sympathy between Dryden and Ormonde

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"FABLES" AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE 1690S

was an antipathy to the Dutch: Ormonde was associated with those who opposed appointing foreigners to English public posts, and in the previous year he had almost resigned his commission after Albemarle, Williams Dutch favorite, was advanced to head of the Life Guards. However, despite his role as a Jacobite leader in later life, Ormonde remained visibly loyal to William.1

Dryden explains his choice of patron in the opening to the dedication:

[A]s your Grandfather and Father were cherish'd and adorn'd by two successive Monarchs, so I have been esteem'd and patronis'd by the Grandfather, the Father, and the Son, descended from one of the most Ancient, most Conspicuous, and most Deserving Families in Europe.2

Dryden has chosen a patron at odds with his own political beliefs because of the values of line and descent, linked to the political by the parallel relationship between the monarchs' patronage of the family and the family's patronage of the poet. There are barbs here: the poet's committing himself to a "House" suggests an ideal of loyalty that implies some criticism of Ormonde's own position. The emphasis on genealogical succession continues with the discussion of the Roman belief in the heritability of virtue: for panegyric ends, Dryden extols a virtue based on family and a merit that is passed down through generations. Dryden presents a cultural ideal grounded in the values that were disrupted by the break in succession and by the Revolution.

In the Dedication, Dryden gets close to the seat of power in order to man- age an effective criticism of it: if the basis of the government is covertly criticized in this passage, then the next section of the Dedication makes possible a critique of the militarism that infected the period's culture. The career of Ormonde is presented in terms of piety and intellectual achievement running alongside vic- tory on the battlefield: he becomes a Caesar and a Lucullus to set against "this de- generate age"; a man of "science" to stand above "those Athletick Brutes whom undeservedly we call Heroes" (Poems, 4:1441-42). Christian virtue and classical ideals are combined in an idealized figure who acts as a foil to the values of those around him. In this way the Dedication provides the first instance of a pattern that appears throughout the work.

1. For a fuller examination of the implications of each dedication through the decade, see Anne Barbeau Gardiner, "Dryden's Patrons," in R. P. Maccubbin and M. Hamilton-Philips, eds., TheAge of William III and Mary II (Williamsburg, Va., 1989).

2. Quotations from Fables Ancient and Modern are taken from The Poems ofJohn Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), cited henceforward as Poems. All other quotations from Dryden's works are taken from E. N. Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, et al., eds., The Works ofJohn Dryden, 20 vols. projected (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956-), referred to as Works. This quotation is from Poems, 4:1439.

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SEAN XWA LSHi

This consistent cultural critique, based on manipulating opposed sets of values, in some ways contradicts the rhetorical surface of the Preface. For example, taking his simile from architecture, Dryden urges the improvisatory nature of the work's composition, claiming to "have built a House, where I intended but a Lodge" (Poems, 4:1444). The book is described as impulsive, as if composed simply by following thoughts where they led and by translating whatever presented itself as connected to another piece. Prefaces are "Rambling" by nature, Dryden later notes (Poems, 4:1450); but this prose reflection on literary and cul-

tural history is more pointed than it at first appears. Dryden continually directs

appeals to his audience, telling us to make up our minds or apologizing for the

possibility of boring us: it is a self-conscious gesture of modesty that seems to set up an almost conversational engagement. But these interruptions and quali- fying gestures are also related substantively to the argument of the Fables: the

preemption of comfortable moral stances through repeated manipulations of

perspective. In the opening pages Dryden seems almost to abdicate the authorial role:

[B]oth the Poets being set in the same Light, and dress'd in the same English Habit, Story to be compar'd with Story, a certain

Judgment may be made betwixt them, by the Reader, without ob-

truding my Opinion on him. (Poems, 4:1445)

[T]herefore I leave them [Dryden's original poems for the volume] wholly to the Mercy of the Reader ... (4:1446)

[The morals] leap foremost into sight, without the Reader's Trouble of looking after them. (4:1447)

The responsibility for judgment, even control, is continually being passed to us; even when the reader does not have to "Trouble" to find the moral, it is not because the author is being directive. Dryden, as polemicist and Jacobite, has van- ished: we are left with a slippery figure who compels us to follow the trail within the work, in both the Preface and the poetry. Just as the implications of using the duke's name are left implicit, provoking interpretation and making the Preface not a transparent introductory statement but part of the literary text, so the creator of this structure removes himself, making judgment by the reader essential but not straightforward.

Dryden's slippery polemic also emerges in a disingenuous deference to Jeremy Collier near the conclusion of the Preface-a display of apparent penitence for immoral writing. Collier, a nonjuror and former political pamphleteer, was the

178 -




author of A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). This critique, the argument of which is apparent in its title, was enor- mously successful, riding the tide of a growing popular disenchantment with the irreligion and license of the theater. Two of its primary targets were Dryden and Congreve, attacked for obscenity and a lack of respect for the clergy. On closer examination, however, Dryden's recantation of earlier immorality, which goes on at some length, can be read as something of a joke: after deferring to Collier- "in many Things he has tax'd me justly"-Dryden suggests that the clergyman must have a filthy mind to notice offenses where there are none:

[I]n many Places he has ... interpreted my Words into Blasphemy and Baudry, of which they were not guilty ... ; a Divine might have employ'd his Pains to better purpose, than in the Nastiness of Plautus and Aristophanes; whose Examples, as they excuse not me, so it might be possibly suppos'd, that he read them not without some pleasure. (Poems, 4:1462)

The recantation also serves to reiterate the emphasis on morality apart from public acknowledgment, seen before in the preface to Examen Poeticum:

I am not asham'd to be Little, when I see them so Infamously Great. Neither, do I know, why the Name of Poet should be Dis- honourable to me; if I am truly one, as I hope I am; for I will never do any thing that shall dishonour it. The Notions of Morality are known to all Men; none can pretend Ignorance of those Ideas which are In-born in Mankind. (Works, 4:364)

This is quoted from Dryden's most virulent attack on corruption, in the court and in print skirmishes over literary works, and the pose is admittedly more explicit in the Examen than in Fables, but the same notes are struck: moral authority is relinquished and then seized and-speaking more in terms of form- despite digression, integrity is being summoned as a weapon. The deference to Collier is the most obvious example; elsewhere sleight of hand is used to neu- tralize politically polarizing figures, adding to the disingenuous indirection, the "literariness,"of the Preface.

