The English Restoration significantly impacted the work of the artists of the day. As England moved from a monarchy under Charles I, to a commonwealth under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, and then back again to a monarchy with Charles II on...

In England, the Baroque was a partly useful concept when discussing about the Restoration Comedy. The English theatres were closed for 18 years, during the English Civil War and English Commonwealth. They were reopened in the Restoration of...

In Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, dullness is the defining trait of the mock epic’s “hero”, and decay is employed as a theme and a weapon within the poem, underlined mostly as the decay of wit as the speaker dangles his victim and his reputation from his...

In Dryden’s satirical poem Mac Flecknoe mock heroism is used to convey a scathing view of dullness specifically as it pertains to writers, authority figures such as monarchs, and the unintelligent masses. This technique allows Dryden to convey an...

‘Age has rusted what the poet writ/ Worn out his language and obscur’d his wit.’ (JOESEPH ADDISON)

Within the quote under consideration, Addison asserts that within the Restoration period the skill and rhetoric of the English poet had diminished...

John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), a verse satire based in Restoration England, has led Edward Albert to dub him “the champion of monarchy”. Indeed, the poet’s use of two Biblical narratives (the tale of David and Absalom and the fable...

‘The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction. And he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender, than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease’

Satire is a difficult,...