[In the following essay, Elias discusses similarities between Buckingham's characterization of the playwright Mr. Bayes and John Dryden.]

Through the figure of Mr. Bayes, the obnoxious playwright in The Rehearsal (first acted December 1671), Buckingham and his collaborators extended their satiric attack on heroic drama to include the personal characteristics of the poets who wrote it. Since Dryden was foremost among the new dramatists of the Restoration, he took most of the drubbing, and despite his denials, the name “Bayes” stuck with him throughout his career. “Bayes,” of course, helps single out Dryden as The Rehearsal's principal target. As poet laureate since 1670, Dryden wore the official bays of English poetry, and according to the letter from “The Publisher to the Reader” printed with “A Key to The Rehearsal” in 1705, it was Dryden's public position that inspired Buckingham's choice of a name for him. After the death of Davenant, so the letter states, “Mr. Dryden a new Laureat appear'd on the Stage, much admir'd, and highly Applauded; which mov'd the Duke to change the name of his Poet from Bilboa [in an earlier version of The Rehearsal], to Bayes.”¹ This account, though sound enough, reduces Buckingham's play to the level of a personal attack on Dryden, motivated chiefly by Dryden's new prominence as a dramatist.² But as this note will show, the name “Bayes” was also suggested to the authors of The Rehearsal by a purple passage in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), his most important defense of the kind of drama Buckingham brought into ridicule.

In Act I of The Rehearsal, Johnson and Smith encounter Mr. Bayes and ask him to explain his last play. Bayes has already forgotten it, but he reaches into his pocket for his new one and invites them to watch a rehearsal of it:

Faith, Sir, the Intrigo's now quite out of my head; but I have a new one, in my pocket, that I may say is a Virgin; 't has never yet been blown upon. I must tell you one thing, 'tis all new Wit. …³

With this speech, the central action of the farce—the rehearsal of Bayes's zany play—is set in motion. Buckingham was probably recalling the following passage from Dryden's Essay, in which Neander amplifies his argument for dramatic innovation by glancing at the inimitable achievements of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson:

There is scarce an humour, a character, or any kind of plot, which they have not blown upon: all comes sullied or wasted to us: and were they to entertain this age, they could not make so plenteous treatments out of such decayed fortunes. This therefore will be a good argument to us either not to write at all, or to attempt some other way. There is no bays to be expected in their walks: tentanda via est, qua me quoque possum tollere humo.⁴

The quotation from Georgics, III, 8-9 effectively sums up Neander's rejection of the English stage tradition: “I must try a way whereby I, too, may rise from the earth.” Neander casts himself, and all Restoration dramatists by implication, as the unwilling inheritors of a bankrupt estate, adding the gratuitous suggestion that not even Shakespeare or Jonson would succeed if they wrote in such a refined age as the Restoration. His argument here echoes the related theme expressed in Lisideius' quotation from Velleius Paterculus earlier in the debate. If we cannot surpass our predecessors, the Roman historian wrote, we abandon our attempt, “and leaving aside those things in which we cannot excel, we seek for something in which we can advance.”⁵

Despite their polemical modernism, Neander and Lisideius leave themselves open to the charge that innovation is required mainly because the giants of the past have exhausted nearly all the possibilities of the English stage tradition. In their claims, the value of the new drama is less important than the need to innovate. Thus Neander's “other way” becomes Bayes's “new way of writing” in The Rehearsal. Where Dryden aspired to supplant the blank verse tragedies of Shakespeare and Jonson with the rhymed heroic play, Buckingham implies that Dryden's new drama has no other basis than his own whimsies. By defiantly rejecting the tradition, moreover, Dryden has willfully cut himself off from whatever possibilities remain to be explored in it. One effect of the thematic parallel between Neander's speech and Bayes's, then, is to undercut Dryden's argument for dramatic innovation.

Verbal similarities undercut Dryden another way as well. Bayes's image of his play as a virgin who has not yet been “blown upon” gives Dryden's phrase a smutty twist. According to Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, “blow upon” meant “to make public” or “to discredit” in colloquial usage between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The OED defines it as “to make stale or hackneyed,” the sense Dryden uses, but also as “to bring into discredit, defame” (“blow,” def. 30). The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century examples quoted in the OED give the phrase an underlying connotation of sexual defloration which agrees more with Bayes's usage than with Dryden's.⁶ Hence, Bayes's use of “blown upon” indirectly deflates Dryden's use of the same phrase to describe the Restoration dramatist's uneasy relationship to the works of his forebears. Again, by extending the virgin image throughout the rest of his speech (“I shall not be asham'd to discover its nakedness to you”), Bayes's attempt at wit brings to mind some of Dryden's equally unsuccessful efforts, as in the dedication of his Essay: “Seeing then our theatres shut up, I was engaged in these kind of thoughts with the same delight with which men think on their absent mistresses.”⁷ Like Mr. Bayes, Dryden manages to sound like an armchair rake.

If Dryden sought his bays in other walks, then, his professed ambition to earn them gave Buckingham yet one more feature to satirize. Contemporaries failed to notice the parallel, but one last piece of evidence suggests that Dryden saw it. His revisions for the 1683 edition of An Essay emend Neander's speech to read “used” for the telltale “blown upon.”⁸ Although most of Dryden's other revisions are stylistic, this one, I suggest, serves mainly to disguise the verbal similarity I have noted. It achieves secrecy at the cost of some force, however, for the original phrase suits the mood and rhythm of Neander's speech far better than the relatively colorless “used.” Yet no wise man ever admits he is the target of satire, and Dryden's emendation shows he was clever enough to conceal Mr. Bayes's ironic indebtedness to his prose.

Notes

1. Miscellaneous Works, Written by George, Late Duke of Buckingham, ed. Thomas Brown (London, 1705), p. xii.

2. The literature relating Dryden to The Rehearsal is too extensive to cite here. George McFadden summarizes much of it in “Political Satire in The Rehearsal,” YES, [Yearbook of English Studies] 4 (1974), 120-121, which presents evidence that Bayes was partly modeled on Buckingham's political rival, Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington.

3. The Rehearsal, ed. Edward Arber, English Reprints, No. 10 (London, 1868), p. 29.

4. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Essays, ed. George Watson (London, 1962), I, 85.

5. Of Dramatic Poesy, I, 56 and note. I quote Watson's translation.

6. For instance, Mrs. Centlivre's Busie Bodie, II.ii: “If I can but keep my Daughter from being blown upon 'till Signior Babinetto arrives”; and Addison's Spectator, No. 105: “He will … whisper an Intrigue that is not yet blown upon by common fame.”

7. Of Dramatic Poesy, I, 13.

8. The text of An Essay in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 17, eds. S. H. Monk and A. E. Wallace Maurer (Berkeley, 1971), generally follows the 1683 version. See p. 73 for Neander's speech.