Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Fabrications
- II Failures
- III Speculations
- IV The Dunciads
- 7 Living in Counterhistory: The Dunciads as Mock-Prophecy
- 8 The Indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads
- 9 Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads
- Conclusion: Events that Didn't Happen
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The Indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads
from IV - The Dunciads
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- I Fabrications
- II Failures
- III Speculations
- IV The Dunciads
- 7 Living in Counterhistory: The Dunciads as Mock-Prophecy
- 8 The Indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads
- 9 Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads
- Conclusion: Events that Didn't Happen
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE Dunciad in Four Books works hard to fanfare the arrival of the new hero, Bays, or Colley Cibber. An important new addition in 1743 is Aristarchus's disquisition ‘On the Hero of the Poem’. He quotes Cibber while relating the opinion of ‘carpers objecting to the clear title of our hero’. Their problem is that he was not, like Achilles and Aeneas, ‘Goddess-born’ (though the poem makes it clear that he is, like a Hanoverian king, adopted), but a player, and, in Cibber's phrase, ‘never even a hero on the stage’ (1743, p. 83). In answer, Aristarchus brings in two advocates for the theory that heroes are self-made, not begotten:
To all this we have, as we conceive, a sufficient answer from the Roman historian, Fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae: Every man is the Smith of his own fortune. The politic Florentine Nicholas Machiavel goeth still farther, and affirms that a man needs but to believe himself a Hero to be one of the best. ‘Let him (saith he) but fancy himself capable of the highest things, and he will of course be able to atchieve them.’ Laying this down as a principle, it will certainly and incontestably follow, that, if ever Hero was such a character, OURS is: For if ever man thought himself such, OURS doth. (p. 84)
There are at least three layers to peel apart here. Firstly, this is an ironic comment on Cibber's brazen forehead, the false modesty dishonestly covering his self-importance. Like many of the dunces, Cibber thinks that he is propelling himself when he is really plummeting into oblivion. Second, ironically granting Cibber such historical agency comically (but still effectively) absolves Pope of the crime of malicious, particular satire. This momentarily effaces Pope's agency, obscuring his intending hand. As Pope himself puts it elsewhere, ‘Fools rush into my Head and so I write’: Cibber puts himself in Pope's poem, or simply finds himself there, having rushed into the vacuum created by Dulness and the convenient evacuation of Tibbald.
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- Things that Didn't HappenWriting, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743, pp. 207 - 222Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019