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1 "Echo's of Her Once Loyal Voice": The Hind and the Panther

1. Phillip Harth, in The Contexts of Dryden's Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1968), claims that in The Hind and the Panther Dryden is able to keep politics and religion separate from one another: "at any given moment in the poem he is dealing with 'Matters either Religious or Civil,' to use his own words, never with both topics simultaneously" (p. 229). Yet Harth's own version of Dryden's rhetorical purpose throughout the poem suggests a close connection between the two: "Dryden was attempting to persuade his Anglican readers to grant religious tolerance as well as political toleration to the members of his new church" (p. 49). If the Anglicans had not been threatening to rebel against a Catholic monarch, Dryden would have been less troubled by their unwillingness to concede that Catholic doctrine was "not unreasonable." Throughout the poem he insists upon a close relation between political and religious rebellion against just authority. [BACK]

2. Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second , ed. Charles Harding Firth (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 845-855. For more recent manifestations of this theory see C. V. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics Under the Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 178; Donald R. Benson, "Theology

and Politics in Dryden's Conversion," Studies in English Literature , 4 (1964), 393-412, pp. 406-407; William Myers, "Politics in The Hind and the Panther," Essays in Criticism , 19 (1969) 19-33, passim . [BACK]

3. Earl Miner, ed. and Vinton A. Dearing, textual ed., The Works of John Dryden , vol. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. 350. [BACK]

4. All citations to The Hind and the Panther are to Miner, ed., Works , 3. [BACK]

5. Harth (p. 261) notices this rhetorical strategy and finds analogues in contemporary Catholic apologetics. [BACK]

6. Miner, Dryden's Poetry (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1967), p. 192, briefly notes the significance of the order in which Dryden introduces his beasts and argues that the Panther is even worse than her fellows: "The introduction of the Panther only after the sectarian beasts . . . adversely affects our opinion of her. As the Wolf was worse then the Fox, the Panther is fiercest of all." But Dryden intends not only to compare bad parties with worse ones but also to taint popular parties with the reputation and principles of universally condemned ones. [BACK]

7. The Rhetoric of Aristotle , trans. Lane Cooper (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1932), 3.15.2. In attacking the Anglicans for Whiggish rebelliousness Dryden was in line with polemicists both before and after the Revolution. See for example A New Test of the Church of England's Loyalty (London, 1687) p. 8:

For my business is, to set forth in its own Colours the extraordinary Loyalty of these Men, who obstinately maintain a Test , contriv'd by the Faction to usher in the Bill of Exclusion. . . . And it is much admir'd even by some of her own Children, that the Grave and Matron-like Church of England , which values her self so much for her Antiquity, should be overfond of a new Point of Faith lately broach'd by a Famous Act of an Infallible English Parliament conven'd at Westminster , and guided by the Holy Spirit of Shaftsbury .

And A Lord's Speech without Doors (London, 1689; reprinted in An Answer to Two Papers , London, 1689, p. 6):

Believe me, My Lords, it is the boldest bid that ever Men made; I see Forty One was a Fool to Eighty Eight; and that we Church of England Protestants, shall cancel all the merits of our Fathers, overthrow the ground and Consequence of their most Exemplary Loyalty to King Charles the First and Second; render their Death, the Death of Fools ; trample their Memories and Blood under our Feet; subject our selves to the just Reproach of the

Phanaticks , whose Principles and Practices we have out-done, even to that King, that we forced upon them, and by our Example, had brought them to live well withal.

Dryden's attackers were well aware of his objects: see for example The Revolter (London, 1687); A Poem in Defence of the Church of England Written in Opposition to the Hind and the Panther (London, 1688); both are epitomized by Hugh Macdonald in John Dryden: A Bibliography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), item nos. 242, 253. [BACK]

8. Miner, ed., Works , 3:383, thinks this a reference to the Anglican reaction to persecution under Mary. It would seem, however, inconsistent with the Hind's purposes to taunt the Panther with a change in the right direction and to describe her royal daughter as a "butcher." [BACK]

9. This strategy has been remarked by Myers. He cites the allusion to Monmouth (II.281-282), argues that the Hind compares the Panther's jury of apostles to Shaftesbury's jury of City Whigs (II.242-243), and, rather inconsistently, compares the Panther's "attempt to mollify the Sects" to "Charles II's attempts to control Parliament" (II.272-274); and justly observes that "This is all calculated to make the Panther feel ill at ease. It is obviously disorienting for Tory High-Churchmen to be told that theologically they think like Whigs, that Anglican authority is as specious as Monmouth's legitimacy" (p. 26). He does not, however, seem to recognize its function in the poem, the purpose of which was, he thinks (before its author was surprised by the Declaration of Indulgence), ''to demonstrate the practical good sense of the Church allying herself with the Royal Party" (p. 25). In fact the references to Tory polemic in part II argue the political no less than the theological Whiggery of the contemporary Anglicans. Dryden had more political sense than to expect a triumphant alliance between the Anglicans and the court; and if he had expected such an alliance, he certainly had more polemic ability than to have supposed he could abuse the Anglicans into joining it. [BACK]

