SOURCE: "The Fable Is Inverted: 1628-1700," in Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History, pp. 81-109. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Patterson maintains that in seventeenth-century England the Aesopic fable was refined into a verbal weapon. No longer limited in range to local or temporal political issues, the genre was used to dealt with larger, more universal issues such as the conflict between absolute and parliamentary power.]

The world is chang'd and we have Choyces,Not by most Reasons, but most Voyces,The Lion's trod on by the Mouse,The lower is the upper House:

The feet, and lower parts, 'tis sed,
Would trample on, and off the head,
What ere they say, this is the thing,
They love the Charles, but hate the King;
To make an even Grove, one stroke
Should lift the Shrubb unto the Oake.
Anon: "A Madrigall on Justice"

If Elizabeth's reign was, for all its strategic successes and overall stability, occasionally vulnerable to the subversive critical analysis that fables made possible, we would expect the same to be even more true of the earlier seventeenth century, when the first two Stuarts were less accomplished in maintaining the stance defined by Lyly's Lion, of being above question. Indeed, to begin with, the fable under James continued on the track pioneered by Spenser; as Hoyt Hudson has demonstrated, Mother Hubberds Tale spawned a whole series of animal satires, with the cast of characters extended as necessary. The earliest was Michael Drayton's The Owle (1604), an extended bird polity marking the accession of James as the Eagle. Richard Niccols produced two such satires, the first, The Cuckow (1607), in obvious imitation of Drayton's bird kingdom, the second, The Beggers Ape, written before 1610 but unpublished until 1617, virtually a sequel to Mother Hubberds Tale. The Cuckow was a generalized attack on sexual looseness that unfavorably contrasted Jacobean mores with Elizabeth's ethos of chastity, and The Beggers Ape, which retained Spenser's Fox and Ape as the villains, was primarily directed against the sale of titles as a means of raising revenues. William Goddard's The Owles Araygnement (c. 1616), pointed "with some plainness" to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by the agents of Carr and Frances Howard; and, finally, John Hepwith's The Calidonian Forrest, another fable of misgovemment by false deputy (Buckingham as the Hart) extended the genre into Charles's reign. Although written at the time of Buckingham's death in 1628, Hepwith's poem was not published until 1641 when, Hudson speculates, it may have appeared in order to counter the effect of James Howell's Royalist tree-fable, Dodona's Grove: or the Vocall Forrest, the first instalment of which appeared in 1640.¹

While the very existence of these neo-Spenserian texts is proof of the fable's functionality, their procedures—to attack either generalized corruption or egregious local instances of it—render them relatively inaccessible today. It was the more theoretical model provided by Sidney that would gradually emerge on the cutting edge of seventeenth-century politics. In that model, central elements of classical fables, or of the fable's history as a genre, are used as ideological principles, and against them are measured the new historical circumstances that motivated the writer to return to Aesop. For the fable to do its work in the world, a contemporary vocabulary and issues cannot merely be grafted upon a traditional matrix, but past and present must be seen to be structurally related. And the more people wrestled to accommodate received systems to vast social and cultural changes, the more it became evident that the fable was no rudimentary signifying system, but capable of doing advanced work in the arena of political definition.

The major issue in need of definition from Elizabeth's death to the outbreak of civil war was, in fact, peculiarly adapted to Aesopian tradition: the sanctions of royal power and its limitations, if any. In James's reign the theoretical relationship between the sovereignty vested in the king and responsibilities vested in parliament, became, of course, widely debated and contested, not least because James himself had published his views on the subject; the stock phrases that registered the contest were royal prerogative and the liberties of the subject. Parliamentary history shows a series of confrontations between king and parliament in which attempts to deal with other issues (the proposed union between England and Scotland, monopolies, impositions, the Great Contract of 1610) foundered in the impasse created by those terms; and of those confrontations, the most disruptive was the 1628-29 struggle over the Petition of Right and the resulting decision by Charles I to rule without parliament indefinitely.

In the records of the House of Commons for May 22, 1628, there appears an instance of fabulist discourse that is almost too good to be true, in its making explicit the procedure by which an old metaphor was reappropriated and reinterpreted in terms of the current crisis, and in showing how a literary training and imagination could function in political debate; not, as one might too easily assume, merely to add rhetorical force or emotive content, but to clarify and demystify an otherwise ill-defined constitutional abstraction.

The context of the discussion was whether the Petition of Right should be circumscribed by a proviso proposed by the Lords excluding the king's "sovereign power" from the terms proposed. In opposing the Lords' amendment, Sir Henry Marten (father of the regicide) spoke with unusual forcefulness and color:

Horace dislikes the painter that humano capiti would join a horse's neck. Yet if he made a horse's neck alone it was good. The King may not require money but in parliament. It is a man's head; but add this clause, "unless it be by sovereign power," then it is a lion's neck, and it mars all.… It implies the King is trusted with a power for the destruction and also for the safety of the people. It admits also he may use "sovereign power," and if he do we may not refuse it, for it is for our protection. So it bounds up my mouth that I cannot but say that it is for the good of the people. "Sovereign power" is transcending and a high word. There is a tale in Aesop's Fables, the moral whereof shall be that when actions are regulated by law you may guess at the proportion, but if it be regulated by the prerogative, there is no end. The ass, the lion and the fox agreed to go on hunting, and they found good prey, and the ass was willing to make a division, and so he did laying all into three heaps, and said to the lion, "It is your prerogative to choose." The lion took it ill and said, "It is my prerogative to choose," and he tore the ass and did eat him up. He said to the fox, "Divide you," so he took a little part of the skin, and left all the rest. The lion asked him what he meant. He answered him, "All is yours." The lion replied, "This is my prerogative," and he asked the fox who taught him that. Said he, "The calamity of the ass."²

The fact that this episode was recounted in four of the parliamentary journals, and in one of them with such precision, suggests a paradox: that Marten's speech was so remarkable that its textual nuances were seen as essential to the record; and that the fable he chose was so familiar that Marten could count on his audience to recognize and appreciate his divergences from it. The preexistent fabulist plot on which he depended was simple: in The Lion, the Cow, the Goat, and the Sheep, which usually appeared early in the Aesopian corpus, the lion and three nonpredators agree, unnaturally, to go hunting together and to divide the spoils; but when the time comes for division, the lion claims all the shares one by one, by a series of rationalizations, and none dare gainsay him. In Caxton's version, already quoted in my introduction, the lion offers a four-point claim to all four shares, culminating in naked threat: "who so ever toucheth the fourthe part he shalle be myn mortal enemy." And therefore, Caxton moralizes, "this fable techeth to al folk that the poure ought notto hold felawship with the myghty. For the myghty man is never feythfull to the poure."³ The disparity in power relations was more emphatic in Caxton than in some other versions, where the strees fell on the fragility of the original agreement. So, for example, the reader might be admonished that reads: "Faithfulness hath been ever rate; it is more rare now-a-days: but it is and hath always been most rare among potent Men. Wherefore it is better that you live with your equals. For he that liveth with a potent man, must necessarily part ofttimes with his own right: you shall have equal dealings with your equals."⁴

