Finally, Folly herself is killed by the dullness of the works being read aloud. The result is, appropriately, that there is no judge for Dulness, for Dulness requires an absence of judgment.
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And then the means which should kindle love, are used with more dulness, and remissness, and indifferency.
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And then the means which should kindle love, are used with more dulness, and remissness, and indifferency.
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The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties.
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Dulness is the goddess who presides over Alexander Pope's The Dunciad. She is the central character, introduced at the start of the work. Dulness is the daughter Chaos and "eternal Night," and her mission is to convert all the world to stupidity ("To hatch a new Saturnian age, of Lead"). Her triumph is part of the translatio stultitia (the inverse of the translatio studii).
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This is opera, who wears patchwork clothing (for operas being made up of the patchwork of extant plays and being itself a mixed form of singing and acting). Opera then speaks to Dulness of the Muses: However, Opera warns Dulness that Handel is a threat to her. His operas make too much sense, have too strong a plot, and are too masculine in their performance.
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This competition of vulgarity is led by two theatres, and each has its champion of decadence. At Lincoln's Inn Fields is the "Angel of Dulness," John Rich: Rich's ability to ride in a stage whirlwind (in parody of God in the Book of Job) is matched by Colley Cibber and Barton Booth, patentees of the Drury Lane theatre, who mount the stage in purple dragons and have an aerial battle. Dulness is the winner in these contests, for she benefits. Settle urges Theobald to refine these entertainments, to hammer them home and get them all the way to court, so that Dulness can be the true empress of the land.
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It opens with a second, nihilistic invocation: The fourth book promises to show the obliteration of sense from England. The Dog- star shines, the lunatic prophets speak, and the daughter of Chaos and Nox (Dulness) rises to "dull and venal a new World to mold" (B IV 15) and begin a Saturnian age of lead. Dulness takes her throne, and Pope describes the allegorical tableau of her throne room. Science is chained beneath her foot- stool.
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Two lines have a final extrametrical syllable or feminine ending, as exemplified by line eight: × / × / × / × / × / (×) The spirit of love, with a perpetual dulness. (56.8) :/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus. (×) = extrametrical syllable.
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Book II centres on the highly scatological "heroic games." Theobald sits on the throne of Dulness, which is a velveteen tub ("tub" being the common term for the pulpit of Dissenters), and Dulness declares the opening of heroic games to celebrate his coronation. Therefore, all her sons come before her on the Strand in London, leaving half the kingdom depopulated, for she summons both dull writers, their booksellers, and all who are stupid enough to patronise dull writers. The first game is for booksellers.
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Busby tells Dulness that he is her true champion, for he turns geniuses to fools, "Whate'er the talents, or howe'er design'd,/ We hang one jingling padlock on the mind" (B IV 161–162). Dulness agrees and wishes for a pedant king like James I again, who will "stick the Doctor's Chair into the Throne" (B IV 177), for only a pedant king would insist on what her priests (and only hers) proclaim: "The of Kings to govern wrong" (B IV 188), for Cambridge and Oxford still uphold the doctrine. As soon as she mentions them, the professors of Cambridge and Oxford (except for Christ Church college) rush to her, "Each fierce Logician, still expelling Locke" (B IV 196). (John Locke had been censured by Oxford University in 1703, and his Essay on Human Understanding had been banned.) These professors give way to their greatest figure, Richard Bentley, who appears with his Quaker hat on and refuses to bow to Dulness.
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She chooses Lewis Theobald as his successor. In honour of his coronation, she holds heroic games. He is then transported to the Temple of Dulness, where he has visions of the future. The poem has a consistent setting and time, as well.
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Accordingly, Dulness banishes Handel to Ireland. An illustration of Othello striking Desdemona from Thomas Hanmer's ornate 1743 edition of William Shakespeare. The text was based on Pope's edition. Fame blows her "posterior trumpet," and all the dunces of the land come to Dulness's throne.
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When she and her husband came to the throne in 1727 she had a much busier schedule and thus had less time for Pope who saw this oversight as a personal slight against him. When planning the Dunciad he based the character Dulness on Queen Caroline, as the fat, lazy and dull wife. Pope's bitterness against Caroline was a typical trait of his brilliant but unstable character. The King of the Dunces as the wife of Dulness was based on George II. Pope makes his views on the first two Georgian kings very clear in the Dunciad when he writes 'Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first'.