The treatment of Hobbes stands out for some of the same reasons. He is mentioned twice in the Preface:

In the mean time, to follow the Thrid of my Discourse, (as Thoughts, according to Mr. Hobbs, have always some Connexion) so from Chaucer I was led to think on Boccace. (Poems, 4:1446)

% 179



180

Mr. Hobbs, in the Preface to his own bald Translation of the Ilias, (studying Poetry as he did Mathematics, when it was too late), Mr. Hobbs, I say, begins the praise of Homer where he should have ended it. (Poems, 4:1448)

The two remarks seem offhand, the second perhaps snide, the first even paren- thetical. Hobbes is mentioned in relation to psychology and literary criticism, and the popularly demonized philosopher and political theorist is thus dismissively

acknowledged by two references that bring him into the Preface in nearly acci- dental fashion. Dryden himself had been attacked as a believer in Hobbes's doc- trines and must have been aware of the implications of using his name

-dangerous notions of atheism and absolutism, invoked by association. Instead, a neutralized Hobbes is elided from the political world and merely alluded to for

psychological and literary footnotes. But the casual nature of the statements is studied, and it is a variation on the cultural politics evident in the nomination of Congreve as successor or Ormonde as patron of the book: here a controversial political figure becomes a harmless theoretician, as a Williamite placeholder becomes the bearer of the true poetic laurel, and a loyal royal military leader becomes an ideal above the conflicts of the age. There is a transcendence of party throughout-which never ceases to be a useful political strategy.

Through a number of strategies, the Preface appropriates moral authority for Dryden while seeming to yield it, at the same time as the author covers his tracks by deferring to the reader. This strategy constructs an alternative genealogy that implicitly centers literary, and hence moral, value around this line and establishes Dryden as true poet and inheritor. The corollary is the denial of valid cultural authority in the society that surrounds him.

The appropriation of individuals, extracted from their usual context, occurs

repeatedly in the Preface: the gesture becomes more telling when it concerns

poets. Artistic lineage and succession are pushed to the fore, allowing Dryden to ascend to a position of moral and cultural authority that is ostensibly above the

political.

Milton was the Poetical Son of Spencer, and Mr. Waller of

Fairfax; for we have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: 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 Spenser was his Original. (Poems, 4:1445)

This is Dryden's most emphatic statement of poetic genealogy; the line of poets is treated as a virtual family, and the concomitant notion of succession, with its

SEAN WNA LS -H




cultural authority and political subtext, is prominent. He uses the first-person pronoun: the reader must acknowledge Dryden as the current representative of this "clan." As we will see, however, he works the "line of poets" against the dom- inant readings in official culture, removing part of the canonical support for Williamite art.

Dryden places Milton in this line on the grounds of personal association with him. In doing so, he pulls the earlier writer from the reductive and highly partisan contexts in which he was read during the 169os, appropriating him against the grain of his current reputation and political significance. Despite the 1688 publication of the Somers edition of Paradise Lost, Milton was not an established literary monolith whose reputation was celebrated and whose interpretation was uncontested. Rather, he was a controversial figure surrounded by attackers and claimants, simultaneously canonized by establishment poetry and appropriated by radicals to supply precedents for their position. More than any of the other poets Dryden mentions, Milton reveals the political nature of literary reputation in the period-and consequently the disingenuous subtlety of Dryden's attempt to fix Milton as one branch on a purely literary family tree. Dryden's treatment of Milton becomes clear when it is seen in contrast to his function in the political polemic of the 169os, which is worth discussing at some length.

Authors loyal to the government of William appropriated Milton by imitating and alluding to him in poetry praising the monarch. Nahum Tate is one of the most obvious examples. In 1691, the year before his appointment as laureate, his Poem, occasion'd by the late Discontents and Disturbances in the State3 celebrates Milton as mentor and cultural hero. Lycidas is alluded to throughout this pastoral work, as the subtitle makes obvious: "With Reflections upon the Rise and Progress of Priestcraft." Alluding to Paradise, "Palaemon" speaks on female in- clination to Jacobitism:

The frailer soul (for when were Women Wise?) Gave ear to murmuring Fiends suggested Lies Fair gloz'd to cheat 'em of their Paradise

PHILANDER

But Man methinks his reason should recall Not let frail Woman work his second Fall.4

3. In Poems on Affairs of State, from 1620 to this present Year 1707 (London 1707), 4:285-307. 4. Ibid., 4:264 (mispaginated; should be p. 294).

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SEAN 1WALS H

Milton's Paradise has been appropriated by loyalist poetry-although it should be noted that Tate fails to escape the stylistic influence of Dryden, in rhyme and meter; and there is also a citation of Religio Laici in the preface to the poem. Later in the work Milton is invoked as a poetical inspiration, lying "Deep wrapt in Dreams of his own Paradise," in the "Elysian Bowers,"5 a poetic standard- bearer for the immortalization of William III and the Battle of the Boyne. For Tate, this process of joining Milton in the hall of fame also involves criticism of "Passive Obedience" and praise of governmental policies of comprehension and toleration. Milton has become a useful figure: an emasculated radical hauled into Williamite service. Tate repeats this strategy: his poem On the Promotion ofSeveral Eminent Persons in Church and State (1694) summons both Milton and Spenser to "Charm the Boyne, and then the Shannons Stream." His Mausoleum, on the death of Queen Mary, again deploys the figure of Eve in Paradise, here in a neg- ative simile depicting the figure of"Eusebia," the Church of England.6 If the laureate represents the mainstream conjunction of power and poetry, that alliance

may be seen to lean heavily on Milton in this decade. Tate is not the only writer who takes up Milton to add weight to propaganda

and panegyric. The death of Queen Mary elicited more poetry than any other occasion in the period, prompting eulogies as well as praise for the king. Dryden was criticized for his silence while the loquacious Whigs invoked Milton. Milton's influence is attested in John Dennis's preface to The Court of Death:

[I]n the writing these Pindarick Verses, I had still Milton in my Eye, and was resolv'd to imitate him as far as it could be done without receding from Pindar's manner.7

The poem proper expresses the usual sentiments of grief on the loss of Mary and

praise for the martial achievements of William while drawing heavily on Paradise Lost. These sentiments and language are paralleled in works by various minor

figures throughout the decade. The versions of Paradise Lost in Latin, including one in rhyme, and the publication of John Philips's mock Miltonic poems, not to mention Dryden's own State oflnnocence, all show the centrality of Milton in

contemporary literary culture. For the most part-Philips and of course Dryden being notable exceptions-those working under the influence of Milton are

Whig authors working to produce poetry that validates the authority of William and the state.

