Otherworldly Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays by Jack M. Armistead (review)

Mr. Armistead provides archaeologically close readings of numerous works, from the Heroique Stanzas (1659) to The Secular Masque (1700). We are left with a couple of impressions. First, we cannot help but recognize Dryden's recurrent fascination with the occult: angels, devils, dreams, potions, magic wands, tumid rivers that portend danger, "the Sacred Tetragrammaton." J. K. Rowling has nothing on Dryden. Second, and equally clear, is the extent to which critics have neglected Dryden's "persistent otherworldliness," preferring instead to cast him as a poet of the here and now, and, at heart, a pragmatist. Mr. Armistead interrupts such worldly narratives.

The book's primary theme is prophecy. More specifically, Mr. Armistead argues that Dryden saw himself as a prophetic writer before James II's retreat and a notso-prophetic one afterward. The early Dryden, we discover, practiced a "visionary empiricism" by which he foretold Stuart glory, sometimes in his own voice, as in "Annus Mirabilis" (1667), and sometimes through charmed characters such as the wizard-priest Serapion in All for Love (1677), or the blind seer Tiresias in Oedipus: A Tragedy (1678). In either case, he fashioned himself as a poet-prophet and imagined his art to be of the diviner's sort. But once he lost his post as poet laureate and historiographer royal, once the Glorious Revolution contradicted his inner empirical daemon, Dryden, Mr. Armistead suggests, "gave up his pretentions to prophecy," no longer presuming to have "privileged intelligence from Heaven." More generally, the argument goes, Dryden relegated the very notion of the poet-prophet to a bygone era, an idea for the curio cabinet, so to speak, not proto-Enlightenment England. Of course, the older Dryden continued to believe in the supernatural, and he continued to marshal occult imagery to great effect, as in King Arthur (1691), for instance, but Mr. Armistead nonetheless detects in the later works "a widening gap between heaven and earth."

Part of Mr. Armistead's thesis is surely correct. Dryden lost confidence in the visionary empiricism of his youth, which is not lamentable. As a prophetic method, visionary empiricism ranks just below the Magic 8-Ball and far beneath tarot cards and tea leaves; with it, Dryden accomplished virtually nothing in the realm of prophecy, except to flatter Charles II and impugn enemies of the state as false luminaries. Indeed, Dryden's disillusionment should be seen positively, the first step on a journey toward real prophecy, which is why I would have phrased things differently from Mr. Armistead. It is more apt to say that the older Dryden saw himself as a bad prophet before his exile, if prophetic at all, and a better one later, due largely to a deepening in his philosophy of history. The younger Dryden saw the Stuart regime's collapse as a total catastrophe, an event that paralleled—in miniature form—Rome's sack by the Visigoths. On the contrary, post-Glorious-Revolution Dryden developed a richer view of God's providence, a genuinely prophetic view consistent with Augustine's perspective in The City of God, where Rome's destruction is a consequence of divine purpose, not an interruption of it, and certainly not a thwarting of it. Unencumbered by the demands of political advantage, the mature Dryden apprehended this Augustinian perspective, and, at that moment, began to write prophetically, perhaps for the first time.

Still, nobody to date—as far as I know—has used any of Dryden's works for bibliomancy, as in casting the Virgilian lot. Dryden is a modern, which Swift noted in The Battle of the Books. His works do not fit comfortably alongside the ancients. But in the older Dryden we do find a temperament better suited for prophecy and mystery. Consider, for example, the Catholic Dryden contra Archbishop Tillotson, who speculated that "hocus pocus" was in all probability "a corruption of the hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of...