Unit- 2

John Dryden: Mac Flecknoe

2.1 John Dryden: Mac Flecknoe

One of the best recipes for great literature is a setting in which writers and poets mock and antagonize one another. One great example of this is the Restoration period, which lasted from 1660 to about 1698.

Like many eras of literature and art, the Restoration period is strongly influenced by its political context. Much of its literature takes as its subject the turmoil resulting from the political events that had occurred in previous decades, particularly the conflicts between Catholic supporters of a traditional royal government and Protestant supporters of more democratic parliamentary government. After the Protestants defeated the Catholics in the English Civil War, which lasted from 1642 to 1651, a Protestant Parliament ruled England from 1651 to 1660. The violence that took place during this time came to an end once Charles II claimed the throne, and this restoring of a traditional king is what gives the period the title 'Restoration.'

Many writers of Restoration literature believed the violent behavior of the earlier decades was caused by the strict devotion to great political and spiritual ideologies, therefore Restoration writers' mistrust of anyone who held dogmatic positions. This context helps to give details why the poetry and drama of the Restoration age was noticeable by amusing and often persistent satire that redicules conventional position and those who held them. Writers of Restoration also reviled any unprocessed aspects of English civilization and, on the contrary to the Protestant calls for modest living, sturdily embraced generous lifestyles.

One great instance of his significant work is Mac Flecknoe. In the poem, Dryden ridicules Thomas Shadwell, an associate poet with whom Dryden had been acquaintances for several years. Although it's not known precisely what events ended the friendship and began the dispute, Shadwell and Dryden had fairly a few differences, including their theories of literature, their religions, and their politics.

Mac Flecknoe is the supreme small satirical poem in which Dryden has treated Thomas Shadwell with funny disapproval. Mac Flecknoe is considered as personal and literary satire. Dryden reveals Shadwell as a tedious poetaster, a plump man and a plagiarist.

Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel was followed by his other piece The Medal, which was answered by Thomas Shadwell in Medal of John Bayes, a crude satire on Dryden. He decided to retaliate himself on Shadwell and Dryden completely revenged himself by the publication of Mac Flecknoe in 1682.

Mac Flecknoe is the primary considerable mock-heroic poem and Thomas Shadwell is the hero of this epic. The poem exemplas the character of Dryden's satire- the finance of fact at the base, the clever alteration of the satire so as to create faults of the qualities which are allowable, the splendid power and mixture of the verse, and the steady maintenance of a kind of greater disrespect never degenerating into simple railing or losing its dominance in little malice.

The poem opens with Richard Flecknoe's choice to renounce the throne and to discover a praiseworthy descendant. Flecknoe's name has already become a synonym for a fool. The name of his empire is Nonsense. Flecknoe's option falls upon Shadwell. In the midst of his sons, Shadwell is the suitable for he looks like him mainly in tediousness. He by no means diverges into sense. Flecknoe, with parental conceit, dwells on his son's attainments. Shadwell has a 'goodly stuff that fills the eye' He is the master of replication; he is a realistic fan of awful poets like Heywood and Shirley. Even Flecknoe, 'a dunce of more renown than they' is lower to his son. He, consequently, ends that his son, Shadwell is the most awful possible poet and thus merits the crown of flatness. Flecknoe continues his tribute of Shadwell's virtues by referring to his acting as a musician. In all points of view, Flecknoe leads to the end that for "anointed dullness" Shadwell is prepared.

Dryden next explains the place selected by Flecknoe for Shadwell's throne. Considerably, Flecknoe selects "Nursery": a real London theatre for boys and girls to learn drama for this reason. Great poets like Fletcher and Jonson cannot go there. At this point Dekker had one time foretold that a powerful prince who would state an everlasting war in opposition to humor and sense should rule, making uninteresting classics like Psyche, The Miser and The Humorists.

Once Flecknoe has selected Shadwell as his descendant, the news gets a broad publicity. In preference to carpets, there are the remains of deserted poets; bad poets like Ogle by come out from their dirty shops. Flecknoe sits on a throne with Shadwell, and "lambent tediousness plied around his (Shadwell's) face." Poppies overspread Shadwell's temples. At the time of sanctification twelve owls fly over the spot. Shadwell next vows to uphold the tediousness so productively maintained by his father.

Flecknoe crowns Shadwell and bursts into prediction. He appreciates his son and descendant who would rule from Ireland to Barbados. He instructs him to precede unawareness and to encourage tediousness. He still suggests that Shadwell need not work very firm in this effort; fairly, let tediousness come logically to him. He advices him not to reproduce Ben Jonson, but to imitate his father and Ogle by. He predicts that Shadwell would write feeble verse, bad plays and unsuccessful satires. Let Shadwell put his own songs to music and sing them. Before Flecknoe's speech ends, he is sent crashing through a trap door, while his cloak falls on Shadwell.

