SOURCE: Munns, Jessica. “‘The Monster Libell’: Power, Politics, and the Press in Thomas Otway's The Poet's Complaint of His Muse.” In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, edited by James E. Gill, pp. 59-75. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Munns asserts that the Exclusion Crisis, coupled with Otway's own need for artistic patronage, led him to compose The Poet's Complaint, an ode that gives qualified support to royal authority.]

Thomas Otway's twenty-one stanza ode, The Poet's Complaint of His Muse; or, a Satyr Against Libells, was written in 1679 and published in 1680.¹ It was written at the height of the Exclusion Crisis—the movement to exclude the heir, the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from the royal succession—which many feared was a prelude to another civil war. Although the poem describes the contemporary political fractures and concludes with a panegyric on the Duke, the work's overt political content has been ignored. The few critical comments that have been made about The Poet's Complaint have tended to stress the originality of its opening, probably autobiographical, stanzas, and the work is generally referred to now only as a source of information about Otway. Apart from any gleanings The Poet's Complaint may offer with respect to Otway's short and troubled life, however, the poem offers compelling evidence of what Deborah C. Payne has described as the flawed “cultural machinery” of the Restoration.

As Payne notes, while aristocratic and royal patronage encouraged the “project of royalist myth-making” the gap “between professed aristocratic munificence and actual material practice was far too apparent to impoverished writers and other artists” (106). This gap is certainly apparent in the dedication of the poem to the Earl of Ossory, as the author sues for patronage promising that he will then be enabled to write a second and celebratory part to the poem (Otway 2: 403-4).² But by July 1680 Ossory was dead: there was no patronage and there is no celebratory second part to The Poet's Complaint. The materiality of the political-poetic culture of the Restoration is inescapable.

The very structure of The Poet's Complaint incorporates a critique of the failed structure of royal and aristocratic cultural politics. It begins with a loyal poet complaining of his failure to secure “Royall Favour” and patronage (5.121) and concludes with a depiction of the royal family torn apart by power of Libell's “dirty Rhymes” (19.621). The poem, however, not only articulates flaws within the “cultural machinery” of patronage but also exposes flaws in the “royalist myth.” A broadly based popular movement is pitted against a monarchy, one of whose claims to authority rests on the fact of its popular restoration. Anti-exclusionist patrilineal descent is defended amidst images of sterility, and the sacred nature of kingship, another strut of Stuart authority-claims, is evoked by dwelling on images of regal sacrifice and exile. The Poet's Complaint is a poem whose margins invade its center and whose apparent center moves to a marginalized wasteland of inarticulacy. In the monstrous power the poem grants to the oppositional forces ranged against the late Stuart monarchy, we can trace the emergence of new discursive formations articulating the politics of the crowd.³

In the opening six stanzas the author meets a poet, a friend of his, who is raving in a desolate landscape replete with emblems of infertility and degeneration. The poet sketches in a youth of intellectual virtuosity, suddenly cut short and followed by his migration to London.⁴ London is described in conventional satirical terms as the haunt of “Gay Coxcombs, Cowards, Knaves, and prating Fools, / Bullies of o're-grown Bulks, and little Souls, / Gamesters, Half-wits, and Spendthrifts” with whom the poet spends two years in “fulsome Follies” (4.90-92, 97).

The personal materials of the opening stanzas, although offering tantalizing material to the biographer, are generic. Satiric conventions authorized the shaping of an autobiographic presence, often, as in Milton's Lycidas, allied to pastoral conventions. Alvin Kernan, characterizing the satirist in The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, notes that “[s]omehow the satirist seems always to come from a world of pastoral innocence and kindness: he is the prophet come down from the hills to the cities of the plain; the gawky farm-boy, shepherd, or plowman come to the big city; or the scholar, nurtured at the university, abroad in the cruel world” (18). The opening stanzas manage to convey many of these thoughts with the happy childhood and precocious academic genius of the poet contrasting strongly with his subsequent life of debauchery in “our new Sodom” (10.310, emphasis in original), London, which he now abhors. The poet goes on to describe his development as a writer couched, conventionally, in terms of a love affair with the Muse who allured him with promises of “Royall Favour” and “endless Fame” but neglected to warn him of their brief and transitory nature (5.119, 121). Initially, the affair was happy and fertile, producing “Off-springs of the choicest kinds, / Such as have pleas'd the noblest minds” (6.144-45). At the height of his success, however, the poet's inspiration dried up, “my faithless Muse was gone … The more I strove, the more I fail'd,” and his literary productions, “the hidious Issue of my Brains,” were deformed (6.152, 155, 163). The poet, sterile as the landscape he now inhabits, swears “never [to] write agen” (6.165). At this point the poem takes another direction.

