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Text: | John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis |
Absalom and Achitophel | |
William Congreve, The Way of the World | |
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress | |
Contexts: | Samuel Pepys, The Diary |
Ancrene Riwle | |
Topics: | London Reborn: Annus Mirabilis |
Reading Political Poetry: Absalom and Achitophel | |
Restoration Visions: Congreve and Bunyan |
In terms of political history, the Restoration was an event. In cultural terms, it was a complex process. The conflicts that had torn England apart for two decades did not disappear overnight when Charles II was restored to the throne. These conflicts were, however, expressed in different ways: in literature rather than on the battlefield. Some of those who had suffered on the royalist side before 1660 took literary revenge by mercilessly satirizing the foes they had feared and hated. Others sought through poetry to heal the nation's divisions, prophesying a bright future for a newly united and confident England. At the same time, brilliant Puritan writers like Milton and Bunyan continued to express defiance with their pens.
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London Reborn: Annus Mirabilis
The restoration of Charles II to the English throne was attended by much celebration—and much anxiety. People of all political persuasions hoped that the nation could now look forward to an era of peace and security after two decades of conflict and instability. A minor royalist poet, Alexander Brome, expressed his optimism in verses written in the spring of 1660:
We'll eat and we'll drink, we'll dance and we'll sing,
The Roundheads and Cavs, no more shall be named,
But all join together to make up the ring,
And rejoice that the many-headed dragon is tamed.
'Tis friendship and love that can save us and arm us,
And while we all agree, there is nothing can harm us.
Just below the surface of Brome's celebratory lines lurks his fear of civil conflict and the enduring threat of mob rule (the "many-headed dragon"). The poet expresses more confidence than he perhaps feels, but it was through such acts of willed optimism all across the country that the Restoration came about, and came about peacefully.
Six years after the Restoration, it must have been even more difficult to remain optimistic about the nation's future. The year 1666 witnessed a string of disasters, including humiliating military defeats by the Dutch, huge mortality from the last great outbreak of bubonic plague, and finally the Fire of London, which destroyed a huge part of the old city. The destruction and horror caused by the fire are vividly described by Samuel Pepys in his Diary.
John Dryden's Annus Mirabilis ("year of wonders") performs the paradoxical feat of turning the disasters of 1666 into triumphs, or at least signs of victories to come. Like Brome in the verses quoted above, Dryden is resolutely (if not quite convincingly) optimistic, paving over recent defeats and lingering divisions within English society by painting a picture of England's imminent exaltation. Although the technical subject of the extract from the poem in NAEL is the destruction of London by fire and the rebuilding of the city, Dryden's comparison of the conflagration to a Cromwell-like "dire usurper" sent "To scourge his country with a lawless sway" (lines 849-50) makes the wider relevance apparent. The poem conveys a sense of new beginnings, of a nation starting from scratch but with confidence in its unlimited potential. Like John Donne at the dawn of the seventeenth century, Dryden chooses the legendary phoenix as the emblem of his age:
More great than human, now, and more August,
New deified she from her fires does rise
Her widening streets on new foundations trust,
And, opening, into larger parts she flies.
In this poem, much more than a bigger, better London is rising upon new foundations. Dryden's confidence in England's future greatness at the end of this year of disasters may be nine-tenths bluster, but what is most remarkable is what he is blustering about: naval power and global trade:
Now like a Maiden Queen, she will behold
From her high turrets, hourly suitors come:
The East with incense, and the West with gold,
Will stand like suppliants, to receive her doom.
These lines consciously invoke the memory of Elizabeth, the virgin queen. Yet her modern equivalent is not Charles II, but the mercantile city of London. Even for Dryden, a royalist to the bone, the index of English greatness is to be found not in the majesty of its monarch, but the balance of its trade.
When Dryden wrote Annus Mirabilis, the London that would rise in splendor from the ashes was still little more than a blueprint by Christopher Wren. Many were inclined to interpret the fire, along with the horrific plague that preceded it, as a sign of God's unappeasable anger with England's decadent capital. Yet at least as far as the city was concerned, Dryden's confidence proved entirely justified. Just two years after the fire that he recorded so vividly, Samuel Pepys was cheerfully doing business at "the Change"—that is, the Royal Exchange, swiftly rebuilt after the fire as a vast shopping mall that became the hub of city life. The resurrection of London added greatly to the confidence of its citizens that they were indeed living in a new Augustan age. Just as the Emperor Augustus had found Rome brick and left it marble, so Wren and others had triumphantly transformed England's capital. Looking back, Samuel Johnson would say that Dryden, the city's panegyrist, had performed the same feat with English poetry.
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Reading Political Poetry: Absalom and Achitophel
Although London was indeed reborn from the ashes of the fire, England's future remained uncertain and the political mood dangerously insecure. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel is an allegory of the political crisis of the years 1678-81. These events, known as the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, had the immediate result of dividing members of the English ruling class into two rival political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Divisive party politics, which still dominate national affairs in Britain and America in the twenty-first century, are a legacy of the Restoration.
Absalom and Achitophel is at once a piece of party-political propaganda (brought out to influence events in 1681) and a denunciation of party politics. The central issue, from Dryden's point of view, was the danger that renewed Civil War might overthrow the tenuous social order that had been established by the Restoration and leave the nation at the mercy of intolerant and power-hungry political factions. The poem is full of satiric references to the religious and political strife of the early seventeenth century. Dryden's analogy between the English and the people of ancient Israel works on several levels, one of which is to mock parallels the Puritans had observed between their deeds and the events of the Old Testament. In this poem, the "Jews" are "a headstrong, moody, murmuring race," never satisfied for long with their leaders, "God's pampered [as opposed to "chosen"] people" (lines 45-47). Dryden dismisses the widespread fear of a new Catholic persecution under a Catholic monarch as a trumped issue, exploited by unscrupulous politicians as the "communist menace" was in the McCarthy era.
