Otherworldly John Dryden

Occult Rhetoric in His Poems and Plays

Jack M. Armistead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472424976
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317084846
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reminding readers of John Dryden's persistent use of occult rhetoric, Jack M. Armistead argues that Dryden's otherworldliness involves more than Christian apologetics, biblical typology, or intermittent borrowings from the supernatural materials in classical literature. Rather, it manifests throughout his career in occult materials drawn from many traditions, including but going well beyond the standard classical and Christian ones. As Armistead shows, Dryden's practice of juxtaposing pre- and post-scientific treatments of such occult topics as alchemy, astrology, and demonology pervades many of his poems and plays. In its engagement with works such as The Indian Queen, Annus Mirabilis, All for Love, and Absalom and Achitophel, among many others, Otherworldly John Dryden not only enhances our understanding of Dryden's works, but also tracks the writer's attitudes about Providence and the ability of the poet to perceive a hidden design in earthly events.

Chapter 1

The Early Poems, 1649–63

In Dryden’s earliest poems, occult language and ideas become important rhetorical and analytical tools, alongside allusions to the classics and Holy Scripture. The transitional nature of popular beliefs about the occult during the later seventeenth century provided a rich resource that he could draw upon for analysis, definition, and praise, especially as he dealt with problematic subjects. He employs the occult to lend “an air of permanence” to “highly ephemeral particulars”¹ and to address some of the problems associated with the subjects he chooses to address—for example, a young man who died without a legacy of tangible achievements to praise, a great leader whose achievements were politically controversial, a mediocre poet, or a countess with less than praiseworthy morals. In treating these and related issues in the early poems, he relies heavily on astrology and alchemy—which he tends to weigh against the competing “sciences” of astronomy and chemistry—and to a lesser extent on demonology and other folk beliefs.² As he develops this occult rhetoric, his concept of the “modern” poet’s occult vision comes into focus as well.

Dryden’s earliest published poem, the elegy “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings” (1649), uses occult language to commemorate the young man’s excellence in the absence of any specific achievements on which to ground that excellence. Hastings was only nineteen when he died on the eve of his wedding. Toward the middle of the poem his body is described as an “Orb,” whose “Reg’lar Motions” on the single “Pole” of virtue and learning show his “sublime Soul” better than Archimedes’ “Sphere” could exhibit the “Heavens” (California Works 1:27–30). In the mid-seventeenth century, “Orb” could mean one of the nested spheres in the medieval universe or a single planet or star in either the old or the new world picture.³ Was Hastings’s body like one of the concentric spheres, whose motions were directly impelled by God or an angel, or was it like a single star or planet moved by a force obeying God’s natural law? The reference to Archimedes presumes a pre-Copernican world picture, but the claim that Hastings’s earthly form shows his soul “better” than Archimedes’ physical model could represent the heavens suggests that Dryden wants his reader to understand Hastings in more modern terms as well. The ensuing references to Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe confirm this duality of signification.

In lines 31–38 the “Graces and Vertues, Languages and Arts, / Beauty and Learning” that constituted Hastings’s inner “Pole” while he lived are collectively termed “Heav’ns Gifts.” In most of the population, Dryden says, such gifts are scattered like shooting stars, no single person embodying all at once or, by implication, for long. In ordinary people, they are transitory and directed toward earthly affairs. The context is that of a mutable, imperfect universe, the legacy of Galileo. A different context is needed, however, to distinguish Hastings from these ordinary humans. Within his soul, the heavenly qualities, instead of resembling “falling Stars,” were “fix’d and conglobate” as in a “Sphear.” Indeed, this Ptolemaic sphere of fixed stars—the assembled virtues fixed on his soul—glowed so brightly that it imparted a “Celestial” dimension to his earthly form. But just as this pre-Copernican metaphor becomes established in the reader’s mind, Dryden changes the reference point again. The very Ptolemy whose system is used to describe Hastings’s excellence is now said to be inadequate to the full task of understanding him. Addressing Ptolemy directly, the speaker claims that calculating Hastings’s “Altitude … / transcends thy skill” (39–41). Ptolemy’s model thus joins that of Archimedes in the weakness of its power to describe the link between Hastings and the divine. The early modern astronomer, Tycho Brahe, is now summoned to interpret Hastings as a single star newly added to “our Hemisphere” (42–46).