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MacFlecknoe is a poem celebrating the apotheosis of Thomas Shadwell, whom Dryden nominates as the dullest poet of the age. Shadwell is the spiritual son of Flecknoe, an obscure Irish poet of low fame, and he takes his place as the favourite of the goddess Dulness. Pope takes this idea of the personified goddess of Dulness being at war with reason, darkness at war with light, and extends it to a full Aeneid parody. His poem celebrates a war, rather than a mere victory, and a process of ignorance, and Pope picks as his champion of all things insipid Lewis Theobald (1728 and '32) and Colley Cibber (1742).
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Lewis Theobald (baptised 2 April 1688 – 18 September 1744), British textual editor and author, was a landmark figure both in the history of Shakespearean editing and in literary satire. He was vital for the establishment of fair texts for Shakespeare, and he was the first avatar of Dulness in Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.
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Bavius dips each soul in Lethe to make it dull before sending it to a new body. (In classical mythology, the souls of the dead were put into Lethe to forget their lives before passing on to their final reward, but these are dipped in Lethe before being born.) Elkannah Settle hails Theobald as the great promised one, the messiah of Dulness, for Bavius had dipped him over and over again, from lifetime to lifetime, before he was perfected in stupidity and ready to be born as Theobald. Theobald had formerly been a Boeotian, several Dutchmen, several monks, all before being himself: "All nonsense thus, of old or modern date,/ Shall in thee centre, from thee circulate" (III 51–52). Settle gives Theobald full knowledge of Dulness.
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He therefore collects all the books of bad poetry in his library along with his own works and makes a virgin sacrifice of them (virgin because no one has ever read them) by setting fire to the pile. The goddess Dulness appears to him in a fog and drops a sheet of Thule (a poem by Ambrose Philips that was supposed to be an epic, but which only appeared as a single sheet) on the fire, extinguishing it with the poem's perpetually wet ink. Dulness tells Theobald that he is the new King of Dunces and points him to the stage. She shows him, The book ends with a hail of praise, calling Theobald now the new King Log (from Aesop's fable).
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Book three is set in the Temple of Dulness in the City. Theobald sleeps with his head on the goddess's lap, with royal blue fogs surrounding him. In his dream, he goes to Hades and visits the shade of Elkannah Settle. There he sees millions of souls waiting for new bodies as their souls transmigrate.
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Campbell 1995 pp. 32–34 Despite the link to Dulness, the general satire of the play more closely resembles Gay's Beggar's Opera than the other works produced by the Scriblerus Club.Warner 1998 p. 242 The Author's Farce is not a standard comedy; rather, it is a farce, and as such employs petty forms of humour like slapstick.
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Alexander Pope, author of The Dunciad The Dunciad is a landmark mock-heroic narrative poem by Alexander Pope published in three different versions at different times from 1728 to 1743. The poem celebrates a goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain.
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Instead, she has an essential antipathy toward learning and independent thinking, and, for Pope, loss of the ability to discern, to think, and to appreciate is a living death and the license of all evil. For Pope, who was a Roman Catholic, absolute monarchy, foreign language opera, flattery, the replacement of sound architecture for politically well placed hacks, the redesign of good (classically ordered) buildings, the money grubbing of what would now be called tabloid press are all signs of the triumph of Dulness over reason and light. Each of these things represents choosing the less thoughtful over the more rational choice, each requires credulity and acceptance over curiosity and independence, and therefore Pope blames, at least as much as any agent of Dulness, an indifferent and uneducated public.
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Regardless of the quarrels, though, Theobald was, in a sense, the nearly perfect King of Dunces. The Dunciads action concerns the gradual sublimation of all arts and letters into Dulness by the action of hireling authors. Theobald, as a man who had attempted the stage and failed, plagiarised a play, attempted translation and failed to such a degree that John Dennis referred to him as a "notorious Ideot", attempted subscription translation and failed to produce, and who had just turned his full attention to political attack writing, was an epitome, for Pope, of all that was wrong with British letters. Additionally, Pope's goddess of Dulness begins the poem already controlling state poetry, odes, and political writing, so Theobald as King of Dunces is the man who can lead her to control the stage as well.