The poet calls on Reason to reveal the truth about the Muse, who is shown to be a “rampant, tawdry Quean” (7.213) with a shabby “Train” of bad poets. The processional description that follows is in the mode of the lampoon A Session of the Poets (ca. 1676). Indeed, the group includes the “blundering Sot” (8.224) who wrote the Session, as well the author of the pornographic Sodom; or, The Quintessence of Debauchery, and “Lord Lampoon and Monsieur Song” who promised to make the Muse “famous at Court” (8.234-36, emphasis in original).⁵ The “City Poet” (8.237, emphasis in original), Thomas Jordan, who had just created a pageant for the Whig Lord Mayor of London, Sir Robert Clayton, is included and, bringing up the rear, comes “The Poets Scandall, and the Muses Shame,” a monstrous beast called “LIBELL” (8: 245-46, emphasis in original). With the entrance of Libell, the poem really takes off as the poetamachia of the Restoration is superseded by an allegorical narrative of the genesis of Libell.

Libell's factional credentials are impeccable and are worth outlining. They represent a brief history of Restoration England, an anatomy of the Whig faction, and not only an explanation but even a justification for civil unrest. Libell's mother is a witch who used to live in the wilderness in a cottage “Built of mens Bones slaughter'd in Civill War” (9.257); her “late dead Pander” was “Old Presbyter Rebellion,” and her name is revealed as “THE GOOD OLD CAUSE” (9.285, 286, 288; emphasis in original)—the term associated with the civil war parliamentarians. After the plague and fire, the witch, disguised as a modest widow, makes her way to the city of London—the stronghold of the Whigs—where she sedulously ferments discontent. Her constituency as outlined here represents a broad coalition ranging from those who have been “disgusted at the Court,” or have failed to find preferment, to the “Atheist” hoping for “Toleration,” to rebels seeking “Pow'r,” spendthrifts seeking royal or church lands, and, finally, the “Ungovernable, headlong Multitude” to whom she promises “strange Liberties” (11.337-55; emphasis in original). It is from her vigorous sexual congress with this entire multitude of social and political discontent that Libell is born.

The birth of Libell is an emphatically female event attended by “Bawd Hypocrisy,” “Madam Impudence,” “Dame Scandall,” Queen “Malice,” and, last but not least, “Midwife Mutiny” (12.371-78, emphasis in original). Libell is sent to nurse with a “Sister-witch … of another sort” who, from her abode in the “outcasts of a Northern factious Town,” Edinburgh, can be identified as Scottish Presbyterianism (13.396, 399, emphasis in original).⁶ Libell's higher education is at the hands of a “Wretche,” perhaps William Petyt, the rising Whig barrister, whose The Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted, published in 1680, was in circulation in late 1679.⁷ Certainly, the wretche's favorite reading is “Old worn-out Statutes, and Records / Of Commons Priviledges, and the Rights of Lords,” and the “Acts, Resolves, and Orders made / By the old Long Rump-Parliament” (14.456-57, emphasis in original). The “Rights of Lords” was a major plank in the Whig platform as in A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country circulating in 1675 and warning against weakening the power of the nobility who stand between the people and the imposition of arbitrary monarchical power.⁸ Thus tutored in Whig Parliamentary politics, Libell learns how to distinguish between “Legislative, and Judicial power,” and how to insinuate a “Commonwealth, / And Democracy” by pretending an interest merely in a “Well-mixt Monarchy” (15.481-85, emphasis in original).⁹ Generally, works such as Petyt's, pamphlets such as A Letter from a Person of Quality and A Letter from a Parliament Man to his Friend (1675), and polemics such as Andrew Marvell's Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677), had reinvigorated the debate over parliamentary rights versus the royal prerogative.¹⁰ The issue of how to define the nature and locus of political authority and national sovereignty lay behind the contemporary crises and informs the style, organization, and topics of The Poet's Complaint.

