If this is not the faith of George Herbert, it at least makes sense in an area where
reason could not help either Bunyan or Rochester.
Satire
In Mac Flecknoe Dryden found his true vocation, verse satire. The aged Richard
Flecknoe, a Catholic priest and a tedious writer, has long ruled the Empire of
Dulness:
All human things are subject to decay,
And when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire, and had governed long:
In prose and verse, was owned, without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute.Seeking a successor, Flecknoe – like Augustus – adopts an heir (Macmeans ‘son’),
the playwright Shadwell:
‘Sh––– alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years:
Sh––– alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh––– never deviates into sense ...’The poem, composed in 1679, was published in 1682, when Shadwell had become a
political opponent.
Mac Flecknoe reverses the aims and methods ofheroic tragedy, turning heroic
into mock-heroicand converting the rhyming couplet to new ends: magnifying the
littleness of pretension. ‘There is a vast difference’, Dryden wrote in a Discourse
concer ning the Original and Progress of Satire, ‘betwee n the slovenly Butchering of a
Man,and the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves
it standing in its place.’ Dryden, like Chaucer, used the sharp edge of praise. Whereas
Donne,Jo nson,Milton and Butler employ the harsh ridicule of classical satirists,
Dryden preferred ‘fine raillery’, intelligent teasing. Flecknoe’s ‘deviates’ is a ‘fine
stroak’; we are amused, not outraged. Such writing is easy, yet full of comparison,
metaphor, allusion, wordplay. Dryden made the couplet so efficient an instrument
of satire that Swift, Pope and Johnson used no other. Pope re-used Mac Flecknoe’s
Empire ofDulness in his Dunciad.
The subject ofAbsalom and Achitophel is the Exclusion Crisis (see p. 162), which
later led to the rebellion of Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth,
pr ompted by the Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs. Dryden parallels this failed
rebellion with that of the biblical Absalom against his father David, the great King of
Israel; Israel, as in the sermons Dryden heard as a boy, means England.
Nonconformists thought that Charles’s infidelities had made God send the Plague,
the Fire and the Dutch in 1666–7. Achitophel (Shaftesbury) was supported by City
merchants who believed that ‘Kings were useless, and a Clog to Trade’. The brave
David (Charles II), humane to his enemies, was a King beloved in Israel. He loved
God – but also music,song, dance and beautiful women. Dryden grasps this nettle
with glee:
THE RESTORATION 171mock-heroic(‘mock’ =
‘pretend’) A mode which
does not ridicule heroism, but
uses heroic style to belittle
pretension. Less misleading is
Pope’s term for The Rape of
the Lock(1713), ‘Heroi-
Comical’.