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Pagliaro 1999 p. 71 Nonsense, like Dulness, is a force that promotes the corruption of literature and taste, to which Fielding adds a sexual element. This sexuality is complicated, yet also made comical, when Nonsense chooses a castrated man as her mate. Her choice emphasises a lack of morality, one of the problems that Fielding believed dominated 18th-century British society.
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In 1719, when he was living in Greville Street, Holborn, he published An Appeal to the Word of God for the Trinity in Unity. Alexander Pope wrote (Dunciad, i. 208): :To Dulness Ridpath is as dear as Mist. According to Wodrow, the dedication to the Lower House of Convocation, prefixed to the collected edition of the Independent Whig, 1721, is by Ridpath.
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Most of the argument of the Dunciad B is the same as that of Dunciad A: it begins with the same Lord Mayor's Day, goes to Dulness contemplating her realm, moves to Cibber (called "Bays", in honour of his being Poet Laureate and thereby having the laurel wreath and butt of sherry) in despair, announces Cibber's choice as new King of Dunces, etc. Other than a change of hero, however, Pope made numerous adaptations and expansions of key passages. Not only are the topical references altered to fit Cibber's career, but Pope consistently changes the nature of the satire subtly by increasing the overarching metaphor of Cibber as "Anti-Christ of Wit", rather than Classical hero of Dulness. Most of the adaptations increase the parody of the Bible at the expense of the parody of Virgil.
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The "minister" is Robert Walpole, an extremely unpopular Whig leader, and the "queen" is both Dulness and Queen Caroline of Hanover, who was a Tory enemy for her reconciliation of George II with Walpole. When the new king is about to burn his books in despair, Pope heightens the religious imagery, for Cibber says to his books, "Unstain'd, untouch'd, and yet in maiden sheets;/ While all your smutty sisters walk the streets" (I 229–230), and it is better that they be burned than that they be wrapped in "Oranges, to pelt your sire" (I 236). Again, Dulness extinguishes the pyre with a sheet of the ever-wet Thule. Cibber goes to Dulness's palace, and Pope says that he feels at home there, and "So Spirits ending their terrestrial race,/ Ascend, and recognize their Native Place" (I 267–268).
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Blackmore has come down, largely through the verse of Alexander Pope, as one avatar of Dulness, but, as a physician, he was quite forward thinking. He agreed with Sir Thomas Sydenham that observation and the physician's experience should take precedence over any Aristotelian ideals or hypothetical laws. He rejected Galen's humour theory as well. He wrote on plague in 1720, smallpox in 1722, and consumption in 1727.
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He does nothing at all. Immediately after him, Annius speaks. He is the natural predator for idling nobles, for he is a forger of antiquities (named for Annio di Viterbo) who teaches the nobles to value their false Roman coins above their houses and their forged Virgil manuscripts above their own clothing. He serves Dulness by teaching her servants to vaunt their stupidity with their wealth.
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He objects not to professional writers, but to hackney writers. His dunce booksellers will trick and counterfeit their way to wealth, and his dunce poets will wheedle and flatter anyone for enough money to keep the bills paid. The plot of the poem is simple. Dulness, the goddess, appears at a Lord Mayor's Day in 1724 and notes that her king, Elkannah Settle, has died.
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Bentley tells Dulness that he and critics like him are her true champions, for he had "made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains" (B IV 212) and, no matter what her enemies do, critics will always serve Dulness, for "Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain,/ Critics like me shall make it Prose again" (B IV 213–214). Picking fine arguments on letters and single textual variants and correcting authors, he will make all wits useless, and clerics, he says, are the purely dull, though the works of Isaac Barrow and Francis Atterbury might argue otherwise. He says that it is "For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,/ And write about it, Goddess, and about it" (B IV 251–252). They cement over all wit, throwing stone back onto the figures that authors had chiselled out of marble.