Bred and schooled in the alternative radical tradition of English politics, Libell successfully enters the political arena, gains “Authority and Place,” and signals his adherence to Shaftesbury's camp by the “wearing of a Mysticall green Ribband in his Hat” (15.503, 508).¹¹ Significantly, along with this entry into the political arena comes Libell's access to the press. The poet reveals that Libell now enjoys the embraces of his “faithless Clio” and is “Poetry all o're,” becoming the author of a wide range of oppositional texts: “Painter's Advices, Letanies, / Ballads” (16.514, 519, 523-24; emphasis in original), as well as the “Lucius Junius Brutus” pamphlet.¹²

As the poem reaches this point, with Libell strongly placed in London and fluently denouncing the government of Charles II in a variety of literary genres, the poet, filled with despair, asks, “But from such Ills when will our wretched State / Be freed?” (16.531-32). The poem offers no answer to this question, and instead makes a transition from satire to panegyric with a portrait of Libell's latest and greatest victim, the Duke of York, forced into exile by the exclusion fever Libell has whipped up. The poem's last four stanzas review the Duke's naval career in glowing terms and depict the heroic grace with which he acquiesces to the “Mandates” from “the most Loving BROTHER, Kindest KING” (19.631, 634, emphasis in original) to leave the country. The last line of the poem describes observers watching the royal barges fade out of sight and then turning their eyes once more inland to “the hated Shore”—an England over which the monarchy has lost control.

In terms of its style, The Poet's Complaint is not so much innovatory as indebted to older forms of political verse: to Spenser's allegorical treatment of Britain in The Faerie Queene, or to the high seriousness of Abraham Cowley in his three-book poem, The Civil Warre (ca. 1643). The poem's use of allegory is more sustained than was usual, but allegory was also a regular feature, as in Elkanah Settle's The Medal Reversed (1682), which features the Hags Sedition and Persecution (30-45), or John Ayloffe's Oceana and Britannia (1681) in which Mother Britannia debates eagerly with the spirit of Republicanism over the fate of her “Daughter,” Parliament.¹³ The alternation from satire to panegyric was also a standard feature of satire; Antony Wood, for instance, praised John Cleveland for his “high panegyric and smart satyrs.”¹⁴ A mixture of styles was often held to be a feature of satire, as in Menippean mixtures of high and low forms, digressions, fantasy, obscenity, and obscure pedantry. The Poet's Complaint certainly contains Menippean elements of the grotesque; however, unlike Samuel Butler's Hudibras, to which the poem refers, it cannot be classified as a thoroughgoing Menippean satire.¹⁵The Poet's Complaint describes anarchic disorder, but in tone, mood, and style it does not embody anarchy. It is grimly depressed and somber and distinctly lacking in extravagant wit or, indeed, in any sort of wit. Thomas Shadwell (if he is in fact the author), commented in the satire The Tory Poets (1682) that Otway's style was oddly suited to his subject matter.

Sure thou wast drunk, when in Pindarick strain,
'Gainst Libels didst thy dull Muse Complain:
But why didst term it Satyr? Satyr [is] tart.

(221-23)

Shadwell (or whoever) had a point. From his plays we cannot doubt but that savage humor was well within Otway's capacity, but in avoiding “tart” satire he was, surely, drawing on older models to attempt a kind of solemn satire which signaled its distance from the contemporary and degraded forms employed by Libell.

It was not unusual for the satires of the period to attack what were felt to be lowly forms of attack, the lampoon and the libel. The argument over styles of satire was often couched in terms of a comparison between the plain style and good nature of Horace and what Ramen Selden describes as Juvenal's “majestic … reprehension” (96). This debate antedates and postdates the years of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, but is never merely a question of style; it is also always a question of political and social site. In his Essay on Poetry (1682), Mulgrave gravely insisted that

But 'tis mens Foibles nicely to unfold,
Which makes a Satyr different from a Scold.
Rage you must hide, and prejudice lay down:
A Satyr's Smile is sharper than his Frown.

(121-24, Mulgrave 2: 290)

In moving satire to the higher ground of the censure of human foibles, what is also being projected is the upper-class castration of a verse form strongly associated with popular political agitation. For the confidently aristocratic Earl of Rochester, such well-bred attacks are as pointless as venting wind: “I'd fart just as I write, for my own ease” (An Epistolary Essay from M. G. to O. B. upon Their Mutual Poems).¹⁶ However, for less aristocratic writers engaged in political debate, linguistic violence needs justification if the writer is to retain the higher ground for his party.