The moral of Marten's version, however, is not predetermined by cultural precedent but "shall be" arrived at. The lion is bound by convention to be recognized as the king; but by retelling an ancient tale of "might makes right" in terms currently hot, especially the central and ironically repeated "prerogative," the immediately topical application is secured. The subtheme of censorship ("it bounds up my mouth that I cannot but say that it is for the good of the people") connects this fable to Sidney's in the Arcadia, while at the same time permitting the parliamentarian to open his mouth after all. The fox learns by the calamity of the ass to let the prerogative alone, but the fabulist learns by the example of Aesop to let the animals speak for him. And by setting his intervention in the frame of Horace's Ars Poetica, where the rules are established for a probable, rather than a fantastic mimesis, Marten implied that not only parliamentary debate, but the constitution itself, should be governed by the rules of a natural decorum. Men should keep their own heads on their own necks; a king who roars like a lion has become a monster.

Marten's warning, as we know, was inefficacious. In 1629 Charles's second parliament dissolved in undignified confusion, to be followed by eleven years of prerogative rule, and then by the ultimate confrontations of 1640 to 1649. The broadside ballad verses cited at the opening of this chapter show both how pervasive fabulist thinking had become, in the sense that they literally circulated on the street, and how clearly the inversion of the old fables were connected to the inversion of conventional power structures in England, in which process parliament itself is seen as the primary agent. But for a truly intelligent attempt to rethink Aesopian concepts in relation to the civil war and the republican experiment, we need to turn to John Ogilby and his Fables of Aesop Paraphras'd in Verse, first published in 1651 with illustrations by Francis Cleyn. Ogilby's interpretations of Aesop stand at the midpoint of both the century and the revolution, and they significantly altered the status of the fable in the second half of the century.

In Mary Pritchard's pioneering study of the political fable, Ogilby is given credit for converting the fable into a medium of historical representation. His system was signaled to the seventeenth-century reader by "politically charged" language, unmistakably referring to persons and events:

There are, for example, several references to covenants and covenanters (Fables 3, 8, 42) and one to the "Solemn League and Cov'nant" (32). Civil war is likewise mentioned in four fables (6, 21, 40, 72) along with a multitude of references to various kinds of rebellion. Cromwell's cavalry regiment, Ironsides, is alluded to in Fables 8 and 27, while the term "malignants," a common epithet used by the Parliamentarians to describe the Royalists, occurs in Fables 13, 17, 22, 39, 40 and 71 as both adjective and noun. Two fables, 29 and 72, mention sequestration, and four, commonweal or commonwealth (32, 47, 75 and 77). Reference is made to two issues with which Cromwell was particularly concerned during his Parliamentary career: the draining of the fens (15) and the Root and Branch bill (40, 42 and 67).⁵

This careful analysis is useful confirmation that Ogilby's Aesop is indeed as topical as it feels. Nor would one wish to quarrel with Pritchard's larger conclusion, that the theme of the volume as a whole is a principle of order and hierarchy, which war and rebellion subvert. But in order to substantiate my claim that Ogilby significantly altered the status of the fable, we need to go deeper; and one can hardly do better than begin where the seventeenth-century reader began, with the commendatory poem by William Davenant that preceded the 1651 edition.

It was certainly part of the effect intended that Davenant addressed himself to the reader "From the Tower Sep. 30. 1651," underlining the condition of many Royalists after the battle of Worcester that very month. His poem on Ogilby's paraphrases is an elegant play on ideas of imprisonment, appropriating for both politics and aesthetics the tradition of the fable as the political language of slaves, and connecting both ancient and recent styles of bondage to the freedom with which Ogilby had treated his material. Davenant begins by praising Aesop for having rescued from Egyptian priests the ancient system of hieroglyphs, by which animal symbolism conveyed knowledge of the divine, and for having restored it to "the Laitie," a challenging application of Reformation imagery to one who clearly opposed the current "reformers." He then proceeded to praise Ogilby for having performed a comparable act of rescue for Aesop:

Blest be our Poet too! whose fire hath made
Grave Aesop warme in Death's detested shade.
Though Verses are but Fetters deem'd by those
Who endlesse journeys make in wandring Prose,
Yet in thy Verse, methinks, I Aesop see
Less bound than when his Master made him free:
So well thou fit'st the measure of his mind,
Which, though the Slave, his body, were confind,
Seem'd, as thy wit, still unconstrained and young.
(A5v)

And he concludes with a classic defense of poetry as a form of passive resistance:

Laws doe in vain with force our wils invade;
Since you can Conquer when you but Perswade.
(A6r)

What Davenant's poem suggested, everything that we know about Ogilby's career confirms, from his early service in Wentworth's household in Ireland, through his lost Royalist epic, the Carolies, to his remarkable prestige and privileges at the Restoration.⁶ This was to be a Royalist collection of fables, speaking to a social and cultural elite of sudden reversals in the power relations; and to that end the classical fable was to be not only "paraphrased" but converted to a use hitherto alien to it. Instead of representing the voice of the slave or laboring class, of the disenfranchised, the powerless, the uncouth, negroid, or base, the fable is now, by the vagaries of political fortune, discovered as a vehicle of protest and solidarity for the Royalist nobility and gentry who seemed to have lost the war and had certainly, with the execution of Charles I in 1649, lost their leader. Since it was now widely understood that the only hope for the restoration of the monarchy lay in strategic acceptance of the Engagement, consolidating their position under Cromwell and waiting for the revolution to burn itself out, Ogilby's fables as a group adopted a position that was somewhere on the fine line between active and passive resistance.⁷

In accordance with this program, which required Ogilby to seem to have rightfully appropriated fabulist tradition, his fables were constructed as elegant and complex lyric structures, which nevertheless incorporated, wherever possible, the more basic strengths of earlier English fabulists. Ogilby had obviously read his Spenser. His Fable 36, Of the Husbandman and the Wood, combines the original Aesopian tale—a wood foolishly provides the woodcutter with a handle for his axe—with "February's" fable of the Oak and the Briar. But taking seriously the Spenserian implications of age and rootedness, and the hints that the Oak was both person and institution, Ogilby abandoned the theme of rivalry between two trees for a far more complex narrative of political interests. For the tree with a long history he substituted an ancient forest system, "Neer a vast Comons," in which the oak is only one element:

This wealthy grove, the Royall Cedar grac'd,
 Whose head was fix'd among the wandring stars,
 Above loud Meteors and the elements Wars,
His root in th'Adamantine Center fast;
 This all surpast
Crown'd Libanus; about him Elmie Peers,
Ash, Fir, and Pine, had flourish'd many years,
By him protected both from heat and cold.
Eternall plants, at least ten ages old,
  All of one mind
  Theyr strength conjoyn'd,
  And scorn'd the wind;
Here highly honour'd stood the sacred Oke,
 Whom Swains invoke,
Which oracles, like that of Dodon, spoke.