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In March 1881, though still a junior barrister, he was appointed a judge in the Queen's Bench Division and knighted. At first he was hardly the success on the bench that his friends had predicted. He was often over hasty in speech, and he showed himself too impatient of slowness and dulness. These defects, however, wore away, and he became eventually the best nisi prius judge of his time.
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Nevertheless, the poem is still a satire and not a lamentation. The top of society (the kings) may be dulled by spectacle and freak shows, but Dulness is only one force. She is at war with the men of wit, and she can be opposed. In the Four Book Dunciad (or Dunciad B), any hope of redemption or reversal is gone, and the poem is even more nihilistic.
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Potter describes the vision of Hades and the Styx pouring into the Thames, but it is not merely Lethe that pours in. Lethe and the effluvia of dreams go into the Thames, so the effect is that it "Intoxicates the pert, and lulls the grave" (B II 344). The Archbishop of Canterbury becomes the Archbishop of Dulness. The book concludes with the contest of reading Blackmore and Henley.
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These dunces orbit Dulness. They struggle to break free, and they get some distance from her, but they are too weak to flee. The third class are "[...] false to Phoebus, bow to Baal;/ Or impious, preach his Word without a call" (B IV 93–94). They are men and women who do dull things by supporting dunces, either by giving money to hacks or by suppressing the cause of worthy writers.
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The poem begins with an epic invocation, "Books and the Man I sing, the first who brings/ The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings" (I 1-2) (Smithfield being the site of Bartholomew Fair entertainments, and the man in question was Elkanah Settle, who had written for Bartholomew Fair after the Glorious Revolution; Pope makes him the one who brought pantomime, farce, and monster shows to the royal theatres). The goddess Dulness notes that her power is so great that, "...Time himself stands still at her command,/ Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land," (I 69-70) and thus claims credit for the routine violation of the Unities of Aristotle in poetry. On Lord Mayor's Day of 1724, when Sir George Thorold was Lord Mayor, Dulness announces the death of the current King of Dunces, Elkanah Settle. Settle had been the City Poet, and his job had been to commemorate Lord Mayor's Day pageants.
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The Latin motto at the top means "Know thyself," and the verse at the bottom is Pope's own satire on Thersites from Essay on Criticism. This was only one of many attacks on Pope after the Dunciad Variorum. The central premise of the poem is the same as that of MacFlecknoe: the crowning of a new King of Dulness. However, Pope's poem is far more wide-ranging and specific than Dryden's had been.
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189 such as incorporating in their work the styles of the entertainments that they were ridiculing. Fielding thus allows the audience to believe that he is poking fun at others, less discriminating than themselves, and less able to distinguish good art from bad.Rivero 1989 pp. 34–35 Fielding also borrowed characters from the work of the Club's members, such as the Goddess of Nonsense, influenced by Pope's character from The Dunciad, Dulness, who is at war with reason.
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Logic is gagged and bound. Wit has been exiled from her kingdom entirely. Rhetoric is stripped on the ground and tied by sophism. Morality is dressed in a gown that is bound by two cords, of furs (the ermines of judges) and lawn (the fabric of bishops sleeves), and at a nod from Dulness, her "page" (a notorious hanging judge named Page who had had over one hundred people executed) pulls both cords tight and strangles her.
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Frontispiece and front page to The Dunciad Variorum (1729). Pope first published The Dunciad in 1728 in three books, with Lewis Theobald as its "hero." The poem was not signed, and he used only initials in the text to refer to the various Dunces in the kingdom of Dulness. However, "Keys" immediately came out to identify the figures mentioned in the text, and an Irish pirate edition was printed that filled in the names (sometimes inaccurately).
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Upon her return, she became depressed and could not write: "[in Italy] I might live – as once I lived—hoping—loving—aspiring enjoying ... I am placid now, & the days go by – I am happy in Percy [Florence's] society & health – but no adjuncts ... gild the quiet hours & dulness [sic] creeps over my intellect".Qtd. in Sunstein, 353. Despite this lethargy she managed to publish a second edition of Percy Shelley's prose and began working on another edition of his poetry.Sunstein, 353.
