Shakespeare Restored: or a Specimen of the Many Errors as
well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his late
Edition of this Poet. Many of the other dunces had previously
attacked Pope in print on poetical, religious, or moral
grounds. An enlarged edition, still anonymous (Pope did not
publicly acknowledge authorship until the poem was included
in his Works of 1735) with notes partly explanatory and
partly burlesque in mockery of modern pedantry (the extent
to which these were a collaborative effort or Pope’s own is
uncertain), was published in 1729 with the joke title The
Dunciad Variorum, in parody of variorum editions of
established classics with notes by various editors and
commentators. The original design entailed three books. In
the first the hero is chosen by Dullness and crowned king in
succession to a previous favourite recently dead, thus ensuring
the continuity of her reign. There is a parodic inversion here,
initiated by Dryden in MacFlecknoe, of the idea of cultural
transmission associated with Virgil’s Aeneid, a poem in which
civilization is to be transferred through the chosen agent of
fate (Aeneas) from Troy to Rome. In the second, games are
held in honour of the goddess (in parody of the heroic games
in honour of dead heroes in the Iliad and the Aeneid). In the
third, the hero is transported in a vision to Elysium (paradise
in the classical underworld) where the spirit of his predecessor
shows him past and future triumphs of Dullness in which he
will play a leading part (in parody of the vision of the
glorious Roman future given to Aeneas as in the underworld
by the spirit of his father Anchises). In 1742 The New
Dunciad: As it was found in 1741 contains a fourth book in
which the prophecies of the third are fulfilled. Pope then
revised the poem replacing Theobald with a new hero, Colley
Cibber, the poet laureate, in The Dunciad in Four Books of
- Extensive new notes were provided by a collaborator.
The present selection is taken from the 1743 edition.
from Book the FirstLines 1–18, 29–84, 107–30, 145–8, 155–66, 173–80, 187–90,
225–30, 243–8, 257–66, 273–8, 289–94, 299–304 and 311–
- The dates of the original notes are given in brackets.