The ancient forest, then, is clearly the English political system, in which all the trees are distinguished by their height, that is to say, their rank, from the "Comons," and in which the "Royal Cedar" (the king) is distinguished from the "sacred Oke" (the national church or its greatest representative, Archbishop William Laud). Even to name them, however, as Ogilby had no need to, detracts from the dignity that inheres naturally in the very idea of a great forest, and culturally in the concept of solidarity ("All of one mind") with which Ogilby has endowed the English aristocracy.

But the fable's point is that this defensive unity does, after all, give place to the rivalry between different types of tree that Aesop and Spenser had recognized. There is an equally clear historical referent for "the under cops (that did complain / Their Soveraign / A Tyrant was)," as well as for the "rotten-hearted Elms, and Wooden Peers," who support the husbandman's plans for chopping down some of their colleagues in order to give themselves more room. Central to the tragedy, also, is the shortsightedness of the royal cedar, who is persuaded to give the husbandman the wood he needs for a handle to his axe, thus enabling his own destruction and that of his entire kingdom—a none-too-inscrutable allusion to the Nineteen Propositions in which Charles I, many of his own supporters thought, had given away the constitutional grounds of his sovereignty; while the husbandman himself is both villain and victim, who weeps to behold "the havock his own hands had made." And if, as in Spenser's fable, the husbandman stands as he must for the monarch who mistakenly destroys something or someone of value to the land, Ogilby's husbandman must logically be the English nation itself. But the fable as a whole is, if not impersonal, honestly judicious. It offers not a narrowly partisan but a polytropic explanation of the causes of the civil war, in which there can be no simple apportionment of blame, and, because it is a tragic fable, a final moral (that kings should not put weapons into their subjects' hands) whose very inadequacy is part of the somber effect.

The tone established here is continued in another Spenserian recall, Ogilby's version of The Wolf and the Kid, which Spenser had adapted to the purposes of anti-Catholic propaganda. Ogilby returned in his version (Of the She-Goat and Kid, Fable 72) to the wolf of the Aesopian original, but the psychological details of his account, in which much is made of the goat's widowhood and her devotion to her only child, "her comfort and her care," are unmistakably derived from Spenser's "May" eclogue. They are equally unmistakably adapted to the new historical circumstances of 1651:

A She-Goat Widowed by Civill War,
(As many other wofull Matrons are)
Although her sequestration a small fine
   Had taken off,
 Had little cause to laugh,
For when she rose, she knew not where to dine.

"Sequestration" was a technical term employed by the Long Parliament to describe the temporary confiscation of Royalist estates, which could subsequently be released by taking the Engagement and (usually) paying a fine. Like Spenser's fable, Ogilby's dwells on the death of the kid's father at the hands of the wolf and the mother's fears for her son, whom she must leave alone to go foraging for food. But what the wolf brings to the door in 1651 is not the grab bag of religious superstition or a deceptive martyr complex, but the allure of a political loyalty that is bound to destroy its adherent. Disguising himself as "the King and Father of the Heard," the wolf addresses the kid in the language of those who had attempted to drum up military support for Charles II for the abortive campaign that ended on the field at Worcester; or, perhaps, of those who might, disguising themselves as the king's adherents, attempt to betray a trusting young man to engage in a destructive and doomed conspiracy:

I live, whom Fame reported dead, and bring
Good tydings, never better was the King.
The Lyon now is fourty thousand strong,
   Enumerous swarms,
  Both old and young, take arms,
And he will thunder at their Gates ere long,
Changing their tryumph to a dolefull Song.
  And now the Conquering Boar,
  Of those subdu'd before,
  Doth speedie aid implore,
But the dissenting Brethren in one Fate, Too late,
Shall rue they turn'd this Forrest to a State.

The result, for this kid, is a situation in which all of the most sacred values of his culture are invoked to lure him to disaster: "Whom Pan, his Parents, and his King obey'd, / Duty, Belief, and Piety betraid." It is fair to ask whether Ogilby would have conceived of rendering this problem—of the psychology of loyalty in defeat—in these touching familial and adolescent terms if he had not been able to appropriate Spenser's insights, and particularly the dangers to themselves of idealism in the young; but where Spenser's message is obscure, and his effects achieved by expansive, even self-indulgent description, Ogilby's psychology is as deft as his political meaning is unavoidable.

Given the strategic compromises required by Engagement politics, Ogilby's fables also explore the psychological territory between unwise resistance and total capitulation. His version of The Oke and the Reed (67) somehow merges the traditional values of massivestrength and ductility by suggesting the merits of post-ponement:

Though strong, resist not a too potent foe;
Madmen against a violent torrent row.
Thou maist hereafter serve the Commonweale,
Then yield till time shall better days repeale.
(Italics added)

But while his own later career amply confirmed the wisdom of Ogilby's position, it was not merely a rationalization of timeserving. The ancient fable of the war between the birds and beasts, in which the bat, biologically a compromise between the warring species, decides on neutrality, now becomes in Ogilby's version (29) a traitor to both sides:

The treacherous Bat was in the battell took:
All hate the traitors look,
    He never must display,
    Again his wings by day,
But hated live in some foul dustie nook,
Cause he his Country in distresse forsook.

And the Moral points specifically to those who compounded with the new government in order to save their estates: "Or King or State their ruin they'l endure, / May they from Sequestration be secure."

Given this careful definition of the indefinable, a condition of loyal and unselfserving temporizing, we can see why Ogilby attempted to adapt to current circumstances The Frogs Desiring a King (12), a fable whose precedent history in the theory of political obedience had assumed a transition from a frog republic to different styles of monarchy. But because English history had, in effect, released into practice the contradictions inherent in the fable from its origins, those contradictions admitted by Holinshed's Chron-icles and exploited by Sidney, Ogilby's version of the fable (figure 6) needed radical adjustment. It opens with the voices of the frogs, speaking from the position of whose who have once enjoyed a king but are now experiencing—and negatively—a republic:

Since good Frogpadock Jove thou didst translate,

How have we suffer'd turn'd into a State?
In severall interests we divided are;
Small hope is left well grounded peace t'obtain,
   Unlesse again
   Thou hear our prayer
Great King of Kings, and we for Kings declare.