In Achitophel (the earl of Shaftesbury), Dryden has drawn the portrait of a clever politician without principles, interested only in personal power, "Resolved to ruin or to rule the state" (line 174). Achitophel's method is to arouse and to manipulate the prejudices of the majority. To accomplish his ends, he seeks to make a puppet of the handsome, popular, and weak Absalom (Charles II's illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth). Whereas Milton has seen kings and bishops as oppressors, Dryden feared the oppression of mob rule under the control of radical politicians like Shaftesbury. Dryden admired Milton as a poet (see his "Epigram on Milton"), but opposed his politics absolutely. A true conservative, he believed that order and civil rights were better protected by law and the monarch's paternal sway than by democratic processes. King David (Charles II) asserts this philosophy in the speech that closes the poem:
The law shall still direct my peaceful sway,
And the same law teach rebels to obey:
Votes shall no more established power control—
Such votes as make a part exceed the whole:
No groundless clamors shall my friends remove,
Nor crowds have power to punish ere they prove . . .
(lines 991-96)
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Restoration Visions: Congreve and Bunyan
Few works in the canon of English literature seem to have less in common than Congreve's The Way of the World and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Had they ever met—which itself would have been most unlikely—the two authors would certainly have despised each other. Bunyan would probably have disapproved of plays on principle, and even more so of plays like Congreve's, which seemed to Puritans to celebrate worldliness and immorality. Congreve, for his part, made his view of Bunyan known in The Way of the World. When Lady Wishfort points out the books over her chimney—"Quarles and Prynne, and the Short View of the Stage, with Bunyan's works to entertain you"—Congreve associates Bunyan with enemies of the stage and killjoys generally. Nothing, it is implied, could be less entertaining.
In spite of the immense difference between these two works, each embodies part of the spirit of the age, and each is an outstanding example of its literary kind. Congreve and Bunyan have both been loved by generation after generation—though rarely by the same people. Today, perhaps, it is at last possible to appreciate them both.
The Way of the World has a good claim to be the best as well as the best-known Restoration comedy. The play succeeds in part because it is a critique as well as an exemplar of Restoration dramatic values. Indeed, compared to some of his predecessors, Congreve is an outright moralist. He might be speaking to the previous generation of playwrights when he has Mrs. Marwood ironically remark, "Besides, you forget, marriage is honorable." The Way of the World sparkles with wit, yet it is also sharply critical of those for whom wit appears the highest virtue. Congreve and the reader are simultaneously delighted and repelled by the finely observed Fainall, who wittily argues that it would make him miserable to be rid of his wife: "For having only that one hope, the accomplishment of it of consequence must put an end to all my hopes; and what a wretch is he who must survive his hopes!" An equally subtle and scathing portrait is that of the foolish Witwoud, who has covered up his rustic background and one-time apprenticeship to reinvent himself as an endlessly epigrammatic fop. Witwoud might stand for many in Congreve's original audience—perhaps one reason the play was at first not well-received.
Lady Wishfort's reference to "Bunyan's works to entertain you" may be Congreve's little joke, but the fact is that the best-selling Pilgrim's Progress entertained as well as instructed many more people in the Restoration era than did The Way of the World. The book still retains its capacity to captivate, though this requires the reader to shed the prejudicial assumption that Bunyan is a simple-minded moralizer, standing in wholesome and homely contrast to his thrillingly wicked Restoration contemporaries. Like Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress reveals the response of a boldly eloquent Puritan to the experience of defeat. The Vanity Fair episode offers a devastating allegorical depiction of English society and its treatment of Dissenters after the Restoration. Though Bunyan writes within the age-old tradition of Christian allegory (compare the Parable of the Christ Knight from the thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle), he is a keen observer of contemporary England, with its emerging consumer society:
at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
In the end, like the older Milton, Bunyan found himself less concerned with the reformation of the commonwealth than with the transformation of the human soul. In a hostile society, the individual is often required to seek the path to salvation unaided and alone—Christian stops his ears against the cries of his wife and children and runs on, "crying Life! life! eternal life!" In the long years of defeat, the Puritan mindset still offered experiences of literary and spiritual intensity far surpassing anything available from Restoration rakes and wits.
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Text: | Aphra Behn, "The Disappointment" |
John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, "The Imperfect Enjoyment" | |
John Dryden, Song from Marriage a la Mode | |
Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage | |
Daniel Defoe, Roxana | |
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband" | |
Frances Burney, The Journal and Letters | |
Contexts: | William Congreve, The Way of the World |
William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode | |
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas | |
Topics: | Restoration Provocations |
Arguments in Verse: Gender and Class | |
Debating Marriage |
The condition of women in the Restoration and the eighteenth century presents a complex picture. On the one hand, this was an era in which women's access to certain kinds of power and freedom grew steadily. In the new market economy (including the book market), women's importance as consumers could not be ignored; women were often seen as arbiters of taste and sometimes of morality, and an elite few played important if unofficial roles in politics. More and more women of all classes wrote, some for coteries and others for the public. On the other hand, the intellectual and sexual freedoms that some women had begun to exercise in the Restoration era soon receded, to be replaced by a regime of propriety. Later generations brought forth no equivalent to the brilliant and outrageous Aphra Behn.