Dryden has it both ways. While still alive, Hastings was a microcosm of the Ptolemaic world system, his inner qualities like fixed stars and his body like their sphere glowing with divine influences. Divested of his diseased body, however, he can be understood only through modern astronomy as a single, radiant star in our sky. As the poem ends, Dryden emphasizes the continuing, benign influence of Hastings’s resurrected soul through the mediation of his would-be widow. She is charged to propagate the ideas of “Vertue, Knowledge, Worth” (100) that emanate from Hastings in his spiritual form. In this final image, Dryden relies upon the still-widespread belief, despite the dominance of heliocentrism and empirical science in his time, that both stars and the souls of the dead could influence sublunar life.⁴

The elegy on Hastings is not a masterful poem. Dryden has been faulted for its “clogged, stumbling diction” and “over-ingenious images.”⁵ However, in using occult language to celebrate the late lord’s virtues, he initiates two strategies that would become increasingly useful in future works. First, he takes advantage of the ambiguous status various forms of occultism held in the later seventeenth century, reflecting in this poem especially the ongoing transition from astrology to astronomy. Secondly, he begins using “recurring patterns of imagery as an allusive ‘counterplot’”—a practice he seems to have learned from Virgil.⁶

In his other major pre-Restoration poem, the Heroique Stanzas to the Glorious Memory of Cromwell (1659), Dryden uses both these strategies with a clearer, though no less complex, purpose—in this case a political purpose. There is broad agreement about the challenge Dryden faced in writing this poem and about his overall method of meeting that challenge. The challenge, of course, was to commemorate the greatness of a conservative Puritan, the late Oliver Cromwell, during unsettled times when it was not at all clear whether Puritans or Royalists would emerge as the dominant political force in England.⁷ The overall strategy was to balance affirmation with denial through rhetorical qualification and irony. Beyond this, however, opinions diverge. On the one hand, the California Works editors find a restrained but clearly defined point of view designed to console Cromwell’s compatriots while avoiding offense to the Royalists (1:191). Roper adds that the poem rejects “a republican dictatorship … without embracing a Stuart orthodoxy” (Poetic Kingdoms 61, 59).⁸ To Zwicker, however, Dryden fails to understand Cromwell, and his use of occult terminology is intentionally pejorative, undermining praise of Cromwell’s successes (Politics and Language 80–84). My own approach to this poem, as with the elegy on Hastings, starts with a different assumption—i.e., that during the later Stuart period attitudes toward the occult arts were ambiguous and ideologically problematic (see “Introduction,” above, p. 7). Where Zwicker reads that ambiguity as evidence of Dryden’s confusion, I see it as a strategy to bring a broad range of readers into his circle of understanding.

Dryden obviously felt that all readers, whatever their political bias, could agree on his main point—that Cromwell did not accidentally become great and powerful; Heaven had chosen him at birth for a special kind of “Grandeur” (21), long before circumstances favored his rise. It is the attempt to grasp and communicate the nature of this divine act, and of the “strangely high endeavours” (147) which followed, that brings forth from Dryden a series of terms and images drawn from occult traditions. Relying on their ambiguous status in the Restoration, he imbeds these occult references in contexts that allow them to be understood in different ways by readers of different political persuasions.⁹

The references to stars provide good examples of the method. First, Cromwell is said to have scattered his conquests “Thick as the Galaxy with starr’s is sown” (56). The word “galaxy” was used in English literature to indicate the Milky Way at least as early as Chaucer’s time, when the pre-Copernican view of the universe was standard, and this usage continued through the modern era (OED). So, on the one hand, Dryden could be saying that Cromwell’s conquests have been added to the map as stars might be added to the firmament, which would make him the earthly equivalent of God in His ability to alter the make-up of the immortal sphere of fixed stars. The comparison might have pleased readers of the Puritan persuasion. But to some Royalists, no doubt, this passage would be understood as comparing Cromwell to a modern astronomer whose very earthly endeavors have the effect of adding new stars to the empirically developed map of the heavens. In this conception, Cromwell becomes more of a natural and rational force than a supernatural or supra-rational one.¹⁰

A few stanzas farther along, Dryden raises the prospect of comparing Cromwell’s control over events to the influence that stars have on earthly affairs. However, he raises this analogy only to reject its initial formulation:

Nor was he like those starr’s which only shine

When to pale Mariners they stormes portend,

He had his calmer influence. (69–71)

But Dryden fails to complete the substitute comparison, the analogy between Cromwell’s calm and steady influence and that of God through the stars, leaving those readers inclined to see Cromwell as God’s vice-regent to complete it in their own minds.