John Oldham, for instance, defended the use of violent language and crude style in his “Prologue to Satires Upon the Jesuits” (1679, pub. 1681). He looks forward to drawing blood with his “stabbing pen” and remarks that “Nor need there art, or genius here to use, / When indignation can create a muse” (2: 28-29). Surgical severance, as later advocated by Dryden in his Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), is, perhaps, the most approved, aristocratic, and authoritative form of attack: “there is still a vast distance betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place” (Of Dramatic Poesy 2: 137). Butchering, such as Oldham advocates, however, is allowable in a discourse on a subject which deserves no better. As in Oldham's and Dryden's satiric practice, alternations between urbanity and “Billingsgate” indicate a righteous moral anger held in check by a superior intellect. Either satiric form takes authority from its form: elegant ease indicates courtly confidence; scabrous attack, particularly when prefaced by explanatory justification, indicates a writing down from a position of strength.

Aristocratic disdain and the urbane sneer are not options for a poet who has opened with stanzas indicating his poverty and his marginality to the world of the court. Placed from the start in a position of weakness not strength, and specifically attacking the poetry of violence and anger, Otway endeavored to find an alternative form and voice. To select, however, a form and voice outside of the available current forms of burlesque inflation or deflation, anger and lofty contempt, as Otway has in writing The Poet's Complaint as an allegorical Pindaric ode, is a dangerous choice. Indeed, the poem's mixtures of modes combine to elevate the opposition and lay poetic wreaths at the feet of the monarchy. The Pindaric's strains of glory can all too easily function as an elegiac commentary on a lost cause; autobiography demonstrates the sterility of the author/s; literary lampoon indicates the success of others; allegory portrays the power of sedition, and panegyric depicts the defeat of the royal family. What Otway failed to do in The Poet's Complaint was to pour aristocratic disdain on the lowly form of the political libel, or to show by the raw violence of his own form that he suited his style to his lowly subject. His monster Libell is the true Tory nightmare—vital, articulate, and popular. He flourishes in the city, “A Leader in a factious Crew” (15.499), and as the Muse's new and vigorous lover is highly productive.

Libell's power is further emphasized by the recounting of a myth of defeated royalty. Libell is compared to a “Serpent's head,” a “huge Dragon, sent by Fate / To lay a sinfull Kingdom wast” (16.532, 534) and duly fed virgins by a terrified city until, running out of lowly maidens, the King sacrifices his own daughter. Now, the poem asserts, the situation has called for the sacrifice of “A ROYALL BROTHER” (16.549, emphasis in original). The parallelism the poem insists on between the virgin sacrifice and the Duke's exile enables the transition from allegory to direct statement, and thus from fantastical England to “real” England. However, integrating myth and allegory with politics and people creates problems here as “this Dragon Libell” is elevated to an instrument of “Fate” punishing a “sinfull Kingdom,” (17.550, 16.534-35, emphasis in original). If, however, the current political unrest is an instrument of fate, and if the kingdom is sinful, then the Stuarts' misery can figure as pathetic but providential.

Moreover, in emphasizing that while the King of legend sacrificed his “Royall Daughter” the present King sacrifices his “ROYALL BROTHER,” the myth chosen as parallel also draws attention to the fact that Charles has no legitimate children (16.349, emphasis in original). Due to the failure of the royal bed, the King's brother is heir and must stand in as royal sacrifice. The topic of the exile of the Duke of York, audaciously but also almost suicidally in terms of Tory politics, concentrates on the weakest link in the royal platform. The Duke of York, who had declared himself a Roman Catholic in 1673 and had married a Catholic Princess as his second wife, was, of course, at the heart of the Exclusion Crisis as well as being implicated via members of his household in the Popish Plot. In early March 1679, seeking to lessen conflict with the newly elected Parliament about to take its seat, Charles II ordered his brother's exile, and it is with the enactment of this exile that the poem concludes, depicting, at variance to other contemporary accounts, the King's sorrow at his brother's departure.¹⁷

For the Whig opposition, the Duke's religion and character combined into a package threatening the imposition in England of absolutist rule along the lines of the French monarchy. J. P. Kenyon cites a report on the Duke of York drawn up for Shaftesbury before March 1679 (i.e., before the sitting of the Parliament elected in February), which is notably violent in its language. “His religion well suits with his temper; heady, violent and bloody, who easily believes the rashest and worst of counsels to be the most sincere and hearty. … His interest and design are to introduce a military and arbitrary government in his brother's time” (171).

