Mac Flecknoe, Heir of Augustus

Abstract The aim of this essay is to balance a largely literary-critical account of Mac Flecknoe, certainly correct so far as it goes, with a historical and political account. For a start we may briefly review some of the salient points of the poem’s reception during the last forty-seven years. Ian Jack’s Augustan Satire (1952) insisted on the work’s mockheroic logic: high terms used, ironically, to ridicule a low subject. On the occasion of the poem, James Kinsley, in his edition The Poems of John Dryden (1958), candidly stated that while the critical disagreements between Dryden and Shadwell concerning the achievement of Jonson and the nature of comedy were ‘the basis of Mac Flecknoe’ yet ‘the occasion of the satire on Shadwell is unknown’. Kinsley found no personal animosity on Dryden’s part in his critical exchanges with Shadwell, and was unable to explain Dryden’s sudden change to poetic satire without positing ‘some personal quarrel’ thus far undiscovered.