The Politics of the Fancy in Dryden’s Early Literary Criticism

This chapter examines the fancy in Dryden’s theorization of heroic drama from 1664 to 1677. In his early essays on the literary imagination, Dryden describes a symbiotic relationship between the fancy and the judgement. From around 1668 onwards, however, he begins to prioritize the fancy as a faculty that creates images of things from outside nature. The fancy facilitates a theory of representation in Dryden’s work that sought to go beyond the accurate portrayal of nature and to depict supernatural objects and provoke extreme emotion. This lends itself to his interest in the sublime, which the chapter reads in relation to Milton’s late poetry. At the same time, Anglican polemicists used the fancy as a term with which to attack fantastical beliefs in spiritual inspiration they believed were professed by religious dissenters. The chapter explores Dryden’s literary thought alongside the rhetoric of religious intolerance and arguments about toleration.