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Restoration Provocations
A small group of royalist writers celebrated the Restoration and the defeat of Puritanism by launching a playfully wicked assault on middle-class morality. Writers such as Aphra Behn and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who moved, at different levels, in the cosmopolitan world of the court, delighted in what is now often called "pushing the envelope." They wrote to outrage and scandalize, as well as to titillate and amuse.
In the charged cultural climate of the late seventeenth century, a peculiar sub-genre came to brief and shocking prominence: satirical poems dealing in explicit terms with sexual encounters, or attempted sexual encounters broken off by male impotence. Aphra Behn's "The Disappointment" and the Earl of Rochester's "The Imperfect Enjoyment" are both examples of this sub-genre, as is the later poem "The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady's Dressing Room" by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It is not surprising that these poems continue to make many readers feel uncomfortable, as they were written to provoke and to shock. Indeed, the poems by Behn and Rochester can be regarded as subjecting the reader to a kind of test. How the reader responds to the poem determines whether he or she is one of "us" (a member of the sophisticated Tory elite) or one of "them" (a Puritanical middle-class prude).
In spite of their obvious similarities in terms of subject matter and political subtext, there are important differences between the poems of Behn and Rochester. Rochester's sexual imagery is harsh and violent, while Behn writes an ironic version of pastoral. Behn emphasizes her empathy with the nymph Cloris ("The nymph's resentments none but I / Can well imagine or condole," lines 131-32), while Rochester's poem is male-centered ("Corinna" seems to disappear halfway through the poem, leaving the poet alone to rage against his own body).
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Arguments in Verse: Gender and Class
The arguments over women's moral, social, and literary worth gathered in the section "Debating Women: Arguments in Verse" can be seen as an extension of the medieval and early modern querelle des femmes (a long-running literary debate about the worthiness of women). Contributors to this controversy in the previous century include Aemilia Lanyer and Rachel Speght. Never before the eighteenth century, however, had so many women, or women from such a range of class backgrounds, written in defense of their sex. The social chasm dividing Mary Leapor, the gardener's daughter, from Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, is arguably as great or greater as that separating men and women of the same class, but it manifests itself in different ways.
Although all of the women writers represented here seek to defend their sex against male attacks, the means open to them are determined in part by their social position. As a working-class woman, Leapor could never have risked the playful images of violent retribution found in Finch's "Answer." Montagu's "The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady's Dressing Room" speaks volumes about class as well as sexual antagonisms. Swift's Celia is transformed into the vulgar and mercenary Betty, and the poem is full of glancing blows at those who seek to rise above their proper station (lines 41-44), not to mention the Irish (line 87).
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Debating Marriage
One of the most important debates of the eighteenth century, in literature and in society, was over the institution of marriage. Only a tiny minority of people in this period would have been prepared to argue against marriage altogether. However, an increasing number of women and some men were convinced that marriage was badly in need of reform. In its present state, they argued, it stifled and degraded women and men, when its purpose was to comfort and uplift them.
Contributions to the debate in this period include:
Almost all of the contributors agree that contemporary marriage is flawed. For some, the fault lies in those who enter into marriage; for others, it lies in the institution itself. In general, women writers tend toward the latter opinion, men toward the former, though there are exceptions to this rule. Perhaps the most rhetorically complex text is Roxana, in which a male author puts in the mouth of a female character a series of powerful arguments against marriage that, she admits to the reader, she does not herself believe. But Roxana's real objection to marriage, namely the loss of economic independence it entails for women, is as powerful an argument against the institution as any other.
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Text: | Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave |
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano | |
Contexts: | Richard Savage, Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works |
Hannah More, "Slavery, a Poem" | |
William Cowper, "The Negro's Complaint" | |
Topics: | Oroonoko in Context |
Oroonoko and the Struggle for Abolition | |
The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano |
Slave labor and the slave trade played a crucial role in Britain's economic and political expansion in the eighteenth century. Both in the sugar colonies of the West Indies and in the port cities of Bristol and Liverpool, the entire economy rested on the ongoing traffic in slaves, and even many who never set eyes on a plantation or a slave ship owed their fortunes to slavery. The problem of slavery, then, is a central one for eighteenth-century society and for eighteenth-century literature—its relevance is by no means limited to the relatively few texts that deal explicitly with the terrible practice. As indicated by James Thomson's "Rule Britannia," which trumpets "Britons never will be slaves," the question of slavery was central to the way eighteenth-century white Britons thought about themselves.
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Oroonoko in Context
Oroonoko had a huge impact on later debates over slavery, but Aphra Behn's story is not about the slave trade alone. Although the central narrative deals with the enslavement of an African prince by the English, Behn's is a story of the meeting and clash of three cultures—the English, the Africans, and the natives of Surinam. (If we count the Dutch, who took Surinam in 1665, and who are blamed for treating the natives "not so civilly as the English," there are four cultures.) The unreliable and greedy Europeans contrast unfavorably both with the highly cultured and sophisticated Africans, and with the South Americans, who are represented as noble savages living in prelapsarian innocence, strangers to clothing, cowardice, and deceit.
Behn's narrator is by no means opposed to slavery or to colonialism, though she does imply that both practices have the potential to debase the European character. What makes Oroonoko's tale a tragedy is that he is a royal slave, the social superior of those who abuse him as a racial inferior. His tragic end, and the stoicism with which he faces it, are intended to recall the fate of *the royal martyr, Charles I* [http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/nto/17thC/politics/eikonfrm.htm]. Aphra Behn's story thus both looks forward to eighteenth-century debates over slavery and freedom, and backward to Civil War debates over royalism and regicide. Which of these strikes you as more important in understanding Oroonoko?