10. See Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry , pp. 144-145. [BACK]

11. All citations to The Medall are to The Works of John Dryden , vol. 2, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1972). [BACK]

12. See, for example, Poems on Affairs of State , vol. 3, ed. Howard H. Schless (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), pp. 408-409. [BACK]

13. See note 1, above. Harth provides a rather more complex account of Dryden's rhetorical purpose: "to isolate the Dissenters, renounce the actions of the more extreme Catholics, and question the motives of the more intransigent Anglicans in the expectation of arriving at some kind of accommodation between men of good will in the Anglican and Catholic

camps" (p. 50). If this was Dryden's purpose, his decision to represent the entire Anglican church as a single beast was unfortunate. [BACK]

14. See Zwicker, p. 150. [BACK]

15. For an analysis, to which I am much indebted, of Dryden's attitude towards his work in his later poetry, see Zwicker, chapters 5-7. [BACK]

16. Donald Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England . . . 1641-1700 , 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945-1951), lists, under the heading "Aesop," eighteen Latin editions and as many editions of English translations, published between 1660 and 1700. For the generic status of fable in this period, see Thomas Noel, Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), and Annabel Patterson, "Fables of Power," in Politics and Discourse , ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 271-296. [BACK]

17. Aesop's Fables with His Life in English, French, and Latin , 2nd ed. (London, 1687). [BACK]

18. See Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (Cambridge, 1925; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 1:238-272, passim . [BACK]

19. The generic precedents of The Hind and the Panther have been the object of much excellent but rather confusing scholarly attention. The two fullest accounts are in Miner, Dryden's Poetry , pp. 144-175, and Sanford Budick, Dryden and the Abyss of Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 191-237. Miner places the poem in a number of traditions of which the most important are sacred zoography, beast fable, and discontinuous tropology; Budick thinks it "an adaptation of allegorical Holy Writ—of the complex beast fable of Daniel" (p. 227). Both offer excellent support for their conflicting views, and the controversy between them has not much clarified matters (see The Times Literary Supplement , 3 April 1969, p. 371; 1 May 1969, p. 466; 22 May 1969, p. 559; 3 July 1969, p. 730). Both, further, have contributed to our understanding of the poem; and Budick's work, by showing how Dryden turns against the Protestants antipapist polemic based on Daniel, advances our knowledge of its polemic strategies. Dryden himself, however, establishes the genre within which he means the poem to be read at the beginning of part III: whatever his sources, he wants his audience to see the poem not as discontinuous tropology or Old Testament prophecy but as Aesopian fable in the tradition of Chaucer and Spencer. [BACK]

20. See Zwicker, pp. 150-153. [BACK]

21. See Miner, ed. Works , 3:449, 456. [BACK]

22. "An Apology for the Church of England, with Relation to the Spirit of Persecution, for Which She Is Accused," in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts , ed. Walter Scott (London, 1813), 9:175. On the

same page Burnet remarks that the papists' ''little finger must be heavier than ever our loins were" (cf., The Hind and the Panther , part III.691). [BACK]

23. See, for example, Poems on Affairs of State , 3:183-206, and passim . [BACK]

24. Reasons Against Repealing . . . the Test , p. 4. [BACK]

25. The Spanish Fryar , in The Works of John Dryden , ed. Walter Scott and George Saintsbury (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1883), 6:442. [BACK]

26. This explains the "confusion over imagery of flight" that D. W. Jefferson finds in the poem ("The Poetry of The Hind and the Panther ," MLR , 79 (1984), 32-44, p. 42). It is appropriate to Dryden's polemic purposes that the Catholics be seen as victims of forces they cannot control. [BACK]

27. Anne Barbeau Gardiner, in "Dryden's Britannia Rediviva : Interpreting the Signs of the Times in June 1688," HLQ , 48 (1985), 257-284, concentrates on this aspect of Dryden's poem. She justly remarks that lines 267-303 constitute an appeal to the country "to support the king's toleration"; but the heavy emphasis throughout the poem on divine intervention strongly suggests that Dryden has despaired of a human solution to England's political woes. His account of politics is cast entirely in general terms of sin and repentance, justice and mercy. [BACK]


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