Otherworldly John Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays 1472424980, 9781472424983

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Early Poems, 1649–63
2 The American Plays, 1664–65
3 Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, 1667
4 Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada, 1669–71
5 The State of Innocence, Aureng-Zebe, and the Limits of Poetic Vision, 1674–77
6 All for Love, 1677
7 Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar, 1678–80
8 Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius, 1681–85
9 Later Public Poems, Elegies, and Poems about Art, 1685–96
10 King Arthur, 1691
Conclusion: The Secular Masque, 1700
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Otherworldly John Dryden

In memory of my father, Dr. W. W. Armistead, and dedicated to my wife, Jane, and our children: Emily Buck, née Armistead; James Armistead; and Richard Armistead

Otherworldly John Dryden Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays

Jack M. Armistead

© Jack M. Armistead 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jack M. Armistead has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818 Surrey, GU9 7PT USA England www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Armistead, J. M. Otherworldly John Dryden: Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays / by Jack M. Armistead. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2497-6 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-2498-3 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-4724-2499-0 (epub) 1. Dryden, John, 1631–1700—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Occultism in literature. I. Title. PR3427.O25A76 2014 821’.409357—dc23 2013033645 ISBN 9781472424976 (hbk) ISBN 9781472424983 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472424990 (ebk – ePUB)

IV

Contents Preface   Abbreviations   Introduction  

vii x 1

1 The Early Poems, 1649–63  

11

2 The American Plays, 1664–65  

25

3 Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, 1667  

41

4 Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada, 1669–71  

57

5 The State of Innocence, Aureng-Zebe, and the Limits of Poetic Vision, 1674–77  

79

6 All for Love, 1677  

87

7 Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar, 1678–80   101 8 Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius, 1681–85  

111

9 Later Public Poems, Elegies, and Poems about Art, 1685–96  

129

10 King Arthur, 1691  

139

Conclusion: The Secular Masque, 1700  

155

Works Cited   Index  

161 181

This page has been left blank intentionally

Preface As a graduate student, I was both intrigued and annoyed by the urbane sanity of later Stuart and earlier Georgian writers. Surely, I thought, somewhere beneath the hard, witty surface of these restrained minds was a buried life of core feelings and human uncertainty. Perhaps I could find more authentic personalities in authors or fictional characters whose minds had become unhinged from the realities of the day. The “mad poet” Nathaniel Lee might reward closer study, as might the later Gulliver, whose detachment became so radical that he could skin human children without so much as an increase in his pulse-rate. I was fascinated by such exceptions as well as by the exceptional lyricism of writers who normally kept their wits about them: the Shakespearean passion of Otway’s Jaffeir or Rowe’s Calista, the anguished monologue of Pope’s Eloisa, Thomson’s exhilarated depiction of the seasons, or Samuel Johnson’s taste for the sublime. I wrote a master’s thesis about Johnson and the sublime, a PhD dissertation about the mythopoeic dimension of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther, an article about Calista, and a book about Lee. Alas, I failed to find any of these travels into the remote regions of eighteenthcentury writing fully satisfying. They were all too narrow in scope and, ironically, unfaithful to a key aspect of that basic human nature I was seeking. Years later, as the friction of experience shaped my own life, what others found to be obvious belatedly dawned on me as well: that human identity expresses itself only through the available realities with which it interacts. Instead of looking for some transformative lyricism beneath all major literary works, I should examine the dynamic interactions between human tendencies, which change little through time, and the most powerful public and private contexts within which writing occurs. After retiring from many years in university administration, I decided to have another look at John Dryden from this revised perspective. Suddenly, the major Dryden studies, which I had earlier found uninspiring, if not wrongheaded, began to make better sense. Bredvold and Harth, alongside standard histories of the Stuart era, helped me to understand the conditions of Dryden’s contemporary culture, those encasing sets of hard realities with which any artist must come to terms. Critical analysts like Roper, King, Barbeau Gardiner, McKeon, McFadden, Zwicker, Reverand, and others now showed me how Dryden interacted with these realities in a way that distinguished him from both his predecessors and his successors in literature. I could see that Dryden the op-ed poet, inventor of literary analysis, and lay theologian was, in fact, the “real” Dryden, as authentic in his way as Shakespeare or Donne or Wordsworth in theirs. After the mid-seventeenth century, basic human nature had not taken a new form in Dryden, but its expression within the changing environment of events, institutions, and ideas had.

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Still, there was something missing even in this corrected portrait. Among the more enduring aspects of the human mind is its awareness of invisible reality— whether conceived as an ideal world, elemental spirits, angels and devils, the informing mind or spirit of God, the oversoul, parallel universes, or some other hidden presence. This occult sensibility could be codified in religious doctrines or scientific theories, but it could also take a less systematic form in the literary imagination. Writers could express their sense of invisible presences in a play or narrative by portraying them as characters (for example, Shakespeare’s Ariel) or by referring to them in the language (for example, Yeats’s “vast image out of Spiritus Mundi”). I had always felt that Dryden shared this otherworldly awareness, but I had only recently realized that it did not show up in his writings as a subtext that translated them, as it were, into something other than what they seemed. Instead, it was expressed as part of that rhetorical engagement with current events which other scholars had already mapped out. His otherworldliness bore to some extent the same relation with his typical mode of expression as pre-Copernican, preBaconian philosophy did with the new science of his day: there was tension and development, but no apparent contradiction. The book I decided at last to write explores what Dryden’s works can tell us about this tension and this development. That I was willing to undertake such a task in retirement, after so many years away from serious scholarship, is due in large part to the encouragement of my wife, Jane, and my three children, Emily, James, and Richard—all of whom persisted in believing it was possible to reinvent my lapsed career of literary research. Several chapters of the book itself draw upon studies completed in the earlier part of that career, and I am grateful to the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for making those studies possible through grants from the Better English Fund and through the unflagging confidence of my colleagues and students in that department. I especially remember with gratitude the encouragement provided by the late Percy Adams, the late Bain Stewart, and the late Norman Sanders, as well as John Hurt Fisher, the late John Manchip White, and Allen Carroll. In these latter days, both my attitude toward scholarly work and the work itself have been greatly enhanced by discussions with Professor Misty Anderson of the University of Tennessee and Professors John Vance and Elizabeth Kraft of the University of Georgia. To Professor Kraft I owe the suggestion that Ashgate Publishing Company might be interested in my manuscript, and the editors at Ashgate, particularly Ann Donahue, have been resourceful and steadily helpful in bringing this project to completion. I hope that it measures up to their expectations and rewards their expertise. I would like also to acknowledge the indirect (and unwitting) contributions to this book by Professors Michael Gunter and Calvin Dickinson of the Tennessee Technological University. During my years as Dean and Provost at TTU, Professor Gunter exemplified the central role that scholarly analysis could play both in the classroom and, through publications, in the intellectual life of our times. Without being aware of it, he encouraged me to return to this role in retirement, as did

Preface

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Professor Dickinson, who retired several years ahead of me and demonstrated that research and publication could become an invigorating part of one’s emeritus career. The professional journals that published the results of my work while I was on the faculty at the University of Tennessee—SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Studies in Philology, The South Atlantic Review, Papers on Language & Literature, The Seventeenth Century, and Notes & Queries—have been both cooperative and generous in permitting extensive borrowing from the following articles: “Dryden and the Occult as Dramatic Code: Tyrannick Love.” PLL 24 (1988): 367–83. “Dryden and the Popular Tradition: Backgrounds for King Arthur and The Indian Emperour.” N&Q, NS 31 (1984): 342–44. “Dryden’s King Arthur and the Literary Tradition: A Way of Seeing.” SP 85 (1988): 53–72. “Dryden’s Poetry and the Language of Magic.” SEL 27, 3 (Summer 1987): 381–98. “Dryden’s Prospero and his Predecessors.” SAR 50 (1985): 23–33. “Egypt in the Restoration: A Perspective on All for Love.” PLL 22 (1986): 139–53. “The Higher Magic in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada.” PLL 26 (1990): 478–88. “The Occultism of Dryden’s ‘American’ Plays in Context.” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 127–52. “An Angel seen from Behind” by Giovanni Lanfranco (1581–1647) is reproduced on this book’s cover courtesy of Spaightwood Galleries, Inc. at www.spaightwoodgalleries.com. The image suggests Dryden’s perspective on the occult for most of his career: inhabitants of the invisible world exist but are becoming less involved in human affairs than, perhaps, they once were—hence, the angel looking back on a world he is leaving. Finally, I wish to thank Professor Cedric D. Reverand II, editor of EighteenthCentury Life, for his upbeat assessment of the book manuscript and for agreeing to publish my first post-retirement article, upon which Chapter 1 is based: “Dryden’s Occult Rhetoric in the Early Poems, 1649–1663.” Eighteenth-Century Life 37 (2013): 1–20. Jack Armistead, January 2014

Abbreviations CL Comparative Literature DUJ

Durham University Journal

ECLife

Eighteenth-Century Life

ECTI

The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation

ELH

English Literary History

ELN

English Language Notes

ES

English Studies

HLQ

Huntington Library Quarterly

JEGP

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

MLQ

Modern Language Quarterly

N&Q

Notes & Queries

PL Milton’s Paradise Lost PLL

Papers on Language & Literature

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association

PQ

Philological Quarterly

RES

Review of English Studies

Restoration Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 SAR

South Atlantic Review

SD

Stage Directions

SECC

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture

SEL

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

SP

Studies in Philology

TSLL

Texas Studies in Language and Literature

Introduction Much has been said about the worldly John Dryden. Samuel Johnson seems to have started the trend in 1779 by remarking that Dryden typically presented human passion “as … complicated by the various relations of society and confused in the tumults and agitations of life.”1 By the middle of the twentieth century, Johnson’s Dryden had become the keen analyst of public affairs and religion portrayed in Louis I. Bredvold’s The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (1934) and Bernard N. Schilling’s Dryden and the Conservative Myth (1961). Schilling tells us that Dryden does not think of himself as soaring aloft into the realm of spirit or the ideal. For all his poetic use of mythical materials, he believes that he speaks for what is here and now, for what is at once necessary and happily quite possible and real in everyday life. He displays ideas that may govern men as political and social units, showing them how to remain inside the realm of health and order. (3)

We have learned a great deal about this earthbound, journalistic, politically oriented Dryden from recent studies by George McFadden, Steven Zwicker, Cedric Reverand, David Bywaters, Phillip Harth, Susan J. Owen, and others.2 The relatively new interest in Dryden’s ideas about trade and colonialism is also, at heart, an interest in his worldly side, as are the studies of his work as critic, classicist, and translator.3 But Samuel Johnson also saw another side of Dryden: “He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle” (306). Far less scholarly and critical attention has been devoted to this otherworldly dimension of Dryden’s mind and artistry. It tends to surface only in studies concentrated on the Christian ideas or biblical typology in Religio Laici, The Hind and the Panther, and Absalom and Achitophel. This is the case in Schilling’s study and in Harth’s Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (1968). Two other students of Dryden’s religious poems do, however, emphasize the transcendent nature of his Christian ideas. Sanford Budick finds him seeking “the darkling revelations of divine truth” (Abyss 235), and Anne Barbeau Gardiner thinks all of his major works subsume history in the “eternal present” of “divine art” (Ancient Faith 4–5). These earlier excursions into Dryden’s otherworldliness tend to emphasize systematic religious thought and to avoid analysis of his occult references. By contrast, in the present study I make no attempt to treat religious ideas separately or systematically, and I look closely at all of his occult language and onstage phenomena. What emerges is an occult rhetoric that persuades the reader or “Life of Dryden,” in Critical Heritage 304. Garrison’s Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric is also in this vein. 3 See Orr, Gelber, Corse, and Morton. 1

2

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Otherworldly John Dryden

audience to connect the subject or action at hand with invisible forces and hidden patterns that may or may not express divine purposes. Often, the occult rhetoric also comments on Dryden’s own capacity—and that of other poets—for making such connections. I do not use the term “rhetorical” in the formal, academic sense—that is, in reference to the classical canons of persuasive discourse.4 Instead, I have in mind what Wayne Booth calls “the author’s selecting presence” (19) within his or her arrangement of literary materials. The materials, in the present case, are “occult” only in the senses that were most common in later Stuart England: “hidden … privy, secret … ; recondite, mysterious … pertaining to … ancient and medieval reputed sciences … of a secret and mysterious nature (as magic, alchemy, astrology … and the like)” (OED). In Dryden’s writings, “the like” includes demonology and spirit possession but nothing of today’s popular interest in vampires or werewolves. Understood in these ways, occult ideas and beliefs flourished in medieval and Renaissance England, underwent a major transformation during the period when Dryden was active, and surfaced in many of his writings as important rhetorical tools. In medieval England, without much competition from empirical science, a joint inheritance from pagan antiquity and traditional northern folk beliefs peopled the universe with a host of invisible powers, which the Church theologians either rejected or precariously integrated with Christian doctrine. After the Reformation the notion of Fortuna became subsumed in the conviction that God’s sovereignty prevailed over all earthly phenomena. All the intermediary spirits of medieval Christendom came under attack, as did their manipulators, who included both Roman priests and the black and white magicians of Renaissance magic. Orthodox Protestant theologians laid all ghosts to rest until Judgment Day, and preferred to interpret all remarkable physical and psychic events as evidence of God’s Providence, which sometimes operated indirectly through Satan’s evil machinations. Nevertheless, a strong underground, made up mainly of intellectuals at one extreme and ill-educated villagers at the other, persisted in animating the world with forbidden spirits and arts. Whole hierarchies of daemons and angels were carefully identified and invoked, using as authorities everything from folk legends to Plato, Plutarch, and the neo-Platonists; from Egyptian or Cabbalistic writings to the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, and saints’ lives. More securely within orthodox Protestant theology was the belief in witchcraft, which gained special impetus from the great witch trials of the Continental Inquisitions and the publications they generated. Occult beliefs and practices actually increased in numbers and intensity during King James’s reign—partly, no doubt, because he himself had subscribed to the more orthodox spirit lore in his Daemonology (1597).5 4 The extent to which Dryden adopted these has been instructively studied by Feder, Hamilton (esp. 125–26), and Garrison (39–46, 141–47). 5 This overview synthesizes materials from: Anglo, Briggs, Forrester, Christopher Spencer, Thomas, Woodman, and West.

Introduction

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After the Restoration of Charles II, occult thought faced new challenges that have been well documented and explained by Keith Thomas in Religion and the Decline of Magic.6 Thomas shows how the revival of classical rationalism, the postCopernican worldview, the growth of the natural and social sciences, urbanization, and a variety of techniques for controlling the environment progressively undermined occult beliefs, resulting in mixed or ambiguous opinions about their reality and efficacy. This mixed attitude was expressed in a wide range of writings to which Dryden would have had ready access. Fuelled by religious fanaticism and social unrest, the 1650s alone saw a reinterpretation of hermetic, cabbalistic, and neo-Platonic thought. Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy was translated and published in 1651, to be followed by Paracelsus of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature in 1657, Giambattista della Porta’s Natural Magic in 1658, and Robert Fludd’s Mosaicall Philosophy in 1659. These publications envisage a universe of metaphysical hierarchies, whose various strata are made sympathetic with one another (and with the whole system) through spiritual agencies and intelligences. Human beings are seen as capable of discovering and perhaps even manipulating these invisible entities. Such occult notions continued to interest the literate members of society after 1660. The early Restoration stage is one indicator. Theater managers plundered earlier drama for plays involving alchemy, ghosts, witches, and the like. In the years before Dryden entered the fray, members of the early Restoration audience could see Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, Webster’s The White Devil, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois, all of which employed ghosts. They could also see Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Green’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, both of which dealt in magic and conjuration. The considerably less serious uses of occult lore in the revivals of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Birth of Merlin (possibly), and Jonson’s The Alchemist, would also have responded to the popular interests.7 Outside the theaters, the persistence of occult ideas was also evident. Pamphlets and anecdotes about ghosts had wide appeal. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester agreed with a friend that whoever died first would make a posthumous visit to the other, and Mary Betterton was said to have conversed with the ghost of Sir William Davenant. The supernatural sources or revelations of dreams fascinated John Smith, Sir Thomas Browne, John Aubrey, Thomas Tryon, and John Bunyan. Oxford debaters questioned the efficacy of love potions, and Cambridge dons debated the whole question of Devil worship. A witch of Worcester claimed she could have prevented the Restoration. Another witch, this one from Cornwall, was In a more recent investigation of this changing intellectual environment, Coudert emphasizes its complexity: “atomism, Aristotelianism, and vitalism, together with … religious, occult, and esoteric theories, are all recognized as contributing to both the emergence of modern science and reactions against it” (xxiii). 7 See West, The Invisible World; Reed; Yates, Occult Philosophy; and Harris. For the revivals, see The London Stage, Part 1: 1660–1700 7–87. 6

Otherworldly John Dryden

4

held responsible for the Duke of York’s inability to defeat the Dutch fleet. During his bid for kingship, Monmouth carried magical incantations by his side. Goodwin Wharton spent the last quarter of the century invoking daemons and fairies to help in his search for treasure. Everything from the Restoration itself to the Great Fire, Anglo-Dutch wars, Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis, and Monmouth Rebellion was widely ascribed to supernatural agency, and most such events were widely believed to fulfill old prophecies.8 The fascination with occult matters in the Restoration went beyond their value as entertainment or popular folklore. Claims for connections between the visible and invisible worlds were taken seriously by some of the most learned men of the age—and not only those with mystical and eschatological leanings, like Thomas Vaughan, John Heydon, William Lilly, or Elias Ashmole. Many of the more empirically minded and skeptical thinkers, the atomists, Baconians, and mechanical philosophers, earnestly investigated the claims for alchemy, astrology, magic, and demonology.9 Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, Henry More, and Joseph Glanvill, all prominent members of the Royal Society, are telling examples. Their various expressions of a mixed attitude toward occult matters align well with what we can surmise from Dryden’s use of the occult. His early awareness of this “modern” ambivalence about the supernatural may have been owing, at least partly, to his friendship with Walter Charleton, who nominated him for membership in the Royal Society in 1662. The two men shared a conviction that the mid-century shift in philosophical methods and perspectives expressed divine will. Charleton’s own mid-century writings document his transition from a commitment to sympathetic magic, astral irradiations, and the spiritual interdependence of all created things to a new conviction that all physical phenomena represent the actions of hard particles moving through space and time under heavenly guidance. By 1657 he had reached the conclusion that this change in outlook was part of a greater, Providential realignment of England’s entire intellectual community. God was making his will manifest through the “Light of Nature” as interpreted by the new brand of thinkers.10 Dryden celebrates Charleton’s perspective in “To My Honored Friend, Dr. Charleton” (1662), where modern learning aligns with Providence through the intercession of a guardian “Genius.”11 This genius inspires Inigo Jones’s portrayal See Thomas 103–10, 122–28, 276–81, 464–92, 645, 673, 708–16, 759, and DePorte

8

25–30.

9 On the changing attitudes toward all of the major occult subjects, see Coudert as well as such older studies as Josten, “Introduction,” Elias Ashmole 1.1–308; Hunter, “The Debate over Science”; Margaret C. Jacob 29–108; Webster; Vickers 124; and Westfall, “Role of Alchemy.” 10 See my introduction to Charleton’s The Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), esp. v–vi; and Kargon 186. 11 The Works of John Dryden, ed. Hooker and Swedenberg 1:55. Hereafter, this series of volumes will be cited as California Works. First references in a chapter will start with the volume number from California Works. Thereafter, parenthetical references for quotations

Introduction

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of Stonehenge as a temple, so that it could become a holy “Refuge” (57) for the “Sacred Head” (53) of Charles when he was without political power. At the appropriate moment in history, when Charles is chosen by his people to resume political sovereignty, the same “Genius” inspires Charleton’s new analysis, which redefines Stonehenge as “A Throne, where Kings, our Earthly Gods, were Crown’d” (48).12 In this new era, Dryden reminds us, intellectual submission to Aristotle has been replaced by “homage” (15) not merely to “Nature” (27) but also to God and the new king. Charleton’s new book exemplifies the development and role of skeptical inquiry in this new age.13 Boyle, More, and Glanvill were more empirical in their studies than was Charleton, but they, too, expressed the transitional nature of occult ideas in the Restoration. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle roundly condemns alchemists for “not having clear and distinct notions” (114) when “the naked knowledge of the truth is the thing principally aimed at” (115), yet he remains convinced that spiritual forces affect matter in the natural world, and he continues to exchange alchemical secrets with Newton and Locke.14 Boyle also hoped to distinguish between the scientific and superstitious elements in astrology, and recommended experiments to find out to what extent “celestial bodies … have a power to cause such and such motions, changes, and alterations … which shall at length be felt in every one of us.”15 He even shared with More and Joseph Glanvill the conviction from the poems will be given by lines only; for plays will be given by act, scene, and lines (preceded, in the case of The Conquest of Granada, by the part number); and for prose will be given by page numbers. Old spelling will be maintained, but Dryden’s frequent use of italics will not. 12 Dryden refers to guardian angels, or genii, in several other works as well: e.g., Heroique Stanzas (1:139), Conquest of Granada (11:2.3.3.94), Annus Mirabilis (1:893–95), and Threnodia Augustalis (3:387). Dryden later defended the concept in the “Discourse concerning … Satire” (4:19–20). Henry More’s rather well-developed concept of “genii” can be found in “An Antidote against Atheism” and “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Collection 1:130–33, and 2:134, respectively. 13 Harth put to rest the presumption that this poem celebrates Charleton as a new scientist like Boyle or Harvey. What he shared with them was not the study of natural phenomena but rather “the use of skepticism, in the sense of freedom of inquiry” (Contexts 22). Wasserman argues that the poem celebrates the Stuart monarchy through “the providential correspondence of political developments and the progress of the new science.” Roper treats the poem as essentially about “the kingdom of letters” and rejects some of Wasserman’s interpretations of analogies (Poetic Kingdoms 141–48). McKeon sees the poem as a rhetorical construct and considers Harth’s approach reductive and dogmatic in adopting “what Dryden means to mean, not what he might mean to others” (23–29). 14 See The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1959–77) 3.192–93, 195, 215, 217–19—cited by Westfall, “Newton and Alchemy” 315. See also Coudert 192–93; and Thomas 270, 415, and 770. 15 “Of celestial Influences or Effluviums in the Air,” probably written in the 1650s but first published in his History of the Air (1691), cited by Curry 63. Among John Aubrey’s papers is the natal horoscope of Charleton—Bodl., Aubrey MS. 23, f. 54, cited by Thomas 346n36. For Aubrey’s considerable interest in the occult, see Hunter, John Aubrey 102–47.

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that those “spiritual beings” who filled the “distance betwixt the infinite creator and the creatures” should be seriously studied.16 For his part, More was attempting a “scientific” analysis of spirit life in order to defend the doctrine of immortality and combat the atheism he perceived in the writings of Thomas Hobbes and others. His studies led him to claim, for example, that both the upper and lower atmospheres are “replenisht with Daemons” through human death. Upon “quitting of the Earthly Body,” the most virtuous and heroic of the separated souls obtain “Aetherial” vehicles and enter paradise for an eternity of intellectual conversation, love, friendship, and sacred singing. The rest assume “Aereal” forms and go to different “Regions of the Aire” depending on their degree of purity.17 It may well have been Boyle and More, perhaps together with Glanvill, to whom Dryden refers in the “Preface” to Tyrannick Love (1667) as “those who have written” about “Astral or Aerial Spirits” (10:112), though he specifically names only the ancient writers. In “Of Heroique Playes. An Essay” (1672), the reference to contemporaries is more strongly implied when he contrasts the materialism of Thomas Hobbes with “Magick” and “the whole Doctrine of separated beings” described by “Philosophers or Divines” (11:12–13). Seven years later, in “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” he may have the same thinkers in mind—“followers” of Plato—when he discusses the questions of whether “Spirits … are vested with a subtil body” and whether a spirit could sire a monster on a witch (13:239–40).18 But whether or not these are allusions to specific contemporaries, it is typical of Dryden to avoid direct statements of his own beliefs regarding the occult. He refers to magic, prodigies, daemons, and spirits, indeed brings them onstage, yet at almost every opportunity to express a personal opinion about them, he dodges the issue not only by citing “Philosophers or Divines” but also by ascribing his poetic usage to conventions established by ancient writers, scriptural authority, or folklore. In the passage from the “Preface” to Tyrannick Love (1667), cited above, he names Ovid and Virgil as sources for “credible” uses of daemons and ghosts (10:113). In “Of Heroique Playes” and “The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence” (1677), he claims that poets are especially well equipped to “produce … satisfactory notions” of “visionary objects,” “Beings which are not in Nature,” and “the extraordinary effects of Magick,” but only “if they are founded on popular belief” or “authoriz’d by Scripture” (11:12–13; 12:94–95). In the “Discourse concerning … Satire” (1693), he uses the Book of Daniel as the basis 16 “Of the high veneration man’s intellect owes to God” (1685), in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle 5.146–48. See J. R. Jacob 65–163; Coudert 159; Cope, Joseph Glanvill; and Jobe. 17 “The Immortality of the Soul,” Collection 2:8, 147–49, 155–58, 180–87. And see Brann. 18 Cope, “Dryden vs. Hobbes,” argues that the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his collaborator Joseph Glanvill “supplied Dryden with proof that Hobbes was wrong in reading magicians and spirits out of nature” and that “aesthetic naturalism was the unpalatable fruit of … philosophical materialism.”

Introduction

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for his comments on angels or genii who guard “Cities, Provinces, Kingdoms, and Monarchies” as well as “the several People and Regions committed to their Charge” (4:19–20). This non-committal attitude takes the form of ambivalence in his references to astrology and alchemy. In “The Vindication of … The Duke of Guise” (1683), he explicitly avoids disputing “the Truth or Lawfulness” of astrology by remarking that “’tis usual with Poets, especially with the Italians, to mix Astrology in their Poems” (14:350).19 However, he had his own and his son’s nativities cast by Elias Ashmole.20 In Astraea Redux, he scoffs at alchemical wizardry and its false claims to have created gold, which, when tested, “shuns the Mint” (1:162), yet, as we shall see, he uses alchemical terminology to describe the highest forms of leadership. Dryden’s works, therefore, document neither his personal acceptance of specific occult ideas nor—to use Michael McKeon’s terms—his “quasi-ironic reaction to an alien ideology” (250). In Politics and Poetry in Restoration England, McKeon surveys dozens of manuscripts and printed works from the Restoration that employ astrology and prophecy, and finds that they represent a very wide range of political, religious, and social stances. He concludes that Restoration writers could use the occult in support of just about any point of view, and when he reads Annus Mirabilis from these alternative points of view, he reveals a rhetorically sophisticated Dryden, one who exploits the malleability of occult beliefs in the period. It is this rhetorical sophistication that I am assuming as I analyze Dryden’s use of occult language and phenomena in his original poems and serious plays.21 In the poems, occult references are accessible to us only through the language, but within that medium of expression they take various forms. Some serve as analogues for the behavior of individuals or the trend of events. Others suggest divine messages or interventions. Considered together in a given poem, they often constitute a subtext that expands or reinforces the main theme. Reaching conclusions about the meaning of occult material in poetry requires close attention to its sources and relation to the overall significance of the poem in which it appears. Arguably, though, this is somewhat less difficult than interpreting the occult in a dramatic work. In a play, or a dramatic poem like Absalom and Achitophel, we have to make allowances for the type of character whose language carries the 19 In the first Prologue to The Wild Gallant (1663) Dryden makes astrology look and sound ridiculous (8:ll. 4–5). In the Epilogue to Sir Martin Mar-all (1668), contemporary astrologer William Lilly is said to “foresee” events only “when the Year is past” (9:209, ll. 13–16), and astrology is demeaned throughout An Evening’s Love (1671). 20 See Ashm. MS. 243, fol. 209 (Bodleian Library, Oxford); Dryden, Letters 93–94; and Gardner. 21 For the basic idea that Dryden may have extensively used the occult as a rhetorical tool, I am generally indebted not only to McKeon but also to Maximillian E. Novak, who noted more than forty years ago (“Demonology of Dryden’s Tyrannick Love”) that Dryden was heavily influenced by the spirit lore in A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Substance of Devils and Spirits, which was anonymously added to the 1665 edition of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft.

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occult imagery or terminology. The significance of a particular occult reference in the speech of an unreliable character differs from the meaning of a similar reference in the mouth of a normative or admirable character. Thus, it is sometimes more difficult to find the occult subtext in dramatic works, with their multiple speakers of varying credibility, than in poems with one narrative voice. The absence of a single speaker also complicates our understanding of onstage occult phenomena, such as prodigies, ghosts, elemental spirits, or angels. When such phenomena are presented in stage directions, we can assume they were contrived by or with the approval of the playwright, so that they assume an almost choric function. Our understanding of their meaning, however, may be influenced by what is going on in the dramatic action at the time of their appearance, by their literary sources, or by a certain character’s reaction to their appearance. If such phenomena remain offstage, and we learn of them through a character’s report, then their significance will depend, additionally, on the reliability of the reporter. My analysis of Dryden’s occult sensibility, as evinced in his works, does not uncover a totally new mindset. He manipulates occult materials with the same conscious intent that he applies to plot and character.22 He retains his journalistic eye and remains the sane and clever public writer we have learned so much about through recent scholarship. On the other hand, his frequent employment of occult language and phenomena informs his writings in ways that we miss if we attend only to his politics and orthodox religious ideas. It draws our attention to his convictions about invisible forces or purposes underlying observed, earthbound events. It expands our awareness of his literary sources and, hence, his intellectual contexts. It also registers fluctuations in his views about the powers of poetry. Do poets and other artists sense connections between the mundane and the supernal that escape the notice of ordinary mortals? Are these connections accessible to artists only during certain historical periods? To what extent does John Dryden think that he himself possesses this special vision, and does it alter in response to changes in socio-political circumstances? The reader will soon discover that I say relatively little about some works of great interest to students of Dryden, works such as Religio Laici, The Hind and the Panther, the comedies, Don Sebastian, and the Fables. These omissions are not meant to detract from the importance of such works but rather to suggest that they contribute less to our primary understanding of Dryden’s occult vision than do the original poems and serious plays chosen for extended analysis. As mentioned above, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther have been extensively analyzed in light of their heavy dependence on Scripture and Church doctrine.23 Although I agree with Ryan Stark that Dryden’s occult language is “ontologically disconnected from the spiritual world,” my analysis reveals an occult rhetoric which is more than what he calls mere Baconian ornament (4). 23 Harth’s Contexts, Budick’s Abyss, and Barbeau Gardiner’s Ancient Faith are the best known studies. See above, p. 1. My own contribution to the discussion of The Hind and the Panther appears in my essay, “The Mythic Dimension.” 22

Introduction

9

By contrast, their use of occult materials, in the sense adopted for this book, is minor and does not significantly change our understanding of their meanings. It is possible that a study of occult rhetoric in the comedies—especially An Evening’s Love and Amphitryon—would be revealing but only, I think, in the context of what we have learned from works that more directly reflect Dryden’s serious interest in the invisible world. Occult materials in the Fables might also reward concentrated study, but I concluded that sorting out Dryden’s own occult rhetoric in these works from that of their original authors would be a major and distinctive task better left for another time and for other scholar-critics. The decision not to include Don Sebastian was particularly difficult, given its status as one of Dryden’s best serious plays. Although it contains no onstage occult business, its language includes three derivations from dream theory and astrology24 along with a number of references to geniuses, daemons, guardian spirits, souls, and ghosts. Bodies are said to be devil-possessed, a rake and his mistress are compared to a conjurer and his devil, kings are repeatedly termed “sacred,” and Christian Providence is accused of being asleep while crimes are committed.25 These occult references, however, are intermittent and localized. They deepen significance only slightly, never coming together in any sort of metacommentary on the main actions or themes. The occult material in Don Sebastian exists, as King has explained, only to augment the general background of religious values and to underline “Sebastian’s inability to understand the complex, hidden ways of destiny” (168).26 I would also ask the reader’s tolerance for the typical way in which I quote from Dryden’s works. For the most part, I provide evidence for his occult rhetoric by integrating his own words or phrases into my ongoing discussion. This departure from the more traditional practice of quoting longer passages and then analyzing them is necessitated by the nature of the evidence itself. Although it sometimes appears in more sustained passages or scenes, in which cases I do quote several lines at a time, more often it appears as single words or short phrases distributed across a poem or play, gradually adding an otherworldly layer to Dryden’s commentary on human experience. That such scattered references to the invisible world can be understood as parts of an occult rhetoric is central to the thesis of this book. Almeyda’s account of a dream vision in which her mother warns her away from marriage (15:2.1.567–73); Muly Moloch’s morning dream of being cast into “our Holy Prophet’s arms, / Who bore me in a purple Cloud to Heav’n” (4.1.131–42); and Sebastian’s recollection that “Nostradamus … took my Horoscope” and predicted “I shou’d wed with Incest” and then live “A long Religious Life” (2.1.581–89). 25 Occult references also figure in the play’s dedication “To the Right Honourable Philip, Earl of Leycester,” but they are used inconsistently and do not clearly support or develop Dryden’s main point about Leicester (see 15:60). 26 King’s point is reinforced by Kroll’s observation that “the eventual union of Antonio the Christian with Morayma the Muslim establishes, symbolically, the union of body and soul” (“The Double Logic of Don Sebastian” 63). 24

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I approach Dryden’s works in chronological order and divide them into periods roughly corresponding to phases in his employment of occult rhetoric. Along the way, I trace the development of a leitmotiv that seems to accompany his use of occult materials: the ebb and flow of his confidence in poetry’s occult vision, its capacity for penetrating to the Providential patterns hidden in historical events.27 In the poems written between 1649 and 1663 he exploits his readers’ mixed attitudes toward the occult—mainly astrology and alchemy—to bring into focus his own empirical view of Providence at work in public events and literary art. At the same time, he develops a quintessentially Restoration concept of literary art. This concept carries over into the American plays of 1664 and 1665, where demonology, rather than astrology and alchemy, dominate the occult rhetoric. By linking early American cultural change to parallel episodes in ancient and Renaissance European history, Dryden exuberantly suggests that the data of observed experience can be understood as enacting the Tory drama of destiny. The year 1667, with the publication of Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, marks the peak of this confidence in his own Providential vision and that of great poets in general. From 1669–73 Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada delve into the process whereby Providential aims are achieved through the triumph of Christian love. Both within and outside these plays, Dryden expresses his conviction that poets possess a special, post-Baconian kind of insight into both the visible and the invisible worlds. Then a brief period of uncertainty sets in—an uncertainty not about his overall poetic abilities but about God’s intentions as revealed in current events. Between 1674 and 1677 he remains confident enough as a writer to undertake such major projects as Aureng-Zebe and the adaptations of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. But at the same time, he finds occult materials of less rhetorical assistance than before. Both directly and indirectly, he now uses references to the invisible world to convey doubts about the future direction of both public affairs and the public role of art. From 1678 to 1680, although he remains unable to find a Providential design in the specific sequences of human events, his occult rhetoric exhibits a renewed certainty about the ultimate purposes of the Almighty. The sense of a detailed Providential design returns in about 1681 but persists only until the end of James II’s brief reign. In the works written during the final decade or so of Dryden’s life, with one major exception, the occult material suggests a major fissure between earthly events and the invisible world, and depicts the best contemporary art as excellent in craftsmanship but severely limited in vision. In the one exceptional work, King Arthur, Dryden achieves a detailed Providential vision only by turning away from specific current events in order to gain an epic perspective on England’s history.

27 I do not attempt to provide a detailed account of Dryden’s theory of poetry. The authority on that subject remains Gelber. My comments will be limited to his ideas about poetry’s capacity to link the visible and invisible worlds.

Chapter 1

The Early Poems, 1649–63 In Dryden’s earliest poems, occult language and ideas become important rhetorical and analytical tools, alongside allusions to the classics and Holy Scripture. The transitional nature of popular beliefs about the occult during the later seventeenth century provided a rich resource that he could draw upon for analysis, definition, and praise, especially as he dealt with problematic subjects. He employs the occult to lend “an air of permanence” to “highly ephemeral particulars”1 and to address some of the problems associated with the subjects he chooses to address—for example, a young man who died without a legacy of tangible achievements to praise, a great leader whose achievements were politically controversial, a mediocre poet, or a countess with less than praiseworthy morals. In treating these and related issues in the early poems, he relies heavily on astrology and alchemy—which he tends to weigh against the competing “sciences” of astronomy and chemistry— and to a lesser extent on demonology and other folk beliefs.2 As he develops this occult rhetoric, his concept of the “modern” poet’s occult vision comes into focus as well. Dryden’s earliest published poem, the elegy “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings” (1649), uses occult language to commemorate the young man’s excellence in the absence of any specific achievements on which to ground that excellence. Hastings was only nineteen when he died on the eve of his wedding. Toward the middle of the poem his body is described as an “Orb,” whose “Reg’lar Motions” on the single “Pole” of virtue and learning show his “sublime Soul” better than Archimedes’ “Sphere” could exhibit the “Heavens” (California Works 1:27–30). In the mid-seventeenth century, “Orb” could mean one of the nested spheres in the medieval universe or a single planet or star in either the old or the new world picture.3 Was Hastings’s body like one of the concentric spheres, whose 1 Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven: Yale UP, 1968), cited by McKeon 32. In this regard, Dryden uses the occult in ways similar to his use of classical and biblical references. See Hoffman, Roper (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms), Harth, (Contexts), Barbeau Gardiner (Ancient Faith), Frost, and Corse. Although Winn’s focus is on the language of art and nature, especially the sister arts and sexuality, rather than of the occult, he analyzes most of these same poems in “When Beauty Fires the Blood,” esp. 35–70. 2 This chapter significantly revises and expands my earlier overview of all the poems in “Dryden’s Poetry and the Language of Magic.” Substantial portions are quoted by permission from SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. The chapter also incorporates “Dryden’s Occult Rhetoric in the Early Poems.” Substantial portions are republished by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press. 3 It could also refer to a person’s rank or station in life. See OED.

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motions were directly impelled by God or an angel, or was it like a single star or planet moved by a force obeying God’s natural law? The reference to Archimedes presumes a pre-Copernican world picture, but the claim that Hastings’s earthly form shows his soul “better” than Archimedes’ physical model could represent the heavens suggests that Dryden wants his reader to understand Hastings in more modern terms as well. The ensuing references to Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe confirm this duality of signification. In lines 31–38 the “Graces and Vertues, Languages and Arts, / Beauty and Learning” that constituted Hastings’s inner “Pole” while he lived are collectively termed “Heav’ns Gifts.” In most of the population, Dryden says, such gifts are scattered like shooting stars, no single person embodying all at once or, by implication, for long. In ordinary people, they are transitory and directed toward earthly affairs. The context is that of a mutable, imperfect universe, the legacy of Galileo. A different context is needed, however, to distinguish Hastings from these ordinary humans. Within his soul, the heavenly qualities, instead of resembling “falling Stars,” were “fix’d and conglobate” as in a “Sphear.” Indeed, this Ptolemaic sphere of fixed stars—the assembled virtues fixed on his soul—glowed so brightly that it imparted a “Celestial” dimension to his earthly form. But just as this preCopernican metaphor becomes established in the reader’s mind, Dryden changes the reference point again. The very Ptolemy whose system is used to describe Hastings’s excellence is now said to be inadequate to the full task of understanding him. Addressing Ptolemy directly, the speaker claims that calculating Hastings’s “Altitude … / transcends thy skill” (39–41). Ptolemy’s model thus joins that of Archimedes in the weakness of its power to describe the link between Hastings and the divine. The early modern astronomer, Tycho Brahe, is now summoned to interpret Hastings as a single star newly added to “our Hemisphere” (42–46). Dryden has it both ways. While still alive, Hastings was a microcosm of the Ptolemaic world system, his inner qualities like fixed stars and his body like their sphere glowing with divine influences. Divested of his diseased body, however, he can be understood only through modern astronomy as a single, radiant star in our sky. As the poem ends, Dryden emphasizes the continuing, benign influence of Hastings’s resurrected soul through the mediation of his would-be widow. She is charged to propagate the ideas of “Vertue, Knowledge, Worth” (100) that emanate from Hastings in his spiritual form. In this final image, Dryden relies upon the stillwidespread belief, despite the dominance of heliocentrism and empirical science in his time, that both stars and the souls of the dead could influence sublunar life.4

On the persistence of astrology during the Restoration, including its espousal by Dryden, see Thomas 346, 414–24; McKeon 190–266; Dryden, Letters 93–94; Eade 207–11; and Curry 51. For a sense of the intellectual status of ghost lore during the period, see More, Immortality of the Soul 2:34–35, 130–58, and An Antidote against Atheism 1:131–32, in Collection; also Glanvill, Lux Orientalis 124–68. 4

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The elegy on Hastings is not a masterful poem. Dryden has been faulted for its “clogged, stumbling diction” and “over-ingenious images.”5 However, in using occult language to celebrate the late lord’s virtues, he initiates two strategies that would become increasingly useful in future works. First, he takes advantage of the ambiguous status various forms of occultism held in the later seventeenth century, reflecting in this poem especially the ongoing transition from astrology to astronomy. Secondly, he begins using “recurring patterns of imagery as an allusive ‘counterplot’”—a practice he seems to have learned from Virgil.6 In his other major pre-Restoration poem, the Heroique Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell (1659), Dryden uses both these strategies with a clearer, though no less complex, purpose—in this case a political purpose. There is broad agreement about the challenge Dryden faced in writing this poem and about his overall method of meeting that challenge. The challenge, of course, was to commemorate the greatness of a conservative Puritan, the late Oliver Cromwell, during unsettled times when it was not at all clear whether Puritans or Royalists would emerge as the dominant political force in England.7 The overall strategy was to balance affirmation with denial through rhetorical qualification and irony. Beyond this, however, opinions diverge. On the one hand, the California Works editors find a restrained but clearly defined point of view designed to console Cromwell’s compatriots while avoiding offense to the Royalists (1:191). Roper adds that the poem rejects “a republican dictatorship … without embracing a Stuart orthodoxy” (Poetic Kingdoms 61, 59).8 To Zwicker, however, Dryden fails to understand Cromwell, and his use of occult terminology is intentionally pejorative, undermining praise of Cromwell’s successes (Politics and Language 80–84). My own approach to this poem, as with the elegy on Hastings, starts with a different assumption—i.e., that during the later Stuart period attitudes toward the occult arts were ambiguous and ideologically problematic (see “Introduction,” above, p. 7). Where Zwicker reads that ambiguity as evidence of Dryden’s confusion, I see it as a strategy to bring a broad range of readers into his circle of understanding. Dryden obviously felt that all readers, whatever their political bias, could agree on his main point—that Cromwell did not accidentally become great and powerful; Heaven had chosen him at birth for a special kind of “Grandeur” (21), long before circumstances favored his rise. It is the attempt to grasp and communicate the nature of this divine act, and of the “strangely high endeavours” (147) which followed, that brings forth from Dryden a series of terms and images drawn from Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 24. Hoffman (308) cites earlier critiques. Winn, John Dryden and His World 110, but see also Hoffman 16–17. 7 Winn, John Dryden and His World 79–95, provides the background and sees the 5 6

poem as a restrained effort to chart a course between conflicting political positions and principles of style that reflected “the conflicting forces that had shaped his early life.” 8 That Dryden remains politically neutral in this poem is also the view of Garrison 149–55. Holberton 197–204 also emphasizes Dryden’s neutrality, achieved through a skeptical depiction of Cromwell as “a fine mixture of the limited and the prodigious” (203).

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occult traditions. Relying on their ambiguous status in the Restoration, he imbeds these occult references in contexts that allow them to be understood in different ways by readers of different political persuasions.9 The references to stars provide good examples of the method. First, Cromwell is said to have scattered his conquests “Thick as the Galaxy with starr’s is sown” (56). The word “galaxy” was used in English literature to indicate the Milky Way at least as early as Chaucer’s time, when the pre-Copernican view of the universe was standard, and this usage continued through the modern era (OED). So, on the one hand, Dryden could be saying that Cromwell’s conquests have been added to the map as stars might be added to the firmament, which would make him the earthly equivalent of God in His ability to alter the make-up of the immortal sphere of fixed stars. The comparison might have pleased readers of the Puritan persuasion. But to some Royalists, no doubt, this passage would be understood as comparing Cromwell to a modern astronomer whose very earthly endeavors have the effect of adding new stars to the empirically developed map of the heavens. In this conception, Cromwell becomes more of a natural and rational force than a supernatural or supra-rational one.10 A few stanzas farther along, Dryden raises the prospect of comparing Cromwell’s control over events to the influence that stars have on earthly affairs. However, he raises this analogy only to reject its initial formulation: Nor was he like those starr’s which only shine When to pale Mariners they stormes portend, He had his calmer influence. (69–71)

But Dryden fails to complete the substitute comparison, the analogy between Cromwell’s calm and steady influence and that of God through the stars, leaving those readers inclined to see Cromwell as God’s vice-regent to complete it in their own minds. For the benefit of the rest, Dryden shifts to a different source of language, yet one that was also in the occult lexicon: ’Tis true, his Count’nance did imprint an awe, And naturally all souls to his did bow; As Wands of Divination downward draw And point to Beds where Sov’raign Gold doth grow. (73–76)

Cromwell’s “calmer influence” is said to emanate from his “Count’nance,” which struck observers with “awe” as we are struck when divining wands guide us to Dryden’s double perspective on politics as he leaned toward the Puritan bias in the 1630s, to the Royalist in the 1640s, back to the Puritan again in the 1650s and, finally, more firmly, toward the Royalist in the 1660s is pointed out by Winn, John Dryden and His World 57. 10 Natural versus supernatural in astrological discourse is concisely discussed by Curry 8–9. 9

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where “Gold doth grow.”11 The trope combines two widespread beliefs, each of which, like the belief in astrology, had both adherents and scoffers. The divining rod used for locating buried treasure was introduced to England from Germany in the mid-1600s and retained a large following during the Restoration, as did the theory that precious metals “grow” in the earth.12 Cromwell’s physical bearing points to his superior inner qualities as a divining rod points to hidden gold, and these inner qualities have grown to “Sov’raign” value in the way that gold “grows” in the earth—i.e., through the operation of nature and time.13 Readers who wish to regard Cromwell’s personal charisma as the outward sign of his spiritual potency are free to do so. But for Royalists, this analogy removes his greatness from a direct and primary to an indirect and secondary effect of God’s decrees.14 God may have planted the golden seeds of heroism in the Protector’s nature at birth, but He consigned them to temporal processes for their full development. Cromwell’s power is conveyed through a physical bearing that grew naturally and just as naturally was destined to die.15 Still farther along in the poem, where Cromwell’s domination of the House of Commons is commented upon, Dryden’s syntax reveals a similar duality of meaning: “When such Heroique Vertue Heav’n sets out, / The Starrs like Commons sullenly obey” (105–106). Readers of the Puritan persuasion have latitude to read this analogy as an affirmation of Cromwell’s divine role: “the Commons obey Cromwell as the stars obey God.” Royalists, however, could read the analogy differently: “the stars obey this example of heroic virtue, Cromwell, just as the House of Commons does.” It is not Cromwell alone to whom the obedience is owed. Rather, it is heroic virtue throughout history—the kind that God plants, and that can grow into a Cromwell. The representatives in the House of Commons can be seen as sullen in their obedience because Cromwell is no king even though his financial demands upon them are king-like.16 The stars can be understood as sullenly obedient because the “effort” to align with 11 In Dryden’s day “countenance” signified not just “face” or “mien” (71) but overall bearing and conduct. See the various meanings current in his time: OED. 12 See Thomas 280–82, 362, and 796; and California Works 1:296n. 13 The gold sovereign was minted from the reign of Henry VIII to that of Charles I (OED). See California Works 1:296n. My reading differs from that of Roper who sees incoherence in this imagery, noting that while “subjects bow down” to a king, “who remains above them; divining rods bow down” toward hidden gold (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 56). 14 This is not quite what Roper means when he describes Dryden’s Cromwell as a kind of surrogate god minding the machine (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 59–60). 15 Roper thinks Dryden is distinguishing between God’s regular Providence and the “special Providence” through which He directly intervenes, by-passing fortune and secondary causes, to choose Cromwell for a special role (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 61–62). My own feeling, based on the occult language in the poem, is that Dryden is distinguishing between two types of special Providence, the one further removed from immediate divine intervention than the other. 16 See Roper, Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 60.

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this secondary, natural cause drains their energy. It is hard work to reflect God’s design in the rapidly changing historical landscape, especially without the aid of a tidily structured universe.17 The final star image seems at first sight non-allusive, and indeed it does not carry the richness of significance seen in the earlier references: Cromwell’s maneuvers in the West Indies are said to have been carried out “where Southern Starrs arise” (122). Royalists can read this as a simple example of metonymy, with the southern stars substituting for locations such as San Domingo or Jamaica. However, what follows directly specifies the action taken under those “Southern Starrs” and resonates for Puritan readers in the context of the earlier occult metaphors: “We trac’d the farre-fetchd Gold unto the mine” (123). This could suggest a Cromwell whose affinity with the southern stars is like his alignment with stars in general: it enables him to direct his explorers with divinely sponsored accuracy to the hidden gold growing in the West Indies. These star references, taken in the aggregate, reinforce the image of Cromwell as God’s deputy but do so without insisting on magical abilities or a place in the divinely ordained heritage of leadership. The same principle guides Dryden’s reference to alchemy in lines 97–104: For from all tempers he could service draw; The worth of each with its alloy he knew; And as the Confident of Nature saw How she Complexions did divide and brew. Or he their single vertues did survay By intuition in his own large brest, Where all the rich Idea’s of them lay, That were the rule and measure to the rest.

Like the skilled alchemist, Cromwell understands the differing properties of his materials—in this case, the men who carry out his plans and commands—and can therefore employ them in effective combinations. But this skill need not be ascribed to immersion in the harmonies of the universe or to communication with Heaven or the stars, though those who seek evidence of Cromwell’s continuing communion with the Almighty could see it this way. For the Royalist, however, the reference to alchemy simply reinforces Cromwell’s inborn qualities. “The rich Idea’s” that are scattered piecemeal among his men come together in his own “brest,” informing his ability, as nature’s “Confident,” to align his actions with nature’s rhythms. His kind of alchemy, like his influence over history, does not rely upon spiritual sympathies. It shares a Charleton’s or a Boyle’s conviction that while the patterns and laws of nature are Providential, human understanding

17 Thomas points out that “Heliocentrism was consistent with astrology. If the earth was constantly changing its position then certain calculations would have to be made all over again, but the task was not impossible” (414).

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of natural phenomena must be based on observation and experience—that is, the knowledge of secondary causes once removed from God’s direct intervention.18 Near the end of the poem Dryden inserts one reference to demonology: Cromwell is called the “Protecting Genius” of England (139). In seventeenthcentury usage the term “genius” could mean many things, from an evil daemon to a heavenly spirit or ghost, and the genius could either inhabit or guard a person or place.19 Dryden appears to be using the term to designate the guardian spirit of a place. He would soon use it in this sense again in “To My Honored Friend, Dr. Charleton” (1662), where he speaks of Charles II as being “Watch’d by the Genius” (55) of Stonehenge during his escape from defeat at the battle of Worcester. Unlike the usage in this later poem, however, where the “genius” is disembodied, in the Heroique Stanzas it is embodied in the person of Cromwell himself. This usage would satisfy both Puritan and Royalist convictions that the late Lord Protector had been on a divine errand. In addition, the Royalist reader could have made much of the placement of this line immediately following the reference to the Thames whale that had recently been captured and killed. Dryden sees the whale as the ocean’s tribute to Cromwell’s mastery of the sea, but the accompanying implication is that Cromwell’s mastery, like the ocean’s tribute to it, was unusual, vulnerable, and temporary. In the Heroique Stanzas, notwithstanding Zwicker’s instructive analysis, Dryden comes across as confident about what can be known as well as what escapes reasoned analysis. He wants his readers to admire Cromwell as an exceptional leader chosen by God, but he recognizes their divided opinions about the historical significance of this leadership and the type of divine sponsorship it reflects. One strategy he uses to accommodate this ambivalence is to enlist his readers’ incertitude about the efficacy and meaning of occult practices. Through this strategy he enables those of a Puritan persuasion to regard Cromwell’s achievements as evidence of a continuing, supernatural intervention in earthly affairs that foretells a lasting shift in political, religious, and social norms. Royalist readers, at the same time, are permitted to understand Cromwell’s divine appointment as having occurred only at birth, when God established that “strange” harmony with nature which assured his temporary ascendancy. Royalists could thus discount any imputation that he supplanted the true monarch in the sense of taking a predestined place in the royal line. Dryden is not uncomfortable with this ambiguity of interpretation. Cromwell’s outward acts embody “deep Secrets” (128) of divine origin. As such, they exist at the limits of reasoned analysis where, as Dryden would later express it in Religio Laici, they dissolve “in Supernatural Light” (2:10–11).

18 Webster (esp. 59–71) surveys the later seventeenth-century tension between adherents of natural and sympathetic concepts of alchemy. See also Coudert 164–66, 173–96. 19 See the OED and West, Invisible World 30–31, 101, 185–86.

