“Mac Flecknoe”

by John Dryden

THE LITERARY WORK

A satiric poem set in London; written c. 1676; published in 1682 (pirated edition) and 1684 (authorized edition).

SYNOPSIS

Dryden lampoons his political and literary antagonist, the playwright Thomas Shadwell, by depicting him as heir to the throne of literary dullness left him by the notoriously bad poet Richard Flecknoe.

Events in History at the Time of the Poem

The Poem in Focus

For More Information

Critic, playwright, poet, and translator, John Dryden (1631-1700) so dominated the literary scene of the later seventeenth century that it is often referred to as “the Age of Dryden.” Dryden himself explicitly took on the responsibility of speaking for his age in a pioneering work of literary criticism, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), in which he called himself Neander, Greek for “New Man.” The year before, he had published the poem “Annus Mirabilis” (“Year of Wonders”), which celebrated the English spirit as manifested in two events of 1666: a naval victory over the Dutch, and recovery after the Great Fire of London. This and other poems on matters of public or political importance won him the honor of being named poet laureate by King Charles II in 1668. Yet most of Dryden’s literary output in the 1660s and 1670s was for the theater. As the author of nearly 30 plays, he led the way in the revival of the English drama during the reign of Charles II (1660-85). Only in the late 1670s, as he was nearing 50, did Dryden begin writing the satiric poems for which he is best known today. In the political satires “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681) and “The Medall” (1682), he attacked the enemies of the king; and in “Mac Flecknoe,” written earlier but published later, he lambasted rival playwright Thomas Shadwell, with whom he had earlier clashed on literary issues.

Events in History at the Time of the Poem

Restoration of the monarchy

In 1660 King Charles II returned from exile to reclaim the English throne, 11 years after his father’s execution at the end of the English Civil War and the beginning of the Puritan interregnum (parliamentary rule) under Oliver Cromwell. While Charles was enthusiastically welcomed by his subjects, the restored monarchy was not the powerful institution it had been before the Civil War. The king’s powers were limited by restrictive laws that Parliament had forced Charles I to accept before he was deposed and that continued in force after the Restoration. Earlier, for example, monarchs had recourse to secret courts, such as the Star Chamber, and they could also arrest members of Parliament without cause. These and similar royal prerogatives were now abolished. Most important, the king could no longer impose taxes without Parliament’s approval. Charming, resourceful, and politically savvy, King Charles II would be forced to spend much of his time and energy contending with Parliament for the royal treasury to remain solvent.

Charles, however, had another source of revenue, if a politically risky one. He had spent much of his exile in France, under the protection of that country’s powerful and ambitious Louis XIV, who was also his first cousin. Influenced in his tastes by French culture and envious of Louis XIV’s broad royal prerogatives, Charles saw the French king as a natural ally. In 1670 he signed the Treaty of Dover, under the terms of which he agreed to assist France in war against Holland. In a secret version of the treaty, Charles, who had long had Catholic sympathies, agreed to declare himself a Catholic in return for a large cash payment from France. Furthermore, in 1669, the year before the treaty, Charles’s younger brother James, the duke of York, had told the king that he himself had converted to Catholicism. While Charles ultimately acknowledged 17 illegitimate children (a fact to which Dryden humorously alludes in “Mac Flecknoe”), he had no legitimate heir, so that James was next in the line of succession. If James’s Catholicism became known, there would certainly be deep unrest.

Religious tensions

Despite the king’s buoyant return, religious tensions in English society persisted, and they built up steadily during the 1660s and 1670s. There were three main religious groups in the country: the Anglicans, the majority group, who belonged to the Church of England (also called the Established Church), generally an ally of the Crown; the Dissenters, or the smaller Protestant sects that flourished in England outside the Anglican Church and viewed Anglican practices as too close to Catholicism (these included the various Puritan groups); and the Catholics, those who had clung to the original faith after the Protestant Reformation of the previous century.

Early in Charles’s reign, the Anglican Church moved aggressively to reassert the supremacy it had lost during the years of Puritan rule. Its aim was to crush both the Catholics and the Dissenters. From 1661 to 1665 Parliament passed a series of severe laws called the Clarendon Code that proscribed non-Anglican worship. The Act of Uniformity (1662) imposed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on all ministers; the Conventicle Act (1664) banned non-Anglican religious meetings; and the Five Mile Act (1665) prohibited those ministers who did not subscribe to the Act of Uniformity from living in or even going within five miles of the towns where they had earlier held services. The climax to such measures came in 1673, when Parliament passed the first Test Act, which prohibited all non-Anglicans from holding public office. It was at this point that Charles II’s brother, James, was forced to reveal his conversion and to resign his position as Lord of the Admiralty.

