1688 Appointed by Charles II, John Dryden was the first official Poet Laureate, and the only one – so far – to be sacked. His pay was a pension of £300 (£34,322 or $55,603 in today’s money), plus one butt of Canary wine per year. A butt is a barrel big enough to drown a man in, as is clear from Richard III. It holds 476 litres, or 210 imperial (252 US) gallons. This was a lot more than later emoluments. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (laureate from 1843–50) got £72 a year in cash and another £27 ‘in lieu of the butt of sack’. Andrew Motion (1999–2009) started on £5,000, but claimed the fortified wine, now refined as 600 bottles of sherry.
Poets Laureate are a bit like Nobel Prize-winners in literature (see 10 December). With political and literary criteria always so intermixed, official approval has seldom coincided with critical opinion. The poetic standard has ranged from Tennyson and Wordsworth to forgotten nonentities like Henry James Pye (see 21 May) and others whose work even their contemporaries thought worthy only of parody.
Some live on only in these jokes at their expense. ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them’ (1799), by Robert Southey (1790–1813), has long been displaced by Lewis Carroll’s ‘You are Old, Father William’; and the hapless Alfred Austin (1850–92) didn’t pen the following lines on the illness of Edward VII:
Across the wires the electric message came,
He is no better, he is much the same
… but might as well have, judging from the quality of his other work.
But the first Poet Laureate was also one of the best. Dryden was an immensely practised versifier, committed to his craft, and not afraid to use his invention and skill to tackle big, public issues, as well as the more private topics of the traditional lyric, as in these words set to Purcell’s music in The Indian Queen (1695), his own late echo of the Petrarchans and the Metaphysicals:
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly – in vain,
Since I am myself my own fever,
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.
Today Dryden is often remembered for his feud with another poet and playwright, Thomas Shadwell. They were divided by party as well as religion: Shadwell was a Whig and a Protestant, Dryden very much the other thing. The two poets had got along well enough, and even collaborated, but Dryden’s verse satires on populist Whig manoeuvres following the so-called Popish Plot of 1678, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1681) and ‘The Medal’ (1682), brought Shadwell out in opposition. His ‘The Medal of John Bayes’ (1682) attacked Dryden, not for his politics, but for the quality of his satire:
He quite defiles the Satyr’s dignity.
For Libel and true Satyr different be;
This must have Truth, and Salt, with Modesty.
Sparing the Persons, this doth tax the Crimes,
Galls not great Men, but Vices of the Times.
Of course, all satirists high-mindedly aspired to attack the sin, not the sinner, but sometimes it was hard to dissect out the two, as Shadwell himself found when he went on to reveal an idle joke Dryden shared with a few friends one lazy afternoon:
Thou [Dryden] never mak’st, but art a standing Jest;
Thy Mirth by foolish Bawdy is expresst;
As —
Let’s Bugger one another now by G-d.
(When ask’d how they should spend the Afternoon This was the smart reply of the Heroick Clown.)
Dryden was too clever to respond with a counter-libel. In fact, he side-stepped lampoon altogether, and went instead for a tone of comic seriousness that has since been styled the mock heroic. ‘MacFlecknoe’ (1682) imagines the Prince of Dullness trying to decide ‘which of his Sons was fit / To Reign, and wage immortal War with Wit’. Before long the obvious choice presents himself:
S[hadwell] alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
S[hadwell] alone, of all my Sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But S[hadwell] never deviates into sense.
Dryden’s sly inversions of expectation (‘Mature … dullness’ and ‘deviates … sense’) are part of that measured tone that severs the head from the body while leaving it in place. At first, you could mistake the attack for praise.
Dullness isn’t just being boring; it is the absence of wit. It includes bad political and critical judgement, of course, but it’s also present in the snobbery that considers profanity to be the more serious because uttered ‘in the company of persons of Quality’. Alexander Pope was quick to see the possibilities of the trope. He would create an entire mock epic of dullness, in his monumental The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743).
Who remembers ‘The Medal of John Bayes’ today? About all we have left of Shadwell’s is that old chestnut of girl-guide outings, ‘Nymphs and shepherds, come away. / In the groves let’s sport and play, / For this is Flora’s holy day’. But who now understands those callow classical references? Who was Flora, anyway, and why was she on holiday?
But royal favour and poetic achievement don’t always coincide. In 1688, when the Protestant monarchs William and Mary were invited to succeed the deposed Catholic James II, Dryden lost his job. And who took his place? Step forward, Thomas Shadwell, who would hold the post until his death in 1692. Or as Dryden himself would put it in another context (his attack on the Earl of Shaftesbury in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’), ‘He had his jest, and they had his Estate’.