5. Ibid., 4:309. 6. Both poems appear in Nahum Tate, Elegies (London, 1699).

7. John Dennis, The Court ofDeath. A Pindarique Poem Dedicated to the Memory of Her most Sacred Majesty Queen Mary (London, 1695). The Pindaric ode seems to reach a high watermark of popularity with this

event.

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Sir Richard Blackmore, who figures interestingly in the Preface to Fables, is another significant example, consciously and conspicuously writing in imitation of Milton to support the state. His position as physician-in-ordinary to William from 1697 shows his investment in the court, and he was clearly confident of his connections to the seats of power. His claims of political influence seem absurdly exaggerated, such as his statement, quoted in Johnson's "Life of Blackmore," that he had contributed a great deal to the succession of the House of Hanover to the Crown.8 His literary productions reveal his conformity to some of the major cultural currents of the age. Locke, for example, compliments his work, and he praises Locke.

Blackmore's first major work, Prince Arthur (1695), has two major unspoken debts. The first, evident from the preface, is to Dryden. Its plan for a Christian heroic poem and its theories of epic apparently derive from Dryden's formulation in the "Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire" (1693), prefixed to Dryden's translations of Juvenal and Persius. The idea of combining Christian religious machinery with an epic narrative, based around a national hero (King Arthur is mentioned in the "Discourse"), seems to come straight from this work.9 Dryden certainly thought so, since his attack on Blackmore in the Preface to Fables charges him with just this point of plagiarism. His animosity toward Blackmore, however, is more broadly based, since the second debt in Prince Arthur is to that author Dryden has claimed as his "ancestor." The influence weighing most heavily on Blackmore's ten-book poem is Milton. Like Dryden, he is appropriated silently and goes unmentioned in the preface, but the poem begins:

Ambitious Lucifer, depos'd of late From Bliss Divine, and high Angelick State, Sinks to the Dark, unbottom'd Deep of Hell, Where Sin, and Death, and endless Sorrow dwell.'°

The inspiration for this passage is obvious, even at the level of diction: compare these lines to Milton's "dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss."" Its political affiliations are equally obvious, since the whole work centers around a "Briton" who sets out to "re-enthrone fair Liberty," a theme ideally suited to a Whig literary sensi- bility. The fusion of this partisanship with the Miltonic borrowings, at great length, seems the antithesis of Dryden's own achievements during the decade, as

8. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 2:240. 9. Dryden, Works, 4:19-23, and Blackmore's Preface to Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (London, 1695). The

latter is reprinted in J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Bloomington, Ind., 1957), 3:27-42.

o1. Blackmore, PrinceArthur, lines 12-15. 11. Milton, Paradise Lost, II.405.

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SEAN WALSH -

well as of his appropriation-or "disappropriation"-of Milton as poetic "ancestor" in the Preface to Fables.

A different phenomenon occurred in more extreme Whig circles. The publication in 1698 of an edition of Milton's prose works with a prefatory life seems to have attached, or reattached, Milton to resurgent republican theory, or at least to the rhetoric that opposed the compromises in the Revolution Settlement. This

publication, itself a provocative act, was the work of John Toland, possibly the decade's most notorious figure, following the publication of Christianity Not Mysterious in 1696. Toland was linked to opposition Whig groups throughout the period, with ties to Shaftesbury, Harley, and those controversialists and extra-

Parliamentary figures associated with the Calves'-Head Club.'1 Ned Ward's Secret

History of that obscure group is a collection of republican ballads allegedly written by Ben Bridgewater to celebrate the anniversary of the regicide.'3 Toland, and his prefatory life, warrant special mention in the preface to Secret History. Discussing the disputed attribution of Eikon Basilike, Ward attacks the "late mer-

cenary author" who assigns it to John Gauden:

[A]lthough 'tis certain, to any Man at least that can distinguish Stiles, that the Person, to whom the Republicans ascribe it, was no more capable of writing so excellent a Piece, than the aforesaid

Compiler of Miltons Life, of Writing an Orthodox System of the

Mysteries of Christianity.14

Milton's reputation was complicated by that of his editor. Toland joined the partisan controversy over Eikon's authorship in his biography of Milton, thereby drawing attention to some aspects of his writing least savory to Tory tastes; and the association with freethinking further meant that those interested in Milton had to confront the radicalism implicit in his writings. Toland had also edited

Harrington's Oceana, the midcentury blueprint for a commonwealth; he produced the first edition of the Discourses of Algernon Sidney, offering credibility to a Rye-House Plot victim; and he rewrote Edmund Ludlow's memoirs, turn-

ing them into a work usefully in tune with the opposition Whig ideals of the

12. On the affiliations of Toland at this point, see Blair Worden's introduction to his edition of Edmund Ludlow, A Voycefrom the Watch Tower, Camden Society, 4th ser., vol. 21 (London, 1978). See also

J. A. I. Campion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church ofEngland an d Its Enemies, i660-1770; Stephen H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind (Kongston and Montreal, 1984); R. R. Evans, Pantheisticon: The Career ofJohn Toland, American University Studies, ser. 9, vol. 98 (New York, 1991); and Robert E. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist Controversy: A Study in Adaptations (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

13. Edward Ward, The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club or The Republican Unmasqud (London, 1703). 14. Ibid., 5.

184 4




decade. A cearer agenda would later be established with the adoption of Newton, Locke, and William III as iconic heroes of "liberty"; but Toland's oeuvre suggests an initial essay on several fronts-a plan for utopia; criticism of Court failings through an idealized tradition; and canonical support for radicalism.'5

Unsurprisingly, Tory thinkers and polemicists perceived a threat in this ac- tivity: the anonymous Letter to the Author ofMiltons Life accused Toland of

rooting up the very Being of our Ancient National Constitution, preparing the People by lewd Principles, to murder another King if he does not please them.'6

The tradition of prototypical Whig heroes that Toland helped create, and into which he places Milton, was a provocative one: he made the writer provide precedents for concepts of liberty that challenged the order of post-Revolutionary government as much as Stuart absolutism. This reading of Milton was taken up elsewhere. In the year before the publication of Fables, Charles Gildon prepared a revision of Gerard Langbaine's Account ofthe English Dramatic Poets (1691) pre- senting a very different Milton from the regicide seen in the original version:

[D]uring the Civil Wars, and after the Death of King Charles the First, he was advanced to considerable Posts in the Government, as Under Secretary of State &c. and he was a strenuous Defender of the Power and Liberty of the People, upon which that Government immediately stood.17

Gildon's own political position is not easy to determine: He started out a Catholic and was sent to Douai, abandoning Catholicism for Deism in 1695, when he produced an edition of the works of the freethinker Charles Blount. However, he returned to the fold of orthodox Christianity sometime around 1697, and this sketch of Milton can consequently be seen as an interpretation of the poet-hero still close to the radicalism of Toland's edition and beliefs, or at least to a more mainstream Whig reading. Here, the poet is less the regicide than a defender of the public within the Commonwealth hierarchy, entwined with a theory of government based on popular consent. His literary productions are seen to prop up the culture of the post-Revolutionary period-or possibly used to criticize the backsliding that Country Whigs saw in the regime.

