The
Autopoiesis of Dullness: Literary Succession and Self-Observation in Dryden's Mac
Flecknoe
Sounak Das,
Independent Researcher,
Kolkata, West Bengal, India,
&
Yash Kartik Sharma,
Assistant Professor of English,
Acharya Institute of Graduate Studies,
Bangalore, Karnataka,
India.
Abstract: Paul Hammond asked
why Dryden made Richard Flecknoe the father of Thomas Shadwell's dullness. We
ask what model of literary inheritance Mac
Flecknoe constructs, and read the poem alongside Niklas Luhmann's
account of self-reproducing social systems. Flecknoe chooses the heir who
"most resembles me," forbids him "foreign aid," and asks
for "Issue of thy own." Dullness is imagined as self-reproduction by
identity, closed against whatever might make it deviate. We argue that the poem
stages this ideal as a counterfeit of the recursive reproduction Luhmann
describes, which depends on new and different communications. Dryden builds the
satire from Shadwell's own prefaces and dedications, turning their claims about
variety, novelty, consistency, wit, and Jonsonian descent against their author,
and completes the succession with a trap-door taken from Shadwell's The Virtuoso. The poem thus takes up
earlier literary communications, re-enters their distinctions, and reverses
their value. Its own transmission in manuscript and in the printings of 1682,
1684, and 1692, together with Pope's later claim to resemble it while differing
from it, shows literary succession working through variation. On this reading Mac Flecknoe is a concentrated
self-observation of Restoration literary communication.
Keywords: John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, Thomas Shadwell, Niklas
Luhmann, literary succession
The question of inheritance
In the dedication of The Virtuoso (1676) to the
Duke of Newcastle, Thomas Shadwell called Ben Jonson "the best Drammatick
Poet that ever was, or, I believe, ever will be," and said that he
"had rather be Author of one Scene in his best Comedies, than of any Play
this Age has produced" (Shadwell, Virtuoso). Mac Flecknoe
answered by giving Shadwell another father. Paul Hammond has put the resulting
question plainly: "Why did Dryden select Richard Flecknoe as the man whose
poetic kingdom Shadwell was to inherit?" (168). The familiar answer, that
Flecknoe was already the type of the bad poet, rests on Andrew Marvell's satire
against him, which, Hammond notes, was not printed until 1681 (168). Hammond's
own answer lies in the dispute over Jonson: Shadwell's position was "that
he is the true heir of Ben Jonson," and the poem "dresses Shadwell in
precisely those robes which he had assumed" (168–69).
That answer explains the target of the substitution. We
are concerned with its mechanism: the model of literary inheritance the poem
constructs when it makes dullness hereditary. The poem's first judgement is a
rule of succession. Flecknoe, "Worn out with business," resolves "To
settle the succession of the State," and declares that "Nature pleads
that He / Should onely rule, who most resembles me" (lines 9–14).
Quotations of the poem follow the text in Jacob Tonson's Miscellany Poems
(1684), which abbreviates Shadwell's name to "Sh—," and are
cited by line.
We argue that Mac Flecknoe imagines dullness as
self-reproduction by identity and exposes that ideal as counterfeit. In Niklas
Luhmann's account, systems of communication reproduce themselves by producing
new communications, which is to say by difference. Flecknoe's programme of
resemblance, exclusion, and suppressed deviation parodies that process, and the
poem's own practice supplies the alternative: Dryden takes up Shadwell's
writings, re-enters their distinctions into a new communication, and reverses
their value. The poem's transmission and Pope's later use of it show the same
principle at work. Literary succession, on this reading, runs through
resemblance with a difference, and Mac Flecknoe works as a
self-observation of Restoration literary communication as well as a verdict on
one poet.
Shadwell's programme
Several of the poem's charges are Shadwell's own claims
turned round. The preface to The Sullen Lovers (1668) claimed a variety
of humours, "most of the persons of the Play differing in their
Characters from one another," on the model of Jonson. It also reported the
objection "that there is the same thing over and over," and defended
"the carrying on of the humours to the last" by Horace's rule that a
new character remain "Qualis ab incepto processerit, & sibi
constet," as it began, consistent with itself (Shadwell, Sullen Lovers).
The preface to The Humorists (1671) argued that, given Jonson's
excellence, it "would rather (in my opinion) seem impudence in me not
to" imitate him, and that "that which may be folly in the Speaker,
may be so remote and pleasant, to require a great deal of wit in the
Writer" (Shadwell, Humorists). The dedication of The Virtuoso
announced that "Four of the Humors are entirely new," and that no
comedy of Shadwell's had lacked "some natural Humour in it not represented
before" (Shadwell, Virtuoso).