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His satire is political and cultural in very specific ways. Rather than merely lambasting "vice" and "corruption," Pope attacks very particular degradations of political discourse and particular degradations of the arts. The political attack is on the Whigs, and specifically on the Hanoverian Whigs. The poem opens, in fact, with the goddess Dulness noting that "Still Dunce the second rules like Dunce the first," which is an exceptionally daring reference to George II, who had come to the throne earlier in the year.
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Book I covers the night after the Lord Mayor's Day, Book II the morning to dusk, and Book III the darkest night. Furthermore, the poem begins at the end of the Lord Mayor's procession, goes in Book II to the Strand, then to Fleet Street (where booksellers were), down by Bridewell Prison to the Fleet ditch, then to Ludgate at the end of Book II; in Book III, Dulness goes through Ludgate to the City of London to her temple.
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When Dulness chooses her new king, she settles on Bays, who is seen in his study surveying his own works: The base of Cibber's pile of sacrificed books is several commonplace books, which are the basis of all his own productions. Although Cibber confesses: The accidental common sense was The Careless Husband. When Cibber casts about for new professions, he, unlike Theobald in 1732, decides, "Hold—to the Minister I more incline;/ To serve his cause, O Queen! is serving thine" (I 213–214).
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The story is that of the goddess Dulness choosing a new Avatar. She settles upon one of Pope's personal enemies, Lewis Theobald, and the poem describes the coronation and heroic games undertaken by all of the dunces of Great Britain in celebration of Theobald's ascension. When Pope's enemies responded to The Dunciad with attacks, Pope produced the Dunciad Variorum, with a "learned" commentary upon the original Dunciad. In 1743, he added a fourth book and changed the hero from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber.
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Alexander Pope later ridiculed him in The Dunciad (III.321, IV.111-12) for having erected a monument to John Milton in Westminster Abbey, 1737, then having turned and honoured with a bust by Michael Rysbrack, a distinctly minor writer of Latin verses, Dr Arthur Johnston (1587–1641); in the elaborate procession attending the Goddess Dulness, Benson appeared: "On two unequal crutches propt he came, Milton's on this, on that one Johnston's name" (Dunciad IV.111-12). Benson stood for Parliament again at Shaftesbury at the 1727 general election.
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The first action of the poem is of a Sybil that comes to Hillario: :A tawny Sybil, whose alluring song, :Decoy'd the 'prentices and maiden throng :First from the counter young HILLARIO charm'd (The Hilliad lines 6-12) Her charms transform Hillario from an apothecary into "th' INSPECTOR" (The Hilliad line 58). She is reminiscent of Pope's Dulness character, although she also has traits deriving from Smart's "Mrs Midnight".Bertelsen p. 146-147 Hillario's transformation is only to doom him; he quickly becomes "The UNIVERSAL BUTT of all mankind" (The Hilliad line 237).
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In 1728, Pope struck back against Welsted. In Peri Bathos, Welsted's obsequiousness is isolated and presented for derision, and in The Dunciad Pope accused him of writing poetry that flows like its inspiration: beer. In fact, Pope presented Welsted several places in The Dunciad as a laughable poetaster. Welsted attempted to fight back, and he teamed up with another of Pope's dunces, James Moore Smythe, for One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope in 1730, and in 1732 he wrote two attacks on Pope, Of Dulness and Scandal and Of False Fame.
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By the 19th century, the Confessio was regarded by some as an established "monument of dulness and pedantry" (quoted by Coffman 1945:52). While Macaulay (1901:x-xxi, 1908:sec 28) was cautiously appreciative, his contemporary Crawshaw (1907:61) attributed to the work "a certain nervelessness or lack of vigor, and a fatal inability to understand when he had said enough". Even C.S. Lewis, who has been quoted above admiring the style of the work, was unconvinced by its structure, describing the epilogue as "a long and unsuccessful coda" (Lewis 1936:222).
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Lewis Theobald was working for Rich on writing pantomimes. When Alexander Pope wrote the first version of The Dunciad, and even more in the second and third editions, Rich appears as a prime symptom of the disease of the age and debasement of taste. In his Dunciad Variorum of 1732, he makes John Rich the angel of the goddess Dulness: > Immortal Rich! how calm he sits at ease > Mid snows of paper, and fierce hail of pease; > And proud his mistress' orders to perform, > Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.