The poem's attempt to refute such beliefs is evident as stanza eighteen opens with a description of the Duke's willingness to sacrifice his life for “his ungratefull Country's sake” (18.578). The stress, however, on the Duke's military (naval) prowess was unlikely to be reassuring to those who never doubted that the man was brave and, indeed, feared he might unleash that courage and military ability on the “ungratefull” nation.

Charles II followed the advice of his first minister, the Earl of Danby, in sending his brother into exile, an action which could be seen as acknowledging his brother's unsuitability and unpopularity. Kenyon describes the King's decision as “unwise” (171), and according to J. R. Jones “most people interpreted James's exile as the prelude to his abandonment” (140). Tactlessly, but in tune with the poem's mournful and defeated tone, it is this critical moment of concession, widely seen as establishing the grounds for further concessions, that is highlighted.

What is missing in the poem's allegorical structure is Perseus or any other vision or version of salvation, such as Libell turning his venom on his fellow scribblers. Such a possibility is suggested in Absalom and Achitophel (1682), as Dryden predicts that the viper of conspiracy will end up by consuming itself (1012-13). Dryden successfully modulates from his own mud-slinging libel and evocations of the grotesque and unruly into panegyric. The awakened David expels the forces of the grotesque, restores order, and, through that restoration, erases the need for satire and its lowlier cousins, libel and lampoon. A series of panegyric portraits sketch in the qualities of the brave and loyal men who support the throne, and their character and fidelity gives credence to the emergence of David as a just, grim, and powerful monarch. Authority is represented and enacted—just as after proroguing the Oxford Parliament of 1681, Charles II was managing to stem the Whig opposition. In The Poet's Complaint, however, written at a critically earlier date, the only authority the poem can call upon is the grace with which the Stuarts face defeat.

Insofar as Charles sought to remove his brother from the public gaze and to reduce that visibility that endangered the entire Stuart monarchy, the poem reverses that royal policy. Otway, in a passage that emphasizes eyes—the Duchess's weeping eyes and the “longing Eyes” and straining “sight” (21.702, 708, 710) of those who watch the embarkation—puts the Duke of York back firmly in the picture. Despite, or because of, the glowing terms used to describe Charles II as a “most Loving BROTHER, Kindest KING,” filled with “Royall Goodness” (19.634, 21.687, emphasis in original), there is an inescapable implication that Charles is not merely an “unhappy Monarch,” but a powerless monarch. The use of panegyric to articulate Tory praise for royal policy precludes the possibility of portraying the exile of the Duke of York as a short-term, if Machiavellian, policy while the King rides out the storm quietly. The alternative, however, is to portray Charles submitting passively to the all-powerful Libell as he bids farewell to those he loves. The closing stanzas' themes of royal suffering, mourning, and sacrifice elevate the monarchy with their religiomagical connotations, but also elegize it out of existence as the regal scapegoat fades from sight (21.710).

All too well this undoubtedly “loyal” poem depicts the weakness of royal authority and the power of a popular opposition movement. All too well it depicts the current unrest as the product of long-standing grievance with its roots in a civil war which the “other” side won. As represented by the poem's broad historical and social scope, Libell's power wells up from the past, embraces all the present causes for discontent, and threatens to overwhelm the future. A broad base of popular political dissent is delineated as the witch unites the free-thinking atheist and the canting puritan, the city businessmen, the disgruntled courtier, and the “Ungovernable … Multitude.” For all these disparate groups Libell, child of the times, has a voice and the ability to incite and inscribe their anger in any and all styles and genres.

In 1679 it was plausible to see Libell as triumphant. The Licensing Act that enabled government censorship had lapsed and the period sees an enormous outpouring of satiric materials both from the press and from the manuscript houses. The production and distribution of antigovernment political materials were taken very seriously, and, in the absence of a Licensing Act, the Treason Act of 1660 served, indicting “all printing, writing, preaching, or malicious and advised speaking calculated to compass or devise the death, destruction, injury, or restraint of the sovereign or to deprive him of his style, honor, or kingly name.”¹⁸ In 1677 coffee-houses, seen as sites for the distribution of manuscripts untouched by the Licensing Act, were briefly closed down. Printers of Whig verses, such as Francis Smith, and the owners of manuscript houses, such as Robert Julien, “Secretary to the Muses,” repeatedly had their premises raided and were fined and pilloried.