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In the poems written during the very early years after the Restoration, Dryden adopts a more clearly Royalist view and broadens the application of occult language and concepts beyond the subjects of government and sovereignty to include those of learning and the arts. In Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Restoration of Charles the Second (1660), he enlists the ambivalence of occult references for new purposes. Instead of accommodating divided political perspectives, ambivalence helps Dryden define different types or levels of Providence visible in the actions of key Royalists while connecting sectarian belief and actions to the delusions of old-fashioned magic. In the Royalist interpretation of the earlier poem, Cromwell is Providentially chosen at birth and sent along a natural path to greatness. The equivalent process for Charles is more like a divinely sponsored “Pilgrimage” (54) involving both stellar and direct heavenly intervention. Initially, the stars are presented as “cross” (19) and “black” (113), “infecting” the skies and endowing Charles’s pilgrimage with “Sorrows” (52) and “wounds” (57). Here, as in the elegy on Hastings, Dryden calls upon the surviving astrological tradition according to which the stars could convey God’s influence through spiritual sympathy. Toward the end of the poem he reinforces this view. The star that “shone out so bright” at Charles’s birth (288) performs at the Restoration a function equivalent to that of the star of Bethlehem, “Guiding our eyes to find and worship you” (291). Thus, through his astrological language, Dryden implicitly sets Charles apart from Cromwell, in that Charles is guided by “Heav’nly Parentage and earthly too” (257), while Cromwell, from his Providential birth onwards, follows his own, very earthly path. During the pilgrimage, God teaches Charles “the way” (318) of true leadership. He sustains Charles not through stellar influences but inwardly, enabling him to live courageously “above his Banishment” (60) just as “Souls reach Heav’n while yet in Bodies pent” (59). While enduring his misfortunes, Charles gains wisdom as Adam does during his own pilgrimage through the fallen world. What Charles learns is that in other countries monarchs rule through “secret Arts” (77) very much as Cromwell was said to rule in the Heroique Stanzas: his “Mechanique Arts in publique moove / Whilst the deep Secrets beyond the practice goe” (127–28). The implication is that Charles will use a different method once he assumes the throne, a more open engagement with his subjects, exhibiting “mildness” (258) and a “forgiving mind” (261) instead of a detached, secretive adherence to policy. The only hidden sources of action in Astraea Redux are those through which Providence guides the actions of General Monck before Charles resumes his throne: “So on us stole our blessed change; while we / Th’ effect did feel but scarce the manner see” (129–30). By hiding his intended “Acts” behind a “close … vizard” (179), Monck secretly implements his strategy for the Restoration, just as Cromwell kept his own counsel while ruling during the Interregnum. Monck becomes Cromwell’s true successor, taking up his Providential role as a natural and temporary force for good. However, Dryden’s Cromwell has not, as Schilling claims, reverted “to the status of a rebel, and … false dissembler” (269). That description is reserved for the extreme Puritan sects who fomented the mid-

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century unrest. They are represented as self-deluded conjurers who “charm’d their useless conscience out” (190) and then invented a false “Heaven … far distant from the sky” (196).20 Like Cromwell, and unlike these petty wizards with their earthbound substitute for heaven, Monck is “designed” by “Providence” (151) to restore civil order in preparation for the Restoration. Also like Cromwell, he enjoys only the indirect attentions of the Almighty in the process. As Monck guides events toward the Restoration, the stars do not directly influence his actions, as they did during Charles’s pilgrimage. Now they become mere witnesses, albeit divinely ordained ones. “The blessed Saints that watch’d this turning Scene / Did from their Stars with joyful wonder leane” (153–54). This may be a reference to Dante’s Paradiso, Canto XXIII, where Dante encounters the Virgin Mary and other saints in the sphere of the fixed stars.21 Even though Dryden does not share this pre-Copernican world picture, his reference to the watchful, star-borne saints clearly indicates divine oversight of Monck’s actions but without any direct intervention.22 General Monck is permitted to use only natural means. To indicate this, Dryden contrasts Monck’s true chemistry with the false magic of old-fashioned alchemy, which he now ranks with the delusions of the rebellious Puritans. Alchemy is seen as the hasty and fanciful pursuit of “Chymaera’s” (159), and its outcome, its “gold,” fails to stand the test of reality (162). The true chemistry proceeds naturally, as General Monck does in preparing for the Restoration, by a slow measuring out of real forces until the time is right for them to be combined into an effective reaction. God’s role is only to fix the “hour” (147) for Monck to combine the forces and set them in motion. “To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyrick on His Coronation” (1661) holds less interest for the explicator of occult references than does the following poem to the Lord Chancellor. In the coronation poem, Charles is compared to Noah (1:1–9), to the nature-animating sun (13–24), to God himself receiving the praise of his “Angels” (68), to the patriarch of a family (93–96), and to Jove’s “Royal Oke” (129), with much emphasis on his divine ordination: his “Sacred Majesty,” “sacred Head” (46), and “sacred boughs” (132). This mysterious holiness of the monarch is reiterated in “To My Lord Chancellor, Presented on New-years-day” (1662), where it serves as the source for Clarendon’s effectiveness, placing the Lord Chancellor in the ranks of heroic leaders like Cromwell and Monck. Through occult references, Dryden emphasizes the Providential nature of this special relationship with the king and navigates the current allegations against Clarendon by rising above them. Charles is “joyn’d” to Clarendon as the sky joins the earth’s horizon (31–42), but Clarendon remains the earthly part of the contract. Charles is the “Nations soul” On charmers, conjurers, sorcerers, and the like, see Thomas 210–11. Paradise 257–61. 22 Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 189–91, notices the supernatural sponsorship 20

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of Monck but does not analyze the natural means by which Providence operates in this case.

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(27), and Clarendon invisibly receives the king’s “vital influence” (28). However, he conveys this invisible influence to society not as the stars spiritually influence sublunar life in the astrological sense but rather as blood conveys energy to the body through arteries. As “Heavens Eternal Monarch” imperceptibly deputizes “his bright Ministers the Stars,” Charles conveys “His pow’r unseen” to Clarendon who then executes it in less than mysterious ways (84–86). Clarendon himself is presented more as a known or knowable quantity. His methods of government are open to inspection: While Emp’rique politicians use deceipt, Hide what they give, and cure but by a cheat; You boldly show that skill which they pretend, And work by means as noble as your end: Which, should you veil, we might unwind the clue As men do Nature, till we came to you. (67–72)

Clarendon is no quack who uses “deceipt” to “Hide” the true ingredients of his prescriptions. Even if he should find it necessary temporarily to “veil” his methods, they are so natural that we ordinary mortals can figure them out inductively, just as we might “unwind” any other operations of nature. Now that Charles is on the throne, there is no further need for secrecy among those who execute his commands. Charles has assumed the sacred role of dispenser of a secret Providence, but those who serve him, like Clarendon, must operate within the natural world where their methods become visible. The rest of the poem invokes the language of natural philosophy, specifically astronomy, to enforce this view. In what seems at first an occult definition of his role, Clarendon’s efficient stewardship of England’s international affairs is related to heavenly harmony in the cosmos: For as in Natures swiftnesse, with the throng Of flying Orbs while ours is born along, All seems at rest to the deluded eye: (Mov’d by the Soul of the same harmony) So carry’d on by your unwearied care We rest in Peace and yet in motion share. (113–18)

Much depends on how we understand the parenthetical phrase, “Mov’d by the Soul of the same harmony.” If the “Soul” imparting movement to the “Orbs” modifies Clarendon’s “unwearied care” of England’s business, then Dryden is somewhat inconsistently ascribing a spiritual dimension to Clarendon’s administrative methods. My own view is that the entire parenthetical phrase modifies “deluded eye” and refers to the natural movements of the “flying Orbs” in our solar system. The “Soul” is that of the Prime Mover, God, who operates on the solar system through forces that follow His laws. Humans do not see or feel the motions of the orbs because their orb is also in motion following those same laws. The equivalent earthly phenomena would be Charles’s purposes as the prime mover

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and Clarendon’s “unwearied” forces executing those purposes with such skill and swiftness that we don’t have time to register the details as we are carried along.23 Here, then, Dryden exploits, as he has done before, the duality of significance in an important, occult concept: the music of the spheres. By the later seventeenth century this notion “was becoming rapidly discredited as empirically true,” yet it continued to be applied within the framework of post-Copernican astronomy (Hollander 19, 332–33). The transitional nature of the concept enables Dryden to suggest that Clarendon’s methods—which make us feel at ease even while “born along” in his “active … arts of Peace” (105)—seem mysterious only in the preCopernican sense. In fact, his methods are not really mysterious at all, in just the way that new scientific truths are not really mysterious—i.e., they are perceptible but not godless. Although the musical harmony of the solar system was no longer thought to be caused either by friction among the nested spheres or by the angels in charge of them, Dryden and his contemporaries remained convinced that God imparts harmony to his post-Copernican solar system. Scientists can empirically understand that system and the forces that move it without fully understanding God’s intentions or plans. We likewise can understand contemporary England and Clarendon’s executive methods and actions, swift and smooth as they are, without fully grasping the king’s sacred purpose behind them. As if to reinforce this image, Dryden ends the poem by comparing the seemingly ageless Clarendon, executing the intentions of his royal master, to the “Heav’nly bodies” (which “measure Change, but share no part of it”) orbiting around the “Sun” (149–54). In the verses to Howard and Lady Castlemaine, Dryden turns his main attention from sovereignty and government to literary art and patronage. The preoccupation with power, however, remains, and the occult references help him to develop this interest. The continued vitality of the arts and learning depended in Dryden’s time on robust patronage by wealthy or influential aristocrats. In his earliest poetic tribute to a patron, “To the Lady Castlemaine” (1:45–46) Dryden sets out to thank Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, for “Incouraging” his first play, The Wild Gallant. As the notorious mistress of King Charles, Lady Castlemaine had earned a reputation for carnal frailty that would have made it difficult for Dryden to define her patronage as Providential. At first, he seems to assign her a rather high status: You, like the Stars, not by reflexion bright, Are born to your own Heav’n, and your own Light: Like them are good, but from a Nobler cause, From your own Knowledg, not from Natures Laws. (25–28)

She is more like a star than a planet, “not by reflexion bright” but emitting an inborn “Heav’n” and “Light.” This function, however, is now said, ironically, to proceed from a “Nobler Cause” than either God’s direct influence or His secondary My thanks to James Winn for assisting in explicating these lines.

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instrumentality through “Natures Laws.” That cause is her own “Knowledge,” by which Dryden seems to mean the good judgment of dramatic art she has developed through experience. If her actions are like those of fate or a god, imparting new life to his “dying Muse” (54), they are so only in the pagan sense intended by “Grecian Poets” (42). Lady Castlemaine exercises her beneficent patronage not as the immediate agent of heaven but rather as the agent of her own acquired taste in the products of artistry and learning. Dryden recognizes the power of her intervention, earthbound and material as it is, and depicts it as more potent at the present moment than “my Stars” (38). He strongly implies, however, that like the immature beauty sung by “old Poets” in return for praise, his plays will eventually come “to age,” at which point he will no longer need support from the likes of Barbara Villiers (46–50). Unlike his practice in the poem to Lady Castlemaine, Dryden’s assignment of high status to literary art in “To My Honored Friend, Sir Robert Howard” (1660) is not undercut by irony. It is, however, tacitly distinguished from his direct comments on Howard’s own poetry. Dryden avoids judging the value of Howard’s rather mediocre collection of poems by treating them as representatives of postRestoration poetry in general. In defining the new poetry, Dryden anticipates the opening section of the verses to Clarendon. There the reinstatement of poetry is equated to the restoration of the “Druyds” to “that great charge which Nature did ordain” (25, 23). Interest in the British Druids, those ancient magician-priestpoets, had been revived earlier in the century when writers like Thomas Carew and Michael Drayton traced the British monarchy and, by implication, their own lineage, back to an ancient world in which bards embodied both political and priestly powers. The last druids, those in Wales, were considered heirs of Noah and of the magical theology of Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras. Later, the druidical union of lawgiver and wizard split into the partnership of king and magician-bard typified by Arthur and Merlin (Brooks-Davies 150–79). Although less popular in the Restoration, this tradition obviously appealed to Dryden, since in his “Life of Plutarch” (1683) he discusses “our Druydes, who were nearest to the Pythagoreans of any Sect” (17:256). Later, in King Arthur (1691), he would give a major role to Merlin. In the early 1660s, then, Dryden seems to endow poets, including himself, with druidical powers. In the verses to Howard, however, it becomes clear that these modern druids are not old-fashioned wizards directly tapping divine forces in nature. They treat nature not as an expression of spiritual forces but rather as a material structure, and their peculiar gift is to shape that structure into a “beautifull … world” (1:32) rather than simply to see it as an accidental assemblage of Lucretian “Atoms casually together hurl’d” (31). As the confidants of nature rather than of nature’s prime mover, they occupy a lower status and wield a less potent form of power than the king. The “providence” of their “wit” (34) is owing not directly to the Almighty but rather to their “hidden … Engine” (22) of creativity, their “Genius” (35). Poets become post-Baconian, natural magicians

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whose manipulation of images and language corresponds to God’s handling of corpuscular reality.24 The secretive way in which this is accomplished, through “hidden springs” (22), suggests a parallel between this conception of the writer and Dryden’s portraits of Cromwell, Monck, and Clarendon. Cromwell’s strategy of reform and conquest was founded on “deep Secrets” (128) of a mysterious Providential purpose. After the Restoration, however, Monck’s ingenious preparations and Clarendon’s veiled administrative methods only seemed secretive but could be understood empirically, “As men do Nature” (72). This distinction between the actual mystery of God’s plan for a Royalist England and the seeming mystery of great leadership in executing that plan resemble the distinction between God’s Providence and literature’s “providence of wit.” In the epistle to Howard, however, this analogy breaks down almost the moment it is implied. The future effects of Cromwell’s actions are left undetermined in the Heroique Stanzas. In Astraea Redux Monck could not foresee the future, even though he could manipulate existing forces to achieve it under Providential direction. And Clarendon could only “measure Change,” not predict it. Howard, by contrast, representing all purveyors of the “providence of wit,” is given prophetic status. His opening poem on the exiled king, composed well before the Restoration, foresees “great Charls his morning break” (90).25 Accordingly, as the whole collection of Howard’s poems is published, restoring poetry’s dominion over “Morall Knowledge” (45), “Charls ascends the Throne” (105) of political dominion.26 As represented by Howard, the modern druids may have lost their predecessors’ direct access to divine will, but they have retained a special insight into the future. In the poems Dryden wrote during the years before his first serious plays appeared, he develops an occult rhetoric. In the elegy on Lord Hastings, he fills the void of solid achievements to which occult metaphors might refer with a pattern of richly suggestive contrasts between the metaphors themselves, in this case juxtaposing the old and new astronomies. In the stanzas on Cromwell, the division of contemporary opinions about astrology, alchemy, and demonology assists in accommodating fiercely divided opinions about the source and meaning of his 24 Six years later, in “An Account of the ensuing Poem [i.e., Annus Mirabilis] in a Letter to the Honourable, Sir Robert Howard,” Dryden makes a similar point in relation to Virgil’s art: “We see the Soul of the Poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his Pictures” (1:54). Unlike Winn (John Dryden and His World 102), I see no contradiction between the earlier poem’s opening lines and its subsequent claim for a “providence of wit.” Howard’s genius is to write in such a way that it seems natural but is actually under subtle control. 25 See California Works 1:211n. 26 Roper (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 148–58) shows how, on several levels, “Howard … has brought back the paradigm of true poetry, just as Charles II has been brought back as the true ruler of the land” (154), but Roper does not pick up the magical implications of this analogy.

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achievements. After the Restoration, Dryden continues to use the richly diverse occult ideas of his time to address the problems presented by his subject matter, though his political bias is now clearly Royalist. In Astraea Redux astrology, alchemy, and various conceptions of the soul assist in defining the ways in which Providence was revealed in Charles’s experience before and after the Restoration, in distinguishing between the divine sponsorship of Charles and that of General Monck (and, implicitly, that of Cromwell), and of contrasting Charles’s truly sacred earthly assignment with the false claims of the extreme Puritans. In the poems about Clarendon, Howard, and Lady Castlemaine, the occult language of astrology, magic, and demonology assists Dryden in compensating for the imperfections of his subjects while finding for each an appropriate role in the Providential world of Royalist England.

Chapter 2

The American Plays, 1664–65 It is not easy to think of John Dryden—proponent of reasonable Christianity, analyst of political realities, and sometime Fellow of the Royal Society—as the initiator of an occult revival in the drama. Yet The Indian Queen, A Tragedy (1664), which he co-authored with Sir Robert Howard, and The Indian Emperour, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. Being the Sequel of the Indian Queen (1665) contain the first genuine supernatural episodes in original serious drama of the Restoration.1 In these two plays, as in his early poems, he makes a calculated application of what today seems a curious blend of occult and empirical ingredients of Restoration thought. In the early poems occult traditions gave him ways to assign Providential significance to tensions and changes visible in history and current events. The two plays about early America dramatize similar tensions and a like sensitivity to cultural change, and the occult again assumes an important role in suggesting the Providential direction of events.2 Like the poems, these two plays reflect a transition away from the mysteries of supernatural power and toward a more experience-based view of political and culture events, but whereas astrology and alchemy provided most of the occult references in the poems, in the plays the occult is expressed primarily through demonology. This is partly because spirit life figured prominently in the available historical sources from which Dryden would have learned about Inca and Aztec cultures. The Renaissance narratives regarding the Spanish conquest of Mexico and South America pay special attention to the Indians’ heavy dependence on “Sorcerers, Magitians, and Inchanters.”3 A more 1 Revivals of older plays do, of course, carry forward Renaissance supernaturalism into the Restoration (see “Introduction” above, p. 3). Among original productions, Hells Higher Court of Justice (published 1661) is a comic political satire. The episodes of conjuration, witchcraft, and prophecy in Robert Stapylton’s The Step-Mother (performed October 1663) may say something about the contemporary interest in such matters, but they are hoaxes perpetrated by Tetrick and Fromund to promote their intrigues and are not echoed by Dryden. The other serious plays of the period do not employ supernaturalism in any overt way. See above, “Introduction,” n7. 2 Throughout the discussion of The Indian Queen, I assume that Dryden was responsible for the play’s occult dimension, since neither of Howard’s other serious plays— The Vestal Virgin (1665) and The Great Favourite (1668)—employs any supernatural phenomena, whereas Dryden continues to brings the invisible world onstage throughout his career. Winn (John Dryden 568–69n87) summarizes the contradictory arguments for the specific contributions of the two writers. In her discussion of the play (69–71), Maguire speaks only of Howard as the author. 3 For example, Purchas his Pilgrimes 1022. This and four sources in previous fiction and drama are identified by Loftis, California Works 8:289–93. Dryden’s physical

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important reason, however, is that demonology enabled him to connect regime change and empire building in the Americas with the same topics in the ancient and Renaissance European worlds, with important implications for the current and future prospects of England.4 The Indian Queen, which takes place before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, depicts a pattern of change that is enacted more fully, with clearer application to Restoration England, in the story of Cortez and Montezuma that is staged the following year.5 The earlier play is about how conflict among raw passions leads to regime change and the discovery of higher laws governing human behavior. The occult references and activity extend the Christian implications of this pattern so that it foreshadows both the rise of the Spanish empire and, though faintly, its demise as English values and power gain potency. Early in the play, Zempoalla’s highest law is will-to-power, Montezuma’s is a kind of personal honor, Orazia’s is filial duty, Acacis’s is patriotic honor, and the Inca’s is traditional authority. But as the political conflict between Zempoalla and the Inca intensifies, these codes of behavior are overwhelmed by the forces of pride (Montezuma and the Inca), friendship (Acacis and Montezuma), jealousy (Orazia and Montezuma), and, above all, love in its various forms (all of the major characters). Through the clash of these passions, a higher law emerges that is essentially Christian in orientation, unbeknown to the pagan survivors it favors. Its basic elements are forgiveness, mercy, and a less carnal form of love. Until Act 5, “Tyrant Love” with its “Cruel … Laws” (8:4.2.37) blocks the schemes, weakens the resolve, and clouds the minds of each main character. Gradually, however, the more selfish, lustful, and irrational lovers are destroyed, leaving in positions of power those who have been able to reconcile the erotic and the Platonic, revenge and forgiveness, the personal and the public.6 The Christian tendency latent in this process is implied in Act 5 as each of the survivors forgives Zempoalla her crimes (5.1.260–71). When Montezuma declares that “Acacis lives in me” (5.1.285), he is suggesting the birth within himself of the proto-Christian perspective that Acacis took toward life, a perspective that led him to question the absence of “mercy” and “pitty” in the Indian conception of deity (5.1.96–97) and to recognize, with

description of the God of Dreams in The Indian Queen appropriates some of the images used in these narratives to describe the ornate statue of the God of Wars. See the section on The Indian Emperour below for more on historical sources. 4 This chapter is based on my article, “The Occultism of Dryden’s ‘American’ Plays,” extracts reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www. tandf.co.uk/journals). The article makes a few points that have later been made by scholars without citing my work. In those few cases, I do not cite theirs. In many other respects I have found their research very helpful and have appropriately cited it. 5 Maguire (195–99) also sees the play as a comment “on current English Affairs” but does not analyze the occult references. 6 For excellent studies of love in the heroic plays, see Osborne, Gagen, Hagstrum 3–68, and Ehrenpreis 27–49.

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some degree of humility, the limits of man’s ability to penetrate his “doubtful fate” (2.1.119).7 This emergence of a Christian-like, higher law out of the strife of passions is reinforced and its meaning expanded by the occult phenomena in Act 3, scene 2. Zempoalla’s dream, which she reports to her priest-magician Ismeron, involves a dove descending “from above” (3.2.33), suggesting both the dove of peace and the Holy Spirit.8 It enfolds the lion in loving wings before releasing the beast from bondage, just as Amexia brings the peace and love that are needed for Christian liberation of the strength embodied in the lion-like Montezuma. Zempoalla’s “wonder” at seeing “so mild a Creature with so fierce agree” (3.2.39) has the millennial implications one would expect to find in a play about the shift from her power-centered society to one centered on love, forgiveness, and reasoned order. Her discovery that the Indian priest, spirits, and gods have lost some of their old powers also supports this pattern of change. When she goes to the magician’s cell for supernatural aid in her crusade against the “love, that .,. disorders me” (3.1.37), her priest-magician, Ismeron, fails to “alter Love” (3.2.135–37), and the aerial spirits fail to “ease the Passions of the Mind” (3.2.132) with their reputedly “powerful Charms of Musick” (3.2.117). While the Indian daemons do have some knowledge, they lack power. Indeed, the God of Dreams is “forbid by Fate” (3.2.106) even to tell all he knows. Upon sadly witnessing such impotency, Zempoalla concludes that her gods “have bound [them] selves by harsh decrees; / And those … are now the Deities” (3.2.113–14). This supersession and emasculation of Indian magic and demonology recalls the way in which the Greco-Roman gods were demoted to the status of devils and elemental daemons by the early European Christians.9 Although this analogy would be more clearly drawn in the sequel to this play, it is implied here by Dryden’s allusions to classical precedents in his descriptions of occult phenomena.10 The scenario of an anxious leader consulting a prophetic daemon This reading is in line with those of Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 64–81, and Derek Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays 22–37, though I incline more toward Barbeau Gardiner’s emphasis on Dryden’s optimism at this stage of his career. 8 Summers, Dryden: The Dramatic Works 1:488, notes that the “gaulless Dove” of 2.1.44 recalls Cowley’s “gaulless Dove” in “Ode Upon His Majesty’s Restoration and Return” and the “meek and the gall-less” dove of The Whole Duty of Man (1658). Cowley identifies his dove with Charles II, which would reinforce Dryden’s sense of the movement of events toward the new empire under the new monarch. See Cowley’s Poems 422. 9 See West, Milton and the Angels 10 and the fuller discussion of this analogy, below, in section on The Indian Emperour. See also Elliott 51, who notes that the New World was equivalent to the “the Roman Empire, whose establishment was the necessary preliminary for the spread of Christianity”; the “arrival of the Spaniards bearing the gospel marked the opening of a new and glorious epoch, which could be seen as the climax of God’s mystic design.” Also, see Cawley 344–87. 10 On these sources, see Smith; California Works 8:289–92 and 303; Reed 63–77; West, Invisible World 31; Thomas 269–79; and Hollander 230. A number of pre-Restoration 7

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through the mediation of a priest-magician had a distinguished pedigree in the Greek sibyls and the Delphic oracle. Subsequently, Renaissance wizards were thought able to invoke earthly daemons who could foretell the future somewhat in the manner of Dryden’s God of Dreams who, says Ismeron, lives in “the Realm of Sleep” where “all th’ informing Elements repair, / Swift Messengers … / To give account of Actions” (3.2.51–54). Zempoalla’s desire for Ismeron to “force love” into Montezuma’s “Scornful Brest” (3.2.134) reflects the love magic and concoction of love potions in Horace and Lucan. The song “suppos’d sung by Aerial Spirits” to restore Zempoalla’s “Soul back to its harmony” (3.2.118–30) combines Orphic and Pythagorean themes of music’s healing virtue. The “Realm of Sleep” with its lethargic god reflects dream worlds such as those described by Homer and Virgil and particularly by Ovid, whose “House of Sleep … Deep in a Cavern,” with its “lazy Vapors” hangs over a “drowsy God.”11 Symbolic dreams and their interpretations were profoundly interesting to Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, and that model for Renaissance dream books the Oneirocritica of Artemidoris of Daldis. Ismeron’s notion that sleep releases the soul’s prophetic faculty (3.2.58–59) echoes Plato and the neo-Platonist Macrobius.12 Whether or not Dryden’s audience connected the weakening of Indian gods, spirits, and magicians with the demotion of their Greco-Roman equivalents, the Prologue to The Indian Queen does encourage spectators to look for signs of transition from a pagan Indian regime to a Christian European one. An Indian Boy introduces the idea: By ancient Prophesies we have been told Our World shall be subdu’d by one more old; And see, that World already’s hither come. (11–12)

The “World” to which he refers is that of the Christian Spaniards to be depicted in Dryden’s next play. But two more “worlds” are suggested when he adds, “And see, that World already’s hither come.” First, he could be referring to the stage world of the play that is about to begin onstage—i.e., Amexia’s world of proto-Christian values. Secondly, his remark evokes the world inhabited by the Restoration audience and implies that the English, as distinguished from the cruel Spaniards, would be worthy empire builders. This latter implication is emphasized by an Indian girl, Quevira, as she responds to the boy with a reference to the Restoration audience:

plays depict music therapy, magical prophecy, love charms, or dream interpretation, but I could find in them no close analogues to this scene in The Indian Queen. 11 For “The God of Sleep,” see Dryden’s “The Sixth Book of the Aeneis” 5:396. For Ovid’s “House of Sleep” see Dryden’s “Ceyx and Alcyone” 7:267–81. 12 On Renaissance and Restoration dream theory, in addition to the notes to the California Works 8, see Goodwin 10–14, 42–47, 62, 268–69, 311; Garber 1–13; DePorte 25–30; and Stock 29–30.

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If these be they, we welcom then our Doom. Their Looks are such, that Mercy flows from thence, More gentle than our Native Innocence. … They came not here to Conquer, but Forgive. If so, your Goodness may your Pow’r express; And we shall judg both best by our success. (13–21)

In this way, the Prologue appears to intend an analogy between the pattern of imperial rise and fall shared by pre-Christian Rome and pre-Christian America, and the similar pattern that may be developing in current history as a purified English colonialism supplants the bloody and debased imperialism of the Spanish.13 Within the play itself, however, this further analogy is not carried to its logical conclusion, which would include the paradigm shift from the mystical view of spirit life common in the pre-Christian and Renaissance cultures to the provisionally empirical view of occult lore in Restoration England. It should be noted, however, that later-seventeenth-century skepticism about demonology and magic would have chimed with the weakening of magicians and daemons in this play. In Oxford the potentialities of love potions had been debated in 1652 and would be again in 1669. The reality and functions of “Aiery Genii,” including their ability to prophecy, were under investigation by Henry More and others.14 Whether dreams had natural or supernatural causes and, in the latter category, whether Satan or God spoke through them, were topics of serious study.15 As mentioned in the “Introduction” (above, pp. 4–5), Dryden seems to have shared Charleton’s view that this new empirical treatment of the occult was part of God’s design for the emergence of Restoration English intellectual life. By addressing the Restoration “world” in the Prologue, perhaps Dryden is asking the audience to see his play not only as foreshadowing their Providentially emergent empire but also their Providentially emergent mind-set. If so, Indian experience depicted in this play becomes a prototype for the shift from an Interregnum world of “enthusiasm” and power politics to the Restoration world of Anglican science and responsible monarchy.16 But even if Dryden intended no reference to recent political or intellectual history, the Prologue and the play itself dramatize the empirical view that regime change is driven primarily from within human nature rather than by the direct 13 In her very instructive book, Empire on the English Stage 1660–1714, Bridget Orr has recently reiterated this point (14–42) without citing my earlier article, and she does not as fully explicate the triple implications of Dryden’s use of the term “World” in the Prologue. 14 An Antidote against Atheism (1:131–32) and Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (1:21, 40), in Collection, and see 157, 134. 15 See above, n12. 16 I am ringing a change here on Barbeau Gardiner’s observations in Intellectual Design 78–81.

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action of supernatural powers. The “harsh decrees” to which Zempoalla’s gods have become bound are the laws of a God who drives history through what Alexander Pope would call the “elemental strife” of “passions” (1.169–70). Pride, desire, and revenge give way to humility, love, and forgiveness. In The Indian Queen these deeper, more potent forces realign early American culture at all levels— psychological, social, historical, and metaphysical. Usurpation and arbitrary government give way to natural succession and patriotic stewardship of power. Magicians become mere priests, and daemons, once responsive to the tyranny of human art, withdraw their occult forces and are subjected, like the rest of creation, to “springs that be / Too small, or too remote for us to see” (2.1.75–76). These are the same hidden springs to which Dryden refers as the “deep Secrets” that account for Cromwell’s “Mechanique Arts” in the Heroique Stanzas (127–28); the “hidden springs” driving “Art” in “To my Honored Friend, Sir Robert Howard” (19–22); the invisible “manner” by which General Monck effects “our blessed change” in Astraea Redux (129–30); and the veiled “means” used by Clarendon to sustain order and progress under the new monarch (70–71). These are the Providentially sponsored but human-centered “engines” of change that can be discovered if we “unwind the clue / As men do Nature” (“To my Lord Chancellor” 71–72)—through empirical study rather than through outmoded magic. Through the compulsion of proto-Christian feelings, the course of Mexican history falls under the direction of those who would try to understand and cooperate with Providential change rather than of those who would force history to satisfy their own desires. This hopeful state of affairs, however, has degenerated in the years between Montezuma’s accession and the maturing of his children. Through Dryden’s carefully designed echoing of key passages, ideas, and relationships from the previous play, we learn in Act 1 of The Indian Emperour that history seems about to repeat itself. Even before he knows the Spanish have arrived, Montezuma slips into a doting version of his former self as his “Lyon-heart,” once freed by the forces symbolized in Zempoalla’s dream, again struggles with “Loves toyles” (9:1.2.182) and “Traxalla’s chains” (1.2.176), here in the form of his desire for Almeria, daughter of Traxalla and Zempoalla.17 Almeria reincarnates her mother to the extent that she is obsessed by “pow’r” (1.2.50) and the desire to secure the throne for her family. At the same time, the love-rivalry of Odmar and Guyomar threatens to interfere with a peaceful succession of the crown within Montezuma’s family. Despite the resurgence of these old forces and problems, however, the cycle of history is about to be interrupted and reshaped forever. The Spanish invaders are to become the catalysts for this momentous change, and their leader, Cortez, at first seems nothing more than a foreign, male equivalent to Zempoalla, a usurper who intends to force the Indians to yield up their gold, religion, and sovereignty. The crucial distinction of Cortez, however, is that his ambition arises not from 17 Derek Hughes in Heroic Plays has discussed some of the ways in which this play reiterates its predecessor, but I take issue with his conclusion that the characters’ imprisonment in the past “frustrates the promise of renewal” (42, 58).

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a personal will to power but from his desire to gain “fame” (1.2.248). He does, indeed, seek gold but not as an end in itself; rather, he takes it to be symbolic, a kind of holy grail hidden in the New World from all but heaven’s champions: “Heaven from all ages wisely did provide / This wealth, and for the bravest Nation hide” (1.1.31–32). Among the invaders are men with baser ambitions— Pizarro’s for gold, Vasquez’s for carnal indulgence, the Christian Priest’s for gold and power—just as the Indians have their selfish Odmar, proud Almeria, and treacherous Taxallans. But Cortez himself clings to a higher vision despite the pull downward of his nation and, indeed, his own passions.18 Montezuma and Cortez are a great deal alike. Both believe in honor, love, and a political order controlled by a divinely ordained king who takes his responsibilities seriously: “Heaven … / … bestows the Crown that Monarchs weare” (1.2.293–94). And they represent cultures that have a great deal in common as well. In this respect, Dryden intentionally departs from his key sources, for both Montaigne’s essays and Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru contrast the “wiles, … policies and stratagems” of the artful, gold-hungry Spaniards with the “carefull observance of lawes, unspotted integrity, bounteous liberality … and free liberty” of the Indians.19 Through Cortez, Dryden stresses the likenesses between the two cultures: to Vasquez’s conventional notion that America is “all untaught and salvage” Cortez responds that the Americans simply practice “fashions differing from our own,” albeit their fashions may be less artificial than ours (1.1.10–14). He makes a similar observation when he tells Cydaria that love in Spain is “as Natural as here, / But fetter’d up with customs more severe” (2.3.69–70). And very early in the action he sadly remarks that the Indians also share with Europeans the vice of treachery (1.2.214–15). Dryden’s Indians are clearly not, in this rendering, the “guiltless Men, who danc’d away their time, / Fresh as their Groves, and Happy as their Clime” whom he mentions in “To My Honoured Friend, Dr. Charleton” (1:13–14). We have, then, a confrontation between two rather similar men representing two nations whose cultures differ more in degree than in kind, more in customs than in social or political structures. Theoretically, they could reach some sort of agreement, were it not for the forces of disruption that lie just under the surface at the end of Act 1: not only the conflicts within Montezuma’s family but also the rivalry between Cortez and Orbellan for the affections of Cydaria, and Pizarro’s Popish chauvinism and lust for gold, which embody the superstition, imperialism, and cupidity of Roman Catholic Europe. In the end, these will be the forces that determine the course of events, not any inherent hostility between the two leaders or the basic ingredients of their cultures. As in The Indian Queen, the struggle that I disagree with Derek Hughes’s notion that Cortez merely re-embodies the “old processes” (46–48). Like Gagen (208–20) and Kirsch (90–91), I see Cortez as educable, though flawed, and as an agent of Providential change. 19 Montaigne, “Of Coaches,” Essayes 5.207–208. See “The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru,” Act 4 of The Play-house to be Let, in Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant 4:77–91. Dryden’s sources are discussed at some length in California Works 9:306–16. 18

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is about to ensue results not in the triumph of true over false or virtue over vice, but rather in a further evolution of Christian history through progressive displacement of pagan values. Just as in The Indian Queen Montezuma was purged of thralldom to his own will and passions and, through the catalytic relationship with Orazia, reincarnated the more Christian traits of Acacis; so in The Indian Emperour Cortez is enabled through loving Cydaria to transcend what amounts to the paganism of his own culture, its materialism and self-serving religious practices, while overcoming his own blind pursuit of “gloire” unredeemed by love. All of this happens, again as in The Indian Queen, under the sponsorship of Providence, whose chief agents are human passions.20 Seen as a vital part of this design, the occult episode in Act 2, scene 1, together with the theological debate at the start of Act 5, deepens the metaphysical dimension of the play’s meaning and helps to transform what might have become a dramatic version of historical romance into an instructive prototype of Restoration culture. The scene in “The Magitian’s Cave” (2.1) comes at that crucial moment of the action when all the forces that will reshape Indian history have been mobilized, and it is appropriate, therefore, that the invisible world should reflect the pressure of imminent change. In The Indian Queen spirits were “prest” to appear by powerful charms (3.2.105) but could not take action. Here, even the magician’s power of invocation is withdrawn, for the “Earthy Spirit” ignores the High Priest’s primary intercession for Montezuma’s “demand” to know “Almeria’s mind” (2.1.107) and proceeds to predict the religious and political fortunes of Mexico. Similarly, when the High Priest again tries to elicit information about Almeria from “subtle Spirits” (2.1.67–75), he is astonished to be greeted instead by prophetic ghosts, “Ghastly Visions” who refuse to vanish at his command (2.1.76–78). Like the specter of Banquo in Macbeth or of Malefort’s murdered family in Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat (c. 1621), they gesture accusingly toward the man responsible (however indirectly) for their deaths and thus strengthen the link between this play and The Indian Queen. Like the Christian ghost in Hamlet, they depart only at the call of “early Cocks” (2.1.95), and in the meantime, unlike the lesser gods that he, and before him Zempoalla, had often confronted, these forms “shake” the king’s “Soul” (2.1.87), as Banquo’s ghost unnerves Macbeth (3.4.102–103). Only Kalib, the “fair” goddess, responds directly to command by singing a “pleasing” prophecy (2.1.48–52).21 This analysis of Cortez is compatible, in most respects, with the views of Alssid 1:150–52, and Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 82–86. 21 Regarding Kalib, we have little to go on but her name. If Loftis is right (California Works 9.306–308) and the name echoes “Caliban” from The Tempest, then at least it takes on vaguely Christian connotations. Additionally, it is just possible that Dryden had in mind the witch “Kalyb” from Richard Johnson’s prose romance, The Seven Champions of Christendom, which went through numerous editions from 1596 to 1687 and was telescoped into a play by John Kirke in 1638. In both forms, Kalyb is a cave-dwelling sorceress who imprisons six of the champions by using her powers of enchantment. She and the magician Ormandine possess magic wands, as Dryden’s High Priest does, and 20

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That all of these prophecies turn out to be perfectly valid is problematic when it is remembered that the Indians were regarded as devil worshippers, for devils would be more likely to convey bogus or obscure prophecies to promote their infernal schemes. Moreover, devils were thought to be conjured by witches or black magicians, not by the priests of a “natural religion” whose tenets are shown to be in many respects compatible with those of Anglican Christianity (see the discussion, below, of the play’s final scene). Furthermore, even in some of his plays with Christian settings, Dryden employs earthly or aerial spirits similar to those invoked by the Indian High Priest. Clearly, for dramatic purposes at least, Dryden had developed a doctrine of elemental beings, and of prophecy, which in this play could be substituted for the more conventional notion of Indian demonology. He may have based his concept of such beings on the writings of Henry More and Joseph Glanvill, both of whom shared his need to rediscover spiritual forces within a world increasingly politicized and materialistic.22 Indeed, without the context of writings by More and Glanvill, the utterances by the Indian spirits become misleading. The first one tells how both the social and metaphysical orders of life are about to be transformed by the inception of Christianity: In vain, O mortal men your Prayers implore The aid of powers below, which want it more: A God more strong, who all the gods commands, Drives us to exile from our Native Lands; The Air swarms thick with wandring Deities, Which drowsily, like humming Beetles rise From their lov’d Earth, where peacefully they slept, And far from Heaven a long possession kept. The frighted Satyrs that in Woods delight, Now into Plains with prick’d up Ears take flight; And scudding thence, while they their horn-feet ply About their Syres the little Silvans cry. A Nation loving Gold must rule this place, Our Temples Ruine, and our Rites Deface: To them, O King, is thy lost Scepter given. (2.1.23–37)

This exiling of pagan deities by “A God more strong” repeats the process by which the early Christian Fathers subsumed the Greco-Roman pantheon under the category of fallen angels, i.e., devils, which had the effect, says West, of “crippling a widespread tendency to identify daemons with the souls of the dead,” and also Ormandine in particular derives his power almost entirely from his wand. Like Dryden’s play, both Johnson’s romance and Kirke’s play center on the overthrow of a pagan worldview by a Christian one. 22 See the discussion of More and Glanvill in the “Introduction” above, pp. 5–6. West, Invisible World, points out that St. Augustine and other Church Fathers wrote that spirits could predict the future on a conditional basis (31).

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damaging “the pagans’ concept of … the cycle theory of the soul.”23 St. Augustine had even included the Roman fauns and satyrs in the process, speculating that they were a kind of spirits by virtue of being generated by incubi and mortal women.24 The “Syres” with whom these Indian satyrs take refuge, therefore, would be fallen angels. But not only is this interpretation at odds with Dryden’s apparent sympathy for the Indian religion and with his demonology in later plays; it is inconsistent with the tone of this passage. The “wandring Deities” are like “humming Beetles” and the satyrs are “little Silvans”—hardly the kind of terminology one would expect in a description of satanic hordes. More significant than this is the way in which Dryden distinguishes between the High Priest’s designation of these spirits as “Deities” and “gods,” and Dryden’s own practice in stage directions of calling them “Earthy” or “Ayrie” spirits. Since the stage directions are addressed to Dryden’s contemporaries, one would expect him to use the terms “devils” or “infernal daemons” if he had decided to follow in the footsteps of the Church Fathers. Instead, his terminology, together with the lighthearted tone in key parts of the Earthy Spirits’ prophecy, suggests that he regards the Christianizing of the Indian spirit world as a less radical conversion than the one experienced in the world of Greco-Roman mythology. This point is strengthened when we consider that Dryden has found common ground between the Indian and Restoration concepts of ghosts. The High Priest, like his Greek and Roman forebears, identifies his lesser gods as … Immortal Souls, who once were Men, And now resolv’d to Elements agen, Who wait for Mortal frames in depths below, And did before what we are doom’d to do. (17–20)

While this sounds almost nothing like Lopez de Gomara’s description of Indian concepts of immortality,25 it is compatible with the classical European belief that “the soul … is immortal, the number of souls fixed, and reincarnation regularly occurs.”26 On the one hand, the Christians in the Restoration audience would be unlikely to approve the idea of reincarnation; Dryden would expect them to dismiss it as the High Priest’s pagan misconception. But on the other hand, when Dryden allows the returned soul of Zempoalla to speak—and he calls her shape a “Ghost” in the stage directions—he gives her a vocabulary surprisingly similar to that of the High Priest, a vocabulary imbedded with allusions to the ancient Mediterranean theory of the afterlife. She speaks of “dusky Vallies” and “dark Dominions” peopled by “empty shades” and leading to “a tall black Poplar” guarding the “entrance of the Fields below” (2.1.96–101). Though Montezuma 25 26 23 24

Milton and the Angels 10. The City of God, cited by West, Milton and the Angels 188n15; and by Shumaker 97. Purchas his Pilgrimes Pt. 3, Ch. 9, 1137. Rose, “Metempsychosis,” Encylopaedia Britannica (1963) 15:33.

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and his priest take all of this at face value, the better educated portion of Dryden’s audience would be hearing Virgil’s description of the landscape leading toward the “mournful Fields” in Aeneid 6: a landscape of “dusky Clouds” and “waste Dominions” peopled by “empty Fantomes” and defined by “a gloomy Grove.” In Virgil, the “mournful Fields,” Zempoalla’s “Fields below,” are home for the souls of pining lovers, so that the allusion is appropriate for the Indian Queen who committed suicide partly out of unrequited love for Montezuma.27 Some interesting conclusions can be drawn from these observations. In the first place, Dryden obviously wanted to carry forward the analogy between preChristian Mexico and pre-Christian Europe that he had initiated in The Indian Queen. But, secondly, he also wanted to distinguish between the two when it came to the matter of their conversions to the Christian world-view. The early theologians had accentuated the distance between pagan and Christian demonology by demoting gods to the status of devils and by damning the pagan inclination to equate daemons with the souls of the dead. Dryden, by contrast, allows the Indian deities to retain some integrity as reliably prophetic, elemental spirits, and if he does not identify them with departed souls, he certainly houses the two forms of spirit life in the same classically conceived underworld. Just as he has emphasized the similarities between the social and political worlds of Montezuma and Cortez, he stresses here the similarities between their metaphysics; in both cases, the object is to dramatize evolution rather than revolution, Providential development rather than radical surgery. A related purpose, as we shall see, is to reinforce the audience’s sympathy for the “natural religion” of the Indians as juxtaposed with the cruel superstition of the Roman Catholic priest. For many members of Dryden’s audience, the most readily accessible precedent for the “redeemed” demonology of this play would have been the Christian neoPlatonism of Henry More and Joseph Glanvill. In works such as The Immortality of the Soul and Lux Orientalis, they posited that departed souls take on aerial forms and inhabit higher or lower realms corresponding to the purity or impurity of their earthly, corporeal lives. Once thus translated, they become indistinguishable in substance and attributes from fallen and unfallen angels, respectively: all are “created spirits” or “genii” or “daemons,” though the angels, unlike disembodied souls, were never made to inform terrestrial matter. Either sort of “genii” might appear to humans in a familiar but aerial form and therefore be defined as a ghost, and either sort might convey the gift of prophecy.28 When these spirits return to In California Works 9:328, Loftis, following Summers, notes the echo from Aeneid 6. See Dryden’s translation in California Works 5, the quoted phrases in 596, 382, 379, 408, and 340, respectively. 28 More, Immortality of the Soul 2:34–35, 130–58 and An Antidote against Atheism 1:131–32, in Collection; Glanvill, Lux Orientalis 124–68. Agrippa’s theory, which More can be said to have modified, is less applicable here because of the negative moral connotations attached to his Christianized Ovidian ghosts: see West, Invisible World 52, 188–90. Dryden’s ghosts, while they may reflect Montezuma’s guilty conscience, are not mere figments of the imagination like Alonzo’s ghost in The Changeling. That they might be considered daemons 27

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advise or incite the living, however, they do so only in order to further the designs of Providence, which More, in his continuing efforts to harmonize his metaphysics with the scientific mentality of his day, speaks of as “the Law of the Universe.” And although they might be drawn into such intercourse by affection for a loved one, they are not, it is implied, compelled by the will of a magician.29 The loss of magical power over the spirit world becomes, in The Indian Emperour, one of three occult effects of the modulation from a pagan to a Christian world order. A second effect is the transformation of Montezuma’s petty gods into earthy and aerial spirits very like the “genii” of More and Glanvill. And a third is the adjustment of these spirits’ relationships with human history: while they lose influence over human passions, they gain more reliable knowledge about the future than even Ismeron and his spirits could command in The Indian Queen. As if to signal this increased clarity of vision, Dryden enriches the High Priest’s first charm with astrological references: Thou Moon, that aid’st us with thy Magick might, And ye small Starrs, the scattered seeds of light, Dart your pale beams into this gloomy place, That the sad powers of the Infernal race May read above what’s hid from Humane Eyes, And in your walks, see Empires fall and rise. (2.1.11–16)

Paracelsus had believed that astronomy “provided clues concerning the course of history by its direct reference to the heavens in which the plan of history was drawn out for our benefit,”30 and in Dryden’s day this conviction was being reaffirmed by William Lilly and others.31 Benjamin Worsley, in particular, regarded the moon as a mediator of planetary influences.32 Dryden’s own emerging astrological interests are exemplified in his early poems, as we have seen. In the magician’s cave, however, Dryden grants astrological wisdom not to the human priest but to the spirits he is about to raise, and, of course, they prove worthy of their charge. Although they share the inability of Ismeron and his daemons to control love, they do accurately foretell the political and religious future of Mexico, as well as the personal future of Montezuma. The Christian God does take command, a gold-hungry nation does conquer and, after losing an opportunity to subdue his foes (see Kalib’s prophecy 2.1.57–61), Montezuma does impersonating the souls of the departed, like the specters of Brachiano in Webster’s The White Devil or “Sweet Helen” in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, is within the provisions of More’s conception of “genii.” 29 More, Immortality of the Soul, in Collection 2:130–57. 30 Webster 17. 31 See Debus, esp. 32. 32 Worsley may have read the 1658 translation of della Porta’s Natural Magick, where (1.8.10–13) the moon’s power in conjunction with the Zodiac is regarded as second only to the sun’s.

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die because he indulged passion (as foretold by Zempoalla’s ghost 2.1.88–91). As in The Indian Queen, all of this is accomplished without magic or supernatural intervention. Gone are the days when an Indian monarch expects aid from the occult powers he summons. The agents of historical change have become the distinctly human and psychological forces that gathered strength in Act 1: love in several forms, the corollary passion of jealousy, “lust of power” (2.3.40), and the “holy Avarice” of Renaissance Catholicism (5.2.116). Yet, although these agents are human, it is striking to note how little the human leaders actually control the course of events. While Almeria and Odmar scheme, while Orbellan attempts to murder Cortez and Guyomar fights heroically, Montezuma and Cortez engage in mainly internal struggles to control their feelings and to understand phenomena. Weakened by an unworthy form of love, Montezuma abandons active cooperation with destiny, which he had achieved in The Indian Queen, and submits to fate rather than trying to steer amidst the forces it has generated (see 1.2.175–84, 2.1.1–7, 3.1.59, 4.3.43). Although Cortez could hardly be called submissive, he too recognizes that the course of events has less to do with his overt activities than with his frame of mind: early in the play he feels that “Heaven” has sent him (1.1.31–32), and at the end he speaks not of conquering or of loving but of being “Blest” by “the powers above” with both “Conquest, and … Love” (5.2.378–79). Like Montezuma, he feels less an actor than a reactor, less an agent than a reagent, in a chemistry whose ingredients and purposes he only partly comprehends. Thus, when the spotlight falls on the two leaders in the final scene of the play, the emphasis is not upon their martial or political prowess, but rather upon their religious and moral beliefs, and on their efforts to understand what has happened to them. If the scene in the magician’s cave provided a background of Christian metaphysics and history against which the succeeding events could be brought into focus, this final scene performs a coordinate function. It fixes the outcome of these events in a position against the background which enables the Restoration audience to find relevance in the play as a whole. In defending Indian religion, Montezuma employs language that anticipates Dryden’s defense of the Anglican via media in Religio Laici, language that the audience of 1665 would readily have linked with the established tradition of Anglican apologetics.33 The Indian Emperour’s notion of a “middle way” (5.2.77), posing rational humility against the Roman Catholic priest’s proud claim of infallible interpretation of “Heavenly Beams” (5.2.72), would have gained the assent of any thoughtful Anglican. As in Religio Laici, Dryden conveys through a persona the doctrine that even without the Christian revelation, Indians can gain from the “Light of Nature” (5.2.92) “enough [knowledge about God’s will] for happiness” (5.2.76).34 To Montezuma, this light The authority on this aspect of Dryden remains Harth, Contexts. Loftis links the religious debate in this scene to “the principles of natural religion”

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found in Montaigne, Hooker, Grotius, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, among others (California Works 9:316), and see Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 90–93.

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of knowledge comes literally from the sun-god whom he worships and to whom he expects to be taken by a “Beam” upon death (5.2.43–46, and see 2.3.161). Although the Christian priest condemns this “Heathen Ignorance” (5.2.49), Dryden clearly finds the Indian sun-worship valid as a symbolic model for his own understanding of the relation between God and man. He had already used it in this way in Astraea Redux (61, 289–91), “To His Sacred Majesty” (1:13–14), and “To My Lord Chancellor” (1:47–48, 154–56), and was to remain fascinated by sun symbolism throughout his career. So were other rational Christians of his day. Charleton, for instance, inserted this eulogy to the sun into his Christian-Epicurean tract, The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652): If the visible and perishable Sun can with uncessant liberality, diffuse his consolatory and all-impregnating streams of light, heat and influence on all parts of the sensible and adspectable World; and so concurre to the generation, vitality, growth and perfection and conservation of all sublunary Nature; … why should not the Invisible, Unperishable and Infinite Sun (of which the other is but a dark and contracted shadow) be allowed to have his Wisdom, Power and Goodness … in all places and at all times diffused, in their operations, over all His Work, with the same facility.35

Yet Dryden’s apparent sympathy with Montezuma’s concept of the via media and with the symbolic validity of his sun worship should not be taken as a blanket approval of Indian paganism. Even at its best, the Indian religion remains polytheistic and sanctions human sacrifice. Below the sun-god Montezuma worships “that cruel god” (1.2.236) identified in Dryden’s historical sources as Huitzilopotchli, and “that mild and gentle god” (1.2.240) that the sources name Quetzalcoatl.36 Still, these lesser gods have not been heard about since Act 1, and the strong implication of this final scene is that Montezuma’s religion is being purged of its non-Christian elements, just as his demonology has been, and just as both his political and social attitudes are. Earlier in the play, he had reverted to Zempoalla’s power-centered concept of sovereignty, a sovereignty based not on responsible stewardship and love, but on raw “pow’r” (1.2.318). Similarly, he had regressed from the noble idea of love he had attained with Orazia to a possessive, fawning kind of desire for Almeria. As he dies, these anachronistic traits go with him, as do the unregenerate aspects of his religion, and he leaves to Cortez the valid vestiges of both his moral and religious temper: the sense of patriotic duty, the ability to forgive, a respectful understanding of human passion, and the belief in a loving God (see 1.2.285–88) who fosters order through monarchy and reason. The heir to this fortune is, in some respects, less promising than one might hope. As a Spanish Roman Catholic, Cortez has to live down some rather negative associations in the minds of the Restoration audience. Just as he has had to learn how to rise from infatuation to love and to reconcile love with honor, so he must Cited by Gelbart 162. Loftis, California Works 9:327.

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learn to distinguish his own patriotic and heroic ideals from the debased reality of contemporary Spain, that “Nation loving Gold” and its degenerate religion. Like Cromwell in the Heroique Stanzas, Cortez must show that he possesses “a soul above / The highest Acts it could produce to show” (1:125–26). In Act 1 the spokesmen for a contentious Roman Catholicism that diluted the sovereignty of kings were Vasquez and Pizarro. Cortez kept sagely silent. But in Act 5, spurred by indignation at the torturing of Montezuma, Cortez declares his independence from gold-hungry priests, those “Enemies of Crowns” who forget their proper roles as “humble aids of power” (5.2.128–34). When he cries “Father, Father” (5.2.117), he is addressing neither priest nor God, but Montezuma, symbolically his father in that he has been purged of those qualities which threatened to carry his country through another violent cycle of desire and treachery. Montezuma can thus endow his conqueror with a patrimony fit for the beginnings of Christian history in the New World. At this critical juncture in the play, the two men who had shared our admiration in certain respects throughout, each imperfect yet standing apart from the more vicious aspects of his countrymen, merge into one. As Montezuma in The Indian Queen had absorbed the best traits of Acacis, Cortez here adds Montezuma’s strengths to his own. The hybrid is aptly symbolized in the projected marriage to Cydaria. As we move from The Indian Queen through The Indian Emperour, we witness a decline of daemonic magic, a persistence of demonology, and a strengthening of prophecy, all of which parallels the decline of power politics in heathen Mexico but the persistence, in its Christian reincarnation, of vital political and interpersonal relationships and values. The strong implication in both plays is that in a Christian world magic is impotent without God’s permission on a case-by-case basis. He can allow a daemon to appear and then forbid it to prognosticate, or he can forbid a daemon to appear in one guise but allow it to take on another more suitable to his, albeit not the magician’s, purposes. When God allows prophecy, it can take either symbolic (Zempoalla’s dream) or literal (the prophecies later in the play) form, and it might well depend on astrological code. Meanwhile, the invisible world remains peopled with spiritual intelligences who know a great deal about heavenly purposes in history but can have little effect on their realization, since historical development is now motivated from within man himself. For the spirit world this represents a loss of power that has its counterpart in the priest-magician’s loss of control over his daemons. As the Christian order emerges, occult energy becomes accessible not through daemonic magic, with all its connotations of pride and will to power, but rather through a kind of empirical analysis carried on with an attitude of humility. Like Montezuma before him, Cortez and Cydaria earn power because, as Jean Hagstrum has pointed out, they find a place for love within the “social conditions that govern it” (63). Their knowledge, their grasp of Providential history in the process of unfolding, gives them power. What Robert Burton said of Columbus might have been written by Dryden in regard to Cortez: “Columbus did not find out America by chance, but God directed him at that time to discover it: it was contingent to him, but necessary to God” (2.3.60).