While Protestant Anglicans and Dissenters often opposed each other, both could agree upon their shared fear of and hostility toward the Catholics. Catholicism was associated with foreign domination (by the pope, for example, or the French) and with strongly monarchical or absolutist forms of government, as in the case of Louis XIV. Tainted by such associations, English Catholics’ patriotism was easily doubted. Many English tended to view Catholicism as a dire threat to individual freedom, which they prided themselves on having carefully nurtured for centuries by means of hard-won parliamentary checks on royal power. Fed by Charles’s Catholic and French sympathies, by the revelation of James’s Catholicism, and by the knowledge that the militarily powerful French would support any Catholic claimant to the English throne, anti-Catholic fears grew steadily during the first two decades of Charles Il’s rule. The fears dictated views about other aspects of life; most Londoners were certain that Catholics had started the Great Fire in 1666. The inconclusive Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-1674), which resulted from England’s obligations under the Treaty of Dover, heightened the city’s atmosphere of suspicion, particularly in the stridently anti-French, anti-Catholic House of Commons, which felt betrayed by Charles’s alliance with the French. Such tensions led Dryden to describe London as “much to fears inclined” in “Mac Flecknoe” (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 65).

Emerging political parties

By the time Dryden was writing “Mac Flecknoe,” these religious differences had begun to polarize the English political world in a way that was new. Within just a few years—after the poem was written but before its publication in 1682—English politics would give rise to the first modern political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. The parties would crystallize around the attempt by the king’s opponents to exclude the Catholic James from succeeding to the throne after Charles’s death. The resulting battle, called the Exclusion Crisis, involved a number of parliamentary elections. The king several times dissolved Parliament, hoping to increase the number of his supporters and to forestall attempts to exclude James from the succession. While local issues remained at the forefront of such elections, the larger issue of exclusion emerged as a principle around which two organized, opposing sides took shape. The exclusionists came to be called “Whigs” (after Scottish outlaws called Whiggamores) and the antiexclusionists were known as “Tories” (originally used for Irish robbers); each of the names was adopted after first being bandied about insultingly by the other side. Both parties had acknowledged leaders; both gradually acquired a rudimentary central organization; and both slowly developed ideologically consistent positions on other issues as well.

Though such distinctions were not yet as clear-cut as they would later become, in general the Tories could be characterized as more conservative and the Whigs as more radical. Above all, Tories supported the king and the principle of legitimate succession. The Tory power base was the traditional landed elites, for Tories were often aristocrats whose wealth was based on large estates and who allied themselves with the local Anglican church leaders. They also often tended to be more hostile to Dissenters than to Catholics, and if an English Catholic was active politically, he was likely to be a Tory. (Dryden, for example, a staunch Tory, converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism in the mid-1680s.) By contrast, the Whigs drew on a broader, more varied power base, comprising disparate interests outside the establishment. Above all, they represented the newly emerging commercial middle class—tradesmen, merchants, and shopkeepers whose growing wealth was based on cash, not land. Also the Whigs attracted both Dissenters and “republicans” (those who had supported Cromwell’s Puritan regime for ideological rather than religious reasons).

These new party allegiances not only encompassed political and economic issues but shaped, and were shaped by, broader cultural and aesthetic values as well. While not the ostensible substance of the disagreement between the Tory John Dryden and the Whig Thomas Shadwell, political concerns can be vaguely but certainly discerned in the literary feud that developed between these two Restoration playwrights, whose respective political affiliations paralleled their literary tastes and standards.

In “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681), Dryden attacked—at the request of Charles II—Lord Shaftesbury, one of Charles II’s former ministers, who allied with Charles’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, against the succession of James, the duke of York. Shadwell replied with the much less successful The Medal of John Bayes: A Satire Against Folly and Knavery (1682). Dryden countered not only with the scathing denunciation of Shadwell that is “Mac-Flecknoe” but with an unflattering portrait of his opponent as Og in Part II of “Absalom and Achitophel” (1682).