Despite these efforts, verse and prose libel and lampoon constantly eluded government vigilance. Historians have credited the flow of political propaganda, which intensified during the two elections of 1679, as contributing to the widespread politicization of the period. Libell could indeed be seen as contributing to the destabilization of the realm. Satires, as I have indicated, are often also literary critiques, but The Poet's Complaint is in many ways one of the first critiques of the media. The allegorical narrative delineates the seductive power of the media to reach mass audiences (the Muse as whore); it emphasizes the rich variety of the oppositional press (Libell as general author), and it grants that press the ability to create consensus (the mother of Libell copulates with all sects and factions). In granting such effective powers to Libell, the poem also demonstrates that the government has lost control of the media. Otway loyally responded to a period of disruption and represented the danger of the popular politics. The method he chose, however, an elaborate allegory of the varied and dynamic forces of subversion, also undermines the royal authority he wished to support.

Otway's allegory works against itself, or, in Paul de Man's terms, works as allegory must to reveal, even as it strains to reach beyond itself, that there is nothing beyond itself.¹⁹ The royal family cannot represent any overarching fixed principle exterior to the world of the poem. They too are engulfed by the words Libell has unleashed, and by the end they are sent out into the “wider Flood” (21.711), which is not just the English Channel but also the deluge which wipes out all known signs. In contrast to the images of fading royalty, the allegorical figures take on a life and demonic energy of their own, spawning new stories and possibilities as the personifications expand, alter, and grow. Indeed, the danger, power (and attraction) of the allegorized figures and forces lie in their constantly mutating and all inclusive natures—natures which take them beyond allegory's putative power to stabilize meaning.

The Good Old Cause is an ugly witch, becomes an attractive widow, becomes the mistress of mankind, becomes a mother—Libell is a boor, a reasonably accomplished scholar and Latinist, an able politician, a skillful poet, an ardent lover, and lastly a devouring dragon. The witch, as an allegorized personification of the Good Old Cause, emerges from her marginal position in a hovel, an aberration from some normative order, perversely threatening that norm to become in all her variety and power a new norm as a principle of alteration and movement. There is a chiastic shift of styles and positions as the “real” figures of Duke and King become fabulous projections from “Ancient Legends” (16.533) and exiles and outcasts, while the vibrant and seditious personifications, identified with the Whig political press, occupy the central ground. The mutability of the personifications not only endows them with energy but also defeats the ability of the allegory (even if only briefly) to stabilize and fix meaning.

Loyalty to the Stuart cause (and it is here that the autobiographical materials matter) is situated at the social margins, articulated by a rejected poet to the shadowy figure of the listener, also an author, but one on whom Fortune “always turn'd her Back” (8.207). Marginal men, the poet and his friend are passive spectators and turn the readers into similarly passive spectators of the pageant of Libell's triumph. The loyal writers' literary impotence and sterile site represent, I suggest, an unconscious referent to Stuart political impotence, which is also figuratively embodied in the dragon myth.

As already indicated, an issue which that myth highlights is precisely that the King was not a father, not legitimately at least, which was why, if the political myth of male rule was to be sustained, James, Duke of York, had to inherit the throne. This failure in paternal reproduction is intimated in the first stanza. The poet's site—the position of Stuart loyalty—has reverted to a primal nothingness, “bare, and naked,” like the world before

… by the Word it first was made,
          E're God had said,
Let Grass and Herbs and every green thing grow.

(1.11-14)

The paternal “Word” has failed, and the transcendental phallic signifier is notable only by its absence. The “good,” loyal poet is unable to impregnate the Muse and the voice and words of the text itself are fractured by division into two “authors,” or even three, with Otway lurking behind the barren poet and his unsuccessful friend. What has taken over possession of the word is the monstrous Mother as “faithless” Muse and fertile witch, aided and abetted by all those personified bawds, madams, queens, and midwives—Hypocrisy, Impudence, Scandall, Malice, and Mutiny—who preside over the birth of Libell. Libell's wide variety of fathers, in effect, render him fatherless—child of the mother—and place him outside the patriarchal/patrilineal patterns of orderly decent. Against defeated and ineffectual royal grace, the poem pits the unleashed power of the popular and public voice, and shows it to be victorious. The real sovereign is the popular media, Libell, who has seized and holds the word, potent, mutating and female.

