john dryden: a tercentenary miscellany || "rebekah's heir": dryden's late...

"Rebekah's Heir": Dryden's Late Mystery of GenealogyAuthor(s): Anne CotterillSource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 1/2, John Dryden: A TercentenaryMiscellany (2000), pp. 201-226Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817870 .

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"Rebekah's Heir":

Dryden's Late Mystery of Genealogy

ANNE COTTERILL

D ryden's conversion to Rome has been a subject of comment since the poet was seen going to mass in the company of his sons and Nell Gwyn in January of 1686.' Speculation over the motive for Dryden's conver-

sion was rife from the beginning, and The Hind and the Panther suggests how sen- sitive to the scandal of insincerity Dryden had become in the months following the conversion as he mounted a defense of the integrity of his new faith. The re- lentless attacks in the satires and broadsides that answered The Hind and the Panther remind us that the poet had good reason to fear that the worst possible gloss would be attached to his change of religion. One popular theme of contemporary response was the susceptibility of Dryden's conscience to wifely wish and female art-"his fond uxorious vice."2 A typical anonymous pamphlet scolded Dryden for falling prey "To Midianitish Gods and Wives" and associated the "soft bewitching Arts" of The Hind and the Panther with the decadent wiles of feminized Egypt, Babylon, and Balaam.3

The numerous editions of Aesop and other fabulists in the period suggest the popularity of these tales "both plain and devious" among a wide range of

I am grateful to Steven N. Zwicker, who suggested an investigation of Mary Frampton and carefully read and improved several versions of this essay. 1. This well-known rumor, reported in Evelyn's Diary for 19 January 1686, is the first known reference to

Dryden's conversion. See the satiric responses, for example, printed in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, vol. 4, 1685-1688, ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New Haven, Conn., 1968), both to Dryden's reported conversion and to The Hind and the Panther. For a description of the pamphlets attack- ing Dryden and his poem, from 1687 into the 169os, see the "Drydeniana" in Hugh MacDonald's John Dryden: A Bibliography ofEarly Editions and ofDrydeniana (Oxford, 1939), esp. 253-69.

2. The phrase appears on p. 2 of The Weesils: A Satyrical Fable, Giving an Account of Some Argumental Passages Happening in the Lions CourtAbout Weesilions Taking Oaths (London, 1691), attributed by Wing to Tom Brown.

3. The Murmurers (London, 1689), 14.

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202 ANNE COTTERILL

readers.4 When Montagu and Prior dashed off The Hind and the Panther Trans- versed (1687) in response to Dryden's poem, they knew exactly what a fable should look like:

They were first begun and raised to the highest perfection in the eastern countries, where they wrote in signs and spoke parables and delivered the most useful precepts in delightful stories.... All their fables carry a double meaning.... But this is his new way of telling a story and confounding the moral and the fable together.5

For a story to teach and delight while the characters devour each other, the moral must be clear; but in Dryden's "Medley Offerings," who had won?6 The simul- taneous appearance in 1651 of Hobbes's Leviathan and of the first of John Ogilby's five Restoration editions of Aesop reflects the nervous politics of fable in an un- stable age when the human beast appears to require firm control and when only the simplest words and images can be trusted.7 But Dryden's text refuses to close on a precept-it refuses to close at all. The Hind and the Panther acknowledges fable's ambiguity of pretended reticence and evasion coupled with aggression, and it holds the reader suspended in that tension indefinitely.

Montagu and Prior mock Dryden's "long digressions" and easy "raptures" in "obedience to his new mother Hind"; and they gayly contrast his smooth pro- fusion designed "for the ladies" with the rough, virile lines of Milton that "a man must sweat to read."8 By associating the tantalizing delays of digression with "the ladies" and the Whore of Babylon, they turn their own bewilderment with

4. Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740 (Cambridge, 1996), 5. Mark Kish-

lansky has noted that "from the 155os not a decade passed without the publication of another English edition of Aesop. It was one of the most popular books in early modern England." See "Turning Frogs into Princes: Aesop's Fables and the Political Culture of Early Modern England," in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, eds., Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester and New York, 1995), 338-60, 340.

5. Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transversed to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, in Crump, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 118-45, 119-20.

6. Lewis characterizes the moral of fables as "cynical and pragmatic" (Aesop and Literary Culture, 20); the

phrase "Medley Offerings" appears in The Revenger. A Trage-Comedy Acted Between the Hind and the Panther and Religio Laici (London, 1687), 9.

7. See Lewis, Aesop and Literary Culture, 21. She argues that fables were concrete and moralistic in a way that circumvented the "official hostility to figuration" characteristic of the Interregnum government and later of scientific and philosophic debate within the Royal Society. The popularity of fables in the late seventeenth century might reflect the way that their "complex materiality" made them antidotes to a

figural crisis that was also political and cultural (p. 8). On the historical relations between politics and fable, see also Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, N.C., and London, 1991).

8. Montagu and Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transversed, 134.

202 .o ANNE COTTERILL



DRYDEN'S LATE MYSTERY OF GENEALOGY

the poem into a portrait of a weakened and wandering laureate and feminize their prey. But unwittingly they describe his game. For after the Revolution, Dryden will assume this cover of the subordinate gender, as well as syntactic sub- ordination and digression, to establish control over his own closure-whether of censorship or of death.

At least since Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden had been practicing the control of narrative closure through his "loose" periods and digressions-those syntactic and narrative strategies of wandering and self-display to which he draws the reader's attention.9 By the 169os Dryden is far more self-authorizing and fla-

grantly digressive; he boasts to the earl of Mulgrave in the "Dedicatio" to the Aeneis about the difficulty of controlling his own epic plenty and observes, "I have taken up, laid down, and resumed as often as I pleased, the same subject; ... Yet all this while I have been sailing with some side-wind or other toward the

point I proposed in the beginning."'° After swimming rejuvenated with the tide of inspiration in the preface to "Eleanora" and sailing by the wind's breath in the dedication to the Aeneis, the poet comes to land in his house of Fables Ancient and Modern, whose inspired disorder he celebrates at the beginning of his most discursive preface.

Susan Stewart describes digression as a movement that opens narrative and

personal closure "from the inside out."1 Dryden's late work appears to reflect a

9. Morris Croll, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, N.J., 1966), referred to the "loose" sentences that are "always periodic in the proper sense" of Browne and Dryden (p. 327). Others have observed how Dryden draws attention to the wayward nature of his prose, beginning in the Preface to Annus Mirabilis ("But to return from this digression to a further account of my poem"; see The Poems ofJohn Dryden, 4 vols., ed. James Kinsley [Oxford, 1958], 1:46). On the digressive nature of Dryden's late work, see Ann Cotterill, "The Politics and Aesthetics of Digression: Dryden's Discourse of Satire," Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 464-95. In the words of one recent assessment, "By the middle of his career, digression had become one of the most telling marks of Dryden's strongly purposeful style," behind which the poet "constructed superbly shaped literary instruments"; Steven N. Zwicker, "Dryden and the Dissolution of Things," John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford, 2000).

10. "Here, my Lord, I must contract also; for, before I was aware, I was almost running into a long digression &. I have detained your Lordship longer than I intended.... but I write in a loose, epistolary way... I have taken up, laid down, and resumed as often as I pleased, the same subject; and this loose proceeding I shall use thro' all this prefatory Dedication. Yet all this while I have been sailing with some side-wind or other toward the point I proposed in the beginning" ("To the Most Honourable John, Lord Marquess of

Normanby, Earl of Mulgrave," prefixed to the Aeneis in The Works ofVirgil [1697], in The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 5, ed. William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1987], 274-75). It is precisely this casual, privileged tone of literary authority and freedom that Swift attacks, yet mimics, as the chaotic "modern" habit of digression in A Tale ofa Tub (1704).

1. Susan Stewart proposes that digression "stands in tension with narrative closure. It is narrative closure

opened from the inside out. It holds the reader in suspension, or annoyance, for it presents the possibility of never getting back, of remaining forever within the detour" (On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Baltimore and London, 1984], 30).

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204 ANNE COTTERILL

shift in the meaning of being on the "inside"-from the world of court and government now firmly closed, to the fluid home and interiors of a mind become infinitely expansive. Dryden becomes master of the mansion that opens the Preface to Fables by replacing and removing the female, and this subtle but aggressive move explains the curious competition between male and female, and the

living and the dead, that happens quietly in the three original verse portraits in Fables amid the louder and more colorful voices from the past.

This essay proposes that Dryden's experience of Roman Catholicism as a feminine domain of domestic patronage among his wife's recusant relations is at the heart of his curious occupying (and then burial) of feminine figures, especially after the loss of public office. In his final career as a lean son of the Hind, abandoned and disinherited, the domestication-even the feminization-of the spirit presses on the poet's self-representation. He is able to use the spectacle of his exile

among soft Egyptian rites to turn a well-honed literary habit of excursion into the

pretense of senile distraction and into the practice of elaborate, aggressive visibility and voyeurism, voluble authority and contestation.

