Robert L. Mack

‘We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought’: Or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody

The stigmatization of literary parody as an essentially parasitic activity, and the concomitant denigration of parodic reference as an authorial technique manifestly unworthy of serious critical scrutiny, exerted the force of profoundly influential stereotypes within our literary culture for an extraordinarily long time. An indignant F. R. Leavis, endeavouring in the last century to express his personal contempt for the mode in the kind of language that even he reserved only for his most vitriolic criticism, not only insisted that parody ‘demeaned the integrity of [its] subject’, but went so far as to characterize parody as nothing less than ‘the worst enemy of creative genius and vital originality’.2 Parody was an act of lacerating discursive rebellion — an enemy to literature worse (or so Leavis would have had his readers concede) than the frustrating impotence consequent upon the arbitrary stasis of writer’s block; worse than the casual or (for that matter) intentional misconstructions of one’s audience; worse than the rhetorical arrows drawn from the quiver of a hostile rival; worse than the ill-intentioned carpings of unsympathetic critics; and worse, Leavis would have compelled his readers finally to admit, than those constraints that are typically brought to bear upon an author forced to produce his or her work within the ever-vigilant shadows of an inflexible ideology.

John Dryden and Homeopathic Parody in the Early Augustan Battleground

The preceding chapters have maintained that the earliest years of the seventeenth century witnessed a fundamental shift in established attitudes towards derivative imitation and text-specific parodic appropriation in English. I have suggested that this same shift in attitude — a transformation that can already be seen manifesting itself (albeit in significantly different ways) in the writings of both Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare — precipitates a deeply consequential change in the conditions that govern poetic activity throughout the subsequent decades. The textual anxieties that so clearly evince themselves for the first time in the early years of the seventeenth century can in fact serve as an analogical model for the more wide-ranging literary instability that characterized the work of a great many writers in the years immediately following the Restoration. The breakdown of a particular kind of literary standard — the collapse of a generally accepted ethic of authorial possession and authority — resulted in the bewildering hyper-demoticization of literary and journalistic discourse in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

Parody as Plague: Ben Jonson and the Early Anxieties of Parodic Destabilization

The earliest appearance of the word ‘parody’ in English — at least to the extent that it has since been immortalized as an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as the first recorded usage of the word — is found in the final lines of Ben Jonson’s early comedy, Every Man in His Humour? The passage in which the word is used constitutes one of those scenes that critics would, in time, tend to read as typical of Jonson’s ambivalent and often disturbingly punitive comic endings. Having allowed the play’s various wits and fools to pursue their idiosyncratic humours for nearly five acts, Jonson draws his characters together in the closing moments of the drama (in a manner he had to some extent learned from the conclusions of the fabula palliata of the enormously popular New Comedies of Terence and Plautus) before finally placing them at the mercy of a nominal figure of authority. In this instance, that figure — introduced as an ‘old merry Magistra[e]’ — passes by the somewhat disingenuous name of Justice Clement.3 As any reader or theatregoer familiar with Jonson’s later Volpone (1606) or his Alchemist (1610) will already have anticipated, the characters in this earlier play, too, have been gathered together so as pointedly to receive not only their (for some very few) anticipated rewards, but also (for a rather more significant number of others) their seemingly well-deserved punishments.

Minding True Things by Mock’ries: The Henry V Chorus and the Question of Shakespearean Parody

In the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson defines a dramatic chorus as ‘the persons who are supposed to behold what passes in the acts of a tragedy, and sing their sentiments between the acts’.2 The quotation that Johnson has chosen to illustrate this usage is drawn from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599), in which the Prologue offers a general apology for the supposedly inadequate resources of the theatre, and humbly solicits the assistance of the audience in transforming the unworthy scaffold of the stage into a venue respectable enough to represent the epic splendour of Henry’s continental victories. ‘For ‘tis your thoughts’, the Prologue reminds the audience at the beginning of Shakespeare’s history, nthat now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times, Turning th’accomplishment of many years Into an hourglass — for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history, Who, Prologue-like, your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.3

Parodying Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard: Richard Owen Cambridge’s An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room

Current studies of the poetry of the eighteenth century seem only to have just begun to redress a perceived imbalance in the depth of interest and attention that has recently been devoted to the various works of the first great poet of the era, Alexander Pope.2 Not surprisingly, the last decade or so of the twentieth century proved to have been something of a golden age of Pope criticism. The long-awaited appearance of Maynard Mack’s massive biography of the poet in 1985 marked the mid-point of a decade that saw more serious scholarly interest in Pope’s work than ever before. The tercentenary of the poet’s birth (in 1688) prompted not one but two impressive collections of commemorative essays, both of which quickly took their place among the numerous articles and the dozens of full-length studies relating to Pope’s work that had appeared since 1980. If, as Margaret Anne Doody lamented in 1988, it was still ‘very hard to find lovers of Pope outside the classroom’, there were nevertheless some substantial indications that his status in the classroom — despite the increased demand to represent hitherto less canonical voices and modes on university reading lists — had grown ever more secure. Charles Kerby-Miller’s fine edition of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) was reissued in 1988, and Steven Shankman’s scrupulously detailed edition of Pope’s Iliad (1743) — a model of academic scholarship — finally made it to bookstores in 1996.3

Thomas Gray: A Life

A biography of Thomas Gray, exploring the life of the English poet and our understanding of his personality and influential body of work. Robert L. Mack draws in developments in 18th-century studies and gender studies as well as on archival research into the life of the poet and his family.