Shadwell in Acrostic Land: The Reversible Meaning of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

S h a d w e ll in A c ro stic L a n d :onmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA T h e R e v e rsib le M e a n in g o fD ry d e n ’s Mac Flecknoe DAVID M. VIETH We need a new way to read Dryden’s M a c F leckn o e. My thesis is that Dryden wrote his poem as a work of the Absurd in the twentieth* century sense, and that we go wrong if we do not read it that way. As an “absurdist” work, M a c F leckn o e was not alone in its time. Among the many analogues are Butler’s H u d ib ra s, Buckingham’s T h e R eh ea r­ sa l, Rochester’s poems, and Swift’s T a le o f a T u b . Nor was this kind of “absurdist” writing new during the Restoration period. Behind “Father F leckn o ” Buckingham’s Mr. Bayes, Swift’s “modern” author, and Rochester’s “fine lady” in A rtem isia to C h lo e stands the figure of Stultitia in the E n co m iu m M o ria e of Erasmus.1 Strange things have happened to M a c F leckn o e during the past three decades. When I began teaching shortly after World War II, M a c F leckn o e virtually taught itself. Students in sophomore survey courses willingly agreed that the poem was very funny and that it demolishes Thomas Shadwell. As the years passed, however, and stu* dents were encouraged to read closely for such things as imagery, they found M a c F leckn o e progressively more difficult and less amus* 503 504 / ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA D A V I D M . V I E T H ing. Today, I encounter entire classes, including graduate students, for whom the poem is a puzzle and not at all funny. My experience is paralleled in the academic publication on M a c F leckn o e during the same years. Between the two World Wars, the relatively meager publication dealt with scholarly matters such as when Dryden wrote M a c F leckn o e and what event or events occa­ sioned the poem.2 After World War II, however, although scholars continued to ask such questions as what Richard Flecknoe might have done to annoy Dryden,3 the really significant effort went into a search for image-patterns and systems of allusions that were assumed to give the poem “organic unity.”4 By the mid-1960s—roughly the time of the unfortunate demise of the New Criticism—the discoveries resulting from this close reading began to engender feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration. The image-patterns and systems of allusions, while undeniably present in Dryden’s text, had multiplied to the point where the poem became almost unreadable and certainly not very amusing.5 This widespread sense of frustration spawned two extreme reac­ tions, which might be termed the “solemn” and the “facetious.” The “solemn” school of criticism has tended to drive New-Critical ap­ proaches into the ground—inventing, for instance, the notion of an “anti-poet” whom Dryden grimly satirizes in M a c F leckn o e as the arch-enemy of true “Augustan” values. The critical enterprise, as these “solemn” people see it, is to turn the anti-poet” upside-down and inside out in order to define Dryden’s positives.6 Not explained is why, if we want to know Dryden’s positives, we do not go to the di­ rect statements of values he was never reluctant to provide in volumi­ nous prefaces and dedications. Taking an opposite tack, the “face­ tious” school has de-emphasized the more intricate imagery and allu­ sions, concentrating instead upon what might be called Dryden’s sewage symbolism, his manure metaphor, or as one critic put it, his “fecal vision.”7 Another critic protests that because we have been mesmerized by “ S h ---- ” (the abbreviation used in the textu s recep tu s), w e have underestimated the true character of Shadwell as a Restora­ tion dramatist. The...