Representing Religious Toleration in Dryden's The Hind and the Panther (1687)

This article situates John Dryden's longest original poem, The Hind and the Panther (1687), within the context of the Stuart court's campaign to cultivate support for repealing legislation penalizing religious nonconformity. Reading the poem's representation of a precariously diversified confessional landscape alongside contemporary discussions of religious toleration, I suggest that the work's polemical and formal incongruity be read in the context of the poem's attempts to enable a space for religious expression within the court's tolerationist agenda. The poem's much observed dissonances register the difficulty of generating culturally legitimate forms of communal identity based on religious diversity, as it experiments with various poetic idioms to negotiate the negative affections bred by the practice of toleration. The inconsistent fluctuation between a zealous defense of the Catholic church on the one hand, and extravagant praise for royal toleration on the other, discloses the poem's efforts to script new modes of sociability that can enable and regulate the expression of competing confessional commitments within a collective defined by an entrenched and irremediable pluralism.

Introduction

In April of 1687, James II announced the suspension of existing laws that penalized religious nonconformity and kept Protestant and Catholic recusants from assuming roles in public office. Anticipating widespread opposition to this use of his prerogative power, James, in His Majesty's Gracious Declaration to All his Loving Subjects for Liberty of Conscience (1687), characterizes his legislative repeals as attempts to implement religious toleration and license freedom of conscience in his realm. Affirming his commitment to the protection of dissenting consciences, the king, in his Declaration, posits religious diversity as a fundamental component of his enlightened rule over a stabilized realm. Associating virtuous government with the defence of religious freedom, the king's Declaration announces a break with the kingdom's history of enforcing conformity to a national church, which has only produced the effects of "spoiling trade, depopulating countries, and discouraging strangers."¹ Urging subjects to endorse the royal suspension of legislation penalizing religious deviance, the king's Declaration projects a vision of a prosperous kingdom secured by the collective practice of toleration.

If James II's Declaration licenses the "free Exercise of…religion" and anticipates the public benefits such freedom will bring to his subjects, John Dryden, his Poet Laureate, would present a less idealized and far more complex vision of a nation transformed by the royal indulgence. Published in the fall of 1687 shortly after the court proposed the repeal of the penal laws, The Hind and the Panther presents, on the surface, as a decidedly incoherent response to royal policy. While Dryden's poem ostensibly affirms James's toleration by representing the kingdom allegorically as a formerly savage forest newly tamed and domesticated by a fierce but benevolent lion-monarch, its poetic depiction of religious diversity as a herd of raucous beasts appears to censure rather than celebrate the Declaration's projections of public "peace," "ease" and "glory." Dryden's Catholic narrator, while praising the king's charitable indulgence to his subjects' various confessional loyalties, nevertheless still finds time in the poem to lament the loss of religious uniformity in his native land, provocatively expressing envy for the forms of confessional hegemony procured by the inquisitorial regimes of Italy and Spain: "Oh happy regions, Italy and Spain,/Which never did those monsters entertain!/The Wolf, the Bear, the Boar can there advance/No native claim of just inheritance;/And self-preserving laws, severe in show,/May guard their fences from th'invading foe" (I. 291-296).²

This seemingly indecisive vacillation between endorsing and undermining Stuart toleration constitutes one of the poem's many incongruities, which have established its reputation as an indecisive and inconsistent piece, marred by "too many conflicting purposes."³ In one of the earliest published responses to The Hind and the Panther, Thomas Heyrick launched what was to become a familiar charge of shiftiness against the poem, while locating the reasons for its evasive inconsistencies in Dryden's unscrupulous opportunism, which, in its sacrifice of "Conscience, Honesty, [and] Religion," can only produce an unprincipled, half...