2. Smithfield Muses: Implying that the vulgar amusements of the Smithfield meat market have invaded high society.
3. you … the Great: i.e. the aristocracy is complicit in the corruption of court and City.
6. Dunce the second: Recalling Dryden’s ‘Mac Flecknoe’, in which ‘Tom the second rules like Tom the first’; also, a covert hit at George II and George I.
10. Pallas: Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom, born fully grown from the head of Zeus (‘the Thunderer’).
14. Gross … grave: i.e. heavy as her father Chaos, and solemn as her mother Night.
19–20. thou … Gulliver: Swift, to whom the ‘Dunciad’ is dedicated, was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and wrote satires under various personae: The Drapier’s Letters, attacking a scheme to debase the coinage (the ‘copper chains’ (24)); ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’, mocking quack astrology; and Lemuel Gulliver, ostensible author of Gulliver’s Travels.
21–2. Cervantes … Rab’lais: Pope believed that Cervantes’s Don Quixote contained serious political satire, and that Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel was a freewheeling fantasy.
25. Boeotia: Greek region renowned for stupidity; hence, Swift’s native Ireland, which he despised for its supine subservience to English rule.
29–30. those walls … Monroe: The walls of the Bethlehem lunatic asylum (known as ‘Bedlam’), where Dr James Monroe attempted to cure patients of their ‘folly’.
32. Cibber’s … brothers: Cibber’s father had carved statues of Melancholy and Madness at the gates of Bedlam; they were of stone, but ‘brazen’ suggests impudence.
36. Emptiness: i.e. empty, rumbling stomachs.
37. Proteus: Sea-god who constantly changes shape to resist capture; here, writers who keep changing pseudonyms to escape their creditors.
39. Miscellanies: Ephemeral collections of little pieces; accented on the second syllable.
40. Curll: Edmund Curll, publisher with whom Pope had long had a quarrel; far from being ‘chaste’, his products exploited scandal and obscenity; see also II, 3n., 71–2n. ff. Lintot: Bernard Lintot: see ‘Arbuthnot’, 62n. rubric: Red-letter pages hung up as publicity outside his shop.
41. Tyburn: Site of public hanging of criminals, memorialized after their deaths in cheap broadside ballads.
42. Merc’ries: ‘Mercury’ was a popular word in newspaper titles.
43. Sepulchral lies: Flattering epitaphs over church tombs (sepulchres).
44. New Year Odes: See ‘Arbuthnot’, 222n. Grub Street: See ‘Arbuthnot’, 111n.
45. In clouded majesty: Borrowed from the moon rising in Paradise Lost, IV, 607.
48. want … of ears: In extreme cases, offenders in the pillory might have their ears cut off.
50. Who hunger … sake: Echoing Matthew 5:6: ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.’
51. glass: Prudence was often depicted looking through a spyglass. approaching jail: Debtors’ prison that awaits penniless writers.
52–4. Poetic Justice … praise: Poetic justice normally refers to the distribution of rewards and punishment at the end of a drama, but here it implies a preference for mercenary writing that pays for pudding (54), as against nobler writing that earns ‘empty’ praise.
55. Chaos … deep: Recalling the creation of ‘waters dark and deep’, and Chaos as ‘the womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave’ (Paradise Lost, I, 11; II, 911).
57. genial Jacob: The publisher Jacob Tonson; ‘genial’ implies ‘generative’ powers. third day: Playwrights received the box office take from a play’s third performance only.
59. quick: Alive.
61. Maggots: ‘maggot: whim; caprice; odd fancy’ (Dictionary), with a pun on scavenging larvae; ‘feet’ (62) likewise puns on the metrical units, known as feet, into which poetic lines were scanned.
63. clenches: Puns.
64. ductile: Malleable.
74. Zembla: In the icy Arctic. Barca: In the Libyan desert.
77. chaplets: ‘chaplet: a garland or wreath to be worn about the head’ (Dictionary).
85. * *: Originally ‘Thorold’, the Lord Mayor in Theobald’s day (see headnote), but no longer appropriate for Cibber.
86. Cimon: Athenian who won victories in battle and at sea; the Lord Mayor’s celebration took place both in the streets and on the river.
90. Settle: Elkanah Settle, who had served as official poet of the City earlier in the century; ‘one day more’ implies that poems like his were extremely short-lived.