15. This agenda is paralleled elsewhere: Ben Bridgewater's 1695 poem on the death of Queen Mary contains a substantial passage on the struggle to escape from tyranny and the embodiment of this quest in "Great Russel" and the duke of Monmouth; Benjamin Bridgewater, A Poem upon the death of her Late Majesty Queen Mary ofBlessedMemory (London, n.d. [1695?]).

16. A Letter to the Author of the Life ofMilton (London, 1699), 2.

17. Charles Gildon, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets (London, 1699).

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The complement of this attempt to both retain and exploit Milton's radicalism is, of course, straightforward condemnation by those with a violent aver- sion to Milton's political principles: the critical reading in which the poetry is sullied by the writer's actions-and prose-remains strong. William Winstanley famously averred in 1687 that "his memory will always stink," owing to his treatment of the "blessed Martyr King Charles the First";'8 Langbaine, in his Account

ofthe English Dramatic Poets, endorsed this position: Milton's "demerit toward his

Sovreign has very much sullied his reputation."'9 Even poets more sympathetic to Milton had trouble separating the political writer from the author of epic. In

1694 Addison's "Account of the Greatest English Poets" wrestles with the idea. He

praises Paradise Lost and then makes a turn:

Oh had the poet ne'er profan'd his pen, To vernish o'er the guilt of faithless men; His other works might have deserv'd applause! But now the language can't support the cause; While a clean current, tho' serene and bright, Betrays a bottom odious to the sight."2

This certainly differs from the more familiar celebrations of Milton in The

Spectator. Two interpretations of Addison's ambivalence are possible, either one

serving to complicate Dryden's reference to Milton in the Preface to Fables. The first is that there remains a true difficulty at this point in removing Milton from the circumstances of his life-that the poetry carries with it some political taint, even for an enthusiast such as Addison. Alternatively, Addison could be assumed to have argued this position in order to please a specific audience. The piece is addressed to an "H.S.," most likely Henry Sacheverell, who would have appre- ciated the Tory ring to this condemnation of Milton's politics. At the same time, however, Addison was consciously courting the approval and literary endorse- ment of Dryden. The previous year had seen the publication of his poem "To Mr.

Dryden" in Examen Poeticum, praising the translations of Ovid in that volume; and this poem, after the passage on Milton, goes on to praise his potential patron and endorse Dryden's own choice of poetic heir, Congreve. Addison, like Dryden, was an acute player of the patronage system (this poem manages to work in the conventional praise of both Dorset and Halifax toward its close) and flattered

18. William Winstanley, The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (Gainesville, Fl., 1963 [reprint of 1687 London ed.]), 195.

19. Gerard Langbaine, Account of the English Dramatic Poets (London, 1691), 375. 20. Joseph Addison, Miscellaneous Works, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 2 vols. (London, 1914), 1:33, lines 8o-85.

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those who could be useful: the political sentiment on Milton can be read as one that will not displease any important reader, including Dryden, a figure still powerful in the world of letters.

The position that Milton's poetry was polluted by his prose is found elsewhere: it is also propounded by Thomas Yalden in "On the Reprinting Milton's Prose Works With his Poems. Written in Paradise Lost."2' The sentiments are identical to Addison's: the same insistence on the value of the poetry combined with a condemnation of the "seditious prose." The mention of Milton's "merce- nary pen" may blunt some of the ideological edge; the crime becomes a matter of selling a talent rather than of political radicalism. Yalden, in searching for a simile for Milton's destiny, resorts to Milton's own works: he has the dual nature of the "fall'n angels," the same combination of beauty and apostasy. The force of the epic achievement comes through here. Even Yalden's critical verse is grounded in Milton's language, and must yield to a presence in letters transcending the categories of biography and literary work, or of poetry and commentary. The in- ability to separate creation and creator is a Miltonic point:

[H]e who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well here- after in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition and patterne of the best and honourablest things.2

To others of this political stripe, Milton remained simply evil, an arch- republican defender of regicide. In Ned Ward's pamphlet on the Calves'-Head Club he is identified-on the evidence of "a reputable Whig"-as one of the founders of the organization; and the poet's "Prophane ... seditious notions and thoughts" are condemned in a Letter to the Author ofMiltons Life (1699).23 This strain of feeling endures throughout the decade among the High Tories and Jacobites of England

Dryden's treatment of Milton in the Preface to Fables seems intended in some way to rescue Milton from both the appropriation of Whig poetasters and the radicalized reading endorsed in Toland's publication of the prose works. At the same time, it is self-serving, establishing a line of true poets who exist outside party squabbles and political controversy. This Parnassian height is, for Dryden, the ideal position from which to attack the partisanship of post-Revolutionary culture.

21. Alexander Chalmers, The Works of the English Poetsfrom Chaucer to Cowper, 21 vols. (London, 1810), 11:74.

22. "An Apology against a Pamphlet," in John Milton, The Complete Prose Works, ed. Douglas Bush, et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953-82), 1:890.

23. Letter to the Author, i.

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Dryden's position with regard to Milton is paralleled in the treatment of Chaucer in Fables. The medieval figure becomes another way to create a lineage for Dryden that is explicitly literary while suggesting points critical of post- Revolutionary culture. This is manifest in both the Preface and the body of the volume; Dryden's translation of "The Wife of Baths Tale" can be seen to oper- ate as a strategically aimed work of formal and generic argument, using misdirection and near contradiction to draw the reader into Dryden's investigation of history and poetic autonomy. This finds a complement in Drydens treatment of the other modern in the volume, Boccaccio. The version of Boccaccio's

"Sigismonda and Guiscardo," explicitly linked to the Chaucerian work in the Preface to Fables, also operates through provocative formal and moral ironies to indicate a political critique, one more radical than might be expected of Dryden.