Political division along lines of party and interest as opposed to family and faction was new to this period, and there was as yet no language and no political system available to domesticate such division into a patriotic two-party system. Forms of political organization were being invented during the Exclusion Crisis—from pope-burning processions and centralized electioneering to the newsletter, polemics and libels—and, as Richard Ashcraft has argued, “the emergence of new forms of political organization is the key indicator of intense social conflict” (7). Fully alert to the power of new political and propaganda formations, The Poet's Complaint recognizes that a birth of sorts has taken place in the political arena and fails either to erase or incorporate the political nature of division or the power of the press.

The Poet's Complaint succeeds, however, in depicting the provenance of a new source of power and new potential patrons signaling alterations in the materials of culture. Although Shaftesbury is indirectly referred to, not so much specific people as The People move through these stanzas. What is being depicted (with horror) is their entrance into politics and their access to the press as writers and as readers of Libell's various and fluent productions. The “discontented Vermin of ill Times” (19.619) have seized the time: royalty bows down before them, and loyal poets, denied patronage, denied access to the press, are mute or, as in this poem, given voice only to despair.

The Filmer-recycling option, indicating the “absolute dominion” inherited by all kings directly from Adam, is not attempted (Patriarcha 7), nor, as has been indicated, are there any signs of an effective counterpress, a probable cessation to Libell's outpourings, or the disillusion of his constituency.²⁰ Instead, it is the inherent contractions in patriarchal-monarchical ideology that become visible. Susan J. Owen has argued with respect to Tory dramatizations of the period that they tend “to bring out the fragility of and contradictions within late Stuart ideology” (71). A similar process can be discerned as The Poet's Complaint comprehensively demonstrates the literal and political senses in which the monarch is not the father of his people, reveals that the restoration of the monarchy was not universally popular, and allows the illegitimate myth of Libell to supersede and erase the weaker myth of royal sovereignty.

As Robert Markley has pointed out, however, the visibility of ideological fracture can support the need for vigilant repression: “ideology foregrounds contradictions to demonstrate the need for continuing vigilance, censorship, and repression” (72). As a warning text and, indeed, as a self-interested text, The Poet's Complaint points to the dangers of an uncensored press attacking a weak monarchy and surely seeks censorship for Libell and patronage for Loyalty. However, as it pits “dirty Rhymes” against majestic sorrow (19.621), unpopular royalty against popular “democracy,” masculine control against feminine anarchy, and loyalty against Libell, there is a danger that it has too effectively loaded the opposition's dice and too effectively pointed to the specific inadequacies of the embattled remnant. A fractured ideology may garner political support to shore up its cracks and repress its opponents, but a defeated ideology (as we have seen in this latter part of this century) may have to pack up shop.

Moreover, in this poem, as in many of the Tory dramas of the period, a posture of party political support is in itself self-defeating. There should be no possibility of a party against the King who by his nature, by the nature of monarchy, divine regality, and the fatherly care of his people, should be above party, beyond politics, and in no need of defense. In his dedicatory epistle, Otway expresses his hopes “to add a second part and doe all those Great and Good men Justice, that have in his Calamities stuck fast to so gallant a Friend and so good a Master” (404). That is the project Dryden carried out successfully inside a single poem, Absalom and Achitophel: it is not a project anyone was willing to fund Otway to carry out. This is not surprising, for even as he outlines the second part celebrating the Duke of York's supporters, the elegiac and despairing note is dominant.

In the short term, of course, Otway was wrong: the monarchy would survive the crisis and the Duke of York would (briefly) inherit the throne. In the long term he was wrong, too: the emergence of party politics led to the expression of competing but loyal interests; the press became the Fifth Estate, usually loyal, usually conservative; and the people remained safely “mute inglorious Miltons.” Nevertheless, or, indeed, because Otway's visions of subversion represent our orthodox pieties—democracy and a “free” press—what the poem succeeds in presenting from the depth of its dismay is a moment of systemic disarray. This poem delineates but also refutes monarchy's authority claims and refutes but also delineates oppositional claims to authority. In its concentration on the shifting sites of textual power, The Poet's Complaint is a poem about processes that cannot be divorced from a specific history. The poem is also about a specific history—a moment of extreme crisis—which is being textualized under the pressure of collapsing practices and emergent formations.