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Oroonoko and the Struggle for Abolition
In the later eighteenth century, with the rise of the abolitionist movement, Oroonoko began to be read as an anti-slavery text. Even then, however, some abolitionists regarded Behn's royalist novel with suspicion. *Hannah More's "Slavery, a Poem"* [http://wwnorton.com/nael/18century/topic_2/more.htm] seems to take issue with Oroonoko's politics and genre, even while turning the book's popularity to polemical account:
For no fictitious ills these numbers flow,
But living anguish, and substantial woe;
No individual griefs my bosom melt,
For millions feel what Oroonoko felt:
Fired by no single wrongs, the countless host
I mourn, by rapine dragg'd from Afric's coast.
A theme running through much writing on slavery from Oroonoko onwards is that of uneven historical development. Since the late sixteenth century, writers and artists had pondered the relationship between non-European "savages" and the peoples of European and British antiquity. Thus Behn notes that the ornate incisions on the bodies of the noble Africans "resemble our ancient Picts, that are figured in the chronicles." The slave-name of Caesar given to Oroonoko also associates him with European antiquity, though in a different way. The parallel between Africans and ancient Romans was later emphasized by Hannah More: "Capricious fate of man! that very pride / In Afric scourged, in Rome was deified." The abolitionist Richard Savage, in Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works, took the opposite tack, associating the enslaved Africans with the barbarian tribes who eventually turned the tables on Rome (Britain): "Revolving empire you and yours may doom, / (Rome all subdued, yet Vandals vanquished Rome)." Many in this period agreed that the difference between Europeans and Africans was one of historical development more or rather than racial development (though they might not agree on precisely which historical parallels should be drawn). A line can be drawn from Behn's Oroonoko as far forward as a passage in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (in volume 2 of the Norton Anthology of English Literature) that imagines the feelings of a Roman soldier on duty in ancient Britain:
I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day . . . Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.
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The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano was one of the first British writers of African descent. Born in an Ibo village in what is now Nigeria, Equiano was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the New World. Equiano was one of the fortunate few who were eventually able to purchase their freedom. Moving to England, he became involved in the anti-slavery movement and went on to write powerfully in favor of abolition.
Equiano's autobiography, The Interesting Narrative, with its account of the Middle Passage, provides a factual account of conditions aboard a slave ship to which Aphra Behn's imagined version may be compared. While white abolitionist readers would have expected to be moved by Equiano's account, just as they were by Behn's, they may well have been taken aback by the horror he expresses at his first sight of white men, and his initial assumption that they must be cannibals. The Interesting Narrative calls into question not only the morality of the slave trade, but also deeper assumptions about the normativity of whiteness.
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Text: | Samuel Butler, Hudibras |
John Dryden, "Mac Flecknoe" | |
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock | |
The Dunciad | |
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal" | |
Gulliver's Travels | |
Contexts: | John Dryden, A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire |
Samuel Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" | |
An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England | |
Topics: | Satiric Modes: Burlesque and Mock-Heroic |
The Jokes on . . . Who? Swift's Shorter Satires | |
The Satire of Gulliver's Travels |
Literary satire is not exclusive to the eighteenth century, but it reached some of its greatest heights in this period, and is the age's dominant mode. The object of satire is to correct folly, vices, and abuses by exposing them to derision and ridicule. But within this broadly defined genre, and in the hands of masters such as Dryden, Pope, and Swift, there is scope for almost infinite variety.
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Satiric Modes: Burlesque and Mock-Heroic
Samuel Butler's Hudibras exemplifies the attractions and deficiencies of the satiric mode known as the burlesque. When Butler published the first part of his satire on militant Puritans in 1662, he was briefly the toast of a king and court who were eager to laugh at "that stubborn crew / of errant saints" (lines 190-91) that had so recently held sway. Hudibras caters gleefully to popular prejudices and Butler's burlesque is both broad and shallow. At his best, however, he conveys serious insights in couplets that are both comic and quotable, as when he describes Presbyterians carrying on "As if religion were intended / For nothing else but to be mended" (lines 203-4).
Hudibras was wildly popular for a short while, but connoisseurs of satire soon came to prefer a subtler and stealthier mode. As Dryden says in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, "there is . . . a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place."
Dryden's own "Mac Flecknoe," a masterpiece of Restoration satire, is a mock-heroic send-up of a literary and political antagonist, Thomas Shadwell. The running joke is that Shadwell, who represents utter mediocrity, is described in the grand language and lofty style suitable for the heroes of epic poetry. The humor of the poem erupts out of the huge gulf between the solemn tone and the ludicrous subject, a poet who excels only in stupidity and obesity:
Sh— alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh— never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Sh—'s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day:
Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design'd for thoughtless majesty:
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.
In the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope was the master of this satiric mode, and his Rape of the Lock is the textbook example of the mock-heroic genre and style. Pope ingeniously adapts time-honored epic motifs such as the scene in which the hero arms himself (Belinda's dressing-table ritual), the great battle (the card-game), and the descent into the underworld (the Cave of Spleen). Yet while all these devices satirize the heroine and her social milieu, Belinda and her world are made astonishingly concrete, alive, and for all their petty vanities, highly attractive.
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The Jokes on . . . Who? Swift's Shorter Satires
Jonathan Swift was a great prose stylist, and he turned prose into a powerful medium of satire. In many of his shorter satires, Swift adopts the persona of a "projector," a man who presents himself as enlightened, reasonable, progressive, and civic-minded, and who argues rationally and ingeniously for projects that are obviously insane. This is the case, for instance, with the persona in "A Modest Proposal," who suggests that the humane and rational solution to hunger and poverty in Ireland is the sale and eating of Irish infants. Only gradually does it dawn on the reader that Swift's point is that the supposedly enlightened, reasonable, and progressive leaders of society are really as crazy as these narrators—that, for example, England's actual policies in Ireland are as barbarous in their consequences as the scheme advanced in "A Modest Proposal." There is, inevitably, a risk attached to a satiric mode that involves professing to admire and advocate the very things toward which the audience is meant to react critically. "A Modest Proposal" was famously misconstrued by some of its original readers as seriously endorsing infanticide and cannibalism.