The biographical sketch of Chaucer in the Preface turns him into an early Dryden, a poet with a close relation to the seats of power but who embodies ideals of loyalty that transcend the political world in which power is exercised:

He was employ'd abroad, and favour'd by Edward the Third, Richard the Second, and Henry the Fourth, and was Poet, as I sup- pose, 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. (Poems, 4:1453)24

Chaucer's allegiances are presented as governed by family ties-the same species of loyalty professed in the Dedication to Fables-but as closely related to the seats of power all the same. Chaucer is represented as an early model for the laureate, Dryden again asserting that his own poetical succession entitles him to a

position of authority; later in the Preface, Dryden mentions Chaucer's "Laurel, [which] tho' unworthy, I have worn after him" (Poems, 4:1460). This casting of Chaucer as poet of power, and of Dryden as his immediate successor, suggests an

authority that those outside the line cannot claim, while the official laureate is by- passed, tacitly denied recognition.

The next part of this passage uses Chaucer's biography to a different end. The poet "seems to have some little Byas towards the Opinions of Wickliff"

24. Chaucer was not related by marriage to John of Gaunt, and Dryden makes other errors (such as the

ascription of Piers Plowman and The Flower and the Leaf to the poet) that he picked up from the 1597 edition of Thomas Speght; a new edition appeared in 1687.

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(Poems, 4:1453)-aligning him, it would seem, with those perceived to be the forerunners of English national Protestantism. However, Dryden interprets this, at least superficially, as sympathy with an entirely different ideal. Chaucer is de-

picted instead as a satirical poet, expressing and seeking to correct the errors of the clergy, "the Check of the Layman, on bad Priests" (Poems, 4:1455), a role in which Dryden had cast himself in a late poem to Peter Motteux. It is, of course, one of the poet's abiding concerns: the plays are full of corrupt clerics, and much of the poetry seems determined to attack any form of priesthood.

Once again, there is latitude in this anticlerical bias. It of course appeals to extreme critics of the Church, and thus points again to the possibilities of a sub-

merged sympathy with, or appeal to, the deep skepticism of radicals. When Milton's Areopagitica was rewritten by Charles Blount during the battles over the

Licensing Act in 1692, the sections on Wycliffe were retained. Milton and

Lollardy are here linked by a freethinker, and one with a complex connection to Dryden.25 Chaucer is thus placed in a perfectly balanced position, adhering to ideals of loyalty above political affiliation while exercising essential moral au-

thority within society. Chaucer is summoned as a critic of clerical faults, and in the "Character of a Good Parson" in the Fables is enlisted as an ally of the non-

jurors. There is only a shade of Lollard radicalism in the background. As with Milton, Chaucer is assimilated into Dryden's pattern of poetic hierarchy and succession, based on independence and morality: the statement that "I found I had a Soul congenial to his" (Poems, 4:1457) is a charged one.

The morality and virtue of the "line of poets" is sustained throughout the Preface to Fables, and as we have seen, Dryden raises it explicitly with respect to Chaucer. But other comments in fact seem to qualify the theme of genealogy and inheritance that governs the piece overall. He comments on "The Wife of Baths Tale" that "true nobility" rests only in "inherent virtue." Then he remarks of the Boccaccio,

[U]nawares I fell on the same Argument of preferring Virtue to

Nobility of Blood, and Titles, in the story of Sigismonda; which I had certainly avoided, for the Resemblance of the two Discourses, if my Memory had not fail'd me. (Poems, 4:1460)

This is surprising after the talk of descent and line throughout the Dedication and Preface; after a reading of both the Chaucer and Boccaccio poems, it seems still

25. Blount is of course dead by the time of Fables. James A. Winn dismisses Dryden's relationship to Charles Blount as hostility glossed by polite sarcasm, and there are cearly enormous religious and ideological differences between them; John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn., 1987), 604-5.

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more so. Dryden goes out of his way to tell the reader that he has stumbled upon, having forgotten, the matching morals of these two stories; he portrays the consistent morals of the two stories as a lapse, a redundancy he would have preferred to avoid. But there is no escaping it: virtue is superior to lineage, and line without virtue is nothing.

If one desired a simple political analogy or application, one could say that this is intended as a simple insult directed at William III; alternatively, it could be seen as a follow-up to the praise of Ormonde in the Dedication; it could be taken to

point to the Stuart blood and lack of "virtue" that should have prevented Mary from taking her father's throne. However, both "Sigismonda and Guiscardo" and "The Wife of Baths Tale," in both underlying form and explicit content, push beyond these political applications to make more sophisticated points about recent history, political theory, and the role of the poet.

A starting point for reading "Sigismonda and Guiscardo" is to note the de-

gree of deviation from the original. It is verse, where Boccaccio wrote prose, a choice that is either assumed or ignored in many critical commentaries. The choice of verse is worth remarking, however, particularly in the context of Fables: the transformation and undermining of generic categories is a major theme of the volume, and this does seem another formal experiment, perhaps with no other

point than to see how far poetry can move into the territory of the nascent (and lucrative) novel. There is more than a trace here of a commercial instinct that may also have influenced the volume's title: the fable was one of the decade's most

popular modes. Dryden describes Chaucer and Boccaccio in the Preface as hav-

ing written "Novels"; here he may be exploring the possibilities of narrative an-

thology and blurring the lines between verse and prose: he translates, of course, three exemplars of compendious narratives in Fables, by Ovid and the two "semi- moderns."

Boccaccio does not have a particularly charged presence in the late seventeenth century. Editions of the Decameron were published in 1684 and in 1702, and his influence is certainly noticeable in the narrative prose of the period: col- lections of novels are often indebted to him.26 He was still known for his "severe reflections upon monks,"27 a link to Dryden's themes in this work. His moral reputation was of course a permanent issue, and a source not only of proscription but also of humor throughout the century. Though there are some tragic rewrit-

ings of the Guiscardo and Ghismonda tale, when Boccaccio appears in Browne or Burton, for example, it is as an entertainer. The fact that this Catholic poet

26. One example, with a link to Dryden, is Walter Pope's Delightful Novels (London, 1694), which takes its Boccaccio via Petrarch; Pope is the author of the other Fables Ancient and Modern (London, 1699).

27. Thomas Pope Blount, De Re Poetica (London, 1694), 29.

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takes three of his "fables" from a source that had been proscribed since 1589 raises some general questions about the nature of what we are to learn from this collection.28 And the explicit moral of the narrative is not as straightforward as its rhetorical form might convey-despite Dryden's claim in the Preface that it will "leap foremost into the sight without the reader's looking after them." The conclusion of the tale certainly does not support the stated "lesson":

Thus she for Disobedience justly dyd; The Sire was justly punishd for his Pride; The Youth, least guilty, suffer'd for th' Offence Of Duty violated to his Prince.

