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For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ Defining the Public Poet: Towards a Definition of Dryden’s Scepticism Adam John Hopley A Doctoral Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University 6 January 2012 © by Adam Hopley 2012 Abbreviations Bredvold Louis Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of Seventeenth-Century Thought (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1936) Companion The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, edited by Steven Zwicker (Cambridge University Press, 2004) Harth Philip Harth, Contexts of Dryden’s Intellectual Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968) Hobbes Richard Tuck, ed., Hobbes: Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Montaigne The Essays of Michel De Montaigne, 2 vols, translated by Charles Cotton (1685) (London: G Bell, 1930) Noggle Noggle, James, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Parker Fred Parker, Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne and Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Poems The Poems of John Dryden, vols 1 & 2, edited by Paul Hammond and vols 3-5 edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 1995-2005) Popkin Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (California and London: University of California Press, 1979) Winn James Anderson Winn, Dryden and his World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) Works The Works of John Dryden, edited by H.T. Swedenberg and others, 20 vols (Berkeley, California 1956-) Acknowledgements I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Nigel Wood, and my Director of Research, Professor Elaine Hobby, who have bolstered my resolve and provided me with invaluable advice and encouraging words; without them this thesis would never have come into fruition. I also wish to thank my mother, Wanda Hopley, whose tireless support and patience has carried me through to the end. 1 Scepticism and Dryden: Critical Perspectives John Dryden was one of the leading public commentators of the Restoration and late seventeenth century. Everywhere in his writings he displays a critical engagement with contemporary ideas about government, philosophy, human conduct and the role of a national Church, and every literary form to which he turned his hand felt his influence. It is widely accepted that Dryden’s age was one in which scepticism had become a defining and irrepressible intellectual force. However the nature of sceptical thought in the late seventeenth century and of Dryden’s scepticism in particular has been a subject of great critical contestation. My purpose in this thesis is to provide a comprehensive account of seventeenth-century scepticism as it relates specifically to Dryden’s work. By examining the philosophical implications of his statements on politics and religion, and by analysing the literary strategies he adopts in a representative selection of his poems, plays, essays and translations, I shall seek to show that scepticism was at the heart of Dryden’s fundamental philosophical sympathies. It is my belief that a kind of undeclared sceptical conviction informed Dryden’s commitment to established, or status quo, authority, whilst, at the same time, a range of less identifiable sceptical ideas pervaded his writing throughout his career. As philosophical and literary criticism repeatedly attests, the term ‘sceptical’ can rarely, if ever, be simply equated with ‘doubt’ or ‘incredulity as to the truth of some assertions or supposed fact’, as the OED generally defines it (OED 2). Yet on the other side, neither do specific, apparently self-contained, critical sub-definitions of scepticism, such as ‘fideism’ and ‘mitigated scepticism’, sufficiently account for the protean nature of sceptical thought at any given moment in the late seventeenth century, or, in fact, for those ideas, sceptical in spirit, at any given 2 moment in Dryden’s work. Indeed, what has been understood as sceptical throughout the seventeenth century refers to no clear attitudes or established principle of belief. Even writers and philosophers who shared a similar political and religious outlook differed in their assumptions as sceptical thinkers. Taking any immediate inconsistencies into consideration, it is my intention to treat scepticism as a dynamic component, alike historical and epistemological, of a wider culture of intellectual debate. As such, I will be looking to augment (rather than attempt to supplant) existing commentaries, expanding upon previous critical considerations of Dryden’s philosophical character by demonstrating how the poet and playwright adopted many of the different forms of scepticism to different literary and political and religious ends and in different political and religious contexts. Central to my study is a consideration of how Dryden managed his relationship with his king and his reading and viewing public, and, to this end, how he accommodated his private interests to his, often self-styled, role as public writer. As Cedric D. Reverand II observes, Dryden regarded ‘his role as a public poet in a classical sense, as vates, meaning both bard and prophet’, which ‘empowered’ him with a ‘special authority to comment and criticize’.1 To this end, I argue, Dryden recognises several aspects of poetry’s public potential: its ability to track social (and usually transient) currents of thought; its capacity to find the general in the particular; and its independence from prevailing political influences, useful because it meant that critical comment could be offered on them. As far as Dryden was concerned, poetry had to take risks – and sides. Jürgen Habermas’s research on the Enlightenment’s first phase, where a serious alternative to 1 Cedric D. Reverand II, ‘‘The Final ‘“Memorial of my own Principles”’: Dryden’s Alter Egos in his later Career’,’ in John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, ed. by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 282-307 (p. 282). 3 Church and Court existed and maintained some measure of hegemonic influence, gives some insight into the historical moment with which Dryden was negotiating: The domain of ‘common concern’ which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which Church and State authorities had the monopoly of interpretation not just from the pulpit but in philosophy, literature, and art, even at a time when, for specific social categories, the development of capitalism already demanded a behaviour whose rational orientation required even more information. To the degree, however, to which philosophical and literary works and works of art in general were produced for the market and distributed through it, these culture products became similar to that type of information: as commodities they became in principle generally accessible. They no longer remained components of the Church’s and court’s publicity of representation.2 Considering this view from the perspective of seventeenth-century history, Craig Calhoun notes that whereas ‘faith and reason’ might now be ‘held to be the attributes of individuals’, they were, in Dryden’s age, ‘defined, defended, and debated in arguments that appealed to public opinion’.3 For Dryden, the ‘public’ in the sense of an identifiable audience was not as yet fully-fledged, and I will go on to demonstrate how he gradually came to assess this domain of ‘common concern’ in his own writings, even putting it to use in such works as Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). What follows now though is an exposition of the meaning and use of ‘scepticism’ in seventeenth-century criticism writ large, and a synopsis of how sceptical and sceptically inspired points of view relate to Dryden’s work. To complete this task I provide by way of analytical review an outline of the development of the history of sceptical thought; references to strictly philosophical studies, such as Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (1979), and to studies which do not directly deal with the seventeenth century, but which 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), pp. 36-37. 3 Craig Calhoun Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press Press, 1992), p. 221. 4 I later show are illuminating in other respects, such as James Noggle’s The Skeptical Sublime (2001) and Fred Parker’s Scepticism and Literature (2003), will prove a necessary part of my discussion here.4 That Dryden was sceptical is certainly no new observation. When, in his Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781), Samuel Johnson found occasion to describe Dryden’s intellectual predispositions, he used a vocabulary that portrayed the poet and playwright in strikingly sceptical terms, stating that he was ‘by no means constant to himself’, and that his writing was ‘always another and the same’.5