Foppling Flutter. Cully and Cockwood figure in his Love in a Tub. 157. alien Sedley, Sir Charles Sedley, the profligate but accomplished wit, dramatist, and minor poet, was intimately acquainted with Dryden, who introduces him as one of the interlocutors in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. Sir Charles had written the Prologue to Shadwell's play, Epsom Wells, and in 1679 Shadwell dedicated to Sedley his True Widow, in which he thanks him for his assistance in correction and alteration. This was not the first time that charges of plagiarism had been brought against Shadwell. In the Dedication of Psyche to the Duke of Monmouth nearly eight years previously he had said, “I have met with some enemies who are always ready to do me the irreparable injury to blast my reputation with the King, and when I have the honour to please him endeavour to persuade him that I do not write the plays I own, or at least that the best part of them are written for me. Shadwell's plagiarisms were notorious. "I cannot wholly acquit our present laureate," says his friend Langbaine, "from borrowing; his plagiarisms being in some places too bold and open to be disguised" (Dramatic Poets, p. 443). With what stinging force Dryden's accusations must have come home will therefore be obvious. 162. Sir Formal's oratory. Sir Formal is the orator, a florid coxcomb,' in Shadwell's Virtuoso, and his language is in accord ance with his character-he is a stilted fool. 164. northern dedications. Shadwell dedicates no fewer than six of his plays to the Duke of Newcastle and his family-four to the Duke himself, one to the Duchess, and one to Lord Ogle, the Duke's son, and they certainly are very much in the style of Sir Formal. In the Vindication of the Duke of Guise, Dryden refers again to Shadwell as the northern dedicator, if Scott be not correct in reading dictator. 166. arrogating Jonson's hostile name. Shadwell is always declaring himself a humble disciple of Ben Jonson, whom, in the preface to The Virtuoso, he calls "incomparably the best dramatic poet that ever was, or, I believe, ever will be," adding, "I had rather be author of one scene in his comedies than of any play that this age has produced.' See, too, his remarks in the Prefaces to The Sullen Lovers and The Royal Shepherdess, and particularly the Epilogue to The Humourists, where he says— "But to out-go all other men would be, O noble Ben, less than to follow thee." 173. Prince Nicander's vein, an allusion to the scene between Prince Nicander and Psyche, in the first act of Shadwell's Psyche. 180. New humours. A reference to a passage in the Dedication of The Virtuoso. "Four of the Humours are entirely new, and (without vanity) I may say I ne'er produced a comedy that had not some natural humour in it not represented before, and I hope I never shall." 181. This is that boasted. These lines are a parody of four lines in Shadwell's Epilogue to The Humourists "A humour is the bias of the mind By which with violence 'tis inclin'd, It makes our actions lean on one side still, 187. A tun of man. See Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel, character of Og, where Shadwell is described as 'goodly and great," a 'monstrous mass,' a 'tun of midnight work' etc. 66 194. thy Irish pen. The imputation of being an Irishman appears to have distressed Shadwell more than anything else in the Satire. "He" (Dryden) "knows that I never saw Ireland till I was three-and-twenty years old, and was there but four months," was poor Shadwell's rejoinder. See Malone, Life of Dryden, p. 173. on 66 196-9. mild anagram wings display. The fashionable poets between the end of Elizabeth's reign and Dryden's time were fond of amusing themselves with these inanities. For an account of them, see D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, article Literary Follies," and Addison's paper on "False Wit," Spectator, Number 63. Verses were arrayed in forms of wings, altars, gloves, eggs, and the like. Butler ridicules these amusements in his "Character of a Small Poet" (Remains, vol. ii. pp. 118-20). An anagram (Greek, ȧvà, back, again, and ypáμμɑ, a letter or written character) is a change in a word from a transposition of letters, as Juno transformed into Unio. An acrostic is a short poem in which the initial letters of the lines spell a word, from the Greek aкpos, point or on the edge, so first, and Orixtov, the diminutive of orixos, a row, order, or line. 204. Bruce and Longville ... trap prepared. A pertinent and amusing allusion to the scene in Shadwell's Virtuoso (Act iii.) where Miranda and Clarinda at the instigation of Bruce and Longville abruptly cut short Sir Formal Trifle's speechifying by making him disappear through a trap-door. In the last couplet the reference of course is to the mantle of Elijah falling on Elisha (ii. Kings, ii. 13, 4). |