Eighteenth-Century Responses to Dryden's Fables

Implicit in much recent critical attention to Dryden's translations is a sense of restoring these works to the centrality within Dryden's œuvre that readers accorded them during the century and more following his death in 1700. Evidence that eighteenth-century readers thought at least as highly of Dryden's translations as of his earlier satiric and public poems is plentiful, given the frequency with which all aspects of hiswork are quoted and discussed in commentaries, novels, plays, and poems.¹ Within this mass of material, the present essay will look atsome necessarily selective examples of how Dryden's last collection of translations (and some original poems), the FablesAncient and Modern of 1700, functions as a reference point in the works of other writers. Frequent citation of the words of one of the most popular and widely read of recent English writers in the decades following his death is, of course, only to be expected; my interest lies rather in those instances where there is a marked engagement with the Fables within a critical or creative work. On such occasions the particular use made of Dryden's words, and an awareness of their provenance, will be significant for the reader of their new setting. However, whereas in some instances the interweaving of Drydenian allusions shows great sophistication, in others, as is so often the case with self-conscious literary imitations, the sense of homage tends to undermine the independence of the later work.

The present discussion concentrates on some of the most popular and remarked upon of the Fables: reworkings of tales by Chaucer (Palamon and Arcite) and Boccaccio (Sigismonda and Guiscardo and Cymon and Iphigenia), and the collection's most significant original poem, Alexander's Feast. This provides a way of suggesting something of the breadth of the responses to the volume throughout the century, which are too disparate and wide-ranging for the scope of a single essay. This group of poems is, however, representative: in all critical opinion that attached itself to the Fables from their publication to the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is of great significance that much ofthe praise for the Fables was given to Dryden's versions of Chaucer and Boccaccio for their markedly successful individuality; these were not, to put it another way, seen merely as new translations of the originals, but as works which in their own right added to the stock of emotional and intellectual reference points for future writers. This is prefigured by the glowing praise of Jabez Hughes, in a poem (written c.1707) describing his response to the Fables, in which Hughes celebrates the fecundity of Dryden's imagination at length, seeing this collection as the greatest of his achievements.² His summaries of individual poems are fervently approbative, for instance when rhetorically asking women readershow they are emotionally affected by the action of Palamon and Arcite, Dryden's reworking of The Knight's Tale:

Say, what sweet Transports and complacent Joy Rise in your Bosoms, and your Soul employ, When Royal Emily the tuneful Bard Paints in his Song, and makes the rich Reward Of Knightly Arms in costly Lists array'd, The World at once contending for the Maid.

The modern reader who finds Hughes' view of gender relations somewhat uncomplicated would have that impression confirmed by the praise of Sigismonda and Guiscardo, from the Decameron:

How nobly great do's Sigismonda shine, With constant Faith, and Courage Masculine! No Menaces cou'd bend her Mind to fear, But for her Love she dies without a Tear.

As we shall see, this was by no means an untypical response, in that the vigour and determination of Sigismonda (though not always described as manly bravery) made her story one of the most frequently referenced of the Fables. For another work taken from Boccaccio, Cymon and Iphigenia, Hughes' admiration is fulsome even if the story is simplified:

There Iphigenia, with her radiant Eyes, As the bright Sun illuminates the Skies, In clouded Cymon chearful Day began, Awak'd the sleeping Soul, and charm'd him into Man. The pleasing Legends...