I want to suggest further that the indirection of the poet's feminine inheritance generates, and operates through, a number of oddly contrasting and com-

peting fabular shapes in the late work. I am thinking, for example, of the feminine beast-churches of the Hind and the Panther and of the effeminate courtier Horace, paired on the field of satire against the manly rage of exiled Juvenal (and Dryden) in The Discourse of Satire.' Finally, the duchess of Ormonde and cousin Driden of Chesterton appear in Fables, a duet on the poetics of gender and genealogy: young yet ancient noble beauty ill matched to a military, Protestant age; and older, sturdier judgment and "sprightly wit" with a careful, chaste eye on life's chase.'3 Rather than reminding us of a mythic or Chaucerian past as does the duchess, Driden of Chesterton perfectly reflects the moment of poise, if also of stasis, between centuries and between an old and new England. This second son and mother's favorite, like the disenfranchised laureate, enjoys the gift of digressive, speculative freedom and the peaceful, philosophical independence of a secondary line-its strategic distance from the Ormonde's biological, political, and military fray. Having foregone earthly marriage, yet linked to Ceres and called "Rebecca's heir," he appears, as Judith Sloman notes, "free to incorporate within himself a feminine principle"-including his ailing popish relative.'4 Similarly, in "The

12. In "Parenthesis at the Center: The Complex Embrace of The Hind and the Panther," Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1996-97): 139-58, I consider the use of the feminine in Dryden's beast fable; on the Discourse

of Satire, see Cotterill, "Politics and Aesthetics of Digression." 13. The insistent repetition of"chase" and "chased" in lines 50-70 suggests the pun and antonym. 14. Judith Sloman, Dryden: The Poetics of Translation (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1985), 217.

ANNE COTTERILL 204 %




Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady," which is the penultimate verse and the last poem originally by Dryden in the volume, the lady with a "manly mind" achieves "inward symmetry"; within her, briefly suspended beyond sex, time and thought become figures for each other.

In the section that follows, I approach my reading of the poems through a sketch of late-seventeenth-century English recusancy and specifically of Dryden's relations through marriage, background that importantly bears on his manipu- lation of gender in fable and miscellany. The feminine as saint and whore, as im- mortal beauty and domestic mortality, becomes a convenient mask for the poet accused of being henpecked to Rome. Dryden appeared to have wandered too far and missed his blessing, but one project of the decade following his conversion was to show that he had in fact wandered on course.

GENEALOGY: DRYDEN'S DIGRESSION HOME

After the Revolution, the poet must have felt less like an eldest son with a guar- anteed patrimony than a second son or a daughter who would have to cultivate distant relations and the mysteries of transubstantiation; and never does Dryden more insistently display command over a labyrinth of lineage to defend both his Jacobite sentiments and his poetic achievements than in his last decade.'5 His preoccupation with inheritance and home, banishment and wandering is un- mistakable in the major translations and original prose and verse of his years as a banished "Jebusite"; such themes have been documented by others.'6 But I would like to add the dimension of gender to our vision of Dryden's Roman Catholicism and his self-presentation as an old man rejected in the public sphere and confined to home, disarmed and curbed. Along with Virgil, Ovid, and Chaucer, the feminine now offers the poet important material for translation.

Between 1689 and 1700, Dryden writes a flurry of epitaphs, elegies, and elegy- like poems to saintly ladies, three of them relations through his wife's family. While

15. See, for example, his letter of dedication to "Eleanora" (1692), the Discourse of Satire (1693), his dedicatory preface to the Aeneis (1697), and the Preface to Fables (1700). Zwicker discusses Dryden's political use of lineage in the Dedication of the Aeneis in Politics and Language in Drydens Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 161-63, 184-85.

16. On poetic families and inheritance, see Harold Weber, "A 'double Portion of his Father's Art': Congreve, Dryden, Jonson, and the Drama of Theatrical Succession," Criticism 39 (1997): 359-82. On wandering self-reflection in the late work, see Candy B. K. Schille "Self-Assessment in Dryden's Amphitryon," Studies in English Literature 36 (1996): 545-60; Robin Sowerby, "The Freedom of Dryden's Homer," Translation and Literature 5 (1996): 26-50; Cotterill, "Politics and Aesthetics of Digression"; Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady, Literary Transmission andAuthority: Dryden and Other Writers (Cambridge, 1993); and David Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), esp. chap. 4.

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206 ANNE COTTERILL

assuming the harmless aspect of disenfranchisement, the impotent bee is domes-

tically busy burying women-almost laying to rest the duchess of Ormonde in his enthusiasm for the mode.'7 These "paper monuments" include the "Epitaph on Mrs. Margaret Paston, of Barningham, in Norfolk" (who died in 1689),'8 the

Epilogue to The Widdow-Ranter; or the History of Bacon in Virginia by Catholic convert Aphra Behn, who had died in April 1689 (the play was first performed November 1689), "An Epitaph on the Lady Whitmore" (who died in 1690; the

epitaph was published in Examen Poeticum in 1693), "Eleonora" (1692), and "The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, Who Dy'd at Bath, and is There Interr'd"

(1700).'9 While paying his respects to the fair temple vacated, and complaining of his own illness and abandonment, Dryden swims increasingly with the tide.

This suspicious pattern, a match of deceased lady and buoyant male sur- vivor, has not been observed before now; and it is suggestive for the curious pair of late verse epistles that preside at the front of Fables Ancient and Modern.

Dryden's collection of translations and of original verse belongs to a tradition of literary anthologizing as old as Tottels Miscellany (1557) and fashionably cur- rent in the last decades of the seventeenth century; indeed, Dryden and Tonson were instrumental in promoting the fashion with a series of publishing ventures that began with Miscellany Poems (1684) and culminated in Fables.20 Like di-

gression, miscellany raises the question of ordering the pieces of experience; and Fables, even more than The Hind and the Panther, has challenged readers to find

17. Dryden also celebrates the Catholic marriage of a Howard family relation, "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"; see Earl Miner "Dryden's Ode on Mrs. Anastasia Stafford," Huntington Library Quarterly 30 (1967): 103-11.

18. The epitaph first appeared in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, published by Lintot in 1712. Joshua Scodel has examined the politics and poetics of Dryden's epitaph to Margaret Paston in The English Poetic

Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflictfrom Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 245-48.

19. The women related to Dryden by marriage are Margaret Paston, Lady Whitmore, and the "Fair Maiden

Lady." Lady Whitmore was the daughter of William Brooke (1598-1643), whose father, George Brooke, and great-uncle Henry, Lord Cobham were arrested and condemned for treason in 1603. Her great-uncle's titles as Knight of the Garter and Cobham were forfeited, and he finished his life in the Tower. Her grandfather was executed. Her grandmother was Frances, daughter of Charles Howard, first earl of Notting- ham, in Elizabeth Howard's pedigree. A great-aunt, Elizabeth Brooke, had married Robert Cecil, the first earl of Salisbury and the great-uncle of Elizabeth Cecil (Dryden's mother-in-law). The son of Robert Cecil and Elizabeth Brooke, named William, married Catherine Howard, Elizabeth Howard Dryden's paternal aunt; see The Complete Peerage, s.v. "Cobham," 348-50, and "Salisbury," 402-6.

20. On the early modern miscellany, see, for example, Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modem Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton, N.J., 1996); T. A. Birrell, "The Influence of Seventeenth-Century Publishers on the Presentation of English Literature," in Mary-Jo Arn, Hanneke Wirtjes, and Hans Jensen, eds., Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern

English forohan Gerritsen (Groningen, 1985), 163-73; and Arthur E. Case, A Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750 (Oxford, 1935).

206 ANNE COTTERILL




a moral in its mixture.2 The Preface to Fables describes a seamless web of association among the verses and a poetic genealogy among writers ancient and modern: "Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax; for we have our lineal descents and clans as well as other families. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease."22 But Dryden as- sembles the poems in another order altogether and out of their original sequence in Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, or Boccaccio. He adds headnotes to his translations from Ovid and consistently returns to Ovid's digressive links, as Earl Miner has observed; but the notes apply to connections within The Metamorphoses, not to the parts of Fables.23 The duchess and Cousin Driden appear to be linked with the translation, which separates them, of Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale": Dryden specifically associates the duchess with Emily, while Cousin Driden, a peacemaker, recalls Theseus. Readers have noted that the couple seems to return in saintly dress near the end of the volume as the Good Parson and the "Fair Maiden Lady," who like the the duchess has a "faultless" frame that none- theless sickens.