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He invokes the same Mock-heroic style in The Dunciad which also employs the language of heroic poetry to describe menial or trivial subjects. In this mock-epic the progress of Dulness over the face of the earth, the coming of stupidity and tastelessness, is treated in the same way as the coming of civilization is in the Aeneid (see also the metaphor of translatio studii). John Gay's Trivia and Beggar's Opera were mock-heroic (the latter in opera), and Samuel Johnson's London is a mock-heroic of a sort.
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Thanks to his hard work in stultifying the senses of the nation, Dulness claims control of all official verse, and all current poets are her subjects ("While pensive Poets painful vigils keep,/ Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep" I 91–92). She mentions Thomas Heywood, Daniel Defoe (for writing political journalism), Ambrose Philips, Nahum Tate, and Sir Richard Blackmore as her darlings. However, her triumph is not complete, and she aspires to control dramatic poetry as well as political, religious, and hack poetry. She therefore decides that Theobald will be the new King.
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There, the young critics are asked to weigh the difference between Richard Blackmore and John "Orator" Henley. The one who can will be the chief judge of Dulness. Three second year students ("college sophs") from Cambridge University and three lawyers from Temple Bar attempt the task, but they all fall asleep. The entire company slowly falls asleep, with the last being Susanna Centlivre (who had attacked Pope's translation of Homer before its publication) and "Norton Defoe" (another false identity created by a political author who claimed to be the "true son" of Daniel Defoe).
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The Times wrote that the score of the piece was mostly pervaded "with a kind of decorous, very accomplished dulness, which makes us sigh for a good catchy tune, however trivial." The paper singled out the principal comedian, Graves, and the soubrette, Courtneidge, for praise, and complained that Pounds had too little singing or dancing and was "all but wasted"."Shaftesbury Theatre", The Times, 13 May 1912, p. 12 The Manchester Guardian thought better of the music, and considered it "somewhat beyond the reach of most of the artists and the orchestra".
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This is his baptism: the time when he can claim his divine role and begin his mission (in a parody of Jesus being blessed by the Holy Spirit). Settle shows Theobald the past triumphs of Dulness in its battles with reason and science. He surveys the translatio stultitia: the Great Wall of China and the emperor burning all learned books, Egypt and Omar I burning the books in the Ptolemean library. Then he turns to follow the light of the sun/learning to Europe and says, Goths, Alans, Huns, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Islam are all seen as destroyers of learning.
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In the ditch, the political hacks are ordered to strip off their clothes and engage in a diving contest. Dulness says, "Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around/ The stream, be his the Weekly Journals, bound" (II 267–268), while a load of lead will go to the deepest diver and a load of coal to the others who participate. "The Weekly Journals" was a collective noun, referring to London Journal, Mist's Journal, British Journal, Daily Journal, inter al. In this contest, John Dennis climbs up as high as a post and dives in, disappearing forever.
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Battestin and Battestin 1993 p. 537 "Councillor Town", the fictional prosecutor, summarised these complaints in saying, "The whole Book is a Heap of sad Stuff, Dulness, and Nonsense; that it contains no Wit, Humour, Knowledge of human Nature, or of the World; indeed, that the Fable, moral Character, Manners, Sentiments, and Diction, are all alike bad and contemptible."Fielding 1915 p. 179 In his reply, Fielding posited a paternal relationship with Amelia, though conceded that it was not without flaws: > ... [N]ay, when I go father, and avow, that of all my Offspring she is my > favourite Child.
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He was beaten severely and died of his injuries in custody on 23 September 1707. While The Observator, in particular, was a noted venue for anti-Jacobite opinion, Tutchin's tendency toward paranoid-seeming fears and suspicions about the government had gotten him few contemporary friends. Even after his death under suspicious circumstances, he was not widely mourned, and Alexander Pope, in particular, memorialized him viciously in The Dunciad a full seventeen years after his death, where he has the publisher Edmund Curll given a gift of a tapestry by Dulness showing the fates of dunces, where the whipping of Tutchin through the west country is a featured panel.