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Thus, Dryden’s revival of dramatic occultism in his American plays becomes less surprising than it might have first appeared. Like many of his contemporaries, he seems not to have considered a belief in daemons and prophecy any more hostile to empiricism than a belief in Providential design was. The combination of observation, induction, deduction, and resort to occult signals that characterized many thinkers of his day is as clearly visible in his first serious plays as in the early poems. In both places it reflects the effort to revaluate occult phenomena for the “New World” of the Restoration. In the age of Boyle the “technology” of occultism had changed a little, for the cruder forms of magic had given way to more systematic observation and analysis, but the subjects of such study continued to include the occult as well as the data of the senses, and the guiding motivation for such study remained the belief that it could reveal something about the relation of God to his creatures. Once any significant aspect of the relation were discovered, it was widely felt that others would follow and that the emerging design could become the basis for cautious predictions about the future. Hence the persistence of interest in astrology and ancient prophecies, especially in relation to millennial ideas. The close connection between this Restoration frame of mind and the history of discovery in the New World is clear in Glanvill’s repeated references to “the Land of Spirit” as “a kinde of America,” as “an America of secrets” to be brought to light using a scientific method.37 It also shows up in Dryden’s poetic integration of Columbus, Bacon, and the “genius” of Stonehenge in “To … Charleton.”38 In the American plays Dryden seems to be exploring this connection further. He sees in the New World experience a scheme of forces and relationships that can tell us something about the shape of change in current history, and he uses familiar occult beliefs to suggest the link between the observable details of this scheme and the purposes of its creator. The occult episodes mark the point of reality where psyche, society, history, and the transcendent intersect, where the line blurs between what is felt, known, and willed, and what actually happens in the long run. This is the point where human complexity and fallibility, which in the Restoration must be accepted as the effective data of experience, can be seen to become the ingredients of destiny.39

The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), cited by Willey 187; and see “Address to the Royal Society,” Scepsis scientifica, and A Blow at Modern Sadducism 115–18. One is also reminded of Sir Thomas Browne’s “the America and untraveled parts of Truth” in “To the Reader” prefixed to Pseudodoxia Epidemica, cited by Willey 187. 38 See above, “Introduction,” n10. 39 Orr explores the play’s tensions—historical realities versus the formal harmonies of heroic romance, “hard” versus “soft” pastoral tropes, the moral worth of characters versus their destiny—and seems to conclude that these tensions are not resolved because Dryden fails “to produce a heroic representation of empire” (154). While I find her analysis revealing, I do not think Dryden was, in these plays, trying to represent empire as an heroic enterprise. His mode is analytical. He sees the New World as an arena where the play of historical forces, passions, and values—including heroic values among others—can be explored and related to an Anglican vision of Providence. 37

Chapter 3

Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, 1667 For Dryden, the year 1667 inaugurates a period of great confidence that, as a poet, he could discern heaven’s purposes in the social and political changes of his time. In Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, the occult becomes one of his primary means of investing these changes with Providential significance and of defining the poet’s role in the emerging culture. In the process, he develops some of the same themes brought out through occult language and ideas in the earlier poems and plays: the shift of Providential power away from entities emerging out of the invisible world and toward earthly phenomena observable not only by scientists but also by poets, administrators, and even rulers; the related adoption of actions based on empiricism in place of those based entirely on human will; and the resulting obsolescence of secretive and self-centered leadership. Any study of Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666, Dryden’s most ambitious poem of the 1660s, must begin by acknowledging the foundational research and criticism by the California Works editors (1956) and Michael McKeon (1975).1 Our understanding of the poem’s major themes and strategies is mainly derived from their work. The California Works editors call our attention to Dryden’s ability to raise “an urgent, practical problem … to a subject of universal meaning” (1:267) by synthesizing three central themes—mercantile theory, the science of the Royal Society, and the king’s knowledge and attitudes. McKeon’s book, entirely devoted to this poem, discusses the interaction of its political and “poetic” meanings in the minds of contemporaries as they followed the poem’s main themes: England as a family-state presided over by a caring, pious patriarch; the Royal Society as interpreter of God’s mind revealed in nature and history; and the English as God’s chosen people enacting a Christian history of national sin and redemption. An overarching pattern charts the progression from a pre-nationalist Golden Age, through a period of national economic rivalry, to a final Golden Age of enlightened internationalism when trade and war are obsolete. England, under Charles and the Royal Society, leads “one City of the Universe, / Where some may gain, and all may be suppli’d” (1:651–52; McKeon 71). Within the context of these overlapping frameworks, McKeon’s “second reading” of the poem goes a long way toward explaining how astrological and alchemical references function. I would like to expand on this reading by including 1 California Works 1:256–67. Also important are the explications by Roper 74–87, especially his reading of Dryden’s treatment of the fire, and Brown, esp. 63–69. Brown stresses the contrast between the unnaturally selfish, monopolistic imperialism of the Dutch and the benevolent economic expansionism of the English, which is voluntary, peaceful, centered on the global city of London, and in tune with the natural order as it is increasingly understood by the Royal Society.

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all of the poem’s occult references, not only those to astrology and alchemy but also those to demonology and dream theory. Together, they form another of the poem’s thematic structures. I do not share Roper’s opinion that when Dryden draws a series of “images … from the same source …, their repetition brings … no meaningful ‘pattern.’” (80). Nor do I affirm Schilling’s view that Dryden sees events as Providentially leading to a static myth in which order restrains energy. In my view, Dryden understands Providential history as dynamic, complex, and partly mysterious. It cannot be explained by any single mythological pattern, however well established in the culture. The artist who attempts to express the meaning and direction of recent and current events must be able to balance respect for the secret purposes of the divine with a journalistic ability to discern significant patterns in social phenomena. Such discernment, given the complex dynamics of social phenomena, requires agility in drawing from a large fund of established analogies those most applicable to the moment. Language drawn from the occult arts, which by definition connect earthly phenomena to invisible forces, becomes one of Dryden’s more effective means for evaluating and placing contemporary events and persons within his vision of Providential history. In Annus Mirabilis, he combines the whole idea of hidden or covert actions with the three major forms of occultism he had used in the earlier works—astrology, alchemy, and demonology. With the addition of a minor reference to dream theory, the result is his most comprehensive development to date of the grand theme of cultural transition. He employs astrology and demonology principally to develop a complex distinction between the Providentially chosen English and their antagonists—i.e., the Dutch, the French, and the great fire. From the start, he portrays the two foreign antagonists in sharp contrast to Charles II and his people. The wily and brutal Dutch have a limitless appetite for wealth. “Crouching at home, and cruel when abroad: / Scarce leaving us the means to claim our own” (2–3), they behave as if nature itself, under the influence of a Dutch-centered sun and moon, existed to serve only their interests—“ripening” (10) precious stones and fostering the growth of spices only for them, and swelling the tides only to support their sea trade. These assumptions, which “seem’d” natural to the Dutch (8, 13), are prideful illusions. Later in the war, they find their cause sickening and “waning” like “Moons too neer the Sun” (499). In reality, from Dryden’s point of view, Holland’s type of imperialism is perverted, clogging up the natural pattern of world trade, which should “like bloud … circularly flow” (5). This picture of the Dutch as purely self-centered, carnal, bestial, and delusional—“Vast bulks which little souls but ill supply” (280)—creates the rationale for comparing them to “fall’n Angels”(453) or boastful “Fiends” (545). With their diabolical traits, they disrupt the natural course of things and believe they are in control when, in fact, they act out Providential history at its furthest edge. Later in the poem, Dryden describes the great fire in terms reminiscent of those he used to describe the Dutch. The fire is said to be lured “By pow’rful charms of gold and silver” (943), and its greedy flames are compared to “Dire night-hags” riding “on their fiends” (990–91).

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If the Dutch and the fire are linked with the underside of the occult, the French are depicted as totally disconnected from the invisible world. They are sly powermongers, covertly devising “vast” and “deep designs of Empire” (28, 33). These designs reflect a very human effort to control power rather than a desire to do God’s will. Leading this effort, France’s king is out of harmony with Christian Providence and therefore cannot produce cultural progress. He is a mere “painted Jove” (155) and “Eunuch Guardian” of wealthy Holland (157). The latter image recalls and contrasts with the guardian genius of Stonehenge in the epistle to Charleton. That guardian, because it served divine will, assisted in the production of a Providential event: the safe escape of a fugitive king who, when crowned, would lead England into a new intellectual and social world. The French king, by contrast, is an impotent pretender to power, nursing a “secret hate” (162) of England that is counterproductive. Secretive strategies like his (31), which in Astraea Redux the exiled Charles is said to have encountered on the Continent, contrast with the English monarch’s open, caring stance. When applied to Charles and the English people, the occult references emphasize the Providential nature of their actions and define the particular social and intellectual forms Providential history is assuming during the mid-1660s. The astrological imagery affirms God’s support for the English even as it registers the temporary defeats they must endure before finding their way to the future. When Charles calls his navy to war, the fleet is illuminated by two comets bearing heavenly approval through the agency of “Angels” (61–64). Even if the poetspeaker cannot fully explain these comets—whether, as current science would have it, they are “Fir’d by the Sun” (66) or whether, like pre-Copernican stars, they have slipped out of their proper spheres by interacting with human events (67–68)—he senses their Providential nature. Indeed, one could be the same comet that “seal’d our new-born King,” bringing “New influence from his walks of light” (70–72). In Astraea Redux this same comet, which was compared to the star of Bethlehem, was said to have “shone … bright” at Charles’s birth and to have marked a new “Series” of time (288–92). Dryden’s ambivalence about the precise nature of celestial phenomena echoes that of the poet-speaker in earlier poems such as the elegy on Hastings and the Heroique Stanzas, and reminds us of the transitional nature of occult ideas during the Restoration. In Annus Mirabilis, the new series of time has to wait through a period of ill aspects which are also part of the Providential plan. For a while the stars favor the Dutch (529) and the great fire (1002 ff.), but just as the tide turns for the English navy, so the fire begins to die, the stars lose their “malice” (1161), and two more comets, these presented as metaphors for the “Plague and Fire,” breathe their last (1163). Now, “frequent Trines” (1165) presage a bright future for the English. London is to be reborn as a “Northern Star” with power to charm visiting merchants into settling in the new international capital (1199–1200). The idea of visitors “Charm’d” (1199) by the new London from its position at the center of international trade suggests a kind of magical force, and the repeated emphasis on King Charles’s divine sponsorship invests him also with an almost

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supernatural power. Any such implications, however, are decisively undermined by the references to angels, ghosts, and dreams,2 which point to a new definition of how the English will exercise power and how Charles, as “God’s Annointed,” will guide England in “God’s own place” (1143). The spiritual entities in Annus Mirabilis share the non-intrusiveness of their counterparts in the early poems and, especially, in the American plays. The most overt act by “Angels” is to open “the Curtains of the skies,” so that heavenly approbation of Charles’s call to war can be expressed not through some angelic trumpet or chorus, but rather through comets (62–64). “Our Guardian Angel,” witnessing the power of the fire and the black Sabbath celebrating it, abandons “his charge to Fate” (893–95).3 God hears King Charles’s prayer for relief from the fire (1081) but sends only a “Cherub” whose chastisement of the flames is short-lived, like the “shooting Star” (1086) he resembles. Meanwhile, the more senior angels, “Thrones and … Dominions” (1114), avoid the fray altogether. “Not daring to behold their angry God” (1115), they remain inactive while the fire proceeds to consume the “pious Structures” of London, including St. Paul’s cathedral (1090).4 Even more ineffectual are the lesser daemons, the ghosts and household genii (1127–28). In their weakness, they are like the pagan God of Dreams, earthy and aerial spirits, ghosts, and satyrs of the American plays. The ghosts of the great English warrior kings submit anxiously to fate just as the various orders of angels do (321–24). The ghosts of the English traitors join evil specters in a black Sabbath celebrating the fire (889–92), yet they can do nothing to assist in the fire’s destructive work. Dryden emphasizes this reduced potency of intrusions from the invisible world into contemporary history by lightening the tone when he describes how the household genii and “little Lares” creep forth from their hiding places after the fire (1127–28). In their comic triviality, these middle creatures, which serve the dominant power of the moment, resemble their counterparts in The Indian Emperour (2.1.27–34), those beetle-like earthy spirits and the “frighted Satyrs” pricking up their ears and crying to their fathers. In Annus Mirabilis dreams are as ineffectual in their power to predict the future as spirits are to influence it. The sleep-induced prophecies of maritime warriors on either side of the Dutch war are notably vague. While the English sailors dream of victory in the abstract, the Dutch see themselves teetering over generic On angelology, see West, Milton 21–42. On ghost lore during the seventeenth century, see West, Invisible World 13–14, 48–53, and Thomas 701–24. Daemons of the infernal and middling variety, including elemental spirits, are discussed by West, Invisible World 15–34 and 65–109, and Thomas 265, On witchcraft, see West, Invisible World 136–61, and Thomas 517–700. 3 “To … Charleton” (55) and Heroique Stanzas (139) speak of guardian genii, and Dryden later defended the concept in the “Discourse concerning … Satire” (see above, “Introduction,” pp. 4–5 and 5n12; and Chapter 1, pp. 17 and 17n19). Henry More’s rather well-developed concept of “genii” can be found in “An Antidote against Atheism” and “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Collection 1:130–33, and 2:134, respectively. 4 Thus, I disagree with Roper’s notion that Charles’s prayer was “successful” (82). 2

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“precipices,” swimming to “some distant shore” after a shipwreck, or walking among the dead in “dark Churches” (275–83). Although accurate in a general way, these visions lack the specificity of Zempoalla’s dream before the regime changes in The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour. As in the American plays, so in Annus Mirabilis the prophetic power of dreams has weakened as the new world emerges.5 Without overt assistance or guidance from the invisible world, human beings— Dutch, French, and English alike—seem bewildered by pride and lost in the labyrinths of fate. No matter how “prudently” they plan, they vainly and blindly “wander” toward the “dark resorts” of a “pathless destiny” (35, 137, 140, 797–800). God hides from them “the undistinguished seeds of good and ill” (141). The new English king shares this common human inability to know the future in any detail, to affect the course of events through imposition of his own designs, and to command supernatural assistance. What appears to be an overt act, his calling up of the fleet, remains a non-starter until “Heav’n” begins the “conquest” (75–76). His pursuit of war is compared to the rise of the Nile (183), clearly a Providential process that is not really under his control.6 As the war proceeds, he observes rather than acts, noting progress and blessing each day’s work as God did during the creation (560–63). Unlike God, however, he must wait for “all-maturing time” to bring the war’s outcome “to light” (559). Similarly, he is powerless to stop the great fire of London, even though his personal efforts exceed those made during the sea war: he organizes the resistance, provides supplies, and builds morale through his caring presence and tearful expressions of pity (957–80, 1037–44).7 However, the fire continues its catastrophic course, and Charles’s prayer for relief from the Almighty (1045–80) turns out to be impotent in the short term. This loss of supernatural knowledge and control of destiny is a liability only for those who depend on occult forces—like the fiery sectarians, mystical artists, and autocrats in Dryden’s earlier poems and plays, and like the Dutch and personified fire in this poem. For Charles and the English, on the other hand, the absence of supernatural access to invisible energy is compensated for by a new relation between humans and heaven, a relation which confers on the king the power to detect and cooperate with the natural operations of Providence. In this respect, Charles becomes the poetic successor to Cortez in The Indian Emperour. Both seem to have a God-given talent for perceiving Providential patterns in current history. On Renaissance and Restoration dream-theory, see Goodwin 10–14, 42–47, 62, 268–69; Garber 1–13; DePorte 25–30; and Stock 29–30. 6 Dryden would use the symbolic value of the Nile again, with a similar meaning, notably in Aureng-Zebe, All for Love, and The Medall. See my discussion of this image in Chapters 5, 6, and 8 below. 7 Historically, Charles’s efforts were more effective than Dryden makes them out to be. See Ashley 143. 5

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To express this royal talent in Annus Mirabilis, Dryden calls upon the language of alchemy.8 Before committing the fleet to battle with the Dutch, Charles … first, survey’d the charge with careful eyes, Which none but mighty Monarchs could maintain; Yet judg’d, like vapours that from Limbecks rise, It would in richer showers descend again. (49–52)

With his God-ordained empirical skills, Charles carefully studies the ingredients that would be combined in a Dutch war and judges that the ensuing reaction would distill riches for England. Dryden employs alchemical language here, as elsewhere in the poem, to draw an implicit distinction between actions that are only temporarily effective and those which generate long-term gains. The former, as we have seen, are motivated by bestial or self-indulgent desires, which ultimately go counter to Providence. The outward signs of such base motivation are visible in the “wily Dutch” (453) and manipulative French. For long-range effectiveness, actions must be conducted with a degree of humility, patience, and observant openness to the power of God as manifested in nature. In Astraea Redux, Dryden attributes this method and frame of mind, also defined using alchemical language, to General Monck as he prepares for the Restoration (161–63). In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden makes them the special province of the Royal Society and describes them in alchemical language similar to what he used to characterize Charles’s deliberations on the advisability of war: O truly Royal! Who behold the Law, And rule of beings in your Makers mind, And thence, like Limbecks, rich Idea’s draw, To fit the levell’d use of humane kind. (661–64)

Here, as in the epistle to Charleton, Dryden sees Restoration scientists as “truly Royal,” in that their Providential role, like that of the king but on a less intuitive level, is to discern and apply God’s laws as manifested in the dynamics of His creation.9 This kind of empirical study to reveal the Providential scheme of natural phenomena is shared not only by the king and his royal scientists but also by true artists like Dryden himself. It is the poet who, early in the poem, understands Although some of the magical qualities of alchemy had been discredited, its power to transform substances remained a lively interest of the early scientists. Here and elsewhere in his writings, Dryden appears to share this interest. See “Introduction” above, pp. 5 and 5n14. 9 Citing earlier studies by Bruce A. Rosenberg and James Kinsley, Barbeau Gardiner (Intellectual Design 201–205) notes the alchemical language but continues to see direct divine intervention where I see an indirect operation of Providence through a more “scientific” approach to problems. Barbeau Gardiner also accepts Roper’s judgment that Charles’s prayer is answered by supernatural power, whereas I do not. 8

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comets as signs of God’s will. At the end of the poem, it is again the poet, not Charles or the Royal Society, who understands the great fire as an alchemical “flame” purging London and distilling from it “a City of more precious mold” (1169–70). His ability to intuit divine intentions in the pattern of current life harks back to the poet’s role as described in the epistle to Howard and looks ahead to the reiteration of that role toward the end of Annus Mirabilis and in the prologue to The Tempest: a kind of lesser prophet within the providence of wit. Thus he encapsulates in one poem the three types of “genii” that have emerged in the new world of Restoration England to oppose and triumph over the impotent diabolical spirits and pride that inform the decadent empires of Holland and France: the genius of a divinely appointed king, that of a royally appointed society of scientists, and that of a Royalist poet. For all of these new-world leaders, observation and inference, with a Christian attitude of humility and love, guide action more effectively than do “proud designs.” The new “Series” of time in Annus Mirabilis parallels that of the earlier poems and plays, where Dryden uses the occult to define an historical trend away from the passion-centered effort to dominate earthly phenomena, and toward a more empirical effort to understand and cooperate with God’s will as revealed in the book of nature. In the poems, the astrological and alchemical references pose prescientific, human-centered ways of interacting with society and nature against “scientific” and Providence-centered ways. In the American plays, demonology underlines a transition from pre-Christian to Christian values, and from governance based on lust and power-mongering to the imperfect beginnings of a caring Christian empire. But this new order lacks the kind of Christian and empirical purity Dryden foresees in the Phoenix empire of England that emerges in Annus Mirabilis. He and his audience knew that, historically, Pizarro’s brutality and lust for wealth outlived Cortez’s values and continued to drive the European empires that arose after the American conquests.10 Through the occult references in Annus Mirabilis, Dryden charts the ascendancy of England as a new kind of empire, one whose values and habits of mind are so appealing that the other nations fall under its Providential spell. In Annus Mirabilis, Dryden applies this occult rhetoric to a narrative analysis of contemporary national politics and international trade. In The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island. A Comedy (1667), larger political and philosophical concerns are only implied, rather than directly addressed, as the main context shifts to interpersonal relations. Yet the occult rhetoric again focuses on the weakening of old-style magic and demonology.11 Many of the implied contemporary issues Perhaps Dryden suggests the flaws that remain, even after Cortez and Cydaria combine Indian and Spanish virtues, by having their most admirable subjects, Guyomar and Alibech, withdraw from participation in the new regime. 11 The ensuing section is based on my article, “Dryden’s Prospero and his Predecessors,” substantial portions of which are quoted with permission of the current editor, South Atlantic Review. 10

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have been instructively studied by Maus, Guffey, Auberlen, Dobson (38–61), and Murray (76–88). I will attempt to add another dimension to our understanding of the play by focusing on what Novak calls its “demythifying of Prospero” (California Works 10:340). Magic and demonology permeate this play, but alchemy is notably absent, and astrology plays only a minor role. As he seems to have done throughout his life, Dryden affirms stellar and planetary influences on human events. His Prospero, like Shakespeare’s, bases the timing of his storm on the influence of a “most happy Star” (10:1.2.102), and he accurately reads Hippolito’s mortal danger in “a black Star” (2.4.19). Later in the play, however, the planets forsake Prospero, though Hippolito’s “good Angel” (5.1.58) can use their influence to increase the potency of a herbal cure. Prospero’s loss of astrological wisdom parallels the general enfeeblement of his magical powers, which form the major subtext of this play and can be clearly traced from act to act. As the play progresses, Dryden transforms Shakespeare’s Prospero from a potent magician into an increasingly inept figure. His weakness, like its equivalents in the earlier poems and plays, is a function of fresh assumptions about the dynamics of human history and about the definition of human competence in relation to Providential decree.12 Dryden begins with a heavy infusion of technical language that makes the shipwreck seem much more circumstantial and less nightmarish than it does in Shakespeare; and while the mariners struggle in a professional manner against the elements, Alonzo asserts his penitence for the treatment he accorded Prospero and Hippolito.13 Like his predecessor, Dryden’s Prospero has “safely order’d” (1.2.24) these events, although he makes less of his magical power at this point than does the Renaissance Prospero. Indeed, he feels no compulsion to set aside his magic robe to diminish the enchantment of the present from the actuality of the past as he tells Miranda of the political intrigues that led to their banishment. Shakespeare’s first act ends with a romantic and innocent encounter between Ferdinand and Miranda and with another display of Prospero’s magic as he charms Ferdinand’s sword. But the opening act of Dryden’s play ends with a discussion between Dorinda and Miranda about sex and reproduction, and with Miranda’s unwitting anticipation of her father’s ultimate impotence: “Th’ effect of his great Art I long to see, / Which will perform as much as Magick can” (1.2.340–41). The physical reality and force of earthly phenomena, the penitent villain, the insistence (even on an “enchanted island”) of human appetite, the suggestion that the magus may be more severely limited than he seems—these are the dominant impressions conveyed by Act 1 of the Restoration version. In developing the logic of these changes in Act 2, Dryden shifts the emphasis from a willful conflict between magic and ambition, dream and reality, to a most Like Novak (California Works 10:319–22), I shall speak of the Restoration Tempest as Dryden’s play, since he seems to have had the overall management of it. 13 My text for Shakespeare’s play has been Frye’s edition. Among the many published interpretations of this play, mine agrees most with those of Kermode (esp. xvii–lix), Levin (125–29), and Garber (187–214). 12

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un-magical recognition of the insistent reality of human pride and desire. The act begins with a masque of spirits embodying representations of Pride, Fraud, Rapine, and Murder, and it ends with the prideful disobedience of Dorindo and Hippolito as they reenact the Fall. The Restoration masque replaces the one which Shakespeare’s Prospero invokes in 4.1 to mark the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand, a vision of fertility within the rhythms of nature that is dispelled when the magus recalls the harsh reality of Caliban’s murder plot. The Restoration version provides not a pastoral fantasy guarding against the “wanton charm” of Venus and Cupid (4.1.94–95), but rather an emblem of the destructive passions within all men and women. Placed as it is just after this masque of vices, Ariel’s famous song about change signals a different kind of death and renewal than is suggested by Shakespeare. Like the masque, it looks back to the earlier cycle through which Ferdinand’s father has already passed but also forward to changes wrought upon youth and innocence by the first stirrings of carnal desire. The different sort of desire that motivated Antonio and Alonzo to usurp the government might seem to have been transferred in the Restoration version to those absurd political quarrels of Stephano, Mustacho, Ventoso, and Trincalo, whose drunken antics parody recent debates over the relative merits of monarchy and commonwealth. But in the intoxicated mouths of the mariners, such political issues form a thin veneer through which we can easily discern the functioning of the same libidinous drives as we are about to see welling up in the younger generation of nobility: sex, possessiveness, and resistance to authority and regulation.14 Like his daughter at the end of Act 1, in the second act Prospero is clearly uncertain about the strength of his “art” to govern these drives. He hopes that his warnings will keep Hippolito and Dorinda apart “till some time were / Past” (2.4.7–8), because his astrological calculations have revealed that “A black Star threatens” the young man if he encounters a woman before he has matured in selfcontrol (2.4.19). Events, however, are soon to show that the circle of Prospero’s enchantment is less strong than the circle of human desires, the one symbolized by the masque as it ends with the vices enclosing Alonzo and chanting: Around, around, we pace About this cursed place, Whilst thus we compass in These mortals and their sin. (2.1.90–93, and see SD after 89)

By Act 3, the Restoration Tempest has become a singular play, almost an original creation in terms of its overall design.15 Gone is the confidence of Prospero as he observes the budding love of Miranda and Ferdinand, gone the Maus observes how “the magic of sexual attraction competes with Prospero’s art” (78), but she feels the main plot and subplot are “curiously exclusive” (83). 15 Obviously, I do not side with scholars who regard the Restoration Tempest merely as a vulgarization of Shakespeare. See, for instances, Scott (Works 3:97–98), Kilbourne (27), Odell (31–32), Hazelton Spencer (85–87), Young (70), and Sutherland (99). 14

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mythical resonance of Ferdinand piling logs, gone Caliban’s plot to kill Prospero and kidnap Miranda to breed a new race of islanders with Stephano, and gone the homiletic, vanishing banquet. A new rhythm has taken over. Instead of being denied the feast that entices them, Alonzo, Antonio, and Gonzalo are allowed to partake of “Meats and fruits” offered by “eight fat Spirits” (3.2.43 and SD after 35)—presumably, a sign that their penance has been accepted, even though the appetites that prompted their original sin remain healthy. Meanwhile, the low-life characters find their wine turned to water (3.3.58) as they begin to act out their own version of the Fall. Each becomes a caricature of his or her counterpart in the main plot, so that their collective behavior not only elaborates the political satire but also serves a choric function: this is the underside of the relations among Ferdinand, Hippolito, Dorinda, and Miranda. Instead of the sexual curiosity, wonder, and comparatively gentle urgings of lust that Dorinda and Hippolito experience in their first meeting (2.5.33–83), we have the most exploitative kind of sexual advances, with Sycorax freely offering her gross body to Trincalo in return for baubles, prestige, and revenge against Prospero, and with Trincalo in turn stifling his revulsion at her slovenly corpulence in order to become king of the island through marriage. Clearly, the differences between these half-devils and the half-angels of the main plot are differences of degree, not of kind. Just before the last scene of Act 3, Prospero ruminates about the uncertainty of his “art” when dealing with human desires, and this uncertainty is equated to man’s perpetual shortsightedness: … perhaps my Art it self is false: on what strange grounds we build our hopes and fears; mans life is all a mist, and in the dark, our fortunes meet us. If Fate be not, then what can we foresee, Or how can we avoid it, if it be? If by free-will in our own paths we move, How are we bounded by Decrees above? (3.5.154–60)

His own magic here becomes a metaphor for free will in general. Can any human, magus or not, design and pursue his or her own course of action, or must we all move, willy nilly, within the more powerful magic circle of Providence? If the former, how is it possible to “foresee” the good, unless “Fate” insures that the good awaits us at the end of our chosen paths? Act 4 shows that Prospero was right to doubt the potency of his art, for all the appetites and desires that emerged outside the circle of his control in the first three acts here collide. In Shakespeare’s play, the fourth act likewise evinces Prospero’s limits: his masque of fecund cooperation between man and nature is interrupted by thoughts of Caliban’s conspiracy. Yet he is not much fussed about this intrusion, since he knows that life itself is “like this insubstantial pageant” (4.1.155) and that “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on” (4.1.156–57). By the end of the act, he has reasserted control. Dryden’s Prospero lacks such assurance, as well he should. Just as the masque of vices had suggested, pride has by now led to fraud

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and force (also to jealousy) despite his best-laid plans. Miranda tries to deceive him about how she regards Ferdinand. The friendship that Prospero arranged to secure Hippolito against the “dark danger” foretold by his art (4.1.11–13) breeds fresh dangers. The two young men fall out over Hippolito’s naïve demand to satisfy his lust on all available women, and subsequently both men accuse their mistresses of fraud. Meanwhile, in the subplot (scene 2), the issue is not jealousy but crossed appetites for wine, ownership, and power. In a coarse parody, it would seem, of the betrothal masque invoked by Shakespeare’s Prospero, the Restoration Caliban conjures a dance of spirits, his mother’s legacy, to celebrate the union of Sycorax and Trincalo.16 But this moment of felicity is soon destroyed by the treachery of Stephano, so that by the end of the scene the mariners and half-devils are engaged in a full-scale brawl. Its civilized equivalent in the main story occurs in scene 3 with the duel between Ferdinand and Hippolito. When the latter is wounded, the two young women heatedly blame each other; but Prospero indicts their disobedience as he vows revenge on Ferdinand, accuses Ariel of neglecting his duties, and laments the demise of his magic: “Alas! how much in vain doth feeble Art endeavor / To resist the will of Heaven!” (4.3.33–34). As Prospero stalks away, determined to call up his spirits once more—not to achieve reconciliation and forgiveness, as in Shakespeare, but to “execute Heav’ns Laws” and “revenge this murder” (4.3.147, 162)—Ariel resolves to redeem the situation by acting independently.17 Although his earlier intention to warn Prospero about the projected duel was blocked “by the ill Genius of Hippolito” (4.3.59), he feels confident that this newest scheme will succeed, for it recognizes, as we shall see in Act 5, the potency of a kind of “art” that no daemon or occult force can neutralize: the “art” of the New Philosophy. Ariel’s speech at the close of Act 4 clearly lays the blame for all the current “discord” (4.3.256) not only on power-mongering, treachery, and disobedience, but most heavily on Renaissance magic itself: Why shou’d a mortal by Enchantments hold In chains a spirit of aetherial mould? Accursed Magick we our selves have taught, And our own pow’r has our subjection wrought! (274–77)

The spirit world shares the Fall. By entering into covenants with men, aerial daemons have subjected themselves to a lower world, just as witches like Sycorax have done by covenanting with devils or as men like Trincalo do in indulging 16 Maus instructively analyzes the disappearance of the “Arcadian impulse” from the adapted version of the play (79–81). 17 Murray compares this Prospero to “some misguided Puritan as he pretends in his delusion of rectitude to read the will of God and to act as interpreter and minister of divine justice” (86). Ariel’s name is traced by Bushnell (690) to “that of a prince of angels who, according to the Hebrew Cabala, ruled the waters.” Novak notes (California Works 10:355) that Ariel belongs to that group of elemental spirits defined by Paracelsus in Three Books of Philosophy (1657) 11–20.

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their appetites with the offspring of such diabolical contracts. The “Magick” that the lower creatures gain by such intercourse is “Accursed” because they do not understand how to employ it in concert with Providence. If we recall that Prospero had earlier equated magic with free will, we can now understand that the “arts” of will are the “arts” of pride. “Accursed Magick” is simply one form of man’s prideful effort to appropriate nature to his own ends. In this respect, Prospero is no better than Alonzo or Antonio, indeed than Stephano or Trincalo. The final act of the Restoration Tempest is both more and less hopeful than the end of Shakespeare’s original version. The discords in the earlier play are resolved only partially, for neither Antonio and Sebastian nor the mutinous mariners share the penitence of Alonzo, though they certainly share in Prospero’s forgiveness. But in another way Shakespeare is rather optimistic. After all, Prospero’s charms do hold until he is ready to “abjure” his “rough magic” and release his spirits “to the elements” (5.1.50–51, 317), and his enemies remain bound by his charmed “circle” (SD after 57) until a better future has been planned. Prospero and his audience must leave the enchanted island, leave the closed, uncomplicated world of dreams, imagination, and art, and cope again with the open-ended, knotty life of real politics and feelings. Still and all, magic has had its day, and is largely responsible for whatever renewal has been achieved. Not so in Dryden’s play. By Act 5, Prospero has relinquished all claim to magical control over human events.18 As the act opens, he has exchanged the pride of the magus for that of the executioner vainly certain that he is implementing heavenly justice. Soon, however, forces within the brave new world itself preempt the execution, heal Hippolito, and reunite the characters, so that, ultimately, even without man’s magic, a much fuller harmony is wrought from the discord of Act 4 than was achieved in Shakespeare’s original. On his own initiative, reinforced by Hippolito’s “good Angel” (5.1.58) and certain planetary influences, Ariel has concocted an herbal potion and a weapon salve out of ingredients gathered from the earth. Although Hippolito recovers when treated, Dorinda resents her sister’s role in promoting the cure, and Miranda suspects Ferdinand of infidelity while Dorinda has been interceding with Prospero for his life. The two young men likewise perceive new cause for mistrust in the same temporary exchange of partnerships. This time, however, jealousy serves a constructive purpose as it becomes a potent argument for monogamy. Hippolito exclaims, I never knew I lov’d so much before I fear’d Dorinda’s constancy; but now I am convinc’d that I lov’d none but her, because none else can Recompense her loss. (5.2.118–21)

Winn speculates that “this diminishing of Prospero” may simply be part of the general effort to keep the play “free from current political relevance” by removing a potential “analogy between the banished Duke of Milan and the recently deposed Chancellor” (John Dryden 189). 18

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This interpretation of his own experience succeeds where Ferdinand, Miranda, and Dorinda had repeatedly failed (see 3.6.53–100; 4.1.200–209, 270–73) in persuading Hippolito that it is best to “be ty’d to one” (3.6.57), a proposition that until now he considered “against my Nature” (3.6.60). “Alas! ’tis sacred jealousy,” as the arch-empiricist Lord Rochester would say, “The only proof ‘twixt her and me / We love, and do not dream.”19 Thus, the dissension of the main plot in Act 5, which had become centered on Hippolito’s promiscuous desires, the jealousies they generated, and the wound he sustained in consequence, are resolved not by daemonic magic but by a practical application of the “scientific” method. Freed of Prospero’s power, Ariel opts not to perform miracles but to practice a form of medicine that had gained widespread approval among the natural philosophers of the mid-seventeenth century: the weapon salve.20 And where the old deductive logic, bound in tradition, failed to convince Hippolito that polygamy is wrong, his own induction from the experience of jealousy shows that, in fact, the precept “you are made for one, and / one for you” (4.1.270–71) is compatible with the order of nature. Without lifting his wand, Dryden’s Prospero has witnessed the righting of all the wrongs, old and new, with which he has been confronted. When he forgives his enemies, there is nothing left to forgive. Not only had Alonzo and Antonio repented before the magician’s plan matured, but the ambitious mariners are weary of the avarice, carnality, and “civil wars” that their drunkenness released within them: their wine is gone and they long for their accustomed ranks and duties aboard their “gallant Ship” (5.2.208–209). As for “those misshapen Creatures” (5.2.223) Caliban and his sister, they are happy also to return, wiser for their experience (5.2.231), to their allotted places in life. Even Ariel can reassume his place in the order of nature, joining his mistress Milcha in their long-delayed, elemental nuptials. That Prospero can bury “All past crimes in the joy of this / Blessed day” (5.2.151–52) is owing not to his magical “art” but to the Providential operation of human passion in conjunction with an empirical interpretation of natural phenomena. It may seem strange, in light of the direction Dryden took in his adaptation, that he should have enriched, rather than stripped bare, the occult dimension of Shakespeare’s play. Prospero may become resigned to the impotence of his magic, but the spirit world he once commanded remains thickly populated. Despite the comic implications of Ariel’s projected sex life, of the culinary delights proffered Rochester, “The Mistress,” in Complete Poems 88. On this curious form of medicine, promoted by Robert Fludd and Sir Kenelm

19 20

Digby, see West (Milton and the Angels 73), Debus (121–23, 146), and Thomas (225–26, 266, 304). Holland (218–19), Dobson (42), and Foster (11) seem not to realize that the weapon salve was not generally regarded as a “supernatural” cure in the early Restoration, and Holland mistakenly ascribes its initiation to Miranda rather than Ariel. Murray makes the interesting observation that Ariel’s “potent herbal cocktail” contains ingredients “in common … use by herbalists in promoting menstruation” and so underlines the fact that Hippolito was played by a female actor (86). It would also underline the natural, rather than supernatural, nature of the treatment.

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by the obese spirits in Act 3, and of the dancing devils inherited by Caliban from his mother, Dryden was not prepared to reduce demonology to a study of metaphor, as Pope would do fifty years later in The Rape of the Lock. Dryden knows that to his audience, as to Boyle, Glanvill, More, and others, the upper and lower stories of nature remained inhabited by intelligences that could assume elemental shapes, though these intelligences had ceased to serve human magicians. The play’s perspective, then, remains cosmic; but as Prospero is displaced from the center of human events, his place is taken by characters who cooperate in the work of Providence not through dream or “art” but rather through observation and analysis—through responding to their drives, interpreting their feelings, working with the visible, natural action of ultimately supernatural laws.21 The new age had not lost its faith in transcendent worlds and forces, but it would no longer allow its dramatic characters, not to mention its kings and writers, “That liberty … / Which works by Magick supernatural things” (“Prologue” 6). Daemonic magic had lost touch with Providence and empirical thought; the course of human events had fallen under the spell of nature. Shakespeare’s Prospero must break his own charmed circle at the end, but clearly in Dryden the only potent circle, almost from the start, has been the circle of appetite, within which fallen man necessarily moves.22 Annus Mirabilis ends with occult language that demonstrates the poet’s role as it was defined in the verses to Howard and Clarendon. The Tempest begins with a prologue that returns to the poet’s role, and again the occult references contribute significantly to our understanding of Dryden’s perspective on this recurring subject. My reading of the prologue does not share Dobson’s opinion 21 I have not come around to Maus’s view that Prospero remains the play’s representative of the “limited but nonetheless efficient” sovereign (83). I think it more likely that Dryden’s Prospero represents a piece of cautionary advice about how a leader should not behave in the Restoration environment. Nor do I share Foster’s view (18) that this play depicts the “shift of power from the monarch to the subject.” 22 On the whole, I find that the 1667 Tempest supports Nussbaum’s generalization that in his art “Dryden analyzed the intellectual results of the philosophical and scientific revolution” (59). Remarking on “the distance between [Dryden’s] … world and Shakespeare’s” as reflected in the two versions of The Tempest, Myers develops an interesting thesis: that Dryden recognized “the inadequacy of the social, cultural, and linguistic resources which the Restoration world makes available to him. In his case, … neoclassicism, trapped in undoubted limitations of idiom, sensibility and thought, repeatedly, wittily and movingly, criticizes itself” (18–25). This reading modifies Holland (217–21), who argues that Dryden and Davenant are confident in Restoration man’s ability to coordinate knowledge and social regulation. In noting several of Dryden’s innovations (e.g., parallels between high and low plots, intensified interest in sexual drives, emphasis on fall and repentance), both Myers and I ring variations on the commentaries of Novak, Christopher Spencer (16–22), and Casanave (39–150). Scouten concisely states the general thrust of all recent interpretations: “Shakespeare’s analogies, affirmations and final harmonies are rejected and replaced by the world of fallen man” (164).

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that in seeing both Shakespeare and kings as masters “of a form of magic no longer tenable,” Dryden and Davenant “imply a certain enlightened skepticism about the sanctity of kingship itself” (40). In my view, this does not track well with Dryden’s developing application of occult ideas. That Shakespeare’s magic, which can no longer be “copy’d” (19), is “sacred as a King’s” (24) does not imply that Divine Right vanishes along with poetic magic. In the earlier poems, Dryden repeatedly insists on God’s continuing sponsorship and guidance of the new English king, even as the king’s servants—the royal executives, scientists, and poets—are assigned more earthbound, reflective roles.23 In this context, the prologue does not seem to be commenting on post-Restoration kingship; it is revisiting the new role of Restoration poets. Dryden and Davenant are treating “Shakespear’s Magick” (19) as a late example of that ancient druidical wizardry he spoke of in the verses to Clarendon. In earlier times, given the people’s supernatural beliefs, poetic art seemed as divinely inspired as a king’s arts of state, but in the new age poets might more appropriately be compared to those members of the Royal Society, who, in Annus Mirabilis, are privy to God’s natural laws but have no supernatural ability to transform or control nature. In the adapted Tempest of 1667 the Royal Society does not appear, and Ariel, by exercising his new form of magic—natural magic in tune with the new science—seems to displace Prospero as the appropriate alterego for the dramatist.24

23 Here I disagree with Maus, whose reading of the revised Tempest remains the best overall commentary on its redefinition of “the limits and uses of sovereignty” (73). Maus thinks Dryden transfers political creativity from king to subjects, whereas I see him as defining different levels of cooperation with Providence. 24 Dobson speculates that Ariel could be read “as a figure for the play’s adaptors” (39), and Maus notes that “Ariel, not Prospero, learns to exploit repressive circumstances in productive ways” (85).

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Chapter 4

Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada, 1669–71 Thus far in his career, Dryden had used the occult as a way to study what has been wrong with England and how the forces of historical change fit into a Providential design for England’s future. In the three heroic plays that emerged from his pen in 1669, 1670, and 1671, he martials all of his usual occult materials—mainly astrology, alchemy, and demonology—in a more thorough dramatization of the process through which Providence achieves its aims. In the earlier works, the Providential roles of various talents and passions had been the focal points for occult lore. In both Tyrannick Love and the two parts of The Conquest of Granada, the occult is devoted almost exclusively to the process through which Christian love overcomes its earthly varieties as well as other passions.1 Tyrannick Love, or the Royal Martyr. A Tragedy was produced in June 1669 and first published in 1670; two years later a second edition contained an expanded preface to answer critics who had ridiculed, among other elements, the seemingly gratuitous display of occult lore. Until the last ten years, all important accounts of the play, following Walter Scott’s, shared this penchant for dismissing the scenes of prophecy and conjuration as fashionable window-dressing, part of the music and spectacle that were expected by the audience but were irrelevant to plot or theme.2 In the first serious effort, though a brief one, to read the spirits back into the play, Derek Hughes has understood them as “actors” who, like Maximin, “are themselves slaves of the transient” and thus belong within his “drama within drama” (Dryden’s Heroic Plays 63–64). More recently, Rose A. Zimbardo has interpreted the daemons and their supervising angel as a “poetic metaphor” for the play’s central movement upward from mundane to spiritual heroism and love (47). It seems to me that each of these readings has merit: Maximin is to some extent mirrored in the occult scene, and the scene does function metaphorically within the play. Neither Hughes nor Zimbardo, however, considers that Act 4, scene 1 is part of a larger occult dimension that includes the prophecy in 1.1, the angelic 1 This chapter is based on my two articles: “Dryden and the Occult as Dramatic Code: Tyrannick Love” and “The Higher Magic in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada.” Substantial portions of both articles are reprinted here by permission from Papers on Language and Literature, vols 24 and 26, 1988 and 1990 © 1988 and 1990 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. 2 See Walter Scott, “Introduction” to Tyrannick Love, in Works 3:343–45; Pendlebury 100–101; and Deane 209–13.

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intervention in 5.1, and Maximin’s use of the terminology of magic throughout the play. When these elements are analyzed alongside the rest, I would argue, they suggest that Dryden was using the occult to better purpose than has yet been maintained. He was building on previous experience to make a comment on the relation between history and Providence and thus to enrich the contextual design of the play. That it has such a design has, in fact, never been demonstrated, so that I shall have to make that case as well. Zimbardo is the first critic to operate on the assumption that the play is, indeed, well unified, though her aim is to deal only with its general movement. Before her analysis appeared, even sympathetic commentators considered it a derivative rush-job in which the various elements of plot and idea do not hang together: Dryden, after all, admitted to spending only “seven weeks”3 in composing it, and most of the plot can be found in previous plays or romances, if not in historical or legendary sources.4 But what if Dryden’s haste reflected an effort to be timely? And what if, as Novak suggests, Dryden was consciously shaping his sources in order to editorialize about Restoration trends and events (California Works 10:380–432)? If so, his dramatic design is more complex than we have thus far suspected; it embodies the aesthetic and intellectual wholeness that Zimbardo remarks upon, but it also becomes a paradigm for Restoration culture at a crucial moment. I am not claiming that we fail to perceive this complex structure before we understand its occult features. On the other hand, they do provide an authoritative guide, because they constitute Dryden’s most original contribution to the traditional story. Although the St. Catherine legend in both prose and dramatic versions includes the miraculous intervention of angels to destroy the instruments of torture and to carry the saint’s body to heaven or Mount Sinai (or both), none of the known sources invokes necromancy and the conjuring of daemons as Dryden does. I will argue that to understand this essentially new material is to gain a clearer picture of the play’s construction. But let us begin with what can be surmised without the occult “chorus.” Notwithstanding Kirsch’s feeling that the martyrdom of St. Catherine would not have appealed to the Restoration (102–103), in fact Dryden could hardly have chosen a fitter vehicle if, as Novak suggests, one of his purposes was to compliment Catherine of Braganza in public. During 1668–69 she was twice rumored to be pregnant and twice reported to have miscarried of the heir that Charles II never was able to sire. Thus at this time, as Novak puts it, “a compliment to the Queen … was very much in order” (10:382). Jacob Huysmans had paid such a compliment in 1664 by painting her as St. Catherine of Alexandria, and this painting may be alluded to in Placidius’ account of the vision in 1.1.100–108. But Dryden need not have been thinking either of this painting or of the martyrdom of Dorothea in The Virgin “Preface” to Tyrannick Love, in California Works 10:111. Ward 263–66; Novak, California Works 10:389–92; Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays

3 4

162–63.

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Martyr. Since the Middle Ages, St. Catherine had been one of the most popular female saints in both England and Continental Europe, and after the Reformation she claimed both Protestant and Catholic sympathies. She was considered “the inspirer of wisdom and good counsel in time of need,” the patroness of intellect, learning, eloquence, courageous piety, and chastity (Jameson 2:468). In England, where her story was told in print several times before Dryden took it up, she was celebrated in murals and panels, stained glass, ivories, and the names of churches and colleges—the latter including St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge.5 For an alert Restoration audience, then, the symbolic value of St. Catherine’s story at this time would have been great. It would have helped to counterbalance disappointment over Catherine of Braganza’s miscarriages, since one of St. Catherine’s chief attributes was her transcendence of sexuality: as Queen of Egypt she had refused to marry for the purpose of producing an heir and later, in a dream, she had become the bride of Christ.6 In another way the implicit comparison of the two Catherines was more daring. Like her namesake, the English Queen was a living contradiction of the libertine materialism and secularism that flourished in the court. Novak, King, and Barbeau Gardiner have shown that St. Catherine’s legendary triumph over fifty philosophers is transformed by Dryden into a series of confrontations in which Catherine, voicing a Latitudinarian fusion of reason and faith, prevails over representatives of the most fashionable philosophical systems in the Restoration: Stoicism (Apollonius), Epicureanism (Placidius), and Hobbism (Maximin).7 Derek Hughes has argued, wrongly in my estimation, that Dryden’s Catherine is not in any way normative, that her self-centered isolation from human suffering depicts an attitude that is as unsavory as Maximin’s opposite kind of extremism. Yet as Hughes undermines Catherine’s arguments for refusing succor to Berenice in 4.1, he ignores the initial and most general explanation for her decisions: “As some to witness truth Heav’ns call obey; / So some on Earth must, to confirm it, stay” (4.1.462–64).8 Catherine distinguishes between her own martyrdom, Providentially ordained, she believes, to promote the Christian faith, and Berenice’s destiny to “stay” on earth to confirm that faith. Dryden’s emphasis on this distinction is confirmed by his providing for the heroic rescue of Berenice by Porphyrius after both have become Christians—an action that significantly alters the received legend, in which these two converts are cruelly executed: “I have taken from the Church two Martyrs,” says Dryden in his Preface to the play, “in the persons of Porphyrius and the Empress” (10:111).9 In addition to Jameson, see Baring-Gould 540–42 and Farmer 69–70. See Jameson 2:469–70. 7 King 41–49; Novak, California Works 10:394–96; Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual 5 6

Design 102–104. 8 As here, all future citations to the play will refer to act, scene, and lines in California Works 10:107–93. 9 For the traditional account, see Jameson 2:473–74.

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The philosophical significance of Berenice and Porphyrius is well described by Barbeau Gardiner: they embody the norms of religious toleration, balanced polity, controlled passion, and, finally, trust that they are helping to realize a Providential design (Intellectual Design 100–101). But both also constitute allusions to Restoration court life. Berenice suggests certain aspects of Catherine of Braganza not implicit in the portrait of St. Catherine: her tolerance for the monarch’s philandering and her invulnerability to the suggestion of divorce. Of course, like both St. Catherine and Catherine of Braganza, she embraces an alien religion and fails to conceive an heir. The contemporary significance of Porphyrius is perhaps clearer, since in his dedicatory epistle Dryden implies a comparison with James, Duke of Monmouth. By 1669, along with rumors that Charles II might divorce his barren queen, there was already talk of legitimizing Monmouth as the Protestant heir to the throne. It would have been easy for a Restoration audience to interpret the actions of Porphyrius in the final scene as an advisory to Monmouth foreshadowing the more explicit one to be offered twelve years later in Absalom and Achitophel. Urged by his army to accept the role of Roman Emperor, Porphyrius advocates allegiance to the “Two Emperours at Rome the Senate chose” (5.1.661) and elects for himself a life of love and service. So, implies Dryden, should Monmouth: he should resist the temptation offered by those who would overturn fate by contriving to have him declared a legitimate heir. Like Porphyrius, he should accept his divinely ordained role of heroic servant to the state. Within the Providential dispensation, then, Porphyrius and Berenice join Catherine as Dryden’s “patterns of piety” who are “equally removed from the extremes of Superstition and Prophaneness” (“Preface” 10:109). Both Hughes and, before him, Alssid identify these extremes with Catherine and Maximin respectively,10 but I think they are only half correct: “Prophaneness” would immediately have been understood in the seventeenth century as a reference to the blasphemous irreverence of Maximin, but the word “superstition,” as it was used in the Restoration, would have pointed not to Catherine’s otherworldly faith but rather to the “false, pagan, or idolatrous religion” (OED) of a Placidius, perhaps even to the outmoded Pagan heroism and Platonism of Charinus and Valeria respectively, both of whom are invested with a religious fervor. When Maximin himself uses the word “superstition” (1.1.162), he speaks of Catherine and the other Christians, but Dryden’s own contrast between Catherine and Maximin is not that between a superstitious zealot and a materialistic power-monger; it is that between the extremes of self-negating faith and of self-centered will. It can also be seen as a contrast between one who finds herself within God’s drama and one who tries to impose his own scenario on reality.11

Hughes Dryden’s Heroic Plays 64–73; Alssid, Heroic Tragedies 1:161–63, 167–71. I find Hughes’s analysis of the theatre imagery (Dryden’s Heroic Plays 63–78)

10 11

instructive though misapplied.

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The minor characters of Charinus, Valeria, Apollonius, and Felicia all seem to represent either outmoded or misplaced forms of passion; they become martyrs to “tyrannick love” of different sorts and thus help to fill out the implications of Dryden’s theme.12 The historical son of Maximin was murdered along with his father, but Dryden’s Charinus articulates the ideals of pagan heroism, which seem to die with him in battle as he competes with Porphyrius for the Emperor’s favor. Maximin’s daughter Valeria has no historical equivalent; as Kirsch first pointed out, she descends from the “self-sacrificing lovers of Cavalier drama” (103). Her entire being is invested in Porphyrius, and she dies a suicide, a martyr to pure, unrequited love. The other two minor martyrs, Apollonius and Felicia, represent the love of truth and maternal love, respectively. Although both die as Christians, the one must first recognize that the truth of Stoicism has been displaced by that of the new faith, and the other struggles to conquer the tyrannical force of maternal love before being led to execution. Beyond their formal significance, these minor characters also seem to reflect upon Restoration England. Charinus and Valeria embody forms of heroism and love that were widely felt to have been left behind along with the severed head of Charles I.13 Apollonius seems to suggest the unhappy fate of Christian philosophy in the increasingly libertine court of Charles II, just as Dryden laments the possible damning of his “godly out-of-fashion Play” (“Epilogue” 22) by the wits in his audience.14 Perhaps Felicia is a comment on the potential loss of reverence for elders and family ties in that same atmosphere, though, of course, she also serves within the play as Catherine’s greatest temptation to forego martyrdom.15 Let us now try to place Maximin within these contexts. In his preface Dryden complains that one of his sources, the anonymous Le Martyre de Sainte Catherine (published 1649), “betrayed” him “into an Errour … by mistaking that first Maximin for a second” (10:112).16 On the one hand, he has given his antagonist the personal background, physical stature, unflinching cruelty, and anti-patrician sentiments of the earlier Maximin (AD 235–38), the first emperor to come from barbarian stock and the first to rise from the military ranks.17 Likewise, in the course of the play he alludes to persons and events associated only with the earlier Maximin’s reign,18 and he sets the play near the besieged town of Aquileia, where the first Maximin was murdered by his soldiers. Although this Maximin was Alssid first noticed this: Heroic Tragedies 1:184–90. Balanced discussions of these feelings can be found in Smith 29–44 and Staves

12 13

43–72.

See Wilson 1–24. See Mignon. 16 In documenting this, Novak points out that the confusion was also implicit in 14 15

Eusebius and Foxe, though not in Herodian (California Works 10:402). 17 These traits were common knowledge in Dryden’s day, as witness Edward and Henry Leigh 202–208. 18 See Novak’s notes, California Works 10:408–12.

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widely believed to have inaugurated a new era of persecutions,19 the martyrdom of Catherine was always associated with “the Great Persecution” begun in Africa about AD 303 by Diocletian’s co-emperor, the later Maximin.20 In effect, then, whether inadvertently or not, Dryden has moved the legendary martyrdom of St. Catherine back about seventy years. Why? He seems not to have wanted his audience to think of Maximin’s death in the way that Eusebius and subsequent historians understood the fall of Diocletian’s colleague: as marking the Edict of Milan and the triumph of Christianity through Constantine.21 Instead, he invests the death of his tyrant with something like the same significance as the death of Zempoalla in The Indian Queen. Both make way for a Christian order that is destined to emerge not immediately, but sometime in the future. Of course, the analogy breaks down at this point. While Montezuma and Orazia become proto-Christian rulers, and thus augur well, Porphyrius and Berenice leave political power to the co-rulers elected by the Roman Senate. Historically, these elected Augusti soon fell victim to a military revolt, and for the rest of the century the empire degenerated as one after another soldier-tyrant assumed the imperial robes, claimed divine status, and attempted to dominate.22 Seen in this light, the play reads as a piece of cautionary advice. Maximin’s story, says Dryden, should be ranked with those biblical examples of wickedness that are “set as Sea-marks for those who behold them to avoid” (“Preface” 10:110).23 For an English Restoration audience, “those” would surely refer to Charles II and his supporters, and they are being asked to observe what can happen if a monarch does not resist the recurrent trends toward materialism, lust, power politics, and absolute rule. In 1668 and 1669, frustrated by the inconclusive efforts to defeat the Dutch and reestablish England’s empire over sea trade, distressed about the fall of Clarendon, disappointed by the barrenness of his queen, Charles 19 See Edward and Henry Leigh 207, and for an authoritative modern account see Grant 139. 20 See Grant 210. Eusebius calls this later Maximin “the eastern despot,” as does Dryden in his preface, though in fact he controlled the West while Diocletian ruled the East. Eusebius never mentions Catherine by name and, indeed, his account of an Alexandrian lady’s martyrdom is now thought to refer to Dorothea: Eusebius, History of the Church 348–50. 21 “Thus,” writes Eusebius, “the wicked were purged away,” leaving Constantine and Licinius to embrace the Christians: 379. For an overview of the defeat of the later Maximin in the same year as the Edict of Milan (AD 313), see Ferrero and Barbagallo 408–10. For authoritative biographical accounts of the two Maximins (Maximinus I and Maximian), see Grant 137–39, 209–13. 22 Ferrero and Barbagallo 361. Parker (139 ff.) calls these “The Years of Anarchy,” and Katz (32) speaks of “Military Anarchy under the Soldier–Emperors.” 23 The continuation of these remarks further reinforces my argument: “I purposely removed the Scene of the play, which ought to have been at Alexandria … and laid it under the Walls of Aquileia …, where Maximin was slain; that the punishment of his Crime might immediately succeed its execution.”

