This article was downloaded by: [University of Cambridge]On: 09 October 2014, At: 16:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The ExplicatorPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vexp20

Dryden's Cinyras and MyrrhaAnthony W. Lee aa Kentucky Wesleyan College ,Published online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Anthony W. Lee (2004) Dryden's Cinyras and Myrrha, TheExplicator, 62:3, 141-144, DOI: 10.1080/00144940409597201

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940409597201

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and viewsexpressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of theContent should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of theContent.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,

sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

16:

23 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

NOTES

I , References throughout are to the Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor

2. Augustine. Christian Instruction, in Writings of Saint Augustinc, vol. 4, trans. John J. Gavi-

3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. I , (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 119161

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

gan, O.S.A. (New York: Cima Publishing, 1947) book 2.64.

1960) book 2 , 5 4 5 5 .

Dryden’s CINYRAS AND MYRRHA

The numerous translations Dryden made late in his poetic career have pro- voked increasing critical attention from scholars and students in the past few decades. Keith Walker’s recent anthology of Dryden’s writings for the Oxford Author Series devotes most of its pages to these translations, including Virgil’s Georgia and the Fables in their entirety. How to approach these texts is a vexed issue: Do we read them primarily as translations or as original poems? One solution, typified by the work of scholars Steven N. Zwicker and David Bywaters, leans toward the latter approach by interpreting the translations as disguised commentary on the political scene in late seventeenth-century Eng- land. In this article, I will follow this approach, analyzing Dryden’s use of incest in his translation of Ovid’s “Cinyras and Myrrha” from Fables, Ancient and Modern and showing that he intended his translation as a corrosive cri- tique of the political settlement following the Glorious Revolution.’

During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Mary the daughter of King James 11, and her husband, William of Orange, replaced James on the English throne when they were crowned king and queen in 1689. Both of James’s daughters were raised as Protestants, and both were married to continental Protestant princes. When James’s bigoted Catholicism became intolerable to the English nation, his daughters provided an alternative Protestant succession. As a Catholic and as poet laureate under the Stuart reign, Dryden was deeply sym- pathetic to James and closely associated with his rule. When a new regime hos- tile to the old government assumed control, Dryden lost his public ofices and fell into political disfavor. Dryden responded to this new state of affairs by turning to translation, which he often infused with subversive political satire.

The relationship between royal fathers and daughters was thus not a political- ly neutral topic in the post- 1688 England in which Dryden wrote “Cinyras and Myrrha.” Hence the opening lines of the poem teem with allusive significance:

But Cinyras, who like his sire had been A happy prince, had he not been a sire.

141

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

16:

23 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Daughters and fathers, from my song retire: 1 sing of horror [. . .] (2-5)

These lines adroitly link Dryden’s fictional king, Cinyras, with the plight of James 11, who would have been much happier had he not sired the daughter who usurped his monarchical position. In the story of “Cinyras and Myrrha,” Dryden portrays an incestuous father-daughter relationship. Myrrha, daughter of king Cinyras, conceives a passion for her father that she initially resists but, with the aid of an old servant, finally secretly consummates. Our understand- ing of the poem, and of Dryden’s choice of translating it, becomes much fuller when read within the political context of the day. As other passages from the poem show, Dryden offers a subversive retelling of the events of 1688, from a radical Jacobite perspective.

For example, Dryden describes the sin of incest as introducing a monster to the land of the story’s setting, Thrace (England):

And with the Sin believe the Punishment: Since Nature cou’d behold so dire a Crime, I gratulate at least my Native Clime, That such a Land, which such a Monster bore, So far is distant from our Thracian shore. (ICL14)

These lines strike at William 111, who invaded England from the Netherlands. Dryden describes his presence as a punishment, a curse-the natural estima- tion Jacobites would make of William. And a little further on, the Convention Parliament, which ratified the installation of William and Mary, is indicted:

Too busie Senates, with an over-care To make us better than our Kind can bear, Have dash’d a Spice of Envy in the Laws, And straining up too high, have spoil’d the Cause. (54-57)

Ovid’s Latin original reads: “humana malignas / cura dedit leges, et quod natura remittet, / invida iura negant” (Metamorphoses 10.329-3 1). Dryden renders “humana cura,” or “human care,” “human business,” as “too busie sen- ates”+learly a politically weighted interpolation critiquing the meddlesome intrusiveness of the Convention Parliament (a body which acted without con- stituted legal authority, as Dryden’s tag insinuates).

Finally, the daughter herself is directly addressed and chastised: More, impious Maid! What more canst thou design, To make a monstrous Mixture in thy Line, And break all Statutes Humane and Divine? Canst thou be call’d (to save thy wretched Life) Thy Mother’s Rival, and thy Father’s Wife? Confound so many sacred Names in one, Thy Brother’s Mother, Sister to thy Son! (83-89)

142

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

16:

23 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Myrrha, or Mary (note the phonetic similarity in the names: “Myrrha” becomes “Mary” by transposing the vowels), is depicted as an “impious” law- breaker, an outcast from civilized norms. Her worst sin is a disruption of the Stuart “line” of natural succession, breaking natural and divine statutes, and creating fundamental social confusion. These passages, viewed cumulatively, offer a brilliantly miniaturized allegory of the revolution of 1688, in which all the major players are identified and characterized: the wronged father James, as Cinyras; the deceitful and treacherous daughter Mary, as Myrrha; the mon- strous usurper from another shore, William; and the over-busy Senate, a Con- vention Parliament meddling in the monarch’s prerogative.

