Modern Language Quarterly, Sept 1993 v54 n3 p345(25)

Collaborating with the forebear: Dryden's reception of Ben Jonson. Brady, Jennifer.

Abstract: John Dryden maintained his understanding of Ben Jonson justified his position as the primary exponent of Jonsonianism. Jonson encouraged the reverential attitudes of his followers and through self-promotion achieved a position of literary greatness. Frequent allusions to Jonson are evident in Dryden's work. However, Dryden maintained Jonson influenced him through a tranfusion of ideas. For example, in 'Mac Flecknoe' Dryden portrays Jonson as his collaborator rather than his inspiration.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1993 Duke University Press

Gramercie, good HORACE. Nay, we are new turn'd Poet too,

which is more; and a Satyrist too, which is more then that: I write

just in thy veine, I.

--Crispinus, accosting Horace, in Jonson's PPoetaster (1602)

I will be no more mistaken for my good meaning: I know I hon-

our Ben Johnson more than my little Critiques, because without

vanity I may own, I understand him better.

--Dryden, Dedication of The Assignation (16773) to Sir Charles

Sedley

As G. E. Bentley's researches into the comparative reputations of Shakespeare and Jonson in the seventeenth century demonstrated as long ago as 1945, Ben Jonson's ascendancy over his Renaissance peers seemed accomplished by the first decades of the Restoration.(1) Through his disciplined campaign of self-promotion, Jonson had emerged from the ranks of the merely great--Spenser, Shakespeare, Fletcher--to become an object of affiliative longing for his successors. The contributing factors to his massive influence were various and differently inflected for individual Restoration writers, but there were leitmotifs in the praise Jonson and his work elicited from the second- and third-generation Sons of Ben. In part, his formidable reputation derived from his promulgation in the 1616 Folio of the ideal of a consonant standard of authorship.(2) A renowned classicist, Jonson had extended the domain of classical literature to include his own Workes. Restoration writers were likewise fascinated by the accumulated and still-accumulating lore surrounding Jonson's charisma, personal and authorial. Unlike Shakespeare and Fletcher, Jonson had explicitly encouraged followers not only in his much-publicized role as foster father to the poets who subscribed themselves the Tribe of Ben but through his impressive body of critical theory on genre and his Discoveries, a posthumously published prose fragment that documented his concern with nurturing the humanist education of young poets.

Jonson, moreover, was a political conservative whose intimacy with the court of James I and, at a greater remove, with the Caroline court made him a beacon for other ambitious conservatives. As Neander characterizes the interregnum in Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), it had been, or in hindsight appeared to have been, a traumatic epoch when "Power, for twenty years together, abandon'd to a barbarous race of men, ... had buried the Muses under the ruines of Monarchy."(3) Jonson's ideological heirs found in him a figure onto whom, in the aftermath of the Civil War, they could project their own cultural and political nostalgia for a cherished authority. He represented for many of his readers the beloved authoritarian father whose monumental Workes countered memories of a nation's implication in regicide with the prospect of renewed cultural stability and a recuperated and progressive tradition of literary greatness.

Successive generations of seventeenth-century writers spoke of Jonson in terms both familial and affectionately familiar; to Dryden, he was Father Ben. The conviction of Jonson's accessibility was especially intense for the immediate postwar generation, who swapped Jonson tales with surviving members of his Apollo entourage, thereby gaining a felt sense of proximity to a writer they had never known. Jonson's authorial character, a compound of his willingness to mentor, his forceful critical judgment, and his ability (shared by Milton) to impress upon his followers that his life and art were coextensive, made him an ideal candidate for early Restoration apotheosis.

Modern Restoration scholars have been slow to appreciate the role that such factors played in the timebound phenomenon of Jonson's dominance from 1660 to 1690. Two prominent features of the critical lag can be readily identified. In his important study of Fletcher's reception during the period, Robert Markley writes that "few scholars of Restoration drama have bothered to ponder the implications of his popularity after 1660"; instead, they have treated Fletcher's inclusion in the Jacobean triumvirate as "an 'aberration' or as evidence of the shallow insensitivity of their Restoration predecessors."(4) To a predictably lesser degree this resistance has also surfaced with respect to Jonson's status in the Restoration. Readers persist in the belief that Restoration writers must (translate: should) have recognized Shakespeare's superiority. Neander's famous remark in Dramatick Poesie that he admires Jonson and loves Shakespeare is often nervously proposed as the final word on the subject. The measured quality of Dryden's overall comparison of the two playwrights, his elevation of Epicoene to the privileged place accorded a "perfect Play" (Works 17:55), and his pacific wish to divide the palm between Shakespeare and Jonson go unacknowledged by readers who are comforted to find Dryden ostensibly siding with posterity. The frequency with which Neander's brief distinction is decontextualized in modern criticism is, like the near erasure of Fletcher from reception studies prior to Markley's, symptomatic of our unease with data that disconfirm cherished notions.

Our understanding of Jonson's preeminence after the interregnum has also been obscured by the closed-shop period divisions that in practice bracket off and estrange later seventeenth-century literature from its antecedents, with the year 1660 forming a "natural" barrier not to the transmission of influence but to our nuanced perception of it. Ironically, the idea of discrete historical ages, a donnee of our conceptions of literary history, was introduced into critical discourse through Dryden. Earl Miner has observed that in the wake of Dryden, Corneille, and Le Bossu, Western poetics became "avowedly partial: an examen of a single play, an essay of dramatic poesy. The narrowing derives in part from sophistication (which is not necessarily identical with insight) and from an altered social institutionalizing of literature."(5) Our institutional praxis of respecting the discreteness of literary periods tends to insulate Dryden and his contemporaries from predecessors who were central to their critical self-awareness, as to their investments in a poetics of emulation. Recent studies of Jonson's influence have focused almost exclusively on his first-generation Sons--Carew, Herrick, Vaughan, Cartwright, and the contributors to Jonsonus Virbius--bypassing later generations.(6) Similarly, discussions of the impassioned sectarian rifts of the 1670s and 1680s, most notably between Dryden and Shadwell, have been disposed to treat theirs as an incidental professional rivalry. Ben Jonson, the iconic referent of Mac Flecknoe, is significantly underrepresented in the notes to the California edition of Dryden's Works and in much of the commentary on the satire.

