The Role of Stylistics in Attribution: Thomas Shadwell and "The Giants' War"

The most far-reaching influence of the periphery on seventeenth-century British culture was the provision of new social drugs. One aspect of the well-documented dispute between Thomas Shadwell and John Dryden was that it was between two drug cultures: the old, native booze culture and the new, exotic coffee culture. The booze culture was conducted in taverns, the coffee culture in coffeehouses; the booze culture generally talked itself out in circumstances that left only fuzzy memories of the brilliance of the night before, the coffee culture encouraged sharp, focused, memorable, caffeinated intellectual sparring between participants who had not been habituated to the drug since childhood; the booze culture rose in literature at best to the group-composed lampoon or drinking song, the coffee culture was prolific in pamphlets and formal verse satires, many of them actually written at corner tables and put straight into circulation by being quietly left at other tables. Dryden, writing from the upstairs room at Will’s Coffee House in Russell Street, is relentless in identifying his foe, Shadwell, with the booze culture at its lowest level, the beer culture.

Shadwell was not like Charles Cotton in starting the day on ale and finishing it with wine: he was a beer man all the way. ¹ Nell Gwynn wrote in 1678: “My lord of Dorscit apiers wouse in thre munthe, for he drinkes aile with Shadwell and Mr. Haris at the Dukes house all day long.” ² So Shadwell was not just a beer drinker but one who seduced wine drinkers to his pusillanimous beverage. The central image of Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe” has him as a “Tun of Man” with only a “Kilderkin of wit” grasping a “mighty Mug of potent Ale” (ll. 195–96 & 121). ³ In the second part of Absalom and Achitophel he is

Og, from a Treason Tavern rolling home. Round as a Globe, as Liquor’d ev’ry chink, Goodly and Great he Sayls behind his link...

(ll. 459–61)

In return Shadwell has a coffee story about Dryden:

You may know he is no concealer of himself, by a story which he tells of himself, viz. That (when he came first to Town) being a young raw fellow of seven and Twenty, as he call’d himself when he told the story, he frequenting but one Coffee-house, the Woman (it seems finding him out) put Coffee upon him for Chocolate, and made him pay three pence a dish for two years together: till at length, by what providence I know not, he discovered the Cheat. ⁴

Both coffee and the culture of consumption that it created were innovations of Dryden’s own generation. Shakespeare never tasted the stuff in his life, nor tea nor chocolate; but its effect is everywhere to be seen in the literature of the Restoration.

Even Shadwell did not escape the effect of the drug-soaked periphery, however. While wedded to beer he was also bigamously affianced to opium, the first English author whom we can confidently identify as a member of the hard-drug culture. One effect of opium is to produce amazing visions, which is one reason for our connecting Shadwell with “Some Passages preceding the Giants’ War.” This is a satire that both begins and ends abruptly (like “Kubla Khan”) and which, in between, presents us with a series of extraordinary, extravagant images—of Saturn devouring his children; of Charles II castrated by his brother, the duke of York, and ridden like a horse by the duchess of Portsmouth; of a Britain mysteriously planted with Greek cities; of a duke metamorphosed to a raging giant; of a judge becoming an enormous mouth on which he plays like a drum; of heaven described as a bawdy house in which wigs, cravats, and embroidered vests swim in a sea of brandy. All this is told in a language itself hyperactive, bombarding us with Greek and mock-Greek names, inkhorn terms, bizarre lists, unhinged orations. ⁵

“The Giants’ War” is also a political poem—one that emerged from a tiny window of...