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increasingly found solace among his mistresses and libertine courtiers, and became increasingly cynical about the prospects of cooperation with Parliament.24 The logical extreme of these tendencies is exhibited in Maximin’s rejection of his barren but pious queen, his lust for another woman, and his determination to impose his will on the Roman Senate. Responding to Maximin’s initiatives, the other characters act out options that were being entertained in 1668–69: the wish-fulfillment dream of romantic heroism (Charinus), the absurd revival of Caroline Platonism (Valeria), the vogue of pagan philosophies (Apollonius and Placidius), the temptations of materialism and hedonism (Placidius), the Whigs’ desire to legitimize Monmouth (the soldiers and Porphyrius). These private scenarios, however, are shown in contrast to the less self-indulgent courses chosen by Dryden’s “patterns of piety,” which also have topical implications. Porphyrius and Berenice depict the kind of virtuous accommodation to Providence that Dryden perceives in Catherine of Braganza and recommends to Monmouth. If their Providential role is to survive and represent virtue in a vicious age, Saint Catherine’s equally Providential role, perhaps reflecting another trait of Charles II’s queen, is to complete God’s drama of martyrdom, figuring forth the full power of His will. Let us now examine the occult material more closely to see if it sharpens our perception of the emerging design. One of the first things we notice is that, as usual, Dryden’s dramatization of the invisible world is more sophisticated than what his audience might have seen in other English plays between 1667 and 1669. Only two employed the occult in an important way. John Caryl’s The English Princess, or, the Death of Richard the III, performed in March 1667, reworks Shakespeare by returning to “plain Hollinshead and down-right Stow” (“Prologue,” n.p.). Several of its characters sense that they are playing a key role in the designs of Providence, and the language of magic is used metaphorically throughout, as when the king tells Catesby that he is “well read in that mysterious Art” of dissembling (1.3.6–7). At one point the Priour of Lichfield, acting a part equivalent to that of Placidius at the beginning of Dryden’s play, announces that his study of prophecies by “the wise Gildas” indicates that the Earl of Richmond and Princess Elizabeth will start a glorious line of monarchs whose continuance is eclipsed by an infernal “Tempest” (the civil wars) and “black” deed (the execution of Charles I). Then “a Prince [Charles II] will rise” to embody the highest virtues of his dynasty and, by overcoming domestic and foreign foes, will make England the “center of his Power” (3.6.32–34). Of course, Richard is confronted in a dream by the ghosts of his former victims, and he dies professing his atheism and cursing fate on Bosworth Field. The Epilogue comments that when the play ends the audience becomes king and should avoid tyranny, for “Commonwealths of Tyrants are much worse” than Richard (n.p.). In a general way, perhaps this play helped prepare the Restoration audience for Tyrannick Love, in that both allude 24 Balanced accounts of this period can be found in Ashley 134–52 and 164–76; and Fraser 234–78.

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to Restoration England, use prophecy and occult terminology to explore tensions between love and power, and ground the action on a belief in Providential design. It may be, as Novak believes (California Works 10:392), that the 1668 revival of Dekker and Massinger’s Virgin Martyr contributed little to Dryden’s composition of Tyrannick Love.25 Nevertheless, the marked similarities between the two plays make it instructive for us to compare them. Both are set in the Roman Empire during a period of persecution—in the Dekker/Massinger play, the Great Persecution sponsored by Diocletian and the later Maximin (beginning AD 303)26—and the main action is framed and partly interpreted by metaphysical episodes involving spirit life. Dorothea, the female martyr in the earlier play, has an unrequited lover in Antoninus, son of the governor of Caesaria, and he in turn fails to return the love of Artemia, daughter of Diocletian. Like Catherine, Dorothea is supported by an angel as she confounds pagans, materialists, and torturers before finally being executed. These similarities do not go very deep, however, and at the level of ideas and symbolic construction Dryden’s play is easily the more interesting. Dekker and Massinger’s materialists are the comic hedonists, Hircius and Spungius, a pimp and drunkard respectively, neither of whom is strongly committed to his philosophy in the way that Maximin or Placidius is. Unworthy of Dorothea’s intellectual steel, they are bribed and scolded like naughty children. The philosophy of Theophilus and his daughters, unlike that of their equivalents in Dryden’s play, Apollonius and Placidius, is practically without theoretical coherence, an undifferentiated mix of Mithraism and Greco-Roman polytheism fueled by the pseudo-epicurean pursuit of pleasure. To defeat these pagans, Dorothea has only to declare the viciousness of their gods and arrange a miracle. The supernatural features in Dekker and Massinger are one-dimensional: Harpax, a devil who incites Theophilus to persecute Christians, shrinks from the presence of Angelo, an angel in the guise of Dorothea’s page, who represents divine truth and care. In contrast to Dekker and Massinger, Dryden vastly complicates the metaphysical dimension by employing not angels and devils but an angel and legions of middle spirits, elemental daemons of the sort described by Paracelsus, Agrippa, Henry More, and the Abbe de Villars. Novak has identified the chief source for these spirits (“Demonology” 95–98), but of course Dryden had already used similar beings in his earlier plays, so that a new source indicates only that he continued to read and think about demonology. Indeed, he implies as much in his Preface: “what I have said of Astral or Aerial Spirits … is … taken from those who have written on that Subject” (10:112). Although his employment of these beings has more in common with The English Princess than with The Virgin Martyr, in that they become an indirect means of commenting on Restoration England, their true progenitors are the magicians and daemons of Dryden’s own earlier plays.27 See The Virgin Martyr in Bowers’s edition of Dekker’s Dramatic Works 3.365–463. See Grant 210; and Farmer 109–10. 27 See Chapters 2 and 3 above. 25 26

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Yet both the description of the invisible world and the ritual used to invoke its inhabitants are more fully described here than in the previous works. Early in the play, Placidius reports that the necromancer Nigrinus has used “holy words” to invoke a “Scene of Fate” performed by “Ghosts” outside his “Magick Circle” (1.1.67–108). Later, like Ismeron and the High Priest in The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour, Nigrinus is charged to use the full “pow’r” of his “Art” (4.1.11, 2) to generate love in the hearts of Catherine and Valeria. He chooses the “Venus hour” and “wexing Moon,” describes his “Chalk … Circle,” and censes the air with a carefully formulated fumigant (4.1.28–38). The spirits are “Astral forms …, / Fram’d all of purest Atoms of the Air,” and they are morally neutral, though “most subservient to bad Spirits will” (4.1.15–18). “Next man in ignorance and sin” (4.1.180), they have passions, live in social hierarchies, and engage in romantic and military pursuits (4.1.56–72). One immediately notices that these third-century Roman ghosts and spirits behave very much as did their counterparts in Dryden’s first heroic plays, even though the Indian versions were derived from very different sources (with the possible exception of Henry More): classical religion and myth, and histories of early America. Like Ismeron and the High Priest, Nigrinus commands an “earthy Fiend” but considers him inappropriate to consult about such “light intents” as love (4.1.13–14); instead, like his predecessors, he invokes aerial spirits (4.1.15–16), only to discover that they, like their Indian cousins, have no power to generate love and only a limited ability to foretell the future of a relationship. Damilcar pronounces the fate of Maximin’s love for Catherine and that of Placidius for Valeria “In double sense, and twi-light truth” (4.1.202). The sensuous dream that she inspires in Catherine, unlike that of Zempoalla, is not sent by God to shadow forth truth but is designed to promote the libertine version of the Epicurean pleasure principle: Love and Time with reverence use, Treat ‘em like a parting friend: Nor the golden gifts refuse Which in youth sincere they send: For each year their price is more, And they less simple than before. (4.1.137–42)

The project fails for the same reason that the aerial spirits lose power in the American plays: the Christian deity sends Catherine’s guardian angel, Amariel, to chase away the dream spirits with his flaming sword, just as in The Indian Emperour “A God more strong” overwhelms the Indian deities (9:2.1.25). As before, Dryden affirms his audience’s interest in elemental or disembodied spirits and preserves a role for them within the incipient Christian order. He endows both the ghostly prophecy in Act 1 and Damilcar’s predictions in Act 4 with full validity: Charinus dies in battle; Catherine resists temptation and gains her martyr’s crown; Valeria finally asks Placidius to help her and, for one moment before her suicide, gives her hand “while I have life” (5.1.560); and the multiple deaths in the final act do

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free Maximin from the bonds of love. Accordingly, Dryden sees to it that Amariel banishes Damilcar and her crew not to hell or oblivion but rather to continuing duties among the natural elements (4.1.163–170). The relation between these occult phenomena and the main action is more carefully worked out in Tyrannick Love than it was in the earlier plays. In fact, Act 4, scene 1 serves as a kind of code for Dryden’s overall design. Like Porphyrius and Berenice, Damilcar and Nakar have to reconcile their love for each other with the need “to perform what the man will have done” (4.1.73) and the need to serve a larger empire. The “man” is Nigrinus, the magician, who is like Maximin in his failed effort to manipulate earthly forces but unlike him in recognizing that “No Charms prevail against the Christians God” (4.1.200). The empire that Damilcar and Nakar serve is that of the natural world, and its elemental strife not only mirrors the political and military strife within the Roman Empire but suggests that both are to be understood in the same way: as a Providentially ordained pattern of change whose dynamics are driven by love in its various forms. Intelligent beings within either “empire” can respond to the promptings of love by humbly discovering or pursuing their ordained roles (as do Catherine, Felicia, Apollonius, Berenice, and Porphyrius), by attempting to control the course of events (Maximin), or by persisting in some outmoded manner of thought or behavior (Charinus, Valeria, and Placidius). At the occult level, these conflicting options are resolved comically. The egotistical sorcerer, Nigrinus, experiences a Christian revelation, while the aerial spirits, whose powerful roles as pagan daemons have been superseded, are reprimanded and brought within the new dispensation by a superior daemon, the angel Amariel. At the mundane level, however, the various unstable elements interact tragically and move Rome into a protracted phase of violence and disorder. Under the Christian Providence, neither dictatorial strongmen nor their recruits from the invisible world control the course of change; they have been displaced by the higher magic of love. These worlds, the comically occult and the tragically visible, are linked not only by analogy but also through language and character. Maximin’s idiom expresses the exercise of sovereignty over social and political reality as a kind of magic. Like Zempoalla, he deals with life as if it were simply a game of power played on a purely natural stage; he sees himself as a dominating magician, superior to the “Christian Sorceress” (2.1.251) in his knowledge of the “Secrets of Empire” (4.1.249). At one point, he leaps beyond this vision and identifies himself as “The Spirit of the World” itself, diffused through “every mind” (4.1.303) and controlling the “little Fates” (4.1.305) of all other beings. The concept is Platonic and Stoic, but knowledgeable members of the audience would have perceived two fallacies in Maximin’s use of it. First, he invokes it to justify the lawless exercise of his will, whereas the original Platonic notion of anima mundi presumed that the world soul realized its intelligence in a lawful fashion, by introducing “into the time-space continuum the perfect order of the godhead’s paradigm” (Heninger 48). Secondly, Maximin thinks of the world soul as having free will, a notion that is contradicted not only by the ancient doctrine

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but also by Henry More’s recent advocacy of a Christianized version of it: More’s spirit of nature is “the immediate plastic agent of God through which his will is fulfilled in the material world … . it possesses life, but not … reason, or free will” (Burtt 141). In trying to emphasize his own self-sufficiency, then, Maximin unwittingly uses occult language that reduces his role to that of a mindless force of God. As Catherine would put it, he is controlled by a “pow’r” that he does not “see” (5.1.334). The visible and occult worlds are also linked through an important character, Placidius. Placidius is a “power-seeker” (Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 95) only in the sense that he believes in the two kinds of magic that the play equates: the personal power claimed by Maximin and the occult mysteries of Nigrinus. Both types claim control over material elements of the world and, unrecognized by Placidius, both types are superseded by the magic of love. At the start, like any Restoration courtier, he is confident of his value as advisor to the emperor and of his essentially Epicurean philosophy. He is equally confident in the power of magic. Though these perspectives were often at war in the seventeenth century,28 they also tended to converge in some of the important thinkers of Dryden’s day—thinkers such as Henry More, who repeatedly argued for the coexistence of spiritual and mechanical aspects of the natural order; Robert Boyle, who embraced atomism even as he contemplated the “inestimable multitude of spiritual beings” in the universe; Walter Charleton, who passed through a neo-Platonist phase on his way to Christianizing the Epicurean philosophy; and Elias Ashmole who, like Newton, intensely pursued occult interests while actively promoting the Royal Society.29 What all of these men shared, a guiding faith in Christianity, is of course exactly what Placidius lacks. His refusal, perhaps inability, to interpret both materialism and the occult in light of the new faith makes him unable to decipher the Providential meaning of events that seem to be conspiring against him. He feels “forc’d by Fate” (5.1.27), betrayed by “Love and good Nature” (5.1.136), but like Zempoalla and Montezuma he cannot perceive these as benign influences on his civilization. Like them he dies violently, though not by his own hand. Despite his Epicurean commitment to pleasure through self-control, he is increasingly driven by the passions of jealousy and revenge, until at the last he and Maximin destroy each other in an ecstasy of primitive emotion. Just as Maximin can be seen as a message to Charles II, so Placidius can be understood as Dryden’s warning against a fashionable attitude of mind in Charles’s court. Through negative example, perhaps he also affirms the Christian endeavors of the Mores, Boyles, and Charletons. See Thorndike 7:426–64. See “Introduction,” above pp. 4–6. On More’s effort to fuse scientific materialism

28

29

with Christian occultism, see Burtt 135–48; Willey 163–71; and West, Milton and the Angels 34–36, 81–93. More’s most detailed descriptions of spirit life are to be found in “An Antidote against Atheism” and “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Collection 1:130–35; 2:180–87. On Boyle, see Webster 69, 93. Charleton’s evolution is discussed in Gelbart 149–68. The best guide to Ashmole’s thought is Josten, “Introduction,” Elias Ashmole … Notes 2:1–308.

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Never had Dryden so carefully integrated the occult episodes with the main plot, and never had topical issues been so widely diffused through the play’s design. In The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour, he had suggested parallels between patterns of change in early America, early Christian Europe, and Restoration England, and in doing so he had reconciled popular notions of Indian occultism with both modern and ancient European ideas. In The Tempest, though the sense of change through time is muted by an ahistorical setting, he had adjusted the Shakespearean paradigm to reflect the Restoration consciousness of modernity, of the displacing of absolutist rule and mystery by a more cooperative leadership and a more empirical and pragmatic understanding of issues. Tyrannick Love takes more liberties with received history than did the American plays, as if Dryden were shaping his materials toward the tightness of structure that he had achieved in The Tempest, yet he wished also to invest the play with some sort of historical validity. As the newly appointed Poet Laureate, he seems to have felt some urgency about commenting on the drift of current events, which he must have seen as the first serious threats to Restoration stability: the Dutch wars, Clarendon’s fall, the Queen’s barrenness, Whig plans for legitimizing Monmouth, the King’s libertinism and impatience with constitutional rule.30 He was not yet ready to draw the kind of overt parallels that he and Lee would attempt in The Duke of Guise (1682), but some sort of editorializing must have seemed in order. That he regarded the occult as an important aid in this kind of enterprise, rather than as mere entertainment or embellishment, is clearly demonstrated in the American plays and The Tempest, where magicians and daemons deepen and enrich meaning. Although his prose of this period indicates skepticism about the empirical reality of spirit life and the efficacy of magic, it also shows an abiding fascination with these matters. Indeed, to judge from his poetry he was at this time refining, rather than losing, his interest in occultism. Just as in The Tempest the prideful sorcery of Dryden’s Prospero gives way to a more “scientific” approach to invisible forces, so in Annus Mirabilis the king is depicted as a loving natural magician instead of an isolated wizard, and in poems about art during the 1660s the Druidical bard becomes a natural magician whose artful control of words corresponds to God’s handling of corpuscular reality and the king’s governance of society. In this latest variation on the theme, Dryden depicts a world that has just moved beyond the pagan phase of power and mystery without fully recognizing what has occurred. Its emperors and thinkers will for a time continue the tradition of absolutism, materialism, and sorcery without the cosmic support required for enduring success. They do not see that love, the highest magic of the Christian God, has transformed the Roman civilization, and until this dawns on them, all their efforts to restore order and prosperity, like Maximin’s efforts to satisfy his

30 I would include the great fire and the plague if I thought they were being commented upon by the play.

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personal desires, will be “vain experiments” (4.1.398). Surely, Dryden was hoping that the lesson would not be lost on the court of Charles II. The published version of Dryden’s gigantic, two-part masterpiece of heroic drama, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (1670) and Almanzor and Almahide, or, The Conquest of Granada. The Second Part (1671), begins with one of his most extensive discussions of magic and demonology. Yet within the action of play itself, he spends less time on the occult than he had done in any of his previous works in the genre. In “Of Heroique Playes,” appended to the published version of Conquest, the author expatiates on the virtues of dramatizing “Gods,” “Magick,” and “separated beings,” and whether the latter should be considered “incorporeal” or “Aerial” in substance. A poet need not believe in such “visionary objects,” claims Dryden, though indeed “they may be in Nature,” in order to use them in his quest to stimulate the imagination and dominate the minds of his spectators (California Works 11:12–13). At first glance, the play does not seem to warrant such an apology, and it is assumed that Dryden must be justifying his practice in The Indian Emperour or Tyrannick Love, both of which generously employ spirits and wizards. A closer analysis, however, belies this first impression and demonstrates that here, as in the earlier works, the occult functions within the play’s design to enrich our understanding and enjoyment of Dryden’s artistry. In the dialogue, the terminology of magic is used primarily to develop the contrasts between profane and sacred love, and between the arbitrary, willful exercise of power and the employment of power as Christian stewardship. Lyndaraxa is depicted throughout not only as the evil “puppet-mistress” (Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays 99) but also as a goetian of sexual passion. She herself likes to speak of the “Charms” and “Art” that aid her in seeking the crown (1.2.1.145; 2.2.2.68; 2.3.3.60; cf 2.4.2.110–40).31 When Abdalla and Abdelmelech come under her power, she becomes their enchantress, Syren or Circe, and Granada the “enchanted place” where her “magique” transforms all into “dogs and swine” (1.3.1.72, 93–95, 99; 2.2.2.9). By the end of Part 2, however, Abdelmelech senses that the “spell is ended; and th’ Enchantment ‘ore” (2.4.2.111). His last act before committing suicide is to destroy her. Lyndaraxa is more than the consummate mistress of theatrical illusion; her control over people and events is comparable to that of an evil sorceress. Indeed, so far as Almanzor is concerned, the “spell” of her values, many of which he shares (Alssid 217–18; Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays 92–101), is broken only by the interposition of his mother’s ghost. “Love is a Magick which the Lover ties,” declares Boabdelin, “But charms still end, when the Magician dies” (1.5.1.337–38). Here the specific reference is not to Lyndaraxa but rather to Almanzor, who at first shares with her this dark concept of love and, like her, seems to exercise a supernatural control over reality. “The charms of Beauty like a pest he flies,” because he thinks of love as a base passion that wrests power from the human will, and he “Acknowledges no pow’r 31 All references to The Conquest of Granada begin with the Part number (either 1 or 2) and proceed to act, scene, and lines.

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above his own” (1.1.1.256, 258). Nevertheless, he finds Almahide’s “charms” overwhelming, so that he is “corrupted with the pow’r to please” (1.3.1.366–67). His first attempt to accommodate the alien feeling is to define it as a kind of natural magic: This raging fire which through the Mass does move, Shall purge my dross, and shall refine my Love. (1.3.1.423–24)

Given Dryden’s tendency during the late 1660s and 1670s to compare the highest endeavors to types of natural magic, perhaps we should regard Almanzor’s alchemical imagery as auspicious. The frustration and jealousy with which he must cope as Almahide resists his advances are like the “Chymick flame” which, in Annus Mirabilis, refines London to “a City of more precious mold” (1:1169–70). Without a redeemed understanding of where this process of refinement is leading, however, he remains a creature driven by instinct, at best a Jupiter to Almahide’s Venus (2.2.3.29–36). As Lyndaraxa shrewdly perceives, Your Love is not refin’d to that degree. For, since you have desires, and those not blest, Your Love’s uneasie, and at little rest. (2.3.3.123–24)

Almanzor sees himself as “a dev’l” who is unable to enjoy “the Heaven” of Almahide’s love” (2.3.1.100–101), and his highest idea of love, even so late as the middle of Part 2, sounds like the brighter side of Abdalla’s daemonic vision: ‘Tis an Enchantment where the reason’s bound: But Paradice is in th’ enchanted ground. (2.3.3.146–47)

At the end, we cannot be certain that this essentially pagan concept has been fully displaced, but Almanzor’s inspirited vow to serve the Christian monarch while Almahide spends her year of widowhood bodes well. For the first time, he seems to act not merely as one enchanted or enflamed by sexual desire, but rather as one moved by the kind of “Heroique Passion” (2.1.1.145) endorsed by the Christian Queen early in Part 2. He seems on the verge of discovering love’s sacred role in the Providential order. It is partly the false analogy between amorous possession and political or military power, often phrased in the language of magic, that misguides Lyndaraxa, Boabdelin, and even Almanzor for most of the play. Lyndaraxa identifies the “Charms of being great” (1.2.1.145) with her ability to enchant Abdalla and Abdelmelech (1.3.1.138; 2.2.2.68). Her attempt on Almanzor’s heart is clearly an effort to acquire what she regards as his magical power over Granada: Enter, brave Sir; for, when you speak the word, These Gates will open of their own accord. The Genius of the place its Lord will meet: And bend its tow’ry forehead to your feet. (2.3.3.92–95)

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She refers to the occult notion that a city, habitation, or geographical location is informed by a “controlling spirit” (OED). In the Christian conception, such genii enact Providence and report only to God, but Lyndaraxa adopts the pagan notion that guardian spirits can become subject to a magus such as she imagines Almanzor to be.32 In the seventeenth century the word “genius,” when used to mean an individual’s tutelary daemon, rather than the guardian of a place, gained astrological associations. It could symbolize “the combination of sidereal influences represented in a person’s horoscope.” In this sense, for example, Milton had spoken of “each one’s allotted Genius or proper sta’r” (OED). Thus, when Boabdelin laments that his “tame Demon …, / Shrinks at a Genius greater than his own” (2.2.3.27–28), he is conflating demonology with astrology in order to interpret the magic of Almanzor’s sexual appeal and military charisma. Perhaps Dryden had in mind Cornelius Agrippa’s idea that “the Demon of nativity, which is called the Genius, doth here descend from the disposition of the world, and from the circuits of the Stars, which were powerfull in his nativity” (Agrippa 410). As his empire sinks, Boabdelin increasingly uses astrological imagery to express his sense of impotency. “No kindly Planet” has cared for his birth; he is “Heav’ns Out-cast; and the dross of every Starr” (2.1.2.19–20). Almanzor “has th’ Ascendant” over his “Fate” (2.1.2.84). In an earlier conversation with Boabdelin, Abenamar had introduced the astronomical metaphor by speaking of Almanzor as “a wandring star; / Whose Motion’s just; though ‘tis not regular” (1.5.1.207–208). Both old men are trying to demystify Almanzor’s extraordinary gifts by incorporating them within a familiar and orderly cosmic picture.33 They are unwilling to accept his own account of things, which ascribes this astonishing influence over current history to the sheer potency of his will in the free execution of personal laws (1.1.1.203–21). For most of the play, Almanzor’s own self-image coincides with Abdalla’s description of him as a “great Soul / Whose single force can multitudes controll” (1.1.1.287–88), for he, like Lyndaraxa, rejects “any order that is not shaped by his own will” (Hughes, Dryden’s Heroic Plays 90; Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 122). On one occasion, his idea of heroic potency sounds like the vis imaginativa of Agrippa and Paracelsus or the notion of “fascination” in witchcraft (Easlea 102, Thomas 249, Porta 229–30). Possessed by an “Enthusiastique fit,” he says, “the Heroes Soul, / Does all the Military Art controul” (2.4.2.13–17). Sometimes his vision is yet grander; he becomes the primate of magicians, a godlike figure whose “word” stands “like Fate” (1.3.1.9) and whose spiritual force On guardian genii, see above, “Introduction,” n12. Ptolemy created the first mathematical demonstration of how the seemingly

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irregular motions of the planets, or wandering stars, could be understood as regular (see OED under “Ptolemy” and “Astronony”). Waith (Herculean Hero 160) notes this image but treats it as Dryden’s authorial comment on Almanzor, rather than as another character’s attempt at definition.

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compels empires, stars, fortune, even destiny, “As winds drive storms before ’em in the sky” (1.3.1.525; see 1.4.2.470–79). He assures Almahide that to be under his protection is to be “as in a Magique Circle” (2.3.1.164). Like the Neo-Platonic magician, Almanzor thinks of “providence as the spontaneous participation of every generated thing in the inclusive Source, so that … [he] might conceive his enchantments as cosmologically irresistible … . His operations were a translation of merit into power” (West 45). What he has to learn is that in the Christian Providence even the most highly gifted beings do not privately determine the course of fate; they become key terms within its historical expression. Unlike Zulema, who persists in thinking that “Man makes his fate according to his mind” (1.2.1.231), Almanzor glimpses the truth after he is primed by love’s alchemy and humiliated by military defeat (Barbeau Gardiner 114). Only then, with prompting by his mother’s ghost, is he prepared to interpret his prowess as the tool of Christian civilization. That the ghost makes only a small impression on Almanzor during its first appearance should not be surprising. In deistic fashion, he admits to the rational acceptance of “a Godhead” (2.4.3.129), but he espouses no particular theology that would invest his mother’s ghost with credibility.34 Because his idea of ghosts, like that of the High Priest in The Indian Emperour, has yet to be redeemed, it harmonizes with his use of the language of magic; it presumes that he, like a theurgist, can conjure and manipulate any of the phenomena of reality, whether visible or occult. When Almahide rejects his amorous advances in 1.4, he vows to carry his desire into the afterlife and in ghostly form to haunt her “every where,” including the bedroom (1.4.2.420).35 Later, he threatens to send his “Ghost” to retrieve Almahide’s scarf if Boabdelin takes it from his dead body (2.3.1.134). Dryden’s audience would have associated such notions either with the popular vestiges of pagan lore or with the unorthodox Christian demonology of neoPlatonists like Cornelius Agrippa. “This idea,” says West, “that the souls of the dead were swayed by earthly passions and frequented the … spots which hope of sensual gratification made attractive to them was one that persisted despite the theologians and that was at the heart of occult pneumatology on ghosts” (Invisible World 52). Agrippa, for one, affirmed such activities by departed souls, though to him “they were usually desolate and terrible vestiges of malignant or lustful personalities not received into heaven.” Their divine part having “returned blameless to God,” they consisted of air condensed into “the astral shapes …

I discuss only the more resonant instances here. Excluded, for example, are the comparison of Almahide’s sisterly feelings to “the Ghost of a departed Love” (1.5.1.453) and Almanzor’s frustrated reaction to Almahide’s absurd allegiance to her dead husband: “I’me now to conquer Ghosts” (2.5.3.314). 35 See Novak’s commentary (California Works 10:419–21) on the similar idea in Tyrannick Love, 3.1.312–27. 34

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which survived awhile the dissolution of the elementary body” (West, Invisible World 51–52).36 The ghost of Almanzor’s mother describes herself, indeed, as an “Airy shadow” (2.4.3.96), but she is hardly the kind of passionate spirit envisaged by Almanzor and Agrippa, and she does not submit to Almanzor’s control. An inhabitant of “the Mountains of the Moon,” she is one of the “Blessed Souls” who, before admission into the Christian heaven, must be “refin’d” by performing an important divine mission (2.4.3.138–41). Milton had imagined such a lunar middle paradise (so had Ariosto) and, interestingly, had reserved it mainly for the souls of those who had misplaced their piety, especially Roman Catholics (PL 3.460–97 in Poems). Perhaps this is Dryden’s way of endowing his Popish ghost with Protestant respectability; her mission to Almanzor preserves his virtue, inspires his dedication to the Christian empire, and at the same time refines away her own Catholic imperfections, enabling her to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The scenario is parallel to the mundane one in which Almanzor must be purged of his misplaced faith in nature and personal will before he can serve the emergent Christian empire. This scenario, however, only partly explains how Dryden addressed a problem that he had confronted in The Indian Emperour. Orthodox Protestants in the Restoration audience, heirs to a half-century of polemics against Roman Catholic doctrine, would have objected not merely to the ghost of a Papist, but to any ghost whatsoever. “Lewes Lavater puts it simply: God can send souls back into the world—but He never does” (West, Invisible World 48). The similarities between the ghost of Almanzor’s mother and the souls in Milton’s middle paradise might have softened potential hostility to some extent, but Dryden was probably depending also on the atmosphere of receptivity to ghost lore that had been fostered by Henry More and Joseph Glanville in their early efforts to combat atheism. They had argued that after death unbinds the soul, it assumes an aerial existence at a level appropriate to its degree of purity. There it retains feelings, though “in a far higher degree than we are capable of” (More, Collection 2:181), and serves Providence. A somewhat tarnished spirit, like that of Almanzor’s mother, might indeed be given the task of counseling a mortal regarding his proper role in the unfolding of history (More, Collection 2:147–48 and Poems 48, 121; Glanvill 124–68) In any case, the refinement sought by the ghost of his mother does recall Almanzor’s own need for refinement. He, too, must gain a more satisfactory vision of his relation to God, and her appearance contributes significantly to the process. Moments after confronting her “Holy Shade” (2.4.3.112), he seems to revive his pagan ghost-lore, but this time there is an important difference. When Almahide seeks emotional distance by talking of sisterly feelings and a purely spiritual love that needs no sensual nourishment, he declares that he would “walk a discontented Ghost, / If flesh and blood were to no purpose lost” (2.4.3.187–88). Although this 36 An accurate, concise summary of seventeenth-century ghost beliefs appears in Thomas 701–707.

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sounds very much like his earlier references to ghosts, it is imbedded in a series of passionate speeches that proclaim an Epicurean resignation to fate (King 71–72; Alssid 210–11). His ghostly wanderings would serve not to fulfill his own wishes but rather to satisfy some impersonal law of compensation. No longer presuming that he controls his environment, Almanzor urges Almahide to yield not to his will but to a lust which fate seems to have ordained. Later, he reaffirms the new vision: to stop seeing her is “past my pow’r; and all beyond is fate” (2.5.3.40). This predestinarian frame of mind, notes Michael Alssid, “forms a marked contrast to his earlier concept of individualism and liberty” (210). It does not, however, incorporate either the warning or the new knowledge that the ghost has tried to convey, the warning against “lawless Love” and the knowledge that he is a baptized Christian whose strength was given for a special purpose (2.4.3.132, 125–28). Up to this point, then, supernatural intervention achieves a limited end: it alters Almanzor’s conception of his role within the larger scheme of things. He begins to see himself as living among forces, both within and outside himself, that are beyond his control. Yet he still understands these forces as expressions of the rhythms of nature: “Born” for Almahide, he does “by Nature, serve, / And, like the lab’ring Beast, no thanks deserve” (2.5.3.7–8). That these forces ultimately manifest the will of the Christian God becomes clear only near the end of Part 2. There, about to slay the Duke of Arcos in a final effort to salvage victory for the overmatched Moors, he is frozen once again by the voice of his mother’s ghost. In their first encounter she had promised to impart the secret of his birth if he left Almahide’s presence without indulging his desire. He had complied, though only after his loved one had threatened suicide. Now, at the crucial moment, the ghost reveals that his father is the very man whom he is about to kill, and, if we can believe the Duke’s report, Almanzor capitulates: “I hear thee, I obey / Thy sacred voice” (2.5.3.203–204). The conversion of Almanzor, which reflects the conversion of Granada, is a function of the cooperation between experience and occult intervention. Experience teaches him that he is not powerful enough to impose his private values on all human relationships and public issues. A divine message discloses the Providential pattern within whose terms his strength, love, and honor can be reinterpreted, reconciled, and employed in a fulfilling way. Our admiration for this play and understanding of its complex form has grown vastly in the since Waith introduced us to the theme of Almanzor’s education by Almahide and showed us how to look for pattern in the interaction of character types (156–65). King later demonstrated how Dryden satirically comments on the emergence of “self-awareness, individualism, and growing secularisation of thought—whether in the form of rationalism, materialism, or determinism—and some characteristically seventeenth-century forms of religious obscurantism” (60). Next, the larger political, religious, and historical implications of the play’s structure and intellectual content were addressed by Barbeau Gardiner. In showing how Dryden links self-destructive ambition and lawlessness to the unfolding of justice, she treated the themes of factionalism, broken contracts, excessive

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freedom, humility, and Providence (Intellectual Design 105–26). Alssid followed with a closer look at how love guides Almanzor from a self-centered to a public sphere of activity within the emergent Spanish empire, and how the subplots reinforce and develop this progression (1.190–224). Taking provocative exception to many of these conclusions, Hughes found that the ostensibly normative characters, drawn into an evil world of theatrical illusions, lose their identities in the confusion of ideal love with morbid eroticism and of ideal heroism with primitive blood-lust. Almanzor’s education, Hughes contended, begins only near the close of the play, and Almahide is not the chief teacher. In fact, both Almahide’s Platonism and Isabel’s heroic love are shown to be ineffectual, Lyndaraxa becomes the central female influence on Spain’s victory, and this victory establishes a society that is far from utopian (Dryden’s Heroic Plays 79–117). Although the occult material supports many of Hughes’s assertions, it can be more fully accommodated by the developmental pattern delineated by Barbeau Gardiner and Alssid. Granada disintegrates because, as Hughes aptly explains, it enshrines “no truths that will lead its citizens from their diverse and incommunicable illusions to a communal enlightenment. Only when Christianity supplants the false and ephemeral order are regeneration and unity possible” (Dryden’s Heroic Plays 91). Chief among these illusions are the beliefs that love is a private, possessive act, and that reality can be subjected entirely to human will. Dryden employs the language of sorcery and perhaps of witchcraft to emphasize the misguided nature of such beliefs, and he uses astrological terms to distinguish Almanzor’s personal brand of lust and power-mongering from the more traditional cast of Boabdelin’s heresies. As if to mark the beginning of Almanzor’s education, Dryden employs the language of natural magic, alchemy, when the hero first reflects on his feelings for Almahide. Although many other experiences become part of the process, Almahide’s sustained resistance to his unbridled desire, though itself founded on an unredeemed morality, heats the refining flame. Meanwhile, Almanzor continues to see himself as the arch-magician within a network of sympathetic forces that are subject to his will. At two critical stages in his growth, however, the ghost of his mother intervenes, first to challenge his magical concept of personal power and finally to reveal his nativity and thus enable him to discover his role. At the end, he begins to understand love as the social force manipulated by Providential magic and his own prowess as the corresponding military power. Through this kind of magic, the Spanish empire emerges. While Dryden would hardly have asked a Protestant audience to regard this as a utopian development, he does present it as leading to a more satisfactory order by reinstituting Christianity in Europe and exporting it to the New World. Perhaps, indeed, he was hinting at even longer-range consequences. Christopher Columbus was present at the fall of Granada,37 and Isabella hopes that his forthcoming expedition to the New World will restore “freedom and true faith” to that benighted land (2.1.1.17–27). Noted by the California Works editors in 11:452.

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In the epistle “To … Charleton,” Dryden had presented Columbus as a pivotal figure in history, because he undid the tyrannical “charms” that “our ancestors” had fabricated from Aristotle’s philosophy and thus paved the way for Bacon and the other great English proponents of free reason (1:2, 7). The conversion of Almanzor thus prefigures not only the emergence of an English empire, recast in the Protestant frame, but also the displacement of post-Aristotelian theurgy, with all its neo-Platonic accretions, by Baconian natural magic (see Easlea 89–153). In the far distance is Charles II, the loving alchemist of Annus Mirabilis. Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada have much in common with each other and with the American plays. Each integrates occult phenomena and language with the plot and characters to reinforce important concepts or developments in the action. In each, the occult features are among Dryden’s most original contributions to the stories he received from history and tradition. In each, the occult emphasizes the contrast between individuals who find themselves within the ultimate drama of Providence and those who try to force their own scenarios on reality. Each is about how the higher magic of Christian love can transform both individuals and civilizations. Each therefore uses occult lore to explore the relation between history and Providence. In the later two works, however, the occult is more carefully integrated with the main action than it was in the American plays, and both of the later plays read partly like cautionary advice to Charles II. In Tyrannick Love the invisible world is represented more through the actions of a magician and spirits than through language, and the occult part of the story works more through the contrast of ideas and characters than through historical process on the larger scale. Only the lesser characters join Catherine in recognizing their ordained roles in Providential history, while the rest either opt out or follow Maximin into a tragic future of continuing violence and chaos. Only at the occult level are such conflicting options comically resolved. In The Conquest of Granada, as in the early poems, occult language is the main vehicle for occult ideas, with spirit life limited to the ghostly appearances of Almanzor’s mother. Unlike Tyrannick Love, the story of Granada’s fall ends as a Christian comedy, with occult language tracing the ascendancy of transformative love at both the personal and political levels. In this respect, it resembles The Indian Emperour, but without all the trappings of spirit life. Chiefly through ghost lore and the terminology of astrology and magic, the occult in The Conquest of Granada registers Almanzor’s gradual change in self-image from a center of pure will to a victim of natural forces and finally to a servant of Christian Providence as revealed in the emergent leadership of Ferdinand and Isabella. In both plays characters who behave like neo-Platonic magicians, manipulating a network of sympathetic forces, find their power challenged by a new form of magic, one both more natural and more potently supernatural than their outmoded wizardry—that of Christian love functioning through the Providential alchemy of human feelings. At the political level these plays comment indirectly on the times, offer veiled advice to the court of Charles II, and by implication foreshadow the English Empire whose features Dryden had outlined in Annus Mirabilis. In Tyrannick

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Love, Catherine’s devotion to an invisible world contrasts instructively with the secular and materialistic ideas currently dominating Charles’s court. Porphyrius, in a choice relevant to Monmouth’s future alternatives, rejects raw power and accepts what he has come to regard as a divinely ordained life of love and service. That Maximin’s self-indulgent and superstitious absolutism leads only to further disorder and violence in the state constitutes a cautionary editorial on trends in the Restoration government. To some extent, the converse of Maximin’s behavior and its reflection in the state is depicted in the two parts of The Conquest of Granada. Almanzor moves from the degenerate public world of Boabdelin, which in many respects recalls those of Zempoalla and Maximin, to that of Ferdinand and Isabella—i.e., to a world of Christian service in harmony with Providence. The new monarchs of Spain are sketchily depicted, however, perhaps implying that their highest value of Christian love is not to be fully realized in the empire they are about to build—the empire whose emergence Dryden has already dramatized, with all of its flaws, in The Indian Emperour. James Thompson, Bridget Orr, and Laura Brown have expounded on this dimension of the plays, though they by no means agree on its details. Thompson sees Almanzor’s transformation as a sign of the “historical shift” (99) from a feudal and aristocratic notion of empire toward the Dutch model “more suited to a fully capitalized economy and its bourgeois society” (100). Orr disagrees. She regards the Christian empire that emerges in the Conquest of Granada as Dryden’s preferred alternative. Despite evidence of its “amoral opportunism,” he sees it, she says, as superior to a “cruel Islamic despotism” as well as to the “sordid” Dutch world of avarice and both “sexual and commercial intrigue” he had dramatized in Amboyna (159–66). Brown, on other hand, finds that these plays undermine any positive model of empire through a pervasive expression of “loss” and “regret.” “Dryden’s major heroic plays figure empire … as a contingent and transitory stage in a self-limiting process that leads to inevitable loss” (71–73). My own reading of the occult elements in these plays leads to a slightly different conclusion regarding Dryden’s commentary on empire. I pick up, however, where Brown leaves off. Earlier in her essay, she claims that Dryden considers “English imperial expansion … to be built upon the major shifts in philosophical and scientific thinking that mark this era” (61). She then quotes the crucial passage from Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) where he exclaims that “almost a new Nature has been reveal’d to us” through the new science (California Works 17:15). This link between the new philosophy and England’s imperial future can certainly be found in Annus Mirabilis, as McKeon has convincingly shown (164–81), but whether it is visible in heroic plays set in the pre-scientific past is not so clear. Perhaps Dryden’s use of alchemical language to describe the beginning of Almanzor’s education through love does suggest that historical change, such as the rise of a new Spain, is primarily driven by Providence through the alchemy of human experience. And perhaps the reference to Columbus does foreshadow the slow rise of free reason beginning with the failed experiments of Iberian and Dutch forms of colonization and trade,

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and culminating in the distinctively English form of imperialism favored by Dryden. These would be reasonable extrapolations from what is said and done in Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada, but they take us well beyond the play worlds themselves. Within those worlds, the occult ideas, language, and beings figure forth only the process, rather than the outcome, through which Providence exercises its natural magic using human emotions, experiences, and analytical abilities. Dryden’s sure touch in integrating occult materials with his main themes and actions suggests that he had achieved a clear vision of poetic magic. The Prologue to Tyrannick Love (1669) confirms this. There, he assures the audience that “in his conjuring” he had “Allow’d his Fancy the full scope and swing” rather than merely conveying the “sence” of his story (10:14–17). This claim echoes the magical implications invoked in the verses to the Lord Chancellor (1662), where Restoration poets are said to take up the charge given to the ancient druids by nature itself. Dryden had distinguished the poetic magic of these modern druids from that of their ancestors in the verses to Howard (1660), Annus Mirabilis (1667) and the Prologue to The Tempest (1667). In these works, he maintained that Restoration poets are creative in a post-Baconian way, manipulating observed reality (in the case of poetry, through language) to discover Providential patterns and purposes, and even to gain a special insight into the future. This vision also informs the prologue to “the University of Oxon” (1673), which reiterates the contrast in the verses to Howard between lesser poets, who treat nature as a casual collision of atoms, and those who have studied nature and gained the ability to imitate her Providential patterns. The pretenders to poetry … build their Poems the Lucretian way, So many Huddled Atoms make a Play, And if they hit in Order by some Chance, They call that Nature, which is Ignorance. (1:32–35)

More accomplished writers examine “with Care th’ Anatomy of Man” and draw “Fame from Science, not from Fortune” (25–27). Judging from his comments on the occult in “Of Heroique Playes. An Essay” (1672), appended to the published version of The Conquest of Granada, at this point Dryden was confident that the modern poet retained a special insight into both the visible and the invisible worlds. The poetic imagination, he says, can represent aerial spirits more convincingly than “Philosophers or Divines” (11:12–13).

Chapter 5

The State of Innocence, Aureng-Zebe, and the Limits of Poetic Vision, 1674–77 In the serious plays Dryden wrote between 1674 and about 1677, spirit life and occult arts from the Western tradition are less varied and less relevant to the main action than before. With some interesting exceptions to be discussed in due course, they come across almost as clichés, and their significance is fleeting and personalized, disconnected from larger themes. Alchemy is rarely mentioned and then, only as a negative metaphor, unlike its use in Annus Mirabilis. The middle spirits—genii, ghosts, and elemental daemons—withdraw from the stage altogether and appear only in the language. Divine and infernal spirits are limited to the scripturally authorized kind and appear in The State of Innocence, though not in Aureng-Zebe. Otherwise, they serve minor rhetorical purposes in the dialogue. Prophecy remains, and to some extent its astrological methods, though almost all references to stellar influences or meanings are without fresh significance to the ongoing action. Four factors help to account for this change: (1) a shift of emphasis toward private life and sentimentalism in Dryden’s works during this period, (2) a temporary blurring of his vision of a divinely sponsored future for English political life, and (3) his revised understanding of poetic access to the invisible world. Although these factors are clearly interrelated, causal relationships among them are impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy.1 Together, they seem to reflect some deep-seated anxiety about what the future holds for English society and its poet-interpreters. In many respects, the occult is notably missing from The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man: An Opera (written 1674, published 1677), Dryden’s adaptation of Paradise Lost. He adopts a version of Milton’s Ptolemaic world system— “There hangs the ball of Earth and Water mixt, / Self-Center’d, and unmov’d” (12:2.2.46–47)—but leaves out the concentric spheres and their guardian angels as well as the stellar influences and their astrological meanings. In one of his Miltonic moments, Dryden has Raphael saying that “th’ Eternal mind / Acts through all places” and “through the Universal Mass does move” (5.4.160–63), but he does not imply that the divine mind informs matter with forces that could be tapped by human beings. Conjuration, divination, alchemy, and sympathetic medicine play no role in the action or language, unless we regard Lucifer’s act of whispering a daemonic vision into Eve’s sleeping mind (3.3.1–45) as a kind of conjuration. The 1 Perhaps they are parts of what James Winn calls “that restless process of reconsidering his career through which he was now passing” (John Dryden and His World 265).

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so-called “spirits” inhabiting this vision are presented as dreamlike apparitions, yet they do not resemble the genii or ghosts that so fascinated More, Glanvill, and others, including the younger Dryden. Angels and devils there are, in abundance— whether falling to Hell and conversing there, celebrating in heaven, riding a chariot near the sun, rising or descending in clouds, or discoursing with Adam and Eve on the earth—but their roles are more discursive than symbolic. They represent the conventional dichotomies: on one side, diabolical pride, carnality, materialism, lust for power, and excessive imagination; on the other, service, compassion, temperance, and loving care and obedience.2 Not so conventional is their discursive role. They engage with each other, and with Adam and Eve, in complex arguments about such abstract matters as free will, human nature, and interpersonal relations. This failure to exploit an occult rhetoric in The State of Innocence seems to correlate with a shift inward that other scholars have noted in Dryden’s works during this period, though these scholars spend little time on The State of Innocence. The classic formulation by Arthur C. Kirsch is focused on Aureng-Zebe, and others have followed his lead (“Significance” 160–75). In regard to Dryden’s use of the occult, however, one might argue that the shift began with The State of Innocence. In this work, he barely touches upon the more pragmatic problems of social, political, and cultural change that he had explored earlier using occult materials—unless Bruce King is right to infer a general fear that the “ordained government … was in danger of rebellion; … another fall from obedience into the anarchy of nature’s wars” (115). If the play does convey this implication, however, it is not developed using occult materials, and more specific allusions to contemporary politics are difficult to prove. The angels do not represent aspects of God’s involvement in the practical politics or cultural developments of the Restoration. Any equation between Lucifer and Cromwell remains debatable, and while Lucifer’s reference to the “States-General of Hell” (1.1.86) may demonize the Dutch, it does not develop into an extended satire. In The State of Innocence, visitors from the invisible world dominate the stage, but instead of serving as complex metaphors for the ways in which Providence interacts with mundane phenomena, they discourse about private salvation, individual morality and psychology, and interpersonal relations—subjects to which Dryden seems not to have considered occult materials particularly applicable. At this point in his development, he tends to avoid using the occult to explore private and psychological worlds when these are separated from the Providential implications of major public activities. As he puts it in the dedication 2 The dedication to Mary of Modena, Duchess of York, also contains mainly conventional occult language. “Providence” has placed the Duchess, “the most perfect Workmanship of Heaven … so near a Crown” that her beauty adds “a Lustre to it.” Her “Person is a Paradice,” through which her soul, a kind of “Cherubim,” “shines thorough.” Such perfection is “beyond the reach of Nature” and strikes mere mortals with a zealous reverence, as if “a Beam of the Divinity shines upon them” (12:82–84).

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of Aureng-Zebe, when “Private Virtue” is “remov’d from … Pomp and Vanity” and is “confin’d to a contemplation of it self, and centring on it self,” it “cannot consist with Providence” (12.153–54).3 It is a different matter, however, when personal life directly affects the life of a nation, as Dryden had demonstrated in the earlier poems and plays where occult ideas contribute significantly to the main themes. Like these earlier works, AurengZebe: A Tragedy (1675) studies the public impact of private behavior, so that, unlike The State of Innocence, it does offer a field for occult references. The characters are not isolated from public life, like Adam and Eve; they are public figures whose personal lives necessarily resonate at the national level.4 Nevertheless, to Dryden the possibilities for occult ideas would have seemed limited, because this play reflects the new emphasis on private feelings and interpersonal relations.5 The possibilities are also limited by his growing feeling that an increasingly factious England and its self-indulgent king were losing their way.6 This feeling weakened the Providential vision with which he had previously associated much of his occult rhetoric—the vision of a Christian God choosing leaders and assisting them in guiding society along the path toward virtue and order. As a result, occultism in Aureng-Zebe is conventional and one-dimensional— with a couple of interesting exceptions.7 In his most famous speech, Aureng-Zebe utters the play’s only reference to alchemy (of the discredited kind): I’m tir’d with waiting for this Chymic Gold, Which fools us young, and beggars us when old. (4.1.43–44)

The meaning is obvious, as it is in the play’s references to angels, devils, witchcraft, ghosts, and stars. Aureng-Zebe wonders if “some Angel” is taking the “shape” of Nourmahal as she expresses kindness and concern for him (4.1.64–65), 3 As a sampling from the many commentaries on the non-occult aspects of The State of Innocence—its revisions of Milton, its philosophical grounding, its politics, its theatricality, etc.—see King 95–115; Winn, John Dryden and His World 262–69; Frank; Vinton A. Dearing, “Commentary,” California Works 12.320–82; von Maltzahn; and Kewes, “Dryden’s Theatre” 141–43. 4 In their stress on the new sentimentalism, critics tend to underplay the continuing, though less central, analysis of public life in this play and in All for Love. Barbeau Gardiner reminded us in 1970 (Intellectual Design 139) that especially in the second part of the Conquest of Granada, as well as in Aureng-Zebe, the public issues remain at the surface even as the center of gravity shifts to “private persons.” 5 Kirsch, “Significance,” and King (133–47) see the shift to sentimentalism as beginning with All for Love. 6 On the temporary lapse of Dryden’s integrating vision for England, see Haley 117 and Erskine-Hill, “Dryden’s Drama” 56. 7 That is, it is conventional despite the Muslim context. Dearing notes that Dryden familiarizes Islam by mixing in Greco-Roman references, imposing European ideas, or selecting aspects of Islam that aligned well with their Christian equivalents (California Works 12:387, 428n).

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and she responds by comparing herself to his “Guardian Angel” (4.1.68). Nourmahal thinks an “Angel” has used her face as the model for Indamora’s beauty (5.1.265–66), and Indamora, upon seeing Nourmahal, feels herself in the presence of an angel (276). A dishonest courtier is described as a “Court-Devil” (1.1.315), and a traitor is an “envious Devil” (5.1.392). To be misled by a woman is to be “Charm’d by … Witchcraft” (1.1.351). To be relieved of worry is to feel the “groaning Ghosts” of care “take flight” (1.1.360). Melesinda promises that after death her “Ghost” will “haunt” Morat’s “Ghost” (5.1.382). Indamora’s unhappiness in love is blamed on “sullen Planets” that shone at her birth (1.1.363). Arimant complains that she has gained “a strange Ascendant” over him (2.1.108), and the Emperor suggests that the influence of her charms, like that of a “Star,” may bode ill (2.1.410). Morat asks nothing more from his “Stars” than the “Charms” of the battlefield (3.1.149–51) but later maintains that Indamora’s “Stars” choose him as her lover over the God-forsaken Aureng-Zebe (3.1.506). These occult terms are used to reinforce a character’s mood or some point he or she is making about personal relationships. Their meaning, individually or as a pattern of metaphors, does not deepen the significance of the play. Only two types of occult language seem to suggest broader or more subtle meanings: the terminology of dreams and the terminology relating heaven to nature. Derek Hughes convincingly shows that the dream imagery develops the theme of “histrionic self-deception.” Each of the leading characters, says Hughes, learns how human fallibility defeats “heroic idealism” (Dryden’s Heroic Plays 124). Aureng-Zebe at first compares his dream of love to the special “fire” that inspired Mohammed’s vision of paradise (1.1.378–80) but later abandons this ideal when it is undermined by arguments and misunderstandings. To Morat, based on his experience of warfare and human treachery, Aureng-Zebe is a “dreaming Priest” (3.1.313). Similarly, experience makes Indamora wonder if her idea of love was a “gaudy Dream” (1.1.375), and Nourmahal realizes that her husband’s vaunted “Heav’n of Love” cannot erase the feverish dream of his “broken Faith” (2.1.212–24). Later on, she fears her dream of a passionate love relationship with Aureng-Zebe was merely a selfish vision (4.1.95–96). Sooner or later, each character has to trade dreams for a more realistic understanding of life’s complex challenges. References to the relation of heaven and nature also constitute an occult leitmotif that fills out the play’s meaning. Since, as most critics have noticed, the religious dimension of the play is non-Christian and none of the main characters is fully normative, the heaven-versus-nature language guides the audience’s identification of positive values. The first forty-five lines begin the process. Arimant says that “Heav’n” rests the future of “the Empire of the East” on “this important day” (1.1.1–2), and Asaph Chan replies that Indus and Ganges, our wide Empires bounds, Swell their dy’d Currents with their Natives wounds: Each purple River winding, as he runs, His bloudy arms about his slaughter’d Sons. (1.1.13–16)

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Seemingly with reference to Asaph Chan’s observation, Arimant reflects that this war, through which sons vie for their father’s crown, is unnatural: “Nature’s Laws are by the States destroy’d” (1.1.43). Three things can be observed about these opening remarks. First, Arimant initiates his role as the most reliable commentator on the events of the play. Fazel Chan recognizes this when he remembers how Arimant “foretold” what would happen “When first the Brothers did their Factions form” (1.1.17–18). At times, Arimant shares this role with Indamora and Melesinda, but at other times their views are invalidated by the influence of strong passions. Arimant, too, becomes temporarily distracted by passion, his unrequited love for Indamora, but he manages to maintain a certain analytical detachment that allies him more with Dryden himself than with any other character in the play. In this respect, he looks forward to Serapion in All for Love (see Chapter 6, below). Second, the river imagery contrasts natural “Currents” with the unnatural blood of civil war, natural “bounds” with the unnatural swelling that threatens those bounds, and the moral indifference of geographical features with the rivers’ compassionate, perhaps loving, embrace of their “slaughter’d sons.” The rivers’ imagery expands the significance of Arimant’s observation that the laws of “States” have clearly “destroy’d” those of nature. Third, although this river imagery does not carry the Providential implications of its equivalent in All for Love, it does seem to reflect “secret causes”8 issuing from the same “Heav’n” to which Arimant attributes the meaning “of this important day.”9 Thus, the play’s first occult reference, its opening imagery, suggests that the audience should attend to the development of heaven’s role in the ensuing human relationships. Does heaven set natural boundaries for human instinct and pride as it does for the rivers’ currents? But does it sometimes ordain the violation of these boundaries as a means of achieving a larger design? It remains for Dryden to go further with such symbolism in All for Love. The rest of the play traces the cause of this national violation of Providential nature to equivalent violations at the individual and interpersonal levels. The civil war whose blood swells river currents, threatening their natural boundaries, is fueled by pride, power-plays, self-indulgence, and instinct. Such bestial forces, as in The State of Innocence, detach human nature from heavenly guidance and render it vulnerable to diabolical perversion. The Emperor, Morat, and Nourmahal As mentioned above (Chapter 3, p. 45), in Annus Mirabilis Charles’s pursuit of war is compared to the rise of the Nile (1:183)—clearly a Providential process—but Dryden may have found new inspiration for Nile imagery in his main source for Aureng-Zebe, Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire. Bernier notes that “the Indus, the Ganges, … are so many rivers Nile” and that “the overflowing of the Nile is owing to particular and secret causes.” See the passages on “the Periodical Rising of the Nile” in the section entitled “Replies to questions put by M. Thevenot,” 450–52. 9 Arimant periodically reflects on the tension between heaven and nature. He feels that “What Heav’n decrees, no prudence can prevent” (1.1.21) and that “Heav’n has inspir’d” (4.2.208) his plan to assist in the restoration of order. 8

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are all cases in point. Both the Emperor and Morat mouth divine-right theory, ascribing their sovereignty to “Heav’n” (1.1.174; 5.1.28), but each actually thinks of himself in natural terms, as a creative, sun-like entity, needing no divine assistance, warming and animating the natural world, including human beings (1.1.202–203; 2.1.126–27; 3.1.167–69). For both father and son, this is not nature as the outward imprint of Providence; it is Epicurean or Hobbist nature, where order is gained and maintained by raw animal power. While Morat is intent on muscling his way to the crown (5.1.27–28, 70–73), the weakened and hedonistic Emperor seeks to exercise his power in the boudoir: “Force is the last relief which Lovers find: / And ’tis the best excuse for Woman-kind” (2.1.159–60). Like these two, Nourmahal considers herself exempt from heavenly assistance. When Morat is dying, she declares her independence from divine power: Where are those Pow’rs which Monarchs should defend? Or do they vain Authority pretend, O’r humane Fates, and their weak Empire show, Which cannot guard their Images below? If, as their Image, he was not Divine, They ought to have respected him as mine. I’ll waken them with my revenge; and she Their Indamora shall my Victim be, And Helpless Heav’n shall mourn in vain, like me. (5.1.343–51)

As she then moves to kill Indamora, which she claims would force “Helpless Heav’n” to “mourn in vain,” she thinks of herself as a fiend laying “all Nature waste” (5.1.325–26). The antidote to this murderous passion, as well as to the civil war itself, proves more elusive in Aureng-Zebe than it had in earlier heroic plays. These earlier works, like Aureng-Zebe, were set in non-Christian societies, but each included at least one overtly Christian character—a Cortez, St. Theresa, Ferdinand, or Isabella—who could represent the proper adjustment between Providence and human nature.10 But Dryden sets Aureng-Zebe in a contemporary, non-Christian society whose destiny is unknown. History does not provide him or his audience with the clear path from an Islamic to a Christian monarchy that was implicit in Conquest of Granada. Even the most admirable characters lack the Providential rhetoric that Dryden had developed in his early poems and serious plays. Indamora has an inner sense that both individuals and nations must abandon purely natural behavior and connect themselves to divine will through virtue, but she offers no supernatural framework for this sense. Without such a framework, her definition of virtue subordinates public values to the more private ones that would dominate Restoration drama in the coming years. She maintains that the God who chooses kings and princes requires them to practice generous pity and to defend “privacy” and “Love” if the See Barbeau Gardiner, Intellectual Design 127.

