Notes Toward a Fertility Theory of the Eighteenth-Century Canon

Squabbles about the canon are no more about the canon than tempests in teapots are about tea. In February, Richard Terry hoped to show that there was a recognized, if fluid, English canon from the later sixteenth century. Such canon formation, he argued, needed neither a separate category of creative literature, nor a new concept of aesthetics, nor institutional dissemination through academic authority. Thomas P. Miller was troubled by that view, which is inconsistent with his theory of literature as a battleground of political powers. For him, the real issue is “whether the canon is to be conceived as a socially contested mode of cultural reproduction” that helps “transform literary studies into cultural studies.” Clifford Siskin praised Terry’s “important contribution,” but mocked its presumably unargued assumptions, unmade arguments, and prescriptive judgments ignorant of “the high stakes” at issue: “how we make use of the past few decades of literary labor that have both expanded canons, as with the work of women and others previously excluded, and recovered/produced new ones.” Border guards protect their territory from the wrong sort. They cannot, however, “refute” Terry any more than Aristotle can “refute” Plato, for whatever the nominal engagement, they live in different realms of critical discourse with different assumptions, different questions, and consequently different answers.

Anyone hoping to bridge those differences probably has been inhaling a certain weed while sitting in the noonday sun and sipping something other than iced-tea. Though I am lamentably innocent of such amusements, I nonetheless offer an encapsulated reconciliation service with three hypotheses, none of which I can fully test in limited space. ¹

There was indeed the beginning of canon formation in later sixteenth-century England; but it was defensive, parochial, and largely based on national aspirations rather than on broadly recognized distinction across genres. The civil wars and interregnum retarded the growth of great literature and debates about it, but the political Restoration evoked a literary restoration well exemplified in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). There modern England vies with its Renaissance inheritance, modern classicized France, and ancient Greece.

Those rivals suggest the essential mode of proceeding in the most visible and important aspect of pioneering canon-makers—the creation of major literary works able to transcend French and at the least equal classical efforts. This required confidence or at least cheek, competition, achievement, and an evolving but recognized national taste and character. In drama that process probably begins about the time of Dryden’s Essay, is complicated through the rigorous but narrow criticism of men like Rymer and Dennis, but essentially is settled by Johnson’s “Drury Lane Prologue” (1747) and Preface to his Shakespeare (1765). In the prologue, Shakespeare’s nature is superior to Jonson’s art and can rejuvenate the English theatre. In the preface, Shakespeare is the national dramatist who has become the “ancient” against whom the moderns are judged. By then the burgeoning accomplishments in other genres allowed eighteenth-century readers to set Shakespeare against Sophocles, Dryden and Pope against Horace and Juvenal, Cowley and Gray against Pindar, Thomson against Theocritus, Clarendon against Tacitus and, once Addison initiated the cleansing process, Milton against Homer and Virgil. New or apparently new genres like the novel, the intellectual prose satire in A Tale of a Tub (1704), and empirical or spiritual biographies also enlarged the national ego through crops from fields the ancients had not plowed. One reason for anger at Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81) was that his denigration of Milton’s “Lycidas” and Gray’s odes threatened the balance of that scale.

Establishment of the canon depended upon at least two other matters. One was disposable income within the growing literate classes. Dryden long begged uncertain aristocratic patronage; Pope grew rich on Homer. Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) and Lives of the Poets, not to mention other anthologies of poems, plays, and fiction, were privately financed commercial projects; of course, so were Fielding’s and Richardson’s novels, whose successes yet further encouraged entrepreneurial booksellers to publish more fiction. ²

The second matter is the unrepealable law of...