The satiric mode employed by Swift in the brilliant essay on "Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England" is rather different. Here, Swift's persona takes a political position that is identical with Swift's own views, arguing against the abolition of the Test Act (the law that barred all those who were not members of the Church of England from holding public office). But the essay remains powerfully ironic. Rather than framing the question in terms of a particular act, Swift's persona blandly assumes that those who oppose the Test Act are bent on abolishing Christianity altogether, and meekly presents a few arguments in favor of retaining the rudiments of religion.
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The Satire of Gulliver's Travels
Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a masterpiece of satire, employing a range of satiric modes against a wide variety of targets. In part 1, dealing with Lilliput, the satire is chiefly political. The Lilliputian's bitter political controversies unmistakably mirror those of the British ruling class. Thus, in Lilliput, High Church Tories and Low Church Whigs find their equivalents in high-heeled Tramecksan and low-heeled Slamecksan: "animosities between these parties run so high, that they will neither eat nor drink, nor talk with each other." There exists a further rift between the ruling (Protestant) Little-Endians and the persecuted (Catholic) Big-Endians, who interpret in different ways the sacred text: "That all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end."
Swift's point here is certainly not that the difference between Whigs and Tories, or Protestants and Catholics, is no more meaningful than the height of your heels or how you eat an egg. As we know from "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England", he was a Tory propagandist and a High Churchman who believed Catholics and Protestant Dissenters should be barred from public office. The later chapters of part 1 of Gulliver's Travels satirize the Whig administration of Walpole (Flimnap) and show sympathy for the Tory lords Oxford and Bolingbroke, hounded like Gulliver with accusations of treason. Swift, in other words, was himself a confirmed high-heeled Little-Endian. His satire is not aimed at political and religious opinions as such, but at the tendency of parties to become more important—as focuses of loyalty and of enmity, as political machines and ladders of advancement—than the causes they were set up to serve.
The first three parts of Gulliver's Travels, which describe the societies of Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and Laputa, satirize different aspects of eighteenth-century English society—its politics, its wars, and its new science. But increasingly the satire also focuses on the human animal. Physically, the Lilliputians appear charming and delicate—like toys—to Gulliver, and he seems repulsive to them. Only gradually does he come to see their pride, pettiness, and meanness. In Brobdingnag, these conditions are exactly reversed, and Gulliver's own pride and nastiness emerge in his offer to make gunpowder for the king.
Harder questions are raised by the great and controversial fourth book. Here, for once, Swift's point of view is not entirely clear. Are the purely rational Houyhnhnms really ideal beings, or are we right to be horrified by the proposal that the Yahoos be exterminated by means of sterilization? Did Swift, to some degree, share Gulliver's misanthropy, or is Gulliver's rejection of his Yahoo identity and his wish to pass for a Houyhnhnm the ultimate insanity of pride?
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Text: | Joseph Addison, The Aims of the Spectator |
On the Scale of Being | |
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man | |
The Dunciad | |
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels | |
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas | |
Contexts: | Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds |
The Female Spectator | |
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World | |
Travel, Trade, and the Expansion of Empire: An Overview | |
Topics: | The Order of Things |
The Poet and the Scientist | |
Questionable Discoveries in Gulliver's Travels |
If the existence of one "New World" had been revealed to Europeans by Columbus in 1492, many more were discovered, explored, and invented in the course of the Restoration and the eighteenth century. In an era of exploration culminating in Captain Cook's voyage to New Zealand and Australia in 1768, the blank spaces on the map of the earth became filled with well-defined places, all populated by different societies with different customs. The reading public was eager for accounts of these newly discovered places and peoples. In the same era, certain sections of the public were no less fascinated by the scientific discoveries made possible by the microscope and the telescope. Suddenly, every star in the heavens and every drop of water could be looked on as a new world. For the devout, the fruits of geographical and scientific exploration offered further reasons to celebrate God's infinite bounty; for the more speculatively inclined, they provided grounds to question the established values and assumptions of their own society.
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The Order of Things
In his important essay "On the Scale of Being," Addison notes that "The author of The Plurality of Worlds draws a very good argument upon consideration for the peopling of every planet." The book to which he refers, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralitŽ des mondes (1686), was enduringly popular in this period. Its translators included Aphra Behn (1688), and later Frances Burney. In the book, a philosopher explains to an intelligent noblewoman his theory of life on other worlds:
To conclude, every thing lives, and every thing is animated. That is to say, if you comprehend the animals that are generally known, the living creatures lately discovered, and those that will be discovered hereafter, you will find that the Earth is very well peopled, and that Nature has been so liberal in bestowing them, that she has not been at the pains to discover half of 'em. After this, can you believe that Nature, who has been fruitful to excess as to the Earth, is barren to all the rest of the planets? [Behn's translation]
It is noteworthy and deserving of emphasis that two of the translators, as well as a large proportion of the audience for this and similar works, were women. Throughout the period, and perhaps especially as the relative freedom of the Restoration period gave way to the straitjacket of eighteenth-century feminine respectability, women were drawn to discourses that allowed them to imagine worlds and ways of life very different from their own. The Female Spectator encouraged women (of a certain class) to make use of the microscope and telescope. The attractions of other worlds, real or imagined, are apparent in Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, which concludes with the writer's determination to "reject and despise all the worlds without me, and create a world of my own."