RESTORATION DRAMA

The Puritans had banned theatrical performances in 1642, but when Charles II was restored in 1660, the institution of theater was restored as well. Yet the tragedies and comedies that flourished during the Restoration period did so on a smaller scale than their Elizabethan or Jacobean predecessors, Dryden, though not considered a great playwright by modern critics, was adept at pleasing audiences, and did so with grand heroic tragedies in verse, and refined, amoral, and chatty comedies of wit or manners. Opposing this school of comedy was the comedy of humors, in which characters stood for a particular mood or quality, and were usually named in such a way as to evoke their characteristic “humor” Sir Formal Trifle, for example, is a vacuous speechifyer in The Virtuoso (1676), a play by Dryden’s rival Thomas Shadwell, the defender of humors comedy.

Thomas Shadwell, playwright

Thomas Shadwell (16427-92), the hapless victim of “Mac Flecknoe,” was born in Norfolk to a well established if not very wealthy family and educated at Cambridge. He left that university before taking a degree and in 1658 entered the Middle Temple in London to study law. The details of his life are somewhat sketchy, but the following fact is not in dispute: before Dryden published “Mac Flecknoe,” Shadwell was considered by many to be one of the most important living English playwrights. His reputation has not yet recovered. According to one Shadwell scholar,

Because most critics have read Dryden and not Shadwell or because they have not penetrated “Mac Flecknoe’s” deceptive premise about Shadwell’s opposition to wit or because they have been pleased with the fiction, they have accepted and promulgated the satire’s facetious conclusions.… It appears “Mac Flecknoe” has been so convincing that habitually just and perceptive critics lose control on describing or evaluating Shadwell.…
(Kunz, pp. 13-16)

Shadwell’s first play, a comedy of humors entitled The Sullen Lovers or, The Impertinents (1668) was a success. The great diarist Samuel Pepys (see The Diary of Samuel Pepys , also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times) attended many early performances of the play; over the course of watching it multiple times Pepys goes from finding Shadwell’s drama “tedious, and no design at all in it,” to “contemptible,” to “a pretty good play,” to “a play which pleases me well still” (Pepys in Borgman, pp. 17-18). His change in attitude has a lot to do with the evident pleasure that other theatergoers, from the king himself to the common folk, take in the play. Shadwell did in fact enjoy the favor of upper-class patrons (prominently, the duke of Newcastle) throughout his career and was a favorite among the masses as well. He followed The Sullen Lovers with a host of other plays: later in 1668 with The Royal Shepherdess (a pastoral tragi-comedy); in 1670 with The Humorists (a comedy); in 1671 with The Miser (a comedy); and, before the end of 1682, with 10 other plays of varying success. Shortly after “Mac Flecknoe” was published, Shadwell’s career went into something of a decline. His next play, a comedy entitled The Squire of Alsatia, would not be produced until 1688, although he would write and translate poetry in the interim. The Squire of Alsatia was a success, and Shadwell’s fortunes picked up. Thanks to his patron, the earl of Dorset, Shadwell became poet laureate on March 9, 1689, a position he would retain until his death in 1692.

Dryden and Shadwell—the literary feud

There was a subtitle on the pirated (unauthorized) version of “Mac Flecknoe” that appeared in 1682: “A SATYR UPON THE TRUE-BLEW-PROTESTANT POET, T. S. BY THE AUTHOR OF ABSALOM [and] ACHITOPHEL” (Oden, p. 283). Clearly the publisher hoped to cash in on the conflict inherent in juxtaposing Shadwell’s extreme and well-known Whiggism (“true-blew-Protestant poet”) with the strongly Tory views espoused so devastatingly in “Absalom and Achitophel.” But the feud itself, more literary than political, had been running for a decade before the writing of “Mac Flecknoe” around 1676. The shots on both sides had been fired off largely in the prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and dedications to plays written between 1667 and 1676. Apart from their political quarrels, and jabs at each other’s personal appearances, characters, and proclivities, the major points of contention between the two writers were:

– the literary assessment of the playwright Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

– the relative merits of the comedy of wit, championed by Dryden, as compared with the comedy of humors, practiced by Jonson and championed by Shadwell (“humor” here refers to a driving character trait or emotion—envy, for example, or anger)

– the proper purpose of comedy itself, which Dryden believed was to divert and to delight, but which Shadwell insisted was to instruct morally