In Mac Flecknoe, Dryden basically made-up, as far as English literature is apprehensive, the mock-heroic poem. Spenser's Muiopotmos and Drayton's Nymphidia are previous illustrations, but they are merely and pleasant movements of fancy, and do not have the satirical content of the classical mock-heroic. Dryden appears to have formed the mock-heroic or parody as a type of anti- image of the true heroic.

In mock – heroic poem trivial and insignificant things are mockingly treated in a heroic or exalted manner. It is a ridiculous simulation of the heroic, applying recognized style and distinguished language to an unimportant theme. The Rape of the Lock of pope is the masterwork illustration of a mock-heroic poem, but Dryden was his predecessor in more than one sense.  Mac Flecknoe of Dryden is the first great mock-heroic poem in English. This personal satire has all the distinctiveness of a comic, mock-heroic flight of the imagination, the pretentious crowning, by Flecknoe, a prince along with poetasters, of an heir worthy of himself, which will provide Pope with more than one attribute of his Dunciad James.

Mac Flecknoe is Dryden's mock-heroic flight of the imagination in selecting to satirize Shadwell by on behalf of him as the descendant to Flecknoe on the throne of tediousness. Shadwell is elevated to an unsolicited self-esteem that he cannot maintain. It is a make-believe decorum certainly the throne is the throne of tediousness. But so cunningly does Dryden go to work in the heroic phrase that the words continually give us a puzzled feeling of splendor, and it is only after a moment's mirror image that we understand that what appeared to be honor is in fact condemnation of the deadliest kind. The effect on the reader is one of a pleased, but to some extent indistinct, comprehension that Shadwell is being gently taken to pieces. Dryden works here by a humorous alteration of values. Flecknoe's opening speech rests upon a sort of ironical, 'Evil, be thou my good'.

“Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years, Shadwell alone of all my sons is he who stands confined in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense. Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, Strike through and make a lucid interval; But Shadwell's genuine night admits no 'ay, His rising Fogs prevail upon me day.”

This has some of the personality mainly distinguishing of heroic sound, particularly the deficiency of all experiences, the solid persistence on the excellent and the infinite.

The negative prospective of mock-heroic has never been improved illustrated than in Mac Flecknoe. Its annihilation of Richard Flecknoe himself is possibly unreasonable, agreed the self- obliteration of the incompetent, but Mac Flecknoe has efficiently substituted its eponymous hero for the chronological Thomas Shadwell so definitely that the latter's authentic attainments stand for practically nothing. In what way this is done is a ideal instance of how a mock-heroic can work. What is concerned is mistreatment of the heroic manner itself, seen luminously epitomized in the opening lines:

“All humane things are subject to decay, and when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey: This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young tom, and had govern'd long.”

Here is a detail, which might point out the mock- heroic, is the background of Flecknoe’s name closes that of Augustus. Uncertainties about the poet's approach produce when Flecknoe’s empire is derived as one of Verse and Prose', but the influential undercutting of his monarchy is held back until the sixth line:

“Through all the Realms of Non-sense absolute, complete and undisputed power-over a realm of nonsense”

In the beginning Dryden goes on to describe Shadwell with cruel exactness, calling upon the language of epic and shrewdly changing it into the anti-world of mock-heroic:

While Mac Flecknoe proceeds, its special effects are more roughly attained, and its conclusion does not have the reverberation of the climax of the final book of The Dunciad, but Dryden has made a Mac Flecknoe a tribute to dullness. In the poem Flecknoe is lastly dropped through the trapdoor to the 'hell' beneath.

In its unique inclination Mac Flecknoe may be measured as a satire. Dryden also explained it as Varronian satire, a type for which its chief criterion seems to be that it is based on a story of the poet's own creation. But the mainly useful categorization of the poem, as well as the most well-known, is that of the mock-heroic. Faced with the task of making Shadwell ludicrous, Dryden selected as his technique the sarcastic courtesy of the mock-epic.

In Mac Flecknoe the style of many passages is indistinguishable with the refined heroic idiom of Absalom and Achitophel. The comic story that makes "a poem gracefully satirical" consists in using this style, which was soon to establish a ideal intermediate for a poem about the King and heavy matters of State, to explain Shadwell and his unimportant relationships. Nor is Shadwell so unimportant before Dryden gets to work: it is the eminent style that makes him so. A small man is not in himself a ludicrous thing: he becomes ludicrous when he is dressed up in a costume of armor intended for a hero. The differentiation between the significant matters that the style is repeatedly suggestive of and the inquiry of Flecknoe's descendant is so noticeable that a shock of laughter follows.

