"A Deadly Shibboleth": Speech Acts and Test Acts in The Hind and the Panther

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One peculiarity of Dryden's poetic fable The Hind and the Panther arises from the protracted debate between the two beasts on the niceties of Eucharistic theology. Toward the end of the last section of the poem, the Hind (standing in for the Catholic Church) laments that his:

[ . . . ] Foes a deadly Shibboleth devise:By which unrighteously it was decreed,That none to Trust, or Profit should succeed,Who would not swallow first a poysonous wicked Weed.

(III.1076-9)¹

While drawing attention to the magnitude of these lines by drawing them out with a triplet rhyme and final alexandrine, the Hind alludes to an oath stipulated by the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 as a "deadly Shibboleth," a potentially lethal speech act. These Acts required as a condition for political office and other employment that one repudiate the doctrine of transubstantiation by uttering the words, "I A. B. doe declare That I doe beleive that there is not any Transubstantiation in the Sacrament of the Lords Supper" (5:784, 1673 wording).² For Catholics, this oath of abjuration amounted to a speech act of renouncing faith. Rather than ingest the body of Christ and receive the benefits of the sacrament, under these conditions the oath bearer would be compelled to "swallow first a poysonous wicked Weed."³ Having converted to Catholicism just prior to composing the poem, Dryden would find both his political status and social authority ("Trust, or Profit") in jeopardy, as he could not satisfy the conditions specified by the Test.

Yet apart from indulging in apologia for himself, his church, and his monarch, why does Dryden bring up exhausted theological debates? After all, these fractious positions contributed to a century of civil discord and bloodshed frequently acknowledged in Dryden's poetic and dramatic output.⁴ Moreover, why does Dryden revive the Real Presence/transubstantiation controversy when Catholic James II appeared willing to accommodate both recusant and dissenting positions?⁵ Dryden's longest poem continues to ask these questions at the intersection of literature, theology, and politics. In responding to these prompts, this essay will argue that the signifying power of language is as much at stake for Dryden as are the religious questions in the poem, centered around whether "Sign shall be substance, [or] substance shall be sign" (I.413). Isolating a major point of contention between Anglican and Catholic liturgies of the Eucharist, the phrase highlights a pattern of insides and outsides explored by the poem: ingesting the sacrament versus uttering an oath, representing the spirit or soul within as opposed to referencing the outward shape or body. In the pages to follow, I shall demonstrate how The Hind and the Panther confronts the Anglican position of the metaphorical and interiorized "Real Presence" articulated by Hooker, Andrewes, More, and others—and why the poem activates the Catholic logic of the Eucharist, asserting the literal and physical presence of Christ in the sacrament, in order to avoid the liability and provisionality of the oath as a speech act.

This argument hinges on two of the most salient speech acts in Dryden's era, speech acts that converge in The Hind and the Panther: the oath of abjuration in the Test Acts and the consecration of the host in the Roman Canon. Recounting the Test Acts as the legislative prelude to the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden declares that they were "Design'd to hew th' imperial Cedar down, / Defraud Succession, and dis-heir the Crown" (III.704-5). To be sure, the political resistance the poem exerts against the Test Acts is registered by Dryden's impassioned appeal to a Catholic understanding of the Eucharist in the first part of the poem (I.80-149), yet what for Dryden might have been a recuperative gesture could also have appeared as anachronistic posturing to others. This disjunction helps to explain why little ink has been spilled in addressing the poem's fixation on the substantial nature of the Eucharist, despite the blood spilled disputing the issue in the century and a half preceding the publication of the...