Literary historians trace the origins of the quarrel to 1667, when Dryden published a prologue to his adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which he compared Jonson unfavorably with Shakespeare. “Labouring” Jonson, Dryden wrote, had “crept” below such geniuses as his older contemporary Shakespeare (Dryden in Oden, p. 6). The following year, in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden praised Jonson as “the most learned and judicious Writer any theater ever had,” but went on to assert that “one cannot say he wanted [lacked] wit, but rather that he was frugal of it” (Dryden in Oden, p. 16). Now, these may seem like mild criticisms, but Shadwell and others of his circle idealized Jonson and would tolerate not even the slightest detraction from their hero’s reputation. Shadwell responded in the preface of his own very Jon-sonian play The Sullen Lovers (1668) by defending Jonson,

whom I think all Drammatick Poets ought to imitate, though none are like to come near; he being the only person that appears to me to have made perfect Representations of Humane Life … though I have known some of late so Insolent to say that Ben Johnson [sic] wrote his best Playes without wit.
(Shadwell in Oden, p. 24)

The last part of this quote is clearly a reference to (if a distortion of) Dryden’s earlier comments in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Shadwell went on in this work to attack Dryden’s plays as “that Indecent way of Writing” because they showed characters behaving improperly—“Swearing, Drinking, Whoring” (Shadwell in Oden, p. 24). The following year, Shadwell enlarged upon his condemnation of Dryden’s type of dramatic writing in his preface to The Royal Shepherdess, asserting as well that a poet who aims above all to please the audience (which Dryden maintained was his goal) “loses the dignity of a Poet, and becomes as little as a Jugler, or a Rope-Dancer” (Shadwell in Oden, p. 32).

In 1671 the play The Rehearsal by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, satirized rhymed heroic drama and included a character named Mr. Bayes, who recognizably mocked Dryden himself. Although Dryden as a shareholder in the theater concern known as the King’s Company actually profited from this play, its ridicule signaled the waning of the vogue for grand heroic plays. Around this same time Shadwell produced The Humorists, whose characters included the foolish poet “Drybob,” another caricature of Dyden. (In this era, “dry bob” meant a harmless blow, or a form of sexual impotence.) As the 1670s progressed, Shadwell continued to fire off barbs at Dryden in prologues to such plays as Epsom-Wells (1672) and Psyche (1675). Finally, in the dedication to The Virtuoso (1676), Shadwell derided “some Women and some Men of Feminine understandings, who like slight plays onely, that represent a little tattle sort of Conversation like their own” (Shadwell in Oden, p. 157). It was this attack, some scholars have suggested, that provided the final provocation for the hammer blow that was “Mac Flecknoe.” Shadwell also wrote the following inflammatory remark:

That there are a great many faults in the conduct of this Play, I am not ignorant. But I (having no Pension but from the Theatre, which is either unwilling or unable to reward a Man sufficiently for so much pains as correct Comedies require) cannot allot my whole time to the writing of Plays, but am forced to mind some other business of Advantage. (Had I as much Money, and as much time for it) I might, perhaps, write as Correct a Comedy as any of my Contemporaries. (Shadwell in Winn, p. 289)

Dryden took umbrage at all this, given his modest salary as poet laureate (£200 for 1675) and other financial circumstances that in fact inhibited his literary pursuits. The “false picture of a well-fed Laureate enjoying the leisure of a profitable pension,” was probably the incendiary incident that gave rise to “Mac Flecknoe” (Winn, p. 290).

The Poem in Focus

Plot summary

Following common practice in such satirical literary skirmishes, Dryden never mentions Shadwell by name, but instead refers only to “Sh—.” This transparent pretense paid lip service to the idea of protecting the identity of the victim (who was, in fact, readily identifiable), and made those who could identify the victim feel as if they were in on a secret joke. In this case, using “Sh—” also allows Dryden to perpetrate a number of scatological puns equating his victim with excrement, a major theme in the poem.