It continues with considerable wit to describe the two sovereigns, neither of whom would have suggested, in 1651, an exact political correlative.⁸ First comes the log, with a huge splash:

At last all calm and silent, in great State
On silver billows he enthroned sate,
Admir'd and reverenc'd by every Frog:
His brow like fate without or frown or smile Struck fear a while;

But when they saw he floated up and down,
Unactive to establish his new Crown;
Some of the greatest of them without dread
Draw neerer to him; now both old and young
   About him throng,
   On's Crown they tread,
And last, they play at Leap-Frog ore his head.

Straight they proclame a fast, and all repair
To vex Heavens King again with tedious prayer,
This stock, this wooden Idoll to remove;
Send them an active Prince, a Monarch stout
   To lead them out,
   One that did love,
New realms to conquer, and his old improve.

The effect of this readjusted series of choices, from monarchy to republic and back again, must have been unsettling at least in 1651, where the frogs' request for the Restoration is so cynically undermined by its predetermined consequences. The Moral is emphatically not a translation of Aesop's advice to the Athenians to endure the current tyranny without complaint or resistance, but a general observation of the fickleness of the nation that assumes an objective distance from both Royalist and republican sentiment:

No government can th'unsetled vulgar please,
Whom change delights think quiet a disease.
Now Anarchie and Armies they maintain,
And wearied, are for Kings and Lords again.

But in 1665, when Ogilby reissued his Fables, he also added Aesop's final address to the Athenians, "To you, O Citizens, bear this, he said, / Lest you a greater mischief do invade." The referential system had in the interim become both clearer and more complicated. On the one hand, the repeated requests made to Cromwell during his Protectorate that he should assume the crown would have made it possible to identify that extremely "active Prince" as the stork; on the other, five years of experience of Charles II had already produced such considerable disillusionment with the ideal of Restoration that the frog fable took on a new lease of life. Even before the Restoration, John Milton had responded in a fury to a sermon delivered in 1656 by the Royalist divine, Matthew Griffith, which had featured The Frogs Desiring a King in an antipopulist argument. Milton claimed that Griffith had distorted the true meaning of the fable:

The frogs (being once a free Nation saith the fable) petitioned Jupiter for a King: he tumbl'd among them a log. They found it insensible: they petitioned then for a King that should be active: he sent them a Crane (a Stork saith the fable) which straight fell to pecking them up. This you apply to the reproof of them who desire change: wheras indeed the true moral shews rather the folly of those, who being free seek a King; which for the most part either as a log lies heavy on his Subjects, without doing ought worthie of his dignitie and the charge to maintaine him, or as a Stork, is ever pecking them up and devouring them.⁹

When the Stuarts were reinstalled, this republican version of the fable was likely to appear in opposition poetry. Two of Marvell's verse satires assume its immediate intelligibility. One of the predictions of Nostradamus's Prophecy remarks of Charles II that "The Frogs shall then grow weary of their Crane / And pray to Jove to take him back againe"; and in The Dialogue between the Two Horses, itself formally related to the animal fable, one of the horses asks the other, "What is thy opinion of James Duke of York?" "The same that the Froggs had of Jupiters Stork," is the by now predictable answer.¹⁰ In 1674 John Freke's ballad, The History of Insipids, was more outspoken still, completely abandoning the fable's classical statement of its purpose:

Then, farewell, sacred Majesty,
Let's pull all brutish tyrants down!
Where men are born and still live free,
There ev'ry head doth wear a crown.
Mankind, like miserable frogs,
Is wretched, kinged by storks or logs.¹¹

Perhaps because The Frogs Desiring a King was no longer controllable, it did not appear to John Dryden a useful medium for debating the political and religious issues of 1687; at least not centrally. Yet because The Hind and the Panther anticipates and attempted to avert the revolution of 1688, as Milton had anticipated and attempted to avert the Restoration, Dryden does in fact allude in a single line to The Frogs Desiring a King, as also to the episode in I Samuel 8 with which, in constitutional theory, it was aligned. When the doves, in their rivalry with the chickens, summon the buzzard from abroad to be their "Potentate," and one who, Dryden's fable warns, will ultimately make them his prey, the allusion to the stork (or crane) of the classical fable is not only plausible, it is authorially encouraged; for the buzzard is, among many other alarming and reprehensible characteristics, described as "A King, whom in his wrath, th'Almighty gave."¹² Yet the warning against those who would once more disrupt the political system by displacing James II and bringing over William and Mary to restore a Protestant dynasty is, of course, only the last item in Dryden's ambitious polemical program.

In part because the poem is so argumentative, it is easy to underestimate how powerful and consistently it engages with fabulist tradition. Dryden's framing fable can be too easily forgotten as he struggles with his defense of Catholic dogma from the awkward posture of a new convert to that religion; but the fact remains that the Hind, as a nonpredatory representative of a faith now claimed as the only true one, has been chosen by Dryden to stand in for the innocent and yet highly intelligent hero of the The Wolf and the Lamb. Indeed, Dryden explains his move by remarking that "the Sheep and harmless Hind / Were never of the persecuting kind" (1:286-87). Against the "milk-white" Hind stands the Anglican panther, spotted by her Reformation antecedents and like them a beast of prey, yet unlike the Baptist boar, the Arian fox, or the Presbyterian wolf, potentially redeemable, "least deform'd, because reform'd the least" (1:409). Dryden thereby suggested that the fable might turn on its own history, and by means of a talking cure allow the powerless (his own tendentious image of Roman Catholicism) not merely to survive but to change the world for the better.