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The story is that of the goddess Dulness choosing a new avatar. She settles upon one of Pope's personal enemies, Lewis Theobald, and the poem describes the coronation and heroic games undertaken by all of the dunces of Great Britain in celebration of Theobald's ascension. When Pope's enemies responded to The Dunciad with attacks, Pope produced the Dunciad Variorum, which culled from each dunce's attack any comments unflattering to another dunce, assembled the whole into a commentary upon the original Dunciad and added a critical comment by Pope professing his innocence and dignity. In 1743, Pope issued a new version of The Dunciad ("The Dunciad B") with a fourth book added.
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He also changed the hero from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber. In the fourth book of the new Dunciad, Pope expressed the view that, in the battle between light and dark (enlightenment and the Dark Ages), Night and Dulness were fated to win, that all things of value were soon going to be subsumed under the curtain of unknowing. John Gay and Alexander Pope belong on one side of a line separating the celebrants of the individual and the celebrants of the social. Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, he said, to settle a disagreement between two great families, to laugh them into peace.
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As he makes his boast, he sees a whore, a pupil, and a French governor come forward, and the devout Bentley skulks away. The French governor attempts to speak to Dulness but cannot be heard over the French horn sound that emerges, so the pupil tells his story. The "governor" is an English nobleman who went to school and college without learning anything, then went abroad on the Grand Tour, on which "Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too" (B IV 294). He went to Paris and Rome and "[...] he saunter'd Europe round,/ And gather'd ev'ry Vice on Christian ground" (B IV 311–312).
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On it, he sees Daniel Defoe with his ears chopped off, John Tutchin being whipped publicly through western England, two political journalists clubbed to death (on the same day), and himself being wrapped in a blanket and whipped by the schoolboys of Westminster (for having printed an unauthorised edition of the sermons of the school's master, thereby robbing the school's own printer). The next contest Dulness proposes is for the phantom poetess, Eliza (Eliza Haywood). She is compared to their Hera. Whereas Hera was "cow-eyed" in Iliad, and "of the herders," Haywood inverts these to become a The booksellers will urinate to see whose urinary stream is the highest.
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At the end of his travels, he is "[...] perfectly well-bred,/ With nothing but a Solo in his head" (B IV 323–324), and he has returned to England with a despoiled nun following him. She is pregnant with his child (or the student's) and destined for the life of a prostitute (a kept woman), and the lord is going to run for Parliament so that he can avoid arrest. Dulness welcomes the three—the devious student, the brainless lord, and the spoiled nun—and spreads her own cloak about the girl, which "frees from sense of Shame." After the vacuous traveller, an idle lord appears, yawning with the pain of sitting on an easy chair.
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When only 21 years of age, Evans was selected a member of the Merthyr Board of Guardians. It was said that he was at the time the youngest guardian in the United Kingdom. In late 1894 he unsuccessfully sought election to the Aberdare Urban District Council but shortly afterwards, in 1895 he was elected to Glamorgan County Council to represent the Aberdare Town Ward, and in 1898 was made an alderman. In 1900 he was elected to the Aberdare Urban District Council, a position which he held without opposition until his retirement two months before his death It was said that 'his presence at the meetings of municipal bodies would invariably banish dulness and monotony, for he was extremely humorous.
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As "enlightenment" moves ever westward, darkness follows behind. In Pope's poem, she already has control of all political writing and seeks to extend her reign to drama. Hence, she chooses as a champion Lewis Theobald (Dunciad A) and Colley Cibber (Dunciad B). Pope presents the power of Dulness as inexorable and irresistible, and in Book IV of the Dunciad B he asks only that she pause a moment to let him write his poem before she takes "the singer and the song" into her oblivion. She is not motivated by any particular malice, and she even shows mercy at one point, if being reduced to insensibility is mercy, for, when a deflowered nun comes before her, she drops her cloak of shamelessness over the ruined woman.
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Pope told Joseph Spence (in Spence's Anecdotes) that he had been working on a general satire of Dulness, with characters of contemporary Grub Street scribblers, for some time and that it was the publication of Shakespeare Restored by Lewis Theobald that spurred him to complete the poem and publish it in 1728. Theobald's edition of Shakespeare was not, however, as imperfect as The Dunciad would suggest; it was, in fact, far superior to the edition Pope had himself written in 1725. Part of Pope's bitter inspiration for the characters in the book come from his soured relationship with the royal court. The Princess of Wales Caroline of Ansbach, wife of George II, had supported Pope in her patronage of the arts.
