8 - Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe

Summary

WHY DID Dryden select Richard Flecknoe as the man whose poetic kingdom Shadwell was to inherit? Although scholars have refined our understanding of the circumstances in which Mac Flecknoe was composed, the precise point of choosing Flecknoe rather than anyone else remains obscure. It is often asserted that Flecknoe was for Dryden's contemporaries the epitome of the bad poet, and as evidence for this assumption one is referred to Marvell's satire ‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’; yet this poem was not printed until 1681, five years after the composition of Mac Flecknoe, and seems not to have circulated in manuscript first, so that it is unlikely that Dryden and his readers would have known of Marvell's poem in the late 1670s. And even if Flecknoe did have a low reputation, the link with Shadwell which this suggests is an uncharacteristically imprecise starting point for one of Dryden's most incisive satires. However there is a very specific reason for Dryden's choice of Flecknoe, and one which gives added point to the poem.

We need to begin by recalling briefly the main points at issue between Dryden and Shadwell in the debate which led up to Mac Flecknoe. Richard Oden summarizes the issues in this way:

(1) their different estimates of the genius of Ben Jonson, (2) the preference of Dryden for comedy of wit and repartee and of Shadwell, the chief disciple of Jonson, for humors comedy, (3) a sharp disagreement over the true purpose of comedy, (4) contention over the value of rhymed plays, and (5) plagiarism.

The ground upon which Shadwell takes his stand is that he is the true heir of Ben Jonson, and the true representative of English classicism. Shadwell's prefaces invoke Jonson as his model, and cite Horace in support of his insistence that plays should not merely entertain, but should also instruct. Shadwell is thus attempting to appropriate classical authority for his own cause, and creating an image of himself as the true heir to this tradition. Dryden's outrage with this unjustified claim finds expression in the Augustan imagery of Mac Flecknoe, which dresses Shadwell in precisely those robes which he had assumed, so that readers might see how uneasily they fit him. But for the image to work cogently, the transformation from Son of Ben to Son of Flecknoe has to be pointed.