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

I was Conscious where a true Critick might have put me

upon my defence. I was prepared for their Attack; and am

pretty confident I could have vindicated some parts, and

excused others; and where there were any plain Miscarriages, I

would most ingenuously have confess'd 'em. But I have not

heard any thing said sufficient to provoke an Answer.

Again, Congreve has nothing to say to his critics, for a "true Critick" simply doesn't exist in his theatrical world. Again, Congreve assures us that his play possesses faults, but that he alone recognizes them. Again, Congreve thwarts any exchange between audience and playwright, "the Ignorance and Malice of the greater part of the Audience" making a dialogue or interchange impossible.

Congreve here participates in what Peter Stallybrass and Allon white have described as a process of cultural cleansing that stretches from Ben Jonson in the early seventeenth century to Wordsworth in the early nineteenth." Congreve's construction of his laureate self depends on both his vulgarization of the theatrical audience and a pattern of literary filiation that subtends and authorizes his estrangement from that audience. Congreve and Southerne generate a myth of literary succession and dramatic vulgarity as an alternate body for themselves, one that uses the fixity of print and a body of type as a defence against the bodily uncontrol and self-exposure that is a necessary condition of entertainment in a popular and commercial theatre.(14)

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It is left to Dryden -- whose "To my Dear Friend, Mr. Congreve" is the singular adornment of the quarto of The Double-Dealer aside from Congreve's own dedication -- to perfect the image of the laureate author prepared by Congreve and Southerne. Dryden's poem deploys and develops both the topos of dramatic vulgarity and that of literary succession in ways that inevitably for a modern reader recall Macflecknoe. Dryden here stands in the place of Flecknoe, grown old and "subject to decay," inspired by his closeness to death to vatic pronouncements in a "prophetic mood." A basso counterpoint to the shrill tenor of the earlier poem, the verses to Congreve attempt to justify and valorize Dryden's career by providing the authorized history of seventeenth-century English theatre. Congreve provides the occasion for Dryden's poem, but Dryden is its subject.

The poem claims prophetic, even apocalyptic speech in its first lines, which announce the coming of "the promis'd hour" when "The present Age of Wit obscures the past." Congreve's succession from Dryden completes a cycle of history, representing the triumph of contemporary poetry over its own past. This competition with the past marks Dryden, as Walter Jackson Bate noted years ago, as one of the first English poets to suffer from a sense of his own belatedness, to experience his literary past as a burden and source of anxiety.(15) "The Gyant Race, before the Flood" that oppresses Dryden's literary imagination does so not simply because of its strength and outsized accomplishments, its "Gyant" stature, but because it came "before the Flood," preceding the cataclysmic events that tragically divide present from past, one age from the next. The almost twenty years of civil upheaval, which encompass the Civil War, execution of Charles I, elevation of Cromwell, and closing of the theatres, dominate Dryden's understanding of both political and literary history, dividing him from his past and disrupting the orderly progression of generations.