It is the Hind who alludes, in her debate with the Panther, both to The Dog and the Shadow and The Wolf and the Lamb, and adjusts them each to new circumstances.¹³ In the first instance, the Hind complains that the Anglican compromise over the Real Presence in the Eucharist is mere wordsmanship:

Then said the Hind, as you the matter state
Not only Jesuits can equivocate;
For real, as you now the word expound,
From solid substance dwindles to a sound.
Methinks an Aesop's fable you repeat,
You know who took the shadow for the meat.
(2:44-49)

This witty play on the relationship between physical and spiritual eating also connects fabling with equivocation, a relation which, as we shall see, Dryden himself exploited at the level of metapoetics. But sustenance connects the theological issue to the ecclesiastical, in the sense that the poem debates the respective rights of Anglicans and Roman Catholics to royal protection and preferment. With the Catholic James now on the throne, the newly Catholic poet takes the position that the Established Church is always on the verge of returning to the wolf, the Romans in England of becoming the lamb:

If Caesar to his own his hand extends,
Say which of yours his charity offends:

When at the fountains head, as merit ought
To claim the place, you take a swilling draught,
How easie 'tis an envious eye to throw,
And tax the sheep for troubling streams below,
Or call her, (when no farther cause you find,)
An enemy profess'd of all your kind.
But then, perhaps, the wicked World wou'd think,
The Wolf design'd to eat as well as drink.
(3:109-10, 123-30)

There is also evidence that Dryden saturated himself in earlier English developments of the fable. In his invaluable edition of The Hind and the Panther and in his monograph on Dryden's poetry, Earl Miner demonstrated that the two long fables-within-a-fable that constitute most of the third part of the poem are derived from Ogilby's Fables. That told by the panther, the story of the martin's prophecy of disaster to the swallows, their failure to heed it, and their fatal refusal to fly south before winter, is a rewriting of Ogilby's Fable 40, The Parliament of Birds. That told by the hind, the story of the rivalry between the pigeons ("a sort of Doves") and the "Domestick Poultry" on an estate, echoes Ogilby's Fable 20, Of the Doves and Hawks, in which the doves, engaged against their will in a defensive war with the kites, call in the hawks to assist them but then become the victims of their own mercenaries. Miner showed how the essentially political premises of Ogilby's fables were adapted, by fusion with the biblical typology of dove, swallow, and cock, to Dryden's more complex subject, more complex because the politics of both church and state were involved;¹⁴ and that in the second fable, Ogilby as model is fused with Chaucer, whose Nun's Priest's Tale of Chauntecleer and the Fox is used as an allegory of the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. So the Protestant pigeons berate the cock for waking them up in the morning, warning that contemporary Roman Catholics may share the fate of their imprudent forebears:

Such feats in former times had wrought the falls
Of crowing Chanticleers in Cloyster'd Walls.
Expell'd for this, and for their Lands they fled,
And Sister Partlet with her hooded head
Was hooted hence, because she would not pray a-bed.
(3:1020-25)

But Miner did not, I think, realize that a crucial passage in the first part of the poem, which raises the problem of man's relation to the beasts, is also a rebuttal of Sidney's fable of the origins of monarchy; crucial because, in Dryden's argument, the survival of Catholicism in England is tied to the survival of a monarchy without constitutional limitation.

When Dryden stands, in the first part of his poem, "like Adam, naming ev'ry beast" (1:309) who will participate in his fable, he appropriates to himself the role assigned to Aesop, who in 1687, the same year as The Hind and the Panther, had appeared on the frontispiece of Francis Barlow's new and more elaborate polyglot edition (see figure 3) as a mild and plebeian Adam surrounded by the animals, the spokesman for a peaceable kingdom. But Dryden's animal world is considerably more threatening; and he is careful to observe that the various beasts of the Reformed churches are politically dangerous also. The Wolf brings with him no mark of his kinship with "Wickliff's brood," "But his innate antipathy to kings" (1:177); together with the Fox, he engages in political sabotage abroad (the Protestant version, Dryden suggests, of Jesuit missions, which in their own terms had been antimonarchical). Significantly, Dryden links "Holland" (the Dutch republic) and Scotland as hotbeds of this heresy, both "Drawn to the dreggs of a Democracy," (1:211).

The question thus raised, about what sort of Adamic kingship was required for this more savage kingdom, was answered in terms readily transferable to James II. In the address "To the Reader" that accompanied the poem in the spring of 1687, Dryden complimented James on his famous or notorious "Declaration for Liberty of Conscience," issued April 4, 1687, and part of his campaign both to extend the royal prerogative, to surround himself with Roman Catholic appointees, and to seek the support of those to the religious left of the established church, the Dissenters or Nonconformists. As Dryden very well knew, this "Declaration" by James had precisely the same unconstitutionality that had forced his brother to withdraw a similar proclamation, similarly motivated, in 1672. Calmly finessing this issue in his preface, Dryden asserted that "some of the Dissenters in their Addresses to His Majesty have said that He has restor'd God to his Empire over Conscience: I Confess I dare not stretch the Figure to so great a boldness: but I may safely say, that Conscience is the Royalty and Prerogative of every Private man. He is absolute in his own Breast, and accountable to no Earthly Power, for that which passes only betwixt God and Him" (p. 120). This plan, to conceal the teeth of the prerogative by metaphorical transubstantiation, is then subtly developed in the first part of the poem, where Dryden, following Sidney, creates his image of a natural monarchy by describing Adam's creation.

Beasts are the subjects of tyrannick sway,
Where still the stronger on the weaker prey.
Man onely of a softer mold is made;
Not for his fellows ruine, but their aid:
The noble image of the Deity.

One portion of informing fire was giv'n
To Brutes, th'inferiour family of heav'n:

But, when arriv'd at last to humane race,
The god-head took a deep consid'ring space:
And, to distinguish man from all the rest,
Unlock'd the sacred treasures of his breast:
And mercy mix'd with reason did impart;
One to his head, the other to his heart:
Reason to rule, but mercy to forgive:
The first is law, the last prerogative.
And like his mind his outward form appear'd;
When issuing naked, to the wondring herd,
He charm'd their eyes, & for they lov'd, they fear'd.
Not arm'd with horns of arbitrary might,
Or claws to seize their furry spoils in fight,
Or with increase of feet t'o'ertake 'em in their flight.
Of easie shape, and pliant ev'ry way;
Confessing still the softness of his clay,
And kind as kings upon their coronation day.
(L1. 245-71; italics added)

Here too, evidently, the royal prerogative is disarmed by being defined, not as individual freedom of conscience, but as the choice of an absolute monarch to set aside law when he feels compassion—a genial if somewhat disingenuous metaphor for a royal but illegal declaration of toleration. But, in addition, and in ways not apparent unless one were familiar with Sidney's fable of the origins of monarchy, Dryden here offered his own substitute for the fable of The Frogs Desiring a King. Unlike Sidney's first man, created as an amalgam of the divine and the bestial, this Adam matches the figure appropriated by Robert Filmer for the central arguments of the Patriarcha, that peculiar defense of absolute monarchy as established in Eden, published in 1680 and promoted as a tool to be used against the Whigs throughout the Exclusionist crisis. Dryden's original ruler is created solely by God, and receives no characteristics from the animals, who, in turn, make no request for a sovereign. Whereas Sidney's Jove reluctantly consented to the new creation by giving the animals "part of [his] heav'nly fire" and allowing them to finish the job, Dryden's God gave "One portion of informing fire" to the inferior creation, but created Man in "the noble image of the Deity." Nakedness and pliability are now essential characteristics, not, as in Sidney's fable, a temporary pose of vegetarian restraint. And though Dryden's fable of the origins of monarchy chooses to acknowledge the ending required by his scriptural plot (his Adam loses his innocence; "pride of Empire sour'd his balmy bloud," "the murtherer Cain was latent in his loins"), this transition from meekness to savagery in the ruler naturally avoids Sidney's double advice to his participants: "O man, rage not beyond thy need.… And you, poor beasts, in patience bide your hell, Or know your strengths."

