Restoration Poetry and the Failure of English Tangier

My essay investigates three poems that respond to the Moroccan siege of English Tangier in 1680 and its aftermath: an anonymous satire, “Rochester’s Farewell”; a broadside ballad, “The English Courage Undaunted”; and John Dryden’s “Epitaph on Sir Palmes Fairborne.” These poems place us as readers in a different position than other verse of the Restoration that addresses colonial themes because we know that English Tangier failed in 1684, soon after they were published. We need to take account of such colonial disasters and the literature they spawned in order to provide a fuller understanding of empire and literature in the Restoration period.