While Dryden encourages these associations and seems preoccupied with connections, a sharp edge of competition between portraits and sexes continues the combative, defensive mood of the Preface. For all of his raptures of retirement, Dryden's Preface is packed with contemporaries and his judgments on them- Hobbes, Rymer, Milton, Waller, Cowley, Rochester, Harrington, Denham,

21. Critics have noted the anti-heroic, anti-Williamite strains; for example, Michael West, "Dryden's Ambivalence as a Translator of Heroic Themes," Huntington Library Quarterly 36 (1973): 347-66. See also Cedric Reverand, Drydens Final Poetic Mode (Philadelphia, 1988), chap. 2. And readers have agreed about Dryden's use of Fables to elevate his English poetic father, Chaucer. Sloman has argued for the work's narrative coherence, while Reverand despairs of a sequential reading and concludes, "whatever Fables

gives, it also takes away; whatever values it offers, it also undercuts" (p. 94). On the problem of the unity of Fables, see also Earl Miner, "Ovid Reformed: Issues of Ovid, Fables, Morals, and the Second Epic in Fables Ancient and Modern," in Miner and Brady, Literary Transmission, 79-120; and James D. Garrison, "The Universe of Dryden's Fables," Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 409-23. For a general discussion of the ordering of poems in a collection, see Neil Fraistat, ed., Poems in Their Place: The Intertexuality and Order of Poetic Collections (Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 1986).

22. Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, in Poems of Dryden, ed. Kinsley, 4:1445. All further quotations of Fables follow this edition; citations are given henceforward in the text.

23. Miner, "Ovid Reformed," 85. On the headnote to "Meleager and Atalanta," Dryden comments, "Ovid ... here makes a digression to the story of Meleager and Atalanta, which is one of the most inartificial connections in all of the Metamorphoses." Entitled "Connection to the former story," the note physically appears between "To My Honour'd Kinsman" and "Meleager and Atalanta," but by "the former," Dryden means the former story in Ovid, not the poem to his cousin. In the note to "The Twelfth Book of Ovid's Meta- morphoses," he again catches Ovid in the act of forging a link: "By this transition, which is one of the finest in all Ovid, the poet naturally falls into the story of the Trojan War." And when Dryden introduces "Of the Pythagorean Philosophy," he emphasizes the room for learning and beauty within the impulse to digress.

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ANNE COTTERILI

Ogilby-and he answers and dismisses his recent critics Jeremy Collier, Luke Milbourne, and Sir Richard Blackmore. Moreover, Fables suspends or decon- structs hierarchies and differences in time; the poet repeatedly forces the reader to feel the disjunctions between fables and around gender. For example, the Fair Maiden's balance of masculine and feminine qualities in Christian tranquillity is followed by rape and murder, the brutal cynicism of"Cymon and Iphgenia" that ends the volume by "undoing, unravelling, taking apart possible progressions" even while the tale unravels itself.24

In the two poems that concern me here, "To her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde" and "To My Honour'd Kinsman John Driden, of Chesterton in the County of Huntington, Esquire," the poet spins similar themes: illness and death, marriage and children, the winding lifeline of genealogy that returns and restores, and an island paradise. But how differently. The portraits match as mirror opposites and complementary points of view.25 The extravagance of fantasy and emotion around the duchess, and that poem's extremes of pitch, are balanced by the bachelor's poise between the high waters of contending extremes. The verse epistles make a fanciful couple, young married female and older, crusty bachelor-feminine beauty and nobility sweeping grandly in, preceding the mea- sured, cautious, yet not illiberal country squire. But the young woman is revealed to be eclipsed, infirm, and compromised, while the elderly cousin Driden "stands" alert and composed at the turn of the century, a solitary self-sufficient Adam in an England only as close to Eden as the cursed world will allow.

Dryden's epitaphs and elegies for women within his wife's family remind us that his experience of Roman Catholicism involved not only spirit and intellect but also domestic detail and domestic patronage.26 The operation of recusant

24. See Reverand, Drydens Final Poetic Mode, 118. 25. Sloman sees them together as heroic, "joint political saviours of British culture" and "complementary

masculine and feminine ideals" (The Poetics of Translation, 114), the poet's alternative vision of William and Mary (the duchess was Mary Somerset). Reverand finds them both distinguished as "peacemakers" and as chaste but also limited in their different ways, neither offering an image of a new order (Drydens Final Poetic Mode, 61-67). Both critics suggest parallels between Chaucer's Emily and Theseus and

Dryden's duchess and Cousin Driden. 26. The family's move at some point after the spring of 1687 from their home of nineteen years in Longacre to

a lodging in the relatively new suburb of Soho might have reflected an anticipation of the doubled taxes (James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World [New Haven, Conn., 1987], 436). Between 1624 and

1715, there were forty-five peerages that were "at one time or another held by Roman Catholics, using the term to include those of Catholic sympathies" (Brian Magee, The English Recusants [London, 1938], 131). By the end of the century, most of the Catholic nobility connecting Dryden to Mary Frampton-the Stourtons, the Pastons, the Cottingtons, and the Eyres-were overwhelmed by debt and would lose at least one prominent residence during the eighteenth century.

Z08 -'-




families as an underground that extended overseas to seminaries and convents,27 and as a network of relatives helping to place children in the world and to provide mutual support against financial and political hardship, was one that

Dryden's own household had come increasingly to resemble.28 And the cen-

trality of the domestic in the underground recusant community throws an in-

teresting light on Dryden's cultivation after 1688 of his outcast, dependent state, of his self-representation as the abandoned laureate confined by debt, illness, and dependents. Church historians have reminded us how Roman Catholic rit- ual was performed at home within the self-contained isolation of rural manors; and they have emphasized how the shadowy line of female descent operated as a crucial underground that kept Catholic discourse alive through generations of

persecution.29 At times, the domestic and feminine proved the only strategic

27. See T. B. Trappes-Lomax, "Roman Catholicism in Norfolk, 1559-1780," Norfolk Archaeology 32, pt. 1

(1958): 27; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 57-185o (Oxford, 1976), 197-202; and M. D. R. Leys, Catholics in England, 155-1829: A Social History (New York, 1962), 154-68. In fact, Catholic family networks typically extended overseas. Their nobility of all ages traveled abroad in a steady stream, either to visit friends and relatives residing in schools or religious houses or to enter an order themselves. See, for example, "Thomas Marwood's Diary, 1699-1703," Miscellanea VI, Bedingfeld Papers, &c., Catholic Record Society Publications, vol. 7 (London, 1909), 44-158, for an intriguing glimpse at the Catholic traffic through the Netherlands and France. Another diary, that of a small English convent in Paris of the order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, popularly known from the color of their habit as the Blue Nuns, testifies to the flow through its gates of unmarried and widowed ladies of prominent Catholic families-Staffords, Howards, Eyres, Bedingfelds among them; see The Diary of the "Blue Nuns" or Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, at Paris, 1658-181o, ed. Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-Lomax, Catholic Record Society, vol. 8 (London, 1910). The community was established about the time of the Restoration and was patronized by Mary of Modena.

28. All three sons of Dryden were Roman Catholics and were in Rome in the 169os; his second son, John Jr., died there in 1703. Charles, the eldest, appears to have held a place in the papal guards through his maternal cousin Cardinal Philip Howard (Winn, Dryden and His World, 620, n. 65). Erasmus-Henry, after study- ing philosophy at Douai, entered the English College at Rome in 1690. Under the auspices of Cardinal Howard, he joined the Dominican Monastery at Florence the following year and by December 1693 was an ordained priest, Father Thomas Dryden (Winn, Dryden and His World, 415, 473, 492). Erasmus-Henry resided in Rome until 1697, when he became subprior of the English Dominican convent of Holy Cross at Bornhem, near Brussels.

29. T. A. Birrell early remarked that "in pre-industrial England, the existence of the Catholic laity as a body depended on the existence of the Catholic nobility and gentry" (Birrell, Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot [Nijmegen/Utrecht, 1950], 6). The standard work of scholarship on England's post-Reformation Catholic community is still Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 170-185o; on the role of women and the domestic in the Catholic underground, see esp. 1o8-81. See also, for example, Hugh Aveling, Northern Catholics: The Catholic Recusants of the North Riding of Yorkshire, 1558-1790 (London, 1966); Leys, Catholics in England; Magee, The English Recusants; T. B. Trappes-Lomax, "Roman Catholicism in Norfolk, 1559-1780"; J. Anthony Williams, Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire, 1660-791, Catholic Record Society, no. 1 (London, 1968), esp. chap. 1; and idem, Bath and Rome, the Living Link: Catholicism in Bath fom 159 to the Present Day (Bath, 1963).

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ANNE COTTERILL

domain and refuge for Roman Catholicism,3° although the state had been known to invade even the maternal sanctuary and forcibly remove a noble heir to Protestant protection.3'

Considered together, the unlikely couple of the duchess of Ormonde and cousin Driden of Chesterton suggests an internal symmetry of domestic oppo- sitions around male and female, ruler and server, including their contending lines of inheritance-through the firstborn and through the mother's favorite. But why are we asked to think about genealogy, inheritance, and domestic order at the opening of Fables? Why does Dryden draw attention with "Rebecca's heir" to inheritance by feminine guile that burlesques the manly as beastlike (as do Dryden's translated Homeric heroes)? Smooth Jacob put on animal skins to pass for a hunter; not unlike Dryden in 1687, he became his own beast fable. Dryden's recusancy was practiced of course within a network of English Catholic families, a feminine underground of bloodlines and marriages, and nowhere is that network more apparent to the reader of Fables than in his brief epitaph to Mary Frampton.