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state is to thrive (3.1.459–68, 475–82, 557–58). Both Morat and Aureng-Zebe himself learn this from her. As the newly reformed Morat prevents his mother from stabbing Indamora, he renounces his proud “strife” with heaven (5.1.352–53) but fails to attach either public or Providential significance to his reform. He describes his new understanding of virtue not as a religious conversion, though he continues to use the term “Heav’n” in the generic sense, but rather as the expansion of his “mind” (5.1.434–36). From the start, Aureng-Zebe exhibits the desirable public values of loyalty, service, and honor. The play is about how these become linked, primarily through debates with Indamora, with those private virtues that “Heav’n” will reward. In this case, however, heaven is the flawed Muslim paradise, and the reward cannot be the Christian transformation of an Islamic state, since the future of Islam in India was unknown in Dryden’s time. Although chastened, the old Emperor retains, as Morat did, a nature-bound vision of empire. He bequeaths to Aureng-Zebe the command not of a land where private virtue harmonizes with heavenly design but one whose future depends on the primal energy of an absolute monarch driving his chariot of the sun (5.1.674–75). In The State of Innocence and Aureng-Zebe, forces from the invisible world seem to recede from the kind of involvement in onstage action and language we observed in earlier works. The spiritual entities in The State of Innocence behave more like philosophers than like executors of divine will. In Aureng-Zebe, Christian Providence may be acting through natural phenomena, including human passions, but the characters themselves fail to understand this, and the play offers no vision of a long-range resolution of the troubles it dramatizes. This general reduction of occult power roughly coincides with Dryden’s reduced opinion of how far poetry can penetrate into the hidden dynamics of either nature or human nature. After about 1674 he seems to lose some of this confidence in the power of “modern” poetic art to probe the occult mysteries of contemporary human experience. His comments on demonology in “The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence” (1677, attached to The State of Innocence) emphasize not so much the poet’s creative powers as his ability to “imitate” conventional descriptions of “Beings which are not in Nature” (12. 94–95). Similarly, in the dedication of The State of Innocence “To Her Royal Highness, the Dutchess” (1677), he feels “too weak for the Inspiration.” He is like “the Priest” who “was always unequal to the Oracle”: The God within him was too mighty for his Breast: He labour’d with the Sacred Revelation, and there was more of the Mystery left behind than Divinity it self could inable him to express. (12:81)

Such thoughts about the modern poet’s limitations echo his lament in the “Prologue” to Aureng-Zebe (1675) that “Nature flies him like Enchanted Ground” (12:10). In this thought-provoking line, “Nature” refers specifically to those strong feelings, mentioned in the previous line, that are “too fierce” to be “bound” in the “Fetters” of rhyme (9)—the kinds of feelings that Shakespeare was able to convey

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through the freer form of blank verse (14–15).11 In the context of Dryden’s evolving use of the occult, however, this passage takes on an additional significance. It compares natural feelings to “Enchanted ground” and claims that while they elude Dryden’s verse, they were accessible to “sacred” Shakespeare. This is a somewhat more negative picture of poetry’s visionary power than we have seen in his earlier comments on the subject. How can we account for this change? Some guidance comes from Dryden’s other references to “enchanted ground.” In the second part of Conquest, Almanzor thought he had found a kind of “Paradice” in the “enchanted ground” of carnal love (11:2.3.3.146–47), but in later usages of the phrase, it refers to more desirable feelings or values. In the play-world of Aureng-Zebe, Morat seeks the link between “renown” and the highest form of virtue. He finds that the latter, “like inchanted ground, / Flies from my sight, before ’tis fully found” (12:5.1.102–103). In Religio Laici (1682) the same phrasing is applied to the pagan philosophers, for whom the highest form of happiness “was never to be found; / But vanish’d from ’em, like Enchanted ground” (2:27–28). In both of these cases, it would appear that the enchanter is some higher, invisible power. Access to true renown is denied to Morat because he lacks the higher form of virtue demanded by Indamora. Access to true happiness was denied to the ancient philosophers because they lacked the true Christian faith. What, then, is the parallel deficiency that Dryden feels is preventing him at this time—and, by extension, the other poets of his age—from matching “sacred” Shakespeare’s poetic access to nature’s mysteries? Perhaps he is feeling a lapse of faith that blinds him to the work of Providence, just as the pagan philosophers failed to see the true outlines of happiness. Or perhaps he feels that he shares Morat’s moral problem: by complying with the “lubrique and adult’rate age,” as he would later put it in the ode to Anne Killigrew (1685), he has “Prophan’d” the “Heav’nly Gift of Poesy” (3:57–65). In King Arthur (1691), the villainous conjurer Osmond enchants a forest and creates a series of illusions that Arthur cannot see through until he abandons his earthbound perspective.12 Perhaps Dryden senses that he, like Morat, lacks the kind of whole vision that Arthur eventually achieves.

11 Nevertheless, as the California editors note, he continued to express the most intense emotions in rhyme, even though never again wrote an entire play in that medium (Works 12:396). 12 See below, Chapter 10.

Chapter 6

All for Love, 1677 Lately, criticism of All for Love: or, The World Well Lost. A Tragedy has emphasized its elegiac tone, linking it more with Dryden’s work in the 1690s than with the essentially optimistic satires of the 1680s.1 My view, however, is that its tone is mixed, more in line with that of the other plays of 1674–77—The State of Innocence and Aureng-Zebe—than with the writings of his final decade. These three plays abandon the upbeat vision with which he concludes Annus Mirabilis, but they retain a vague sense that all earthly events work toward some higher purpose. The new tone is not so much elegiac as apprehensive, apprehensive about the possibility of another rebellion (The State of Innocence), about the isolation of private life from public responsibility (all three plays), and about the dangers of royal weakness and self-indulgence (Aureng-Zebe and All for Love). Dryden seems to look ahead with deep doubts about his ability to imagine what Providence has in store for a country where the people and their leaders are losing shared values.2 Accordingly, the prophetic aspect of his references to the invisible world becomes vague and generalized as the references themselves become both less copious and more conventional. He no longer finds alchemical ideas and terms applicable to current events, and he divests the invisible world of middle spirits, retaining only the stark juxtaposition of angels with devils. Astrology and dream theory function only within the framework of psychological and interpersonal relations. Larger societal developments are interpreted through the standard language of “heaven,” “hell,” “fate,” “fortune,” and the rhythms of “nature.” Max Novak, Ronald Paulson, and Paulina Kewes all conclude that Dryden “saw the world of Charles II and his beloved Portsmouth in the doomed Antony and Cleopatra” (Novak, “John Dryden’s Politics” 100). All for Love, therefore, abandons the optimistic picture of Charles presented in Annus Mirabilis (Kewes, “Dryden’s Theatre” 146) and “anticipates the elegiac satire of the 1690s” (Paulson 55). 2 I emphasize the general nature of these feelings, because it has been notoriously difficult to find sustained political commentary in any of these works. Bruce King thinks it is possible that The State of Innocence expresses Dryden’s abiding fear of another political rebellion (115). George McFadden sees Aureng-Zebe as posing “a striking parallel with the England of 1675” (187–201), though the specific parallels he points out seem forced: the Emperor to Charles II, Aureng-Zebe and Darah to the Duke of York, Morat to Shaftesbury and Buckingham, Nourmahal to the Duchess of Portsmouth, and Arimant to any loyal courtier. A more convincing notion is that of Winn, who thinks Dryden chose the story because of its general relevance to “the political urgency of the issue of succession,” even though “it presents no sustained obvious parallel to the current English situation” (John Dryden 273). Bridget Orr notes its general relevance to the emerging British presence in India (110). 1

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Like The State of Innocence and Aureng-Zebe, All for Love emphasizes psychology and domestic relations. Its occult material, which never appears onstage, is often cliché-ridden and unrelated to larger themes.3 A couple of exceptions stand out. Normally, when Ventidius uses occult terminology, it is impulsive and relevant only to the moment. For example, when he compares Cleopatra’s power over men to magical charms (e.g., 13:1.1.193, 4.1.234), the reference to sorcery does not resonate throughout the play as the same language did when applied to Lyndaraxa (above, Chapter 4). On the other hand, when he calls upon Antony to rejoin his Roman family, the occult language— “has Nature / No secret call … ?” (3.1.241–42)—reinforces the play’s thematic association of old Roman society with hidden forces of nature—about which more will be said in due course. Similarly, when Alexis personifies his “gift of lying” as a “Court-Devil,” which “Forsakes” him just as he needs it most (5.1.143–44), the comparison does not contribute to a larger metaphorical pattern. But when he describes Antony’s failure to seize the opportunities presaged by “each propitious Star” (1.1.158–60), the astrological reference emphasizes an important aspect of Alexis’s character that is developed through the ensuing action: that beneath his professed materialism lies a subconscious yearning for higher sources of meaning. This spare use of Western European notions of the invisible world does not, however, mean that All for Love lacks an important occult dimension. Although, like The State of Innocence and Aureng-Zebe, it fails to imply a particular future for later Stuart England, it does suggest hidden patterns in the ancient past, and it warns against dangerous forces at work in any great culture, including England’s. Once again, as in the heroic plays, Dryden counts on his audience’s awareness of the historical path leading from onstage events toward a Christian society like his own—in this case, the path from ancient Egypt and Rome through the hegemony of the Augustan Empire to the emergence of Christian Europe. To convey this implicit historical sequence, and to endow what might have become a “sentimental” drama with Providential significance, he relies on the audience’s familiarity with contemporary representations of ancient Egypt.4 As we shall see, the main portal 3 Most of the research forming the groundwork of this section relies on my earlier article, “Egypt in the Restoration,” substantial portions of which are reprinted here by permission from Papers on Language and Literature 22 © 1986 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. However, I now see the plays’ Providential dimension as more vague and less optimistic than it appeared to be in the earlier reading. 4 To date, most critics have read it either from their own “modern” perspective or from the presumed perspective of Dryden himself. Pre-twentieth-century critiques usually fall into the class of “modern” views. John Dennis and Samuel Johnson, for example, moralize and measure “correctness.” Walter Scott and William Hazlitt (see Dobree 74) initiate “formalist” discussions of plot, the debt to Shakespeare, elegance of language, and deficiencies of passion that have since become commonplaces. Taking the modernist approach, Hughes says that the play portrays “man’s isolation in life within the prison of his imperfect perceptions” (“Significance” 563), and Kearful develops a variation on essentially the same approach. Other critics try to know Dryden’s own perspective. “Antony in Egypt,” says Fisher, is like “Dryden in the playhouse,” for both represent “a human grandeur that

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to this significance is the priest-poet Serapion. His choric role, which is more fully developed than that of Arimant in Aureng-Zebe, becomes apparent through his use of river imagery, and it gains depth when seen against the historical background suggested by his name. By the end of the play, he seems to project Dryden’s own anxieties as poet laureate during troubling times. But let us begin with Egyptology in the Restoration. Dryden was writing for audiences and readers who had access to a great variety of information about ancient Egypt.5 Dozens of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance books—many of them in new editions and translations—told of plants, animals, and pharaohs; ruins, mummies, and hieroglyphics; geography, chronology, and religion.6 modernity will not tolerate” (188). Kaufmann and Salvaggio also try to see the play through Dryden’s eyes. In a recent effort to probe the plays’ political rhetoric, Huse places it within the ongoing debate about national identity, especially its implicit commentary on Charles’s sexuality, Catholicism, and the Earl of Danby. Haley, on the other hand, thinks all of the plays from this period are “devoid of topical political reference” (119). 5 Thus far, Dryden scholars have not explored seventeenth-century Egypt lore in relation to this play, though many have touched upon it. Source hunters like Thorn-Drury, Davies, Faas, and Caracciolo discuss debts to earlier plays about Antony and Cleopatra, but they focus on specific literary influences, not on the portrayal of ancient Egypt passed along by these earlier works. In surveying both literary and historical depictions of Antony and Cleopatra, Weinbrot (“Alexas”) and Canfield (“Jewel”) confine their interests to the Photinus figure and the mutability theme respectively, while Carol Levine concentrates on analogues with Virgil’s Dido and Aeneis, and Erskine-Hill (Augustan Ideal) probes contrasts between Augustan and Antonian concepts of monarchy. In his commentary and notes to the California edition, Novak goes beyond this earlier work, placing Dryden’s distressed lovers within the “changing historical myth” (Works 13:368) inherited not only from previous drama and chronicle but also from the history of painting; the more general context of early Egyptology, however, is only implied by some of the annotations, not used as a guide to meaning. 6 See Dannenfeldt and Wortham, esp. 3–23. Virtually all of the perennial topics were covered in later seventeenth-century publications alone, beginning perhaps with Fuller’s Pisgah-sight (1650), with its section on Egyptian philosophy, the Nile, and the pyramids (77–92). In the same year, John Everard’s The Divine Pymander translated some of the proto-Christian thought of a reputedly ancient Egyptian priest-king, Hermes Trismegistus, whose ideas influenced the explication of Egyptian occult philosophy in Athanasius Kircher’s monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54). On Kircher, see Iversen 94–98. Early in the Restoration appeared compilations of Egyptiana in a translation of LeBlanc’s voyages, Howell’s Institution of General History, and the “Eye-witnesse” account, A Short Relation of the River Nile. In the 1670s a number of publications primed audiences for Dryden’s Egyptian play. As the decade opened, the whole gamut of traditional notions was reviewed in Blome’s Geographical Description of the Four Parts of the World, Heylyn’s Cosmographie, and especially Ogilby’s Africa. Then, in 1671, ancient Egyptian religion and philosophy were highlighted in Marius D’Assigny’s translation of Gautruche, and Gale’s Court of the Gentiles. The following year J. Davies published his translation of a fascinating repository of both legend and fact, Murtada’s Egyptian History, and Ross included the Egyptians in A View of All Religions in the World.

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Although Dryden’s interest in ancient Egypt may have ranged as widely as these contemporary publications do, the references in his poems and plays emphasize not ruins and mummies but rather philosophy and cultural history, and suggest that he envisaged not one but at least three successive Egypts: 1. A pristine Egypt, the cradle of “Arts and Infant Science,” which is alluded to in “To the Earl of Roscomon” (2:2). 2. A later Egypt of self-indulgent, idolatrous people—those “Aegyptian Dotards,” referred to in the 1673 Epilogue “to the University of Oxon,” who worship “Cats and Dogs, and each obscener Beast” (1:26–28), and become the analogues for Roman Catholics in Absalom and Achitophel (2:283), seditious Whigs in “The Medal” (167–75), and Anglicans in The Hind and the Panther (3: Pt. 2. 538–47, Pt. 3. 803–808, 1045–50).7 3. A still younger Egypt, neither the cradle of pagan wisdom nor the den of slimy materialists, but rather that subsidiary of imperial Rome which becomes the home of Christian Platonism as figured forth in St. Catherine of Alexandria, the heroine of Tyrannick Love. In All for Love, as we shall see, Dryden implies parallels between these three Egyptian periods and equivalent phases of Roman cultural development: the heroic period before Augustus, represented in the actions and speeches of Ventidius; the pagan imperial era that looms on the horizon as Augustus approaches Alexandria; and the early Christian period that Dryden’s audience knew about through their general historical knowledge.8 It would appear that he thought of Egypt and Rome in the way he thought of Mexico or Granada: as focal points for cultural changes that could be seen as significant to Restoration life. Certainly this tripartite view of Egypt was being reinforced by the available publications about the ancient world. Egypt as repository of divine wisdom caught the imagination of Christians beginning perhaps with Tertullian, who thought that the Egyptians had converted Joseph into their god Serapis, but the notion caught on with special intensity among Renaissance thinkers following Ficino’s translation of writings by Hermes Trismegistus.9 The degeneration of this enlightened See also Annus Mirabilis 1:367, “Prologue to Albumazar” 1:29–30, “Epilogue to the University of Oxon. [1673]” 1:27, and the general depiction of the Egypt in which the Spartan king has taken refuge in Cleomenes. 8 See, for examples, Clarke, Marrow; Eusebius; and Howell. 9 On Tertullian, see Allen 7; on Ficino’s translations, see Walker 18–21. Even after 1614, when Isaac Casaubon proved that Hermes must have lived in the Christian era, many seventeenth-century writers continued to place him between the ancient Hebrews and the ancient Greeks in the chronology of great philosophers. In the preface to The Divine Pymander, Everard maintains that Hermes wrote “some hundreds of yeers before Moses his time” (n.p.), and in his defense of magic, Hardick Warren agrees. Kircher insists that essential 7

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culture was also a common theme in the sources available to Dryden and his contemporaries: the Egyptian heirs of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses betrayed their trust and “fell from their purity into such extream blindnesse of heart, ignorance of God, and idolotray, that they differed in nothing from the Gentiles and Heathen” (Polidore Virgil 157).10 Mid-seventeenth-century books such as Fuller’s and the Davies translation of Naudaeus perpetuated the theme, and Stillingfleet was so possessed by it that he denied that such a debauched people, with their monstrous idols, could ever have entertained a legitimate vision of truth.11 Yet before the religious dimension of Egyptian philosophy reached its low ebb, it had been absorbed, perpetuated, and in a way legitimized by the other great Mediterranean religions, or so a number of commentators believed.12 In the early centuries after Christ, the festival of Osiris became subsumed in the Christian festival of All Souls or All Saints, and Isis became identified with Mary, Horus with Christ (Weigall 126–34). More important for Dryden and his contemporaries, most of the early Christian apologists felt that Hermes and his priestly successors, truths from God’s revelation to Adam were transmitted through Noah to Cham, alias Osiris, and thence through Cham’s grandson Hermes to the Egyptian priesthood who, in turn, translated them into hieroglyphics. During the early Restoration a similar chronology was frequently purveyed—sometimes placing Hermes before Moses, sometimes after, but often before the Greeks and always before Christ. For examples, see Gale 2.23–30; D’Assigny’s translation of Gautruche 154; Davies’s translation of Murtada, Preface and 92–94; Polidore Virgil 48–49; Harvey 2, 125; and Marsham 146–50, the latter cited by Allen 38n81. On the long-lived tradition of an “ancient theology” emerging from Adam, see Walker, esp. 1–21. That Dryden shared an interest in this tradition with many of his contemporaries is suggested not only by its general popularity in the period but also by his The State of Innocence (1677), which emphasizes Adam’s search for knowledge after the Fall. 10 Horace, Propertius, and Juvenal had promoted this notion, and it comes through much of the Renaissance Cleopatra lore as well. Horace, The Odes and Epodes 99–101; Propertius 215; Juvenal 289–93; and on the Renaissance Cleopatra lore, see Novak, California Works 13:372–74, 379–83. 11 Fuller 8, Naudaeus 20, Stillingfleet 32–39. William Davenant and Samuel Butler seem to have shared Stillingfleet’s attitude, as did William Howell and Alexander Ross: see Korshin 54, 281; Howell 70–86; Ross 90. 12 Varro thought that Serapis and Isis were equivalent to Saturn and Ops, and that both pairs could be equated with “the first gods … ‘Sky’ and … ‘Earth.’” The worship of Isis and her consort Osiris, having been introduced into Rome during the first century before Christ, had spread through the Empire in the following four centuries, reaching even to London. Lucan’s Romans curse Egypt for keeping Pompey’s ashes while “we have admitted to Roman temples your Isis and … Osiris,” and Dion reports that after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar explained his kindness to the captive Egyptians as a gesture of respect to “their god Serapis.” In the second century a.d. Apuleius of Madauros makes his Lucius a priest in the well-established rites of Isis and Osiris in Rome. And in the Moralia Plutarch explains that Serapis, Osiris, and Isis, who are gods “of all peoples in common,” are equivalent to the “consecrated symbols” used by other cultures to guide “the intelligence toward things Divine.” See Varro 55; on the spread of Isis worship, see Weigall 128–29; Lucan 499; Dion 45; Apuleius 75–103; Plutarch, Moralia 5.157.

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along with the other ancient pagan philosophers, “possessed proximate truth,” and in the forefront of this effort to mine what Augustine called “Egyptian gold and silver” (Allen 17–19) were the Alexandrian Platonists Valentinus, Clement, and Origen.13 Thinking, it seems, of this Alexandrian conduit of Christian philosophy, perhaps even recalling Dryden’s St. Catherine, Theophilus Gale writes that when Joseph assigned land to the ancient Egyptians, he was showing God’s wish that they “lay a foundation, for the Knowledge and Worship of the true God.”14 The search for a primitive, divinely transmitted religion, together with debates over chronology, insured that from Ficino to Cudworth the link between ancient Egyptian ideas and Christian beliefs would surface repeatedly.15 Of Dryden’s dramatic forebears, Samuel Daniel seems most forcibly struck by the heritage of Mysterious Egypt, wonder breeder, strict religions strange observer, State-ordrer [sic] zeale, the best rule-keeper, Fostring still in temp’rate fervor. (Cleopatra, Act 4, n.p.)

Daniel’s play traces the fall of what Dryden would regard as the second Egypt, the Egypt that had lost its ancient purity, and this mutability theme is complemented by Daniel’s sense that the Nile remains a constant receptor of divine messages. At the end of Act 5 the Chorus doubts that “Nylus,” whose “unknown head we hold / A powre divine to be,” can ever finally yield to the “Victors greedy lust.” All for Love is informed by a similar double vision of the constant impress of divine will and truth on the surfaces of historical change, except that in Dryden’s play the transmitter of this vision is not a chorus but rather a choric figure, the priest Serapion. In the opening speech, he joins two well-known bits of Egyptiana: that an official function of the ancient Egyptian priests was to interpret prodigies and that, as Sandys put it, “in the tenth and eleventh yeare of Cleopatra, … the Nilus increased not; which … prognosticated the fal of … Cleopatra and Anthony” (176).16 That the priest should perform this function was assumed in earlier plays about Roman relations with Egypt, and the Nile figures in the imagery of these plays as well. But only in All for Love is the priest called “Serapion,” and only here do his insights carry such profound authority as interpretations of the ensuing events.17 These innovations seem to reflect an awareness of what Restoration audiences and readers knew about the ancient priests and their river. See Walker 1–2; and O’Leary 300–316. Gale 2.39. 15 For example, in the works of Servetus, Bruno, Campanella, Fludd, Kircher, Rapine, 13 14

and others (see Walker 116–17, 204–206; Allen 107–33). 16 On priests as interpreters of prodigies, see Herodotus 108; Murtada, 1–40; and Blome 42. 17 The most interesting analyses of the play’s opening imagery appear in Armstrong 135–36; Hughes, “Significance” 545; Kearful 230–31; Miner 41–42; Reinert 96; Ringler 224–27; and Waith, Herculean Hero 55–56.

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That Dryden does not name his priest “Achoreus” is noteworthy, since that is the name used in the plays by May, Fletcher-Massinger, and Corneille (including the 1664 translation of Corneille, Pompey the Great). Certainly Dryden’s priest shares certain traits with his counterpart in these earlier plays. As in The False One, he is “an honest Counsellor, Priest of Isis” (dramatis personae, n.p.), and like May’s and Lucan’s Achoreus, as well as the Chorus in Daniel, he correctly interprets prodigies and takes a cosmic view of history. But why “Serapion”? Although we may never know precisely where Dryden found the name, it gains provocative connotations from the contexts in which it may have been known to Restoration readers and theater-goers. Listed in the dramatis personae as a “Priest of Isis,” Serapion must be considered to represent his namesake Serapis, the Alexandrian god who fuses the legendary King Apis with the mythical consort of Isis, Osiris.18 To be aware of this is to realize that Kearful is wrong to think of Serapion as the voice of the unconscious, since Serapis-Osiris was the god of reason and the impulse toward order. It is likewise wrong to link the Nile imagery exclusively with Cleopatra and the irrational, because the ancients identified the river with Osiris, while virtually all of the important Cleopatra stories remark that she associated herself with Isis, the goddess of the earth and fertility, and the receiver of shapes.19 Hughes errs in the same direction when he perceives contradictions between Serapion’s role as priest of Isis and his sense of death and historical flux (“Significance” 552, 560). Actually, the latter kind of awareness is appropriate for one named after Serapis. In some accounts he is an Egyptian version of Pluto and, given his Osirian derivation, shares with Dionysius the fate of being perpetually murdered, dismembered, and then regenerated by Isis.20 As priest of Isis and namesake of Serapis, Serapion can serve as oracle for both and hence can speak for order and regeneration as well as for disorder and death. In this regard, he becomes a potent choric figure in a play-world undergoing the kind of critical change through time which the ancient Egyptians symbolized in their mythology.21 “Serapion” gains additional resonance when we realize that it seems to have been a fairly common name in the ancient, possibly even in the medieval, world. Plutarch tells of one Serapion, the outspoken playmate of Alexander the Great. See Plutarch, Moralia 66–71; Diodorus Siculus 291–92; and Ogilby 140 ff. Kearful 130–31; Plutarch, Moralia 71, 79, 93, 129; Plutarch, Selected Lives 2.140;

18 19

Dion 445; and Witt 19. 20 Hughes, “Significance” 552, 560; see Plutarch, Moralia 69, 85–87, 131. 21 See Iversen. Perhaps it is worth recalling that Dryden was not the only Christian writer to use the proto-Christian symbolism latent in Egyptian lore. Valentinus, Origen, and their disciples had constructed a sophisticated Christian doctrine that shows the influence of the Isis-Osiris-Horus story; Kircher worked to fashion a Christian metaphysics that incorporated both Greek and Egyptian mythologies; and Gale reminded Dryden’s contemporaries that respected theologians had identified Osiris and Serapis with Joseph, and Isis “with Pharaoh’s Daughter, who adopted Moses.” See O’Leary 307; Iversen 94–95; and Gale 30.

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Another Serapion served as Ptolemy’s ambassador to Rome in the time of Julius Caesar. Yet another, writes Appian, was Cleopatra’s prefect in Cyprus while she was cavorting with Antony in Alexandria. The name reappears in Dion’s account of a speech in which Octavius Caesar complains that Antony had “chosen” for himself the name Serapion, “casting aside all the august titles of his own land.” Moreover, just as the Egyptian gods were being incorporated into both GrecoRoman and early Christian mythologies, so the name “Serapion” was to be taken on by the early Christians as well. Eusebius cites the authoritative opinions of one Serapion, “Bishop of the Church of Antioch after Maximinius.” In the year All for Love was produced, Samuel Clarke included the Alexandrian Christian Serapion among the saintly worthies in his General Martyrologie. A modern book of saints, in fact, lists among eleven Serapions one who is “said to have been born in England” and who was crucified in Algiers in 1240.22 Thus, whatever Dryden’s source for the name, his Serapion would have carried manifold connotations for Restoration audiences and readers familiar with the available information about the ancient and medieval worlds. Principally, he symbolizes the continuity, from the pagans to the Christians, of priestly insight into God’s will as shown through earthly phenomena. In this regard, together with his role as honest advisor to Cleopatra (see 5.1.110–14), he becomes a major exception to the anti-clericalism prevalent in much Restoration writing, including Dryden’s own.23 Serapion’s sense of the pattern of events and their transcendent significance is most apparent in his “reading” of the river Nile. Although his opening speech has been explicated many times,24 thus far no one has noted that Dryden seems to be drawing upon a solid tradition that treats the Nile as a particularly important part of the Book of Nature through which God reveals his designs. This is hinted at by Bernier, Dryden’s main source for Aureng-Zebe, as noted above (Chapter 5, n8), but it becomes more evident in the Egyptiana extant in Dryden’s time. In Lucan, for instance, the Egyptian priest Acoreus tells Julius Caesar how the Nile fits into the cosmic scheme of things: unlike other “waters,” which “burst forth” during earthquakes “long after the world was created” and have “no special purpose on the part of the deity,” the Nile began “along with the universe,” and “the creator and artificer of all things restrains [it] under a law of [its] own.” As Murtada would “Alexander,” in Plutarch’s Lives 34; Davis 242; Appian 389; Dion 493; Eusebius, “Ecclesiastical History” 84; Clarke, Martyrologie 37; The Book of Saints 635. 23 Like Canfield (“Jewel” 55), I see Serapion as the only reliable choric figure, so that I differ from both Salvaggio, who considers the priest merely an “ideal director of the play’s action” (48) in contrast to Alexas, “the real director” (48), and Freedman (109), who sees Ventidius as the chorus. Ventidius, of course, could not be considered choric unless one thought his old Roman virtues to be Dryden’s norm, ignoring the validity of Serapion’s less history-bound vision. I disagree, of course, with Atkins—see Faith 41 and “Serapion’s Function” 35–37—who includes Serapion as one of the priests against whom Dryden inveighs. 24 See n17 above. 22

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later put it, God “declares his Will to this Nile twice a year.” This is the divinely informed river that rises to save Abrocomas in Xenophon’s Ephesian History, that dries up at God’s command in Isaiah (11:15), that harbors the Egyptian dragon in Ezekiel (29:3–10), and, in Fuller’s anticipation of Dryden’s own imagery, that rises along with “the Pride of the Egyptians, exceeding all bounds and banks of modesty and moderation, defying Nature it self” until God stops its flow near the end of Cleopatra’s reign. Thus, the Nile that Restoration readers knew about from the available Egyptian lore is both a natural and a supernatural phenomenon. Hughes is wrong to presume Dryden was dealing only with its natural role as seasonal catalyst of fertility. Not only does it sometimes defy natural consistency, but when it does so, it sends God’s messages and judgments.25 To read the play with its relation to early Egyptology in mind is to understand it somewhat differently than previous critics have done. Before 1963 most were persuaded by Dobrée to relate all critical observations to the “struggle between Cleopatra and the Egyptians on one side, Ventidius and Rome on the other, for Antony himself” (70). Weinbrot, for example, argues that “Ventidius and Rome lose” the battle for Antony “because they abandon honesty and turn to the crafty methods” of the effeminate and impotent Alexas (632). Miner carries the approach further by noting “the reversal of roles” between Roman and Egyptian characters and a “strange pact” that Antony “tries to make between Rome and Egypt” (51, 61–62). But after Reinert argued that the play is a mature tragedy of “the passional life” (97), the conventional idea of hostility between Egyptian and Roman values was displaced by studies of other oppositions that are not so clearly linked to cultural differences: reason versus emotion (Reinert), conscious versus unconscious (Kearful), ideal order and value versus actual flux and meaninglessness (Hughes, “Significance”), design versus chance (Canfield, “Jewel”). Fisher is typical when he dismisses the “mechanical” tension between Egypt and Rome as insignificant in comparison with the vital “tension between two entirely different ways of thinking and feeling” (197). In my view, however, it is only by employing the terms of cultural conflict that Dryden is able to place the issues of “thinking and feeling” into the larger historical, and ultimately cosmic, perspective that he customarily seeks. The play concerns the struggle of Antony and Cleopatra to legitimate their matured relationship, and the terms through which they pursue this goal are specific to the cultural traditions with which they (and the Restoration audience) were familiar. To Restoration readers immersed in contemporary Egyptian lore, the cultural conflict of central interest in All for Love is not the one between Cleopatra’s Egypt and Octavian’s Rome. It is the one between the pristine values of an older Egypt and Rome, on the one hand, and those of the later, pre-Christian Egypt and imperial Rome, on the other. The values of the later, “faint AEgyptians,” as Serapion calls them (1.1.45), are conveyed through the Roman characters’ view 25 Lucan 607–11; Murtada 142; Xenophon 80–81; Fuller, Pisgah-sight 81; Hughes, “Significance” 545.

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of Cleopatra and through Alexas. To the Romans, Cleopatra embodies latter-day Egyptian superstition and debauchery (e.g., 1.1.193; 3.1.441–43; 4.1.233–48, 324–25). Alexas, like a Restoration libertine, curses the sensual life even as he employs reason to perpetuate it. He eventually realizes that his reason is a disguise for passions that he, like the Egypt of his day, is unable to express through external forms.26 The later, post-heroic Rome’s values are transmitted partly through the “degenerate Progeny” who fatten on Antony’s largess (1.1.155) and partly through Antony’s image of Octavius, who, like Louis XIV, schemes to establish a legal and mercantile empire.27 The two pristine civilizations, on the other hand, are embodied in Ventidius and Serapion. If, as Weinbrot believes (632), Ventidius is to be identified with Rome, it is not the Rome of Octavius but rather an older Rome of honor, “plainness,” and “rugged virtue” (1.1.105–106); and these are not so much the output of what Kearful calls “the conscious mind expressed through the active will” (234) as they are fixed forms through which submerged values of the old Roman culture expressed themselves (see Reinert 93–94). This Roman stoicism of Ventidius corresponds to the anachronistic ritualism of Serapion and Cleopatra; each mode of behavior and expression belongs to an earlier era, one closer to the primitive roots of the culture. Antony and Cleopatra have developed a relationship that is amenable neither to the older cultures from which they have sprung nor to the incipient pax Romana.28 Heiress of Ptolemaic knowledge and self-discipline, Cleopatra has fallen into the self-indulgent ways of latter-day Egypt, but in the course of this final episode of her life she reclaims at least the spiritual integrity of the old regime.29 Hughes rightly senses that she is unique in her “fully articulated consciousness” (“Significance” 553), but he mistakenly thinks of her as resigned to the “disproportion between her inner nature and the public role which has been forced upon her” (553). On the contrary, by the time we meet her at the beginning of Act 2 she has already come to terms with the apparent contradictions in her life:

26 In a different way, Reinert (94–95) and Kearful (243) note this paradoxical relation between reason and passion in Alexas. 27 I do not intend to develop a topical reading of the play. Provocative ideas about its relation to contemporary political issues are aired in J. W. Johnson; Novak “Criticism, Adaptation, Politics” 379; Erskine-Hill, Augustan Ideal 226; Huse; and Kroll, “Political Economy” 127–46. 28 Most critics since Kaufmann have remarked that Antony has difficulty finding in the new Rome a “social utility” for his “heroic energy” (88), but no one thus far has seen the counterpart in Cleopatra’s outmoded behavior, though Hughes, in “Significance,” points out the tendency of several characters to seek refuge in images of the past (556–58). 29 On Cleopatra’s learning, see Diodorus 241–49. All my instincts about Dryden’s Cleopatra militate against Armstrong’s view that Cleopatra is “the essence and the occasion of disorder” (137), though I find Armstrong’s explication of the play in light of the idea of the Great Chain of Being reinforces my own reading in most respects.

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… I have lov’d with such transcendent passion, I soard, at first, quite out of Reasons view, And now am lost above it … . (2.1.20–22)

The only further developments in her life and thought involve purging elements that do not harmonize with this transcendent relationship and martialing the remnants into a final statement of faith. The process of purging culminates early in the final act. There she spurns the influence of Alexas—“Hence from my sight … ; / ’Twas thy design brought all this ruine on us” (5.1.111–12)—and transforms Serapion from public priest to personal advisor: “Serapion, thou art honest; counsel me” (5.1.113). The final statement of faith is made in the final moments of her life when she unites the imagery of a marriage “too strong / For Roman Laws to break” (5.1.417–18) with the imagery of transcendent empire (465–66).30 Antony, too, is doomed by his outmoded values to remain “forsaken” (1.1.233) like the “Dolphins” imaged in the opening prodigy (1.1.12).31 His only real options are intellectual and involve the interpretation of his fate: to see it either as a product of “blind Chance” (2.1.110) or as part of a purposeful rite. In Act 1 he at first considers himself a spent meteor (1.1.206), dispossessed landownerturned-wild man (1.1.232–39), or irrational wastrel (1.1.293–311), but by the end of the act he compares himself to a skilled husbandman facing a particularly challenging harvest (1.1.453). In Act 2, he considers himself either a victim of fate (2.1.110)—similar in this respect to Almanzor before him— or the master of a love-world that “out-weighs” (2.1.430) the Roman Empire and contains its own higher “Faith, Honor, Virtue, all good things” (2.1.441). In Act 3 it is the historical world that again weighs most heavily upon him. He identifies his military and social isolation with imagery of low water that harks back to Serapion’s opening speech (3.1.129–31). Yet even here we can see him turning inward and, in a sense, upward for a more satisfying vision of his condition:

30 For perhaps the first comment on Cleopatra’s ultimate understanding of “spousals,” see Waith, Herculean Hero 57. 31 In his “Commentary” on the edition, Novak notes that Shakespeare used the dolphin, “regarded as a noble fish,” to presage the fall of Egypt (13:413), and notes that Dryden associated both Caesar and Alexas with the crocodile (422). No one, though, seems to have noticed the traditional idea of a “deadly Antipathy” between dolphins and crocodiles (Sandys, Travels 78) or that the dolphin was thought to be the stronger of the two: see Strabo 153 and Wansleben 45. Both Shakespeare and Dryden seem to have been aware that in the Aeneid (Bk. 8, l. 673) the prophetic shield that Venus gives to Aeneas frames the Battle of Actium with dolphins: Virgil 106–107. Thus, Dryden’s symbolism, taken in its full resonance, may suggest that Antony’s strength is to prevail in another sphere. On the other hand, as Sandys indicates (78), “By the figure … of a Crocodile, Providence was by the Egyptians Hieroglyphically expressed” (78), which perhaps would have reminded the Restoration audiences that while Antony has his transcendent victory, Octavius prevails as the driving force of Providence here below.

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What I have left is from my native Spring; I’ve still a heart that swells, in scorn of fate, And lifts me to my banks. (3.1.132–34)

Still, Octavia and the contractual duties of the new Rome temporarily prevail, so that in the latter part of Act 4 he is once again regarding himself as a “shallow” body of water, “Seen to the bottom” (4.1.438–39). In the final act, he comes into his own. He is able to relegate the historical world to a sphere outside himself and to see his apparent military defeat as a transfer of spiritual energy from external to internal worlds: “from each limb … that’s hew’d away, / The Soul comes back to me” (5.1.166–67). By the end of the act, he is able to regard the outer world as a “black Desart” (5.1.287) lacking the light of his spiritual torch. At the same time he realizes an intensified spiritual bond with Cleopatra that transcends history. It is no accident that the lovers mix allusions to a purer Rome and Egypt in their effort to authorize the relationship that neither culture, in its current manifestation, approves. They are Venus and Mars (3.1.11–28) among images of Egyptian gods and tombs of Ptolemies. Antony meditates in the Temple of Isis (1.1.60), and Cleopatra learns to see herself as an otherworldly Roman “wife” (5.1.412–13). These are all efforts, as Miner (51, 63) and Hughes (“Significance,” esp. 556) have indicated, to envision and ritualize an ideal.32 That it is an attainable ideal is what Serapion, the Nile, Cleopatra, and Antony are in the process of affirming. Venus and Mars, Isis and Osiris, heroic Rome and hermetic Egypt: all belong to a vision of reality that incorporates the earthly and the transcendent. By learning to understand their relationship in these pristine terms, first Cleopatra and then Antony can place it both within and beyond history. To the extent that she is his only constant point of reference, Cleopatra is neither the siren, sorceress, and whore of Roman propaganda nor the guileless lover that she claims to be. Her role is more closely akin to that of the priestess of Isis who, in Apuleius, leads Lucius through “low pleasures” into a “state of religious bliss” (87). Her success is measured by Serapion, who from the start has been a reliable priest-poet. His version of the events taking place implies that Antony and Cleopatra are, indeed, forsaken creatures, yet they are not akin to “monsters” like Alexas,33 who refuse to acknowledge their divinely endowed role in history.34 On Dryden and his contemporaries were well aware that the historical Antony and Cleopatra were reputed to have dressed up like Osiris and Isis, respectively, and had themselves “painted and sculptured side by side” in these costumes (see Witt 147). 33 —or the seditious Whigs in Dryden’s own day (“The Medal” 2:174 ff., and see Chapter 8 below). 34 Like Antony, Cleopatra considers herself cut off from history (see 4.1.552–55), but neither of them, I would argue, shares Alexas’s sense of being “Cast out from Nature” (3.1.384) in the limited (biological and social) way that he has in mind. Like Dryden himself, Cleopatra and Antony learn to distinguish “nature,” meaning everything created by God, including invisible worlds, from the material and historical reality that chiefly concerns Alexas. 32

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the contrary, the lovers’ efforts to understand their alienation finally approximate Serapion’s own overview of the pattern of events. The Nile’s unexpected overflow and sudden withdrawal is extraordinary but not unnatural or without divinely endowed significance. It is a comment on the ramifications of powerful cultural changes. Something like this symbolism had been attached to the Ganges and Indus rivers in Aureng-Zebe, but in the earlier play it had not suggested the longerrange direction of current events. Here, it does: while the mainstream of history moves on, sinking whole nations (5.1.70–75) and casting out individuals who have served their purpose, it realizes part of a larger design within which nothing, not even an Antony and a Cleopatra, can be anachronistic. The play’s closing tableau, as explained by Serapion, figures forth the truth which Cleopatra and Antony, after much struggle, have succeeded in affirming: that through death they have gained not only each other and a place in historical memory, but also a role “in another World” (5.1.512). Seen through the occult lens of early Egyptology, then, All for Love reveals a double perspective on the action. On the one hand, Dryden once again dramatizes an occult interpretation of cultural change.35 Historical forces are dimly seen as working toward the good by realizing God’s design: orderly, pious, erudite Egypt spawns the weak hedonists whose way of life is dissolved in an Imperial Rome on its way to becoming the receptacle of Christianity. As part of this design, Antony and Cleopatra’s achievement of a transcendent love can be seen as protoChristian. But against such optimism is posed the contemporary relevance of their anxiety about the forthcoming cultural shift. They become stranded in a relationship lacking cultural definition. The empire that is emerging, along with its leadership, is not a metaphor for Dryden’s earlier Augustan ideal of the firm but compassionate monarch and his loyal subjects, both sides true to God’s law, love, and honor. Instead, the play anticipates an Octavian power detached from the old values of both Rome and Egypt, a form of leadership oblivious to the emotional and imaginative life of the people, an uncoupling of private emotion from public duty, and a scenario of desiccated family life based on empty commitment and legality. Linking the opposed sides of this perspective on the play is the figure of Serapion, a priest-poet whose choric status suggests the poet-laureateship of John Dryden. Beyond his commentary on the main action of the play, Serapion seems to represent the very shift from ancient to modern poetic roles that Dryden was contemplating in his prose and prologues. He is depicted neither as a druid-like Shakespeare nor as the kind of empirical poet celebrated in Dryden’s early poems. He is the poet in transition: his earlier message from the ghosts of the Ptolemies gives way at first to a symbolic interpretation of natural forces, placing him roughly Whether or not Dryden’s discursive, abstract technique militates against true tragic power, as Vieth believes (xxv–xxvi), it does suit the focus of this play. And the “irrational and inexplicable” dimension that Vieth fails to find can, in fact, be seen in historical forces if they are understood as manifesting God’s darkly intelligible purposes. 35

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in the role of poet as empirical visionary, the poetic role Dryden had affirmed in the 1660s and earlier 1670s. But by the end of the play, Serapion has traded occult insight into public affairs for private counseling, and his last pronouncement is not an interpretation of occult forces at work in society but rather a consignment of the dead lovers to an unknowable afterlife. In light of his use of the occult, it seems plausible that Dryden sees himself in the later Serapion—an astute commentator whose earlier insights have been challenged by current events that seem almost unintelligible in the Providential sense. Despite Dryden’s persistent faith that current events were leading toward a distant, divinely sponsored order, he cannot make out the occult details of that order. Here, as in Aureng-Zebe, his occult vision seems blurred by anxiety about that the immediate direction of change. His king now seems culturally stranded, like Antony, and Dryden himself seems to be losing his occult vision, like Serapion.

Chapter 7

Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar, 1678–80 As the events of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis emerge, Dryden seems to regain some of his lost confidence in an occult vision, but the vision itself changes. The process through which Providential design is realized remains unclear while certainty that there is such a design imbedded in current events returns. Some of his worst fears during 1674–77 were being realized as Charles’s philandering continued and became more public, James’s Catholicism drew increasingly hostile reactions, and Shaftesbury’s and Buckingham’s factionalism gained more popular support. A full-blown crisis then developed as a so-called “Popish Plot” was exposed and the demands to exclude Charles’s Roman Catholic brother from succession to the throne found shrill voices in Parliament. The plays of this period show that Dryden could not make any detailed Providential sense of these developments as he had done with the events surrounding the Restoration itself. In a recent article on The Spanish Fryar, David Womersley describes “a particular kind of self-consciousness on Dryden’s part concerning the unformed and indeterminate nature of the times through which he was living—times in which the new was imminent but as yet unknowable” (67). Yet he once again sensed the guiding hand of the Almighty, even though his earlier conviction that the political health of England would be restored by leaders acting in harmony with God’s will had not yet recovered from its lapse between 1674 and 1677. In their ambiguities, the plays of this period remind us of the posture Dryden took in the Heroique Stanzas and other early works: uncertainty about the future direction of events accompanied by submission to the mysterious ways of Providence. Unlike the early works, however, these three plays lack a clear occult rhetoric to express this posture, even though they amply depict or refer to the invisible world. Still divested of alchemy and elemental spirits, they dramatize messages from heaven or hell in the forms of dream visions, prodigies, stellar signs, prophecies by possessed persons, daemons from below, angels from above, and genii and ghosts from either habitat. For most of each play, however, the main characters fail to understand, willfully ignore, or selfishly employ these occult signals. Dryden wrote Oedipus: A Tragedy (1678) in collaboration with his friend Nathaniel Lee. As Richard McCabe notes, Lee focused on “the tragedy of desire” and psychology in Acts 2, 4, and 5, while Dryden concentrated on “the tragedy of fate” and politics in Acts 1 and 3 (275–76).1 Although the Popish Plot had not yet 1 This tracks pretty well with my discussion of the relative styles of Dryden and Lee in Nathaniel Lee 175–76: Lee’s favorite subject is “the mental pathology of political

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become public, the play does seem to reflect currently popular publications warning against mob violence, the Catholic threat, and the machinations of Shaftesbury.2 Hughes thinks that Oedipus embodies “both Cromwell and Charles II” and should be equated with Creon, the Shaftesbury figure. Both characters, he says, depict man as monster, socially and morally “estranged … from all the received social patters of human existence” by the “universal passions of lust and hate.” To Hughes, Oedipus and Creon succumb to “a collapsing, lightless, and chaotic universe” in which “benign power” is “overruled” by malevolent fate (English Drama 262). McCabe and Canfield temper this view in their readings of the play. McCabe finds a persistent idealism in Oedipus (276), and Canfield ascribes some responsibility for the tragic outcome to Oedipus and Jocasta themselves, each of whom, like the father of Oedipus, willfully ignores the “dawning truth” of their actual relationship (Heroes and States 55). The play’s occult phenomena and language confirm much of what these previous critics have observed, but reading the play against its occult background fails fully to support Hughes’s picture of a chaotic universe in which the powers of good succumb to evil fate. That, certainly, would have been a viable interpretation for the audiences of the original Greek tragedy, but Dryden and his audience see the story through a Christian perspective. The occult dimension of this play is borrowed not only from the ancient classical authors like Sophocles, Homer, Seneca, Lucan, Heliodorus, Statius, and Ovid but also from the writings of Christians such as Tasso, Dante, and the contemporary astrologer John Gadbury (see California Works 13:450–51 and notes to the play). To the characters within the play, ghosts and genii originate in the invisible world defined by their pagan religion, but to Dryden’s audience, since the daemons provide reliable information, they would be understood as speaking for the Christian heaven or hell. To this Christian audience, the play’s tragedy and the nihilism of certain characters reflect a failure not on the part of the “universe” but on the part of powerful individuals whose ambition, earthly love, and pride blind them to signals from the invisible world. Such a reading of the play depends heavily on the care with which we attend to the sources of occult knowledge and to the reliability of its interpreters. The first of these sources is the nocturnal prodigy early in Act 2. A supernatural vignette recalling those in Lee’s recent plays depicts Oedipus and Jocasta as regally dressed with ominous, threatening stars over their heads and “Long-bearded Comets” stuck in their “left sides.” Near them, “abortive Stars” seem to bleed forth from the “Womb of monstrous Night,” and a blood-stained moon succumbs leadership and its relation to both social and supernatural phenomena … Dryden’s dramatic designs are more intellectual … Dryden’s lead characters work toward some harmonious adjustment between conduct and theory. Lee’s pursue the course of conduct fixed by their personalities, and it becomes the audience’s responsibility to understand the philosophical implications of what it going on.” 2 McFadden 209–11; Roper, California Works 13:461.

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to eclipse (2.1.16–69).3 While several characters witness the prodigy and react to it with awe or perplexity, none offers either an interpretation or an unbiased rejection of its significance. As a self-explanatory omen of royal death, it therefore becomes Dryden and Lee’s initial claim that the invisible powers are complicit in the circumstances and events of the play. Other than this spectacular portent, Tiresias and Eurydice provide the main occult perspectives onstage. Tiresias is the more reliable of the two, because he comes across as the more disinterested. He shares some features with the conjurers in previous plays—the High Priest, Ismeron, Nigrinus, and Prospero— but his overall posture toward the occult allies him more closely with Serapion. As always, Dryden locates the major supernatural phenomena in an enclosed space— here, a “dark grove” (3.1.SD), elsewhere a “dismal cell” (Indian Queen 8:3.2.2), a “Magitians Cave” (Indian Emperour 9:2.1.SD), an enchanted island (Tempest), or an “Indian Cave” (Tyrannick Love 10:4.1.SD). In Oedipus, the interaction within this charmed space between the seer and entities from the invisible world is distinctive. In earlier works, a priest-magician would command spirits to provide knowledge of, or control over, the future. In the process, however, he would discover frustrating limits to his powers. The spirits would hold back information, ignore directives, or show allegiance to a different master with a different agenda. Tiresias, by contrast, seeks knowledge of the past rather than of the future, and he embraces his limits: … how can Finite measure Infinite? Reason! Alas, it does not know it self! Yet Man, vain Man, wou’d with this short-lin’d Plummet, Fathom the vast Abysse of Heav’nly justice. Whatever is, is in it’s causes just; Since all things are by Fate. But pur-blind Man Sees but a part o’th’ Chain; the nearest links; His eyes not carrying to that equal Beam That poizes all above. (3.1.240–48)4

Also unlike his predecessors, Tiresias can make contact with the higher harmonies of the universe with or without the assistance of conjuration. Without chants or magic circles, he can “read” a “prodigious” message in “Heav’ns dark Volume” (1.1.328–29). Only a song to Apollo is required before the “God” within his own “bosom,” a kind of inner “Fury,” is tame enough to reveal that Lajus was murdered by his own first-born. This daemon, “intomb’d alive” inside him, is like “a strong Spirit Charm’d into a Tree” (2.1.135–51). The analogy recalls Ariel in The Tempest, although in Oedipus the only spirits truly imprisoned in trees are 3 The California Works editors find precedents for these omens of royal death in Gadbury’s astrological writings (13:478). 4 See also his earlier speech: “We must no more than Fate commissions us / To tell” (2.1.133–34).