These paratexts are literary communications about how
comedy should be written and judged. Mac Flecknoe takes them as its
material. Imitation, variety, novelty, consistency, and the relation of folly
to wit each reappear in the poem, applied to their author. The satire is
therefore literary communication that takes earlier literary communication as
its object and transforms it, and this is the first of the senses in which we
call it self-observation.
A counterfeit of self-reproduction
For Luhmann, social systems consist of communications and
reproduce themselves by producing further communications, each an event that
must be followed by another, newly selected one (Social Systems, chs. 4,
8). Such systems are operationally closed, yet "closure does not mean
empirical isolation" (Luhmann, "Operational Closure" 1431). Two
further concepts matter here. The first is the difference between a code, a
binary distinction, and the programmes that decide how its values are assigned
(Art 185–210). Gerhard Plumpe and Niels Werber proposed
interesting/boring (interessant/langweilig) as the code of literature,
and Dryden's dullness invites comparison with its negative value. Our historical
object, however, is Dryden's vocabulary of dullness, wit, humour, novelty, and
imitation, which we treat as an evaluative programme through which Restoration
literary communication was organised. The second is re-entry. Luhmann, citing
George Spencer Brown, describes the evolutionary success of communicative
systems as depending "upon introducing the difference between system and
environment into the system—a 'reentry of the form into the form'"
("Operational Closure" 1423; Spencer Brown, ch. 11). A distinction
re-enters when it is applied within the space it has divided, and an observer
who watches how others draw their distinctions performs what Luhmann calls
second-order observation, which Luhmann's theory of art places at its centre (Art
54–101).
Against this background the dullness of Mac Flecknoe
is a counterfeit. Flecknoe wants reproduction by identity and closure as
isolation: an heir who is his "perfect image" (15) and whose
"genuine night admits no ray" (23). The poem presents this as a fantasy
of self-reproduction, and its failure shows what continuing literary
communication requires. Its "Realms of Non-sense" (6) are a
fictional model; our object is the network of literary communications that the
poem represents and reworks. Luhmann built these concepts for a functionally
differentiated modern society and devotes a chapter to the differentiation of
the art system (Art 133–84). We use them as instruments of description
for a transitional culture of patrons, stationers, and theatre companies.
"Who most resembles me":
reproduction without difference
The vehicle of succession carried political weight when
the poem reached print. Tonson's 1684 volume set Mac Flecknoe before Absalom
and Achitophel and The Medal, poems that return repeatedly to "Succession"
(Miscellany Poems 26, 44, 95, 103). In the first, David "Scatter'd
his Maker's Image through the Land" and had sons by "several
Mothers," yet "No true Succession cou'd their Seed attend" (Miscellany
Poems 26), and the address "To the Reader" declares that "Wit
and Fool, are Consequents of Whig and Tory" (Miscellany
Poems 15). Literary judgement and political inheritance were printed there
as neighbouring questions. Flecknoe, too, is "blest with issue of a large
increase" (8), and must choose among his sons.
His rule is likeness. "Sh—alone my perfect
image bears, / Mature in dullness from his tender years" (15–16). The
other sons fail by producing something: "The rest to some faint meaning
make pretence, / But Sh—never deviates into sense" (19–20). Meaning
counts as deviation, and wit arrives from outside: "Some Beams of Wit on
other souls may fall, / Strike through and make a lucid intervall; / But Sh—'s
genuine night admits no ray" (21–23). Flecknoe then arranges literary
history as typology: "Heywood and Shirley were but Types of
thee, / Thou last great Prophet of Tautology," and he himself "Was
sent before but to prepare thy way" (29–32), a Baptist "coursly clad
in Norwich Drugget" (33; Holy Bible, Matt. 3.4, 11.10). The fulfillment
of the types is tautology, which Thomas Blount defined as "a repeating of
one and the same thing in other words" ("Tautologie"). Dryden's
word answers the objection Shadwell had reported, and "never
deviates" takes his Horatian consistency at its word; even the verse falls
"So just, so like tautology" (56). Luhmann treats tautology as a
condition that a system's description of itself must break up with further
distinctions ("Tautology and Paradox"). Dryden's term is a
seventeenth-century accusation of style and Luhmann's belongs to a theory of
self-description, so we keep them distinct and read them side by side.