The intergenerational triangulation of desire that underlay the Dryden-Shadwell feud over Jonson makes for an interesting case study in the reception of one eminent forebear by his self-elected successors. Brian Corman, conspicuously siding with the claims of one dramatist at the expense of the other, has proposed Shadwell as the legitimate heir to Jonsonian humours comedy; in his view, Dryden pays only "lip service" to Jonson.(7) Ian Donaldson, by contrast, asserts that Dryden "earned the Jonsonian inheritance in a way Shadwell did not." Drawing on his own immersion in Jonson, Donaldson adds, "Allusions to Jonson's work, both acknowledged and concealed, pervade all of Dryden's writing; their very frequency shows that Dryden had an exceptionally intimate knowledge of Jonson."(8) The evidence that Donaldson adduces is, I think, irrefutable, even though one might want to be wary of replicating Dryden's urge to dispossess Shadwell of his just portion of the Jonsonian estate.

Dryden was determined to be recognized as the premier credentialed Jonsonian of his age. At the outset, a good decade before Mac Flecknoe, he did not envisage Thomas Shadwell as a threat to his supremacy. Dryden's ambition and his vulnerability to challenges from his peers and the surviving Sons of Ben warrant review, since both helped instigate the satire. The first section of this essay probes Dryden's progressive entanglement in controversy, as he responds in his occasional prefaces to the self-generated and external pressures that attended his claim of privileged access to Ben Jonson. In moving to the allusions to Jonson's works embedded in Mac Flecknoe, I argue for a reconceived model of influence. It is well known that Dryden analogized the transmission of influence from one writer to another to an experimental procedure; invited influence, he said, was experienced as a transfusion. The transfer of Jonsonian texts to Dryden's or, from another angle, the startling receptivity mac Flecknoe shows to the precursor's voice, which enters the satire in single words and evocative phrases that resonate with the original context, now superimposed on the new, exemplifies Dryden's dictum. In Mac Flecknoe, Ben Jonson is invoked to a particular, cannily conceived, end: the forebear doubles as his heir's collaborator. The last section considers Dryden's satire briefly from the perspective of Thomas Shadwell, who was at once the satire's subject and its first reader. That section is grounded on the premise that Shadwell was a distinguished Jonsonian in his own right and that Dryden meant what he theorized about satire in 1693: it was the genre that ideally accommodated the executioner's ax.

In 1673 Dryden served notice on other contenders for the privilege of interpreting Ben Jonson. His dedication of The Assignation to Sir Charles Sedley acknowledges a charge that had dogged Dryden for several years. "I am made a Detractor from my Predecessors, whom I confess to have been my Masters in the Art," he complains to Sedley, who had been cast as the ultra-royalist Lisideius in Dryden's Dramatick Poesie. A carefully drafted press release follows: "I will be no more mistaken for my good meaning: I know I honour Ben Johnson more than my little Critiques, because without vanity I may own, I understand him better" (Works 11:322). Dryden's contemporaries would have recognized his gesture of arrogation. In "To the Reader," the epigram that opened Jonson's 1616 Folio Epigrammes, the poet had issued a bracing directive: "Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand, / To reade it well: that is, to understand."(9) Dryden's preface takes up Jonson's gauntlet--and promptly flings it down before his own readers. Unlike his "little Critiques," Dryden has honored Jonson as Jonson wanted to be honored. Grasping the promise implicit in the precursor's warning, he has read the Workes well, extensively and intensively. Precisely this claim is lodged in the plain verb understand, with its denotative Jonsonian freight. The testimonial to Jonson coexists with an emergent impetus to settle collateral rivalries in his own favor. To emulate or, more radically, to possess Ben Jonson begins in the criticism of the early 1670s to entail dispossessing another Jonsonian. Dryden's "good meaning" could, then, shade into another, depending on where his readers placed the stress in his resolute declarative.

The preface of 1673 represents a pronounced shift in Dryden's relation to his public. In Dramatick Poesie, published five years earlier, he had proposed another model altogether: civil, balanced critical exchange. "I beseech you Neander," Eugenius (Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst) says, "gratifie the company and me in particular so far, as ... to give us a Character of the Authour [Jonson]; and tell us franckly your opinion, whether you do not think all Writers, both French and English, ought to give place to him?" (Works 17:55). Eugenius's confident formulation of the question is itself revealing. Jonson's Workes provide his company of admirers with a penultimate standard of excellence; to cede preeminence to this consummate author in 1668 made good sense. Moreover, Neander's aristocratic companions graciously defer to his professionalism. A select group of courtly literati, they are predisposed to think that he will offer the most material arguments for English drama's superiority to French as well as the most fitting tribute to Jonson's authorial character.(10)

Neander more than rewards their trust. The innovative centerpiece in his study of Jonson is his close reading of Epicoene, where Neander undertakes the first sustained (and protoformalist) interpretation of a single text in English criticism. His redefinition of his mandate to include a comparison of Shakespeare and Jonson also spawns a rich legacy: Dryden's own equivalently balanced critical appreciation of Juvenal and Horace in his 1693 essay on satire (where Persius is the third variable, as Fletcher was in 1668); Samuel Johnson's study of Pope and Dryden in his Life of Pope, which reenacts Dryden's equitable division of the laurels between two classic authors in the prior essays and his unpredictable confession, late in the comparison, of a personal but unlegislated bias toward one of them (Dryden, in Samuel Johnson's case; Shakespeare, then Juvenal, in Dryden's). Although Neander frustrates his companions' subtle pressure to give the pride of place to Jonson alone, his discourse on Jonson's classicism, on his pattern of constructing a play and the enduring value of his critical judgment, reflects years of immersive study. To Eugenius's prompting Neander responds: "As for Johnson, ... I think him the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever had. He was a most severe Judge of himself as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit and Language, and Humour also in some measure we had before him; but something of Art was wanting to the Drama till he came. He manag'd his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him" (Works 17:57).

Within the confines of his essay Dryden's portrait of Jonson remains uncontested. The near utopian enclave of Dramatick Poesie is nevertheless hedged in by concerns that are anything but disinterested. The literary debate takes place on the Thames one afternoon, during a lull in the endemic hostilities between the English and the Dutch. It is interrupted by the barge's return to Somerset stairs, where the four speakers separate after a longing glance back at "the water, upon which the Moon-beams play'd, and made it appear like floating quick-silver" (Works 17:80). Dryden's vision of a world presided over by gentlemen speaking on topics of national literary moment "with candour and civility" is itself an essay, an attempt to represent and thus prod such exchanges into being, as an alternative to the "violence of words" (Works 17:5--6) that he believes has dominated literary and political arenas.