But there remains the half-acknowledged problem of monarchical violence. The passage ends by casually switching fables, with a bland allusion to James as the "British Lyon" who is merciful even to his foes. The prototype of the merciful lion is, of course, the ancient fable of The Lion and the Mouse. In Ogilby's version of this fable the politics of monarch and subject are fully developed. The mouse, when caught, explains: "think not, great Sir, / I came to pick a hole in Royal Fur, / Nor with the Wolf and Fox did I contrive / 'Gainst you, nor question'd your Prerogative." The moral of the fable is ambiguous:

Mercy makes Princes Gods; but mildest Thrones
Are often shook with huge Rebellions:
Small Help may bring great Aid, and better far
Is Policy than Strength in Peace or War.¹⁵

This advice was not only descriptive of James's strategy in declaring toleration for nonconformity, but also of Dryden's strategy in The Hind and the Panther, designed, as the preface indicates, to persuade more of the "Sects" to withdraw themselves "from the Communion of the Panther" and join the king.

By thus representing monarchy both by Adamic kingship, as Robert Filmer had done, and by the fabulist tradition which made the lion the king of the beasts, Dryden was in fact admitting to a chasm in his own argument. As John Locke was to argue in 1689 (or indeed, if we accept Peter Laslett's argument, had already argued in his not yet published refutation of Filmer and support for Shaftesbury's position), the Stuart position on monarchy's origins as based on Genesis was fundamentally illogical:

[Adam] was Created, or began to exist, by God's immediate Power, without the intervention of Parents or the preexistence of any of the same species to beget him, when it pleased God he should; and so did the Lion, the King of Beasts before him, by the same Creating Power of God: and if bare existence by that Power, and in that way, will give Dominion, without any more ado, our Author, by this Argument, will make the Lion have as good a Title to it as he, and certainly the Ancienter.¹⁶

And if conceived as a lion, James or any other sovereign was immediately resituated on the other side of the ethical line Dryden is attempting to draw, along with the Panther and the other beasts of prey.

It was for this reason, I suggest, that at the opening of part 3 of his poem Dryden identified yet another important model in the adaptation of Aesopian tradition:

Much malice mingl'd with a little wit
Perhaps may censure this mysterious writ,

Let Aesop answer, who has set to view,
Such beasts as Greece and Phrygia never knew;
And mother Hubbard in her homely dress,
Has sharply blam'd a British Lioness,
That Queen, whose feast the factious rabble keep,
Expos'd obscenely naked and a-sleep.
Led by those great examples, may not I
The wanted organs of their words supply?¹⁷

Why was Spenser's Mother Hubberds Tale so chosen for special mention? Because, I suggest, the earlier poem offered a structural solution to the "king of the beasts" dilemma, with its ethical ambiguities.

First, Dryden seems to have used Spenser's authority as permission to admit that the dilemma existed. By mentioning Spenser's "blaming" of the British lioness Dryden indicated that he read it as criticism of Elizabeth (and adjusted the lion's sex accordingly). And he seems to have connected Spenser's impertinence in showing the queen "Expos'd obscenely naked and a-sleep," with the famous trick played by Aesop on his master's wife, whose nakedness was thereby displayed to the philosophical community. This genealogy connects Spenser's delinquent lioness to the various lions in the English royal dynasty, and especially to Henry VIII, "A Lyon old, obscene, and furious made by lust" (1:351), linked by the word "obscene" to Spenser's critique of Elizabeth, literally her father, and whose role in bringing about the English Reformation was a primal cause of the current religious divergences.

By having admitted the liabilities of the lion myth, Dryden was freed to maneuver, and to suggest that Spenser's satirical view was not the only possibility. Indeed, in Absalom and Achitophel he had already introduced James as a noble lion, though that image was discolored by being put in the mouth of Shaftesbury, as part of his temptation of Monmouth, the king's illegitimate son, to lead a popular rebellion. There, Absalom advises violence to prevent violence:

Then the next Heir, a Prince, Severe and Wise,
Already looks on you with Jealous Eyes;
Sees through the thin Disguises of your Arts,
And markes your Progress in the Peoples Hearts.
Though now his mighty Soul its Grief contains;
He meditates Revenge who least Complains,
And like a Lyon, Slumbring in the way,
Or Sleep dissembling, while he waits his Prey,
His fearless Foes within his Distance draws;
Constrains his Roaring, and Contracts his Paws;
Till at the last, his time for Fury found,
He shoots with suddain Vengeance from the Ground:
The Prostrate Vulgar, passes o'r, and Spares;
But with a Lordly Rage, his Hunters teares.
(L1.44154)¹⁸

In 1681 James had not yet properly succeeded to leonine status. In 1687, as the "British Lyon" who reappears in Dryden's bestiary, he is not only awake and alert but also merciful, pacific, a creature of courage and integrity, and legitimately king. But because of his species it is impossible to separate him absolutely from earlier members of the dynasty. Just at the moment when Dryden makes explicit, his identification of the Lion with James II he carefully represents him as a figure of power under rational control, thereby admitting (by denying) the savage potential of the fabulist metaphor:

So when the gen'rous Lyon has in sight
His equal match, he rouses for the fight;
But when his foe lyes prostrate on the plain,
He sheathes his paws, uncurls his angry mane;

So James, if great with less we may compare,
Arrests his rowling thunder-bolts in air.
(3:267-74)

But Spenser had also, in Mother Hubberds Tale, provided the model for an alternative metaphor for monarchy: The caring, if too incautious husbandman, owner of the sheep farm. Turning this too to the purposes of support rather than critique, Dryden makes his final representation of James the "Plain good Man" of the hind's own fable, a figure whose social status, as a landowner with three "lineal" estates, is carefully balanced by signs of humility and statements of personal attentiveness:

Another Farm he had behind his House,
Not overstock't, but barely for his use;
Wherein his poor Domestick Poultry fed,
And from his Pious Hands receiv'd their Bread.
(3:993-96)

This characterization was, of course, also modeled on that of the poor widow in Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, the modest owner of Chauntecleer. As in Chaucer, the story and its teller gets its authority from the world of Aesopian materialism, or, as Leonardo put it in his fable of the razor, of "rustici villani." But in Dryden's adjustment, it elegantly supported his implied plea for toleration between the rival religions ("He therefore makes all Birds of ev'ry Sect / Free of his Farm, with promise to respect / Their sev'ral Kinds alike, and equally protect" (3:1244-46).