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ghosts from hell. They inhabit the “dark Grove” (3.1.SD) where Tiresias goes to consult “th’ Infernal Pow’rs” (3.1.269) in his third effort to decipher the meaning of the past. There, again unlike his predecessors, he manages to force one of them, the ghost of Lajus, to fill in key missing information about the past: that Lajus himself ignored a divine command when he sired Oedipus, starting a chain of events leading inexorably to parricide and incest (3.1.368–69). The reliability of Tiresias and his humility in the face of the unknowable recall Serapion in All for Love rather than the conjurers in the American plays, Tyrannick Love, or The Tempest. Both Serapion and Tiresias affirm that human actions express occult intentions from on high, yet neither offers an interpretation of occult signals that could be applied to the tangled events of contemporary England. In other important respects, the two seers differ. Serapion affirms the lovers’ suicides as a happy escape from adverse cultural conditions and seems to foresee, after the coming “Storms of Fate,” a distant “Posterity” that will be more amendable to their kind of spiritual love (13:5.1.517–18). Tiresias, by contrast, finds no consolation in the grisly suicides and murders that conclude the story of Oedipus and Jocasta. These, he says, are “terrible Examples” of how even while “Heav’n” confers “Peace and Glory” on a particular state or society, some of its most virtuous and powerful individuals may suffer inexplicable horrors (5.1.466–70). Through his name and references to the future, Serapion hints at the Christian civilization to come. Tiresias, however, can see only how past actions lead to horrible consequences in the present. Eurydice appears to share with Tiresias an awareness of links between visible and invisible worlds. However, her appeals to otherworldly powers are generalized and emotionally inspired, coming across more as impulsive gestures than as evidence of a reliable occult vision. Mostly, she invokes the occult to keep Creon at bay. In a transparent ploy to impress her, Creon declares that while his deformed body is the creation of “Nature” (1.1.145), his “daring soul” was shaped by “the God” (1.1.152–54)—probably a reference to Vulcan, whose own deformity would have appealed to Creon. But she immediately perceives the ruse: only the gods, she retorts, have the kind of creative power he claims for nature, and the combined “errour” of his “soul and body” must be owing not to the likes of Vulcan but rather to “some unskill’d Pow’r” (1.1.156–57).5 Later, when he claims that her beloved Adrastus is one of the many “Fools” turned out “daily” by “Nature,” whereas he himself is “a Prodigy,” she counters that he is a self-loving “black detractor, / This same explanation is applied by Torrismond to his own inexplicable situation in The Spanish Fryar: 14:2.2.103–108. See also Eurydice’s disclaimer on behalf of nature: “Nature her self start back when thou wert born; / And cry’d, The work’s not mine_______” (1.1.135–36). She regards Creon as a soulless “Monster” (3.1.72, 191), a kind of “Fury” in human form who will “haunt himself” (1.1.176–77). Instead of a heavenly spirit to guard him, he has “an old Guardian Fiend” that will torment him in hell after he dies (3.1.66). He admits the truth of her analysis, though without affirming her theology: “I am / What she has told me … : / My body … / … lets in day to make my Vices seen / By all discerning eyes” (1.1.177–81). 5

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Who spitt’st thy venom against Gods and man” (3.1.102–10). His fear of death, she exclaims, indicates not only his viciousness—“Death only can be dreadful to the bad” (3.1.74)—but also his blindness to heaven and its purposes: like a child, Creon sees only the “Masque” of death, while the morally pure find death to be “a friend” (3.1.74–77). Creon and the city rabble strongly contrast with Tiresias and Eurydice. Together they represent a mentality altogether lacking in supernatural principles. The urban mob defers to Tiresias as “Apollo’s Priest” not because he is a portal for mystic messages from the beyond, but rather because he can “make Almanacks” and because the gods he serves are “our betters; and therefore in good manners we must hear him” (1.1.251–57). The mob is irresolute, pragmatic, emotional, and class-conscious to a fault, but never otherworldly. The true foil to Tiresias and Eurydice is Creon. Tiresias, despite his blindness to physical nature, can “see” the supernatural. Creon, conversely, is blind to an invisible world and understands everything in natural terms. He accepts neither Alcander’s atheistic philosophy of “invincible Necessity” (1.1.37) nor the conventional pagan scenario of creatorgods, punishing Furies, hellish immortality for the bad, and heavenly immortality for the good. Instead of necessity, he believes in the power of personal ambition; instead of accommodating his actions to the wills of the gods, he believes in grasping opportunities provided by chance configurations of nature and society. His references to gods, heaven, and astrological signs are either tactical or ironic, never devout. “The Gods” to whom he refers as having sent “this commodious plague” (1.1.81–82) are seen as strategically subordinate to “Fortune,” which has combined the plague with a number of other opportune developments: a moody populace, an absent king, a weak and ignored queen, and a beautiful but unattached royal princess (1.1.75–81, 98). His use of the term “Heaven” to describe Eurydice’s beauty is transparently rhetorical (1.1.105). He is being ironic when he says to the “Gods” that “I’m beholding to you, for making me your Image / Wou’d I cou’d make you mine” (1.1.403–404), and irony likewise pervades his reference to “love” as “Heaven’s precept” (1.1.118). When he reads the stars, he finds only what supports his ambitions. It is only to gain Eurydice’s favor that he ascribes her beauty to the “lavish Planet” that “reign’d” at her birth (1.1.103–105). And only when he thinks control of Thebes is within his grasp does he thank his “auspicious Stars” (5.1.1–3).6 Nature, ambition, and fortune are the only god-like forces in Creon’s personal universe. He considers beauty, like his own deformity, to be the craftsmanship of “Nature” (1.1.145, 169). He believes love is one of the “under passions” (5.1.19). It should be subservient to that dominant passion, “the God, Ambition” “(5.1.391–93) but sometimes gets out of hand and takes control of “Nature” (3.1.154; 5.1.17–20). In what passes for his philosophy, “Nature” is the creative 6 On the other hand, the events of the play confirm the cosmic signs when Tiresias reads them. For example, he identifies an “envious Planet” that threatens Oedipus and Jocasta with death, countering the good fortune suggested by their “kindly Stars” (3.1.233–35).

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“Mother Earth” who expresses herself in his passions and in the strength of his good arm (3.1.200; 5.1.390). In light of this devotion to nature, he finds death “dreadful,” because there is no place in his scheme of things for a celestial afterlife. The “best” he expects “after death” is to wander in darkness as a ghost vainly yearning “to enter” his “forbidden Corps” (3.1.41–63). Ghosts and Dreams seem real to him, but in his conception they, like all other phenomena, are natural: ghosts are fragile assemblies of particles shaken “to Attoms” (3.1.54) by every gust of wind, and dreams are the projections of a tortured mind (2.1.307–308). Inability to perceive heaven’s purposes also afflicts Oedipus but not because he has adopted, like Creon, a self-serving, alternative philosophy. Initially, Oedipus shows deep respect for those who claim access to the occult, the Delphic Oracle and the priest Tiresias. It is Oedipus who sends Dymas to consult the oracle, and he considers Tiresias a master magician who “rules all beneath the Moon” (2.1.115). He rejects their messages only when they go counter to the two things he values most: pride in his god-given leadership role in society and his love for Jocasta. The first of these comes into play when Dymas tells Oedipus how the Delphic Oracle blames Thebes’s troubles on the murder of Lajus—“Blood-Royal unreveng’d , has curs’d the Land” (1.1.437–38). Accustomed to the notion, reinforced by the priesthood, that he was “call’d” to kingship by “the Gods,” (1.1.320), that he is “a visible Divinity” (1.1.411), Oedipus hears only a general condemnation of regicide—“What, touch anointed Pow’r!” (1.1.448). The other, more potent source of his denial of occult signs is his profoundly emotional love for Jocasta. In the grip of that “miraculous love” (2.1.79), he ignores the appearance of his name and Jocasta’s on the prodigious figures that fill the night sky at the beginning of Act 2 (SD following 2.1.62). Later, he dismisses his prophetic dreams about parricide and incest as “Chimeras” (2.1.410). I’ll face these babbling Daemons of the air: In spight of Ghosts, I’ll on. Tho’ round my Bed the Furies plant their Charms; I’ll break ’em, with Jocasta in my arms. (2.1.423–26)

Even when the ghost of Lajus names him as the murderer and denounces his marriage as incest (3.1.368–69), a message reinforced by the omen of a young stork pecking out his parent’s eyes (3.1.385–88), Oedipus resists the emerging truth as mere “Riddles” (3.1.438) and priestly lies (3.1.431–34). Until Oedipus finally pieces together the truth from what he has heard in the past and what occult signs tell him in the present, his pride of place and obsessive love for Jocasta distract him from the supernatural. In this state of mind, he cannot imagine any larger purpose that would be served by making him sin unwittingly, by making him pay for generation-old actions about which he had no knowledge. He fails to perceive that the “Monster Sphinx,” plague, confusion of seasons, and disorder in the family and state are symptoms of a deeper and more general infection that he shares with Creon and the mob but which he attributes only to the pagan priests: devotion “To Mother Earth, and to th’ infernal Pow’rs” (1.1.452–53).

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His tragedy results from a prideful failure to submit to the mystery of divine intentions. It is the kind of tragedy Dryden feared might afflict an England whose leaders were so caught up in self-serving politics, personal pleasures, and mindless religion that they had lost sight of Providence. In Troilus and Cressida, or, Truth Found too Late. A Tragedy (1679) Dryden’s emphasis on tragic pathos, Greek simplicity of form, and immediate political suggestiveness seems to have narrowed his focus to the mundane dynamics of human relations, to what Pope would call “this scene of man.” He deliberately eliminates from Shakespeare’s language those constructions that would provide a framework for occult material. For example, as the California Works editors point out, Ulysses’ speech on “degree” is reduced from a cosmic to a political statement about order and disorder, and Cressida’s speech about her future reputation loses its references to the grander processes of history and nature (13:513, 520–21). Likewise, Cassandra’s pronouncements under the influence of spiritual possession, her “raging God” (5.1.164), are alluded to but kept offstage 5.1.89–92). Only Act 5, scene 1, where the Trojans prepare for battle, contains significant occult references. Andromache foresees trouble in the omen of Hector’s falling sword (5.1.27–30) and his dream about eternity (5.1.43–49). Her own dream of “horrid slaughters” and “fiery Demons” bodes ill for Hector, she says, and her drooping spirits presage disaster on this day when his “ill Starrs” (5.1.63) are strong enough to drive his “helpless genius down / The steep of Heaven” (5.1.64–65). When Troilus learns of these forebodings he ascribes them to some “mad-man” or “brain-sick Priest” (5.1.128–29). Hector himself, after a moment of uncertainty, ignores them in favor of his own determination to challenge fate. Of course, Andromache’s forebodings prove to be reliable, while the skepticism of Troilus and the earthbound heroics of Hector lead only to tragedy. Thus, in ascribing the death of the royal brothers partly to their lack of metaphysical awareness, Dryden injects the occult in a small way into the play’s cautionary advice to a troubled nation. Other components of that advice— the dangerous influence of a royal mistress, the precarious balance of private indulgence and public duty, the abuse of clerical power, factionalism among the influential subjects of a great leader—belong outside the scope of this study and have been instructively discussed by other scholars.7 The serious plot of The Spanish Fryar or, The Double Discovery (1680) dramatizes, according to Bruce King and almost all commentators after him, “the myth of divine intervention to protect monarchy” (151).8 For most of the 7 See, for examples, McFadden 211–16, and California Works 13.497–98, 516–19. Hughes finds topical allusions but feels, as I do, that the main theme involves “the perils of seeking Truth in the treacherous texture of experience” (English Drama 265). 8 For a more recent example, see Owen, “Politics” 102. Opinions remain divided about its political allusions, however. Harth is sure that Dryden deliberately avoided controversy, including “aspects of both politics and religion that were least likely to give offense to the spectators” (Pen for a Party 54). McFadden thinks Dryden uses reference

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play, however, this heavenly care is visible neither to the characters onstage nor to the audience. The play continues the occult themes of Oedipus and Troilus and Cressida: that even if heaven’s purposes are indecipherable from inside an emotional and political tempest, they will be realized in the long run. There are no occult manifestations onstage to signal divine purpose, even though the dialogue is lightly peppered with references to stars, angels, devils, genii, and ghosts. With very few exceptions, it is the inchoate nature of the times which the characters reflect in their relatively few occult references, rather than some privileged knowledge of a deeper structure beneath surface events. This myopia takes various forms along a spectrum with Pedro at one extreme and Raymond at the other. Pedro cynically dismisses any deeper structure: “Heav’n must not be Heav’n: Judge the event / By what has pass’d” (1.1.19–20); “Oh Religion and Roguery, how they go together” (1.1.106–107). Raymond, by contrast, feels not only that God is firmly in charge but that He has deputized Raymond himself to identify a king who brings an instinct for justice to the throne. When it appears that Torrismond lacks that instinct (5.2.41–42), even though he is the lineal heir, Raymond decides to take matters into his own hands by leading a popular rebellion.9 Thus, his occult belief is shown to be as vain and narrow as the interests of the other characters (4.2.341, 404). Torrismond and Leonora share neither Pedro’s outright cynicism about occult signals and those who interpret them, nor Raymond’s certainty that he understands heaven’s purposes. An inability to find meaning in “this Labyrinth of Fate” (4.2.378) distinguishes Torrismond for most of the play. When he realizes that his military success cannot lead to marriage with Leonora, given Bertran’s prior claim, he consigns that success to mere chance (1.1.221, 262). Ignorant of his royal heritage, he explains his kingly instincts with the outrageous theory that “some o’er-hasty Angel” misplaced him “In Fate’s Eternal Volume” (2.2.107–108). When he hears of the true king’s apparent assassination, he questions “the Power that guards the Sacred Lives of Kings” (3.3.254). Still, he seems to believe in stellar messages even if he cannot make sense of them. He blames hostile stars for the barriers to his relationship with Leonora (1.1.262–63), and after their marriage, when it seems that she has murdered his father, he feels that opposed planets ruled at their births (5.1.137–39). His one allusion to a parallel pattern in Scripture—comparing Raymond’s republican ideas to those of “Lucifer … / … the first Reformer of the Skyes” (5.2.19–20)—turns back upon himself when he threatens to lead an insurrection against the rightful king. Leonora’s occultism shares some features with Torrismond’s. Like him, she affirms the mysterious influence of stars and planets (3.3.276–77; 5.2.102) and to current events as a means of invoking “rage” which he then attempts to “allay” through sentiment and … humor” (218–19). Hughes considers the play’s topicality as secondary to its main theme, the problematic nature of paternal authority (English Drama 236–39). 9 In this respect, Raymond has come round to a theory similar to that of Bertran in 4.2.65–68: “when Subjects are oppress’d by Kings. / They justifie Rebellion” by the “Law” of “Self-preservation.”

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seeks a scriptural explanation for her mistakes: Bertran has tempted her as the Devil tempts Eve in the Garden (4.2.99–101). However, in trying to make sense of the course of events, she takes a step beyond Torrismond’s angry perplexity. Convinced that she is “th’ Accurst of Heaven” (5.2.180; and see 5.1.113–14), she rejects the whole concept of free will, which she now sees as a priestly fabrication: The Priesthood grosly cheat us with Free-will: Will to doe what, but what heaven first decreed? Our Actions then are neither good nor ill, Since from eternal Causes they proceed: Our Passions, Fear and Anger, Love and Hate, Meer sensless Engines that are mov’d by Fate. (3.2.159–66)

God must be using her own “Passions, Fear and Anger, Love and hate” as “sensless Engines” to realize His inscrutable decrees. It turns out she is partly correct in this assessment, though not in its conclusion against free will. God does put her highest passion, the love she shares with Torrismond, to good use. Torrismond dimly senses this when he speaks of Leonora as his “Angel” (2.1.59) and “Earthly Heaven” (3.3.207). In Act 2, as she appears to encourage his passion, he feels her words are in tune with the divine: “Tune your Harps / Ye Angels to that sound” (2.2.150–51). Leonora’s dream in Act 3, like dreams in the previous plays, proves a reliable guide to this hidden harmony of earthly events with divine purpose. Coming in the early morning, “when Dreams, they say, are true,” the dream depicts Torrismond leading her safely across a wide river by “Leaping and bounding on the Billows heads” (3.3.33–41). This loving defiance of natural barriers and purely natural forces accurately depicts the dynamics of the play. The violent usurpation of the throne, the conflict with the Moors, Betran’s strategies as well as those of the Queen herself and Raymond—all these billows threaten to engulf the state in continual unrest, and all can be surmounted through love. Indeed, except for the first of these (the usurpation), all can be seen as reactions to the love between Leonora and Torrismond. Bertran’s machinations are designed to displace Torrismond in the Queen’s favors. The Queen’s misguided authorization of regicide and, later, of mob violence, is to insure her union with Torrismond. Raymond’s tactics are designed to undermine Torrismond’s love affair with one whom he considers an unlawful monarch and a murderess. It is as if their Providential love stimulates and then resolves a period of civil and personal conflict, ultimately uniting usurper and the true heir to the throne, force with divine right.10 Thus, in this play the only invisible force that consistently

10 In this respect they are somewhat like Almanzor and Almahide in The Conquest of Granada, though unlike Oedipus and Jocasta, whose love was tragic even as it drove them toward revelations that prepared Thebes for the next phase of its history.

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influences earthly events is the same one that dominated in Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada—love, the “fatal fondness,” as Raymond calls it (5.2.74).11 Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar depict Dryden’s inability to find a detailed heavenly plan in earthly actions and relationships, but they also depict his renewed trust in Providence. In each of these works, the occult language suggests that forces from the invisible world are involved with the inexorable course of events—that, from the Christian perspective of the audience, Providence is at work. Yet within the play world of each work, central characters fail, at great cost, to perceive any occult pattern in their experiences. To the extent that Dryden’s sympathies are with the more admirable of these characters, their failure implies his own. Indeed, the subject of poetry’s distinctive and comprehensive occult powers does not even arise in his non-dramatic writings during the later 1670s, suggesting that he maintained his post-1674 doubts about poetry’s capacity for tracing specific links between socio-political phenomena and the invisible world.

11 This interpretation of the play suggests that its meaning is not quite so “self-evident” as Hume and Milhous claim in Producible Interpretation 141. My occult reading is most compatible with that of Womersley.

Chapter 8

Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius, 1681–85 By the time he wrote The Spanish Fryar Dryden had begun, as Winn puts it, “to cast off his earlier caution” about making explicit political statements (332). This new outspokenness was coupled, as we saw in the previous chapter, with occult references that express a return of confidence in the ultimate purposes of Providence. What did not return, until about 1681, was his vision of hidden forces working through the events that would eventually realize those ultimate purposes. In 1681, with Absalom and Achitophel, he once again uses occult materials to suggest that a divine design is emerging through the personalities and actions leading toward a happier future. This vision also informs The Medall (1682), The Duke of Guise (1682),1 and Albion and Albanius (1685). These works present a conventional occult picture of heaven and hell, angels and devils, and use the language of magic only in a pejorative sense. Divine sponsorship of the monarch and his loyal executives is assumed to be well established within the natural order, and treasonous behavior is depicted as reflecting diabolical intervention: … when to Sin our byast Nature leans, The carefull Devil is still at hand with means; And providently Pimps for ill desires. (Absalom and Achitophel 2:79–81)

In the world of Absalom and Achitophel, the devil finds fertile ground for his evil machinations. Natural urges and materialistic views of life dominate Jerusalem (i.e., London) at this time. God, of course, works through nature and its matter, and it is “after Heaven’s own heart” that King David (i.e., Charles II) scatters his “Maker’s Image through the Land” by imparting his “vigorous warmth” to “Wives and Slaves” alike (5–10). But nature in its human expression is, unlike its maker, imperfect. King David’s natural urges produce problems for the succession. They result in the birth of Absalom (Monmouth), whose extra measure of “Angells Metal” (310) endows him with excessive ambition for power, Edenic beauty, and a “Natural” manner (28–30), all of which make him the perfect tool for a devil intent upon reducing “Government … / To Natures state” (793–94).2 Like Harth also analyzes these three works together in terms of their politics and language, though he does not study their occult dimensions: Pen for a Party 188–205. 2 Winn reminds us that years earlier, in the dedications of All for Love (13:7) and Tyrannick Love (10:107), Dryden had equated Shaftesbury with Satan and Monmouth with Adam. 1

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Absalom, the Jews (Protestants) and Jebusites (Roman Catholics) are distracted from heaven’s laws and purposes by their “byast” natures (79). They are like the misguided humans Dryden later describes as … those, who never truly scan The effects of Sacred Providence, But measure all by the grosse rules of sence.”3

Dryden’s condemnation of the rebels, including their leaders, is often couched in astrological language. Somewhat as in the Heroique Stanzas, he exploits the multivalent significance of cosmic phenomena, except that his rhetorical purpose here is to denounce one side of the conflict while affirming the other, rather than trying to accommodate both sides. He achieves this purpose in two ways. First, in describing most of the rebels, he stresses the purely natural causes and effects of heavenly bodies instead of treating them as divine messengers. Second, when Achitophel claims to read a divine message in the stars, Dryden ensures that the audience understands it to be a message from hell. A good example of this first type of occult rhetoric appears in Absalom’s one loyal speech, where he ascribes the “Disease” of treason to the influence of Sirius. He refers here not to the dog-star’s role as a channel for divine messages but rather to its capacity for heating the Jews’ “Brains” (334).4 Earlier in the poem, the Jews’ penchant for changing gods and kings was said to reflect the lunar cycle and thus to become a kind of insanity (216–20)—or “lunacy” as it had been called since medieval times. They exhibit the “Moon struck madness” predicted by the Archangel Michael in Paradise Lost when he reveals the future to Adam (Milton, The Poems, PL 11.486).5 One of their leaders, Zimri (Buckingham), shares this moon madness, for he changes interests repeatedly in “the course of one revolving Moon” (549).6 A similar emphasis on natural qualities and causes, phrased in astronomical language, appears in the description of Corah (Titus Oates). Dryden compares Corah’s rise in prominence to the path of a comet, but he strips this 3 “On the Marriage of the Fair and Vertuous Lady, Mrs Anastasia Stafford, with that Truly Worthy and Pious Gent. George Holman, Esq. A Pindarique Ode” (c. 1687), 3:32–34. 4 Schilling discusses at some length Dryden’s treatment of the rabble, including a list of previous works in which the London mob is satirized (168–73). Kewes adds that “it is not until Absalom and Achitophel … The Medall … and The Duke of Guise … that the antipopulist sentiment comes to the fore” (“Dryden and the Staging of Popular Politics” 77). 5 See California Works 2:252n; OED under “Lunacy” and “Moonstruck”; and Thomas 341–42 (“the brain … was believed to be particularly subject” to the moon’s influence. “Hence the notion of the insane as ‘lunatic’ or ‘moonstruck.’”). In his poems and snatches of prose, the bedlamite James Carkesse repeatedly maintained that his “Brains” were “not rul’d by the Pale Moon” (34 and see 27, 28, 32, 35, 52, and 63). 6 By representing Zimri as a “Chymist,” Dryden calls upon the contemporary skepticism about natural magic. Later, however, he would refer to the more scientific side of alchemy. See the “Introduction” above, p. 7.

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image of the divine associations he had given it in Annus Mirabilis. There he made “Heav’n” the creator of “two glareing Comets” and listed one of the secondary causes of comets as “unctuous Exhalations …, / Fir’d by the Sun” (1:63–66). In Absalom and Achitophel, he assigns heaven no role in the comet’s appearance, and he equates its secondary cause with the decidedly sublunar force behind, or perhaps beneath, Corah’s rise: “Earthy Vapours” (636–37).7 A similar cause, at least one from a similar location in his body, is assigned to the “Visionary flights” for which Corah was becoming known: “The Spirit caught him up, the Lord knows where” (656–57). Through this emphasis on the natural effects of heavenly bodies Dryden is able to distinguish the purely earthbound motives of the rebels from the divinely sponsored actions of the loyalists. However, as pointed out above,8 astrological language was multivalent in the Restoration. The supposed links between heavenly bodies and earthly phenomena, even when divested of supernaturalism, did not necessarily carry only negative connotations. In fact, such links were earnestly being studied by some of the leading scientific thinkers of the day—individuals such as Robert Boyle, Thomas Sprat, and John Evelyn. Following Bacon’s call for the reform of astrology, many agreed with Boyle that “there was a valuable kernel of truth buried in judicial astrology, which he hoped to rescue from its vulgar and superstitious exponents through research.”9 Thus, to Dryden’s first audiences, his use of astrological language to describe the rebels might indicate a mixed attitude toward their behavior. This would be consistent with his reference to them as “Adam-wits (51).” Like the first human rebel, they are driven by natural “Instinct” (45–66) to work what could ultimately be seen as Heaven’s will. In his address “To the Reader,” Dryden suggests that even Achitophel, like the other rebels, is to some extent the victim of his own fiery nature and therefore may, like the devil himself, “at last, be sav’d” (2:5).10 However, within the poem itself, he gives to Achitophel an astrological rhetoric that is unambiguously Satanic.11 In Achitophel’s mouth, such language realizes the worst fears of Restoration thinkers like Thomas Sprat, who denounced any effort to find “the secret Ordinances of Heven” in the stars. “This” writes Sprat, “withdraws our obedience, from the true Image of God the rightfull Soveraign” and causes “calamities” by making Although generally skeptical of astrological predictions, John Evelyn noted that although recent comets must “appear from natural causes, and of themselves operate not, yet … They may be warnings from God” (cited by Curry 51). 8 See “Introduction,” p. 7, and Chapter 1. 9 Curry 63. Curry ably discusses this transitional period in attitudes toward astrology in Chapter 3 (45–91). 10 Winn guesses that Dryden’s near-esteem for the un-fallen Shaftesbury could reflect the poet’s appreciation of Lord Ashley’s earlier assistance in collecting his “wife’s dowry from the Treasury” (John Dryden and His World 355). 11 Schilling connects Achitophel’s Satanic qualities to Paradise Lost and other works (186–99). Weinbrot reminds us that Absalom also “becomes associated with the devil” (“‘Nature’s Holy Bands’” 150). 7

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us “depend on the vain Images of his pow’r, which are fram’d by our own imaginations” (History of the Royal Society, cited by Curry 60). Achitophel, “Hells dire Agent” (373), uses astrology as one of his “Impious Arts” (498, and see 289 and 402) to assure the Adam-like Absalom that “Some Royal Planet rul’d the Southern sky” at his birth (231) and that “Heav’n” has allotted to his “Fate” a “lucky Revolution” (252–53).12 A second subject of occult language in Absalom and Achitophel is powerseeking through magical control of invisible forces. “Th’ Egyptian Rites” (118) espoused by the Jebusites (Roman Catholics) seem to associate them (and Catholic France) with the luxury and superstition of that post-primitive, debased Egypt depicted in All for Love, alluded to in The Medall (167–74) and The Hind and the Panther (3: Pt. 3.805), and described in many publications current in the Restoration (see Chapter 6 above, pp. 89 and 89n6). The reference might also have evoked the biblical “Egyptian Sorcerers” who “vainly” employ their magic wands in The Hind and the Panther (3: Pt. 2.538–39) or even that Egyptian hermetic magic which, though discredited, still held the fascination of a taboo.13 Throughout Absalom and Achitophel, the radical Whigs, led by Shaftesbury, are spoken of as black magicians. Their arts threaten the “Form and Order” (531) fostered by Charles and maintained by those “Holy Bands” of nature (339). They seek raw power through illegitimate means, as if there were no divine energy informing natural phenomena and hence no divinely sponsored method for tapping it. Bumbling Zimri tries alchemy, but his only effective “Art” lies in “squandring Wealth” (550, 559). Shimei derives “Power” (612) from the London mob but misapplies it to “free the suffring Saint from Humane Laws” (609). Corah becomes the converse of Moses’ magical brass serpent; instead of counteracting the venom of rebellion, he protects and incites the rebels (632–35).14 To recruit Absalom, Achitophel interprets the conflict between himself and King David as a competition between rival forms of magic. Absalom, he insists, has been chosen by good fortune to revive the Mosaical kingdom of theurgy and miracles, visions, dreams, and sacred prophecies (230–39);15 David, on the other hand, is a fallen

Schilling points out that this augury seems meant to persuade Absalom that he is like his father, “for when Charles I was on his way to St. Paul’s to give thanks for the birth of the future Charles II in 1630, a bright star shone in the sky at mid-day, as already seen in Astraea Redux, 288–91” (268). 13 See the discussion of Restoration Egyptology and Hermes Trismegistus in my “Egypt in the Restoration” 141–44, and in the major sources listed in “Introduction” above, n9. 14 See Numbers 21:6–9. In Politics and Language 97–98, Zwicker fully analyzes this image. 15 The Renaissance demonologists were fond of citing the contest of Moses (and Aaron) against the Pharaoh’s magicians as an example of heavenly versus diabolical magic. See West’s account of Deacon, Walker, and Bodin on this matter: Invisible World 33, 44. 12

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angel (273) who has been “Charm’d into Ease” (708) and now tries to “Enchant” his son with “Love,” which is “Natures trick” (423–24).16 The narrator, of course, ensures that we see through this diabolical propaganda. It is Absalom who is the victim of infernal designs, and it is the resurgent king, invoking the divine presence, who wields “Lawfull Pow’r” (1024).17 The full potency of this “Establish’d Pow’r” (993), we are told, is accessible only to the “faithful Band / Of Worthies” (914–15) who perform their rituals within nature’s divinely ordained order. In describing Thomas, Earl of Ossory as one of these, the narrator conflates the traditional image of perfection with the magician’s conjuring circle. Ossory’s life had magical potency because it was centered on his faithful soul, the locus of his love for both father and king: O Narrow Circle but of Pow’r Divine Scanted in Space, but perfect in thy Line! (838–39)18

Such spiritually motived love, far from being “Nature’s trick,” is offered as the true magic, the only truly holy way to tap heavenly power. In The Medall. A Satyre against Sedition, Dryden again employs occult language to condemn the Whigs. Again mixing Western European with Egyptian sources, this time he emphasizes the latter slightly more than he did in Absalom and Achitophel. The Whigs have coined a medal depicting Shaftesbury on one side and various symbols of London on the other. The poem depicts this act as “sedition,” which Dryden’s contemporaries would have understood to mean “a concerted movement to overthrow an established government” (OED). This evil magic takes various forms as the poem develops, but ultimately its operations fall within the circle of Providence through a self-destructive dynamic. The California Works editors break the poem down into four large sections, but in tracing the occult rhetoric I find these less helpful than Dryden’s own six divisions. The first and longest section (1–144) introduces the dominant idea that Shaftesbury and the Whigs are diabolical magicians whose magic is selfdefeating. Over his variable career, Shaftesbury was at first a kind of Prospero 16 Shaftesbury was identified with necromancy and Satanism in contemporary pamphlet literature, as noted by Miller 212–18. But even though Achitophel’s diabolical rhetoric has been analyzed many times, it has never, as far as I know, been examined in terms of allusions to magic. For examples, see Schilling 175–99 and Hoffman 76–88. 17 In Poetry of Civilization 102–105, Budick instructively analyzes the relationship between power and design in this poem. Schilling reviews seventeenth-century ideas of “law” (147–53). David/Charles is a godlike creative force in Maresca’s reading. 18 In the dedication of Don Sebastian, Dryden writes admiringly of the individual “who centring on himself, remains immovable, and smiles at the madness of the dance about him” (15:60). Canfield cites this passage in “The Image of the Circle in Dryden’s ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman.’” Here Canfield reviews the various connotations of circles but does not include the magician’s circle; in the section on Barzillai’s son, as in the letter to “My … Kinsman,” says Canfield, the “circle implies the perfection of the soul” (173).

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seeking to “be great by wicked means,” “like white Witches” (61–64). Now, at his worst, he is the “Fiend confess’d,” the “Lucifer” depicted on the medal (81, 21).19 There is even a hint of the type of Egyptian, Hermetic magic that involved animation of statues. Through their art, the engravers have created a portrait of Shaftesbury that “seem’d … alive” (7).20 Dryden then prepares us for the recurrence of this Egyptian motif, and for the poem’s controlling theme, by comparing the current unrest to “Waves” or “Seas” that by their nature threaten, as did the unruly Indus and Ganges in Aureng-Zebe, to overwhelm “the Banks” of established government (69–71). In Aureng-Zebe governmental stability is shaken by feuding brothers. In The Medall it is threatened by the London’s mob’s anarchic tendencies, and Shaftesbury, now seen as an opportunistic sailor, “shifts the sayle; / Drives down the Current with a pop’lar gale” (79–80). The section ends with a prediction that informs the entire poem: by tapping the power of the mob, Shaftesbury unleashes a self-destructive force that will, in effect, reenact the inevitable course of the Civil War: God try’d us once; our Rebel-fathers fought; He glutted ’em with all the pow’r they sought: Till, master’d by their own usurping Brave, The free-born Subject sunk into a Slave. (127–30)

The imagery of currents and flooding is carried over to the second section (145–204) of the poem and subsumed in another Egyptian occult reference that further develops the central idea that sedition, in the context of England’s Godordained order, is ultimately self-defeating. London, though great Emporium of our Isle, O, thou too bounteous, thou too fruitful Nile, How shall I praise or curse to thy desert! Or separate thy sound, from thy corrupted part! I call’d thee Nile; the parallel will stand: Thy tydes of Wealth o’rflow the fattend Land; Yet Monsters from thy large increase we find; Engender’d on the Slyme thou leav’st behind. (167–74)

Five years earlier, in All for Love, Dryden had called upon the tradition of the Nile as God’s dynamic imprint on the Book of Nature. In that work, the creatures left floundering in the mud as the Nile’s tides receded symbolized Antony, Cleopatra, and Alexas, left behind by the ongoing evolution of a civilization they once seemed born to lead. The Medall gives a new twist to this dynamic. The Nile See Roper’s discussion of Shaftesbury as Satan in this poem (Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms 87–103). In his comments on lines 18–21, Winn notes that “since Shaftesbury has proved so difficult to ‘finish,’ he must be a fallen angel like Lucifer, not a man like Adam” (John Dryden and His World 339). 20 See Yates, Giordano Bruno 10. 19

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now symbolizes London and the material abundance generated by its commerce. The “Monsters” left behind now stand for the Whigs and Shaftesbury, who were never true leaders, never the natural inhabitants of the river’s God-given mission of nourishment for the nation. They were “Engender’d” not within the “tydes of Wealth” but rather “on the Slyme” created by the effects of wealth on the lowest orders of society. Dryden thus associates the seditious behavior of Shaftesbury and the Whigs not only with the impressionable mob and their slothful resentment of authority, but also with a natural and Providential pattern emerging from London’s growing wealth. Both good and evil inevitably flow from this prosperity, as from every other Providential event in this imperfect creation, but the evil phenomena finally become self-destructive and end up furthering the Providential cause. The occult material in the third and fourth sections (205–55, 256–86) repeats the pattern we have just observed in the first two: the attempt of Shaftesbury and the Whigs to abrogate power by occult means only contributes to their downfall. The rebels are trying to “clip” the king’s “regal Rights within the Ring” (229), in effect to penetrate “the magic circle of kingship symbolized by the … national currency” and to substitute Shaftesbury’s portrait for that of his monarch at the powerful center.21 But such extreme measures cannot be sustained in “Our Temp’rate Isle” (248), and we should understand them as we do the occasional natural disasters that punctuate God’s design: they are like a “wholesome Tempest” which “purges what it breeds; / To recommend the Calmness that succeeds” (254–55). A similar self-defeating dynamic informs the fourth section. In forming his coalition with the dissenting sects, Shaftesbury panders to their false religion: Religion thou has none: thy Mercury Has pass’d through every Sect, or theirs through Thee. But what thou giv’st, that Venom still remains; And the pox’d Nation feels Thee in their Brains. … Yet, shou’d thy Crimes succeed, shou’d lawless Pow’r Compass those Ends thy greedy Hopes devour, Thy Canting Friends thy Mortal Foes wou’d be; Thy God and Theirs will never long agree. (263–76)

“Mercury” alludes not only to Shaftesbury’s slippery faith, to the Protestant newspapers (with “Mercury” in their titles) which spread the Whig propaganda, and to a dangerous remedy for syphilis,22 but also to one of the key elements in the alchemy supposedly invented by Mercurius Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian

I quote Budick, Poetry of Civilization 108, whose observation was anticipated by Reverand, “Patterns of Imagery and Metaphor in Dryden’s The Medal” 108–109; Reverand compares the clipping of a coin to invading “the circle … in necromancy.” 22 These allusions were identified by Swedenberg in 2:298, and Barbeau Gardiner, “Dryden’s The Medall and the Principle of Continuous Transmission of Laws” 65. 21

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magus-king.23 In hermetic alchemy, mercury was considered “a sharpe liquor, passable, and penetrable … most pure … quickning, and … the foode of life.”24 However, when applied for Shaftesbury’s infernal purposes, it “pass’d through every Sect, or theirs through Thee,” without rarefying the treasonous concoction.25 The residual mixture of Shaftesbury and the dissenters remains unstable, and the “sullen Saints” (281) will ultimately clash with Shaftesbury and his “jolly God” (279). The final two sections (287–317 and 318–22) distill the theme of selfdestructive sedition into a prophecy that is so obvious, says Dryden, so accessible through mere “common Sense” (288), that poetic vision of occult patterns is not necessary. Neither Shaftesbury nor those taken in by his “Factious Arts” (291) will “reap that Harvest of Rebellious Rage” (291–92). As they gain power, the various factions will turn against each other, Presbyterians versus the “puny Sects” (303), military versus religious groups, Commons versus Lords, indeed friends versus friends, until a dictator emerges only to be opposed as vigorously as was the king before him. Thus, as before in recent history, … inborn Broyles the Factions wou’d ingage, Or Wars of Exil’d Heirs, or Foreign Rage, Till halting Vengeance overtook our Age: And our wild Labours, wearied into Rest, Reclin’d us on a rightfull Monarch’s Breast. (318–22)

The Duke of Guise. A Tragedy (1682), Dryden’s second collaborative effort with Nathaniel Lee, exploits Davila’s Historie of the Civill Warres of France to suggest parallels between the political upheavals in later sixteenth-century France and those surrounding England’s Exclusion Crisis a century later.26 The occult material in this play is richer but less subtle than we have seen in any of Dryden’s serious dramatic works since the early 1670s, except possibly Oedipus. It would be tempting to ascribe this to Lee’s influence, since he wrote more than half the scenes. Dryden, however, took responsibility for the first scene, the fourth act, For a survey of the various connotations of “mercury,” see Brooks-Davies 1–10. Joseph Quercetanus Duchesne, The Practise of Chymicall, and Hermeticall

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Physicke, trans. Th. Thymme (London, 1605), sig. DI(v), cited by Debus 93. 25 Barbeau Gardiner, “Dryden’s The Medall,” also notes that these lines refer to “the interpenetration of Jesus, the Father, and his disciples” (65), which reinforces my sense that through his diabolical arts Shaftesbury ineffectually apes the divine alchemy. 26 Despite the play’s Royalist bias, its implied parallel of the treasonous titular character to the Duke of Monmouth, King Charles’s biological son, apparently troubled the Lord Chamberlain. He banned the play in July 1682, reversing that decision only after the political temperature of London cooled. It was first performed in November. Dryden’s role in the propaganda warfare surrounding the premiere is analyzed by Dearing and Roper in the commentary to the California Works edition (14:476–512) and by Phillip Harth in Pen for a Party 188–228. The occult rhetoric of the play has, however, not been discussed in print.

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and “somewhat more” than half “of the fifth,” and together these sections include almost half the play’s lines.27 More to the point, Dryden’s contribution includes the interaction in Act 4, scene 2 between Malicorne and the diabolical spirit Melanax. Here and elsewhere, the occult language and phenomena are so pervasive that they convey one of the play’s most important themes, the struggle to understand and control hidden intentions—not only those of other humans but also those of oneself and even of God and Satan. The French king awakens to this theme in the final act: Not Man, who knows not Man but by surmise; Nor Devils, nor Angels of a purer Mould, Can trace the winding Labyrinths of Thought. (5.1.82–84)

The king’s loyal supporters are the best at ferreting out the secret intentions of other humans. No one is better at this than Marmoutier and her Uncle Grillon. Marmoutier, in fact, comes across as the one character who manages to see deeply both “Into the dark Affairs of fatal State” (3.1.202) and into her own most elusive feelings. In the political arena, she figures out the conspiracy by studying “the long Chain of Causes” leading to Guise’s “Soul” (1.2.76–77).28 She also understands her complicated feelings for the king and Guise. She knows that she does not return the king’s love except at the highest level—that she loves him only as a loyal subject who would follow him even into exile (3.1.241–70). She will not trade her “Virtue for a Throne” (3.1.345) but will give the king “all the Preference” of her “Soul” (5.1.151) if he offers Guise a second chance to abandon his treasonous plans. About Guise she feels torn between “Reason and Love” (3.1.364), yet her powers of rational analysis enable her to understand and control this inner conflict: I’ve heard the Guise, not with an Angels temper, Something beyond the tenderness of pity, And yet, not Love. … Love to his Tune my jarring Heart woul’d bring, But Reason over-winds and Cracks the String. (3.1.208–10, 366–67)

Thus, she will not allow “any dark’ning Thought” about Guise to “Cloud” her “Virtue” (3.1.175–76). Her uncle has almost as much insight as she does, except when it comes to knowing what she herself intends. Like his niece, he immediately deduces from the facts at hand that Guise is a “Murderer … within” and a “double Traytor, to Conspire so basely, / And when found out, more basely to deny’t” (2.2.109, 115–16). He also sees the true nature of Guise’s advisor, correctly inferring that Malicorne has “Compacted for a Lease of Years / With Hell” See 14:311, 480. In this respect, she is like the observers of Clarendon’s hidden tactics in “To My

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Lord Chancellor”; they “unwind the clue / As men do Nature” (1:71–72).

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(3.1.149–50). But he takes much longer to know his niece’s intentions. At first, he thinks she has sacrificed her honor to both Guise and the king (3.1.165–66) but after hearing her “Hearts design” (3.1.229) concludes she is “some new Eve” whose “Virtue might redeem us” (3.1.338). Like Marmoutier and Grillon, the king soon sees Guise’s “dark design” at “the bottom of his Soul” (2.2.158, 149), but he takes awhile to understand his own intentions. He prefers that they remain open to inspection: All Conjurations blot the Name of Kings. What Honours, Interest, were the World to buy him, Shall make a Brave Man smile, and do a Murder? (2.1.53–55)

In The Massacre of Paris, Lee gives similar lines to an earlier king: “Conspiracies of that foul Nature / For ever blot the Memory of Kings” (Works 1.2.26–27). By changing “Conspiracies” to “Conjurations” Lee emphasizes the magical, evil side of the occult.29 In The Duke of Guise, therefore, the king wants to be seen not as the equivalent of a secretive magician manipulating his enemies with daemonic assistance but rather as a transparent executor of God’s will and law.30 The trouble is that he is also a human being subject to confusing emotions. “I’m clear by Nature, as a Rockless Stream,” he claims, but traitors “raise the Mud of Passions up to cloud me” (3.1.319–321). As a result, his own intentions are “huddl’d up in Night” (2.1.70) until near the end of the play. Against his nature, and under the influence of his passions and the Queen Mother, he has to employ the “Arts” (5.1.101) of disguise until he can “wear / The Fox no longer, but put on the Lyon” (5.6.14–15). The main characters on the other side of the political conflict have a more consistent grip on their own intentions than the king does, but their knowledge of what others secretly intend is fatally flawed. Guise maintains a clear-headed determination to seize power and leadership,31 but he is less adept than the king or Marmoutier at understanding the intentions of others, especially when it comes to Marmoutier herself. Sometimes he thinks she is an ambitious trickster, playing his love for her against the king’s (2.2.36–38; 3.1.406). At other times he embraces her as his heaven on earth (5.3.110–47). This failure to understand Marmoutier wreaks havoc on his emotions, but his failure to perceive the king’s hidden intention is life-threatening. Guise’s advisor Malicorne also discovers that failure to understand the hidden purposes of others can be fatal. The others, in this case, however, are not humans Of the three meanings of “Conjuration” current in later Stuart England, according to the OED, two include supernatural invocations, and one of these focuses on the invoking of spirits. 30 Grillon also exhibits Dryden’s ideal of an “open Nature” (3.1.224). 31 In this sense he is different from his counterpart in Absalom and Achitophel. He is more decisive, more aggressive, less inclined toward compassion for the king, and more philosophical than the earlier Monmouth figure. 29

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but denizens of the underworld. He fails to see through the deception perpetrated by the devil Melanax. His anxiety about “The Promise that I made the Prince of Hell” (1.2.2) turns out to have been amply justified when in Act 5 Melanax reveals that he “dazl’d” Malicorne’s eyes with a “Mist” when he signed away his soul in exchange the devil’s power. What appeared to be a 21-year agreement was actually only for 12 years (5.2.70–72). Now the 12 years are up, and the two of them descend together in a lightning flash (5.2.126.SD).32 Malicorne’s inability to see through the devil’s deception connects the mundane with the supernatural dimensions of the play. Ultimately, all of the main characters try to reach beyond human thoughts and behavior toward the hidden intentions of the Almighty. Melanax, the fallen angel, explains how difficult it is in these latter days to find this intersection of the visible and invisible worlds: The ways of Heaven are brok’n since our Fall, … Once we cou’d read our mighty Maker’s mind, As in a Chrystal Mirror, see th’ Idea’s Of things that always are, as He is always. Now shut below in this dark Sphere, By Second causes dimly we may guess, And peep far off on Heavens revolving Orbs, Which cast obscure Reflections from the Throne. (4.2.51–59)

Unlike angels, who communicate directly with their Maker, devils now share with humans the need to study natural phenomena, including the stars, for “obscure Reflections” of God’s intentions. Interestingly enough, in this play the only character who tries to “read” his “Maker’s mind” through stellar signs is the devil Melanax. He advises Malicorne that when Guise and the king were born, their stars “were full oppos’d.” Now, however, Guise must strike while the king’s “Stars are weak” (4.2.42–48). Despite the inherent difficulty of knowing God’s hidden intentions, those loyal to the king try to discern and cooperate with Providence, while the rebels try either to control Providence or to substitute their own version of occult order. Aside from conveying Melanax’s astrological wisdom to Guise, Malicorne does not heed Providential signs. Instead, he tries to shape events to satisfy his own desires. He believes he can apply the power and prophetic vision of a spirit to ensure Guise’s triumph over the king. In this respect, he is like priest-magicians in The Indian Queen and Indian Emperour. In these plays, as the aboriginal American culture collapses, the spirits show a new independence, a reduction of their powers, and a new relationship with humans deriving from the emergent Christian culture.33 No 32 The Faustian pact between Malicorne and Melanax dramatically embodies and extends the verbal associations of Shaftesbury with Satan in the poems. 33 Later, the Queen Mother recalls the American plays when she urges the king to flee, because “when new Gods are made, / The old must quit the Temple” (4.5.24–25).

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longer will they be conjured and forced to influence human activities or to reveal specific secrets from the invisible world. In later works—The Tempest, Annus Mirabilis, Oedipus—the spirits all exhibit this same type of independence and, for the most part, those humans who communicate with them accept their willfulness and incomplete execution of commands. Malicorne, however, is a throwback to Dryden’s earlier conjurers; he persists in believing that he controls Melanax and that Melanax will foresee the precise outcome of current events. In Act 4 these illusions are erased. When he complains that Melanax comes “uncall’d,” and Melanax replies “Always uncall’d” (4.2.5–6), we hear echoes of the High Priest’s consternation in The Indian Emperour when the ghosts of Traxalla and Acacis rise unbidden: I did not for these Ghastly Visions send, Their sudden coming does some ill portend._______ Begone,_______begon._______They will not dis-appear, My Soul is seiz’d with an unusual fear. (9:2.1.76–78)

Later, in Act 5, when Melanax once again appears uncalled, a frustrated Malicorne tries to intimidate him: “I’le ram thee in some knotted Oak, / Where thou shalt sigh and groan to whistling winds” (5.2.48–49). This echoes Dryden’s Prospero, another impotent magician, when he threatens the recalcitrant Ariel: “I will rend an Oak, / And peg thee in his knotty Entrails, till thou / Has howld away twelve Winters more” (10:1.2.216–18). Melanax responds only with a diabolical laugh (5.2.53), and the descent to Hell follows. Malicorne ignores Providence and tries to assist Guise in substituting an alternate political order for the one based on Divine will. Through Malicorne’s Faustian contract, Dryden and Lee make it clear that this effort is the work of the devil. Through language and stage business, they also make it clear that the other rebels are acting under similar diabolical influences. When Grillon calls Malicorne “a Fiend that soars above, / A Prince o’th’ Air, that sets the Mud a moving” (3.1.93–94),34 he is referring to the rebellious city mob, the “moving Dirt” that is “out of Providence’s reach” (3.1.79–81). This urban rabble is led by devils disguised as dissenting preachers who twist the Bible’s message, making it “speak Rebellion, Schism and Murder” (4.2.17). Melanax himself takes the form of a dissenting clergyman at one point, conveying Dryden/Lee’s opinion of such seditious preachers who “have led on the Rabble in all Ages” (4.4.13). The rest of the rebel leaders also try to define an earthly order to suit their passions and pride, but their illusion differs from Malicorne’s. Instead of allying themselves with an alternate order, they try to shape the existing one to suit their own predilections. They borrow “Arguments from Heretick Books” (1.1.23) and employ biblical passages out of context. They try to defend treason with a wishful 34 Grillon’s words continue his assignment of the rebels to a status less than human: “Good Rats, my precious Vermin, / … / You Oven-Bats, you things so far from Souls, / Like Dogs” (3.1.78–81).

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revision of divine right theory in which they become “Saints” (1.1.90), heaven retracts its choice of Henry as king (1.1.77), and the Guise himself becomes the true, God-given savior of his nation: “the Moses, Gideon, David, / The Saviour” (1.1.2–3), one of God’s stars who deserves “a whole Heaven, for room to shine” (8). The language echoes the Jews’ description of Absalom in Absalom and Achitophel. The chief rebel leader also wants to impose his own will on the course of events, but he is less sure than the rest of how this intention can be aligned with divine or natural designs. The Duke of Guise wants to believe it is God’s will that he form a new society to replace the old. After all, … my Right was born with me, And Heaven confest it in my very frame; The Fires that would have form’d ten thousand Angels, Were cram’d together for my single Soul. (4.3.140–43)

Yet for much of the play he sees himself as a kind of creative natural force, nodding this new “World into Creation” and making “the dull Matter … the Form obey” (4.3.153–56). Somewhat like Creon, he rests his confidence more in nature than in God. His “Judgment” is the “Effect of Equal Elements, / And Atoms justly pois’d” (1.2.49–51); his reliance on the support of the City is as dependable as the sunrise (4.3.35–38); and his mistress, Marmoutier, was “made when Nature was in humour, / … / Where all the honest Atoms fought their way” (1.2.69–71). It is this nature-bound aspect of Guise’s thought and behavior that the king emphasizes by comparing him with “a blazing Meteor” (4.1.88), implying that his fame and power are destined to perish like all other natural phenomena.35 The inconsistent terms of Guise’s vision—whether they refer to natural or supernatural orders—reflect the inconsistency of his feelings, and the vision itself reflects his own ambitions, not submission to God’s will. As his passions change, so does his terminology. Driven by jealousy, the same Guise who showed confidence in heavenly sponsorship of his actions vows to confront the king “tho’ Fire-arm’d Cherubims / Shou’d cross my way” (3.2.427–28). Driven by emotion, his occult depiction of Marmoutier swings between angelic and diabolical terms: first she is “meer Angel upon Earth” (1.2.87) and “Image of the Deity” (1.2.154). Later, he suspects that “Ambition sets her on her Head” and she bears the “Cloven Mark” of a “Devil” (2.2.36–39; 4.3.56).36 She is the offspring of Eve and “the Serpent” (4.3.65), becoming one of the “Angel Traytors fit to shine in Palaces” (4.3.67). Nearer to the end, he once again regards her as angelic but now with a “Face pale, as the Cherubins / At Adam’s Fall” (5.3.121–22). Seeing himself as Adam-like is Guise’s last scenario. Abandoning his trust in nature—“O Mighty 35 This analogy echoes the comparison of Corah’s rise with the path of a comet, except that there is no redeeming element of humor here. 36 Earlier he had reveled in the fact that her “Soul” was as “flush’d as mine is with Ambition” (1.2.67).

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Nature! / … why does thou call me on / To fight, yet rob my Limbs of all their use?” (5.5.7–9)—he feels certain that God will forgive him as Adam was forgiven. He will wed Marmoutier in the heaven he has merited (5.3.108–10). This deferred submission to God, not to mention his continuing reliance on personal merit rather than on God’s grace, finally places him among the Malicornes of hell—those who, in Melanax’s terms, “Dispute, know nothing, and believe too late” (5.2.126). Against these imposers of warped intentions and would-be manipulators of occult forces are ranged the loyal defenders of an earthly order that embodies the divine plan. The loyalists seek God’s will through secondary causes, as we have seen in the cases of Marmoutier and Grillon. They also heed the influences of guardian genii, the higher form of love, and their divinely sponsored king. Onstage, there are no visible supernatural agents working for the loyalists, no angelic equivalent of Melanax and none of the middle daemons he seems to monitor and control—the singing spirit (3.1.387–91), the various “Elves / and foolish Fairies” (4.2.99–100), and the ghosts and fiends from Limbo that haunt “sacred Churches” until they “go loaded to the Neather Skies” (4.2.78–87).37 The only spirit life supporting the Royal cause is that of guardian angels or genii.38 Marmoutier’s genius is a reliable guide, even though her uncle wonders if her “better Angel” can survive court politics (3.1.216–21). The king’s genius is truly a “Guardian Angel” that rouses him, when his conciliatory efforts fail, to authorize Guise’s execution (5.1.259–61 and see 4.1.51). On more than one occasion, under the influence of his love for Marmoutier, the king conflates her influence with that of his inner genius. He calls her “Thou Genius of my State” (3.1.316) and “thou good Angel of my way” (4.5.61 and see 3.1.275). This is not empty rhetoric. Dryden and Lee dramatize love both as problematic for humans and, at its highest level, as an agent of God’s will and therefore equivalent to a guardian angel.39 Although Marmoutier does not return the king’s love at the carnal level, she does give her soul to him. In this sense, she does love him “with an Angels temper” (3.1.208). She comes to think of Guise’s attractions as “Charming” but to think of the king’s as more “Noble” (4.3.82–85 and see 3.1.362). For his part, the king does experience an unrequited, very human love for Marmoutier, but he also senses the higher feeling she espouses, a feeling that is “like” the love experienced by “the Powers above” (2.1.144–45). In her presence, he says, “I love and tremble, as at Angels view” (3.1.240). Ultimately, Alchemy and dreams have been, to all intents and purposes, left out of the occult mix, with the exception of Guise’s brief account of an accurately prophetic dream: “last Night I dreamt / The Council-Hall was hung with Crimson round / And all the Cieling plaister’d o’re with black” (5.3.169–71) 38 On Dryden’s persistent belief in genii, see above, “Introduction,” n12. Guise’s genius, which he feels can dominate that of the king (4.3.6), is really the diabolical creature of his “ambition” (5.3.141–42) and, as such, has “assum’d” Malicorne’s “shape” (4.4.167–68) in service to the devil. 39 This continues a theme that pervades Dryden’s works—love as the highest magic— the theme received its fullest treatment in The Conquest of Granada. 37

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neither of them subordinates reason to carnal desire, and this distinguishes each from Guise, whose love for Marmoutier is the kind of powerful and confusing desire warned against by Mayenne early in the play: “to a Politician, / All Passion’s bane, but Love directly death” (1.2.63–64). The loyalists’ willingness to accept divine guidance through genii and spiritual love derives from their trust in the king. He is God’s earthly “Pattern” for the enacting of divine will (3.1.252–53, 312). Far from being “Heaven’s repented Choice” (1.1.77), the king shows himself to have been “born a Monarch” (3.2.43), with a “Soul” that is “bent” toward “Laws, … Custom, Right, Succession” (2.1.120–21). His thoughts, when free of distracting passions, “are Starts Divine” (2.1.13), and while he rules, the court is “a Heav’nly Place” (2.2.13). The loyalists must protect him, even assuming his “Divinity” (4.5.12), because the rebels may kill “some one part of him that’s not Divine, / And so the mortal part … wou’d draw the Divinity / of it into another world” (4.5.19–21).40 When the king’s powers of forgiveness are finally exhausted, he emulates his creator: Even Heaven is wearied with repeated Crimes, Till lightning flashes round to guard the Throne, And the curb’d Thunder grumbles to be gone. (5.1.254–55)

The occult rhetoric of The Duke of Guise is far from subtle. In fact, it is so intrusive and obvious as to constitute an important theme in itself, the theme of hidden intentions, those of humans, those of Satan, those of God. Trust in God’s hidden intentions, as executed by His vice-regent the king, distinguishes the restrained and successful characters from the overly passionate and unsuccessful ones. The latter group, mainly represented by Malicorne and Guise, know their own evil intentions but are so distracted by passion that they have trouble discerning the intentions of others on both the earthly and otherworldly stages. Conversely, those loyal to the king, principally Grillon and Marmoutier, quickly discern the intentions of others but struggle to understand and control their own feelings. Their rational powers, based on trust in the king, and informed by guardian genii, spiritual love, or both, enable them to overcome personal confusion and align their efforts with Providence. The Duke of Guise expresses Dryden’s resurgent confidence in England’s Providential future. As in Absalom and Achitophel and The Medall, he uses occult language and phenomena to underline the diabolical nature of treason and to predict the long-range success of a country led by its rightful monarch. The unexpected death of that rightful monarch did not initially weaken Dryden’s renewed confidence in his ability to discern a divine plan. It did cause him to add “twenty or thirty lines” to Albion and Albanius: An Opera (1685), making room for an “Apotheosis” of Charles (“Postscript” 15:13). With or without 40 Even Melanax agrees when he tells a citizen that the king’s “Politick / Capacity is to be distinguish’d from his Natural; and though you / murder him in one, you may preserve him in the other” (4.4.47–49).