For the benefit of the rest, Dryden shifts to a different source of language, yet one that was also in the occult lexicon:

’Tis true, his Count’nance did imprint an awe,

And naturally all souls to his did bow;

As Wands of Divination downward draw

And point to Beds where Sov’raign Gold doth grow. (73–76)

Cromwell’s “calmer influence” is said to emanate from his “Count’nance,” which struck observers with “awe” as we are struck when divining wands guide us to where “Gold doth grow.”¹¹ The trope combines two widespread beliefs, each of which, like the belief in astrology, had both adherents and scoffers. The divining rod used for locating buried treasure was introduced to England from Germany in the mid-1600s and retained a large following during the Restoration, as did the theory that precious metals “grow” in the earth.¹² Cromwell’s physical bearing points to his superior inner qualities as a divining rod points to hidden gold, and these inner qualities have grown to “Sov’raign” value in the way that gold “grows” in the earth—i.e., through the operation of nature and time.¹³ Readers who wish to regard Cromwell’s personal charisma as the outward sign of his spiritual potency are free to do so. But for Royalists, this analogy removes his greatness from a direct and primary to an indirect and secondary effect of God’s decrees.¹⁴ God may have planted the golden seeds of heroism in the Protector’s nature at birth, but He consigned them to temporal processes for their full development. Cromwell’s power is conveyed through a physical bearing that grew naturally and just as naturally was destined to die.¹⁵

Still farther along in the poem, where Cromwell’s domination of the House of Commons is commented upon, Dryden’s syntax reveals a similar duality of meaning: “When such Heroique Vertue Heav’n sets out, / The Starrs like Commons sullenly obey” (105–106). Readers of the Puritan persuasion have latitude to read this analogy as an affirmation of Cromwell’s divine role: “the Commons obey Cromwell as the stars obey God.” Royalists, however, could read the analogy differently: “the stars obey this example of heroic virtue, Cromwell, just as the House of Commons does.” It is not Cromwell alone to whom the obedience is owed. Rather, it is heroic virtue throughout history—the kind that God plants, and that can grow into a Cromwell. The representatives in the House of Commons can be seen as sullen in their obedience because Cromwell is no king even though his financial demands upon them are king-like.¹⁶ The stars can be understood as sullenly obedient because the “effort” to align with this secondary, natural cause drains their energy. It is hard work to reflect God’s design in the rapidly changing historical landscape, especially without the aid of a tidily structured universe.¹⁷

The final star image seems at first sight non-allusive, and indeed it does not carry the richness of significance seen in the earlier references: Cromwell’s maneuvers in the West Indies are said to have been carried out “where Southern Starrs arise” (122). Royalists can read this as a simple example of metonymy, with the southern stars substituting for locations such as San Domingo or Jamaica. However, what follows directly specifies the action taken under those “Southern Starrs” and resonates for Puritan readers in the context of the earlier occult metaphors: “We trac’d the farre-fetchd Gold unto the mine” (123). This could suggest a Cromwell whose affinity with the southern stars is like his alignment with stars in general: it enables him to direct his explorers with divinely sponsored accuracy to the hidden gold growing in the West Indies.

These star references, taken in the aggregate, reinforce the image of Cromwell as God’s deputy but do so without insisting on magical abilities or a place in the divinely ordained heritage of leadership. The same principle guides Dryden’s reference to alchemy in lines 97–104:

For from all tempers he could service draw;

The worth of each with its alloy he knew;

And as the Confident of Nature saw

How she Complexions did divide and brew.

Or he their single vertues did survay

By intuition in his own large brest,

Where all the rich Idea’s of them lay,

That were the rule and measure to the rest.

Like the skilled alchemist, Cromwell understands the differing properties of his materials—in this case, the men who carry out his plans and commands—and can therefore employ them in effective combinations. But this skill need not be ascribed to immersion in the harmonies of the universe or to communication with Heaven or the stars, though those who seek evidence of Cromwell’s continuing communion with the Almighty could see it this way. For the Royalist, however, the reference to alchemy simply reinforces Cromwell’s inborn qualities. “The rich Idea’s” that are scattered piecemeal among his men come together in his own “brest,” informing his ability, as nature’s “Confident,” to align his actions with nature’s rhythms. His kind of alchemy, like his influence over history, does not rely upon spiritual sympathies. It shares a Charleton’s or a Boyle’s conviction that while the patterns and laws of nature are Providential, human understanding of natural phenomena must be based on observation and experience—that is, the knowledge of secondary causes once removed from God’s direct intervention.¹⁸

Near the end of the poem Dryden inserts one reference to demonology: Cromwell is called the “Pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Early Poems, 1649–63
• 2 The American Plays, 1664–65
• 3 Annus Mirabilis and The Tempest, 1667
• 4 Tyrannick Love and The Conquest of Granada, 1669–71
• 5 The State of Innocence, Aureng-Zebe, and the Limits of Poetic Vision, 1674–77
• 6 All for Love, 1677
• 7 Oedipus, Troilus and Cressida, and The Spanish Fryar, 1678–80
• 8 Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, The Duke of Guise, and Albion and Albanius, 1681–85
• 9 Later Public Poems, Elegies, and Poems about Art, 1685–96
• 10 King Arthur, 1691
• Conclusion: The Secular Masque, 1700
• Works Cited
• Index