(Poems, 4:1564, lines 750-53)

This is not the moral Dryden derives from Chaucer, of preferring virtuous deeds to the ties of blood or ancestry, nor does it come from Boccaccio. The character of Sigismonda is patently more sympathetic than this allows, and Dryden's ad- dition of a wedding between the lovers, placing them within the bounds of virtue, also weighs against a simple condemnation. To read the lines reductively, they can be taken as a nod toward the importance of filial piety, with reference to Mary, perhaps; another late indictment of tyranny; or praise of that favored late virtue, loyalty.

More broadly, however, "Sigismonda and Guiscardo" is a poem that compels us to ponder fundamental questions: in part, it fits into an important but neglected strand of the later Dryden's writings, his interest in finding a way of talking about desire and sex that subscribes to neither prudery nor lechery. The Boccaccio translation expresses Dryden's mature interest in the mechanics and ethics of passion, also evident in the translation of Lucretius. This is clear from the first description of Sigismonda but finds most forceful expression in her long speech at lines 390 to 581, worth quoting at length. The themes of love, honor, desire, and choice are intertwined here:

This Thought alone with Fury fires thy Breast, (For Holy Marriage justifies the rest) That I have sunk the Glories of the State, And mix'd my Blood with a Plebian Mate: In which I wonder thou shouldst oversee Superior Causes, or impute to me The Fault of Fortune, or the Fates decree.

28. For more on the reputation and reception of Boccaccio and the popularity of "Sigismonda and Guiscardo," see Herbert G. Wright, Boccaccio in England fom Chaucer to Tennyson (London, 1957).

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Or call it Heav'ns Imperial Pow'r alone, Which moves on Springs of Justice, though unknown; Yet this we see, though order'd for the best, The Bad exalted, and the Good oppress'd; Permitted Laurels grace the Lawless Brow, Th' Unworthy rais'd, the Worthy cast below. But leaving that: Search we the secret Springs, And backward trace the Principles of Things; There shall we find, that when the World began, One common Mass compos'd the Mould of Man; One paste of Flesh on all Degrees bestow'd, And kneaded up alike with moistning Blood. The same Almighty Pow'r inspir'd the Frame With kindl'd Life, and formed the Souls the same: The faculties of Intellect, and Will,

Dispens'd with equal hand, dispos'd with equal Skill, Like Liberty indulg'd with Choice of Good or 111. Thus born alike, from Vertue first began The Diff'rence that distinguish'd Man from Man: He claim'd no Title from Descent of blood, But that which made him Noble made him Good.

(Poems, 4:1558, lines 486-513)

The "virtue, not birth" maxim reappears here, with implications that Dryden clearly wishes to draw out, although it is Sigismonda, not Dryden, who makes these statements, and the passage is indeed present in Boccaccio's original. However, the issue of persona is defused by Dryden's notifying us that this is the moral of the piece; and it is much expanded from its source and clearly contains

topical references. The "permitted Laurels" are a reference to the poet's own position, while the fate and fortune motif, apparent in much of the volume, func- tions here in a way that is both general and topical. The special emphasis in this

passage, however, is on the proclamation of essential equality "that distinguish'd Man from Man," which underwrites the belief in virtue.

The side of Dryden that occasionally suggests that a commonwealth would be his

preferred form of government is also heard in Fables. These nods to political be-

liefs seemingly at odds with the Stuart loyalist of received opinion can be seen in

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the "Character of Polybius," where Montaigne is cited to offer a guarded version of republicanism:

[W]hen I am reading either here or in any Ancient Author, their [the men of the Roman Common-wealth] lives and Actions,... I cannot hold from breaking out with Montaign, into this expression: 'Tis just, says he, for every honest man to be content with the Government, and Laws of his native Country, without endeavouring to alter or subvert them: but if I were to choose where I would have been born, it shou'd have been in a Commonwealth. (Works, 20:34).

This stance is paralleled in the preface to Virgil, where Dryden cites the same sentiment from Montaigne29 and outlines a yet more complex political position. Virgil is interpreted as a negotiator of compromise: he "maturely weigh'd the Condition of the Times in which he liv'd"; and after Dryden lists all the possible reasons for compromise (the unlikelihood of a return to a preferred form of government, a possibility of artistic growth under the emperor, and his own favor- able treatment by the ruler, among others), he explains Virgil's decision:

These things, I say, being consider'd by the Poet, he concluded it to be the Interest of his Country to be so Govern'd: To infuse an awful Respect into the People, toward such a Prince: By that re-

spect to confirm their Obedience to him; and by that Obedience to make them Happy. This was the Moral of his Divine Poem. (Works, 5:280-81)

Dryden may be seen as creating a respectable ancestor for that time-serving and

side-changing of which he was so often accused. However, in the late works, this

position-a republicanism deeply tempered by an awareness of political possibility and qualified success-is a fluid one, an explicitly negotiated stance. Fate, fortune, and, by extension, providence are disrupted by such a stance-exactly the values invoked by those defending William's claims to legitimacy. The

subtlety of Dryden's late rhetoric is again apparent, along with a possible appeal to an opposition outside the Jacobite community. He may not have been build-

ing bridges to the republican radicals, but there is something other than Toryism present.

The Boccaccio tale in particular insists on the political implications of original equality. Sigismonda notes that when Guiscardo was in favor, Tancred's "was then the public voice." She later asks:

29. Dryden's source here is Essais, "De l'amite."

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Are these the Kings entrusted by the Crowd With Wealth, to be dispensed for Common Good? The People sweat not for their King's delight, T'enrich a Pimp, or raise a Parasite.

This query can be placed directly in the context of the 169os and seems an obvious smack at William's Dutch favorites (for all that gossip placed Albemarle in the position of catamite rather than "pimp"). More broadly, the role of a king, it seems, had changed over the sixteen years since Dryden wrote in the "Postscript of the Translator" to the History ofthe League that "the People then are not judges of good or ill administration in their king." Circumstances have altered enough, with the deposition of his Stuart patrons, to allow the more provocative side of

Dryden's thought to emerge. The moral of "Sigismonda and Guiscardo" seems to be deeply tied up with the idea of resistance to tyrants, and one tyrant especially. The soldier who executes Guiscardo receives this commentary from

Dryden (rather than Boccaccio):

What Kings decree, the Soldier must obey: Wag'd against Foes, and, when the Wars are o'er, Fit only to maintain Despotick Pow'r:

Dang'rous to Freedom, and desir'd alone

By Kings, who seek an Arbitrary Throne: Such were these Guards; as ready to have slain The Prince himself, allur'd with greater Gain.