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the revision, however, this theatrical spectacle41 transforms “the double restoration of his Sacred Majesty” (15:11) into a parable or, as Dryden puts it, an “Aesop’s Fable” (Epilogue 15:1), with a Providential moral: despite temporary setbacks, “a rightful Monarch’s Reign” is in the hands of Providence; “The Gods in Heav’n, the Gods on Earth maintain” (3.1.154, 184–85).42 For the most part, says Dryden, the allegory is “so very obvious, that it will no sooner be read than understood” (15:11). Its meaning is conveyed almost entirely through occult materials— supernatural characters, magic, and miracle, all extending “beyond the Limits of Humane Nature” (15:3). Charles’s return after exile and eventual triumph over opposition during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis are presented through interactions among classical deities and allegorical representations of Charles II/ England (Albion), James II as Duke of Albany (Albanius), London (Augusta), the Thames (Thamesis), tyranny (Tyranny), religious fanaticism (Zeal and Zelota), a mindless form of democracy (Democracy), Rye House conspirator Richard Rumbold (Cyclop), Love (Venus), Innocence (Acacia), atheism (Asebia), and others.43 Despite this classical veneer, Dryden makes it clear that we are to understand his fable from a biblical perspective, complete with a background “history” of warfare in heaven followed by the consigning of rebel gods to a “Poeticall Hell” (2.1.SD).44 The allegorical pedigree of Titus Oates starts with Cain and moves through an unnamed sinner in Sodom to one of Belial’s sons who “slandered Naboth in 1 Kings xxi.”45 Near the end of the “Opera,” angels and cherubim accompany Apollo when he announces that Albion/Charles has been “adopted” by heaven (3.1.200.SD). The pivotal actions of the opera are accomplished entirely through occult means. The end of Cromwellian England is achieved when Archon (General Monck) charms Democracy and Zeal with Mercury’s magic wand (1.1.143–70 and SD). This magical method differs markedly from General Monck’s mode of operation as depicted in Astraea Redux. There, Dryden’s analogue for the General’s tactics is empirical chemistry, as opposed to magical alchemy, and the inhabitants of the Hume aptly calls it a “super-masque” (208), McFadden a “short opera” (276). In Pen for a Party 254–68, Harth argues against Waith’s view in “Spectacles of

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State” that the opera is about the revival of London, and against Hammond’s claim in “Dryden’s Albion and Albanius” that the piece fails because it does not finally depict any acts of royal power. In Harth’s view, Dryden’s “distinct purpose” is “the portrayal of the role of Providence in the king’s restoration,” so that “the allegorized divinities are the only … agents of change” (257–58). Harth instructively relates Dryden’s Providentialism to contemporary sermons on the subject. 43 On these and the rest of the allegorical personages, see the commentary and notes in 15: 323–81, and the readings by McFadden (276–89) and Harth, Pen for a Party (254–68). 44 Winn, in “When Beauty Fires the Blood” 263–64, sees an allusion to “the first act of The State of Innocence, … , and all the conjuring scenes from The Indian Queen to Oedipus.” 45 15:374n.

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invisible world are cast as observers rather than as actors. Although playing his Providential part in the general scenario of events, Monck achieves the bloodless Restoration without direct intervention by God or his agents in the invisible world—i.e., through the very “second Causes” that Dryden deliberately excludes from Albion and Albanius (“The Preface” 15:3). The Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis are finally foiled when heaven sends a miraculous “avenging Fire” (the Newmarket fire) to block the regicide intended by Cyclop, Democracy, and Zelota (3.1.167–78 and SD).46 Again, as in the allegory of the first Restoration, in this second one the throne is preserved not by a secondary cause such as the potent royal pronouncement that secures the David’s throne in Abalom and Achitophel, but by a direct action of Providence. Venus (love) now escorts Albanius on his return from exile, and Phoebus announces that Albion must ascend to “Jove’s Imperial Court” (3.188–207). Phoebus then assigns Charles’s immortal soul to an astrologically significant lodging between Libra and Virgo—in a sense joining the souls of Lord Hastings and, as we shall see, of Anne Killigrew and Eleonora, among the stars.47 But while the stellar souls of these latter three emanate personal qualities of moral worth, plus, in the case of Hastings, knowledge, that of Charles radiates the political values of “justice, majesty, and peace” (15:379n). Anne Killigrew’s stellar influence will counteract the moral degeneracy of contemporary art, but Charles’s will be added to the sterner virtues of James to counteract domestic and international conflict.48 With this dual set of qualities, James as king will be “In War Victorious, mild in Peace” (3.1.224). For most of the opera Dryden stresses the relevance of his allegory to contemporary England by setting his occult persons and their actions against a background of actual buildings, streets, landscapes, and interiors in London or Dover.49 At the end, he makes this connection more explicit by stressing the “Immortal” nature of his “Story” (3.2.10) through a masque set in the king’s palace at Windsor. There, just below an airy vision of Charles processing with the knights of the Garter, a tableau symbolizes England as a globe surmounted by Fame and resting on a pedestal depicting Shaftesbury “with Fiends Wings, and Snakes twisted round his Body … incompast by several Phanatical Rebellious Heads, who suck poyson from him, which runs out of a Tap in his Side” (3.2.SD). As noted by McFadden 284, this is an “allegorical allusion to the fire at Newmarket, which prevented the assassination or capture of the king at the Rye House” and “involves significant alteration in the actual chronology.” 47 See the discussions of the odes on Anne Killigrew and Eleonora in Chapter 9, below. 48 As Harth points out, a combination of Charles’s and James’s qualities will be needed in this new phase of English history, for Dryden’s ideal nation unified by a loving monarch has been permanently displaced by one “divided between friends and enemies of the Crown” (Pen for a Party 267). 49 McFadden notes that Dryden tends to use “the newly built London of Charles, an Augustus to this extent at least” (277). 46

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The diabolical Shaftesbury of Absalom and Achitophel and The Duke of Guise now inhabits the fiery abyss in a pre-Copernican universe not unlike the one in Paradise Lost. The earth is an orb in the middle, and, connecting it to heaven, instead of Milton’s golden chain, is the Order of the Garter. Here, as in King Arthur,50 the Order of the Garter represents the historical continuity and eventual immortality of those “Hero’s,” led by Charles and James, who guard and embody divinely established values of love and honor (3.1.235; 3.2.8).51 The resurgence of Dryden’s confidence that he could perceive and poetically render the workings of Providence in current events is clearly visible in his major public writings of the early 1680s, even though he offers no accompanying theory about the poet’s ability to connect the visible and invisible worlds. The occult rhetoric in these works, however, is less subtle and nuanced than it was before 1674. It transparently presents earthly events as enactments of the basic biblical conflict between the divine and the diabolical. Vicious characters embody or collaborate with the forces of Hell. Admirable characters are approved through their alliances with Heaven and Heaven’s anointed king. Rebels are insane, selfcentered materialists who pervert astrology and dabble in black magic. Loyalists respond to the king’s spiritually motivated love and thus perform lawful rituals within the divinely ordained circle of nature. In practice, though not in theory, Dryden clearly demonstrates that Restoration poetry can once again probe the hidden recesses of Providence.

And in “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond.” Pinnock points out that between 1680 and 1682 Charles II had redecorated St.

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George’s Hall at Windsor Castle, “physical headquarters of the Knights of the Garter, a neo-Arthurian chivalric brotherhood,” with a ceiling depicting “Charles II enthroned, surrounded by the insignia of the Garter” (59–60).

Chapter 9

Later Public Poems, Elegies, and Poems about Art, 1685–96 The major public poems and theater pieces of the early 1680s come forth from a Dryden who believed he could discern Providential design in the series of crises that punctuated the reign of Charles II. But whether poetry could effectively convey this vision to the people of England is questioned in the prologue to Albion and Albanius. The prologue laments the repeated failure of Londoners to resist the false allures of commonwealth and religious fanaticism, despite two decades of cautionary instruction by dramatists. In light of this failure, the prologue says, dramatists must now offer instruction in a more obvious dramatic form, hoping to “bubble” (15:28) audiences into accepting Providential truth instead of the false claims of “Freedom and Zeal” (27).1 After the death of Charles II in 1685, Dryden’s occult rhetoric extends such doubts about the effectiveness of literary art to doubts about whether any major art form, quite apart from its impact on the audience, could show show God’s purposes in earthly phenomena. Whether his conversion to the Roman Catholic faith during this same year either influenced or reflected this incertitude is not made clear by the available evidence. However, except for King Arthur, about which much more will be said in Chapter 10, the works of Dryden’s last 15 years do clearly depict a widening gulf between the visible and invisible worlds. Threnodia Augustalis: A Funeral-Pindarique Poem Sacred to the Happy Memory of King Charles II (1685) describes no such gulf when it focuses on the late king, but in its attempt to express hope for England’s future under the succeeding monarchy of James, the occult rhetoric falters. Charles is “God’s Image, God’s Anointed” (3:63), “A Prince on whom (if Heav’n its Eyes cou’d close) / The Welfare of the World it safely might repose” (237–38). His works are repeatedly called “Miracles” (90, 293, 427), their result a “British Heav’n” (9) whose arts and sciences he had cultivated as “by hands Divine” (363), bringing the island into “Heav’ns high way” (353). Charles welcomes death as if it were an Angel bringing good news (208). The quietness of his passing is compared with God’s “gentle whispers” to Elijah in I Kings 19:12–13 (286). Leaving his “sacred earth” (282) behind, he becomes “our Guardian Angel” (387)—presumably assisted by Cromwell’s soul, which had previously assumed this function.2 Charles’s reign, as Barbeau Gardiner points out, was a period of productive interplay among the shaping forces of God’s, the king’s, and Dryden’s art (“Divine and Royal Art” 400). 1 This interpretation of the prologue differs slightly from that of Winn in “When Beauty Fires the Blood” (272–73). 2 Heroique Stanzas 139. On guardian genii, see above, “Introduction,” n12.

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But Dryden cannot explain why Charles should be taken just as he was poised to enjoy the fruits of his labors. Through these “mists of Providence” he “cannot see” (410–11). He insists that James’s accession points to a greater “Good” (499), yet he seems unable to describe James in ways that would show he received his late brother’s legacy of intimacy with the invisible world. James comes across more as one of the “second Causes” (110) that take over now that “the Promis’d Land” is “in view” and “Miracles” are no longer needed (427–28). Released from Charles’s “Charms” (471) of loving husbandry, the country’s martial spirit arises as James assumes the throne. An era of “Arts,” “Science,” and “soft Humanity” (348–50) is displaced by one whose outlines Dryden can only dimly make out as “A Series of Successful years” (508) and “A Conquering Navy” (511). The relation of this future to God’s intentions remains a closed book until heaven chooses to “unfold” it (491–99).3 But James is not able to move his country in the new direction, whatever it is. Instead, he spends his brief, tumultuous reign confronting the domestic crises engendered by his own heavy-handed decisions. For the first time since the early Restoration years, Dryden now calls upon alchemy and white magic to support the new king and his son, as if sensing that their personal assets were not fully adequate to the task of holding the nation together against the evil magicians of the day. In The Hind and the Panther (1687), as in Absalom and Achitophel, he once again senses that “the Daemon” is being permitted into the garden (3:3.314).4 The radical Whigs, those “dire Magicians” (3.721) of the Puritan persuasion, were exposed during Charles’s reign before they could thoroughly infect the Protestant cause; now the Panther/Anglican Church has been charmed again (3.725), and without the divinely sponsored power of James and his mother faith, it is impossible to undo the enchantment. On their own, the Anglicans are outside the true magic circle, and Dryden compares them to false magi: … like Aegyptian Sorcerers you stand, And vainly lift aloft the magick wand, To sweep away the swarms of vermin from the land: You cou’d like them, with like infernal force Produce the plague, but not arrest the course. (2.538–42)

The false magic of the Anglicans can bring on “the plague” of sectarian enthusiasm but cannot stop it from spreading. Beneath the surface optimism of Dryden’s last important public poem, Britannia Rediviva: A Poem on the Birth of the Prince (1688), runs a strong Here I take issue with Barbeau Gardiner, who argues that Dryden “decides that God’s art in history”—i.e., in the accession of James—“is decipherable” (“Divine and Royal Art” 420). 4 This first reference to The Hind and the Panther begins with the volume of California Works and proceeds to the part number (1, 2, or 3) and lines. Hereafter, references to this poem will be only to part number and lines. 3

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undercurrent of anxiety about the future. Dryden feels that the birth of an heir to James could be another of heaven’s “Footsteps,” showing that “God is abroad, and wondrous in his ways” (3:73–75). While the new prince is growing up, he provides his subjects and, indeed, his father with a powerful incentive to secure his future by “living well” (298). For all English subjects, to live well is to practice moderation of hopes, humility, non-violence, charity, and forgiveness (299–302). For the king, in particular, the good and God-like life is, above all, to dispense justice with an even hand, to balance punishment and reward and thus balance the people’s hopes and fears. The use of force is also God-like but not distinctively so. In a lightly veiled reference to James’s penchant for military action, Dryden stresses that force can also be applied with disastrous effects by diabolical tyrants or even unprincipled natural phenomena such as storms (339–51). Worried about James’s dangerous tendency toward the use of extreme measures for enforcing his will,5 Dryden counsels moderation in the interest of leaving the new king a nation in which civil discontent has been prevented from leading to civil violence. If James can bequeath such a legacy, then to sustain it in England’s potentially explosive political atmosphere, his son will need an even more potent link with the divine than either his uncle or his father possessed. Dryden envisions the prince as embodying a mystical power to resist the diabolical magic, the “fascinating Eyes,” “Spells, and Sorceries” (203, 200), of the Whig “Fiends” (122). In developing this idea, he compares the prince not only to Christ, “the Godhead cloath’d in Earth” (123), but also to “the Sacred Tetragrammaton” (197). In this his only overt reference to cabbalistic magic, Dryden implies that the prince is like the fourlettered name of God (in Hebrew) upon which Christian cabbalists, following Pico della Mirandola’s example, would meditate. As a potent symbol for the ineffable creative Word, the Tetragrammaton gave access to both stellar and angelical forces; it became the ultimate door to magical power.6 In the poem, then, this reference suggests that the prince will in some way complete the magical cycle of history begun with Charles’s reign of love and continued in what this poem calls James’s reign of “Justice” (355).7 As we have seen, Dryden symbolized the former as Christ-like cooperation with natural forces through post-Baconian natural magic. Now, he implies that James’s heir will possess a higher magic, one with more direct access to divine power than either Charles or James could command. The prince will in some way “fill the Trine” (327), become the third part of the “Unit” (326), 5 By the time this poem was written, James had already generated ill will by creating a standing army and putting Catholics in charge of regiments. See Kenyon 144–65. 6 See the discussions of cabalistic mysticism in Yates, Occult Philosophy 20–21, 37; and Coudert 138–39. Dryden’s knowledge of the cabala might have come via Agrippa, who discusses the Tetragrammaton in his third book. Barbeau Gardiner overlooks this allusion in her otherwise revealing study, “Dryden’s Britannia Rediviva.” 7 See Garrison 186: “The merciful king of Astraea Redux, challenged in Absalom and Achitophel, gives way to the just king of Britannia Rediviva.” In “The Secular Masque,” of course, Charles’s reign is symbolized by Venus.

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not only in the biological, astrological, and Trinitarian senses,8 but in the sense of rounding out the age of love and justice with a monarchy of more transcendent virtue.9 Beyond such mysticism the poet cannot go. As in Threnodia Augustalis, he qualifies his hopes (and mutes his fears) for the future by stressing the limits of his vision: one cannot expect to “read the Book which Angels cannot read” (227). By failing to express a clear relation between earthly events and heavenly intentions for the future, Dryden’s later public poetry suggests either that God’s plan had gone into hiding (had become indecipherably “occult”) or that Dryden’s own ability to discern that plan in current events was becoming increasingly modest. His last great elegies and his later verses on art and artists suggest that both conclusions are valid, at least from Dryden’s point of view. In To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poësie, and Painting. An Ode (1685), he faced a problem similar to the one he addressed in the poem to Sir Robert Howard 25 years before: how to praise a second-rate artist. In the earlier poem, he compliments Sir Robert on his naturalness and prophetic vision but avoids evaluating the quality of his work. Instead, he uses Sir Robert’s example to define the role of modern poetry, which is to apply “genius” to nature, creating a “providence of wit” that imitates God’s Providence. Like Sir Robert, Anne was a mediocre poet, though her paintings sometimes rose to a high level of distinction. As in the poem to Howard, Dryden subsumes her modest achievements in a larger discussion of “modern” art and emphasizes her naturalness. But here the similarities end. The “modern” artistry of Sir Robert’s poetry aligns well with Providence, but Anne’s art, because it flowers in “This lubrique and adult’rate age” (3:63), is more earthbound. Dryden uses occult language, ranging from astrology and the pre-Copernican cosmos to theories of the soul and demonology, to place her achievement on the scale between the “Debas’d” art of the present age and a truly “Heav’nly” art which registers God’s will and celebrates spiritual love as do the “Tongues of Angels” (57–61).10 At her birth the planets were configured in an “Auspicious Horoscope” (41–43). Her soul reincarnated that of previous poets, as well as that of her poetic father, but her signature excellence lay in moral purity rather than in artistic gifts. It was her character, rather than her artistry, which, purged of all dross, qualified her soul for permanent residence in heaven. On the other hand, this same moral excellence also lifted her art above the “obscene and impious” (59) practices of contemporaries, even as it fell short of what earlier, “Sacred Poets” (188) could create. In the lesser art of painting, her works often “surpass’d the Image in her Mind” not by achieving a Raphael-like transcendence11 but by creating surprising See Earl Miner’s note to line 327 in 3:482. My reading differs slightly from that of Bywaters, who sees this poem as evidence

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that “Dryden has despaired of a human solution to England’s political woes” (171n27). 10 In John Dryden and His World 419, Winn agrees that the poem stresses “Anne’s artless but morally impressive poems,” though he comes to this conclusion through means different from an analysis of the occult material. 11 See “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” 4:59–63.

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natural effects—“shallow brooks that flow’d so clear, / The Bottom did the Top appear” (107–11)—or by boldly mixing “Nature” with the “Fiction” of nymphs, satyrs, and ancient ruins (116–23).12 One of her best portraits figures forth King James’s feelings and thoughts “As when, by Magick, Ghosts are made to appear” (133). This is high praise indeed, since it shows her to be an exception to the maxim, expressed by the king in The Duke of Guise, that neither humans nor daemons “Can trace the winding Labyrinths of Thought” (14:5.1.82–84). But hers is not the art magic Dryden elsewhere ascribes to the Druids or Shakespeare, and the ghosts she conjures are not the visionary ones invoked by a Serapion or a Tiresias. Her magic is limited to freezing on canvas a moment of the king’s psychological life. While her moral soul is “Heav’n born” (34), her artistic “Genius” is “like a “Ball of Fire” which must be “thrown” to keep it blazing before its life ends (142–43). Dryden had begun the poem by wondering how close to the divine throne Anne’s soul has come to rest in the afterlife. Has she been “adopted” by an angel or saint in one of the planetary spheres; is she lodged closer to heaven among the fixed stars; or has she been promoted to a place very near to God among the “Seraphims” (6–11)? The answer is given near the end of the poem: she has joined the Pleiades in the sphere of fixed stars. This location affirms her poetic worth by association with the souls of earlier writers who were said to inhabit this constellation, but it assigns her a certain distance from God’s pronouncements and designs. Had she been destined in death to lodge with the Seraphim, presumably in life she would have joined the sacred artists in crafting a Providential vision. At Judgment Day, because of her moral purity, she leads these earlier, greater artists, though her own art falls somewhat short of theirs. This reading differs a little from the prevailing ones. Tillyard sees Dryden’s use of the occult in this poem as purely ornamental, the equivalent “of good manners and of an ordered way of life” (148), with the intent of inflating Anne Killigrew to heroic proportions in the face of an increasingly scientific, empirical age. Although I can agree that the occult language has the effect of placing a high moral value on Anne’s poetry and painting, I see it as more than merely ornamental. It becomes a metaphorical gauge for measuring the distance between her natural artistry and the sacred achievements of earlier poets and painters. Hoffman thinks this distance is minimal. He emphasizes the closeness of Anne’s art to that of the Almighty. He sees her as redeeming the poetry and painting of her age not through moral force but rather by impressing upon her materials the celestial nature of her soul. Thus, in her case, “Aesthetic creation is analogized to God’s creation” (111). Essentially agreeing with this reading, Reverand sees the poem as the last major example of Dryden’s “extravagant claims for the artist’s power” and for his own “idealistic hopes of his ultimate efficacy as a public poet” (“Final ‘Memorial’” 283). My own feeling, based on an occult reading of the poem, is that it represents not the last of Dryden’s claims for the power of art, his own and that of his age, but rather the beginning of his conviction that “modern” artists have lost their great predecessors’ insight into Providential design. See the annotation by Hammond and Hopkins in Dryden: Selected Poems 369.

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The occult rhetoric of Eleonora: A Panegyrical Poem Dedicated to the Memory of the Late Countess of Abingdon (1692), like that of the Killigrew ode, suggests that Dryden found it increasingly difficult to make a clear connection between what he observed in contemporary life and what he supposed were God’s intentions. Unlike Anne Killigrew, Eleonora was no artist, but Dryden remembers both ladies principally for their moral purity, which he contrasts with the polluted natures of most contemporary humans. Anne’s moral art shines brightly against “This lubrique and adult’rate age” (63), while Eleonora’s Christian behavior becomes a “Satyr on the most of Humane Kind” in “this bad Age” (366, 368). The occult language of the two poems makes similar points about the women’s pristine virtue, expressing their distinctive readiness for heaven through stellar imagery and theories of angels, souls, and dreams. The democratic breadth of Eleonora’s charity relieved “Heav’n” (33) of the need for miracles to save the poor and made her home fit to entertain angels or Jesus himself (52–64). Her acts of friendship reached a truly spiritual level (250–52). She died in her thirties, so that both her life and death were like those of Jesus (299–300). And because in life she knew all the “Offices of Heav’n” so well, the angels must have welcomed her to heaven “As one returning, not as one arriv’d” (130–33). Yet the poet ultimately finds it too difficult to sustain such comparisons. Muse, down again precipitate thy flight; For how can Mortal Eyes sustain Immortal light! (134–45)

There are more appropriate analogies for heroic earthly virtues, analogies more firmly based on observable reality. In the earlier ode he had distinguished Anne Killigrew’s earthbound art from the art magic of Shakespeare, angels, or God Himself. Now, he seeks imagery within the reach of his observation and knowledge to distinguish Eleonora’s saintly works from those which “blest Angels exercise above” (119–20).13 He observes, for example, that her earthly behavior, admirable though it certainly was, was not exactly angelic. She was a “second Eve”—free of Eve’s “Crime” (170) but not of Eve’s “Pride” (204). Similarly, in her thrift she was more like the sun, a second cause, than like heaven itself. Just as the efficient sun can brighten and sustain “Perhaps a thousand other Worlds,” her careful husbandry of resources enabled her to assist many more of the needy than would otherwise be possible (77–81). Dryden continues this reference to observation-based astronomy by comparing her “various Vertues” to “the Milky-Way, all over bright, / But sown so thick with Stars, ’tis undistinguish’d Light” (143–45). To describe the operation and influence of these various virtues on earth, he gives an astrological twist to the observation: her virtues were 13 Bywaters feels that throughout this poem Dryden’s “emphasis … is on the distance between the earthly and the celestial.” I would agree but would add that “the celestial” does not include Eleonora herself in quite the way he supposes (115).

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One, as a Constellation is but one; Though ’tis a Train of Stars, that, rolling on, Rise in their turn, and in the Zodiac run. Ever in Motion; now ’tis Faith ascends, Now Hope, now Charity, that upward tends, And downwards with diffusive Good, descends. (148–53)

That is to say, Eleonora’s virtues in life became a conduit for divine influence, just as the observed stars do through their zodiacal combinations. Observers could understand God’s intentions by noting which of her virtues was on the rise.14 Still, even while applying empirically derived metaphors, Dryden knows he has achieved only “th’imperfect draught” of Eleonora’s excellent life (263). He has taken his description as far as his modest powers allow. Comparing the weakness of his vision to the limitations of modern astronomy, he feels the depiction of Eleonora falls as short As the true height and bigness of a Star Exceeds the Measures of th’ Astronomer. She shines above we know, but in what place, How near the Throne, and Heav’ns Imperial Face, By our weak Opticks is but vainly ghest; Distance and Altitude conceal the rest. (264–69)

In the some seven years that had elapsed since the Killigrew ode, the poet had lost the ability to situate the ascended soul of an admirable person in relation to the Almighty. Anne’s soul is lodged in the Pleiades near kindred spirits, but Eleonora, though certainly she has become “all Intelligence, all Eye” (341) and can look “up to God, or down to us” (342), has vanished into the abyss. Threnodia Augustalis, The Hind and the Panther, Britannia Rediviva, the Killigrew ode, and Eleonora all reveal through their occult language that Dryden could no longer clearly perceive or depict invisible forces purposefully guiding the details of contemporary life. His poems about art and artists during this period attribute similar limitations to contemporary poets and painters, and he advises them to accept these limitations. As he puts in “To my Friend, the Author [Peter Motteux]” (1698), Tis hard, my Friend, to write in such an Age, As damns not only Poets, but the Stage. That sacred Art, by Heav’n it self infus’d, Which Moses, David, Solomon have us’d, Is now to be no more. (7:1–5)

I can agree with Barbeau Gardiner, “Dryden’s Eleonora,” that Eleonora is “a sign of the divine presence in England” (106), but to say that her behavior is “at one with the community of angels” (104) is to go beyond what I can find in the poem. On the persistence of astrology in the first scientific age, see above, “Introduction,” pp. 5 and 7. 14

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In “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On His Comedy, call’d, The DoubleDealer” (1693), Dryden nominates the young author for the “Throne of Wit” (4:53) and predicts he will be seen as the first since Shakespeare to have received the divine gift of “Genius” (60). However, at the moment, Dryden quietly implies, it is too early to tell. Almost no occult language is used to describe Congreve’s abilities. He is not yet seen as embodying the lost sacred art but rather as joining the “boisterous English Wit” of “the Gyant Race, before the Flood” (10, 5) with the “skill” of “this Age” (12, 28). The lines on Congreve are to the renewal of visionary artistry what Britannia Rediviva is to the renewal of visionary leadership: each is a poem of hope. With regard to Restoration painting, however, Dryden is less sanguine. In the epistle “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” (1694) he compares his own poetic subordination to Shakespeare and Virgil with Kneller’s relation to Raphael and Titian. They were “wondrous” and “Divine” in their creativity (4:140, 149), true magicians of painting as Shakespeare was a true magician of poetry. Kneller, like Dryden himself, should be “Proud to be less; but of [their] Godlike Race” (76). “Bounded by the Times” (147), he must be content with “imitating Life” (18) rather than contending “with Heroes Memory” (119). Kneller has taken his craft as far as anyone can in “these Inferiour Times” (118); it remains earthbound and lacks the Promethean “Fire” (25) that Dryden once expected the greatest Restoration artists to possess. But in the final analysis, it imitates life so well, exists in such complete harmony with “Nature” (8), that “Time” will “Add every Grace” that the painter could not provide (176–81).15 Read from an occult perspective, the poems about music and musicians run roughly parallel to those about poetry and painting. The two poems celebrating St. Cecilia’s Day posit a scale of artistic excellence stretching from the most heavenly to the most profane,16 while the elegy on Purcell laments the loss of one who might have restored music to its highest calling in these inferior days. “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” starts by representing God’s own creative magic in musical terms. He composes the universe by uniting the physical and supernal dimensions of reality in a harmony “closing full in Man” (3:15). Only the lower range of this harmony could be re-created by the pagan musician Orpheus. His tuneful wizardry could command plants, animals, and human passions but could not reach beyond the “Woes of hopeless Lovers” (35) into the realm of “holy Love” (45). This required the Christian artistry of St. Cecilia. With her faith-inspired organ, she “rais’d the wonder high’r” (51), unwittingly conjuring “An angel”

Though he does not take up the topic of magic, Reverand provides an instructive close reading of the imagery of this poem in “Dryden on Dryden.” For a recent discussion of Dryden’s notion of imitation, see Mahoney 22–32. 16 In Dryden’s Poetry 282, Miner uses a diagram from Robert Fludd’s Historia to illustrate this scale as it applies to the St. Cecilia ode. 15

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(53) from the heavenly realm.17 The poem not only brackets all of human history between God’s initial tuning and the final untuning of “the Sky” (63); it implies that all of human art can be placed somewhere between the profane and sacred extremes represented by Orpheus and St. Cecilia. A similar contrast is drawn in “Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Musique. An Ode, In Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day” (1697). There, Timotheus is the Orpheus figure,18 egotistically manipulating emotions through masterful fiction-making that is in one instance compared to necromancy (7:138–46). Again, St. Cecilia, adding the sacred “Arts” of the organ to “Nature’s Mother-Wit,” enlarges the “narrow Bounds” of pagan music and is able to invoke “an Angel” (161–70).19 Of the composers in Dryden’s time, only Purcell could approach such musical magic. In “An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell” (1696) he is both “our Orpheus” (4:16), with power to tune the discord of hell (21–22), and the teacher of angel singers (23). Thus he might have linked nature and heaven in the full “Scale of Musick” (24), but unfortunately, The God-like Man, Alas, too soon retir’d, As He too late began. (13–15)20

After 1688, Dryden’s occult rhetoric suggests that he, like Purcell, had “retir’d”—in his case, not from life itself and certainly not from his writing career, but from the effort to make detailed sense of current English politics. He exhibits a desire, says Bywaters, “to remove himself from his age,” placing himself alongside Cicero and Spenser within “a transcendent literary tradition to which politics is ultimately irrelevant” (37). Dryden abandons visionary journalism, as Milton did a generation earlier. When Milton’s ideals were undermined by baffling events, he backed away from contemporary life and composed an epic that depicted human nature itself as the just expression of God’s will. Dryden does something similar in King Arthur, as we shall see. The best analyses of this poem are those of Hollander 404–10 and Jay Arnold Levine 38–50. Levine reminds us that in Clement of Alexandria, Orpheus is spoken of as “influenced by daemons” (47); clearly, says Levine, Dryden considers the harps of Orpheus and Jubal inferior to Cecilia’s organ, which more closely approximates the celestial harmony. Coltharp has recently argued that this poem attempts to preserve “Baroque emotionalism,” “spiritual presence,” and “internal freedom” within “a disenchanted world” (1–18). 18 See Hollander 412–21. 19 Although I can readily agree with Bywaters, who sees the poem as favoring the power of all art, including that of both Timotheus and Cecilia, over “the emptiness of political achievement” (133), I can find little support for Turner’s argument that the poem actually equates Timotheus and Cecilia, since both deal in “modulations” of “the same seductive sounds” (331). In my reading, Dryden is commenting on the human difficulty of rising to the higher modulations of love and the dangers inherent in exploiting its lower modulations. See also Buck, and Carnochan. 20 On this poem, see Hollander 404 and Miner, Dryden’s Poetry 252–54. 17

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Chapter 10

King Arthur, 1691 There has been a tendency among recent scholars to see the later Dryden as pessimistic.1 I find no evidence of such pessimism. Although, as we have seen, he had come to doubt the power of art and artists to discern God’s future plans in the current state of affairs, he seems not to have lost his faith that such plans existed. In this respect, he was like Milton. Despite Milton’s personal misfortunes and disenchantment about the direction English politics had taken since Cromwell’s death, Paradise Lost is profoundly optimistic. For each believer, Milton claims, the tragedy of history is offset by a “Paradise within” during this life and by the triumph of Christian salvation after death. Dryden avoids pessimism in a similar way, though within a less biblical context, in King Arthur: or, The British Worthy. A Dramatick Opera (1691). As his principles are violated by later Stuart politics, he withdraws from the fray and composes not an epic but a semi-opera that is epic in scope and purpose. To this task he brings the kind of perspective used in All for Love—a long view, rich in occult material drawn from cultural history and mythology—except in this case his sources are imbedded in his own culture rather than in one from the ancient world. The result is a celebration of what he now regards as the essential English “constitution.” Imbedded within the British character, he suggests, are a redeeming set of values and an authenticating form of perception. These, and not a particular leader or party, will protect England from permanent disruption in bad times and will guarantee a brighter, divinely ordained future. The key to this future is held only by those who can “see” beneath the chaotic surface of current events and into the deep forces of Providence.2 One is reminded of how, nearly two centuries later, Gerard Manly Hopkins felt he could see through the current smudge of Victorian England and into “the dearest freshness deep down things.”3 Dryden claimed that the death of his patron, Charles II, followed by the exile of James II, obliged him to delete many beauties from the original version of King Arthur before it could be produced in 1691.4 Taking him at his word, Walter Scott See Bywaters 107 and 107n8. The ensuing analysis is adapted from my article, “Dryden’s King Arthur and the

1 2

Literary Tradition,” substantial portions of which are quoted by permission of the editor, Studies in Philology. My research toward this article was generously supported by a shortterm resident fellowship at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, matched by a grant from the Better English Fund established by John C. Hodges at the University of Tennessee. 3 “God’s Grandeur” 10. 4 “To the Marquiss of Hallifax” 16:3, 6.

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started a century and a half of counterproductive criticism by reading the 1691 rendition as “a mere fairy tale, as totally divested as possible of any meaning beyond extravagant adventure” (Works 8:111).5 Since about 1970, however, students of Dryden have been unwilling to attribute the formal idiosyncrasy of King Arthur6 merely to shoddy revisions. Waith has noted its debt to the “heroic politics” of English court masques (“Spectacles of State”). Alssid has pointed to the complex “growing together” of spectacle, music, and speech, in effect a fusing of the ideal and the historical, as Emmeline and Arthur grow in sophistication and love (“Impossible Form”). Thinking along the same lines, Altieri has argued that myth and reality, imagination and reason finally collapse into a baroque emblem, analogous to a Lord Mayor’s pageant, in which national pride is celebrated through a fusion of mercantile and feudal forms of order. More recently, Price has depicted Dryden and Purcell as musically transforming scrambled “shards” of the original Tory allegory into a comical roasting of “heroism, passion, even patriotism” by “humorous juxtaposition.”7 Winn concentrates on the relation of sex and power in King Arthur, and emphasizes the role of Philidel (“When Beauty Fires the Blood” 274–302). Before we are prepared to capitalize on such findings, at least one other aspect of the work needs to be explored farther, its transformation of literary tradition. Having lost his hopes for a lasting Stuart regime that would become the focal point of the country’s mission, Dryden seems to have adapted the Arthurian material so that it could foreshadow not the monarchy of 1691 but rather a “Race of Hero’s” (16: 5.2.221) whose clear vision of Providence would guarantee the preservation of Britain’s essential strengths. By reaching back to the beginning of British nationalism, before the time of those great Saxon kings with whom he had associated James,8 Dryden could link the divine mission of his country not with a particular line of royal succession but with a particular mode of perception that was born within the first British worthy. This mode is fundamentally occult, in that it sees behind the material phenomena of history. To grasp Dryden’s occult rhetoric we need to understand the variations he rings on the versions of Arthurian legend available to his contemporaries. Arthurian scholars are struck by Dryden’s apparent neglect of key elements in the legend, some feeling that he was insensitive to its poetic beauty and mythic resonance, others assuming that he fell victim to debased court tastes, scientific rationalism, or neoclassicism.9 None of these attitudes would have made much sense to Restoration readers or spectators. Unlike their twentieth-century descendants, they 7 8

See also Scott’s introduction to Canto 1 of Marmion, cited by MacCallum 148. Hume calls it a “peculiar potpourri” (Development 405). On the musical dimension of the work, see also Dent, Haun, and Moore. As in, for example, Britannia Rediviva 3:216. See Barbeau Gardiner, “Dryden’s Britannia Rediviva” 275. 9 See MacCallum 160; Brinkley 142–46; Reid 34–35, 77; Van der Ven-Ten Bensel 169–74; and Merriman 51–64. 5 6

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would not automatically have compared the 1691 Arthur to Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Instead, they would have had in mind a rich miscellany of easily accessible Arthurian literature, ranging from ostensible “histories” to out-and-out romances.10 Many of the elements in Dryden’s version are derived from what Restoration readers would have considered the corpus of information about the British worthy. The opera’s action is connected with two of Arthur’s well-known 12 battles which, in much of the literature as in the opera itself (5.2.1), were associated with the twelve labors of Hercules.11 The setting, in “this Barren-Down” (1.1.10) near a heavily wooded hill at the summit of which is a fortress, combines two, possibly three familiar locations of the battles: “Baunsedowne in Somer” (also referred to as Badon Hill, Bathen-hill, and Bath),12 “the wood Calidon” (or Caledon), and “the Castle called Guynien” (or Gwynyon).13 Of the Restoration accounts, the one closest to Dryden’s in regard to setting is that of Cressy, who writes that Arthur drove the Saxons from the siege of “Bathe” and back “to Mountain Badonicus,” which is “now called Bannesdown, at the foot whereof is … Bathestone, where to this day are seen rampires and trenches.”14 Other borrowings from the Arthurian story as Restoration audiences might have known it are the contrast between the Saxon and Christian religions, the names and functions of certain characters, and the association of Arthur with the worthies and the Order of the Garter. Of these last two elements more will be said in due course.15 For the moment, suffice it to note that the inspiration for the scene of Saxon religious ritual (1.2), which Summers links with Tacitus (Dramatic Works 6:233), might also owe something to Sammes, who interpolates into his The more contemporary accounts were characterized by a cautious, skeptical treatment of the material, probably a reflection of Whig bias or the vogue for “scientific” inquiry (see Brinkley 61–63). Neither Milton’s outright dismissal of the whole tradition as mere legend nor the retailing of the full-blown “History” is typical. Most of the accounts begin by eliminating the more “fabulous” elements before relaying what their authors regard as the essential facts (see Brinkley 61–84 and 207–209). Somehow, however, Brinkley overlooks the anonymous Great Britain’s Glory, 1685?), a free paraphrase of Malory retelling the standard “history.” See Milton, History of Britain 122–26. 11 See, for example, Fuller, History of the Worthies 201 and Merriman 43 and n90. 12 John Selden’s notes on Drayton’s Poly-Olbion 69; and see Leland, Winstanley 12, and Howell 97–98. 13 Winstanley 12, and Leland 21. 14 Cressy 219. Klausner (29–30) thinks Dryden owed something to Thomas Gale’s Scriptores quindecim, though it was not in print while Dryden was composing King Arthur. 15 Hill traces Arthur and Merlin directly to the mainstream of Arthurian legend, as represented in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Nennius, Layamon, and their successors, though, as we shall see, Dryden’s audience would probably have had other sources in mind as well. Names of other characters were drawn from Arthurian sources but not from episodes involving Arthur himself; such are Arthur’s friend Aurelius, his Saxon counterpart Guillamar, and Emmeline’s attendant Matilda. I shall add considerably to Hill’s discussion of Oswald, Conon, and Emmeline. 10

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1676 account of early British kings a long, lavishly illustrated discussion of the Saxon theology (431–59). Sammes, of course, was merely making more explicit a theme that runs through all the monkish chronicles of British history, the theme of Christianity emerging and displacing pagan religion as Britain herself assumes national identity and international prominence.16 Thus, Dryden founded the opera on a setting and overarching theme that were well known to contemporary readers of Arthurian literature. The challenge is to understand his interpretation of the familiar.17 The best guide to that interpretation lies in his only blatant departure from established features of the Arthurian story, his invention of a blind daughter for Conon, Duke of Cornwall. In this character, who is called Emmeline, Dryden embodies what becomes the controlling motif in the opera, the motif of perception. That he chose not to focus the love story on Arthur’s legendary relationship with Guenevere (Geoffrey’s Ganhumara or Malory’s Gwenyvere) would not have startled the first audiences as it does any modern reader. They knew Arthur not only as Lancelot’s rival but also as the incestuous lover of Margawze in the romance tradition18 and as the illegitimate father of the popular “Tom A Lincolne” by virtue of an affair with “faire Angellica the Earle of Londons Daughter” (Richard Johnson, Most Pleasant History). Indeed, they need not have assumed that Arthur had only one wife. In 1668 Cressy speaks of a tradition that after the death of “Guenevera” Arthur “married a wife named Guenhumara descended from the Noble stock of the Romans,” an unexcelled beauty who “had been brought up in the Court of the Duke of Cornwal” (241).19 These two ladies are one and the same in most of the other sources, and while not all give her Roman blood, most agree that she was indeed brought up by Cador, Duke of Cornwall, the loyal general to whose offspring Arthur leaves his crown.20 This same Cador was remembered in the Restoration as the father and guardian of yet another beauteous lady, Laura, the sister of Chinon in Christopher Middleton’s popular Chinon of England. Perhaps Dryden names him “Conon” in an allusion to the “faithfull counseller” in Thomas Hughes’s The Misfortunes of Arthur (1597).21 An interesting study of this theme, as it is worked out through the interplay of medieval literature and politics, is to be found in Lagorio. 17 McLeod instructively discusses the “competing myths of Trojan and Saxon racial identity” in King Arthur, but he cites only Geoffrey of Monmouth as Dryden’s source and provides no evidence for his claim that “Dryden … created much of the plot from his own imagination” (85). 18 See Merriman 23. A mock-romantic Arthur, “to Nuptial Ties a Slave,” and his “fair Geneura” appear in Dryden’s version of “The Wife of Bath Her Tale” (7:1, 65–73). 19 Leland also mentions this tradition (65). 20 See Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History 37, Leland 62 (where the lady is said to be a kinswoman of the Duke), and Howell 99. See also Chester’s Loves Martyr 52–54, Baker 4, Dugdale 1, Winstanley 11, and Heylyn 310. 21 Although the name “Conon” derives also from Arthurian legend through Geoffrey and Gildas (see Hill 26), there it is not an especially admirable name, since it is most often 16

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In light of these quasi-historical and literary traditions, it would not have been difficult for the Restoration audience to imagine that Cador/Conon could have raised another daughter, Emmeline, or that she could have become the love object of an Arthur capable of philandering and reputed to have married more than once. Nevertheless, the sheer novelty of the conception would have drawn special attention to the charming scenes about Emmeline’s blindness and recovery of sight. These scenes, in turn, would have led the more sensitive spectator to inferences about Arthur’s own partial sightedness and, indeed, about the rhetoric of the entire opera, for it is Merlin’s art that restores full sight to both Emmeline and Arthur, and it is Dryden’s theatrical magic that clarifies the audience’s perception of England after 1688.22 In 1663 Robert Boyle told of “a Maid of about Eighteen,” blind from birth because of cataracts, who was “brought to the free Use of her Eyes” and “was so ravisht” at the “spectacle of so many and various Objects … that … she was in danger to loose the eyes of her Mind by those of her Body” (Some Considerations 3). When Emmeline feels her eyes “Unseal’d,” she initially expects to “run mad for Pleasure” (3.2.90, 93), like Boyle’s maid,23 but a more mature response immediately succeeds. She makes philosophical observations: her newly awakened eyes do not give her access to anything fundamentally new but merely “let in Knowledge by another sense” (3.2.104). The answer to her Cartesian question “what Thing am I?” is the Cartesian one: the self is not material, and the body which sight reveals is but a “Reflection” (3.2.112, 116). When Osmond tries to exploit her untutored eyes by magically tempting them with “the Fruit of Desire,” she readily detects the cheat: “From my sight, / Thou all thy Devils in one” (3.2.324, 337–38). The “eyes of her Mind” remain superior to “those of her Body.” If Matilda and Arthur are her tutors in empirical matters, they are her students in matters pertaining to the soul’s vision (see 1.1.102–60).24 Even before she can physically see the forces of earthly life, she possesses a spiritual introspection that enables

associated with “Aurelius Conanus,” who usurped the crown by murdering Constantine, the son of Cador, to whom Arthur left the throne: see the Restoration accounts in Baker 4 and Heylyn 310. 22 Alssid, “Impossible Form” 132–33, was the first to suggest larger thematic implications of Emmeline’s education. 23 Hill (27) is reminded of Shakespeare’s Miranda. But a closer analogue would be Dorinda, the sexually curious and sense-bound sister of Miranda in the Dryden/Davenant version of The Tempest (1667). All three ladies make comical blunders in their efforts to interpret reality before their judgment has been sufficiently well informed. Winn also finds a source in The State of Innocence where “Eve sees her reflection in the pool and meets Adam” (“When Beauty Fires the Blood” 295). 24 Eric Jager and I were working on the epistemological issues at the same time. See Jager’s “Educating the Senses.” He and I slightly disagree on the importance of empiricism in the play, and he notices statements by William Molyneux and John Locke that post-dated Dryden’s composition—though not his revision — of the opera (see Price 291–95).

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her to evaluate them: through her “shut Eyes” (3.2.167) the trumpet had “an angry fighting Face” (1.1.144) and Osmond’s “Voice look’d ugly” (3.2.168). Arthur, too, needs wholeness of “vision,” but his deficiency is the converse of Emmeline’s. In full possession of the empirical awareness that she lacks, he must learn to look with the eyes of his mind. Both his deficiency and its cure are pointed up by his rivalry with Oswald. Whereas Oswald regards both the lady and her country as the empires or commodities upon whose acquisition his reputation and personal satisfaction depend—“Gaining is our End, in War or Love” (2.4.31)— Arthur learns to value them in a new way. At first, Arthur understands love and duty in purely conventional terms, as competing desires for objects belonging to separate worlds. His love for Emmeline is obviously genuine but misperceived: he regards her as a romantic icon, a characterless Guenevere defined by “Carnation” lips, “dark shaded Eye-brows, / Black Eyes, And Snow white Forehead” (1.1.127–28). Behind the romantic facade this suggests a shallow, sensual, and proprietary kind of desire, and Emmeline immediately perceives this: “you do not love on equal terms: / I love you dearly, without all these helps” (1.1.130). Later, Arthur offers a piece of his kingdom in exchange for her, as if love and empire were mutually exclusive conquests to be bartered with (2.4.20–21, 58–60). Not until he triumphs over Osmond’s illusory temptation to treat Emmeline as a momentary conquest of the flesh does he become “worthy” of her (4.2). But the future of Britain depends only in part upon the displacing of Oswald’s perception of love by Arthur’s; it also hangs on the emergence of a new vision of heroism. Just as the former is defined through the rivalry for Emmeline, so the latter is brought into focus by the struggle for control of Britain. As the reiterated parallel between Emmeline and Britain (2.4.1–5, 60–66; 5.2.30–44) makes clear, however, success in both endeavors depends less on physical prowess or gallantry than on redeemed sight. From the well-read members of the Restoration audience, Dryden’s Oswald would have evoked an ambivalent response. On the one hand, he would have seemed a major impediment to the unfolding of Britain’s history as a Christian nation, for he is bent on perpetuating the realpolitik that had always defined relations between the kings of Kent and the Britons. In the standard “histories,” Vortigern, an evil Duke of Cornwall and one of Arthur’s predecessors as King of the Britons, had given Kent to Hengist in exchange for marriage to the Saxon’s ravishing daughter, Rowena.25 Now, in Dryden’s account, the second king of Kent wishes not only to “revenge my Father Hengist’s death” (1.2.4) but also to acquire in the bargain the equally ravishing daughter of Vortigern’s descendent, Conon, Duke of Cornwall, who has promised her to Arthur. Yet Dryden seems deliberately to have avoided giving Hengist’s son the “historical” name of Osric (Roger of Wendover 1:18) and instead opts for 25 In 5.2.52–54, Dryden makes Kent the price of Hengist’s military aid, which is only part of the story: see Pagitt 7–9 and Warner 88–89.

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“Oswald,” the name of the Saxon King of Northumbria who was converted to Christianity after the arrival of St. Augustine.26 For the Restoration audience, the positive associations of this name would have seemed more in keeping with the character of Dryden’s king of Kent, who is not only revengeful, proud, ambitious, and possessive (1.2.4, 83–86; 2.2.81–82), but also “open Hearted,” “violently brave,” and honorable (1.1.36–39; 2.2.91; 5.2.51), a worthy predecessor of the Christianized Saxons of a later day. Thus, the name change helps Dryden to dissociate Oswald from his advisor, the villainous conjurer Osmond, and to place him in the ranks of admirable heathens in previous plays, figures such as Acacis in The Indian Queen, Montezuma in The Indian Emperour, and Ozmyn in The Conquest of Granada. What Dryden is implying is that Oswald, his virtues notwithstanding, is stuck in a psychological, spiritual, and ultimately historical rut. He is a pagan hero who, more like Acacis than Ozmyn (or Almanzor), and even somewhat like Antony, is not given a role in the emerging Christian order. It is simply not “Heav’ns time” (3.1.25) for the “Saxon Race” to conquer (1.2.10), but Oswald, unlike Montezuma, cannot see this. The juxtaposing of Arthur not only to Oswald but also to Aeneas (5.2.30) emphasizes the British worthy’s destiny as their successor. He redeems their heroism as he learns to see the hero’s proper function in a Christian society. By perceiving his historical role, Arthur, instead of Oswald, becomes the more potent historical force. His education in whole vision is presented to the Restoration audience within a rich context of literary allusions to Christian heroes like Rinaldo, Tancred, and Godfrey. The overall strategy is reminiscent of Tasso. In Act 4 Arthur confronts a series of illusions created by the diabolical magic of Osmond. The passage over the golden bridge and subsequent sexual temptation by naked nymphs are derived from Rinaldo’s visit to the garden of Armida in the Gerusalemm Liberata 18:21 ff.27 The echoes from Homer’s Circe, Ariosto’s Alcina, Trissino’s Faleria, and Spenser’s Bower of Bliss seem more remote than this one from Tasso. Unlike Rinaldo, however, whose resistance is clearly a product of faith alone, Arthur’s reason and experience save him from the lure of the naked sirens. High principles reinforced by careful observation and rational analysis are key traits for the British hero. Not until he faces the second illusion, the figure of bleeding Emmeline emerging from the tree he has just slashed, do his earthbound faculties fail him. Although here Dryden may again be alluding to Tasso, to Armida’s emergence from the charmed myrtle in 18:30–35 (Summers, Dramatic Works 6:234), the parallel is closer to the episode in 13:38–45, where Tancred cuts through the trunk of a myrtle that embodies the image of his beloved Clorinda (Tasso 13:38–45). At this point, Arthur abandons his “Reason,” recalling his “Grandsire” Adam (4.2.126, 130), and must be rescued by divine intervention. Just as Philidel had See Hill 26 and Pagitt 9. Noted by Scott, Works 8:111, and Summers, Dramatic Works 6:233–34, 563.

26 27

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earlier used Merlin’s potion to dissolve the “Films” that clouded Emmeline’s sight (3.2.81), now the spirit uses Merlin’s wand to dissolve the illusion that clouds Arthur’s vision, freeing him to disenchant the grove with his sword (4.2.130–44). The successor to Aeneas and Oswald needs more than martial prowess and more than rational strength to evaluate evidence from his senses. To distinguish truth from fiction, he must ultimately rely upon faith. To emphasize this, Dryden uses his dramatic structure. Near the end of Act 4, Arthur is divinely empowered to distinguish the false from the true Emmeline. At the beginning of Act 5, he matches this redeemed perception with a new understanding of his country: before (2.4.58–60), he had been willing to exchange part of it for the return of a love object; now, he understands that the land is “Sacred to Freedom” (5.2.56). Emmeline and Britain are “two Crowns” (5.2.43) of the same immaterial sort, and Arthur can now see their essential value with the eyes of the mind. The true possession of each is founded not upon conquest but upon Providential matching, what Emmeline calls a “Dance of Hearts” (2.2.38). Neither bestows a static, willful sovereignty over conventionally perceived objects but rather a responsibility to distinguish (and preserve) God’s chosen vessel of history amidst the manifold illusions that tempt the corrupt vision of all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.28 Here, as in several of Dryden’s earlier plays, the relation between vision and delusion is expressed in terms of magic, demonology, and prophecy. As in The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperour, a pagan wizard-prophet is frustrated when he tries to force events to take a certain direction. As in The Duke of Guise, such magical power is clearly attributable to a covenant with the satanic underworld. And as in The Tempest, real human potency is shown to depend not upon conjuration of daemons or manipulation of occult energy, but rather upon a kind of cooperation between unbiased empirical study and pious insight into the designs of Providence. In regard to its employment of magic, King Arthur differs from these previous plays not so much in its philosophical orientation as in the kind of emphasis it lavishes on the whole subject. Of the eight major set pieces of spectacle, five are (within the stage world) magical illusions, and throughout the opera one is made aware that the rivalry between Arthur and Oswald, Britons and Saxons, is only a front for the grander competition between Providential and satanic forces, as Merlin and Osmond oppose “Art with Art, … Charms with Charms,” and spirits with spirits (1.1.69). The effect of this emphasis is to shift the focus of Arthurian story away from its potential value as allegory, as a pattern of events parallel to specific recent developments in English history. Instead, the action takes on a mythical coloration. It becomes a genesis story, a story about the birth of a Christian nation whose divinely ordained future is protected by a new race of 28 Perhaps Dryden thought of Emmeline and Arthur as antitheses of Caeca, a blind and decayed widow, and her suitor Pysander, who overcomes his revulsion to marry her for an estate, in Sir Robert Howard’s Blind Lady, in Poems 29–140.