The poem itself is relatively short, amounting to 217 lines. It begins with a description of the aging Flecknoe, monarch of “all the realms of Nonsense,” who (like King Charles II) must settle the question of his succession:

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.
     (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 1-6)

Now nearing the end of his reign and blessed (also like Charles) “with issue of a large increase,” Flecknoe ponders which of his many sons should inherit his throne and “wage immortal war with wit,” the enemy of Nonsense (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 8 and 12). Only the one who most resembles the monarch himself is fit to rule, Flecknoe cries:

Sh—alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness beyond his 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.
     (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 15-18)

Even Sh—’s “goodly fabric”—that is, his fat body—seems majestic to Flecknoe (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 25). Like Old Testament prophets prefiguring Christ, earlier bad authors, such as Thomas Heywood (c. 1570-1641) and James Shirley (1596-1666), prefigure Sh—; even Flecknoe himself, like John the Baptist, was merely sent “but to prepare thy way” (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 32). Flecknoe recalls that, as Sh—’s barge preceded his own in a royal procession down the River Thames, Sh—’s lute playing brought calls of his name from Pissing Alley (a street in London) and A—Hall (probably Ashton Hall, owned by Colonel Edmund Ashton, a friend of Shad-well’s). Little fish flocked around the boat in the same way as they crowded around the bits of floating sewage in the river, and, in strumming the lute, Sh—kept better time even than the mechanical meter of his play Psyche. Flecknoe ends his speech weeping “for joy/In silent raptures of the hopeful boy” (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 60-61). While every consideration says that Sh—is meant for “anointed dullness,” the strongest argument is to be found in his plays (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 63).

Near the walls around the fair city of Augusta (London) is an old ruined building, once a watchtower but now the site of several brothels. Nearby is an acting school, the Nursery, where tomorrow’s queens, heroes, whores, and emperors are trained. Plays by the great John Fletcher (1579-1625) are not performed there; nor are those by the greater Ben Jonson. The clowns Simkin and Panton often practice their verbal tricks at the Nursery, though. This is the site Flecknoe has chosen for Sh—’s coronation, since Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632), a bad playwright, long ago foretold that a mighty prince would reign there, born to be “a scourge of wit, and a flail of sense,” a virtuoso of “true dullness” (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 89-90). The news of the coronation spreads throughout the city, or at least through that neighborhood. Instead of Persian carpets, the “imperial way” is strewn with the “scattered limbs of mangled poets” (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 98-99). The books of ignored writers come out from the bookshops to attend the ceremony, books whose pages have been used to wrap pies and wipe bottoms: there are many works by Heywood, Shirley, and John Ogilby (1600-76), but “loads of Sh—almost choked the way” (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 103). Cheated publishers make up the ceremonial guards, with Henry Herringman (Dryden’s and Shadwell’s publisher until 1678) commanding them.

Then Flecknoe himself appears, high up on a throne of his own works. Next to him is Sh—, who is compared not only with Aeneas’s son Ascanius, “Rome’s other hope,” but also with Hannibal, Rome’s great enemy (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 109). Just as Hannibal swore eternal enmity to Rome, so now does Sh—swear that he will always maintain “true dullness” and keep up the fight against wit and sense (“Mac Flecknoe,” line 115). Acting as both king and priest, Flecknoe prepares the oil with which to anoint his heir. In Sh—’s left hand, Flecknoe puts a mug of ale, instead of the ball that English monarchs hold at coronation; in Sh—’s right hand, Flecknoe puts a copy of his own awful play Love’s Kingdom, in place of the English monarch’s scepter. Around Sh—’s temples he spreads a garland of sleep-inducing poppies (Shadwell was an opium addict), and there are reports later that say 12 owls flew overhead exactly at that moment, just as Rome’s founder Romulus saw 12 vultures at the site of the future city. The ceremony and the omens of coming might are cheered by the admiring crowd.