(Poems, 4:1561, lines 597-603)

The tyrant Tancred has clearly kept a standing army after the end of a war in order to impose his own will on the people. Those who disliked William may have seen a parallel to the events that followed the Nine Years' War.30 It seems that the moral Dryden says will leap out at us is actually a critique of the contemporary monarchy, allied to a remodeled, nearly radical, political vision.

This tale, along with others from Boccaccio, clearly had an influence on con-

temporary writers, as a kind of template. Tom Durfey's Tales tragical and

Comical3' explicitly acknowledges Dryden's Fables as an influence, and itself uses Boccaccio as a source. More interestingly, a later version shows counterinfluence; Prior's "Frederic ecca: From Boccacce" (1714), in Miltonic blank verse, seems a late

30. Dryden's late poetry, and Fables especially, can often be constructively read in light of the fact that Britain

was emerging from its first major land war since the Commonwealth.

31. Thomas Durfey, Tales Tragical and Comical (London, 1704).

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and limited echo of Marvell's response to The State of Innocence.32 The usual rhetoric defending this choice of meter is present:

Yet of the Noblest heights, and best Examples Ambitious, I in English Verse Attempt But not as heretofore, the line prescrib'd To equal cadence, and with Semblant Sounds Pointed (so modern Harmony Advises) But in the ancient guise, free, uncontroll'd, The Verse.33

This modulates into a defense of the British tongue, elaborated with praise of both Queen Anne and the duchess of Shrewsbury, Adelaide Paleotti, whom Shrewsbury met and married in Italy in 1705. The conceit is an elegant one: she receives a poem that has been translated out of Italian, as she herself has been (the duchess was naturalized in 1706). The Englishness celebrated here is clearly that mode of freedom from rhyme that preoccupies the Miltonic tradition: it dis- tances Boccaccio from Dryden formally and offers a critique of his approach to these materials.

In the Preface, "The Wife of Baths Tale" is the work that Dryden had pointed to as having the same moral. It lacks the thematic complexity of the Boccaccian translation, yet in making the same point more directly it introduces different issues. Again, the lesson that should "leap out" is contained in a lengthy speech, here by the old woman who has revealed the secret of what women want to the rapist knight. It unequivocally argues the superiority of virtue to lineage: "The Nobleman is he who whose noble Mind / Is filled with inborn worth, unbor- rowed from his Kind." Although the narrative itself does not offer this as the immediate and necessary didactic point, there is less ambivalence and qualification than in "Sigismonda and Guiscardo."

Other aspects of the Chaucer tale, however, amplify and complicate Dryden's argument about history and cultural history. At the outset, Dryden elaborates the passages in Chaucer that offer a vision of England "ere priestcraft had begun." The tale is set in the reign of King Arthur, when the island's population still in- cluded "the King of Elfs and the little Fairy Queen" (Poems, 4:1564). Dryden's

32. The actual source, according to Prior's editors Wright and Spears (see n. 33 below), is La Fontaine, who in turn had derived the material from Boccaccio. In the opening of the poem, however, it is nonetheless clear that Prior is more interested in offering a different idiom for the Italian author.

33. Matthew Prior, Works, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), 1:404, lines 6-12.

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recent writings and skirmishes, the fight with Blackmore over PrinceArthur, and the already unstable politics of Dryden's own KingArthur-a work that belongs to the reigns of both Charles and William-figure in this landscape. Dryden seems here to be rewriting his own preferred myth, the idea of the Golden Age, but removing it from classical antiquity and transferring it to a pre-Christian England. In part, this seems intended to undermine the authority of the Graeco- Roman cultural idiom that Dryden had both exploited and helped to make a cornerstone of post-Restoration poetry's political language. But this language had

subsequently been appropriated by Williamite poetry, and Dryden's construction of a different vernacular aesthetic seeks to outmaneuver the consequences of his own influence: the willingness to offer a Chaucer who easily bears comparison to Ovid is part of the same gesture. It is a process of literary construction that continually widens its sights, expanding the horizon of an English tradition, one that, in its links to Boccaccio and Ovid, is open to both a European and a classical heritage.

The setting in pagan England also allows Dryden to indulge in priest bait-

ing: the fear of being assaulted by fairies has "now" (a difficult temporal register in a work that belongs at once to Chaucer and to Dryden) been replaced by the fear of being attacked by clergymen. He plays once again at being the "check of the layman on bad priests," even after his apologies to Collier. But working against this resituation of a pre-Christian Golden Age in medieval England is the narrative of the tale: this idealized rural world of fairies also has a knight at its center who opens the action with a rape. The undercurrent of violence that runs through Fables is evident here, and the brutality that informs "Theodore and Honoria," for example, also makes us question what at first seems an idealized fiction.

Dryden adds to Chaucer's opening, unsurprisingly, to set up literary political points. The surprise is that such points cannot be situated as easy Jacobite allusions, or even as broad opposition polemic:

Then Courts of Kings were held in high Renown, E'er made the common Brothels of the Town; There, Virgins honourable Vows receiv'd, But chast as Maids in Monasteries liv'd: The King himself to nuptial ties a slave, No bad Example to his Poets gave; And they not bad, but in a vicious Age Had not to please the Prince debauch'd the Stage.

(Poems, 4:1705, lines 61-68)

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Dryden seems to be looking backward here, as was his habit in much of the poetry from this period. However, the passage has a difficult relationship to the history to which it appears to allude, because of misdirection and near contradiction, mirrored in the awkward syntax of the final couplet. The passage seems another of Dryden's allusions to his own career as a playwright, and another recantation of the plays of a "vicious Age." This sets up a surprising parallel. The un- debauched court, in that case, would be that of Charles II, and if so, a simple political point could be construed: Charles ideal, therefore William bad. However, the lines form a virtual anti-allusion to that period of history, celebrating the king in patently exaggerated terms and offering praise for the quality the court most notoriously lacked. This is one of the later Dryden's most sympathetic yet also astutely argumentative modes: his reflections on recent history, frequently bound, as here, to issues of poetic autonomy.34

In Dryden's treatment, "The Wife of Bath's Tale" presents an acute awareness of the interconnectedness of ethics, aesthetics, and history. Court culture is seen as a broadly corrupting influence, with the monarch-that is, Charles himself- receiving the blame. More important, Dryden offers a critique of history that equally will not allow celebration of the present or of the present monarch: the passage shares some of the tone of weary reflection heard in The Secular Masque (1700), with its overview of the failures and inadequacies of the preceding century. The passage quoted above is also notable for reenacting in miniature the opening of the poem. Some form of cultural ideal seems to be offered, that of a pre-Christian native community ruled by an uncorrupted court. But a "rape" in- trudes upon this utopia, confirming that this was a "vicious age," just as in the notoriously tricky narrative of"Cymon and Iphigenia," where the "love conquers all" motto is entangled in pillage and kidnapping. This juxtaposition suggests a permanent irresolution that defies easy partisanship, the ongoing battle between morality and corruption with which politics must always deal and to which no party is invulnerable.