Many male writers also gloried in the plenitude of God's creation, but were at the same time concerned to insist on its order, and to forestall certain kinds of speculation. As Pope writes in An Essay on Man, "Through worlds unnumbered though the God be known, / 'Tis ours to trace him only in our own" (lines 21-22). Addison, though he writes with wondering admiration of a universe that teems with every form of life, wants to emphasize that all of these forms are organized on a single scale, stretching from the lowest slime to the deity, with humanity nearer the former than the latter. Many worlds, then, but a single hierarchy. It was in the spirit of thinkers like Addison and Pope, not Cavendish and Fontenelle, that it was said "there could be only one Newton" for "there was only one world to discover."
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The Poet and the Scientist
In much eighteenth-century literature, delight in the revelation of Newtonian physics is combined with hostility toward most other kinds of science and scientists. For Alexander Pope, the role of science (embodied by Sir Isaac Newton) was to demonstrate the operation of a universal order. As Pope expressed it in the famous couplet cited under "Physics" in Johnson's Dictionary:
Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be, and all was light.
In Pope's view, the enlightenment delivered by Newton was all that humanity required. Any further scientific research—for instance, by the botanist and entomologist who appear before the throne of Dulness in The Dunciad—was at best redundant, at worst an incitement to: "See Nature in some partial narrow shape, / And let the author of the whole escape" (lines 455-56). Even wonder at the divine order was dangerous if it led human beings "To wonder at their Maker, not to serve" (line 458).
Other writers of the period show the same mingled suspicion and contempt for scientific enterprises. As Samuel Johnson observes in Rasselas, it is not the business of the poet—or, he implies, anyone with any sense—to "number the streaks of the tulip." The psychological and spiritual dangers of immersion in scientific study are made evident later in the story in the fate of the astronomer who comes to imagine that he is personally responsible for the weather.
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Questionable Discoveries in Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift was as scathing in his satire of science as of his other favored targets. The Laputans in part 3 of Gulliver's Travels are so terrified of destruction by comets or the extinction of the sun that they cannot sleep, and so preoccupied by abstruse speculations that they must be struck with a bladder to awaken "the organs of speech and hearing" (1.2415). Readers today may recognize the Laputans as antecedents of the modern stereotype of the "absent-minded professor."
Whereas part 3 of Gulliver's Travels satirizes scientists, the book as a whole is a satire of travel writing, at once reflecting and mocking the public appetite for tales of distant lands and strange peoples. As Gulliver notes in his concluding remarks on travel writing, such books were typically full of "strange improbable tales" and "the grossest falsities" (1.2470), abusing the trust of the reader. Swift no doubt had in mind texts such as George Psalmanazar's wildly inventive Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. The final chapter calls into question not only the veracity of traveler's tales but their purpose. Is it the role of the travel writer, as Gulliver claims, to serve "the PUBLIC GOOD" (1.2470) by providing examples of virtuous societies? How does this tally with Gulliver's other claim that his work has no implications for British politics (1.2331, 2471)? How seriously are we to take his denunciation of conquest and colonialism? Gulliver's Travels still challenges its readers to consider their motives—and the sources of their pleasure—in reading tales of new and different worlds.
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Text: | William Congreve, The Way of the World |
Jonathan Swift, "Description of a City Shower" | |
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" | |
Oliver Goldsmith, "The Deserted Village" | |
George Crabbe, "The Village" | |
Contexts: | Alexander Pope, "Epistle to Miss Blount" |
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Song: 'Men of England'" | |
Jonathan Swift, "A Description of the Morning" | |
Topics: | "Town" and "Country" |
Baneful Arts: Satirizing the City | |
Poetry and Social Change: The Villages of Goldsmith and Crabbe |
The theme of the country and (or versus) the city has an exceptionally long history in literature—the ancient Greek Aesop has a fable of the town mouse and the country mouse. The theme is however especially pertinent to the period of the Restoration and eighteenth century. This was the era that witnessed the spectacular growth of a host of English and Scottish cities, including Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow. Ever more dominant as the center of cultural and commercial life, London set the tone for business and for pleasure in Britain's emerging consumer society. In the same period, the face of the countryside, where the vast majority of the population still lived and worked the land, altered radically as well. Poets and playwrights throughout this period were closely attuned to the changes going on in both city and country.
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"Town" and "Country"
In the Restoration period, the habit originated of referring to London, and its fashionable society in particular, as "the town." Thus in the Prologue to The Way of the World, Congreve writes "Poets are bubbles, by the town drawn in" and later in the play Witwoud tells his brother "'tis not modish to know your relations in town." The use of the term involves a complex, self-mocking irony, by which London is at once comically diminished (not a city but merely a town) and set on a pedestal ("the town"). "Town" is comically contrasted with "country" in The Way of the World, with the shallow town fop Witwoud mocking his "great lubberly brother" from the provinces. A similar contrast occurs in Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount," in which the poet describes how Miss Blount was forced to leave London for a retired life in the country:
She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks
Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks:
She went from opera, park, assembly, play,
To morning walks and prayers three hours a day.
Yet these works, and others like them, ultimately criticize the town as much or more than the country. Congreve's over-sophisticated Witwoud is probably a greater fool than his crude but honest brother, and Pope's epistle ends with the poet "Vexed to be still in town" surrounded by "Streets, chairs and coxcombs."
Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is at once condescending and sympathetic in its meditation on the limited potential for greatness afforded by rural life. As he wanders among the gravestones, the sophisticated poet speculates whether they might memorialize "Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast / The little tyrant of his fields withstood" (lines 57-58). Like Congreve and Pope, Gray warns the privileged urban reader against wearing a too-easy "disdainful smile": death is the equal lot of peasant and potentate, and "The paths of glory lead but to the grave" (lines 31, 36).
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Baneful Arts: Satirizing the City
While some writers celebrated the splendor and variety of eighteenth-century London (as Johnson declared, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life") others came to regard the city as a sink of moral and physical corruption. The city's rapid growth brought with it a host of social and sanitary problems. London played host to both abject poverty and unparalleled wealth and sophistication. It was a city of teeming slums and open sewers, as well as of opulent mansions, theaters, and pleasure gardens. In the eyes of some moralists, London's wealth gave rise to sins no less heinous than the sins associated with poverty. As the poet Goldsmith wrote, London was the place "To see ten thousand baneful arts combined / To pamper luxury, and thin mankind" ("The Deserted Village," lines 311-12).
Jonathan Swift's satirical poems "A Description of the Morning" and "Description of a City Shower" concentrate unsparingly on all the varieties of filth the city breeds. As the rainstorm in the latter poem turns the streets to rivers, the poem follows the course of "dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats and turnip tops" through London's foul open sewers (lines 61-63). Yet the poem implies that the real source of London's filth has less to do with these obviously disgusting objects than with the pampered and selfish citizens who are forced to shelter from the rain.
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Poetry and Social Change: The Villages of Goldsmith and Crabbe
In the latter half of the eighteenth century, vast tracts of land all over England were transformed from common land into private property, through a process known as enclosure. Fields that had once been used by all members of the village community for growing crops or grazing animals now became the property of one wealthy man. The modern English landscape—dominated by privately owned fields divided by stone walls and hedges—is largely a product of enclosures carried out in the second half of the eighteenth century. The result of this process was sometimes an increase in agricultural productivity, but only at the cost of the partial depopulation of the countryside; thousands of rural people were forced to abandon their homes, migrating to London or America in search of a livelihood.
Partly as a result of such developments, the focus of many writers in this period shifted from the city to the countryside. Two exceptionally powerful poems dealing with the effects of enclosure and rural depopulation are Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" and Crabbe's "The Village." These works still challenge the reader to think about the politics of poetry and the ways in which a poem can make a statement. The two poems are sharply opposed to one another, yet they do not take opposite "sides"—both are written in anger at the dispossession and impoverishment of country people. The poets differ not in their aims but in their methods.
Goldsmith's method is to present an ideal image of rural life and then to lament its destruction by greedy landowners. His deserted village was a place of smiling gardens, wise elders, and innocent pastimes, but now it has been transformed into a wasteland:
Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green.
(1.2859, lines 35-38)
Goldsmith's approach leads him to exaggerate both the pleasantness of traditional rural life and the negative effects of enclosure (which did not produce the unproductive wasteland described in lines 35-50, but rather greater productivity in a partially depopulated landscape). His angry nostalgia allows for fine flourishes of bitter rhetoric—"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates and men decay" (lines 51-52). But though Goldsmith plays expertly on the heartstrings, it can be argued that his politics of nostalgia are ultimately undemanding. It is easy now for all Americans to lament the extermination of the American bison. In the same way, Goldsmith's privileged readers—many of whom would have benefited directly from enclosure—could partake in his sorrow while secure in the knowledge that "half the business of destruction [was] done" (line 396).
Crabbe's "The Village" is a reply to Goldsmith's poem and in some places a direct rebuke, as when he quotes and mocks the description of the village preacher as "passing rich with forty pounds a year" (line 303 in Crabbe, line 142 in Goldsmith). With its picture of a rural life that has always been and grows ever more ugly and painful, "The Village" denies its readers the pleasurable solace of nostalgia. It concludes with a funeral ceremony that is itself inconclusive (the "busy priest" never arrives), and this absence of closure leaves the reader unsettled, and potentially angry. Crabbe, then, is more effective than Goldsmith in stirring a desire for action and redress in the reader's breast. But what sort of action is desirable, or even possible? A heavy air of fatalism hangs over "The Village," and while Crabbe complains that "The wealth around them makes them doubly poor" (line 139) he avoids naming the direct connection between the gentry's wealth and the laborers' poverty. In the end, the reader is able to wish for nothing more radical than the provision of better doctors and better ministers than those who so abysmally fail Crabbe's aged pauper.
Both "The Deserted Village" and "The Village" are written for readers of the classes that profited, directly or indirectly, from enclosure. Goldsmith addresses himself to "Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen" (line 265), while Crabbe mockingly interrogates the pampered, self-indulgent city folk who would make up the bulk of his audience (lines 250-261). Neither speaks to the rural laborers with whose woes they are ostensibly concerned. Several decades and a revolution lie between these poets and the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who addressed himself directly to the exploited working class:
Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?
("A Song: 'Men of England,'" lines 1-4)
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Text: | John Dryden, Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern [In Praise of Chaucer] |
John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy [Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared] | |
Samuel Johnson, The Preface to Shakespeare | |
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets: Cowley [Metaphysical Wit] | |
POPULAR BALLADS | |
Contexts: | Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales |
William Shakespeare, King Lear | |
James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian | |
Topics: | Dryden's Chaucer |
Johnson's Shakespeare | |
Percy's Reliques |
Many of the great literary writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century—Dryden, Pope, and Johnson among them—were also brilliant editors and literary critics. It was in this period that what we now think of as the canon of "English Literature" was first defined. Dryden and Johnson were gifted interpreters of old texts, yet in their evaluations of Shakespeare and Chaucer they reveal as much about themselves, and the critical standards of their age, as about their illustrious predecessors. The eighteenth century also saw the first efforts to study traditionally oral productions, such as ballads and folktales, as part of the national literature.
