Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English 4-30-2010 The Pleiadic Age of Stuart Poesie: Restoration Uranography, Dryden's Judicial Astrology, and the Fate of Anne Killigrew Morgan Alexander Brown Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brown, Morgan Alexander, "The Pleiadic Age of Stuart Poesie: Restoration Uranography, Dryden's Judicial Astrology, and the Fate of Anne Killigrew." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2010. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/77 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE PLEIADIC AGE OF STUART POËSIE: RESTORATION URANOGRAPHY, DRYDEN'S JUDICIAL ASTROLOGY, AND THE FATE OF ANNE KILLIGREW by Morgan A. Brown Under the Direction of Tanya Caldwell ABSTRACT: The following Thesis is a survey of seventeenth-century uranography, with specific focus on the use of the Pleiades and Charles's Wain by English poets and pageant writers as astrological ciphers for the Stuart dynasty (1603-1649; 1660-1688). I then use that survey to address the problem of irony in John Dryden's 1685 Pindaric elegy, "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew," since the longstanding notion of what the Pleiades signify in Dryden's ode is problematic from an astronomical and astrological perspective. In his elegiac ode, Dryden translates a young female artist to the Pleiades to actuate her apotheosis, not for the sake of mere fulsome hypberbole, but in such a way that Anne (b.