Fighting the urge to make a speech, Flecknoe shakes his hair; droplets of sweat fly from his forehead onto Sh—as Flecknoe gives in and begins speaking prophetically. May Sh—reign from Ireland to far Barbadoes, he proclaims, and may his mighty pen stretch even beyond Love’s Kingdom. Let others teach success, he says, addressing Sh—after the crowd roars its approval, but you learn from me how to go through labor without giving birth and how to work hard without producing anything. Other playwrights’ characters may betray their author’s wit in their own follies on stage, he says; the fools in your plays will always prove that you yourself are senseless, too. Don’t steal your fools from other writers but make them out of your own dullness, so that future ages will see your originality. And if you want empty, flowery rhetoric, don’t work at it but trust your own nature. Sir Formal Trifle (a fatuous orator from Shadwell’s The Virtuoso) will always be with you, whether you want him or not. Nor should you be seduced into following Jonson, who wouldn’t really like your plays anyway, but instead you should acknowledge me, Flecknoe, as your true artistic father. When did Jonson attack arts he didn’t understand? When did Jonson inject vulgar non sequiturs into his dialogue, or produce a situation comedy when he had promised a real play? When did he steal whole scenes from Fletcher, the way you do from George Etherege (c. 1635-c. 1692, an eminent Restoration playwright)? Comparing Jonson’s work to yours is like comparing oil to water; the oil floats above, while your territory is down on the bottom. Your mind is bent toward dullness, which makes your writings lean that way, too. Your only resemblance to Jonson is that you both had mountainous stomachs, but yours is full of wind, not sense, making you a huge wine cask of a body but only a small keg of wit. Your verse, like mine, drones weakly: your tragedies make people laugh, while your comedies put them to sleep; your satires are toothless, and the poison in your heart loses its venom when it touches your pen. Your genius is not in sharp satire but in soft anagrams or acrostics, where you can make puns and play mechanically with the shape of the words on the page (as in George Herbert’s famous poems “Easter Wings” and “The Altar”):

Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land.
There thou may’st wings display and altars raise,
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
     (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 205-208)

Or write your own songs and sing them yourself, playing your lute.

But Flecknoe’s last words are hardly audible, for two characters from The Virtuoso have recreated a trick from that play and opened a trap door under his feet. Down goes “the yet declaiming bard,” while his coarse mantle is “borne upwards by a subterranean wind” (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 213-15). It settles on his heir, bringing the poem to an abrupt conclusion “The mantle fell to the young prophet’s part / With double portion of his father’s art” (“Mac Flecknoe,” lines 216-17).

Dullness: the intersection of politics and criticism

“Mac Flecknoe” hinges on the idea of dullness; the word itself appears eight times in the brief poem, always in reference to Sh—. For Dryden, however, dullness was not only the defining characteristic of Shadwell and his literary output, but it was also the most potentially dangerous aspect of all writers who share Shadwell’s literary values. In Dryden’s view, nothing less than the survival of art and culture was at stake in the battle against dullness. Dryden was a Tory because he saw the king as fighting in the front lines of that battle, indeed as having rescued the nation from dullness:

At his return, he found a Nation lost as much in Barbarism as in Rebellion. And as the excellency of his Nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reform’d the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern, first waken’d the dull and heavy spirits of the English, from their natural reserv’dness: loosen’d them, from their stiff forms of conversation; and made them easy and plyant with each other in discourse. Thus, our way of living became more free: and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force.
(Dryden in Oden, p. 102)

Dryden thus explicitly links freedom with the “Mac Flecknoe” throwing off of dullness, and therefore also links it with wit; furthermore, he attributes the injection of freedom and wit into English culture directly to Charles II.

Ranged against freedom and wit is the panoply of Whiggishness, as embodied by Shad-well, the monarch of dullness. Even the setting of “Mac Flecknoe” in the city center, London’s commercial district, has political overtones. As one critic has noted, “Dryden’s placing of the action in the mercantile center of London indicates the important and truly dangerous natural alliance he saw between Whigs, the mercantile middle classes, sedition, and bad art” (Wykes, pp. 180-81). It is this larger preoccupation that lies behind the more overtly political and topical concerns in the poem with coronations, succession, and legitimate rule. For Dryden, dullness threatened to undo the invigorating atmosphere of the Restoration itself.

“ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL”

Dryden changed the course of history with his masterful poem “Absalom and Achitophel,” published shortly before “Mac Flecknoe,” in 1681 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. The poem turned the tide of public opinion against the Whigs and in favor of the king, thus allowing James, duke of York, to succeed to the throne on Charles’s death in 1685. The poem capitalizes on parallels between the events of the Exclusion Crisis and the Biblical story of King David and his son Absalom, who is induced to revolt against his father by the king’s treacherous advisor Achitophel. Particularly damning was Dryden’s portrait of Charles’s advisor Shaftesbury as the false Achitophel, “a name to all succeeding ages cursed”:

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy body to decay.
     (“Absalom and Achitophel,” lines 150-57)

Sources and literary context

“Mac Flecknoe” represents the earliest example in English of a mock heroic or mock epic poem, a genre that would become influential among later writers. The mock epic takes the elevated style and diction of epic poetry and applies them to trivial or unworthy subjects, using the resulting disparity to make its humorous point. As the recurring references to Rome in “Mac Flecknoe” suggest, Dryden lived in an age that was preoccupied with ancient civilizations, particularly that of Rome, which many English saw their own nation as resembling or even emanating from. According to a medieval myth, a descendant of the Roman hero Aeneas, whose name was Brut or Brit (hence “Britain”), had led survivors from the Trojan War to found London, or New Troy. By Dryden’s time, historians were challenging this myth, but it nonetheless had a tenacious hold on people, many of whom saw themselves as descendants of the Roman Empire.