Dryden’s use of incest to frame his allegory is a deft one. The incest theme intersects with the political allegory by means of the trope of metonymy: Myrrha craves and achieves her father’s bed, just as Mary craves and ascends the throne of James, thus incestuously occupying the place deservedly belong- ing to him. The trope fuses unspeakably dark sexual passions with forbidden political aspirations. Furthermore, the psychological and cultural horror gen- erated by the incest taboo damns the Whig political maneuvers of the Revo- lution Settlement with austere and convincing moral authority. Historian Julian Hoppit recently characterized the sentiment of many toward the events of 1688: “To most a monarch was God’s earthly representative, chosen by Him for the benfit of His people. For men to meddle in that choice was to tam- per with the divine order, the inevitable price of which was chaos” (21-22). Dryden’s appropriation of the incest topos brilliantly conveys the unnatural and fearful social confusion and political chaos when humans, motivated by selfish passion, disrupt the divine order and “make a monstrous mixture in th[e] line,” the English monarchical succession.

Intrepreting “Cinyras and Myrrha” along these lines enables us to account for Dryden’s otherwise peculiar fondness for the incest theme in his later work.* This interpretation also illuminates similar uses of the incest trope in the amatory fiction of Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, writers ideologi- cally allied with Dryden, and may prove useful in investigation of the incest theme by later canonical nineteenth-century writers such as Defoe, Fielding, and Burney.

-ANTHONY W. LEE, Kentucky Wesleyan College

NOTES

I . The two most recent book-length studies of Dryden’s late translations, Cedric D. Reverand’s Dryden’s Final Poetic Mode: The Fables (U of Pennsylvania P, 1988) and Judith Sloman’s Dry- dent The Poetics of Translation (U of Toronto P, 1985) only marginally address incest, whereas both David Hopkin‘s John Dryden (Cambridge UP, 1986, 177-80) and James D. Garrison’s Pierusfrom Vergil to Dryden (Pennsylvania State UP, 1992,250-52) treat incest in “Cinyras and Myrrha” from the essentialized. apolitical categories of natural law and pietas. Studies which ana-

143

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

16:

23 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

lyze the political texture in Dryden’s later writings include: David Bywaters. Dryden in Revolu- tionary England (U of California P, 1991); John Robert Moore, “Political Allusions in Dryden’s Later Plays,” P M l A LXXIII (1958): 36-41; James A. Winn, John Dryden and His World, (Yale UP, 1987); and Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Dis- guise (Princeton UP, 1984).

2. Another example from the Fables of father-daughter incest occurs in “Sigismonda and Guis- cardo.” In Don Sebastian, a tragedy staged in 1689, his first major work after the Glorious Revo- lution, brother-sister incest occurs between the central characters Sebastian and Almeyda. In Dry- den’s last dramatic work, the tragi-comedy Love Triumphant, the appearance of brother-sister incest occurs between Alphonso and Victoria.

WORKS CITED

Bywaters, David. Dryden in Revolutionary England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991. Hoppitt, Julian. A Land of Liberry?: England 1689-1727. The New Oxford History of England.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. 2 vols. Ed. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1944. Walker, Keith. John Dryden: The Oxford Authors. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Zwicker, Steven N. Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise. Princeton:

New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Princeton UP, 1984.

Voltaire’s CANDIDE

Just as Candide’s optimism is systematically undermined at every turn by harsh reality, so is CunCgonde’s beauty ravaged by the harsh course of time and events. Whereas these and other characters in Cundide pass through a process of change and degeneration over time, one character is unique in that she enters the story immune to change, ready made, having already developed and degen- erated, her youth spent and beauty destroyed, her body already deformed. That character is “la vieille,” the old woman who has lived her time and who remains, throughout the story, an icon of what all will become by the end of the tale. We learn of the events leading to her own degeneration only in retro- spect as her story unfolds after being held in suspense numerous times. Unnamed, but identified only by the substantive that defines her completed character, she alone holds the narrative together, accompanying Candide and assuring that the string of events leads, in the end, to the fulfillment of his quest, namely that he find CunCgonde and reestablish the Edenic order of the paradise parodied in the first chapter’s “chlteau de monsieur le baron de Thun- der-ten-tronckh” ( 149). The old woman’s first words presage her role in the text as she addresses Candide: “Mon fils, prenez courage, suivez-moi” (162).

Only after comparing the vicissitudes they have undergone, does the old woman obliquely refer to her “derrikre” and begin to tell her own story in chapter 11. She situates herself in time as the daughter of a fictitious pope

144

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity o

f C

ambr

idge

] at

16:

23 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014