Asked by his companions to embark on what is a labor of love, however, Neander pauses, wondering aloud whether "in obeying your commands I shall draw some envy on my self" (Works 17:55). He is thinking of Jonson's controversial poem prefacing Shakespeare's 1623 Folio, which begins, "To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name, / Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and Fame" (BJ8:390). Neander's allusion is self-ironizing; his identification here with Ben Jonson's awareness of the difficulty of his undertaking would certainly register with Dryden's coterie of listeners, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Robert Howard, and Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst. Like Jonson before him, Dryden hopes to ward off envy by appeal; hence his insistence, even amid the unanimity of purpose that governs his speakers' debates, that Neander is obliging the company by taking over. James Winn has proposed that the "fear of provoking envy" may have "contributed to Dryden's delay in publishing the Essay," which was released only after "Annus Mirabilis and several theatrical successes."(11) Whether one attibutes his anxiety, as Winn does, to Dryden's consciousness that he is addressing his social superiors, or to his knowledge that his select audience--listeners in the fiction, readers beyond its borders--are all partisan Jonsonians, or, finally, to the recognition that he has quietly appropriated Jonson to himself (these are hardly exclusive propositions), it seems plain that Dryden was concerned about the reception his essay would meet with from his contemporaries.

The ideal of reasoned, skeptical critical exchange that Dryden advanced in Dramatick Poesie was soon revealed as wishful thinking. Readers took issue with its findings; positions hardened in the intemperate debates that followed. Dryden broke with his brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard over their advocacy of rhymed and blank verse, respectively, as the vehicle best suited to modern plays and over Dryden's characterization of Howard as the captious Crites in his essay.(12) Edward Howard, Sir Robert's elder brother, who was himself an occasional playwright, entered into the dispute as an adjunct, enlisting on his own side the services of Edward Ravenscroft, a younger dramatist who was already an established rival of Dryden. In the quarrel Ben Johnson became a lightning rod for the expression of both professional and personalized antipathies.

Ravenscroft invoked Jonson to good effect in his prefatory poem to Edward Howard's Six Days Adventure. The play had failed miserably onstage, and when it was published in 1671 Ravenscroft soothed Howard's injured feelings by reminding him that Ben Jonson too had written for an

unthankful age

... The same fate now

Do's your Play disallow,

'Tis lik'd by as few as understood.(13) Howard is fashioned into Jonson's heir by an assertion of their shared history of meeting with rebuffs from recalcitrant audiences; the failure to please had become, in Jonson's wake, a perverse proof of artistic merit and even grounds for congratulation from one's peers, and Jonson's career provided Restoration writers, including Dryden, with ample precedents for the elitist aloofness Ravenscroft recommends to Howard. Ravenscroft does more than celebrate Edward Howard's efforts to "retrive / The fading glories of the [Renaissance] Stage" (ll. 31--32) in his plays, however. He seizes the occasion to attack Dryden, now England's laureate and considered by most her foremost authority on the Renaissance dramatists. Ravenscroft calls for exactly the kind of critical appreciation of Jonson that Dryden thought he had provided in his Essay. By remarking that Jonson was frugal with his wit, Dryden had offended many of Jonson's sect and gave Ravenscroft the opportunity he needed. "Could we but find a man had as much wit / To read and judg[e of Jonson's plays] ... as he that writ" them (ll. 38--39), Ravenscroft exclaims in what is an unanswerable snub. With a shrewd gesture of willed amnesia, he puts Dryden at a distinct disadvantage. How can Dryden answer the insinuation when it seems that he has not yet spoken, at least not to any purpose?

If Ravenscroft scored a palpable hit, Richard Flecknoe, later immortalized in Mac Flecknoe, showed far less finesse in his foray into the tu quoque mode of contestation. In Dramatick Poesie Dryden had politely ignored Flecknoe's contribution, "A Short Discourse of the English Stage," published in 1664 in tandem with his play Love's Kingdom. Flecknoe evidently had not invested much intellectual energy in Jonson's writing, which "was too elaborate; ... had he mixt less erudition with his Playes, they had been more pleasant and delightful then they are."(14) By 1671, however, Flecknoe was an ardent Jonsonian. His epigram "Former Playes and Poets Vindicated" defends learned Jonson and his wit from what he took to be Dryden's depreciation of both. Flecknoe now regards any attitude toward the Renaissance playwrights that falls short of adulation as an invariable sign of precursor envy. His epigram is a nostalgic paean to the glory days of Jacobean theater, when

none ever went away

But with a glowing bosom from a Play,

...so fir'd,

You'd think they were celestially inspir'd.(15) Unlike the Howards, Ravenscroft, and Dryden, Flecknoe ignores the very mixed or hostile reception plays like Sejanus, Catiline, The Magnetic Lady, or The New Inn had had in Jonson's lifetime. His Jacobean playwrights are faultless; the moderns lack wit, animation, even the ability to plot a play. The close of Flecknoe's poem refuses to name Dryden but addresses him in derisively familiar terms:

Yet know, who e'r thou art, dost less esteem

Of Johnson for the faults oth' Times, not him,

Had he writ now, h'ad better writ than thee,

Hadst thou writ then, th'adst writ far worse than he;

And all in spight of Envy must confess

If he be'nt worthy praise, others much less.

(ll. 19--24)

Given Flecknoe's impatience with stumbling blocks to his nostalgic representation of the Jacobean era, it is not surprising that he also renders Dryden's critical stances in the Essay with broad strokes. The passage in Dramatick Poesie that Flecknoe purports to answer reads: "But it is to raise envy to the living, to compare them with the dead. They are honour'd, and almost ador'd by us, as they deserve; neither do I know any so presumptuous of themselves as to contend with them. Yet give me leave to say thus much, without injury to their Ashes, that not onely we shall never equal them, but they could never equal themselves, were they to rise and write again" (Works 17:72--73). Because Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher well-nigh exhausted the forms they made their own, Dryden continues, their successors must "attempt some other way" to attain excellence (Works 17:73), for example by exploring the avenue of rhymed verse in their plays. Flecknoe hears his adversary claim that "had Jonson writ now, Dryden had better writ than he," but the passage he critiques imagines the precursors' ghosts rising from the dead to contend with their former selves. Spectral returns are a recurrent motif in Dryden's criticism; when T. S. Eliot speaks of Dryden's criticism of Jonson as "living," he has caught the sense of Jonson's abiding presence for his heir.(16) But Flecknoe has a poor ear for such nuances. For him the dead return as sentimental cliches, and his sudden allegiance to Jonson is shallow at best. As the protagonist of Mac Flecknoe, he reverts to his earlier stance, exclaiming to his son, "Thou art my blood where Johnson has no part" (Works 2:59, 1. 175). The comic barb is directed both at Shadwell's vanity and at Flecknoe's specious, even presumptuous, vindication of Jonson in 1671.