The heir is then told how to reproduce:
Let 'em be all by thy own model made
Of dullness, and desire no foreign aid:
That they to future ages may be known,
Not Copies drawn, but Issue of thy own.
Nay let thy men of wit too be the same,
All full of thee, and differing but in name;
But let no alien S—dl—y interpose
To lard with wit thy hungry Epsom prose. (157–64)
The couplet on Sedley implies that whatever wit Shadwell's
Epsom comedy possessed had been imported. "Foreign aid" is
Dryden's image of closure, a purity defined by exclusion, and it differs from
closure in Luhmann's sense, which does not seal a system off. The demand also
contains a paradox, since Flecknoe wants an heir who is his "perfect
image" (15) and a progeny that are not "Copies" (160). Line 162
answers the Sullen Lovers preface directly: characters who were to
differ "in their Characters from one another" now differ "but in
name." Shadwell's novelty meets the same treatment: "New Humours to
invent for each new Play: / This is that boasted Byas of thy mind, / By which
one way, to dullness, 'tis inclin'd" (188–90), a bias that bends him
"in all changes" (192). Luhmann distinguishes events, which pass as
they occur, from structures, the expectations that limit which events can
follow (Social Systems, ch. 8). Dryden allows Shadwell new events and
denies him any change of structure. Dullness varies without deviating.
Genealogy completes the fiction. "Nor let false friends
seduce thy mind to fame, / By arrogating Iohnson's Hostile name,"
Flecknoe warns; "Thou art my blood, where Iohnson has no part"
(171–75). Alongside Hammond's historical reason for Flecknoe's place, the poem
suggests a formal one. Dryden fictionalises literary closure as genealogy,
giving the realm of dullness a father, an "Uncle Ogleby"
(174), and a line of "Types" (29) through whom its defining property
can pass, so that Shadwell's claim to Jonson becomes the foreign aid the realm
refuses.
"The Writers wit": reproduction
through difference
Against this counterfeit the poem sets another kind of
succession, and its clearest instance is a distinction taken from Shadwell. The
Humorists preface separates folly in the speaker from wit in the writer:
a fool copied from life "would be there too dull a Fool, and must be
helped out with a great deal of wit in the Author" (Shadwell, Humorists).
Dryden reproduces the distinction and reverses its result:
Let gentle George in triumph tread the Stage,
Make Dorimant betray, and Loveit rage;
Let Cully, Cockwood, Fopling, charm the Pit,
And in their folly shew the Writers wit.
Yet still thy fools shall stand in thy defence,
And justifie their Author's want of sense. (151–56)
Dorimant, Loveit, and Sir Fopling belong to George
Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), whose epilogue Dryden wrote:
"Sir Fopling is a Fool so nicely writ, / The Ladies wou'd mistake
him for a Wit" (Dryden, Epilogue). By Shadwell's own criterion Etherege
passes and Shadwell fails. Shadwell drew the distinction to claim wit for the
comedy of humours; Dryden identifies it in his programme, reproduces it in a
new poem, and reverses its verdict, so that the distinction operates inside the
communication that observes him with it. That is a re-entry in the strict
sense, a distinction applied within the domain of comic writing that it
divides, by a work belonging to that domain, and it is second-order
observation, since Dryden observes how Shadwell distinguishes wit from folly. Mac
Flecknoe then does to Shadwell what the couplet says Etherege does to fops:
its fools are Flecknoe and his son, and their folly shows the writer's wit.
"Sir Formal's oratory will be thine,"
Flecknoe promises (168). In The Virtuoso, Sir Formal Trifle boasts that
"whatever I speak in praise of anything, with very little alteration, will
serve in praise of the contrary" (Shadwell, Virtuoso 47), and he is
dropped through a trap-door in mid-speech (47–48). Flecknoe leaves the same
way: "For Bruce and Longvil had a Trap prepar'd, /
And down they sent the yet declaiming Bard" (212–13). In Shadwell's scene
Clarinda springs the trap; Dryden gives it to Bruce and Longvil, whom
Shadwell's cast list calls "Gentlemen of wit and sense" (Shadwell, Virtuoso).
Dryden takes over Shadwell's stage machinery and changes who works it.
