Mac Flecknoe

Thomas Shadwell, about 1690. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

“An Allusion to Horace” started making its way in manuscript around literary circles. Here, Rochester praises Shadwell and other new playwrights like William Wycherley (author of The Country Wife) and George Etherege, but mocks Dryden as a bad rhymer who lacks the wit of the younger men. Dryden was in no position to take on Rochester, a very powerful and potentially dangerous man. But, as Kirk Combe suggests, Shadwell became a safe target by which Dryden could defend himself and outflank the attacks that were by now coming from those he considered to be his lessors (the younger upstarts) and those he knew to be his social betters (Buckingham and Rochester). “Mac Flecknoe” is the result. It is an occasional poem, but it helped set a lot of terms for how high and low culture got talked about for generations; in imagining a sequence of great–or terrible–writers as a kind of succession akin to the succession of a monarchy, it also sets up a model of literary generations as dominated by a series of great men.

“Mac Flecknoe” was thus probably written in 1676, and it circulated in manuscript in literary circles in London for several years. The poem was first printed in1682 in an edition that Dryden almost certainly did not authorize (the publisher, “D. Green” is otherwise untraceable, suggesting that whoever was being the publication of the poem did not want their identity known; the text is also filled with typographical errors, suggesting quick and sloppy printing). In 1684, the poem was published as part of a more respectable collection of poems by several authors, and this time, the text is much cleaner; it seems likely that Dryden had the chance to proofread. The version published in that 1684 collection is the text reproduced here. We have consulted The Works of John Dryden, Poems 1681-84, ed. H. T. Swedenberg et al. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1972), the standard scholarly edition of Dryden’s works.

For further reading: Kirk Combe, “But Loads of Sh— Almost Choked the Way”: Shadwell, Dryden, Rochester, and the Summer of 1676,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 37 (Summer 1995): 127-164.

Mac Flecknoe
 
Augustus, young 
alone my perfect image bears, 
 alone, of all my Sons, is he 
genuine night admits no ray, 
Heywood and Shirleywere but types of thee, 
whilom strung 
Epsom blankets toss’d. 
Pissing-Alley, Sh—– call, 
A—- Hall. 
St. Andre’s feet ne’er kept more equal time, 
Villerius more. 
boy. 
 
Barbican it hight: 
Watch, in silence sleep. 
greater Jonson dares in socks appear; 
Simkin just reception finds 
Psyches owe, 
Ascanius sat 
swore, nor should his vow be vain, 
Ball, 
to his right he did convey, 
Psyche sprung, 
in five years be Writ; 
George in triumph tread the stage, 
S-dl-y interpose 
Sir Formal’s oratory will be thine. 
Northern Dedications fill. 
 Hostile name . 
Prince Nicander’s vein, 
Kilderkin of wit. 
Bruce and Longvil had a trap prepar’d, 
The Mantle fell to the young Prophet’s part, 

With double portion of his Father’s Art.

 



Phillis Wheatley

The frontispiece from Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Several Occasions (1773). This is the only portrait of Wheatley from her own lifetime.
Phillis, and she was given that name upon her arrival; there is no record of her African name and we do not know anything about how she was captured and enslaved. She was purchased by the Wheatleys, a well-off and prominent Boston family. John Wheatley was originally a tailor who branched out into a substantial business in wholesaling, shipping, and money-lending; his wife Susanna became an active supporter of Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries who came from England to preach in the colonies. When they purchased Phillis, the Wheatleys had eighteen-year-old twins, Nathaniel and Mary, and several other slaves working in their household.

An advertisement placed in the Boston Censor for February 29, 1772, soliciting subscriptions for a Boston edition of Wheatley's poems. The solicitations seem to have fallen short of what was need to publish the volume, and the Wheatleys turned to the Countess of Huntington, a prominent supporter of the Methodist movement, to subsidize publication of the book in London.

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773, which Wheatley in turn dedicated to her. Phillis Wheatley went to London (accompanied by Nathaniel Wheatley and traveling on the Wheatleys’ own ship) to supervise the printing and publication of her book, and was treated as a celebrity, meeting aristocrats and prominent public figures (including Benjamin Franklin, then resident in London officially as an advocate for the colony of Pennsylvania, but serving in general as a voice for the cause of the American colonists), and being given tours of the Tower of London and the British Museum. She returned to Boston just before the book was published, however; Susanna was ill (she died in early 1774), and Nathaniel may have prevailed upon her return to help take care of her. But, as Vincent Caretta suggests, Phillis may also have made a deal here, exchanging her willingness to return to Boston for the guarantee of her freedom. In any case, she was given her manumission in October 1773, and although she stayed a part of the Wheatley household until the death of John Wheatley in 1778, she was now a free woman.

Poems. Other critics enlisted her in the nascent abolitionist cause, using her obvious gifts as evidence for the equality of Africans with Europeans, and proof that slavery was immoral. As scholars in recent decades have studied and recovered her poems and letters, Phillis Wheatley’s place as one of the most important and originary voices of American literature has become secure.

Getting started with Anne Bradstreet

I am now going through my syllabus for the fall 2016 semester, adding texts that we need. One of the authors I most want to spend time on is Anne Bradstreet. She was the most important Puritan poet in seventeenth-century New England, or, perhaps better, the most important poet whose works have survived to reach us. Her poetry was first published in London, in a book called The Tenth Muse, the idea being that a tenth muse had arrived in the Americas, one who was going to add to, or even outdo, the muses of Europe. Her works were widely reprinted, and she continues to be in modern anthologies as a representative figure of Puritan America.

But what shall we read, and where shall we find it? Most of the poems in modern anthologies are the shorter poems, such as the “Verses on the Burning of our House,” or the poems Bradstreet wrote to her husband, or poems about her children. That is, most of these are domestic poems, about her home and family. They’re fine poems, but it’s hard not to think that they’ve been anthologized because they’re 1) short and 2) seem to be about the kinds of things that people expect poetry by women to be about.

But they were not the only kinds of poems that Bradstreet wrote. In fact, most of The Tenth Muse is devoted to much longer poems, about the seasons, the history of the world, the rise of empires. I want to make these available somehow, but editing them will be laborious.

In the short term, I want to produce a poem that sort of fits in the middle of the poles of domestic and political poems. It’s Bradstreet’s “A Dialogue Between Old England and New.” Here, the poet imagines a discussion between New England and the homeland, both of them figured as women. It’s a clear allegory of the English civil war, and also of the hope implied in the title The Tenth Muse that America might be able to help the “mother” country overcome its struggles. I am now thinking that we will start the semester with this poem. More to come.