91. Shrieves: Sheriffs.
96. City swans: The City poets, whose position died out after Settle’s time. the walls: Of the City of London.
97. revolves: ‘revolve: to consider; to meditate on’ (Dictionary).
98. Heywood: Thomas Heywood, seventeenth-century playwright and author of pageants for the City.
100. imprest: ‘impress: to print by pressure; to stamp’ (Dictionary). His image is stamped or ‘impressed’ on his offspring.
101. Bruin … care: According to an old belief, bear cubs were born shapeless and had to be licked into form. plastic: ‘having the power to give form’ (Dictionary).
103. Prynne: William Prynne, seventeenth-century Puritan controversialist. Daniel: The novelist Daniel Defoe, who as a Presbyterian was a Dissenter from the Church of England. Both were punished in the pillory for writings that offended the government. For Defoe, see also II, 147n.
104. Blackmore’s endless line: See ‘Essay on Criticism’, 463n.; ‘endless line’ puns also on the line of inheritance in which Eusden is Blackmore’s successor.
105. Tate: Nahum Tate: see ‘Arbuthnot’, 190n.; also 258 below.
106. mighty mad in Dennis: John Dennis championed poetic inspiration, which Pope interprets as actual insanity; see also ‘Essay on Criticism’, 270n.
108. BAYS: Ever since Buckingham’s Rehearsal (see Argument note), traditional name for a bad poet; here, Cibber. monster-breeding: Creating deformed literary works.
109. stage and Town: As a successful stage actor, Cibber pleased the fashionable ‘Town’; by implication, it was a mistake for him to turn author.
110. coxcomb: See ‘Essay on Criticism’, 27n.
111. transport: ‘rapture; ecstasy’ (Dictionary).
112. pertness: ‘brisk folly; sauciness; petulance’ (Dictionary, citing this line).
113. ill run at play: Bad luck with dice.
114. Blanked his bold visage: Erased his usually confident expression.
115. Swearing: Cibber was known for constant swearing. sate: Sat.
118. a vast profound: Milton calls the chaos that preceded Creation ‘the vast profundity’ (Paradise Lost, VII, 229).
122. future … Play: Struggling to compose the odes required of the Laureate, Cibber abandoned unfinished plays.
126. sooterkins: ‘sooterkin: a kind of false birth fabled to be produced by the Dutch women from sitting over their stoves’ (Dictionary); thus, Cibber’s ‘dull heat’ produces literary abortions.
128. stole: Cibber frequently adapted material from old plays.
131. Fletcher’s half-eat scenes: Plays by the Jacobean dramatist John Fletcher, left in tatters by Cibber’s borrowings.
132. frippery: ‘old clothes; tattered rags’ (Dictionary). crucified Molière: In The Non-Juror, Cibber’s adaptation of Tartuffe.
133. of Tibbald sore: Theobald called his book Shakespeare Restored, claiming to recover correct readings, but Pope implies that Shakespeare suffered injury.
134. blotted: Erased, rewrote; see ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, note 13.
138. red and gold: In expensive bindings, just as parents might dress their children in finery.
140. Quarles: Francis Quarles, whose aphoristic Emblems were illustrated with allegorical pictures.
141. Ogilby: Scottish cartographer John Ogilby, poet and translator; by calling him ‘the great’, Pope may be remembering his own boyhood fascination with an illustrated edition of Ogi
lby’s Homer; he also translated Aesop’s Fables (327–8).
142. Newcastle: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, prolific seventeenth-century author and pioneer feminist; her coat of arms was stamped on the covers of her books.
144. jakes and fire: Pages from unwanted books could be used in privies (‘jakes’) or to light fires.
145. Gothic: Medieval (with pejorative connotations); as Johnson observed, it was incongruous for the pedantic Tibbald’s old-fashioned books to be reassigned to Cibber.
146. Well purged … Banks, and Broome Well purged: i.e. empty of books by classical authors. John Banks and Richard Brome, seventeenth-century playwrights. Pope may have altered the spelling of Brome’s name to rhyme with ‘Rome’, often pronounced ‘Room’ at the time, but there may also be a covert dig at William Broome, who translated part of the Odyssey for Pope and was offended to find himself included in an earlier version of the ‘Dunciad’.
