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How did Mac Flecknoe influence Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad?
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John Dryden
John Dryden, oil painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1693; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe served as the immediate ancestor and a primary influence on Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.12
As the first English mock-heroic poem, Mac Flecknoe established the template for using an elevated, heroic style to ridicule contemporary figures by portraying them as literary dunces. Dryden’s work specifically targeted the playwright Thomas Shadwell, mocking his abilities as a critic and artist through good-humoured but devastating contempt. Pope adopted this satirical framework, refining the mock-heroic tradition to critique the intellectual and cultural failings of his own era in The Dunciad.12