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Dryden's Chaucer
"In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil." The words with which Dryden begins his praise of Chaucer may sound uncontroversial to us today, but they are remarkable in the context of their time. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers had been far from certain that there was or ever could be such a thing as "English poetry," meaning a canon of national literature that could bear comparison with the writings of the ancients. Poets like Edmund Spenser and John Milton had embarked on grand projects in the epic vein (The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost) partly because they believed England had not yet produced its Homer or Virgil. Dryden has no such worries. For him, English poetry is an established fact, and Chaucer is its father.
Dryden sees Chaucer not as a model to be followed, but rather as the originator of a tradition that has been steadily improving ever since. This again marks out his difference from earlier ways of thinking about literature. Renaissance theorists tended to equate origins with perfection—the point was not to improve on Homer or Virgil, but to emulate their flawless achievement. Dryden, on the other hand, finds plenty of flaws in Chaucer, owing to the perceived barbarity of his age: "he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and . . . nothing is brought to perfection at the first." According to this view, literary tradition is not static, but progressive and evolving.
Dryden asserts that "Chaucer followed Nature everywhere. . . ." Truth to nature was perhaps the most important criterion of aesthetic excellence for neoclassical critics like Dryden. "Nature" is also an important term in Dryden's praise of Shakespeare (in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson Compared). What does Dryden appear to mean by "Nature" in both of these passages?
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Johnson's Shakespeare
Samuel Johnson was a great writer and a great literary critic in an age when these two activities were still closely intertwined. Through works such as his edition of Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets, Johnson sought to create and educate the literary appetite and taste of an ever-expanding reading public.
Like Dryden before him and in common with most critics of the eighteenth century, Johnson valued nothing in a work of literature so much as truth to nature. In addition, he stipulated that art should reflect general and universal truths, rather than focusing on the perverse or unique. As Imlac famously puts it in Johnson's Rasselas, "The business of the poet is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances; he does not number the streaks of the tulip."
In the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson makes much the same point when he insists that "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of a general nature." This, Johnson argues, is precisely the source of Shakespeare's greatness: "the poet of nature, the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life." What might sound like a criticism to our ears—that Shakespeare's characters are not really individuals but common types—is for Johnson cause for the highest praise. By contrast, the eagerness for originality and distinctiveness that Johnson observes in the so-called Metaphysical Poets (see his discussion of Cowley in Lives of the Poets) strikes him as little better than contemptible.
Shakespeare's great tragedy, King Lear, presents an apparent challenge to Johnson's literary theory. In its original form, the play concludes with the violent death of the innocent and good Cordelia. In the eighteenth century, however, the play was usually performed in a revised version by Nahum Tate. In Tate's Lear, Cordelia survives and marries the young hero Edgar—the tragedy effectively becomes a comedy.
Though he prints Shakespeare's original version, Johnson is sympathetic with Tate's emendations. The death of Cordelia fills him with horror. Yet Johnson finds it difficult to argue that the tragic end violates his critical standards. In life, good people do often meet with cruel and early deaths—Johnson is thus forced to acknowledge that Cordelia's death "is a just representation of the common events of human life." Nevertheless, he argues, Cordelia's death is "contrary to the natural ideas of justice." It seems Shakespeare's conclusion is both true and false to nature at the same time.
What do you think of Johnson's argument that art should mirror nature? Does it accord with any of your own ideas about literature? Do you find Johnson's argument in regard to Cordelia's death convincing or contradictory?
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Percy's Reliques
The relationship between literature and oral tradition has always been a vexed topic. On the one hand, orally transmitted songs and stories can be regarded as a legitimate branch of literature. On the other hand, oral traditions have often been seen as the very opposite and antithesis of written literature.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it was rare indeed for educated people to take an interest in the orally transmitted lore of the illiterate masses. What was not worth recording in writing, it was assumed, was not worth remembering. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, there was a growing interest in the outlook and customs of the "folk." In the face of rapid technological and cultural change, urban intellectuals began to fear that the nation was losing touch with its primitive essence. They looked to isolated rural communities, such as those of the English-Scottish borders and the Highlands of Scotland, as places where the national past remained vital and alive.
In 1765, James Macpherson published The Poems of Ossian. These poems were based to a large extent on traditions still extant in the highlands and islands of Scotland. Macpherson, however, ascribed the poems to the legendary Gaelic bard Ossian, translated from a manuscript he claimed to have in his possession. Evidently, he assumed that such a manuscript would carry more weight with the reading public than mere oral tradition. The authenticity of Ossian was vehemently disputed by Samuel Johnson among many others. Although Macpherson was eventually discredited, Ossian influenced many of the writers, artists, and composers of the Romantic period, including William Blake, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Felix Mendelssohn.
In the same year that Macpherson published his Ossian, Bishop Percy printed his three-volume Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a collection of ballads. Many similar collections followed. Ballads had traditionally been scorned as crude effusions of no literary merit whatever. Yet, as his title indicates, Percy believed these texts to be worthy of an honored place in the canon of "English poetry."
The six ballads included in your Norton Anthology differ from most of the other texts in the volume in some obvious ways. They are meant to be sung rather than read; they are meant to be remembered and continually revised rather than recorded in a fixed form. Unlike most literary texts, ballads come in multiple versions, all of which may be equally "authentic." Is it possible to "read" (that is, interpret) these texts in the same way that we "read" the poetry of Pope or Johnson? Are they, indeed, "texts" at all?
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