By once again inverting the fables he inherited, Dryden hoped to purge the image of monarchy of the negative inferences (tragic irresponsibility in the husbandman, reprehensible sloth in the lion) that had previously seemed so "natural." Yet precisely by reacting to Spenser and following his binary model, Dryden offered a view of the king's conduct in 1687 that was, while transparent in its sympathies, ambiguous at least in its rhetorical effect. Was the king a lion or a careful farmer, the Declaration of Indulgence an act of beneficence or an unconstitutional exertion of the prerogative? In the line of the best political fables, The Hind and the Panther remained, if not argumentatively, structurally evasive on this, the central political point.

As with the case of La Fontaine, I do not think we need to give this discovery a deconstructive edge. To do so is, I believe, to misunderstand Dryden's assertion that his poem is a "mysterious writ." In Steven Zwicker's account of Dryden's career, it is claimed that Dryden in The Hind and the Panther collated three kinds of "mysterious writ": his newly adopted theology, with its insistence that true religion consists of mysteries and hence requires one central and infallible interpreter; the indeterminacy of reference with which all language is infected; and the fable genre itself. Zwicker suggested that ambiguity was part of Dryden's subject and his special contribution; and that, therefore, the resistance of the interpolated bird fables to interpretation, and in particular the apparent confusion between William III and Gilbert Burnet as alternative prototypes for the buzzard, was fully intentional, part of Dryden's chosen disguise, a way of speaking his mind without being fully held to account.¹⁹ It is not clear to me why being thought to refer both to William and Burnet was a form of personal insurance against career damage; and although it is certain that Dryden in this poem was fascinated by problems of interpretation in Scripture, and in the technical meaning of "equivocation" as saying something, under pressure, other than what one truly believes, the poststructuralist notion of the indeterminacy of language in general is not a useful interpretive tool here. As in Bellosta's account of La Fontaine and his interest in the Life of Aesop, a belief in the indeterminacy of language in general works against, rather than strengthening, the fable's claim to indeterminacy. A text that with-holds its full meaning because of the sociopolitical constraints against open discussion is a text committed to referentiality; this does not prevent it from advertising its writerly mystery. As Hegel put the paradox, because the fabulist "dare not speak his teaching openly," he can "only make it intelligible in a kind of riddle which is at the same time always being solved."

But we cannot leave Dryden and the fable in 1687. For in 1700 he marked the turn of the century by producing a volume of Fables Ancient and Modern that contained, as its only fable in the strict sense, a new version of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, already, I have argued, a bulwark against the political implications of the fable as Lydgate would recover them. In his Preface to Fables, Dryden, who had read his Chaucer in editions that included the Plowman's Tale, noted, in order to dispose of it, the mistaken tradition of Chaucer's political radicalism: "In Richard's Time, I doubt, he was a little dipt in the Rebellion of the Commons; and being Brother-in-Law to John of Ghant, it is no wonder if he follow'd the Fortunes of that Family; and was well with Henry the Fourth when he had depos'd his Predecessor. Neither is it to be admir'd … if that great Politician should be pleas'd to have the greatest Wit of those Times in his Interests, and to be the Trumpet of his Praises." The effect is to make any supposed democratic sympathies disappear into the territory of patronage and political self-interest.

As Steven Zwicker defined the tone of Fables, its method is "not primarily figural or historical," and its context is "not political crisis" as it had been for The Hind and the Panther, "but poetry and eternity," "literary self-consciousness," "the sense of place and tradition in literary terms."²⁰ Just so. The Preface establishes Chaucer as "the Father of English Poetry" (replacing, we might add, Aesop as the Father of the fable), and conceives of poetry in terms of lineage and property inheritance, significantly by primogeniture: "for we have our Lineal Descents and Clans, as well as other Families: Spencer more than once insinuates, that the Soul of Chaucer was transfus'd into his Body; and that he was begotten by him Two hundred years after his Decease." And by translating the Nun's Priest's Tale into early modern idiom, therefore, as he claimed, preserving it for posterity, Dryden located himself in the same lineage.

Nevertheless, Dryden took this solemn occasion as an opportunity to rewrite Chaucer in more than linguistic terms. Consider, for instance, his description of Chauntecleer's sexual prowess. Where Chaucer had merely written that:

This gentil cok hadde in his governaunce
Sevene hennes for to doon al his plesaunce,
Whiche were his sustres and his paramours,
(L1. 2863-65)

Dryden expatiates on the very problem of lineage that his Preface renders literary but his era had seen as the center of political controversy:

This gentle Cock for solace of his Life,
Six Misses had beside his lawful Wife;
Scandal that spares no King, tho' ne'er so good,
Says, they were all of his own Flesh and Blood:
His Sisters both by Sire, and Mother's side,
And sure their likeness show'd them near ally'd.
But make the worst, the Monarch did no more,
Than all the Ptolomeys had done before:
When Incest is for Int'rest of a Nation,
'Tis made no Sin by Holy Dispensation.
Some Lines have been maintain'd by this alone,
Which by their common Ugliness are known.
(L1. 55-66)

If this passage recalls the witty opening of Absalom and Achitophel, in which Charles II's sexual pro-miscuity is given an ironic dispensation from disapproval by scriptural precedent, it also glances nastily at the fact that William III's father married his first cousin Mary, daughter of Charles I. And the rest of the poem gradually reveals that, for Dryden, it has become an allegory not of ecclesiastical but of political history. In Chauntecleer's tale of how a man dreamed his own murder, where Chaucer wrote, "the peple out sterte" (1. 3043), Dryden substituted, "The Mob came roaring out" (I. 276); and into a second tale, of how an equally prophetic dream of shipwreck was disregarded, Dryden inserted the following passage of mockery:

Dreams are but Interludes, which Fancy makes,
When Monarch-Reason sleeps, this Mimick wakes:
Compounds a Medley of disjointed Things,
A Mob of Coblers, and a Court of Kings:
(L1. 325-29)

