Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak (review)

306 enemies, he is clearly a ‘‘dangerous writer ’’ in his ‘‘cold-blooded intensity.’’ For evidence of this sadistic side, Mr. Higgins comes up disconcertingly with a great many evil thoughts and expressions . For example, in the Partridge papers , often seen as a lighthearted sally against a fool and a parasite, the hoax becomes an assassination: ‘‘Swift’s meticulously premeditated satiric kill.’’ A Modest Proposal, as one might predict, goes deep into ‘‘the black humour of satiric fantasy . . . [and] suggests the unspeakable and unimaginable horror of Hanoverian Ireland.’’ Not a liberal document establishing the poor as innocent victims deserving our sympathy, this ‘‘jeremiad’’ wreaks havoc in every direction , high and low. Ever the misanthropist in Timon’s manner (notwithstanding Swift’s own repudiation of this charge), Gulliver is ‘‘the hidden face of Swift.’’ Mr. Higgins implicitly rejects persona theory by unsuccessfully arguing that historical and extra text remarks support the closeness of Gulliver to Swift. The two merge in the Houyhnhnm plans to exterminate the Yahoos , the human race stripped of façade and manners. ‘‘What modern readers have regarded as the negative aspects or limitations of the Houyhnhnms in fact starkly express the apparent positives of this satire or embody Swift’s didactic positions and personal longings. . . .’’ This is not satire of the Enlightenment’s deification of reason or stoicism. In a neocolonialist and historicist reading, Mr. Higgins adduces Swift’s covert support of the slave trade proposed by the horses. ‘‘Gulliver’s Travels reflects the linguistic habit of silence, occlusion and euphemism on the subject of the slave trade.’’ The evidence for this questionable interpretation involves entering the minds of the average reader of Swift’s time to flesh out the Travels’ code words Swift supposedly used to endorse the Assiento (slave trade). Devoted to the poems, the last chapter does not celebrate the jokey Augustan wit. (Mr. Higgins has nothing to say about the birthday poems to Stella.) On the contrary, the poems ‘‘can be recognized as powerful and idiosyncratic interventions in a contemporary and traditional cultural discourse that was saying that it is probably just as well that the human carcass is covered up.’’ Though mostly devoid of jargon, this relentless and, yes, humorless analysis has forsaken the genial and Rabelaisian Dean. Arthur J. Weitzman Northeastern University Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak. Toronto: Toronto, 2004. Pp. x ⫹ 332. $75. This collection of fifteen essays celebrates the tercentenary of Dryden’s death in 1700. Ms. Lewis and Mr. Novak have divided the essays into two sections: the first involving politics and society; the second, problems of aesthetics (poems, plays, and songs). This division makes good sense. Readers interested in the ‘‘material culture’’that informs Dryden’s satirical poem The Medall can find a fascinating treatment of seventeenthcentury medallions and engravings in the opening essay by Margery Kingsley, ‘‘Dryden and the Consumption of History .’’ Readers interested in Dryden’s preoccupation with heroic-erotic passion can find an illuminating discussion of such matters in the concluding essay by James Turner, ‘‘‘Thy Lovers were all un- 307 true’: Sexual Overreaching in the Heroic Plays and Alexander’s Feast.’’ I single out these two essays to show how carefully and thoughtfully Ms. Lewis and Mr. Novak have arranged their volume so that it reads like a coherent book rather than an anthology of disparate pieces. Enchanted Ground may sound like a whimsical title, but it is serviceable and appropriate. As a governing trope, the image of ‘‘enchantment’’ becomes an ingenious metaphor for the slippery and elusive nature of Dryden’s art, politics, society, and religion. The individual essays all recognize the inherent difficulty of pinning down Dryden—whether it be in his ‘‘protean character’’ of political satirist (David Haley); or in his ‘‘giveand -take, or rather take-and-leave, attitude ’’ toward the literary canon (Cedric Reverand); or in Dryden’s ‘‘practice of adopting other voices . . . when he entered the territory of belief’’ (Steven Zwicker). Several essays clearly break new ground. Blair Hoxby, for example, makes a brilliant argument that heroic dramas like Aureng-Zebe can best be understood as theatrical exercises in ‘‘Baroque Dramaturgy.’’ Richard Kroll relates the action or inaction of All for Love...