A "double Portion of his Father's Art": Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the drama of theatrical succession - William Congreve, John Dryden, Ben Jonson

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In Self-crowned Laureates, Richard Helgerson asserts that "when the writer first appears before his audience, the pressure on self-presentation is greatest. To some extent, each beginning-beginnings of individual works as well as beginnings of careers-brings a renewal of self-presentational pressures."' Helgerson is surely correct to emphasize the self-presentational weight on that moment when authors first formally introduce themselves to their audience, inaugurating a relationship fraught with personal, cultural, and economic implications. Yet Helgerson's concern with the origins of early modern conceptions of authorial identity-his general focus on beginnings"-explains his inattention to how "endings" may also define moments when "the pressure on self-presentation is greatest." Taking leave of one's audience, imagining the end of one's career, involves a writer in a host of literary and emotional issues that are invariably charged with and transformed by the recognition of the writer's individual mortality, that moment when self-presentational pressures may indeed be said to be greatest," when all must render their accounts before God.

In this essay I will examine an unusual "moment" when the "beginning" of one writer's career takes place in conjunction with the "ending" of another's, when authorial introduction and farewell are conjoined in a self-conscious attempt to create an important drama of cultural succession. William Congreve was not an unpublished author when the first editions of his first two plays, The Old Batchelour and The Double-Dealer, appeared in March and December of 1693, within weeks of each play's premiere. But Incognita had been published anonymously early in 1692, and the poems and translations also published in that year in Charles Gildon's Miscellany of Original Poems and John Dryden's Satires of Juvenal and Persius represent occasional efforts rather than the beginning of a career; presented along Criticism, Summer 1997, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, pp. 359-382 Copyright c3 1997 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 th works by other authors, or embedded in the text of another, they cannot declare the identity of a new and singular authorial presence.

The two play quartos of 1693, however, reveal Congreve's desire to present himself to fin de siecle London as a dramatist, and to imagine his literary career within the precincts and traditions of the English theatre. It is not only the plays themselves, and particularly their prologues and epilogues, which articulate Congreve's authorial identity, but the two dedications and sundry commendatory verses that herald his arrival on the literary scene. Although we must take care in reading such highly conventional forms of writing, which employ familiar tropes and obey specific rhetorical rules, the careful fabrication of each quarto, and the quite evident links between them, suggest that Congreve thought of these two slender volumes as far more than the simple publication of dramatic texts that provided the opportunity to exploit economically one very successful and one less successful play.2 They represent rather a determined attempt to formulate a history of the seventeenth-century English theatre and to position the fledgling playwright as the fulfillment of its most important traditions.

At the center of this strategy are not the plays themselves, but Dryden's "To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On His Comedy, call'd The Double-Dealer," in which the elderly literary lion formally pronounces Congreve his poetic successor. Dryden rehearsed his retirement from the stage in other forums as well, most notably in the 1694 production of his final play, Love Triumphant, where the prologue announces that "He Dies, at least to us, and to the Stage," while the epilogue even imagines that "the Poet's dead." But in the verses prefixed to Congreve's play Dryden clearly desires to create a cultural moment of great literary significance, one that attempts to encompass the past development of English drama and to enforce a particular vision of the theatrical present. The aged eminence, like his younger counterpart, expresses his concern for his place in history and his determination to formulate that history in ways that can legitimate his art and career.

In examining these two quartos I want to revise a conventional narrative of the dramatist's relationship to the stage that Jonas Barish, for instance, employs in The Antitheatrical Prejudice when he places Ben Jonson "among a galaxy of talented playwrights who at a given moment in their careers have seen their whole enterprise as hollow, and proceeded to renounce it, or else reform it.3 When applied to the career of William Congreve, this narrative seizes on the reputed failure of his acknowledged masterpiece, The Way of the World, as the decisive "moment" when the artist formally recognizes the unworthiness of his audience-fools and knaves all-and retires in high dudgeon from a vile commercial theatre that has failed to properly appreciate, and even threatened to pollute his genius.