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He hears the prayer, passes a pile of feces down, and catapults Curll to the victory. As Curll grabs the phantom Moore, the poems it seemed to have fly back to their real authors, and even the clothes go to the unpaid tailors who had made them (James Moore Smythe had run through an inherited fortune and bankrupted himself by 1727). Dulness urges Curll to repeat the joke, to pretend to the public that his dull poets were really great poets, to print things by false names. (Curll had published numerous works by "Joseph Gay" to trick the public into thinking they were by John Gay.) For his victory, she awards Curll a tapestry showing the fates of famous Dunces.
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In the fourth book of the new Dunciad, Pope expressed the view that, in the battle between light and dark (enlightenment and the Dark Ages), Night and Dulness were fated to win, that all things of value were soon going to be subsumed under the curtain of unknowing. John Gay and Alexander Pope belong on one side of a line separating the celebrants of the individual and the celebrants of the social. Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, he said, to settle a disagreement between two great families, to laugh them into peace. Even The Dunciad, which seems to be a serial killing of everyone on Pope's enemies list, sets up these figures as expressions of dangerous and antisocial forces in letters.
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In this, Dulness offers up the prize of a "catcall" and a drum that can drown out the braying of asses to the one who can make the most senseless noise and impress the king of monkeys. They are invited to improve mustard-bowl thunder (as the sound effect of thunder on the stage had been made using a mustard bowl and a shot previously, and John Dennis had invented a new method) and the sound of the bell (used in tragedies to enhance the pitiful action). Pope describes the resulting game thus: The critics are then invited to all bray at the same time. In this, Richard Blackmore wins easily: (Blackmore had written six epic poems, a "Prince" and "King" Arthur, in twenty books, an Eliza in ten books, an Alfred in twelve books, etc.
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The revue had a mixed reception. The Daily Express noted that "half a dozen scintillating items ... in these days of much dulness is probably not a bad achievement", but remarked of the script by Bovill and Wodehouse that "it does little credit to their ingenuity". The Express reserved most praise for the dancing of Phyllis Bedells, who was "thunderously cheered" for what it described as "the one purely and delightfully artistic contribution of the whole entertainment". The Times referred to "a number of clever artists for the most part making good fun out of material that was not very funny" and commented that "for lack of wit in the treatment, some of the best things miss fire", while the London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, in paragraph on the continuing craze for revues in England, dismissed it as "not a very brilliant specimen".
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These people come to Dulness as a comet does: although they are only occasionally near her, they habitually do her bidding. Of this last group, Pope classes Sir Thomas Hanmer, a "decent knight," who absurdly thinks himself a great Shakespeare editor and uses his own money to publish an exceptionally lavish and ornate edition (with a text that was based on Pope's own edition). He is outshone in darkness by one Benson, who is even more absurd, in that he begins putting up monuments of John Milton, striking coins and medals of Milton, and translating Milton's Latin poetry and who had then passed from excessive Milton fanaticism to fanaticism for Arthur Johnston, a Scottish physician and Latin poet. Unable to be the most fantastically vain man, Hamner prepares to withdraw his edition, but "Apollo's May'r and Aldermen" (B IV 116) take the page from him.
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The Dunciad Variorum, 1729 The derogatory allusions to Cibber in consecutive versions of Pope's mock-heroic Dunciad, from 1728 to 1743, became more elaborate as the conflict between the two men escalated, until, in the final version of the poem, Pope crowned Cibber King of Dunces. From being merely one symptom of the artistic decay of Britain, he was transformed into the demigod of stupidity, the true son of the goddess Dulness. Apart from the personal quarrel, Pope had reasons of literary appropriateness for letting Cibber take the place of his first choice of King, Lewis Theobald. Theobald, who had embarrassed Pope by contrasting Pope's impressionistic Shakespeare edition (1725) with Theobald's own scholarly edition (1726), also wrote Whig propaganda for hire, as well as dramatic productions which were to Pope abominations for their mixing of tragedy and comedy and for their "low" pantomime and opera.
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