149. Caxton: William Caxton, the first printer of books in England. Wynkyn: Wynkyn de Worde, his colleague and successor.
150. wood … cow-hide: Bookbinding materials (wood was used for heavy medieval books).
151. saved by spice: Like embalmed mummies, valuable books were protected from bookworms by aromatic spices.
152. Divinity: Theological writings; Pope has in mind the Complete Body of Divinity by Thomas Stackhouse, who had attacked Bishop Francis Atterbury (see ‘Arbuthnot’, 135–41n.).
153. De Lyra: Nicholas de Lyra, fourteenth-century writer (though Pope was actually thinking of a sixteenth-century writer, Nicholas Harpsfield). front: ‘the face, in a sense of censure or dislike’ (Dictionary).
154. Philemon: Philemon Holland, seventeenth-century physician who translated so many books that the shelves groan under their weight.
156. tapers … pies: Books whose pages could have been used to light candles or line pie-plates.
158. hecatomb: Sacrifice of a hundred animals (Greek). unsullied lays: Poems never ‘sullied’ by being bought.
159. folio Commonplace: Large-format anthology of quotations, the ‘base’ of Bays’s writings since he has no ideas of his own.
161. Quartos, octavos: Books of decreasing size at the top of the pyre.
162. birthday ode: See ‘Arbuthnot’, 222n.
163. Great Tamer: Dullness suppresses energy and imagination.
165. good old cause: Puritan term for their crusade to overturn the monarchy, thus associating bad writing with political disloyalty.
167. Sir Fopling’s periwig: For Sir Fopling, see ‘Rape of the Lock’, V, 63n. Cibber had been applauded for a spectacular wig.
168. butt: Cask or ‘butt’, of wine that was a perquisite of the Laureate; see also 293 and note. bays: The laurels symbolic of his position.
170. bias … bowl: In bowls (lawn bowling), ‘the weight lodged on one side of a bowl, which turns it from the straight line’ (Dictionary).
181. wind-guns: Guns using compressed air rather than gunpowder.
184. the load below: Large clocks were driven by heavy hanging weights.
187. Daemon: Guardian spirit.
191–2. on the stage … ampler lessons: i.e. if the characterization of fops in Cibber’s plays seems limited, his personal life furnishes a fine example of foppishness.
195. had Heav’n: If Heaven had. save the State: Echoing Aeneas’ hope to save the ‘state’ of Troy.
198. grey-goose weapon: Quill pen.
199. my Fletcher: His copy of Fletcher’s plays, from which he has freely borrowed.
200. once my better guide: Cibber once thought of entering the Church.
202. box: In which dice were shaken.
203. White’s: Gambling club to which Cibber belonged; also 321. amidst the doctors: Learned men, recalling the child Jesus ‘in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors’ (Luke 2:46); but ‘doctors’ was also a slang word for loaded dice.
205. Party: Political faction, a reliable source of income for hack writers.
208. Ridpath … Mist: George Ridpath and Nathaniel Mist, editors, respectively, of a Whig and Tory newspaper, with a pun on foggy ‘mist’ as well. On Ridpath, see also II, 149n.
209. Curtius: Heroic Roman who threw himself into a chasm in the Roman forum because an oracle said Rome would be saved if its greatest strength were thrown into it.
210. Commonweal: The Puritans’ term for England when they ruled.
211–12. geese … Tories: The cackling of geese warned Rome of an attack by the Gauls. Bays/Cibber considers going over to the Tories, with their loyalty to monarchy, if they should pay better than the Whigs.
213–14. the Minister … Queen: The prime minister Walpole, who had a close working relationship with Queen Caroline.
215. Gazetteers give o’er: When Walpole resigned in 1742 after two decades in office, his propaganda organ, the Daily Gazetteer, adopted a more moderate policy.
216. Ralph … Henley: James Ralph and John (‘Orator’) Henley, who had both ceased to write for the Whig ministry. For Ralph, see III, 165n., and for Henley, see ‘Donne’, 51n.
219. squire: Unsophisticated country squires (as contrasted with peers (220)) appreciate Cibber’s brisk liveliness.
222. Hockley Hole: See Horace, Satire, II, i, 49n.; also 326 below.
224. bear and fiddle: Bear-baiting was preceded by fiddle music.
225–6. born in sin … Works damned: Audiences ‘damned’ unsuccessful plays (and books), as the human race was guilty of the original sin of Adam and Eve.
