Art in a Time of Burning

Photo by Alison Courtney on Unsplash

If the Restoration dramatists were on Twitter today, their subtweet game would turn the entire platform into a smoking ruin. Compared to these literary rivals and sometime political foes, we are all rank amateurs. They wrote quickly, they wrote smartly, they wrote for politically powerful patrons as well as for an unpredictable and increasingly fearsome “publick,” and they made hay and made bank out of their personal rivalries, grievances, and squabbles with one another.

This vanished world is newly alive to me as I read John Dryden and His World, James Anderson Winn’s inelegant but serviceable biography of the great dramatist and critic. Indeed, through his prefaces and epilogues to his plays as performed and later as published, as well as through essays dedicated to various aspects of writing poetry, drama, prose, and translation, Dryden almost singlehandedly invented criticism—both literary criticism and cultural criticism—as both a genre and a paying job.

Dryden’s works—his poetry, his plays, and his reflections on them—made the case and argued the case for the writer as cultural critic, responsibly and deftly wielding his pen to tell his age the truth about itself. “Using the epic past and his own poetic imagination to illuminate present realities was Dryden’s special gift,” Winn writes. “It sets him apart not only from the smoothly empty Waler and the pungently specific Marvell of the ‘Painter’ poems, but from the greatest poet of his century as well”—that is, unquestionably, Milton (177).

While Milton made “glancing references” to recent inventions and current events here and there in Paradise Lost, “Milton’s choice of an epic mode deliberately limits such direct commentary on his own times.” Dryden, by contrast, preferred a “heroic” to an “epic” mode of poetry, “In Annus Mirabilis,” Dryden’s stirring poem about the disastrous year of plague, war, and fire, “he teaches us how to see the events of 1666 as both ‘Epick’ and ‘Historical’; his poem is both effective propaganda for the court and a moving vision of human suffering and triumph.” (177-178)

Throughout his career, Dryden straddled the shifting line between poet and pamphleteer, between aesthete and activist. Writing in conversation with his moment, rather than in an attempt to escape it, invigorated Dryden’s work, as did writing in conflict with other playwrights and poets whose different political commitments showed up in and showed through their own aesthetic choices.

“The London theatre world,” Winn notes, “was a nest of tangled rivalries and intrigues, in which theatrical, sexual, and courtly politics often intertwined.” It was a subculture that mimetically magnified the proclivities and conflicts of the wider culture of Restoration England. At times the various factions of the theater world—factions defined along lines of class, lines of patronage, aesthetic approaches, amorous alliances, political views—clashed in robust, explicit conflicts. There were duels and duelling prologues, spectacular productions and vicious lampoons of rival poets, rival houses, rival court parties.

Playwrights and poets developed rivalries that were personal or aesthetic or political, or all of the above. Andrew Marvell and John Dryden, who had both worked under John Milton as Latin translators for the Protectorate, despised one another in person and on paper. Thomas Shadwell skewered John Dryden, and Dryden skewered Shadwell in return, usually without naming names. In fact, to understand many of the references and catch many of the in-jokes woven throughout the writing of the Restoration “wits,” one needs a meta-dramatis-personae, some sort of score card or roster that names those names the writers left unmentioned but knew would be instantly recognized.

This is what I meant when I said above that the Restoration dramatists’ subtweet game would immolate Twitter. They were ridiculously skilled at skewering their rivals without addressing them directly.

Recognize, though, that this skill was not just an idle hobby or the precipitate of an ornery age; to say things without saying them, to bring a pointed critique without explicitly naming the target—these were not just the aesthetic commonplaces for an age of satire, irony, and wit, but the crucial survival skills for artists in an era of very real political and mortal peril. In 1680, “with Parliament still prorogued,” Winn tells us, “the political struggle [over succession] was being acted out in such arenas as the theatre and the courtroom” (331). Recall that from the 1630s to the 1680s, the political struggle over succession in England was a life or death battle; many people, from King Charles I down to minor clerics, literally lost their heads over that question.

To write present politics into the historical dramas and comedies of manners playing in the theaters was to play with fire, but to write plays that piqued no one’s interest because they had nothing to offer audiences was to court failure. In that impossible situation, the ferocious vituperation cloaked beneath mannered prose that literary rivals heaped upon each other was a way of honing the skill of cloaked critique and keeping it sharp for its most risky applications. The flame wars of the 17th century were good practice for saying what needed saying while keeping oneself out of the flames for heresy or off the chopping block for treason.

It’s a fascinating cultural moment, and perhaps an instructive one for us today. Like the English dramatists of the 17th century, we live in a time of great political turmoil when the usual systems for legitimating power—royal succession in their case, free and fair democratic elections in our case—are themselves facing crises of legitimacy. The threat of both extrajudicial and civil violence lurks behind and beneath our increasingly polarized political landscape, just as it did then. And then as now, arenas of culture—theater, poetry, music, the visual arts—are sites of conflict in a roiling contest for power.

It is tempting to view “culture wars” as a bloodless proxy for “real” political conflict or “real” contests of power. It is tempting to view aesthetic matters and aesthetic controversies—say, arguments over the genre of superhero movies, or the genre-bending practices of sampling, remix, and meme-ification—as frivolous or irrelevant struggles in a world filled with more immediate existential dangers and threats of impending political violence. We should resist the temptation to underestimate or devalue the role of the arts and artists in collectively hashing out what matters to us as a society, as a culture, as a dismally self-destructive species, particularly in times when direct confrontation between different factions and power groups could lead to an explosion of physical violence. As the threat of civil unrest or political violence grows, the arena of culture will become more, not less, important as a site for challenge and resistance. The more dangerous the times, the better artists must become at oblique critique, and the sharper audiences must become at reading between the lines and behind the lines. And when artists choose to take a public stand, as Dryden did in making explicit his loyalty to James II as the rightful heir to the English throne, they should recognize that such a stand might cost them their career and their livelihood. In times past, and not so distant at that, such commitments have cost artists their lives.

May our times be spared and our artists be unsparing.