These seemingly petty alterations collate with Dryden's treatment of the brief Chaucerian allusion to the Peasants' Revolt, which is carefully brought up to date. Where Chaucer wrote, in describing the barnyard clamor that follows Chauntecleer's seizure, "The dokes cryden as men wolde hem quelle" (1. 4580) Dryden substituted: "The Ducks that heard the Proclamation cry'd, / And fear'd a Persecution might betide" (11. 736-37). And where Chaucer made a negative comparison between this uproar and "Jakke Straw and his meynee," whose uprising he had designated mere occupational rivalry ("Whan thay they wolden any Flemyng kille"), Dryden ventured his own opinion that popular protest is itself a form of persecutiorn:

Jack Straw at London-stone with all his Rout
Struck not the City with so loud a Shout;
Not when with English Hate they did pursue
A French Man, or an unbelieving Jew.
(L1. 742-45)

Finally, Dryden's Fox is presented, as Chaucer's certainly was not, as the protagonist in an act of sedition. Having made the same mistake as his victim, and opened his mouth incautiously, thereby losing his prey, this Reynard reveals himself as a would-be kingnapper:

Th'appearance is against me, I confess,
Who seemingly have put you in Distress:
You, if your Goodness does not plead my Cause,
May think I broke all hospitable Laws,
To bear you from your Palace-Yard by Might,
And put your noble Person in a Fright:

I practis'd it, to make you taste your Cheer,
With double Pleasure first prepar'd by fear.
So loyal Subjects often seize their Prince,
Forc'd (for his Good) to seeming Violence,
Yet mean his sacred Person not the least Offence.

A vision of the late 1640s, when Charles I was a prisoner of the army, here blends, in poetic retrospective, with the arguments of Shaftesbury as Dryden had represented them in Absalom and Achitophel, advising Monmouth to lead a popular rebellion:

Commit a pleasing rape upon the crown.
Secure his person to secure your cause:
They who possess the prince, possess the laws.
(L1. 474-77)

It is fair to say that when Dryden entered the field, the need or fashion for fables was at its height. Ogilby's first collection was reissued in 1665, 1668, and 1675, and supplemented in 1668 with a new collection of Aesopics, written to take into account the changed political circumstances of the Restoration. Following Ogilby's lead, if not his partial independence from the fabulist canon, Francis Barlow had introduced in 1666 the first version of his polyglot edition, which combined the attraction of an illustrated Aesop, accompanied by a Life, with an encouragement to read the fables in a broader European context. This version and its main competitor, the translation of the fables and the Life by W. D., were constantly reprinted throughout the last three decades of the century. In both W. D.'s and Barlow's edition, as also in the anonymous Aesop Explained … accommodated to the Lives and Manners of Men in this present Age (1682), or Aesop Naturaliz'd and Expos'd To the Publick View (1697), the political implications of the text were either implicit or dormant, the translators apparently being content to draw on the market that had been created for them by Ogilby. Not so, however, with the two major translations that would follow and shape the eighteenth-century perception of fabulist discourse, the rival contributions of Sir Roger L'Estrange and Samuel Croxall, who took up positions diametrically opposite on the fable's social function, and chose those positions in relation to actual political parties.

Because L'Estrange and Croxall cannot be separated, I choose to postpone discussion of them until my last chapter, where the story of the fable's political afterlife is briefly and selectively told. The publication of Dryden's Fables conveniently serves to mark a real turning point, not least in its retrospective quality, reminding Dryden's readers of what had motivated fabulist activity throughout the century, but especially from its turbulent center onward. In its own turn towards literary history, even when, as in the prefatory discussion of lineage, the literary serves as a metaphor for the political, rather than the converse, Fables Ancient and Modern indeed looks forward to the demise of the Aesopian fable proper, or rather to the gradual disappearance of its strong relation to the real history of its early modern discoverers and rediscoverers.

Notes

¹ See Hoyt Hudson, "John Hepwith's Spenserian Satire upon Buckingham: With Some Jacobean Analogues," Huntington Library Bulletin 6 (1934): 39-71.

² Robert Johnson et al., eds., Commons Debates 1628, 5 vols. (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1977), 3:532.

³ Lenaghan, ed., Caxton's Aesop, p. 77.

⁴Aesop's Fables, with Their Morals in Prose and Verse, Grammatically Translated, 14th ed. (London, 1698), p. 7.

⁵ Mary H. Pritchard, "Fables Moral and Political: The adaptation of the Aesopian Fable Collection to English Social and Political Life, 1651-1722" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 1976), pp. 36-37.

⁶ For Ogilby's biography, see Katherine Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, England, 1976); and see also Marion Eames, "John Ogilby and His Aesop," Bulletin of the New York Public Library 65 (1961): 73-78; Earl Miner's facsimile edition of the 1668 Fables (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1965), pp. i-xiv; Margret Schuchard, John Ogilby, 1660-1676; Lebenbild eines Gentelman mit vielen Karieren (Hamburg, 1973).

⁷ For Engagement politics see David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649-1660 (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 30-51, 73-96.

⁸ Compare, however, Philip Massinger's play, The Emperor of the East, which appeared in 1631-32, at the beginning of Charles I's period of prerogative rule, and whose fictional protagonist complains:

… O the miserable
Condition of a Prince! who though hee varie
More shapes than Proteus in his minde, and manners,
Hee cannot winne an universall suffrage,
From the many-headed Monster, Multitude.
Like Aesops foolish Frogges they trample on him
As a senselesse blocke, if his government bee easie.
And if he prove a Stroke, they croke, and rayle
Against him as a tyranne.

See The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. Philip Edwards and Colin Gibson, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1976), p. 428.

⁹ John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. D. M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953-80), 7:748.

¹⁰ Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), 1:179, 212.

¹¹ John Freke, The History of Insipids, in Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George de F. Lord (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1975), p. 143.

¹² John Dryden, "The Hind and the Panther," pt. 3, 1. 1198, in Poems 1685-1692, ed. Earl Miner and Vincent Dearing, in Works, 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956-87), vol. 3 (1969).

¹³ In Dryden's Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1967), pp. 157, 339, Earl Miner points out that the text is sprinkled with other, less obvious allusions to fables, and that in one passage (1:438-47) there are three allusions within ten lines, to The Husbandman and the Wood, The Gourd and the Pine, and The Sun, the Wind, and the Traveller.

¹⁴ Miner's commentary is available both in his notes to the edition, cited above, and in Dryden's Poetry, pp. 144-205.

¹⁵ John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop Paraphras'd in Verse, Fable 9.

¹⁶ John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1967), p. 169. For Laslett's argument about dating see pp. 45-66.

¹⁷ Dryden, Works, 3:161.

¹⁸ Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, cited from Poems 1681-1684, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., in Works, vol. 2 (1972).

¹⁹ Steven Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984), pp. 123-58.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 164.