"The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady, Who Dyd at Bath, and is There Interr'd" has remained a small mystery, sealed like the tomb on which it is

engraved. We know almost nothing about the maiden lady of this epitaph-a Roman Catholic named Mary Frampton-or why Dryden should write his

longest verse epitaph for the Framptons.32 Barbara Lewalski has noted verbal echoes of Donne's Anniversaries, but otherwise critics have paid little attention to Mary.33 I want to entertain the idea that the mystery of Mary belongs to a much larger story born in a distant familial connection to Dryden. Behind the

30. As in Elizabeth Howard Dryden's own family: Dryden's wife appears to have adopted her mother's faith and passed it to their three sons before Dryden had declared. Because of the numerous and powerful influences of Catholic Howards and Cecils, Dryden's biographers have assumed that Elizabeth was a Catholic well before Dryden's conversion; Winn (Dryden and His World, 123) and James M. Osborn (John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems, rev. ed. [Gainesville, Fl., 1965], 290) both cite the same letter in the Bodleian from Cardinal Howard, written in 1693. He recommends Dryden's sons, Charles and John Jr., who were presumably staying with him, for positions in the court of exiled James II,

"theyr father being a Convert, and theyr mother a Cathc. Sister to ye. Lord Berkshire." 31. For example, after his father drowned, James Butler, first duke of Ormonde and grandfather to the dedica-

tee of Fables, was placed by his mother under a Roman Catholic tutor; but through "some legal subtlety" James I claimed him as a royal ward and conveyed him to Canterbury for Protestant instruction; Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 162. See also Lady Burghclere, The Life of James, First Duke of Ormonde, 2 vols. (London, 1912), i:32f. Bossy emphasizes that the removal of children from recusant parents by

prerogative or legislative action was more common in the first half of the century. 32. Scodel, in English Poetic Epitaphs, treats several of Dryden's late epitaphs on women, including the epitaph

on Margaret Paston, Mary Frampton's relation by marriage, but he does not discuss the poem to Mary. 33. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry ofPraise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode

(Princeton, N.J., 1973), 354-55.

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epitaph run intricate lines of familial and Catholic patronage but, as well, lines of association between the feminine domains of genealogy and of Mother Church and of Dryden's final claim to mastery.

Through the intermarriage of his wife's Catholic Howard relations with the

Bedingfelds of Norfolk, Dryden would have known the Pastons of Norfolk and, subsequently, the Framptons of Wiltshire.34 Mary Frampton was related by mar-

riage to the Pastons, specifically to Margaret Eyre Paston, the subject of an epitaph by Dryden.35 Margaret Eyre Paston's mother was descended from a Beding- feld father and a Paston mother (Margaret Eyre Paston had married her grandmother's second cousin).36 The Pastons, in turn, were related to Dryden's wife's family also through the Bedingfelds: three years before Margaret's marriage to Edward Paston in 1685, her uncle and mother's brother, Sir Henry Bedingfeld, second Baronet, had lost his first wife, Anne Howard, the only surviving child and heiress of Charles Howard, Viscount Andover, Elizabeth Howard Dryden's recusant brother. That is, Margaret Eyre Paston's uncle had married the niece of Dryden's wife. Three years after Margaret Paston's death, her widowed husband, Edward Paston, married Mary Frampton's eldest sister, Jane.37

These lines of intermarriage and circumstance linking Mary Frampton and Dryden suggest a labyrinth to which the woman holds the key: Elizabeth

34. Rosamond Meredith, "The Eyres of Hassop, and Some of Their Connections, from the Test Act to

Emancipation" Recusant History 9 (1957): 5-52. The connection between the Drydens and the Beding- felds was still active in 1700 when Sir Henry Bedingfeld's son, Henry Arundell Bedingfeld, was traveling on the Continent with his tutor, whose diary records several visits with Father Thomas Dryden at Bornhem; see "Thomas Marwood's Diary." Clearly, relatives who went into orders did not disappear but continued an active role within the family. The Dominican Clement Paston, of Barningham, for exam-

ple, is visited, along with two sisters, aunts Margaret and Anne Bedingfeld, of the English Carmelite convent at Lierre, where grand-uncle Edmund Bedingfeld was afterward Canon. From the "Diary," those whom we glimpse abroad include the earl of Ailesbury with his second wife; Henry Stafford Howard, brother of Anastasia Stafford and son of Viscount Stafford; and Thomas Eyre, either Margaret Eyre's father, of Hassop, or her brother.

35. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lines of the Paston family in Norfolk had become established at Appleton and at Town Barningham, while Oxnead Hall in the east remained the seat of the senior branch; see E. B. Burstall, "The Pastons and Their Manor of Binham," Norfolk Archaeology 30 (1952): 101-29. Margaret Paston survived only to the age of twenty-three. We do not know when the

poet wrote her epitaph, although Rosamond Meredith has suggested that Dryden might have spent time in 1689 in Norfolk with his wife's Bedingfeld connections and written the epitaph for Margaret as a

gesture of sympathy to his host (Meredith, "The Eyres of Hassop," 25-26). See also Meredith, "A Derbyshire Family in the Seventeenth Century: The Eyres of Hassop and Their Forfeited Estates," Recusant History 8 (1965): 12-77.

36. Her grandmother, Margaret Paston, outlived Margaret Eyre Paston by over a decade. 37. Jane was the heiress of the three surviving daughters of Richard Frampton, who is described as a "promi-

nent papist" of Biddestone, Wiltshire, in a list of 168o for the House of Lords (Williams, Catholic

Recusancy in Wiltshire, 235, nn. 384, 388). Richard Frampton had four daughters; the only son, William, died before Mary was born. At least a decade before Mary's death, one of the daughters, Elizabeth, died

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ANNE COTTERILL

Howard Dryden and her Roman Catholic mother, Elizabeth Cecil; Margaret Eyre Paston and her mother and grandmother; Anne Howard Bedingfeld; Jane

Frampton Paston; and Mary's second sister Catharine Frampton Stourton, who commissioned the marble commemorative tablet and Dryden's inscription for the wall of the Abbey Church of SS. Peter and Paul at Bath.38 In the necessity to

expand and return alternatively, such a twisting feminine underground of lines weaves tightly together counties and families and faith. Behind such a domestic

map of genealogy-its fascination with patterns of connection and return, its drama of property, titles, and heirs-Dryden may safely sound the depths of a

private, poetic genealogy. By the end of his life the poet has inhabited the writers he translates so long that they are his family; his wandering has been an interior journey until he becomes them.

THE DUCHESS OF ORMONDE: COSTLY MOULD AND MILLENNIUM

The verse epistles of Fables contain a debate about genealogy and inheritance,

birthright and blessing. And the competing domestic voices are not only feminine and masculine or wife and bachelor but also more subtly those of Esau and Jacob, the firstborn and the second line-primogeniture versus its subversion. When we remember the vicious accusations of deceit and Eastern softness that Dryden had been answering since his conversion to Roman Catholicism, and imagine as well the burden of his own personal disappointment and misgivings, his reminder in the portrait of cousin Driden that the descent of Israel's chosen was not from the hunter but from the shepherd begins to look more interesting. In fact, the duchess and the country justice sound like the last contending voices in the defense of another Jacob who has wrestled a long night for his blessing.

"To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde" begins and ends in genealogy, and it contemplates the failure of a male lineage. In the background hover family tragedies: the duke and duchess of Ormonde never had another son after their

unmarried. A genealogical chart for the Framptons of Dorset appears in John Hutchins, The History and

Antiquities of the County of Dorset, 3d ed., ed. W Shipp and J. W Hudson, vol. 1 (Wakefield, England, 1973), 398-99. Jane Frampton was named for their Catholic mother, Jane Cottington, of Fonthill-Gifford, Wiltshire, whose great-uncle had been Francis Cottington, baron, Chancellor and Under Treasurer of the

Exchequer to Charles I. Francis Cottington had reconverted for the third time to Roman Catholicism before he died at the English seminary in Valladolid. See the DNB, s.v. "Francis Cottington"; A History of Wiltshire: The Victoria History of the Counties ofEngland, vol. 3 (Oxford, G956), 90; and Williams, Catholic

Recusancy in Wiltshire, 189. The most recent biography is Martin J. Havran, Caroline Courtier: The Life of Lord Cottington (London, 1973).

38. For a discussion of Bath Abbey, those interred there, and the inscriptions, see John Britton, The History and Antiquities ofBath Abbey Church (London, 1825).

