MacFlecknoe Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Margery A. Kingsley

Critical Essay by Margery A. Kingsley

SOURCE: "'High on a Throne of His Own Labours Rear'd': Mac Flecknoe, Jeremiad, and Cultural Myth," in Modern Philology, Vol. 93, No. 3, February 1996, pp. 327-51.

In the following excerpt, Kingsley asserts that Dryden 's intention in writing Mac Flecknoe was to warn England against the cultural, moral, and political "chaos" that was being created by irresponsible and sloppy writers.

Ironically, scholars have had little to say about Mac Flecknoe, the Restoration's great nightmare vision of cultural anarchy, despite the fact that John Dryden, poet laureate, historiographer royal, and "the father of English criticism," has long stood as the central figure for the formation of a literary culture in late seventeenth-century England. One of Dryden's most virulent satires, Mac Flecknoe defies the very critical constructions of eighteenth-century decorum and neoclassical balance and proportion which he himself championed, and as a result it is often bypassed as an anomaly by...
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