The mantle then falls: "The Mantle fell to the young
Prophet's part, / With double portion of his Father's Art" (216–17). The
couplet joins Elisha's request for "a double portion of thy spirit"
and "the mantle of Elijah that fell from him" (2 Kgs. 2.9, 2.13) to
the law that gives the firstborn "a double portion of all that he
hath" (Deut. 21.17). Prophetic and legal forms of succession are
transposed into literary descent, and the political question with which the
poem opened, how "To settle the succession of the State" (10), is
answered in the terms of authorship.
"A Throne of his own Labours":
literary production and material mediation
The coronation gives literary production a body:
No Persian Carpets spread th' Imperial way,
But scatter'd Limbs of mangled Poets lay:
From dusty shops neglected Authors come,
Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum.
Much Heywood, Shirly, Ogleby there lay,
But loads of Sh—almost choakt the way.
Bilk't Stationers for Yeomen stood prepar'd,
And H—was Captain of the Guard.
The hoary Prince in Majesty appear'd,
High on a Throne of his own Labours rear'd. (98–107)
Books pave the road, booksellers guard the procession,
and the prince's works make his throne. Milton's Satan sat "High on a
Throne of Royal State . . . by merit rais'd / To that bad eminence" (Paradise
Lost 2.1–6); Flecknoe is raised by output. Margery Kingsley's reading of
the poem through jeremiad and cultural myth takes this line for its title. In
Luhmann's terms books and stationers are not the elements of literary
communication, which are communications (Social Systems, ch. 4); they
are the material through which it circulates and is sold. Dryden makes that
material the setting in which literary authority is displayed, and the setting includes
the satirist's own. "H—" is Henry Herringman, whom the poem
makes, in Marcus Nevitt's words, "the foremost member of a booksellers'
regiment" waging, in his quartos of Shadwell's plays, a war "against
paper and enduring literary value" (782). Herringman's name stands on the
title pages of The Virtuoso and The Man of Mode, and of Dryden's Tyrannick
Love (1670). The Nursery where "unfledg'd Actors learn to laugh and
cry" breeds "little Maximins" (76–78), and Maximin is the
tyrant of Tyrannick Love, listed in its cast as "Maximin, Tyrant
of Rome" (Dryden, Tyrannick Love). The field the poem observes
includes its observer's stationer and his tyrant, which is the second sense in
which the poem observes itself.
From manuscript to Pope
The poem's own history tests its model, and its dates
need distinguishing. Hammond places its composition in 1676 (168); John
Oldham's copy dates the poem 1678, though the copy itself belongs to 1678–83,
and the text has been discussed at length since the 1950s (Beal). G. Blakemore
Evans examined "the evidence furnished by a comparison of seven
contemporary, or near-contemporary, manuscript versions of the poem" (32)
and concluded that the 1682 quarto "may in effect be treated as simply
another manuscript transcript which happened to escape into print" (43).
That quarto, "Printed for D. Green," named no author and
offered the poem as "By the Author of ABSALOM & ACHITOPHEL"
(Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, or, A Satyr), an author whom the commendatory
verses in Miscellany Poems two years later still addressed as
"UNKNOWN" and "CONCEAL'D" (Miscellany Poems 19, 23).
Tonson's volume printed Mac Flecknoe first and unsigned. Only in its
second edition of 1692 did the poem appear with Dryden's name in its heading,
which Nevitt identifies as the first acknowledgement of Dryden's authorship in
print (781). For years, then, the poem circulated as a communication identified
by its relations to other communications, and its text varied as it went. Where
the 1684 text reads "As at the Morning Toast, that Floats along"
(50), the Green quarto has "And gently waft the overall along"
(Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, or, A Satyr 5). The poem that recommends
reproduction without deviation survived by deviating.
Pope's Dunciad shows the other model at work. The
second book of the Variorum opens with Tibbald "High on a gorgeous seat,
that far out-shone / Henley's gilt tub, or Fleckno's Irish
throne" (Dunciad 2.1–2), taking Milton's "far / Outshon"
(Paradise Lost 2.1–2) to grant Flecknoe's prayer that the heir's throne
be "greater than his Father's" (142). The note on the line explains
that "our author" mentioned Flecknoe "in respect to the poem of
Mr. Dryden, to which this bears some resemblance; tho' of a character
more different from it than that of the Aeneid from the Iliad"
(Dunciad 116). Dryden's dull heir was to resemble his father; Pope's
poem claims resemblance and difference together, and so achieves the succession
that Shadwell's dullness cannot.
