Dryden's "Cymon and Iphigenia": The "Vigour of the Worse" Prevailing

In the spring of 1698, Jeremy Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, sparking off a long and furious pamphlet controversy that involved many of England's most important contemporary literary figures. Most of those who were directly and ruthlessly attacked by Collier responded in kind. But one figure who seemed-to the contemporary scene as well as to later literary historians-largely muted in his response was John Dryden. This is certainly surprising; Dryden was more than capable of a spirited response, as his satires testify to. Furthermore, Dryden was the most sustained object of Collier's moralistic diatribe. The most common answer to this muted response has always been that Dryden felt chastened by Collier's arguments and did on occasion, with many qualifications, acknowledge their justness. But I think other reasons should be considered when assessing the nature of Dryden's response. First is the general prudence that Dryden felt he had to practice in an England where he was a political outcast, where Collier was so obviously applauded by those in power, and where even someone like Congreve, never the prop of the former political regime that Dryden had been, could find himself before the courts because of the hysteria Collier was stirring up.¹ But second and more importantly, Dryden did not just see the attack as a personal one; therefore, his response, unlike so many of the others' in the pamphlet war, was more rational and involved, less obvious, and more dangerously political. To Dryden, Collier represented something much larger than just a somewhat deluded preacher gaining fame at his expense. He was a part of the cultural world Dryden had spent all of his energies denouncing since its ascendancy after the Glorious Revolution. Yet Dryden's most elaborate and direct ideological attack against Collier has gone largely unnoticed as such because it is presented in the more subtle, allegorical form of his translation of "Cymon and Iphigenia" in Fables Ancient and Modern. In "Cymon and Iphigenia," Collier, like William throughout Fables, is made an icon of a degenerate cultural regime that Dryden portrays himself heroically opposing. In this final story in Fables, Dryden fuses the figures of Collier and William to signal their dual threat to the world that Dryden portrays as a meaningful, moral one overrun by the forces that Dryden in "To Sir Godfrey Kneller" calls William's "stupid Military State."²

The general critical reaction, both past and present, to Dryden's response to Collier is best summed up by Samuel Johnson's remark: "Dryden's conscience or his prudence, angry as he was, withheld him from the conflict."³ Dryden's references to the debate have also been typified as the efforts of "an overmatched general who is unwilling to surrender though he is conscious of his inability to make an effectual resistance." ⁴ But the effectiveness of the resistance depends upon what you think he was trying to resist. Critics have been overly preoccupied with the concessions Dryden makes to Collier in terms of the lewdness of some of his own performances, for this is a minor part of the issue for Dryden.

After Collier's first volley, Dryden made a brief response in June of 1698, but only indirectly: it appeared in his verse epistle addressed to Peter Motteaux and attached to that author's Beauty in Distress. A Tragedy. Dryden demonstrates here a pattern that he will follow in all references to this controversy in the future. His argument will deflect the petty concerns of "profaneness" or some "immodesty," charges Dryden had already made against himself years earlier in "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew"(1686),⁵ and will focus on what the controversy says about the culture at large. Here, as in Fables, Dryden admits some guilt: "What I have loosely or profanely writ / Let them to Fires (their due desert) commit."⁶ Dryden's anger is leveled less at the particular admonishers of the stage and more at the culture that permits them to flourish; it...