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first died in 1686 aged six months; and in July 1698, while she was in Ireland,

Mary Somerset's brother Charles, heir to the Beaufort title, was killed in a coach accident in Wales, thirty-eight years old. Her father never recovered from the shock and died in January 1700oo.39

Dryden is addressing his praises to a Plantagenet, of the "race divine," the

longest-reigning royal house in English history. Mary's father, Henry Somerset, was created the first duke of Beaufort by Charles II in 1682 in part because of"his noble descent from King Edward III by John de Beaufort, eldest son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, by Catherine Swinford, his third wife."40 Raised a Catholic, he had conformed during the Interregnum but with the Restoration

proved a firm supporter of the court party. He voted against Exclusion, bore the

queen's crown at the coronation of James II, was appointed a gentleman of the bedchamber, and refused to swear the oath of allegiance to William. Hardly a match for the Plantagenet origins in the twelfth century, Ormonde's line ex- tends back to his "father and his grandsire known to fame." As the last line of the

poem insists, the hoped-for heir will wear "the garter of his mother's race,"41 not Ormonde's (who has "a venerable name," not a "race"), but must fill "his father's

place," which in the poem the duke appears, in effect, to have vacated already. It would not be true to say, however, that James Butler, second duke of

Ormonde, does not have kingly blood. His mother, the Dutch Emilia de Bever- weert, claimed the same great-grandfather as William III. They were both descended, each through at least one illegitimate child, from William I of Nassau and Orange, "William the Silent" (1533-84). The second duke of Ormonde's father, Thomas, earl of Ossory, had been a great favorite of William, prince of

Orange; and the duke himself had been at William's side from his arrival in 1688 (and in communication with those who prepared the way for the Revolution) and, in contrast to the duchess's father, was one of the first peers to take the oaths. He cultivated the king's intimacy in court and especially on the battlefield in hopes for

preferment-his father's vice-royalty in Ireland-which William strategically with- held. This delicate matter was among the issues, along with William's favoring of Dutch officers, that lay behind public gestures of cooling between Ormonde and

39. The Complete Peerage, s.v. "Beaufort"; and the DNB, s.v. "Somerset." 40. The patent as quoted in Collins's Peerage of England, ed. Sir Egerton Brydges, 9 vols. (London, 1812),

1:237. John de Beaufort, however, was himself "born a bastard" and legitimated only by an act of Parlia- ment; he "was further sullied by being through yet another bastard (not so legitimated), viz., Sir Charles Somerset." See The Complete Peerage, s.v. "Beaufort," 51-52. The legitimate male issue of the Plantagenet line became extinct in 1499.

41. Joan of Kent, daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent, and first cousin to Edward III, married (her third husband) Edward III's son, Edward, the Black Prince. Their son was Richard II. She is believed to have named the Order of the Garter, created by Edward III.

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214 ANNE CoirLalil

the king in 1699, and to which Dryden refers when he compares the duchess and Emily, Ormonde and Palamon: "And conquering Theseus from his side had sent Your generous lord, to guide the Theban government" (lines 36-37). But he had not. Ormonde acquired the lord lieutenancy only after William's death.42

The duke of Ormonde belongs to "that house" which has helped to subdue the "sturdy kerns" of Ireland, whose Roman Catholicism deepens the resonance of "the vanquished isle." The Irish country bumpkins who have become "accus- tomed" to commands stand "in due subjection / Nor hear the reins in any foreign hand"-not an ambiguous phrase from this old Jacobite. Ormonde, through his

grandfather and his own aspiration to the lord lieutenancy of Ireland, is implicated in the Protestant domination of Irish Catholics. He was present at the final scat-

tering at Boyne (1690) of James II's drive to be acknowledged king, was sent to se- cure Dublin for William, and afterward entertained William in his own castle at

Kilkenny, for which services he was made a member of the Irish Privy Council. The second duke of Ormonde participates in what Dryden refers to in "To

Sir Godfrey Kneller" (1694) as "a stupid military state." The poet's satiric association of dullness with a military figure has been noted by one critic of The Hind and the Panther as a rather careful suggestion in its ambiguous final portrait of

James II. In the Hind's fable, this Catholic lion famed as a naval hero must be de- clawed and recast as the "prince of Toleration"; and accordingly he appears in the guise of a mild-mannered poultry farmer-but one almost immobile and deaf under a dead weight of blunt single-mindedness.43 A more aggressive dunce, however, haunts the hyperbole of the letter dedicating the Fables to the duke, who as a youth had worried his grandfather by proving a consistently mediocre student, one whose only chance for distinction lay through "exercises."44 In the dedication, under cover of the high sounds of righteous indignation ("Curs'd be the Poet"), Dryden smoothly diverts his celebration of Ormonde's scientific

knowledge of warfare into a startling diatribe against "Athletick Brutes":

Science distinguishes a Man of Honour from one of those Athletick Brutes whom undeservedly we call Heroes. Curs'd be the Poet, who

42. In 1703 from Anne; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts ofthe Marquess of Ormonde, K. P., n.s., vol. 8 (London, 1920), xxxviii. Winn is mistaken when he asserts that Ormonde was lord lieutenant at the time Dryden sent "an extravagantly complimentary letter to Mary Somerset," in late December 1698 (Dryden and His World, 5o0).

43. For a discussion of the implications of this portrait for Dryden's work in The Hind and the Panther, see Steven N. Zwicker, "The Paradoxes of Tender Conscience," ELH 63 (1996): 851-69.

44. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, vii-xiv. At fourteen, he was established in Christ Church, Oxford, where "at the end of eighteen months' residence ... it was discovered that Ormonde was in need of a plainer method of teaching than the University afforded. Probably whatever he learned there was due less to Aldrich than to Drelincourt, who wrote a graphic description of the efforts to teach

ANNE COTTERILI, 214 ·-




first honour'd with that Name a meer Ajax, a Man-killing Ideot. The Ulysses of Ovid upbraids his Ignorance that he understood not the Shield for which he pleaded: There was engraven on it, Plans of Cities, and Maps of Countries, which Ajax could not comprehend, but look'd on them as stupidly as his Fellow-Beast the Lion.45

One poet in conscience cannot honor as hero "a Man-killing Ideot." The royal beast with and for whom Ormonde has been fighting has provoked the frenzy of this digression-although why not the duke as well?

In the world of the poem, the duchess's lord is always absent but "expected." We know that "for nine years from 1689 to 1697 Ormond spent every summer in the field."46 After the duchess and their three daughters sailed to Ireland in the summer of 1697, he joined them briefly at Kilkenny in October, and left almost immediately for Dublin to take his seat in the House of Lords whence, as "ex- citement was wanting," he set out again for London in November.47 He made another trip to Ireland in 1698, from August to November, where the duchess had grown increasingly discontent during the spring, if the weary closing of her letter of 25 May 1698 to Ormonde's secretary, Benjamin Portlock, is an indication: "Here are two packets come in to-night and on Sunday last, but not one letter from my Lord. Pray desire him to do me the favour but to write two words once in our posts, and I am satisfied."48 He makes an appearance, however, in one line (125) as a mourner over her burning fever, "like young Vespasian"; but Titus, the son of the Roman Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus, mourned the burning of the Temple while having commanded the siege of Jerusalem. Has he commanded the siege of the duchess-or has Dryden?

The duke is not only a shadowy figure; he also casts a shadow. The poem subtly suggests that the duchess's background and proper world is Chaucerian and kingly, like that of the poet. She has the richer blood in this marriage, and her family represents the oldest tradition of English monarchy. Her marriage to Ormonde has brought her into the distasteful business of keeping the kerns happy. The duchess's beauty does not inspire "deeds of arms" but covers the "Blood, rapines, massacres" of Protestant conquest. As soon as she sets foot on "Hibernia," the poet revives the memory of Roman Catholic Ireland's recent past, which the duchess's "Angel-Face" is claimed to cover or compensate for-

Ormonde 'the Latin tongue,' in which he improved 'so much as his love of it permitted,' and arithmetic, in which the multiplication table was a hindrance" (p. x).

45. Poems ofDryden, ed. Kinsley, 4:1442. 46. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, xxii. 47. Ibid., xxx. 48. Ibid., 79.

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details of the "tears of three campaigns," not "all forgot." In fact, in a reversal, Ireland's conquered state uneasily reflects back her image. While allowing her beauty to be used as palliation for past wars and present subjugation, Mary Somerset serves as the "precious mould" for breeding "all the future Ormondes." The veiled threat of the command to produce an heir (line 166), although read by some critics as "that gentle injunction to human fertility,"49 is the reason why she cannot "afford" to get sick. Heaven has invested too much in her to let her die ("such over-cost bestowed, / As scarce it could afford to flesh and blood"), just as English nobility like the Ormondes, who have heavily invested as landowners in Ireland, have their financial interests there to protect.50 Like "the Holy Isle," the duchess undergoes her own internal, civil warfare. The poem opens on the high note of literary beauties and literary succession and rebirth but descends to more urgent biological and medical perspectives. Under the pressure of these concerns, "Illustrious Ormond" becomes soft, vulnerable to the invasive scrutiny of learned "enquiry"-including the poet's.