Dryden bided his time in responding to Flecknoe. He initially defended his opinion of Jonson's wit, but then, recognizing that he had been induced to adopt too polarized a stance, he withdrew from the fray. His "Defence of the Epilogue," appended to The Conquest of Grenada, Part 2 (1672), wavers between conciliation and attack. "The truth is," Dryden candidly admits, "I have so farr ingag'd my self in a bold Epilogue to this Play, wherein I have somewhat tax'd the former writing, that it was necessary for me either not to print it, or to show that I could defend it" (Works 11:203). Dryden seems fully aware that he has backed himself into a corner. He has committed himself to exposing the errors of his predecessors more out of pique than any conviction that this is a productive form of critical engagement, and he has allowed the "little Critiques" of his own age to define the terms of the dispute. Weary of the feud he has inadvertently triggered in Dramatick Poesie, he doubles back late in the essay to proclaim Jonson "the most judicious of Poets": "He always writ properly; and as the Character requir'd: and I will not contest farther with my Friends who call that Wit: It being very certain, that even folly it self, well represented, is Wit in a larger signification: and that there is Fancy, as well as Judgement in it" (Works 11:213).

Within a few pages, however, Dryden's irritability revives, directed now at the surviving Sons of Ben: "The memory of these grave Gentlemen is their only Plea for being Wits: they can tell a story of Ben. Jonson, and perhaps have had fancy enough to give a supper in Apollo that they might be call'd his Sons: and because they were drawn in to be laught at in those times, they think themselves now sufficiently intitled to laugh at ours. Learning I never saw in any of them, and wit no more than they could remember.... They have lasted beyond their own [age], and are cast behind ours: and not contented to have known little at the age of twenty, they boast of their ignorance at threescore" (Works 11:216). Dryden's characterization betrays a certain ingratitude, for his criticism draws repeatedly on Jonsonian lore accessible only through the Sons. "I am assur'd from divers persons," he confides in his examen of Epicoene, "that Ben. Johnson was actually acquainted with such a man [as Morose], one altogether as ridiculous as he is here represented" (Works 17:59). In the "Defence" itself he seems to remember that Jonson, "in reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth, ... us'd to say it was horrour" (Works 11:208). The sole possible source for these observations, since neither is documented elsewhere, was the Tribe of Ben; now men in their sixties, they were the oral historians of Jonson's era.

By portraying the Tribe of Ben as Struldbruggs-in-training, Dryden is engaging in a hostile demystification of the value he and his culture attached to having known Ben Jonson. He willfully misreads the celebratory poems by Jonson, Randolph, Brome, and others on the ethos of the Apollo coterie, just as he ignores his indebtedness to the keen memories of that generation of Sons. He writes as though their pride in having known Jonson firsthand were an affront. Dryden's own claim to a privileged understanding is based, as it must be, on other grounds, namely, his intensive study of Jonson's Workes, which backs his more sober challenge to the Jonsonians of his generation in 1673 and, ultimately, the lethal comedy of dispossession in Mac Flecknoe.

Dryden was a self-elected Son, of course, not the heir designate he would have wanted to be. But his unrealizable longing, inadmissible in the decorous world he fashioned in Dramatick Poesie, which reveals none of his envy for the priority of Jonson's professed Sons, surfaces in disguised, instinctively perverse, forms--satire, lampoon, libel. As Michael Seidel has shrewdly remarked, "Satirists generate their own insecurities and then elaborate a fable in which they attempt to displace themselves from what they have generated."(17) The passage I have excerpted from the "Defence" is one such fable, Mac Flecknoe another. In his 1676 satire Dryden once again enlists Jonson as his ally to mock a rival's claim to intimate knowledge, but where the fantasy of the "Defence" is a crude, transparent vehicle for anxious contempt, Dryden's collaboration with his forebear in Mac Flecknoe produces a nearly seamless fiction of satiric wills working in cross-generational accord.

While allusions to Jonson abound in Mac Flecknoe, by far the greatest concentration of them is found in Flecknoe's last instructions to his son and proclaimed heir, Thomas Shadwell (Works 2:58--60, ll. 139--210). Flecknoe strives to impress on the "filial dullness" (l. 136) two related concerns: the majestic decreating potential of true dullness and the pitfalls that could check its spread. He entices Shadwell with the prospect of expansionism, prophesying that under his aegis dullness, properly channeled, might extend from Ireland (Flecknoe's rumored birthplace) to "farr Barbadoes on the Western main" (ll. 138--40). Flecknoe's dream of a cultural movement to rival the English tradition of wit has an unforeseen drawback: it makes Shadwell ruler of a vast expanse of empty ocean.(18) But what concerns the patriarch of Dryden's satire more is that to realize his goal, Shadwell must embrace his mission wholeheartedly, ignoring bad counsel and countering his own tendency to dissipate his energies in vain pursuits. The garrulous Flecknoe warns him of the temptations young princes must resist: "Nor let false friends seduce thy mind to fame, / By arrogating Johnson's Hostile name"; "Trust Nature, do not labour to be dull" (ll. 166--72).

Flecknoe alternates between a ponderous celebratory gravitas and a narcissistic anxiety that his successor might allow himself to be misled into sense. (Within the fable Mac Flecknoe is preoccupied, but not with Jonson; his thoughts are parricidal, and his fitness for the throne of dullness is established conclusively by the prematurity of his ascension.) Flecknoe wishes to dissuade Shadwell from an unfilial proclivity toward Jonson. But Jonson's authorial voice and his values, which Flecknoe would eradicate from his realm, encroach on the preserve of dullness, as unwanted traces of a legacy more powerful than any he could entail. Flecknoe's instructions are laced with references to Jonson's works, including Volpone, Poetaster, Discoveries, Epigrammes, and The Under-wood. Flecknoe embodies the resistant poetaster, whose tirades against Jonson establish the cultural dominance of his antagonist, just as Crispinus's, Tucca's, and Demetrius's assaults on Horace's integrity in Poetaster bear unwitting witness to his moral and aesthetic superiority. The pervasiveness of Jonsonian allusions in Flecknoe's discourse implies dullness's impotence against its opposite, wit.