Dryden had written on these themes before, but the cosmopolitan nature of the discussion in Fables yields a fresh perspective. The claim that "we [poets] have our

34. A close parallel is presented in Dryden's late address "To My Friend Mr. Motteux, On his Tragedy, called Beauty in Distress" (1698), in which the moral corruption of the Carolean court is weighed against the evil of the Civil Wars and regicide and blamed squarely on the Puritan-Presbyterian element in society-that is, the current Whigs. Again, cultural production in a morally compromised climate is near the center of the poem.

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Lineal Descents and Clans" (Poems, 4:1445) sustains the inheritance theme often heard in the works of the final decade, but the lines are now drawn from a broader

range of sources. Dryden uses the large outlines of the history of literature to cri-

tique post-Revolutionary culture. Links are made between the classical (in Homer, Virgil, and Ovid), the medieval (in Boccaccio and Chaucer), and the modern (in the remarks on Waller, Cowley, and Milton). This is a very broad

range for a work of criticism in this period, and perhaps its most significant feature is its refusal to take sides in the major critical debate of the era. It never becomes an advocate for the Ancients or for the Moderns, all of Dryden's comparisons and assessments working to complicate this dichotomy. It is a strat-

egy seen before, to some extent, in the essay Of Dramatick Poesy, where the dia-

logue form yields an impression of objectivity, but one that is ultimately undermined by the author's pro-Modern views. Here, however, Dryden orders the works on a continuum, or a series of parallel histories, that avoids the conventional division between Antiquity and Modernity. In place of this opposition, a biological version of the genealogical figure is used:

We must be Children before we grow Men. There was an Ennius, and in the process of Time a Lucilius, and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spencer, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being: And our Numbers were in their Nonage till these last appeared. (Poems, 4:1453)

Along with the comparison between Ovid and Chaucer-which disrupts standard critical pairings, such as Virgil and Homer, or Horace and Juvenal-this passage indicates a novel method of reading the classics and the moderns. Over the previous decade, the longstanding Ancients and Moderns controversy had been chiefly reinflamed in the writings of Boyle, Temple, Bentley, and Wootton. The debate was not simply over the relative merits of two eras but was a far-

reaching struggle between intellectual modes and values (see Michael Werth Gelber's essay in this volume). One element of it was the clash between Temple's belles-lettres scholarship and Bentley's professionalism, a turning point in the rise of historical scholarship in England. The latter style was characterized by an in-

vestigative rigor substantially different from Dryden's own use of learning. An

anxiety about the achievements of modernity and the value of new philosophi- cal methods is evident in the controversy, as is a concern with the collapse of the humanist project and the decline of a culture rooted in classical imitation.35

35. For more on the controversy, see J. M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).

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Dryden avoids the bifurcated controversy with his historical, genealogical, and international reading of the authors translated. The writings of antiquity become important in the justification and history of the poet's role rather than serving as a subject for attack or defense. Dryden also seeks to establish an overarching continuity between the two eras, since he does draw substantially on the poetry of the neglected medievals. The extreme and familiar partisan positions are avoided: poetry, like morality, becomes an area of incontestable worth, natural in its familial and biological order, eternal in its concern with immutable human nature-and dominated by Dryden. His stance is suggested even in the title of the volume: Fables Ancient and Modern, in this context, is an announcement of having transcended the controversy.

Dryden's historical criticism is also an indirect but trenchant response to the contemporary preoccupation with national histories of verse that celebrated the rise of poetry in English through the ages. Addison's poem, cited above, is but one example of this popular genre36 showing how, within the confines of England, verse "progresses" toward the 1690s. The equivocation on the issue of Milton's life and works is consistent with this agenda. Addison states initially that his own work will follow the progress of "British rhimes" down to "Drydens times,"37 promising to end with the dominance of the old laureate. However, Addison continues the history of poetry through Congreve, and then on to Dorset and Montague. Of the latter, he admires

How Nassaus godlike acts adorn his lines, And all the Heroe in full glory shines. We see his army set in just array, And Boins dyd waves run purple to the sea.8

The history of poetry leads to a national glorification linked to the initial emphasis on "British rhimes." This nationalist cast certainly contrasts with Dryden's own judgment on the course and excellence of poetry in England, where he twice points out Chaucer's indebtedness to Boccaccio and earlier Italian authors. In part Dryden's own defense of the creative validity of Fables and its translated verse, this judgment also undermines the purely British nature of Chaucer's achievement, making it more difficult to construct a national providential history to support the achievements of William.

36. See also Samuel Cobb, Poetae Brittanici (London, 1700); and Congreve's Birth ofthe Muse (London, 1698), among others.

37. Addison, Miscellaneous Works, 1:31, lines 3-4. 38. Ibid., 1:35, lines 140-43.

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While Absalom andAchitophel is repeatedly and ever more minutely contextual- ized by modern readers, the later poems and translations have so far escaped such examination: they are usually labeled as the productions of a Jacobite in the England of William and Mary. Fables does not simply take potshots at high politics; it is a work that attempts a critique of the cultural consequences of recent

political change. Dryden's politics and religion are not circumscribed by the idea of Jacobite Catholicism; his late work is oppositional, and it can be read as a nod, at least, to parliamentary opposition in its Country (as opposed to Tory) form, and as showing more sympathy for both republicanism and deism than one

might expect. Fables is not positively programmatic, but the boundaries created by assumptions about Dryden's politics are limiting. It is the Whig establishment that receives his critical fire, and it seems more useful in interpreting his late work to see him as anti-Williamite than as pro-Jacobite.

Fables Ancient and Modern was one of the cornerstones of Dryden's reputation throughout the eighteenth century. Even the essentially unsympathetic Wordsworth found the translations from Boccaccio "the best at least the most Poetical of his poems."39 A close examination of the work reveals that Dryden, in both the content and the form of his late style, remains a relentlessly experimental, argumentative, and tough poet who both subverted contemporary cultural categories and challenged the expectations of posterity. It is a collection that remains vital for understanding Dryden, and its decade.

Oxford University

39. Quoted in James and Helen Kinsley, eds., Dryden: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), 324.

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John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany || "Our Lineal Descents and Clans": Dryden's "Fables Ancient...

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Transcript of John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany || "Our Lineal Descents and Clans": Dryden's "Fables Ancient...