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Christian heroes. And the essential quality of the new heroism, also highlighted by the emphasis on magic, is Christian perception. The connection between magic and Christian perception would have been underlined for the Restoration audience by Dryden’s adaptation of a well-known episode in popular literature. The evil necromancer in King Arthur, who combats the Christian magus and his “Aiery Legions” (1.1.68) with formidable powers of enchantment and the aid of an “Earthy Spirit” (1.2.15.SD), would have reminded some members of the audience of another “Osmond,” the wizard in Richard Johnson’s prose romance, The Seven Champions of Christendom, which went through numerous editions from 1596 to the end of the seventeenth century and was telescoped into a play by John Kirke in 1638. Like Dryden’s Osmond, this one is a conjurer who is asked by a besieged pagan leader—here, the “Soldan of Persia”—to help defeat the Christians: “raise a troop of black infernal fiends,” urges the Soldan, “to fight against the cursed Christians.” The magician complies by raising spirits from “earth, water, air, and fire,” and when these fail to daunt the Christian champions, he anticipates Dryden’s Osmond in another way. Just as the latter invokes spirits to tempt Emmeline with “Gay Shows” (3.2.331) and to ensnare Arthur by taking the forms of naked syrens (4.2.28–47), so Johnson’s Osmond summons daemons in the shapes of nubile virgins to lure the Christian worthies into a tent of love (170–77). Eventually, St. George hacks the tent to pieces and chains Osmond to “the root of an old blasted oak,” after which, refusing to be thus “fettered … by the immortal powers of the Christian God,” Osmond commits a grisly suicide (180–83). In Dryden’s play Osmond does not meet his doom in this fashion. Rather, he is consigned to a dungeon by Merlin, his rival in magic. This competition between the two sorcerers belongs to a dramatic tradition that was well established by the 1690s. Dryden’s audience would probably have been most familiar with it through stage revivals of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589–90, revived October 1662) and William Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin (c. 1622, edition published 1662).29 The former pits Bacon’s magical powers against those of the German conjurer Vandermast, whose umbra Hercules is rendered helpless by Bacon’s more potent daemons. The nationalism of the scene, with King Henry commending Bacon for honoring “England with thy skill” (1.9.165–66), would have pleased Dryden, although the religious implications of the magicians’ contest in King Arthur have closer affinities with the one in The Birth of Merlin. There, the Christian hermit Anselme routs the daemons of Proximus, a pagan Saxon wizard, and enlists an army of angel-soldiers to defeat the Saxon forces. After his labors,

Other contributions to the tradition—but more remote from Dryden’s practice, and not revived in the Restoration theater—were the magicians’ contests in Anthony Munday’s John A Kent and John A Cumber (c. 1595) and in John of Bordeaux; or, The Second Part of Friar Bacon (c. 1590). I was guided to these and other Renaissance plays using this convention by Reed 100–116 and Harris 119–26. 29

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Anselme attributes his power over heathen charms entirely to God, for “He onely can controul both hell and thee.”30 This moral, which is similar to the one Dryden had dramatized through the actions of Nigrinus in Tyrannick Love, is elaborated upon in King Arthur. Like his political master Oswald, and like the Renaissance magicians condemned for their pride by Francis Bacon,31 Osmond tries to impose self-willed order on sublunar events. Usually he does so in the name of pagan religion, creating illusions to distract the Christians from their destiny (2.1.55–109; 4.2.28–131). Once, however, his pride and lust lead him to take matters into his own hands: he drugs and imprisons Oswald (3.2.252–61) and, when Emmeline rejects the sensual lure of his masque about Cupid and the frozen Genius (3.2.330–34), he tries to rape her (3.2.339–40). He is clearly a black magician, deriving his powers from the Christian hell, though he thinks of himself as serving the pagan underworld. His “trusty Fiend” Grimbald, an “earthy Spirit” (1.2.14 and 15.SD), is neither a Rosicrucian elemental nor a guardian genius32 but confessedly a fallen angel who “had a Voice in Heav’n, ere Sulph’rous Steams / Had damp’d it” (2.1.84–85). Even Philidel, “an Airy Shape, the tender’st” of his “kind,” is no neo-Platonic sprite but “The last seduc’d” of the angels, the “least deform’d of Hell; / Half white, and shuffl’d in the Crowd,” she “fell” (2.1.13–15).33 Merlin, on the other hand, places little confidence in magical arts and is certainly no black sorcerer, even though Philidel, a tender devil, helps him.34 In fact, he works almost no magic at all, at least not in the sense of forcing earthly events into a certain pattern. He is the heir of Dryden’s Prospero, who discovered that magic is impotent, that the most powerful forces in life are those of human passions and divinely sponsored effort. Thus, his function, like that of Rowley’s Anselme, is to serve as an earthly catalyst for God’s will. This version of Merlin is more in keeping with the general trend of seventeenth-century accounts than is the version passed down from the Middle Ages. In the older version, he is a half-devil whose wizardry and prophecies, used by British kings beginning with Vortigern, chiefly include the discovery of prodigious dragons beneath Vortigern’s castle, the miraculous transportation of Stonehenge from Ireland to Salisbury plains, and the enchanting of Igrayne in order for Uther Pendragon to beget Arthur upon her.35 Seventeenth-century writers tended to discount the sorcery and accentuate 30 The quotation is from the second half of Act 2. Dryden’s Merlin, however, is almost nothing like Rowley’s bearded child. This and the previous paragraph were drawn from my article, “Dryden and the Popular Tradition,” extracted by permission of Oxford University Press. 31 See the discussion by Rossi, esp. 32–33. 32 Scott initiated the former notion (Works 110) and Altieri the latter (434–35). 33 MacCallum associates Philidel with the “Sprites” in Midsummer Night’s Dream (159), Reid with Milton’s angels (34), and Hill with Ariel in The Tempest (27). 34 Philidel is hoping that Merlin will help her to regain her status in heaven. 35 The full repertory is rehearsed in Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History 14–15, 23–24, 29.

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Merlin’s role as prophet, especially his foretelling of Arthur’s heroic unification of England. He becomes the titular author of almanacs, a master mathematician and natural philosopher, and his magic is ascribed to his influence over people’s imaginations.36 Although Dryden’s Merlin occasionally refers to stars, implying some reliance on astrology, his methods are otherwise emphatically earthbound. To gain his ends, he scrupulously avoids appropriating nature or imposing pattern on events; instead, he depends upon (1) his “awful Wand” (2.1.11) which, unlike Osmond’s (3.2.276.SD), clarifies rather than deludes (4.2.8–12, 132–36) and foretells rather than impedes (5.2.80–214); (2) a vial of medicine (3.2.62.SD and 63–69); (3) an empirical study of his rival’s magic (3.1.42–43); (4) Emmeline’s innocence (3.2.211) and Arthur’s courage, prowess, and reason (4.2); and (5), most important, his sense of “Heav’ns time” (3.1.25) for major developments in history. The combination is revealing. The good magician’s power is really only a form of perception. He observes, sometimes almost “scientifically,” and promotes the divinely ordained pattern of what the seventeenth century called “second causes,” operations of nature, society, and psychology through space and time.37 Like Arthur, Merlin has emerged from the pre-Christian and pre-national culture, a culture not only of pride and vengeance but also of magic, and has entered Christian Britain, where “art” is more a way of seeing than of doing. In the closing masque Merlin uses his “awful Wand” not to exercise power but to invoke an instructive spectacle. He offers a vision of the “one People” (5.2.87) and the “Race of Hero’s” (5.2.221) that Arthur’s victories have made possible for the future. He emphasizes, however, that the show is offered only for the more discerning spectator; it is meant “at once, to treat thy Sight and Soul” (5.2.80). On the one hand, of course, the spectators are Arthur and Emmeline. Their redeemed sight enables them to view what, because of their Providentially sponsored love, “the Warm Indulgency of Heav’n” shall “call … forth to Light” (5.2.84–85). But outside the play world there is another set of spectators, the Restoration audience. What are they being asked to see? To what extent is the closing masque an attempt to redeem their sight?

36 For Merlin the prophet, see Segar 57 and Favine 34–38. Separate prophecies printed under Merlin’s name were common: e.g., Merlin Reviv’d and The Mystery of Ambras Merlins, Standardbearer Wolf and last Boar of Cornwal. The almanacs have titles like The Royall Merlin (1655) and Merlinus Redivivus (1687). Brinkley mentions them (77–79), but for a detailed review of the whole subject, see Capp. Naudaeus calls Merlin “the most excellent Philosopher and Mathematician” (206). Merlin the deluder of the imagination is prominent in Great Britain’s Glory. Brinkley (24) lists several mid-late-century French plays involving Merlin. 37 In Catastrophe Mundi: or, Merlin Reviv’d, the anonymous author lists and defines six types of prophecy: by observation of history and contemporary experience, by astrology, by geomancy, by talismans, by communication with good angels, and by spiritual inspiration from within (1–6). Merlin seems to use the first and possibly the second method.

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The literary traditions supporting this prophetic finale must have made it richly resonant for them. Merlin was familiar not only as a political seer but also as the prognosticator of heroic offspring from an important love affair. In Canto II. xx–lix of Orlando Furioso, he and Melissa “show bold Bradamant, in aspect meet, / The Heirs who her illustrious race should swell” (Ariosto 21–26). Moreover, in the Arthurian material one finds a scenario that corresponds in its broad outlines with the order of ideas in the masque: Segar, for example, emphasizes that when Arthur died, after having unified England and founded his famous order of knights, he became “a Starre among the nine Worthies; which fancie is founded upon the prophecie of old Merlyn, who many yeeres before affirmed, that Arthur … should resuscitate, and … restore the round Table.” Segar then goes on to discuss the “Knights of the Garter,” by implication the Knights of the Roundtable revived (55–68). That Arthur belongs with Charlemagne and Godfrey of Boulogne among “the three Christian Worthies” (5.2.79) was a commonplace throughout the seventeenth century and was kept alive in the Restoration by writers such as Edward Leigh, Peter Heylyn, and Nathaniel Crouch.38 Also well understood was the idea that Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable foreshadowed the Order of St. George or the Garter. Segar’s scenario is reiterated in the 1673 edition of Honor Redivivus, in which a discussion of the “Order of St. George” becomes a context for a chapter “Of the Knights of the Round Table in England” (267–78). The same connection is stressed in Elias Ashmole’s definitive The Institution, Laws & Ceremonies of the … Order of the Garter.39 (94–96). Thus, for his contemporaries Dryden was operating in a familiar realm when he showed Arthur becoming a Christian worthy and fathering a “Race of Hero’s” (5.2.221) on St. George’s Day. However, by using a masque-like pageant to incorporate these traditional ideas with some that were not so traditional, Dryden engages in an effort to bend the audience’s perception, to become the Merlin to their Arthur and Emmeline. The initial effect of the masque might have reminded them of the witches’ prophetic pageant of kings in Macbeth or of those masques of courtly compliment frequently mounted in the earlier part of the century. Arthur figures importantly in several of these, most revealingly in Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1633). Here is Waith’s summary: in seeking heroes to replace the stars which represented Jove’s illegitimate lovers, Momus and Mercury fix upon … the British Worthies … These are the masquers, of whom Charles [the first], as the British Hercules, is the leader … The chorus then leads … Charles to the queen as Prince Arthur or “the brave St. George himselfe” (ll. 1030–31), and others as famous British knights of romance … a scene-change … culminates in a view of the firmament with fifteen new stars, the stellified British Heroes … Beneath is a prospect of Windsor Castle, in harmonious relation to the heavenly 38 See Warner 90; Segar 57; Favine 418; Leigh 155; Heylyn 310; and Crouch 146–62. Brinkley, 113–25, discusses some of this material, including Martin Parker’s curious romance, The Most Famous History of That … Christian Worthy Arthur (2 editions in 1660). 39 See also Selden 657–79 and Polydore Virgil 81–84.

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sphere above. At this moment the king is both on his throne (as Arthur or St. George) and in the sky.40

But the appearance is deceptive. Just as Arthur and Emmeline must learn to see beyond convention and illusion, so must the audience of 1691. Since 1688 it had become impossible for Dryden to regard the king as the single focal point of British character, the single heir to the succession of heroes leading forward from Arthur. Correspondingly, the courtly masque ceases to be the appropriate form for celebrating the national identity. As Altieri has shown, the closing spectacle involves elements that distinguish it from the royal masque and associate it more closely with the Lord Mayor’s pageants of the Restoration, which offered a much broader vision of British society.41 Through Merlin, Dryden is asking his audience to see what was and was not “New-Created” by Arthur’s triumphs (5.2.97). The succession of tableaux depicts the various kinds of “Golden Oar” (5.2.83) that God will reveal in subsequent history. The agricultural gold of wool and grain (5.2.116–29) is brought to light through the efforts of a free peasantry, the descendants of those pragmatic Kentish shepherds who in Act 2 had sung that pastoral free love is a fiction, that eroticism is dangerous unless legalized by “Contracts” (2.2.39–60). These latter-day laborers inherit their ancestors’ healthy irreverence for illusions, in this case for the illusion of an ideal priesthood, for “why shou’d a Blockhead ha’ One in Ten” merely “For Prating so long like a Book-learn’d Sot, / Till Pudding and Dumplin burn to Pot”? (5.2.137–39). The high spirits of these common folk are enriched by the gold of British ale and basic patriotism. Finally, because of Arthur and Emmeline, Venus brings to this new world, this “Fairest Isle,” a special kind of love, free of jealousy, despair, and the “vain and senseless Forms” of courtship (5.2.150, 184), a love whose contractual requirements are transcended by constancy and “kind Possessing” (5.2.196). Protecting this new order from destructive forces are “those future Hero’s” (5.2.200) who, as members of the Order of Garter, carry forward the work of Arthur and his knights.42 Notice that the heroes, not “Our Soveraign High” (5.2.211) and not the commoners, become the descendants of Arthur and Emmeline here. Previous critics have mistakenly accused Dryden of confused motives, supposing that by “Sceptr’d Subjects” (5.2.213) he means something on the order of “politically

“Spectacles of State” 325. Dryden would later repeat the connection in his version of “The Flower and the Leaf,” 7:527–54, where Arthur as worthy leads 12 knights who foreshadow the Order of the Garter. 41 But Altieri mistakenly supposes (444–45) that Dryden’s inclusion of mercantile and agricultural interests as part of the community over which the monarch presides is new. See Annus Mirabilis (1667) for an earlier example. What is new is the shift of Dryden’s deeper allegiance from divinely ordained king to divinely ordained British character. 42 A few years later, in “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond” (1699), Dryden hints at this historical role for those who wore the badge of the Order of the Garter (see 7:18 and 168). 40

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empowered commoners.”43 In fact, the wording of Honour’s song makes it clear that the “Scepter’d Subjects” to which she refers are the high-ranking initiates into the Order of the Garter, especially the “Foreign Kings, Adopted here” (5.2.209). This need not be a reference to William III,44 for he was only one among many foreign leaders who had been brought into the Order of the Garter during the Stuart reign. The reference is general and encompasses such foreign dignitaries as Christierne, King of Denmark; Charles, King of Sweden; Maurice Casimire, Duke of Bavaria; and Frederick, Marquess of Brandenburg—as well as a host of lesser luminaries.45 In this spectacular finale, then, Dryden is asking his audience to see beyond the apparent trends in English political life, just as he asks them to interpret not a courtly masque but a more comprehensive, modern pageant. Now that James is gone and William is on the throne, one can perceive that the true stewardship of God’s plan for Britain lies not with the monarch but rather with selected members of the aristocracy, and their role is limited and functional only within the larger pattern of English national life. In 1691 the future of England must be understood to depend neither on “the old-style, divine-right, paternalistic monarchy of the Stuarts” nor on the kind of Lockean contract among subjects that inspired Whig architects of the Revolution settlement, a settlement that included a coronation oath obliging William III “to govern the people of this kingdom according to the statutes in parliament agreed on and the laws and customs of the same” (Kenyon 274, 261).46 The “constitution” implied in King Arthur retains a tincture of Tory mysticism, in that it locates the shaping energy of the nation within its divinely fostered character, rather than within its written documents or legislative processes, but at the same time it accommodates the emerging pluralism of national experience by showing a balanced configuration of classes and activities.47 To grasp the optimism of this concept, one need only contrast it with Milton’s censure of the Britons as

43 See, for example, Altieri 444 and Price 316. By linking this mistaken idea of “Scepter’d Subjects” with the use of contracts by the shepherds in Act 2, Altieri implies that Dryden affirms the Whig “compact theory” (443), but she overlooks the long history of proviso scenes in Restoration comedies by Tories like Dryden. 44 As Alssid thinks it is (“Impossible Form”143). 45 See Brooke 11–13; and Ashmole, Institution 94–96, 717. Pinnock also notes (66) the practice of inducting foreign kings into the Order, but he does not cite my earlier commentary on this practice in “Dryden’s King Arthur” 70. 46 Pinnock mentions (67) Dryden’s “disconnecting Arthur from William III” but does not cite my more extensive analysis in “Dryden’s King Arthur.” 47 Here I disagree with Garrison, who argues (esp. 175–96) that after 1688 Dryden lost faith not only in both monarch and people but also in the metaphorical harmonizing of actual and ideal. In King Arthur the monarch is given an important role in the pluralistic society, but the ideal of God’s plan is realized through the force of British character, which persists through both blessed and cursed phases of history.

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innately vicious and wild, a people for whom Saxon law remains the essential guard against anarchy.48 In the later seventeenth century many important writers found their vision of reality inadequate to account for the changes around them. For some, this uncertainty stimulated a fresh search for a satisfying theory. But for others, it signaled a turn toward the very basis of systematic thought, the act of perception itself. The later Milton, “fallen on evil days” (PL 7.25), prayed that God would “plant eyes” in his mind so that he could “see and tell / Of things invisible” (PL 3.53–55) for the benefit of a “fit audience … , though few” (PL 7.31).49 Similarly, when Thomas Traherne felt dissatisfied with the mercenary, proprietary quality of Restoration life, he learned to see like “Adam in his first estate” (“Eden,” l. 29) or “like an angel” (“Wonder,” l. 1): Harsh ragged objects were concealed, Oppressions tears and cries, … Cursed and devised proprieties, With envy, avarice And fraud, those fiends that spoil even Paradise, Fled from the splendor of mine eyes. … Shops, markets, taverns, coaches were unshown. (“Wonder,” ll. 25–26, 49–52; “Eden,” l. 25)

After 1688, much of Dryden’s original poetry documents a similar disillusionment with the course of history. No longer able to perceive the data of public experience as clear evidence of Providence, he searches for Divine purpose in the private lives of worthies such as the Countess of Abingdon or his cousin Driden. In King Arthur, however, he once again focuses on the public state of Britain, and his approach is like Milton’s in that it stresses the need to qualify empirical sight by planting eyes in the mind. But the opera is also a plea for selective seeing and, in this sense, is like Traherne’s poetry. In his closing speech, Arthur commends Merlin for figuring forth Britain’s “Triumphs” and for leaving “the Pages of our Wo” unshown (5.2.217–18). We can only speculate about whether the “fit” members of Dryden’s audience emulated their great forefather in this regard, whether they saw that their playwright-magician had ground the occult lens of Arthurian legend to distinguish the divine pattern of current history from the merely human one.50 See Brinkley’s discussion 132–37. The parenthetical references are to books and lines of Paradise Lost, in Poems. 50 Zwicker provides a radically different reading of King Arthur in “How Many 48 49

Political Arguments Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?,” Restoration 34 (2010–2011): 103–16. He finds the piece full of puzzles and irony, “a kind of uninterpretable multiplicity” that frees “the opera altogether from argument” and seduces critics into “complex allegorical chess games.” Along the way, he speculates that it satirizes Roman Catholic spirituality and that Dryden, engaging in “self-irony,” enters the piece as Philadel.

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Conclusion The Secular Masque, 1700 The overarching purpose of this study has been to remind us of John Dryden’s persistent otherworldliness. We need such a reminder to round out the valuable work by recent scholars who emphasize his empirical and journalistic tendencies, his observation and analysis of current events and personalities. Such studies have greatly advanced our understanding of a Dryden who was deeply concerned about later Stuart politics and culture, but they have, for the most part, left aside his preoccupation with the hidden or supernatural dimensions he sensed in all earthly phenomena. In his poems and plays he demonstrates this preoccupation in ways both less systematic and more diverse in its sources than his analyses of Christian theology and church doctrine in works like Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. To populate the invisible world as depicted in his original poems and serious plays, he incorporates occult lore not only from Christian Scripture and classical literature, but also from earlier drama, accounts of non-European cultures, and, more than likely, publications about demonology and magic readily available to Restoration readers. He represents the occult aspects of earthbound life through imagery, allusions, and onstage phenomena that reward critical analysis and tell us something about changes in his convictions about the visionary capacities of poetry and poets. He was obviously fascinated by the possibility of hidden or supernatural forces and entities, even though the extent to which this fascination indicates actual belief will probably never be known. He tends to avoid the issue by insisting that his representations of the occult follow the best authorities. Clearly, however, he shared the belief of contemporary intellectuals that an invisible world existed and was overseen by the Christian God. At various times during his career it seems that he felt God’s will could be discerned in earthly events, dreams, and stellar messages, and that spiritual beings inhabiting the invisible world could communicate with mortals and foretell the future. His frequent allusion to or depictions of angels, especially guardian angels, suggests he accepted the angelology of scripture. That any of these entities could be manipulated through daemonic magic he probably doubted, though the manipulation of substances through the type of natural magic commonly known as alchemy gained his allegiance early on, if only as a potent metaphor for the workings of modern leadership. Later in his career, he consigned alchemy to the underworld of seditious conspiracies against lawful authority. Unless we discover some hitherto unknown collections of Dryden’s letters, diaries, promptbooks, or manuscripts, we shall never have enough direct evidence of his personal occult beliefs to write about them with any degree of certainty. It is, however, certain that his extant writings exhibit an occult rhetoric, and that to

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understand that rhetoric is to enhance our understanding not only of the works themselves but also of his own opinions about the powers of poetry and of art in general. Both the rhetoric and its implications for his literary theory reach a high level of development even in his early poems. From 1649 to 1663, these poems exploit the transitional nature of contemporary beliefs in a wide range of occult lore—astrology, alchemy, magic, and demonology—to express the Providential design of current events. Divine purpose is also revealed through an interesting mix of empirical and supernatural elements in the American plays of 1664 and 1665. As ancient America succumbs to both inner turmoil and the Spanish conquerors, its magical culture gives way as well. God begins to act more through social dynamics than through daemonic magic, though spiritual entities continue to communicate with humans. The American plays imply that full awareness of this new mode of Providence will await the rise of imperial England, the England prophesied in Annus Mirabilis. In this major poem as well as in the Dryden/Davenant Tempest, both works offered to the public in 1667, the occult materials portray the displacement of actions based on self-centered human will by those based on an empirical understanding of divine purpose. The heroic plays of 1669, 1670, and 1671 close out this period of confidence on Dryden’s part that he could perceive God’s purposes at work in the events and relationships of his time. In Tyrannick Love and the two parts of The Conquest of Granada, the occult rhetoric shows how Providential design is worked out through the mastering force of Christian love. Thus, in the works of his early career, between 1649 and 1674, Dryden uses the occult to show how the portal of divine influence closes against magicians and secretive tyrants, and opens for scientists, right-minded leaders, and true lovers— and for poets like himself. He feels during this period that Restoration poets are privy to God’s plan, though in a different way from that of their predecessors. He sees modern poets less as descendants of priest-magicians than as compatriots of members of the Royal Society. They are not visionary wizards like the Druids or Shakespeare but rather visionary empiricists. With patience and humility, they can discern and represent Providential patterns in history and current events, and even project those patterns into the future, though without any real power to transform or control them. In about 1674, as Dryden turns to more domestic and sentimental themes, this confidence in poetry’s power to reveal Providential design begins to ebb and flow in concert with the level of his anxiety about the future direction of English politics and society. The occult rhetoric of works between 1674 and 1677 is more about the limits than the revelations of supernatural vision, whether that of leaders and lovers or that of poets. In Aureng-Zebe and The State of Innocence the occult materials come from less diverse sources and are less relevant to plot and theme than before. Alchemy all but disappears. Elemental spirits abandon the stage and appear only in the language. Angels and devils are onstage presences in The State of Innocence, but they philosophize rather than act, and in Aureng-Zebe they function only in the language, as expletives and impulsive appeals to the divine.

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Prophecy and its astrological methods remain but without major connection to the main dramatic action. In All for Love, Dryden to some extent overcomes the sentimental tendencies and political anxiety that severely reduced the occult dimension of Aureng-Zebe and The State of Innocence. His references to heaven, hell, fate, fortune, and natural rhythms still come across as clichés, but he manages to use his audience’s awareness of ancient Egyptian culture to expose hidden forces at work in the stage world of Antony and Cleopatra. Although in this play he seems to imply an historical trajectory leading from ancient Egypt to modern England, somewhat like the one leading from debased to enlightened imperialism in the American plays, his vision of the future in All for Love is relatively vague. From 1678 to 1685, as the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis run their courses, Dryden’s occult rhetoric indicates a resurgence of conviction that current events are realizing God’s purposes, even though his sense of a detailed design returns only gradually. In Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar, alchemy and elemental spirits do not reappear, but other messengers from the invisible world do. Angels and daemons, ghosts and genii, dreams, prodigies, and stellar signs provide advice from the invisible world. This advice, however, is either disregarded or selfishly employed by the main characters, and Dryden himself does not employ the occult materials to reveal a Providential pattern in the onstage action. A more detailed Providential design returns in the works of the early 1680s, but even though Dryden presents it through an obvious and conventional set of occult images, he is not at all sure his audiences are capable of digesting it. In Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius, he depicts the Exclusion Crisis and events leading to it as reflections of daemonic influences sent from heaven or hell. After the death of Charles II in 1685, Dryden once again seems unsure about where events are leading England. The occult references in Threnodia Augustalis, The Hind and the Panther, and Britannia Rediviva indicate a widening gap between heaven and earth, and a certain apprehensiveness and myopia regarding the future. Dryden finds within himself the same weakness of occult vision that he points to in the later poems about his contemporaries in the arts world. Yet in King Arthur, as in All for Love, he manages to recuperate the general outlines of that vision by reaching deeply into the ancient springs of modern culture. There, in the germinating phase of British history, he finds—and presents through occult phenomena and references—a set of values and form of perception that is passed down through the British Worthies in order to keep England on its God-given path even when bad times obscure or disguise that path. Dryden’s last work, The Secular Masque, written only months before his death, is also the last example of his occult rhetoric. Seen in the context of his previous uses of the occult, the masque indicates his final stances on Providence and the subject of poetic vision. If we think of his relation to this work as that of a conjurer to his daemons, we can compare him informatively with the magicians depicted in his earlier theatrical pieces. He is not like the sorcerers of the Indian

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plays or Tyrannick Love, for he invokes spirits not to employ their power but only to represent their knowledge. Moreover, what they know is limited to the shape of the past. Unlike their predecessors in the Indian plays, they possess not even an inkling of what the future holds. What they observe in the past does form a kind of pattern, but there is no indication that it represents a heavenly design. It looks more like a generalization from empirical evidence. The “unthinking,” convivial age of James I, driven by a wild hunting instinct, fails to provide an enduring, rational basis for “Mankind” to “agree” (40, 64). Instead, it fosters the mid-century “Rage” of a “Martial Mind” intent upon warfare (49–50). The “Chase had a Beast in view” (87). Also disappointing is the kind of “Love” that succeeds the storms of war during the age of Charles and James (72). It never rises above the level of emotion and sex. The “Lovers were all untrue” (89).1 What is left is the “pond’rous Orb” with its “load of Human-kind” about to begin a “New” century whose driving forces and ultimate shape cannot be predicted (85, 12).2 In regard to this empirical emphasis, Dryden has more in common with his own Prospero that with Shakespeare’s. The Elizabethan Prospero invokes a masque in which Ceres, Juno, and Iris celebrate fertility, joy, and natural harmony, and he partitions this dream-like show from the harsh reality of Caliban’s murder plot. By contrast, the masque conjured up by Dryden’s Prospero involves no juxtaposition of ideal and real. Out of the invisible world he calls up personifications of the dark side of humankind, its prideful inclinations toward fraud, rapine, and murder. Instead of personifications, The Secular Masque presents classical gods and goddesses, but their symbolism is more in keeping with that of the dark interpreters of socio-political life in Dryden’s adaptation than with Shakespeare’s celebrants of ritual fecundity.3 Diana leads the joyful hunt with the high emotions of a woodspirit, but she ties the “wexing Moon” to her “Forehead” (30). As that moon grows, an unthinking time gives way to impassioned lunacy, the moon-madness of war represented by Mars. The “Sprightly Green” of Diana’s benign woodland has turned red as its convivial huntsmen drink too much of the “Tyrian Dye” and turn their predatory instincts away from the stag, fox, and goat, and toward other human beings (54, 56). The Venus who supplants Mars is no surrogate for Christian love. She represents the transformation of rage into sexual desire, the lure of the battlefield into the lure of the bed, the emotions of one kind of conquest Turner has put it well: “the age of Eros was untrue to itself … , ‘all of a piece’ with the previous periods because, having taken a libertine form, sexuality resembled too much the stylized predation of hunting and the outright aggression of war (319).” 2 Roper notes that “time to begin a New” may also mean “time to begin anew”— i.e., “to go through the whole foolish frivolous process again” (“Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque’” 40). 3 Roper (“Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque’”) and Dearing (California Works 16:432–33) show that the symbolism of Dryden’s gods and goddesses is ambivalent when seen against the backgrounds of classical mythology or of seventeenth-century history. Seen in the context of his occult rhetoric, however, it seems fairly straightforward. 1

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to those of another: “Take me, take me, while you may” (75).4 Thus, both Dryden’s Prospero and Dryden as author of The Secular Masque conjure up entities whose symbolism points not up toward heavenly purpose but rather down to the century as observed and experienced. Clearly, Dryden sees the preceding century as having a pattern, but he cannot discover its Providential meaning and extrapolate it into the future as he once felt he could do. What, then, at the end of his life, does the occult rhetoric of The Secular Masque reveal about his controlling attitude toward the socio-political changes he has witnessed? To me, as to Roper (“Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque’” 39–40) and Sherman (35), the masque is dominated by the “Democritean” voice of Momus. Since no one seems able to “hinder the Crimes, / Or mend the Bad Times, / ’Tis better to Laugh than to Cry” (18–20).5 However, I see no evidence that Dryden associates this sardonic humor with the Christian God Himself, any more than his Diana, Venus, and Mars symbolize Christian qualities or Providential designs. Momus is not an earlier version of Thomas Hardy’s Christian God in “Channel Firing,” even though both deities laugh at the cycle of human folly, share the same view of warfare, and find earthly experience to be pointless. “Things are as they were,” says Momus (70); “The world is as it used to be,” echoes Hardy’s God (12). Unlike Hardy, Dryden has placed classical gods and goddess between the all-seeing eye of God and the blind, repetitive emotions of earthly creatures. These fictional deities bring an overview of the century not from the Christian God Himself but from their vantage point as observers of human behavior. As such, they stand in not for Providence but for the poetic vision of John Dryden. That vision rests somewhere between Howard’s prophetic empiricism and the shallow sight of those poetasters who treat nature as a casual collision of atoms and are able to represent “Order” only “by … Chance.”6 The middle ground Dryden now occupies is suggested by the title of his final masque. Because he no longer feels able to discern the divinely plotted direction of events, he will concentrate on the “Secular,” the non-spiritual, aspects of observed life.7 Lacking Howard’s prophetic power, he will assume the reduced poetic role he had defined in the work of fellow artists. Like Kneller, he feels “Bounded by the Times” (“To Sir Godfrey Kneller” 4:147) and has concluded with Motteux that “sacred Art” is “now to be Roper associates elements of this progression with Hesiod’s five metallic ages (“Dryden’s ‘Secular Masque’”). 5 Zwicker (Politics 176 and “Dissolution” 329) and Sherman note the complexity of Dryden’s attitude toward the previous century. Zwicker (Politics 176) thinks the masque suggests that Dryden found the pattern of his own life “more beautiful than its frustrations.” MacCubbin feels the masque ends optimistically (241). Canfield (Heroes & States 179) sees Dryden as finding in his satire some “consolation” for his current life in the “wilderness.” 6 “Prologue … to the University of Oxon. [1673]” 1:34. 7 Roper (29) and Dearing (California Works 16:423) point out that “Secular” means “concerning the century,” as in Horace’s “Carmen Saeculare” and Prior’s poem with the same title. Neither discusses the more obvious meaning of the word, which was also current in Dryden’s England (see OED). 4

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no more” (epistle to Motteux 7:3, 5). He must be satisfied merely to represent, with all of his God-given insight and craft, the secular life of this “Inferior” age (“Kneller” 118). Interestingly, this posture toward Providence is the converse of his prior stance. Earlier in his career, except for that brief period from 1674–77, he had confidently conveyed a sense of God’s purpose even when the detailed operation of that purpose remained vague. Now, by contrast, he sees the shape of the extinct century but cannot make out any purpose or direction in its cultural and political changes. Dryden/Prospero does not lay aside his poetic “garment.” He can still show how second causes have realized what Wordsworth later called a “A musical but melancholy chime, / Which they can hear who meddle not with crime, / Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care” (4–6). But he no longer presumes to have privileged intelligence from Heaven. In The Secular Masque, Dryden’s employment of occult rhetoric and stance on poetic vision conclude a career-long effort to authenticate and express the otherworldly side of his personality. Like many other thinkers of his day, he wanted to achieve a “modern” understanding of transcendence—not the platonic division between forms and things, not the mystical spirituality proclaimed by some of the Church Fathers, and not some proto-romantic awareness of a single spiritual force rolling rhythmically through all reality. He was engaged in the same mind-bending search for a way out of the dualism of faith and observation that tested the mettle of many a great thinker of the Restoration. Boyle and Charleton had been able to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with an atomistic, mechanical science by positing a God whose invisible force compelled the particles of nature and invited human free will to realize His designs through passion and time. As Dryden finally gives up his pretentions to prophecy, he seems to accept this same God and thus preserves not only his faith and a function for his kind of poetry, but also his sense of humor.

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Index Adam 18, 80, 81, 91, 111–14, 116, 123, 124, 143, 145, 146, 153 Agrippa, Cornelius 3, 35, 64, 71–73, 131, 161 alchemy 2–5, 7, 10, 11, 16, 17, 19, 23–25, 41, 42, 46–48, 57, 70, 72, 75–77, 79, 81, 87, 101, 112, 114, 117, 118, 124, 126, 130, 155–57 and chemistry 11, 19, 126 Alexander the Great 93, 94, 164 Alssid, Michael W. 32, 60, 61, 69, 74, 75, 140, 143, 152, 161 Altieri, Joanna 140, 148, 151, 152, 161 Antony, Marc 10, 87–89, 91, 94–100, 116, 145, 157 Apollo 103, 105, 126 Archimedes 11, 12 Arthur, King 22, 86, 128, 140–53 Ashmole, Elias 4, 7, 67, 150, 152 astrology 2, 4, 5, 7, 9–16, 18, 20, 23–25, 36, 39–43, 47–49, 57, 71, 75, 76, 79, 87, 88, 102, 103, 105, 112–14, 122, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 149, 156, 157 and astronomy 11–14, 20–23, 36, 71, 112, 134, 135 atom 3, 4, 22, 65, 67, 78, 123, 159, 160 Augustine, Saint 33, 34, 92, 145 Augustus, Emperor (Octavius) 89–91, 94–99, 127 Augustan Empire 88 Aztecs 25 Bacon, Sir Francis viii, 4, 8, 10, 22, 40, 76, 78, 113, 131, 148 Barbeau Gardiner, Anne vii, 1, 8, 11, 19, 27, 29, 32, 37, 46, 59, 60, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 81, 84, 117, 118, 129–31, 135, 140 The Bible 1, 11, 62, 114, 122, 126, 128, 139 The Book of Daniel 6

black Sabbath 44 Booth, Wayne 2 Boyle, Robert 4–6, 16, 40, 54, 67, 113, 143, 160 Brahe, Tycho 12 Bredvold, Louis I. vii, 1 Brown, Laura 41, 77 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of 87, 101, 112 Budick, Sanford 1, 8, 115, 117 Burton, Robert 39 Cabbala 2, 3, 131 Caesar, Julius 94 Canfield, J. Douglas 89, 94, 95, 102, 115, 159 Carew, Thomas 22, 150 Caryl, John 63 The English Princess 63 Castlemaine, Barbara Villiers, Countess of 21, 22, 24 Catherine, Saint 58–60, 62, 90, 92 Catherine of Braganza, Queen 58–60, 63 Charles II, King 3, 5, 17–21, 23, 24, 27, 41–47, 58, 60, 61–63, 67, 69, 76, 77, 83, 87, 89, 101, 102, 111, 114, 115, 118, 125–31, 139, 157, 158 Charleton, Walter 4, 5, 16, 17, 29, 31, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 67, 76, 160 charm 19, 27, 28, 32, 36, 42, 43, 48, 49, 52, 54, 66, 69, 70, 76, 82, 88, 103, 106, 115, 124, 126, 130, 145, 146, 148 chorus 8, 50, 58, 89, 92, 93, 94, 99 circle imagery 13, 49, 50, 52, 54, 65, 72, 103, 115, 117, 128, 130 civil war 53, 63, 83, 84, 116 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of 19–24, 30, 54, 55, 62, 68, 119 Clarke, Samuel 90, 94 Cleopatra 87–89, 91–99, 116, 157

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colonialism 1, 29, 77 Columbus, Christopher 39, 40, 75–77 comet 43, 44, 47, 102, 112, 113, 123 constitution 78, 139, 152 Copernican 3, 12, 21 Cortez 26, 30–32, 35, 37–39, 45, 47, 84 Cromwell, Oliver 13–19, 23, 24, 30, 39, 80, 102, 126, 129, 139 currents, imagery of 82, 83, 116 Daniel, Samuel 92, 93 The Tragedie of Cleopatra 92, 93 Dante Alighieri 19, 102 Davenant, Sir William 3, 31, 54, 55, 91, 143, 156 The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru 31 Dekker, Thomas 64 The Virgin Martyr 64 Delphic Oracle 28, 106 demonology 2, 4, 7, 10, 11, 17, 23–27, 29, 33–35, 38, 39, 42, 47, 48, 54, 57, 64, 69, 71, 72, 85, 132, 146, 155, 156 angel viii, 2, 5, 7, 8, 12, 19, 21, 33–35, 42–44, 48, 50–52, 57, 58, 64–66, 79–82, 87, 101, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119, 121, 123, 124, 126, 129, 131–37, 147–49, 153, 155–57 ariel spirit 6, 27, 28, 33, 35, 36, 44, 51, 64, 65, 69, 73, 78 astral form 4, 6, 64, 65, 72 cherubim 44, 80, 123, 126 daemon 2, 4, 6, 9, 17, 27–30, 33–36, 39, 40, 44, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 79, 101–103, 106, 107, 120, 124, 130, 133, 137, 146, 147, 155–57 devil viii, 3, 9, 27, 33–35, 50, 51, 54, 64, 80–82, 87, 88, 109, 111, 113, 119, 121–24, 143, 148, 156 earthy spirit 28, 32–34, 36, 44, 65, 147, 148 elemental spirit viii, 8, 27, 33, 35, 44, 51, 54, 64, 65, 79, 101, 148, 156, 157 elf 124 fairy 4, 124

fury 103–106 genius 4, 5, 7, 9, 17, 22, 23, 29, 35, 36, 40, 43, 44, 47, 51, 70, 71, 79, 80, 101, 102, 107, 108, 124, 125, 129, 132, 133, 136, 148, 157 ghost 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 17, 32, 34, 35, 37, 44, 63, 69, 72–76, 79–82, 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 122, 124, 133, 157 guardian angel 4, 5, 9, 17, 43, 44, 65, 71, 79, 82, 104, 124, 125, 129, 148, 155 Lucifer 79, 80, 108, 116 middle spirit 64, 79, 87 Satan 2, 29, 34, 111, 113, 115, 116, 119, 121, 125, 146 satyr 33, 34, 44, 133 seraphim 133 Digby, Sir Kenelm 53 Divine Right 55, 84, 109, 123, 152 divining rod 14, 15 Dobrée, Bonamy 88, 95 Drayton, Michael 22 dream 3, 9, 26–30, 39, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 52–54, 59, 63, 65, 80, 82, 87, 101, 106, 107, 109, 114, 124, 134, 155, 157, 158 Druid 22, 23, 55, 68, 78, 99, 133, 156 Dryden, John conversion 129 horoscope 7 occult belief 6, 124, 155 Poet Laureateship 68, 89, 99 works Absalom and Achitophel 1, 7, 60, 90, 111–15, 117, 120, 123, 125, 128, 130, 131, 157 Albion and Albanius 111, 125–27, 129, 157 “Alexander’s Feast” 137 All for Love 45, 81, 83, 87–100, 104, 111, 114, 116, 139, 157 Annus Mirabilis 5, 7, 10, 23, 41–47, 54, 55, 68, 70, 76–79, 83, 87, 90, 113, 122, 151, 156 Astraea Redux 7, 18, 19, 23, 24, 30, 38, 43, 46, 114, 126, 131 Aureng-Zebe 10, 45, 79, 80, 81–89, 94, 99, 100, 116, 156, 157

Index “The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence” 6, 85 Britannia Rediviva 130, 131, 135, 136, 140, 157 The Conquest of Granada 5, 10, 57, 69–78, 81, 109, 110, 124, 145, 156 “A Discourse concerning … Satire” 5, 6, 44 Don Sebastian 8, 9, 115 The Duke of Guise 68, 111, 112, 118–25, 128, 133, 146, 157 Eleonora 127, 134, 135 “Epilogue to the University of Oxon [1673]” 90 “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” 6 Heroique Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell 5, 13–18, 23, 30, 39, 43, 44, 101, 112, 129 The Hind and the Panther vii, 1, 8, 90, 114, 130, 135, 155, 157 The Indian Emperour 25–27, 30–39, 44, 45, 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 103, 121, 122, 145, 146 The Indian Queen 25–32, 35–37, 39, 45, 62, 65, 68, 103, 121, 126, 145, 146 King Arthur 10, 22, 86, 128, 129, 137, 139–53, 157 “Life of Plutarch” 22 The Medall 45, 111–19, 121, 123, 127, 157 “An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell” 136, 137, 140 Oedipus 101–10, 118, 122, 126, 157 “Of Heroique Playes. An Essay” 6, 69, 78 “Preface” to Tyrannick Love 6, 58 “Prologue” to The Tempest 47, 78 “Prologue … to the University of Oxon” (1673) 78, 159 Religio Laici 1, 8, 17, 37, 86, 155 The Secular Masque 131, 157–60 “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” 136, 137

183

The Spanish Fryar 101, 103, 104, 107–11, 157 The State of Innocence 79–81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 126, 143, 156, 157 The Tempest 10, 32, 41, 43, 45, 47–55, 68, 103, 104, 122, 143, 146, 148, 156 Threnodia Augustalis 5, 129, 130, 132, 135, 157 “To the Earl of Roscommon” 90 “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond” 128, 151 “To His Sacred Majesty” 19, 20, 38, 126 “To the Lady Castlemaine” 21, 22, 24 “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve” 136 “To my Friend, the Author [Peter Motteux]” 135, 159, 160 “To My Honored Friend, Sir Robert Howard” 22, 30, 132 “To My Honoured Friend, Dr. Charleton” 4, 5, 17, 31 “To My Lord Chancellor” 19–24, 30, 38, 54, 55, 78, 119 To the Pious Memory of … Anne Killigrew 86, 127, 132–35 “To Sir Godfrey Kneller” 132, 136, 159, 160 Troilus and Cressida 107–10, 157 Tyrannick Love 10, 57–69, 71, 72, 76, 78, 90, 103, 104, 110, 111, 148, 156, 158 “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings” 11–13, 18, 23, 43, 127 “Vindication of … The Duke of Guise” 7 Dutch 4, 41–46, 62, 68, 77, 80 Egypt 2, 59, 88–99, 114–17, 130, 157 empire 26–29, 36, 40, 43, 47, 62, 64, 66, 71–73, 75–77, 82, 84, 85, 88, 96, 97, 99, 144 empiricism 2, 4, 5, 10, 12, 14, 21, 23, 25, 29, 30, 39–41, 46, 47, 53, 54, 68, 99, 100, 126, 133, 135, 143, 144, 146, 149, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159

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epicurean 38, 59, 64, 65, 67, 74, 84 Eve 79, 80, 81, 109, 120, 123, 134, 143, 146 Evelyn, John 113 Exclusion Crisis 4, 101, 118, 126, 127, 157 The Fall 49–51, 54, 79, 80, 91, 121, 123 fate 22, 27, 37, 44, 45, 50, 60, 65–67, 71, 72, 74, 84, 87, 97, 98, 101–103, 104, 107–109, 114, 157 Fletcher, John 93 The False One 93 flood 116, 136 Fludd, Robert 3, 53, 92, 136 France 42, 43, 45–47, 114, 118, 119 Fuller, Thomas 89, 91, 95, 141 galaxy 14 Gale, Theophilus 89, 91–93 Galileo Galilei 12 Ganges River 82, 83, 99, 116 Garter, Order of the 127, 128, 141, 150–52 Geoffrey of Monmouth 141, 142 Glanvill, Joseph 4–6, 12, 33, 35, 36, 40, 54, 73, 80 gold imagery 7, 14–16, 19, 30, 31, 33, 36, 39, 41, 42, 65, 81, 92, 151 Gomara, Lopez de 34 Great Fire 4, 41–45, 47, 68 Greene, Robert 147 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay 147 Guenevere 142, 144 Hagstrum, Jean 26, 39 Hastings, Henry, Lord 11–13, 18, 23, 43, 127 heliocentrism 12, 16 hermetic 3, 98, 114, 116, 118 Hobbes, Thomas 6, 59, 84 Hoffman, Arthur W. 11, 13, 115, 133 Homer 28, 102, 145 Horace 28, 91, 159 horoscope 5, 9, 71, 132 Howard, Sir Robert 21–25, 30, 47, 54, 78, 132, 146, 159 Hughes, Derek 27, 30, 31, 57–60, 69, 71, 82, 88, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 102, 107, 108, 142

Inca 25, 26 Indian 25–39, 65, 68, 157, 158 Indus River 82, 83, 99, 116 invisible world viii, 2–4, 8–10, 20, 25, 30, 32, 38, 39, 41–45, 63, 65, 66, 68, 76–80, 85–88, 98, 101–105, 109, 110, 114, 121, 122, 127–30, 135, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160 Isis 91, 93, 98 Islam 9, 77, 81, 84, 85 James I, King 2, 158 Daemonology 2 James II, King 10, 11, 126–31, 139, 140, 152, 158 as Duke of York 4, 87 Jesus 118, 134 Johnson, Richard 32, 142, 147 The Seven Champions of Christendom 32, 33, 147 Johnson, Samuel vii, 1, 88 Kearful, Frank J. 88, 92, 93, 95, 96 King, Bruce vii, 9, 59, 74, 80, 81, 87, 107 Kirsch, Arthur C. 31, 58, 61, 80, 81 Lee, Nathaniel vii, 68, 101, 102, 103, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124 The Duke of Guise 68, 118–25 The Massacre of Paris 120 Oedipus 101–107 libertine 59, 61, 63, 65, 96, 158 Lilly, William 4, 7, 36 Locke, John 5, 143, 152 London 41, 43–45, 47, 70, 91, 111, 112, 114–18, 126, 127, 129 love 6, 10, 26–32, 35–39, 47, 49, 53, 57, 60, 61, 64–70, 72–77, 82–84, 86, 97–100, 102, 104–106, 109, 110, 115, 119, 120, 124–28, 131, 132, 136, 137, 140, 142–44, 146, 147, 149–51, 156, 158 loyalism 85, 87, 99, 111–13, 119, 121, 124, 125, 128, 142 Lucan 28, 91, 93–95, 102 Lucretius 22, 78 McCabe, Richard 101, 102 McKeon, Michael vii, 5, 7, 11, 12, 41, 77

Index magic 2–4, 6, 11, 16, 18, 19, 22–24, 27–30, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43, 46–55, 58, 63, 65–72, 75, 76, 78, 88, 90, 103, 111, 112, 114–17, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 136, 137, 143, 145–49, 155, 156 arts 2, 13, 18, 21, 42, 52, 55, 79, 114, 118, 120, 148 conjuration 3, 9, 19, 25, 33, 51, 58, 72, 78, 79, 86, 103, 104, 115, 120, 122, 126, 133, 136, 145–47, 157–59 enchantment 32, 48, 49, 51, 52, 69, 70, 72, 85, 86, 103, 115, 130, 137, 146–48 incantation 4 invocation 2, 4, 28, 32, 33, 49, 51, 65, 66, 115, 120, 133, 137, 147, 149, 158 magic circle 50, 103, 127, 130 magician 2, 6, 22, 27–30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 48, 53, 54, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 103, 106, 114, 115, 120–22, 130, 136, 147–49, 153, 156, 157 magus 48–50, 52, 71, 118, 147 sorcerer 19, 25, 32, 66, 68, 69, 75, 88, 98, 114, 130, 131, 147, 148, 157 wand 14, 32–34, 53, 114, 126, 130, 146, 149 wizard 7, 19, 22, 28, 55, 68, 69, 76, 136, 146–48, 156 masque 49–51, 105, 126, 127, 131, 140, 148–52, 157–59 Massinger, Philip 32, 64, 93 The False One 93 The Unnatural Combat 32 The Virgin Martyr 64 Maximinus I, Emperor 61 Maximinus II, Emperor 61, 62, 64 Maximus, Gaius Julius Verus 61 May, Thomas 93 The Tragedie of Cleopatra Queen of Aegypt 93 mercury 117, 118, 126, 150 Merlin 22, 141, 143, 146–51, 153 Mexico 25, 30, 32, 35, 36, 39, 90 Milky Way 14, 134 Milton, John 10, 71, 73, 79, 81, 112, 128, 137, 139, 141, 148, 152, 153

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Miner, Earl 92, 95, 98, 132, 136, 137 the mob 102, 105, 106, 109, 112, 114, 116, 117, 122 Monck, George, General 18, 19, 23, 24, 30, 46, 126, 127 Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 4, 60, 63, 68, 77, 111, 118, 120 moon imagery 36, 42, 65, 73, 102, 106, 112, 158 More, Henry 4–6, 12, 29, 33, 35, 36, 44, 54, 64, 65, 67, 73, 80 Moses 90, 91, 93, 114, 123, 135 Murtada ibn al-Khafif 89, 91, 92, 94, 95 Neo-Platonism 2, 3, 28, 35, 67, 72, 76, 148 Newmarket fire 127 Newton, Isaac 5, 67 Nile River 45, 83, 89, 92–95, 98, 99, 116 Novak, Maximillian E. 7, 48, 51, 54, 58, 59, 61, 64, 72, 87, 89, 91, 97 occult definition of 2 history of 2–6 Orpheus 22, 136, 137 Orr, Bridget 1, 2, 9, 40, 77, 87 Osiris 91, 93, 98 Ossory, Thomas Butler, Earl of 115 Paracelsus 3, 36, 51, 64, 71 Plato 6, 28 Platonism 6, 35, 60, 63, 66, 72, 75, 90, 92, 160 Pleiades 133, 135 Plutarch 2, 91, 93, 94 poetic vision 8, 10, 11, 42, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 100, 101, 111, 118, 136, 137, 140, 155–57, 159, 160 poet’s role 41, 47, 54 Pope, Alexander vii, 30, 54, 107 Eloisa to Abelard vii Essay on Man 30, 107 The Rape of the Lock 54 Popish Plot 4, 101, 126, 127, 157 post-Copernican 21 potion 3, 28, 29, 52, 146 pre-Copernican viii, 12, 13, 19, 128, 132 prodigies 6, 8, 92, 93, 97, 101–104, 106, 148, 157

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prophecy 4, 7, 23, 25, 27–29, 32–36, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 57, 63–65, 79, 87, 97, 101, 106, 114, 118, 121, 124, 132, 146, 148–50, 156, 157, 159, 160 Providence 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18–25, 29–31, 36, 39–43, 45–48, 50, 52–55, 57–60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70–78, 80, 81, 83–88, 97, 100, 101, 107, 109–12, 115, 117, 121, 122, 125–30, 132, 133, 139, 140, 146, 149, 153, 156, 159, 160 Ptolemy 12, 71, 79, 94, 96, 98, 99 Puritans 13–19, 24, 51, 130 Pythagoras 22, 28 Reinert, Otto 92, 95, 96 Reverand, Cedric D., II vii, ix, 1, 117, 133, 136 rhetoric definition of 2 river imagery 83, 89, 92–95, 99, 109, 117 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of 3, 53 Roman Catholic 31, 35, 37–39, 59, 73, 89, 90, 101, 102, 112, 114, 129, 131, 153 Roman Empire 27, 29, 60, 64, 66, 88, 90, 91, 94–99 Roper, Alan vii, 5, 11, 13, 15, 16, 23, 41, 42, 44, 46, 102, 116, 118, 158, 159 Rosicrucian 148 Rowley, William 3, 147, 148 The Birth of Merlin 147, 148 The Changeling 3 The Royal Society 4, 25, 40, 41, 46, 47, 55, 67, 114, 156 Royalist 13–18, 23, 24, 47, 118 Sandys, George 92, 97 Saxon 140–42, 144–47, 153 Schilling, Bernard N. 1, 18, 42, 112–15 science natural philosophy 20 scientific method 6, 40, 46, 53, 68, 140, 149 Scott, Sir Walter 49, 57, 88, 139, 140, 145, 148 secret 2, 5, 17, 18, 20, 23, 30, 40–43, 66, 74, 83, 88, 113, 119, 120, 122, 156

covert 42, 43 hidden viii, 2, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 22, 23, 30, 31, 42, 85, 88, 109, 111, 119–21, 125, 128, 155, 157 sedition 115, 116, 118 Serapion 93, 94 Serapis 90, 91, 93 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of 87, 101, 102, 111, 113–18, 121, 127, 128 Shakespeare, William vii, viii, 3, 10, 32, 48–55, 63, 68, 85, 86, 88, 97, 99, 107, 133, 134, 136, 143, 150, 156, 158 Antony and Cleopatra 10 Hamlet 3, 32 Macbeth 32, 150 The Tempest viii, 48–55, 68, 143, 158 Troilus and Cressida 107 shooting star imagery 12, 44 Spain 25, 26, 29–31, 38, 39, 47, 75, 77, 156 sphere imagery 11, 12, 14, 19, 21, 43, 79, 121, 133, 151 Sprat, Thomas 113 star imagery 11, 12, 14–16, 18–22, 32, 36, 43, 44, 48, 49, 71, 72, 81, 82, 85, 88, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112–14, 121, 123, 127, 133–35, 149, 150 Stillingfleet, Edward 91 stoicism 59, 61, 66, 96 storm imagery 14, 48, 72, 104, 131, 158 sun imagery 19, 21, 36, 38, 42, 43, 80, 84, 85, 113, 123, 134 Tasso, Torquato 102, 145 tempest imagery 63, 108, 117 Tetragrammaton 131 Thomas, Keith 3–5, 12, 15, 16, 19, 27, 44, 53, 71, 73, 112 Thompson, James 77 Tillyard, E. M. W. 133 Traherne, Thomas 153 Trismegistus, Hermes Mercurius 22, 89, 90, 114, 117 Virgil 6, 13, 23, 28, 35, 89, 97, 136 Vulcan 104

Index wave imagery 116 weapon salve 52, 53 Weinbrot, Howard D. 89, 95, 96, 113 West, Robert Hunter 2, 3, 17, 27, 33–35, 44, 53, 67, 72, 73, 114 Whigs 63, 68, 90, 98, 114, 115, 117, 130, 131, 141, 152 William III, King 152 witchcraft 2, 3, 6, 7, 25, 32, 33, 44, 51, 71, 75, 81, 82, 116, 150

Womersley, David 101, 110 Worsley, Benjamin 36 Zimbardo, Rose A. 57, 58 zodiac 36, 135 Zwicker, Steven N. vii, 1, 13, 17, 114, 153, 159

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