Through the dense network of allusions, moreover, Dryden proves that he, not Shadwell, has attained the immersive knowledge of Jonson's Workes that the 1616 Folio's author-editor had urged on his followers. Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe, father and son in the narrative, gamely spar with Jonson and Dryden, but they are outpointed round after round. Ever-solicitous, Flecknoe must patiently admonish his son not to construe his Jonsonian girth as a sign of true resemblance:

Nor let thy mountain belly make pretense

Of likeness; thine's a tympany of sense.

A Tun of Man in thy Large bulk is writ,

But sure thou 'rt but a Kilderkin of wit.

(ll. 193--96) In later life Jonson weighed close to 280 pounds; a kilderkin of, say, butter weighed 112. Thus Shadwell, who prided himself on his "mountain belly," is warned not to take it as proof of congruence between his humours comedy and Jonson's.(19) By skewering a recognized vanity, then, Dryden also derides the discrepancy between his rival's mass and his wit. The joke depends in part on our recognizing Flecknoe's habitual overestimation of his son's abilites. The absurdity of a precise comparison of weights carries over to the mock fairness of Dryden's expose, which readily grants Shadwell his physical likeness to Jonson but denies him the sole basis on which a legitimate boast of likeness could be made: their art. Jonson's bulk may be "writ" on Shadwell's body, but the similarity ends there; their plays achieve entirely disparate ends.

The opening lines of Mac Flecknoe fuse quotations from Jonson's self-portrait in "My Picture Left in scotland" (BJ 8:149--50), the source of the phrase mountain belly, and his satiric portrait "On Don Surly," published as Epigrammes 28. The California edition of Dryden notes the first allusion but cites the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of tympany in lieu of its Jonsonian source for the second.

DON SURLY, to aspire the glorious name

Of a great man, and to be thought the same,

Makes serious use of all great trade he knowes.

He speakes to men with a Rhinocerotes nose,

Which hee thinkes great; and so reades verses, too:

And, that is done, as he saw great men doe.

H'has tympanies of businesse, in his face.

(BJ 8:35, ll. 1--7) Jonson's portrait of Don Surly, a pretentious follower of literary fashion who "may heare my Epigrammes, but like of none," ends with the injunction that Surly "use other arts, these only can / Stile thee a most great foole, but no great man" (ll. 20--22). Like many other satirized readers, he is warned off for conspicuously failing to meet Jonson's criteria of fitness. Jonson punctures Surly's egregious self-importance and folly, exposes his secret dislike of Jonson's art, and proclaims this unsought reader "a most great foole." His jutting horn of a nose and his swollen, conceited (and presumably vacuous) face sum up his arrogant folly. Physiognomy alone convicts him.

"Tympanies of businesse" is transposed into Mac Flecknoe as "thine's a tympany of sense." The younger Flecknoe's intellectual vacuity exists in such satiric equipoise to his mountain belly that modern readers have not searched for a corollary in Jonson. The lines are perfectly lucid without our knowing their source. The word tympany bears its original context with it, however, as a synecdoche for Jonson's repudiation of a foolish reader whose values are antithetical to his own and whose motives for reading his Workes are therefore suspect. By associating Shadwell with Don Surly, Dryden insinuates a correspondence between his rival and the reader summarily expelled from the privileged coterie of Epigrammes.

"A Tun of Man in thy Large bulk is writ" splices together references to two of Jonson's poems in The Under-wood. "For, what is life, if measur'd by the space, / Not by the act?" Jonson asked in the Cary-Morison ode. "It is not growing like a tree / In bulke, doth make man better bee" (BJ 8:243--45, ll. 21--22, 65--66). Jonson's distinction between space and act gives Dryden the trope with which to differentiate size from a questionable telos. In "My Answer: The Poet to the Painter" (BJ 8:226--27), Jonson had joked while surveying his immense body that even "the Tun at Heidelberg had houpes" (l. 6). His last collection of poems, in fact, focuses to an extraordinary degree on his negative physical self-image, but Dryden limits the scope of Jonson's allusions.(20) Mac Flecknoe requires as its referent a confident, invulnerable Jonson, who is drafted into the satire as a stable transferential object for Dryden's filial devotion. Furthermore, for Dryden, Father Ben's mountain belly was earned. Unlike Shadwell, Jonson produced volumes of classic art; thus his body is commensurate with a record of sustained productivity.

Jonsonian literary standards are flouted and perverted in the projects Flecknoe recommends to his son. Mac Flecknoe is advised not to write satire, a toothless mode in his hands, or plays, but to concentrate on anagrams and acrostics. Flecknoe's tutelage of his son in exemplary dullness praises whatever Jonson excoriated and pointedly renounces the genres--tragedy, comedy, satire--in which he achieved his greatest renown.

Thy Tragick Muse gives smiles, thy Comick sleep.

With whate'er gall thou sett'st thy self to write,

Thy inoffensive Satyrs never bite.

In thy fellonious heart, though Venom lies,

It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dyes.

Thy Genius calls thee not to purchase fame

In keen Iambicks, but mild Anagram:

Leave writing Plays, and chuse for thy command

Some peaceful Province in Acrostick Land.

There thou maist wings display and Altars raise,

And torture one poor word Ten thousand ways.

(ll. 198--208)

Ben Jonson inhabits the passage as an offstage arbiter, as Dryden's prototype of the accomplished satirist. The "imputation of sharpnesse," as Jonson acknowledged in his preface to Volpone, hung over his work, until his contemporaries joked that "not my yongest infant but hath come into the world with all his teeth" (BJ 5:18). Mac Flecknoe takes as a given that Jonsonian satire had a full complement of razorsharp teeth; hence Dryden's contempt for "inoffensive Satyrs [that] never bite." Flecknoe hastens to explain that while dullness shares the animus that motivates satire, it must be stupidly good, since it lacks the energy to translate venom into "keen Iambicks."

