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Mac Flecknoe (full title: Mac Flecknoe; or, A satyr upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet, T.S. [1]) is a verse mock-heroic satire written by John Dryden. It is a direct attack on Thomas Shadwell, another prominent poet of the time. It opens with the lines: Bust of Mac Flecknoe, from an 18th-century edition of Dryden's poems
Yet, the satire was still more severe in the first edition, and afterwards considerably softened. [a] [2] It was, as Dryden himself calls it, a Protestant play; Jeremy Collier says it was rare Protestant diversion, and much for the credit of the Reformation. Accordingly, the Spanish Friar was the only play prohibited by James II after his ...
Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints.He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Barone t (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and ...
John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Absalom and Achitophel is a celebrated satirical poem by John Dryden, written in heroic couplets and first published in 1681. The poem tells the Biblical tale of the rebellion of Absalom against King David; in this context it is an allegory used to represent a story contemporary to Dryden, concerning King Charles II and the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681).
The Rehearsal was a satirical play aimed specifically at John Dryden and generally at the sententious and overly ambitious theatre of the Restoration tragedy.The play was first staged on 7 December 1671 at the Theatre Royal, and published anonymously in 1672, but it is certainly by George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and others.
The Restoration dramatists renounced the tradition of satire recently embodied by Ben Jonson, devoting themselves to the comedy of manners. [5] The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively courtly, as has sometimes been supposed, but it was quite small and could barely support two companies. There was no untapped reserve of ...
John Dryden wrote an influential essay entitled "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire" [103] that helped fix the definition of satire in the literary world. His satirical Mac Flecknoe was written in response to a rivalry with Thomas Shadwell and eventually inspired Alexander Pope to write his satirical Dunciad .
John Dryden ' s Essay of Dramatick Poesy [1] was likely written in 1666 during the Great Plague of London and published in 1668. Dryden's claim in this essay was that poetic drama with English and Spanish influence [2] is a justifiable art form when compared to traditional French poetry.