Counterfeit and continuing succession
Mac Flecknoe sets
two models of literary reproduction against each other. Dullness selects by
resemblance, excludes foreign aid, admits novelty only along its bias, and ends
in tautology, a counterfeit of the self-reproduction Luhmann describes. Wit, in
Dryden's practice, takes up what already exists, re-enters its distinctions,
and makes it different: Shadwell's programme, his orator, his trap-door, and
the royal, prophetic, and legal forms of succession. Because the poem draws
contemporary authors, a publisher, plays, paratexts, and a live controversy
into its own procedure, it offers an unusually concentrated instance of
Restoration literary culture observing how its communications are made, judged,
and passed on. The autopoiesis of dullness is a fiction, and the poem that
invents it shows what continuing literary communication requires.
Works Cited
Beal, Peter, compiler.
"Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Collection, Rawl. poet. 100 through
149." Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700, celm.folger.edu/repositories/bodleian-rawlinson-100.html
Blount, Thomas. Glossographia,
or, A Dictionary, Interpreting All Such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language, Now
Used in Our Refined English Tongue. 2nd ed., George Sawbridge, 1661. Early
English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A28464.0001.001.
Dryden, John. Epilogue. The
Man of Mode, or, Sr Fopling Flutter, by George Etherege, Henry
Herringman, 1676. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A38694.0001.001.
---. Mac Flecknoe.
Miscellany Poems, Jacob Tonson, 1684, pp. 1–11. Early English Books
Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A36650.0001.001.
---. Mac Flecknoe, or,
A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S. D. Green, 1682. Early
English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A36642.0001.001.
---. Tyrannick Love,
or, The Royal Martyr. Henry Herringman, 1670. Early English Books Online
Text Creation Partnership, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A36708.0001.001.
Etherege, George. The
Man of Mode, or, Sr Fopling Flutter. Henry Herringman, 1676. Early
English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A38694.0001.001.
Evans, G. Blakemore.
"The Text of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe." Harvard Library
Bulletin, vol. 7, no. 1, 1953, pp. 32–54.
Hammond, Paul.
"Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe." 1985. The Making of
Restoration Poetry, D. S. Brewer, 2006, pp. 168–79. Cambridge Core,
doi:10.1017/9781846154874.009.
Kingsley, Margery A.
"'High on a Throne of His Own Labours Rear'd': Mac Flecknoe,
Jeremiad and Cultural Myth." Modern Philology, vol. 93, no. 3, Feb.
1996, pp. 327–51, doi:10.1086/392322.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art
as a Social System. Translated by Eva M. Knodt, Stanford UP, 2000.
---. "Operational
Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System."
Cardozo Law Review, vol. 13, no. 5, 1992, pp. 1419–42.
---. Social Systems.
Translated by John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker, Stanford UP, 1995.
---. "Tautology and Paradox
in the Self-Descriptions of Modern Society." Translated by Stephan Fuchs. Sociological
Theory, vol. 6, no. 1, 1988, pp. 21–37, doi:10.2307/201911.
Milton, John. Paradise
Lost. 2nd ed., S. Simmons, 1674. Early English Books Online Text
Creation Partnership, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A50924.0001.001.
Miscellany Poems. Jacob Tonson, 1684. Early English
Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A36650.0001.001.
Nevitt, Marcus.
"John Dryden, Henry Herringman, and the Dedication of Restoration
Playbooks." The Seventeenth Century, vol. 40, no. 5, 2025, pp.
781–809, doi:10.1080/0268117X.2025.2552294.
Plumpe, Gerhard, and
Niels Werber. "Literatur ist codierbar: Aspekte einer systemtheoretischen
Literaturwissenschaft." Literaturwissenschaft und Systemtheorie:
Positionen, Kontroversen, Perspektiven, edited by Siegfried J. Schmidt,
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993, pp. 9–43.
Pope, Alexander. The
Dunciad: With Notes Variorum, and the Prolegomena of Scriblerus. Lawton
Gilliver, [1735]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation
Partnership, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004809160.0001.000.
Shadwell, Thomas. The
Humorists. Henry Herringman, 1671. Early English Books Online Text
Creation Partnership, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A59427.0001.001.
The Holy Bible,
Containing the Old Testament and the New. John Field, 1668. Early English Books Online Text
Creation Partnership, quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A97378.0001.001.
---. The Sullen
Lovers, or, The Impertinents. Henry Herringman, 1668. Early English Books
Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A59456.0001.001.
---. The Virtuoso.
Henry Herringman, 1676. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership,
quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A59463.0001.001.
Spencer Brown, G. Laws
of Form. George Allen and Unwin, 1969.