Dryden's word "softness," difficult in tone, had always been a euphemism for feminine graces and the domestic.51 As late as 1699, in his letters to amateur poet Elizabeth Thomas, he first praises her verses for being "too good to be a Woman's. .. .'Tis not gallant, I must confess, to say this of the fair sex; but most certain it is, that they generally write with more Softness than Strength." In a later, less indulgent and hastier note, to "you, who write only for your Diversion," he recommends Theocritus over Virgil's pastorals as more appropriate "both in Softness of Thought, and Simplicity of Expression."52 Even more interesting for our subject is the much earlier moment in the preface to Annus Mirabilis (1666) when Dryden defends his poem to the duchess of York as requiring "softness of expression" and "smoothness of measure," rather than "the height of thought,"

49. Winn, Dryden and His World, 502-3. 50. The language of the wife as her husband's financial gamble or investment intrudes oddly in "An Epitaph

on the Lady Whitmore":

Rest in this Tomb, rais'd at thy Husbands cost, Here, sadly summin what he had, & lost.

Come, Virgins, er'e in equall bands you joine Come first, and Offer at Her sacred shryne: Pray but for halfe the Virtues of this Wife

Compound for all the rest with longer life (Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 3, Poems 1685-1692, ed. Earl Miner

[Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966], 229, lines 3-8)

51. On the poet's use of "softness" to express attitudes about gender, see Laura L. Runge, "The Softness of

Expression, and the Smoothness of Measure": A Model of Gendered Decorum from Dryden's Criticism," Essays in Literature 20 (1993): 197-212.

52. The Letters ofJohn Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, N.C., 1942), 125, 127.

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because of its female subject.5 The feminine is "soft" and "tender" like a breast and "should only" be a sanctuary for love: "You lodged your country's cares within your breast; (The mansion where soft love should only rest:) / And ere our foes abroad were overcome, / The noblest conquest you had gained at home" (lines 5-8). The association of "soft love" with the feminine breast, with "mansion," the home and domestic-he further encloses and thus protects "soft love" and "mansion" in parentheses-as distinct from the "manly mind," which serves, and roams, "abroad," recurs throughout the career and culminates in the duchess of Ormonde's fiery breast. In "To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde," the poet's sanctuary of softness has darkened, for it signifies illness and withdrawal. From being "the fair bearer of the message blessed," the duchess audibly merges with the rustle of a sickroom-"so soft a messenger"-where hours become de- pressions like the "soft recesses" in a cushion.54

Yet Dryden regrets his own circumstances in this age as he mourns the de- jection of female beauty. If the duchess absorbs some old, uncomfortable feelings of disappointment, subjugation, and dependence, she is no less the representative of divine poetry with its venerable lineage from an earlier age; of ancient Roman Catholicism; of a royal race yet to be restored. Yet her nobility and beauty have become spellbound in a bad age. Genealogy is used to suggest that a wife of kingly ancestry, like a great poet required to serve a debased court, must beau- tify a half-Dutch Williamite and a military fool. Dryden presses on those ele- ments of his own career as the "ductile Soul" that have displayed consenting softness and softening: after all, he has worked to smooth language to serve others who are busied with destruction, performed as the grateful soil to another's tilling, and, once abandoned by the Stuarts, has been in danger of languishing.

53. Poems of Dryden, ed. Kinsley, 1:49. In this context, one recalls Dryden's famous criticism of Donne's "Amorous Verses, where Nature only shou'd reign"; he "perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou'd ingage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love." See The Discourse of Satire, in The Works ofJohn Dryden, vol. 4, Poems 1693-1696, ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), p. 7, lines 4-7.

54. In the dedicatory epistle to the duchess of Ormonde prefacing The Comical History ofDon Quixote (London, 1694), Thomas D'Urfey, like Dryden, dwells on the duke's absence from his wife and children. The duke of Ormonde's zealous fighting abroad for his king and country "laves him Scarce leisure to dry your Tears up for the last Parting, or pay his Paternal Blessing to his dear Children at home"; the duchess must pass "troublesome Hours" of waiting for his return. But there are other troubles: D'Urfey speaks as well of her need for heavenly protection against a threatening personal trial, "the expected Hour of Trouble." Presumably he is referring to a difficult pregnancy, but the ominous language is startling: "And now particularly, may the whole Hierarchy of Angels protect ye in the expected Hour of Trouble; and may the Rejoycing Worthy Part o'th' World be Blest with another Noble, Loyal, and Valiant Ossory Great and Admir'd as his Illustrious, and never to be forgotten Grandfather." I am grateful to Steven Zwicker for directing my attention to this dedication.

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"To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormonde," if a panegyric with all the sounds of the poet on his best behavior, is finally also a dream-fantasy in which softness rebels against itself. Her body becomes another embattled isle, a civil war in Paradise where no Adam or Ormonde but rather a malignant atom lurks. The softness of a breast becomes feverish: Dryden has set aflame that holy of holies as the beseiged Temple ofJerusalem, an immolation he admits to, if shame-faced

(he shifts responsibility to the duke), along with his intention to eulogize the

lady ("a most detested act of gratitude"). The duchess lives, yet she suffers a de- flation that is more than a sea-change. Whether pointing to a historical or personal moment, her curious enchantment awaits its correction. And the peculiarly embalmed, unresolved vision of unfruitful "remains" and "dimness of a shade" will be answered by the poised, healthy, and fruitful bachelordom of "To My Honour'd Kinsman," who smoothes out, not over, differences. "Chaste" becomes, after all, not "waste" (as lines 158-59 suggest) but the peaceful abundance of one unchased; manna rains its softness when victors and conquerors are "undone." Cousin Driden of Chesterton is a master of the prefix "un-," and "To My Honour'd Kinsman" judiciously undoes the previous epistle.

COUSIN DRIDEN: OLD TESTAMENT MYSTERY AND RETURN

The whole bachelor paradise of "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a woman's gift. John Driden was a "second son" who inherited the estate of Chesterton through his mother, Honor Beville; and there is a stalwart and determined feminine help- meet in the poem from Genesis 25-27: "Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents. And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob" (25:27-28). In this poem, John Driden is the domestic Jacob; and behind the moderating justice of the peace is not an angel of soft purity but a strong-willed mother who has

complained to God and been answered with the knowledge of His plan for her children: "the elder shall serve the younger." Confidently, she takes advantage of her older husband's blindness for the sake of her favorite and younger son, whom she advises to lie. Her maternal voice has the quiet, unequivocal authority of the

Almighty: "Obey my voice according to that which I command thee," says Rebekah to Jacob after telling him what she has overheard. When Jacob protests that Isaac will discover him by his smooth skin and will curse instead of bless him, she reveals nothing of her plan but sends him out for "two kids of the goats," closing all argument, "Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice and

go fetch me them" (27:13). She orders her feminine son into masculine disguise; and Dryden obeys.

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In a letter to Mrs. Steward, Dryden considers the verse epistles a pair of competing poems. And his own preference is clear: "I always thought my Verses to my Cousin Driden were the best of the whole; and to my comfort the Town thinks them so."" He showed them for inspection to the earl of Dorset and Charles Montagu and wrote to Mrs. Steward that these patrons

are of opinion that I never writt better. My other friends, are di- vided in their Judgments which to prefer: but the greater part are for those to my dear kinsman; which I have corrected with so much care, that they will now be worthy of his Sight: & do neither of us any dishonour after our death.56

He admitted to Montagu that he had taken pains with the epistle to his cousin and had used it as a forum and even a monument, "a memorial of my own Principles to all Posterity."57

As the smooth-skinned Jacob who cooks and plants, the solitary peacemaker John Driden (or John Dryden) is a contrast to the disruptive masculine figures of the poem. Ambitious and warring, Alexander, Hannibal, and of course William III wander too far. Like Esau who sought his game at a distance from home, William and his military men may miss their blessing. Jacob, who first ob- tained Esau's birthright by preparing food, similarly stole his father's blessing by staying close to domestic plenitude, the source of his mother's power. And our poet, though a firstborn son himself and accused of wandering malcontent with his "rambling conscience" all the way to Mohamet, is concerned to show the ways in which he did not stray but has always been close to home with its cultivation of abundance. "He'l Mecca's Plenty change for Roman Want," one satirist had taunted in 1687.58 And Dryden has indeed turned the feminine "Want" of Roman Egypt, the mansion that was a dangerous breast, into just the Eastern "Plenty" he was accused of seeking. Only it is not the East of Mecca but the East of Canaan; and rather than a pilgrim to "the Shrines of Crowns and Dollers," he is the one who never left home. He claims his rightful blessing as he blesses his cousin. Together they reap the fruit of "our blessed abode"; but in this verse epistle the blessed isle is not an apocalyptic Ireland but contemporary England, and Ceres is not "unemployed" but has sown "where e'er her Chariot flew." The high- pitched, ethereal strain of the New Testament surrounding the duchess's "second Coming" and its imaginary paradise becomes domesticated here. Millenium takes

55. Letters of Dryden, ed. Ward, 135. 56. Ibid., 123-24. 57. Ibid., 120.

58. The Revolter. A Trage-ComedyActed Between the Hind and the Panther, and Religio Laici, &c. (London, 1687).

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on an Old Testament plenitude as John Driden promises blessings and food for all (lines 44-49).