In Flecknoe's parting remarks the progress of dullness begins to look suspiciously like a retreat. His son's envisioned dominion has shrunk to an already pacified "Province in Acrostick Land," where "one poor word" serves as surrogate for the human subjects dullness would torture with its inantiy; the wings of cultural imperialism have been clipped. But the trifling genres Flecknoe proposes to his son as safe means of contesting the dominance of English wit are not incidental. In his famous "Execration upon Vulcan," Jonson had imagined the puerile exercises that the fire in his library in 1623 should have consumed. Were he in the practice of pumping "for those hard trifles, Anagrams, / ... Acrostichs, and Telestichs, on jumpe names," he exclaims in disgust, "Thou [Vulcan] then hadst had some colour for thy flames, / On such my serious follies" (BJ 8:204, ll. 35--41).(21) Flecknoe is right to warn his pupil against Jonson, whose unbending criteria of excellence would consign their entire enterprise to oblivion.

In Mac Flecknoe, where even the most localized snubs have Jonsonian antecedents,(22) Dryden introduces the idea that strong invited influence can be thought of as a transfusion. The metaphor became increasingly valuable and suggestive to him later as the celebrated translator of Virgil, Juvenal, Persius, Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. In the 1670s, however, Dryden's conception of its possibilities was still tentative. Comparing Jonson's reception of Fletcher to Shadwell's alleged plagiarism of Etherege, Dryden writes:

When did his Muse from Fletcher scenes purloin,

As thou whole Eth'ridg dost transfuse to thine?

But so transfus'd as Oyl on Waters flow,

His always floats above, thine sinks below.

(Works 2:59, ll. 183--86) The oscillation between the assumptions that literature is the property of its author alone and, conversely, that texts, like blood, can be exchanged signals a rupture in logic. Each model in Mac Flecknoe is the bearer of a distinct ideology. A proprietary conception of authorship locates transgression in the unauthorized borrowing, or theft, of a writer's work. It is concerned with the delineation and regulation of boundaries; copyright laws and charges of plagiarism, both seventeenth-century innovations, translate the metaphor into cultural practice. The model Dryden posits through metaphorizing transfusion, however, accents the process of transmitting influence as well as the needs of the receiver. In their texts writers extend their successors, contemporary and future, a lifeline to a rich cultural present or past.

In practice, of course, the conflicting emphases of these rival models could be blurred. In Dramatick Poesie Dryden had resorted to paradox to transform the proprietary paradigm of authorship into a more supple model that accommodated the receiver. Neander celebrates Ben Jonson's translations of the classical writers in his tragedies: "He borrow'd boldly from them.... But he has done his Robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any Law" (Works 17:57). Jonson had provided the readers of his quarto editions of Sejanus (1605) and Catiline (1611) with meticulous marginal glosses documenting his historical and literary sources; unlike Shadwell, then, he never pilfers from other writers. Indeed, he improves on his sources: "With the spoils of these Writers, he so represents old Rome to us ... that if one of their Poets had written either of his Tragedies, we had seen less of it then in him" (Works 17:57--58). Still, despite Dryden's ingenuity in Dramatick Poesie, an aura of transgression against the classical authors clung to Jonson's plunderings. The proprietary paradigm of authorship had limited utility for a writer invested in theorizing the reception of influence. Mac Flecknoe is thus a transitional text that operates out of a necessary double standard. Shadwell is judged by the rigor of the law, which Dryden waves off when he turns to Jonson, or to himself. The model of transfusion, ultimately subsumed in a trope of inheritance, offers Dryden more latitude. By 1700 it has replaced the paradigm of the 1668 essay altogether.

Transfusion emerges as the dominant metaphor of the preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1697--1700), which revolves, as does Mac Flecknoe, around the construction of literary genealogies. From the observation that writers have their "lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families," Dryden segues to Spenser, who, he claims, "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."(23) But Dryden's Pythagorean leap of faith, so out of step with his customary skepticism, intends no irony. Dryden approves Spenser's credulousness and subsequently applies the fantasy of direct descent to Milton, to Waller, and finally to himself in his translations of the Fables.

The preface imagines the body of the successor as host for the soul of the forebear, whose works and values the successor disseminates, either directly (as in translation) or through his own writing (as in imitation). Thus the receiver of influence is at once his poetic father's greatest imitator and his legitimate heir. In fact he discovers his father, but the fantasy argues, on the contrary, that he is "begotten by him." In the essay Dryden has it both ways. Speaking of his affinity to Chaucer, he declares, "I found I had a Soul congenial to his, and that I had been conversant in the same Studies" (533). The example of Spenser projects a more fantastic and thus a more revelatory version of how intensely invited influence is experienced by the successor to a master poet. Dryden never presents his reconceived model of influence as a fully reasoned case. Rather, his procedure in Fables is to build on the metaphor's suggestiveness, so that even Spenser only "insinuates" his direct descent from Chaucer. Milton has "acknowledg'd to me, that Spencer was his Original" (521), Dryden continues, as though disclosing a private confession. The preface itself is insinuating, credulous and precise by turns, in part because Dryden is treating a private fantasy of his own and other poets, but also because his ingrained sense of decorum curbs his explicitness.

Later Dryden admits some tensions in the transmission of influence and texts across generations. He readily grants that "something must be lost in all Transfusion, that is, in all Translations" (534), since cultural and linguistic changes necessarily impinge on what can and should be preserved of a writer's works. The son who receives a donation from his precursor is obliged to "perpetuate his Memory, or at least refresh it, amongst [his] ... Countrymen" (535). As heir, the son simultaneously negotiates other legitimate claims on him: the demands of his own readers or the differential investments of his own age. Attachment to the father is balanced by concerns to which Dryden is sensibly alert, and their dyadic relationship exists in a world jostled by competing loyalties, commitments, and pressures, whether they are construed as cultural and linguistic exigencies or as changed political and economic conditions. Such admissions temper Dryden's metaphoric flights in the essay.

To dismiss Dryden's concept of the transfused soul as mere fancy, however, would be to mistake its powerful allure for him. He is advancing his model of reception after more than a decade of working in close psychic collaboration with other poets. That Dryden devoted so much of his energies to translation during the 1690s has been understood as a compensatory acknowledgment of "the anxiety of influence" or "the burden of the past."(24) Yet Dryden had always been drawn to collaborations. All for Love (1678) and Troilus and Cressida (1679) are professedly written under the sign of Shakespeare; Oedipus (1679) derives from Sophocles via Corneille. The translations of the 1690s are likewise collaborative in spirit and in praxis: Fables (1700), the Aeneid (1697), and the poems of Juvenal and Persius (1693), the Roman satirists Dryden especially cherished, in a commissioned volume undertaken with "Several other Eminent Hands" he sought to promote (Works 4:2), among them Congreve, whom he would shortly nominate as his own successor.