Like all English gentlemen in this period, Dryden received a classical education in Greek and Latin literature. His ancient models can be found in the epics of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and Virgil (the Aeneid), with which he was intimately familiar. (Later he would translate the works of Virgil, including the Aeneid, from Latin into English.) Dryden found a more recent model in a 1667 English epic by John Milton, Paradise Lost (also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), which dealt with the Biblical theme of the Fall of Man after Eve’s temptation in the garden of Eden. Milton had worked in relative obscurity, and Dryden was among the first to recognize the magnitude of his poetic achievement, which may have been imposing enough to deflect Dryden from attempting a grand English epic of his own. Echoes from Milton’s important work subtly pervade “Mac Flecknoe,” as they do Dryden’s other poetry.

Dryden’s immediate inspiration for using the conventions of epic poetry to deprecate an unworthy subject can be found in the French mock epic Le Lutrin (1667), by Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711). “He writes it in the French Heroique Verse, and calls it an Heroique Poem: his Subject is Trivial, but the Verse is Noble,” Dryden noted (Dryden in Miner, p. 196).

On a more superficial level, Dryden’s sources for the poem include the works of Shadwell himself (to which Dryden frequently refers), as well as works of literary forebears (such as Jonson), most of whom are mentioned above. Again, the immediate catalyst for “Mac Flecknoe” seems to have been Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, in which Shadwell excuses any faults by complaining that he does not have the luxury of writing on the pension awarded to others. Directed at Dryden, the barb probably inspired the retort that became “Mac Flecknoe.”

Publication and impact

The exact date “Mac Flecknoe” was composed remains controversial, but recent scholarship suggests that it was almost certainly written as early as 1676. The poem circulated in manuscript for years before being published (some 15 manuscripts are known to have survived). Though very much an “in-joke” (owing to its highly allusive nature), it was popular enough to be pirated in 1682. Dryden himself authorized its anonymous publication in 1684 in Miscellany Poems, a poetry anthology published by Jacob Tonson in London. Yet not until 1693, the year after Shadwell’s death, did Dryden publicly acknowledge authorship of both “Mac Flecknoe” and “Absalom and Achitophel,” the poems now considered his two finest works.

As critics point out, were it not for “Mac Flecknoe,” Thomas Shadwell would today be generally recognized as one of the three or four most significant Restoration playwrights—not a brilliant writer, certainly, but a competent one. As it is, his name has become a byword for literary stupidity, so devastating was the poem’s impact on his reputation. The force of Dryden’s satiric portrait inspired a number of imitators, notably the most brilliant poet of the early eighteenth century, Alexander Pope (1688-1744), whose mock epic The Dunciad openly takes “Mac Flecknoe” as its model in its excoriation of dullness.

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Ashley, Maurice. England in the Seventeenth Century. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977.

Borgman, Albert S. Thomas Shadwell: His Life and Comedies. New York: New York University Press, 1928.

Dryden, John. “Mac Flecknoe.” In John Dryden: Selected Poems. Ed. Christopher S. Nasaar. Harlow, England: Longman, 1987.

____. Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay. Ed. John L. Mahoney. 1666. Reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1704. New York: Norton, 1980.

Kunz, Don R. The Drama of Thomas Shadwell. Vol. 1. Salzburg: Institute Fur Englische Sprache und Literature, 1972.

Lockyer, Roger. Tudor [and] Stuart Britain 1471-1714. Harlow, England: Longman, 1964.

McFadden, George. Dryden: The Public Writer, 1660-1685. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Miner, Earl, ed. John Dryden. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1975.

Oden, Richard L., ed. Dryden and Shadwell: The Literary Controversy and Mac Flecknoe, (1668-1679). Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977.

Winn, James A. John Dryden and His World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

Wykes, David. A Preface to Dryden. London: Longman, 1977.