The contrasts between the two epistles are quite clear. From the bright

heights and stately measures of a cosmic pavane that endlessly returns beauty and poets to their rightful place, the epistle to the duchess descends into a dark fable of failed prophecy. The complicated tone and the lady's unspecified fever ex-

press the strain of covering yet revealing an imperfect world of civil wars and

mortality, of eclipsed virtue, and a marriage where one of the partners is absent. The poem to John Driden begins by assuming vexation, physical illness, and "anxious cares," "strife" and "civil rage." But the speaker soon shifts from civil to domestic strife, and he regrets and dismisses marriage as the impossible fiction of a union that defies physical laws. The couple eventually separate into themselves; the poem notes physical evidence, believes physical laws. The bachelor patriot and

peacemaker, Adam, stands alone; but also the peacemaking duchess curiously stands alone, while she stands in for her ambitious and "expensive"59 shadowy lord, for whom she must be messenger, harbinger, pledge, and widow. The poem to the duchess begs the question of where Ormonde (or the duchess herself, for that matter) exactly is: in England or Ireland? on the Continent? But even the title alone of the poem to Cousin Driden plants him firmly in the English soil of Chesterton in the county of Huntington; he is neither sailing to Ireland nor

dashing off to the Continent. He is clearly poised in place, even as he moves between country and court. His oscillation produces balance and stasis through its

constant, careful calibration of the point where one can stand between, and bal-

ance, extremes of baits, snares, costs, suits, doctors, and wars in order to compose civic and personal harmony.

Dryden addresses not a patron of peerless pedigree, not even one of his wife's extended family, but his own relation.6° John Driden, who shares the poet's

59. "Swift, describing the French ambassador to Stella, says that 'he is a fine gentleman, something like the Duke of Ormonde, and just such an expensive man'"; DNB, s.v. "James Butler," 517.

60. Other instances of his writing to or for his own relatives include the early "Lines in a Letter to his Lady Cousin, Honor Driden" (i655), the sister ofJohn Driden of Chesterton, which were written when the

poet was at Cambridge; the ephemeral "Impromptu Lines Addressed to his Cousin, Mrs. Creed, in a Conversation After Dinner on the Origin of Names"; and an undated epitaph to Erasmus Lawton, the son of his sister, Rose, which is inscribed on a mural tablet in the church of Great Catworth, Huntingdon- shire. The epitaph's last line muses on another occasion when, as with Isaac and Rebekah, the youngest son is the mother's favorite-in this poignant case, her "only Son" (Rose Dryden was John Lawton's second wife):

Stay Stranger Stay and drop one Tear She allways weeps that layd him Here And will do, will her race is Run His Father's fifth, her only Son.

(Poems, ed. Kinsley, 4:1803)

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name, shares as well his interest in politics. He, however, is a Protestant and a Whig; and he will produce no heir. Instead, as justice of the peace and M.P. for Huntington, and as a relation who represents the poet's own network of past and present family, he acknowledges and balances demands and resolves family differences. In a letter to Mrs. Steward of 4 March 1699, Dryden notes with his usual complex protestations of humility the receipt of a "turkey hen with Eggs, & a good young Goose" from this noble "Benefactour" who remembers "a poor, & so undeserving a Kinsman, & one of another persuasion, in matters of Religion."6' John Driden as "patriot" quietly ties the poet back to his Puritan kin, despite and even because of Dryden's conversion to Roman Catholicism.62 The poet refers to their common "patriot line" of male relations who were pe- nalized in the 162os for opposition to the government, as Catholics of Dryden's extended family would be in the 169os. When Dryden, recalling "Patriots in peace" says, "Such was your generous grandsire," he is saying, in effect, "our generous grandsire," for Sir Erasmus of Canons Asby was their common grand- parent. Dryden may be recalling as well, indirectly, Erasmus Dryden's son-in-law, Sir John Pickering, Dryden's "martyred" uncle by marriage (and after whom the poet possibly was named).63 These two family patriots refused to pay a forced loan levied by Charles I and passed months in the Gatehouse, Sir John dying shortly after his release from the ordeal. The phrase "in a loathsome dungeon doomed to die" could refer to Sir John; it also recalls the contemporary fate of numerous English Catholics, including such relations of Dryden's wife as Bernard Howard and James Cecil, fourth earl of Salisbury, and the in-laws of Mary Frampton, Edward Stourton and William and Robert Paston.64 By uniting his Puritan

61. Letters of Dryden, ed. Ward, 112.

62. While a supporter of William, John Driden had always maintained friendly relations with his Roman Catholic kin, in contrast to Sir Robert Dryden, his eldest brother and heir to the Dryden family seat at Canons Asby. At the end of the century, William III culminated an escalating series of laws and proclama- tions against papists with a statute forbidding them to own property. In his will Sir Robert, who was childless like all his brothers, made an effort to ensure that the poet's Catholic sons would not inherit the family seat; see Winn, Dryden and His World, 5o6, 626 n. 67.

63. Ibid., 8. 64. Members of these related families were suspected of Jacobite conspiracy and shared political imprisonment:

Edward Stourton, brother-in-law of Catharine Frampton, had spent time in the Tower in 1692 with William Paston, second earl of Yarmouth (cousin to Jane Frampton's husband); with James Cecil, fourth earl of Salisbury (Elizabeth Dryden's relative, earlier incarcerated in 1689 and 1690, and to whom Dryden dedicated his final play); and with Bernard Howard, Elizabeth's second cousin. Simultaneously, Robert Paston, William's brother, was confined in the Gatehouse on suspicion of treason; see The Complete Peerage, s.v. "Stourton," 312; and also Saturday, 21 May 1692, in Narcissus Luttrell, A BriefHistorical Relation of State Affairs, from September 1678 to April 1714 (Oxford, 1857), 2:458-59. William and Robert Paston had been arrested a few days earlier and released (p. 453). The imprisoned William Paston had served as Treasurer of the Household for James II and been one of the four peers deputed to invite James to

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ancestry with his present Catholic and Jacobite experiences, Dryden reveals with perfectly controlled irony that his conversion is consistent with his family's tradition of courageous patriotism and loyal opposition. Within his cousin's embrace, this kinsman of "another persuasion" composes opposites and balances the poles of his life.

In his character of Jacob, cousin Driden performs an even more delicate resolution. Domestic softness assumes a triumphant solidity within this masculine

disguise. The description of the female as a stream that wanders "at random" far from the source of God's image recalls another wanderer led astray by "Midianitish wives," with whom this essay began; but Dryden now shifts such accusations back onto his conquerors, who leave home for foreign shores and are undone by their conquests. Hannibal returned "too late to keep his own," and the ironic bell of "won" and "undone" tolls twice in this poem, and not for the

poet. The duchess's failure to produce an heir becomes subtly conjoined with Ormonde's absence in farflung conquest from the native source she represents. Meanwhile, the feminine Jacob increases and shares his "fruitful fields" and abun- dant stores. The poem steadily distinguishes between "wandering in the dark" as

physicians do-wandering at random as apothecaries do through their recipe files and as warring men do (doctors and warriors killing "whole parishes")- and the cool "sylvan chase" in which this Jacob participates. The chase was once a "fiery game" in youth hunting down wily "felons," as it was for Dryden when he wrote MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel. In later years that chase has turned into a circular, coolly chaste yet fruitful activity, the healthy round of life committed to rich produce. It becomes a pleasurable, purifying exercise, an ac-

knowledgment and embrace of extremes. The sylvan chase-if sometimes a

"drudgeing" round as the poet described his work on Fables, "A Book of Mis-

cellanyes," to Mrs. Steward-becomes the poet's final argument for his own

morality and steadiness of faith. The verse epistles are separated by the poet's translation of Chaucer's "The

Knight's Tale, "in Fables entitled "Palamon and Arcite"-a work much concerned with the sexual chase, with the natural round of birth, reproduction, and death, and with fame after death. In his epistle to the duchess of Ormonde, Dryden linked her specifically with Chaucer's Emily (lines 32-37); and throughout the translation he added lines of his own to Chaucer's original, notably in part 3 when Emily prays to Diana and expresses her desire to remain a maid "al my lyf, / Ne nevere

return from Sheerness to Whitehall (along with Ailesbury, Feversham, and Middleton). See The Complete Peerage, s.v. "Yarmouth," 891; and Memoirs of Thomas, Earl ofAilesbury (London, 1898), 202. The father of William and Robert had been Sir Robert Paston (1631-83), M.. for Castle Rising, Norfolk, and a faithful

supporter and friend of Charles II.