Whether the collaborator was a contemporary, a son, or a precursor, transfusion proved an apt model for Dryden, whose success as a translator was an outgrowth of his uncanny receptivity to influence over his long career. Fables's preface is its logical culmination. The essay represents an originative contribution to English translation and reception theory. In keeping with the spirit of the preface, Dryden has not "ty'd" himself "to a Literal Translation" of Chaucer but has "added somewhat of my own.... Another Poet, in another Age, may take the same Liberty with my Writings" (535). The presumption is that the successor works with the precursor, reviving and promoting his poetry and values and transcribing his "secret Graces" (Works 4:7), revealed to the son through immersive study, into his own texts. But the interaction is genuinely collaborative. The precursor donates his works, and the successor adds "somewhat" of his own to them.

The allusions to Jonson's works in Mac Flecknoe realize Dryden's ideal of transfusion. Jonson's satiric voice and consonant aesthetic standards are conveyed to us through the resistant medium of the latterday poetaster, Richard Flecknoe, but Flecknoe's disavowal of any kinship to Jonson aligns Dryden all the more surely to the legacy Flecknoe disparages. The transmigration of Jonson's texts to the satire establishes him as its presiding genius. Dryden may not subscribe to Pythagorean doctrine personally, but his satire, as fable, does. Just as Flecknoe continues the lineage of dullness by begetting Shadwell, Jonson transfuses himself into his witty offspring, cowriting Dryden's first triumphant satire.

From the perspective of Thomas Shadwell, Mac Flecknoe's most invested contemporary reader, the satire resembled less a transfusion from Jonson than a bloodletting. Shadwell had made a career out of his conspicuous reverence for Jonson. The Virtuoso (1676), dedicated to William, Duke of Newcastle, Jonson's Caroline patron and now Shadwell's, typifies the fulsome homage Shadwell paid to his progenitor: "Mr. Jonson ... was incomparably the best dramatic poet that ever was, or, I believe, ever will be; and I had rather be author of one scene in his best comedies than of any play this age has produced."(25) There were other indices of Shadwell's fixation. Pepys observed him at a revival of Epicoene, where his ebullient presence in the audience became an event in its own right. The diary entry for 19 September 1668 reads: "And then to the King's playhouse and there saw The Silent Woman; the best comedy, I think, that was ever wrote; and sitting by Shadwell the poet, he was big with admiration of it."(26) Pepys intuited, as did others, the histrionic quality of Shadwell's devotion to Jonson, his need to advertise or publish his affiliation to the inventor of humours comedy. In part a shrewd careerist attachment but primarily an acknowledgment of Jonson's near-totalizing influence on him, Shadwell's posture in print and in person left him vulnerable to quips, and to the ruthless wit of Mac Flecknoe.

As Corman has shown, Shadwell too was an accomplished assimilator of Jonson's Workes, an intelligent, successful playwright committed to reviving the tradition of humours comedy. Dryden's anticipatory pleasure in writing the satire derives from his certainty that Shadwell, painfully extruded from the Tribe of Ben, will recognize, resent, and, against his own interests, admire the barbs to which his stolid fictional surrogate, Mac Flecknoe, remains oblivious: insinuated affinities to Don Surly's bad-faith reception of Jonson, gibes at stillborn "labours," jokes about "mountain bellies." Shadwell will place anagrams and acrostics in their proper context. Dryden's gratification requires a rival whose absorption in Jonson's canon can be played off against the satire's quite fabulous attribution of insensate dullness to his fictional self. Dryden, then, summons the precursor's distinctive voice not only to venerate Jonson but to oust Shadwell from the space Dryden intends to occupy alone. The Jonsonian allusions are especially mortifying to Shadwell because the author he most admires seems to participate in repudiating his sonship and spurning his devotion.

The comic revenge Dryden accomplished in Mac Flecknoe thus anticipated his Discourse of Satire (1693), in which he celebrated the genre's amoral aesthetic: "There is ... a vast difference betwixt 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. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's Wife said of his Servant, of a plain piece of Work, a bare Hanging; but to make a Malefactor die sweetly, was only belonging to her Husband. I wish I cou'd apply it to my self, if the Reader wou'd be kind enough to think it belongs to me" (Works 4:71). Elsewhere in the Discourse Dryden acknowledges neoclassical humanist defenses of the aims of satire: its professed targeting of species rather than individuals, its ethical responsibilities. Yet when he proposes a model for himself, he shelves classic apologias in favor of the satirist's pride in his vocation. For Dryden, the satirist has an intimate, if ritualized, relationship with his human victim; but satire's violences are witty. The head, separated from the trunk but left in place, stands as a mordant monument to a lost connection. The victim's features are not marred; still, a witty, indecent transmutation has taken place. When the target of a published satire survives to read the work, he becomes the mortified spectator of his reconstituted self. "'Tis not bloody" (Works 4:71), Dryden reassures his readers, yet he never backs away from the premise that the art of satire is lethal.

The publication history of Mac Flecknoe suggests that Dryden found it easier to gratify his original impulse to cut Shadwell's lifeline to Jonson than to countenance the impact of his poem on its human subject. Dryden did not publish it until 1682, six to seven years after its composition, when his hand had been forced by the release of a corrupt, unauthorized version. Once the poem was in print, he could make no reparation to Shadwell beyond a face-saving denial that he had written it. Not until the Discourse in 1693, a year after Shadwell's death, did Dryden finally take credit for it. "We have no Moral right on the Reputation of other men," he wrote even then. "'Tis taking from them, what we cannot restore to them" (Works 4:59). The tug of compunction Dryden felt goes far to explain the delayed publication of Mac Flecknoe. A fine stroke can be admired by "the malicious World" (Works 4:71)--indeed, to stretch a point, by the satirized subject who is absolutely secure in his self-worth--but a damaged reputation is its more likely consequence. While the head stays in place, the neck below suffers the permanent impress of the satirist's ax.

