Poem: Mac Flecknoe

Overview
John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682) is a brilliant mock-heroic satire that crowns Thomas Shadwell, Dryden’s rival dramatist and outspoken Whig, as the heir to absolute dullness. Framed as a parodic succession myth, the poem imagines the obscure poet Richard Flecknoe, figurehead of bad verse, ruling a vast empire of Nonsense and seeking a worthy successor. Among a throng of hacks, Flecknoe chooses Shadwell, whose bulk, bombast, and barren imagination make him a perfect dynastic heir. The poem’s elevated epic language, classical allusions, and ceremonial pageantry are deliberately mismatched with its ignoble subject, generating comic shock and critical bite.

Coronation Narrative
The action unfolds in “Augusta” (London), within a blighted theatrical quarter associated with the Nursery, a training ground for juvenile players and a byword for coarse stagecraft. There, amid tumbled props, faded laurels, and the detritus of bad drama, the court of Dullness assembles to witness Shadwell’s investiture. Flecknoe mounts a makeshift throne and delivers a long, mock-august oration. He praises Shadwell’s perfect consistency in nonsense, claiming that, unlike poets who occasionally blunder into sense, Shadwell’s genius never wanders from stupidity. He exhorts the heir to cherish heavy-handed farce, swollen prose, and stale conceits; to prefer noise to meaning; to despise judgment, wit, and harmony; and to emulate the worst playwrights as models. A prophecy follows, promising that Shadwell will out-dull all predecessors and extend the realm of Nonsense across the playhouses and presses of London.

The rite culminates with ceremonial tokens, a scepter of stage-wood, a laurel fit for dunces, and an aura of inflated epic grandeur. Suddenly, a theatrical mishap interrupts the speech: the floor yawns, or a trapdoor gives way, and Flecknoe is swallowed by the stage machinery. As he vanishes, his mantle descends and settles upon Shadwell, sealing the transfer of power in a burlesque echo of prophetic succession. The accident literalizes the poem’s governing joke: even the gods of Dulness function by botched stagecraft.

Targets and Themes
Dryden’s immediate target is Shadwell’s dramaturgy, ponderous humor, laborious satire, and mechanical plotting, yet the poem widens into a vision of cultural decline. Dullness becomes a political and aesthetic regime that rewards quantity over quality, noise over sense, and fashion over judgment. The father-to-son trope (“Mac,” meaning “son of”) casts bad writing as hereditary, multiplying through schools, theaters, and booksellers. The London setting, with its nursery stages and commercial presses, embodies an ecosystem where mediocrity thrives. The satire is also partisan: a Tory poet-laureate lampoons a prominent Whig, entwining literary standards with Restoration politics and the factional atmosphere after the Popish Plot.

Style and Technique
Composed in heroic couplets, the poem exploits the high style, epic invocations, catalogues, prophetic speeches, coronation rites, only to deflate it by attaching grand forms to shabby content. Classical gestures toward Virgil and Augustan imperial imagery are turned inside out: “Augusta” houses not empire but anarchy of taste. Dryden’s artistry lies in precision of ridicule, compressed epithets, sharp similes, and calculated bathos, so that each flourish of grandeur collapses into rubble at the instant of utterance.

Significance
Mac Flecknoe crystallizes Restoration mock-epic, setting a template that Alexander Pope later expands in The Dunciad. Beyond a personal vendetta, it argues for standards in art, dramatizing the stakes when public culture mistakes volume for value. The poem’s final image, mantle drifting onto Shadwell amid a stage disaster, endures as a comic emblem of how bad taste succeeds by default when judgment abdicates.