227. purified by flames: Cibber burns his writings, as if in a religious sacrifice.
228. more Christian progeny: i.e. his literary offspring can ascend to salvation after being purified; see 225–6n. above.
229–30. maiden sheets … smutty sisters: Unsold and thus virginal writings are being sacrificed, contrasted with their streetwalker sisters who do find customers.
231. Bland: Henry Bland, headmaster of Eton and friend of Walpole, wrote pro-government news-sheets that were permitted to circulate free of postal charges; he is imagined here as a beggar given special permission to beg beyond the limits of his own parish.
233. Ward: Edward Ward, journalist who kept a tavern; his scurrilous London Spy is imagined as popular among expatriates in distant colonies (‘ape-and-monkey climes’).
234. mundungus: Cheap tobacco from Jamaica. trucks: ‘truck: to traffic by exchange; to give one commodity for another’ (Dictionary).
236. wrap … sire: Oranges were sold in theatres; wrapped in the pages of their ‘sire’ Bays, they could be used to pelt him.
240. Shadwell: One of Cibber’s predecessors as Laureate; see also Horace, Epistle, II, i, 85n.
244. sev’nfold face: i.e. an actor’s repertoire of expressions, with an allusion to the Greek hero Ajax’s ‘sevenfold shield’.
245. Birthday brand: Firebrand, evidently one of Cibber’s odes for a royal birthday.
248. involve: Envelop.
250–53. the Cid … Nonjuror: All plays by Cibber: Ximena, or, The Heroic Daughter (adapted from Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid), Perolla and Izadora, Caesar in Egypt, Papal Tyranny in the Reign of King John, and The Nonjuror.
255. Priam: King of Troy who watches his city (‘Ilion’ (256)) burn at the end of the Trojan War.
258. a sheet of Thulè: ‘It is an usual method of putting out a fire to cast wet sheets upon it. Some critics have been of the opinion that this sheet was of the nature of the asbestos, which cannot be consumed by fire; but I rather think it an allegorical allusion to the coldness and heaviness of the writing’ (Pope’s note).
265. wait: ‘to attend; to accompany with submission or respect’ (Dictionary).
266. confessed: Acknowledged.
269. Great Mother: The mother-goddess Cybele of Asia Minor was known as Magna Mater.
270. quidnuncs: What now? – a question constantly asked by gossipy members of political clubs. Guildhall: See Horace, Epistle, II, ii, 104n.
271. opium: Lega
lly available, and used as a painkiller or to alleviate hunger.
280. science: Knowledge in general. by the tail: A book’s index enables the user to locate information, a comparison borrowed from Swift’s satire A Tale of a Tub, VII: ‘the index by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail’.
281. makes felons scape: In the Middle Ages felons could escape hanging by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’, proving that they could read.
283. Small thanks … Greece: i.e. with only casual knowledge of recent French literature, and none at all of the classics.
284. vamped: ‘vamp: to piece an old thing with some new part’ (Dictionary).
286. Ozell: John Ozell, translator of foreign plays.
290. Heideggre: John James Heidegger, Swiss theatrical promoter, widely considered the ugliest man in London; in bird form here he represents the Holy Spirit in a parodic Trinity, with Dullness as God the Mother and Cibber as the Son.
292. the promised land: The Israelites’ destination when Moses led them out of Egypt.
293. sack: White wine, a perquisite of the Laureate (see 168 and note), and especially welcome to the alcoholic Eusden.
295. duns: Bill collectors.
296. Withers … Gildon: George Withers and Charles Gildon, minor writers.
297. high-born Howard: Edward Howard, son of the Earl of Berkshire, derided as a hopelessly bad poet by numerous seventeenth-century satirists.
298. Fool of Quality: Lord John Hervey (see ‘Arbuthnot’, ‘Advertisement’ note), seen here as a royal jester or ‘fool’, but one of ‘quality’: ‘rank; superiority of birth or station’ (Dictionary).
299. his: Eusden’s.
301. Lift up your gates: Recalling Psalm 24:7: ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates … and the king of glory shall come in’, with Bays/Cibber as a parodic Messiah.
302. viols: Violins in theatre orchestras. cat-call: Shrill whistle used by dissatisfied patrons.
The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings: Poems and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) Page 53