The reason of such a poem must be made obvious, as amusingly as likely, right from the start. Here Dryden succeeds completely, remarkable the full mock-heroic note with a grave sentential:

“All humane things are subject to decay, and when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey.”

These lines might sketch the opening of a panegyric memorial service funeral song on a regal celebrity; but the track of the trial, which follows denotes the mock-heroic meaning clear of all doubt. Right from the start, too, we have "the numbers of heroic poesy", which highlight by their pleasant-sounding self-respect the absurdity of the matter. The skilled method in which Dryden mingles straight and oblique attack is predominantly clear in Flecknoe's speeches, which are introduced and finished with the elevating of style and make up more than half of the poem.

One of the uniqueness of the heroic idiom which Dryden used to his own intention is the distinguished explanation of time and place. The great occasion is ushered in by a recognized passage:

“Now Empress Fame had publish the renown Of Shadwell's coronation through the Town. Rows'd by report of Fame, the Nations meet, From near Bun-hill and distant Watling-street.”

The scene of the seriousness is explained with equivalent spectacle:

Close to the Walls which fair Augusta bind, (The fair Augusta much to fears inclin'd) an ancient fabrick rais'd t'inform the sight, There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight

The mock-heroic images of Mac Flecknoe are no less luminous. The pleasurable dealing of comparing small men to giants and making pygmies of them in the course begins in the third line of the poem, where we hear that Flecknoe,

“like Augustus, young Was call'd to Empire and had govem'd long”

The unlucky Shadwell is compared in turn to Arion, to "young Ascanius Rome's other hope and Pillar of the State," to Hannibal, and to "Romulus by Tyber's Brook." The propensity to wickedness which is never far away in Dryden whether in satire or panegyric becomes very noticeable in case of the signs and omens which foreshadowed Shadwell's coming. Flecknoe's speech parodies John the Baptist's:

“Heywood and Shirley were but Types of thee, Thou last great Prophet of Tautology: Even I, a dunce of more renown than they, Was sent before but to prepare the way: And coarsely clad in Norwich Drugget came To teach the Nations in thy greater name.”

It is not alone in mock-heroic descriptions that Mac Flecknoe excels. Luminous examples of images may also be found, remarkably in the final sarcasm of Flecknoe's second speech, which makes comparatively little use of satire and is written in a style nearer to that of direct satire than mainly other parts of the poem:

“When did his Muse from Fletcher scenes purloin, As thou whole Etherege dost transfuse to thine But so transfused as oils on Waters flow, His always floats above, thine sinks below. This is thy province, this thy wondrous way, New humours to invent for each new Play : This is that boasted .Bia4 of thy mind, By which one way to dullness, 'tis inclined, Which makes thy writings lean on one side still, And in all changes, that way bends thy will. Nor let thy mountain belly make pretence of likeness; thine's a tympani of sense. A tun of man in thy large bulk is writ. But sure thou'rt  but a kilderkin of wit.”

In such a passage the satire is completely revealed by the imagery. Opening with the easy object of name-calling, the poet selects an image: as he gives expression to it another starts up in his mind, and the new image is tossed about until a third express itself to his notice. The consequence is satire of great power: satire which differs totally from anything in Le Lutrin.

Mac Flecknoe is filled of mock grandeur, a disgraceful combination together of a variety of shades of Christian and pagan complexion. Dryden's scornful epic became a literary sight for its synthesis of dissonant Christian essentials with maximum brilliancy. The father-son relationship of Flecknoe and "Shadwell" is itself a good instance. All through the poem, Dryden cautiously improves the ridiculous similar between Flecknoe's earlier his son as a tedious poet and St. John, the Baptist, former Christ. The poem finishes with upturned indexing to John the Baptist who is said to have risen to heaven having completed his ethical coursework. Flecknoe, the forerunner, falls through a trap door. Mac Flecknoe is full of such illustrations of obvious parody.

Dryden, thus, ends that Flecknoe’s son, Shadwell is the worst probable poet and as a result deserves the crown of tediousness. Flecknoe continues his tribute of Shadwell's qualities by referring to his acting as a musician. In all points of view, Flecknoe leads to the ending that for "anointed dullness" Shadwell is made.

1. Oden, Richard, L. Dryden and Shadwell, The Literary Controversy and 'Mac Flecknoe' (1668–1679) 

2. Reidhead, Julia et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume C.