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wol I be no love ne wyf" (pt. 3, lines 2305-6), or "be with childe" (line 2310). Dryden increases that reluctance to loathing and adds the language of tyranny:

Like death, thou knowest, I loathe the nuptial state, And Man, the tyrant of our sex, I hate, A lowly servant, but a lofty mate; where love is duty on the female side, On theirs mere sensual gust, and sought with surly pride

(Part 3, lines 227-31)

Where in Chaucer's text Emily asks that, if she must take one, let it be the one who loves her best, Dryden adds, "But Oh! e'en that avert! I choose it not, / But take it as the least unhappy lot" (lines 242-43). This female viewpoint on marriage and the sexual hunt prepares for and balances the narrator's misogynistic outburst

against sex and marriage in "To my Honour'd Kinsman." "Palamon and Arcite" "ends with the poem's chief representative of patriarchal values, Theseus, insisting on the necessity of marriage and reproduction-a nod to the biological world of the Ormondes-and also eulogizing the importance of fame for the honorable but childless life, which "To my Honour'd Kinsman" professes to do. An equally deep contest and resolution between the worlds of these epistles and the worlds of the sexes have their roots, I suggest, not in Chaucer but in the Genesis narrative of Jacob and Esau, an episode full of antithetical parallels and oracular reversals. The feminine Jacob serves as a useful compromise between the masculine hunter of Esau (William III, his officer Ormonde, but also all of the hunters who found

Dryden fair game) and the soft feminine state of domestic withdrawal with its

company of illness and age, its long wait for the conqueror to return home-or for a Restoration.

In the final decade, in exile within a home that anecdote suggests may not have been a particularly happy one, the poet lays to rest a complex of feelings that must have included nostalgia, threat, and disappointment behind "softness." He seeks asylum with his cousin of his own name who, as a second son, is removed from the pressures of the duchess's biological world. After all, according to one

report it was to cousin Driden of Chesterton, and not the firstborn Sir Robert, the country justice's brother and heir to the Dryden baronetcy and family seat at Canons Asby, that Dryden sometimes escaped for relief from marital discord. A letter written to Malone in 1799 by a distant cousin, Honor Pigott, makes clear the poet's habit of association with Chesterton and not with "the family," who had never favored his popish connections: "I have often heard my Aunt Lyster say her Cousin John Dryden & his Wife were very Unhappy, for she was of a most sad temper & He was often Obliged (I suppose for Peace) to seperate from her,

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224 x ANNE COTTIRIIi

& my Aunt said spent often those days at Chesterton, for the family never Liked his Connection."65 In "The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady," Dryden looks through the soft and fair and ill, now crystallized as that transparent symbol of the round of mortality, a timepiece.

MARY FRAMPTON: THE MASTERY OF FEMININE GHOSTS

The "Monument" to Mary Frampton briefly anneals and masters the poet's feminine, Catholic identity. Conscience appears to be no longer tender but trans-

parently clear:

Below this Marble Monument, is laid All that Heav'n wants of this Celestial Maid. Preserve, O sacred Tomb, thy Trust consign'd: The Mold was made on purpose for the Mind: And she wou'd lose, if at the latter Day One Atom cou'd be mix'd, of other Clay. Such were the Features of her heav'nly Face, Her Limbs were form'd with such harmonious Grace, So faultless was the Frame, as if the Whole Had been an Emanation of the Soul; Which her own inward Symmetry reveal'd; And like a Picture shone, in Glass Anneal'd. Or like the Sun eclips'd, with shaded Light: Too piercing, else, to be sustain'd by Sight. Each Thought was visible that rowl'd within: As through a Crystal Case, the figur'd Hours are seen. And Heav'n did this transparent Veil provide, Because she had no guilty Thought to hide. All white, a virgin-saint, she sought the skies, For marriage, though it sullies not, it dyes.

A Soul so calm, it knew not Ebbs or Flows,

65. James M. Osborn, John Dryden: Some Biographical Facts and Problems (New York, 1949), 250. See also

P. D. Mundy, "Dryden's Dominican Son-Sir Erasmus Henry Dryden, 5th Bart.," Notes and Queries 196

(1951): 472-73. Mundy quotes from a letter of 1799 to Malone from Elizabeth Lady Dryden, the eventual

heiress of Canons Asby (the letter appears in Osborn, Biographical Facts and Problems, 245-46). She writes

of Dryden's wife and "the family": "having, to bad conduct before marriage, united bad conduct after-

wards, & having used Mr. Dryden very indifferently, the family confined their attentions to formal tea

visits, as I have heard."

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Which Passion cou'd but curl; not discompose. A Female Softness, with a manly Mind: A Daughter duteous, and a Sister kind: In Sickness patient; and in Death resign'd.

(Lines 1-20, 32-36)

This otherwise unremarkable poem is curious in its voyeurism: we are suddenly and familiarly "within" Mary Frampton. Only there is nothing to spy, nothing to hide. We watch Mary's thoughts roll around-but they have become clock- work. In such a slight epitaph, the poet has traveled quickly to reach this perspective of echoing interiority. His passage to "within" recalls and exceeds the more sinister invasion of the duchess in her epistle. In both instances the poet does not peer at a body but transports himself inside it. He imaginatively in- vades the duchess's anatomy when he wonders "How those malignant Atoms forc'd their Way," hinting that an interior weakness acquiesced to the possession, and he travels with the atoms all the way to her fiery breast. But here, where the female subject has actually died of disease, he makes no mention of illness, con- flict, or affect but admires close-up the crystal perspective of "inward Symmetry." The fire of disease, the Temple burning, becomes "Glass Anneal'd." And that transparency of symmetry becomes his own mastery, like death's, over the accusations of feminine softness of his soft-headed conversion to Rome.

Mary Frampton is praised for "A Female Softness, with a manly Mind," but the poem contains little that is soft beyond one curl. "Mind" figures promi- nently, rhyming within the second couplet and within each of two triple rhymes, hardly softened by "kind" and "resigned." If the "Mold was made on purpose for the Mind," softness as vulnerability has disappeared by composing itself into a "transparent Veil"; even that curled lip of her soul under the pressure of passion speaks contempt of discomposure. The mold has become fired glass, a crystal case. And her soul's symmetry, visible within, takes the form of the circular symmetry of a clock through whose crystal case of her body we watch "figur'd Hours." Solitary cousin Driden in his chase and the emblematic hare who "runs the Round," as well as the Boethian cycles "roll'd" around like stars in the poem to the duchess, pass before our eyes, "rowl'd" with the fair maiden's dazzling, if spare, interior movement. The epitaph's confident gaze into her clockworks reflects the clear air of dismissal.

Behind the prominence given to genealogy in both poems, Dryden joins his present Catholic world and its experience of persecution to his own biological family with its tradition of Protestant martyrs. And he claims his pedigree of "Kindred Muses." For while the law of inheritance may insist on the importance

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226 ANNE COTTERILL

of descent through the father's eldest son, the verse epistles introducing Dryden's final expression of literary ease and independence use biology to muse on the poetic psyche-on the circular vagaries of associative thought and descent. A

comfortably roomy home of personal fit, Fables offers a tour through the poet's own country house of relations bound by "resemblance of genius." And in "To My Honour'd Kinsman," Dryden acknowledges his "wandering ways" by show-

ing that they were, in the words of "The Secular Masque," like the age "all of a piece throughout"-that like the age he had come full circle. He had wandered but not strayed. The old hope of another Stuart restoration has dimmed; exactly how that cycle of rebirth would work, that second coming, now looks unclear.

If the English Catholic world of the 169os presented some difficult realities, its political and spiritual underground also offered an imaginatively useful metaphor ready to hand. Embedded in the domestic with its ill health, age, and dependents, Dryden turned domesticity into a poetics of genealogy, inheritance, and homecoming. Adopting and then dismissing fabular feminine voices dead and alive, in elegy and through contesting couples, he eulogized the ghost of softness and buried threats of weakness. Through translation as the rather wifely activity of reimagining for great poets their minds and writings, he succeeded in

reimagining himself as well. And he built his own house according to personal taste and whim-he declared his own lineage in Homer's line of masculine "ve- hemence" and originality. Lord of that estate, he reigns supreme, like his Protestant and bachelor cousin at Chesterton, whose house we never enter nor even seri-

ously imagine. The emblem of that late poem is not the great country house but an indirect movement home, the hare wandering its circle of life. Dryden appears to prepare for death by assembling a miscellany of family in his house of fables, and the lines of inheritance we follow, like the order of the poems, are not linear but digressive and circular, an internalized round, like the circle wandered and filled by the emblematic hare in "To My Honour'd Kinsman." The deceased feminine body of the Fair Maiden allows us to peer into an eerily transparent version of Dryden's more complex mental round, his opaque epic. Under the cover of disenfranchised domesticity passed in recording family lineage and observing rites of

passage, and occupied in the preservation of family fruits while awaiting the hero's return, this exile has returned and has secured his own blessing.

Rutgers University

226 ,%X ANNE COTTERILL



john dryden: a tercentenary miscellany || "rebekah's heir": dryden's late...

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