Notes

1. The poem concludes with James Duke of York's departure for the Spanish Netherlands which took place on March 3, 1679. The Duke returned to defend his accession in September 1679 after Charles II was taken seriously ill in late August. Since neither the Duke's return nor the King's sickness are mentioned, it seems probable, though not certain, that the poem was completed before September. The first reading of the Exclusion Bill was on May 11, 1679, and the poem's representation of the Whigs as busy parliamentarians and the concluding vindication of the Duke of York suggests that the poem was reacting to the Exclusion Bill. The poem was entered in the Term Catalogue for February 1680.

2. All citations from the poem are taken from The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) 2 vols., vol. 2.

3. On the (various) politics of the crowd, see Tim Harris's The London Crowd in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis.

4. Much of this description of the “Poet's” life fits what we know of Otway's own life; for an outline of Otway's life, see J. C. Ghosh's introduction to his edition of Otway's works.

5. Otway seems to have been under the impression that the Whig playwright Elkanah Settle was the author of A Session and hence of its vicious attack on him.

6. As J. C. Ghosh, the most recent and reliable editor of Otway's works points out in his notes, the Whigs supported the Scottish Covenanters who rose in rebellion at Bothwell Brig in 1679.

7. J. G. A. Pocock notes that the work was being read as early as October 1679, which, if Otway is referring to Petyt, would indicate that the poem was completed after the Duke of York's return from exile. This is not inconceivable, but makes the poem's stress on the Duke's exile especially tactless. Pocock also notes that three of Petyt's clerks were questioned in 1676 about writing libels (The Ancient Constitution 186).

8. This pamphlet, ordered burned by the common hangman, emanated from the circle around the Earl of Shaftesbury and was, perhaps, drafted by John Locke.

9. The debate over the concept of a mixed monarchy—that is, a balance of power between King and Commons and people—had been current during the civil war and was revived during this period of crisis. See, for instance, Philip Hunton's A Treatise on Monarchy (1643, reissued in 1680), which advocated a theory of corporate monarchy. Sir Robert Filmer's The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy (1648) was largely written in response to Hunton. With regard to republicanism hiding behind theories of mixed monarchy, see J. G. A. Pocock's discussion of the mid-seventies revival of interest in the works of James Harrington, author of Oceana, in The Machiavellian Moment 401-22.

10. See also Corrine Western's essay, “Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Controversy,” and Caroline Robbins's book, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen.

11. According to Richard Ashcraft, as early as 1677 people were sporting the green ribbons associated with Whig political clubs, see Revolutionary Politics and Locke's “Two Treatises of Government” 141, 143.

12. The “Advice to the Painter” genre, inaugurated by Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter (1666), which offered advice on how to portray the Duke of York heroically after his naval victory over the Dutch in 1665, had rapidly become a vehicle for satire, particularly but not solely associated with Andrew Marvell's series of “Advice” and “Instruction” poems. The Countrey's Late Appeal: An Appeal from the Country to the City: For the Preservation of his Majesties Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion (1679), signed Lucius Junius Brutus and probably written by Charles Blount, a notorious free-thinker.

13. These works are reprinted in Lord 267-277; The Medal Reversed 304-15.

14. Cited by Ruth Nevo, The Dial of Virtue 6. See also Nevo's discussion of railing and raillery in ch. 8 of that work. On the classical precedent for negative and affirmative elements in satire, see Mary Claire Randolph, “The Structural Design of Formal Verse Satire.”

15. Hudibras is cited in stanza 11 (333) in describing the witch's descent on London. See also David J. Rothman's “Hudibras and Menippean Satire” 23-44.

16. Complete Poems, 144, line 36. Rochester is responding to the earlier poem, “An Essay upon Satire” (1679), by Mulgrave and probably also Dryden.

17. As Ghosh notes, Gilbert Burnet stated that the Duke shed many tears at parting “though the King shed none” (Otway 2: 534).

18. Cited from the introduction to Lord, Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State xxvi.

19. Paul de Man has argued that allegory, like language itself, is always self-defeating and cannot point towards a singular truth: “Why is it that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode? Or, to be more specific, why is it that texts that attempt the articulation of epistemology with persuasion turn out to be inconclusive about their own intelligibility in the same manner and for the reasons that produce allegory?” (2)

20. Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, written in prison during the civil war, was published in 1680 in what may be seen as a rather desperate attempt to bolster a political theory of the monarchy. The ideas of patriarchal kingship, however, were widespread and were regularly preached from pulpits.

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