Mac Flecknoe's publication closed a significant chapter in Ben Jonson's Restoration fortunes, weakening Shadwell's claim on his estate and inaugurating Dryden's career as a satirist. Dryden made good his boast of surpassing his peers' understanding of Jonson. Moreover, he handed down to the next generation his desire for privileged access to the precursor. In the 1690s Dryden recast Mac Flecknoe's succession fantasy into his moving tribute "To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve" (Works 4:432--34), a poem laced with references to Jonson's late odes.(27) Rather than found a Tribe of John, Dryden forestalled a repetition of the hard-fought disputes among Jonson's literary progeny by confirming his beloved son himself.

(1)Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson: Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945).

(2)On Jonson's invention of authorship see especially Richard C. Newton, "Jonson and the (Re-) Invention of the Book," in Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 31--58; Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Joseph Loewenstein, "The Script in the Marketplace," Representations 12 (1985): 101--14; Timothy Murray, Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23--93; and Sara van den Berg, "Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship," in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), 111--37.

(3)An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 17:63; hereafter cited as Works.

(4)Markley, Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 56.

(5)Miner, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 5.

(6)Exemplary studies in this mode include Ilona Bell, "Circular Strategies and Structures in Jonson and Herbert"; Michael P. Parker, "To my friend G. N. from Wrest': Carew's Secular Masque"; and John T. Shawcross, "Vaughan's 'Amoret' Poems: A Jonsonian Sequence," in Classic and Cavalier, 157--214; Renee Hannaford, "Express'd by mee': Carew on Donne and Jonson," Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 61--79; Ann Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick's Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 95--113; and Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), which treats Cartwright's tributes to Jonson (46--88). On Jonsonus Virbius, the collection of commissioned elegies published shortly after Jonson's death in 1637, see Robert Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburgh, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 185--91. Earl Miner's Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971) remains a classic study in the field.

(7)Corman, "Thomas Shadwell and the Jonsonian Comedy of the Restoration," in From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama, ed. Robert Markley and Laurie Finke (Cleveland: Bellflower, 1984), 127--52.

(8)Donaldson, "Fathers and Sons: Jonson, Dryden, and Mac Flecknoe," Southern Review 18 (1985): 323--25.

(9)"To the Reader," in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925--52), 8:27; hereafter cited as BJ. I have normalized i/j and u/v. In Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), Michael McCanles emphasizes the centrality of Epigrammes 1 to Jonson's project of constructing his ideal readership (3--4).

(10)David Kramer treats Dryden's poetics of appropriation in relation to rival French dramatists, especially Corneille, in "Onely Victory in Him: The Imperial Dryden," in Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers, ed. Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55--78.

(11)Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 164.

(12)On Dryden's quarrel with Sir Robert Howard see H. J. Oliver, Sir Robert Howard (1626--1698) (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), 88--120; and Robert D. Hume, Dryden's Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), 40--42.

(13)Ravenscroft, "To the Author of the New Utopia," quoted by D. H. Craig, Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, 1599--1798 (London: Routledge, 1990), 293--94. Craig's impresive volume both reinforces and extends G. E. Bentley's originative study of Jonson's reception in ways that should stimulate a reappraisal of Restoration and eighteenth-century writers' engagements with him.

(14)Flecknoe, Love's Kingdom: A Pastoral Trage-Comedy with a Short Treatise of the English Stage, preface by Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1973), n.p.

(15)Flecknoe, "Former Playes and Poets Vindicated," in Epigrams: Of All Sorts, Made at SEVERAL TIMES, on Several Occasions, in Early Career, 1668 to 1671, vol. 1 of Drydeniana (New York: Garland, 1975), 51.

(16)Eliot, "Ben Jonson," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1694), 127.

(17)Seidel, Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 11. My own understanding of satire has been shaped both by Seidel's study and by its precursors, Alvin Kernan's Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1976) and Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).

(18)Earl Miner, Dryden's Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 79.

(19)In "Fathers and Sons," Ian Donaldson observes that "in Mac Flecknoe, Dryden implies that Shadwell ... prides himself upon those very outward forms of which Joson had such mistrust: upon the 'mountaine belly' which Shadwell naively supposed authenticated his kinship with Jonson" (320--21).

(20)On Jonson's preoccupation with his body in The Under-wood see Jennifer Brady, "'Noe fault, but Life': Jonson's Folio as Monument and Barrier," in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, esp. 195--201.

(21)George Puttenham anticipates Jonson's and later Dryden's reaction to a steady diet of acrostics and anagrams: "When I wrate of these devices, I smiled with my selfe, thinking that the readers would doe so to[o], and many of them say, that such trifles as these might well have bene spared, considering the world is full inough of them, and that it is pitie mens heades should be fedde with such vanities as are to none edification nor instruction, either of morall vertue, or otherwise behooffull for the common wealth, to whose service (say they) we are all borne, and not to fill and replenish a whole world full of idle toyes" (The Arte of English Poesie, intro. Baxter Hathaway [Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970], 124). The grandiose dream of a whole world replenished with "idle toyes" defines the mission of dullness as it is conceived in Mac Flecknoe. One concern that Puttenham airs in exploring the limitations of shaped poems and other forced plays on words is that late Elizabethan England had already been surfeited with them; arguably, they were already hackneyed by 1589. Jonson reinscribes the more substantive objection, that they are "to none edification nor instruction," in his "Execration," where he wills the flimsy devices to Vulcan.

(22)"Let Virtuoso's in five years be Writ" (1. 149) recalls that Volpone, Jonson's virtuoso comedy, was written in five weeks; "do not labour to be dull" (1, 166) evokes Jonson's fetishizing of artistic labor. One implication of this study, as of Ian Donaldson's, is that Mac Flecknoe needs a reediting that documents Dryden's allusions to Jonson's texts as carefully as Restoration scholars have already glossed his allusions to Virgil, Milton, and Cowley.

(23)The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 521.

(24)Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); W. J. Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

(25)Shadwell, "To the Most Illustrious Prince, William, Duke of Newcastle, Etc.," in The Virtuoso, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Sturat Rodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 5.

(26)The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970--83), 9:310. On Epicoene's reception see A. H. de Quehen, "The Silent Woman in the Restoration," in Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett, ed. H. B. de Groot and A. Leggatt (Calgary, Alta.: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 137--46.

(27)See Jennifer Brady, "Dryden and Negotiations of Literary Succession and Precession," in Literary Transmission and Authority, 27--54.