Although the writer of The Scribleriad was obviously prompted by the example of The Dunciad and borrows many details from Pope, his poem has very little of that mock-epic quality its title might lead a reader to expect. There are slight traces of parody of Virgil when, on page [16], Cibber appears as Aeneas (the character he was soon to assume in The Dunciad in Four Books) and the epicene Hervey is portrayed as a rejuvenated Sybil guiding the hero through a hell of duncery. There are hints of Paradise Lost too, when Cibber, Satan-like, undertakes his mission (p. [17]) and the dunces, Belial-like, agree “they’re better in a cursed State,/Than to be totally annihilate” (p. [5]). But “Scriblerus’” use of Virgil and Milton, unlike Pope’s, does not import some graver meaning into his poem; it provides him with neither a framework of moral symbols nor a continuous narrative thread.
The action is slight and its setting vague. Sometimes we are in a brothel, crowded with bullies, punks, lords, draymen and linkboys, and managed by Cibber (pp. [11-12]) or by Dulness (p. [10]). This setting, together with the claim that Cibber’s own muse is a prostitute (p. [8]), serves as a retort to the Tom-Tit in the brothel story in Cibber’s Letter to Pope and to emphasize the element of literary prostitution in the activities of Cibber and his like. At other times the setting is a regular dunces’ club (pp. [9], [16]) of the type chronicled in the pages of The Grub Street Journal. Towards the end of the poem it is an Assembly Room (p. [19]) presided over by the Goddess of Puffs (a happy development of that more commonplace mythical figure “Fame,” Dulness’ handmaiden in The New Dunciad) who sets a test for the dunces and judges their performance. Only in this concluding episode can this rather shapeless poem (which certainly is neither the mock epic nor the epistle that its title-page promises) be assigned to any regular literary “kind.” This “kind” is that favorite of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the “Sessions Poem.”[4]
“Scriblerus’” account of the sessions of the dunces is more allusive and particularized than the rest of the poem and consequently calls for somewhat more detailed comment. The chief cases at the sessions embrace the pamphlet battle of summer 1742 and theatrical rivalry in the 1741-42 London season. Cibber’s contribution to the paper-war, the Letter to Pope (written according to Cibber “At the Desire of several Persons of Quality”), is introduced at page [17] and consigned on page [19] to William Lewis its printer. Hervey stalks in “under VIRTUE’s Name” in a “borrow’d Shape” (p. [24]), an allusion to the suggestion in the prefatory epistle to The Difference between Verbal and Practical Virtue that the poem was Cibber’s work. (The “horse him” on [25] of The Scribleriad refers to Cibber’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III.) Other pamphlets issued in August 1742 are mentioned on page [24]—Sawney and Colley,[5] which “Scriblerus” calls “CLODDY’s Dialogue,” and A Blast upon Bays.[6]
Turning to the theatre, “Scriblerus” attacks all three major companies of the 1741-42 London season. He first introduces the two patented theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, as rivals only in that debased dramatic form the pantomime. “The angry Quack” (p. [25]) is John Weaver, dancing master at Drury Lane and author of Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721), who claimed for himself[7] the credit of having originated pantomime upon the English stage. Weaver’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Drury Lane (1718) was hardly noticed, whereas John Rich had more recently bestowed “an ORPHEUS on the Town” (p. [25]) to very different effect. Rich’s Orpheus and Eurydice: With the Metamorphoses of Harlequin had opened on 12 February 1740 at Covent Garden, where he was manager. With Rich himself as Harlequin, it was a wild success that season—remaining a regular and highly popular afterpiece through the 1741-42 season and later.
What The Scribleriad tells us of “Ambivius Turpio, the Stage ’Squire” (p. [26]) suggests that he is to be identified with Charles Fleetwood, Esq.,[8] the wealthy, inexperienced amateur who managed Drury Lane (this even though the original Ambivius Turpio was an actor, while Fleetwood, apparently, was not). All managers were frequently involved in disputes over actors’ pay, but Fleetwood’s were the most notorious. It was the Drury Lane company that included “the contending POLLYS” (p. [27])—Mrs. Cibber and Mrs. Clive who had bitterly quarrelled in 1736 over who should play that role in The Beggar’s Opera. Fleetwood, like Rich, gave a play for the benefit of Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey.[9] What little that Fleetwood knew of management he might well have learned from his one-time under-manager Theophilus Cibber, the “young PTOLOMY” (p. [27]) who, of course, had derived his knowledge from his “great Sire alone.”
The third theatre attacked in The Scribleriad is Goodman’s Fields. Its manager, Henry Giffard, had no patent, but contrived to evade the Licensing Act by the subterfuge of charging admission to a concert in two parts and then offering, “gratis” in the interval, a regular full-length play and afterpiece. The “City Wrath” (p. [26]) arose from the fact that the theatre was inside the City boundaries and was thought to encourage vice; indeed, Sir John Barnard and his fellow aldermen managed to prevent it opening for the 1742-43 season and thereafter. Allusions in the poem are to the theatre’s highly successful 1741-42 season when Garrick sprang to fame as Cibber’s Richard III and also played Tate’s King Lear. On page [26] “Scriblerus” sneers at Garrick’s small stature,[10] and refers to the impropriety of including the figure of Cato in the décor at Goodman’s Fields.
Targets outside the three theatrical companies are chosen from among the obvious ones already attacked by Pope. Mrs. Haywood, who in 1742 had turned publisher under the sign of “Fame,” is shown (p. [21]) appropriately enough as the first dunce to recognize the Goddess of Puffs. “The Chief of the translating Bards” (p. [23]) is the aged and industrious Ozell, and his fellows include Theobald and Thomas Cooke (p. [24]).[11] The satire extends to touch the Administration and the City, with references to Britain’s hitherto inactive part in the War of the Austrian Succession (p. [9]) and to the manner in which stock-jobbers used false war news to aid their financial speculations (p. [4]). It alludes to the “grand Debate” (p. [8]) of the committee set up in March 1742 to consider charges of corruption against the deposed Walpole (created Lord Orford in February), which by the end of the summer had fizzled out, doubtless because so many members of the new government, including the numerous “Peers new-made” (p. [9]), had shared Walpole’s peculations and wished to cover their tracks. When it hits at the King for his patronage of Cibber (p. [13]), at the Queen for her ridiculous Merlin’s Cave and waxworks in Richmond Gardens (p. [16]),[12] and at the Daily Gazeteer which, until Walpole’s fall, had been expensively subsidized from the government secret service fund and had numbered among its journalists such highly placed statesmen as Walpole’s brother Horatio—then, The Scribleriad suggests, there is a general conspiracy between high ranks and low to encourage Dulness. The Hervey-Cibber alliance is merely the most recent manifestation of this conspiracy.
Although it so obviously arises immediately out of the pamphlet battle of summer 1742, The Scribleriad manages to range more widely in its satire than the anti-Pope lampoons it replies to. Further, it contrives to bring in Pope himself without degrading him to the level of his antagonists. This is done by mounting him on Pegasus and likening the dunces to curs (pp. [13-14]), or comparing him to the sun whose warmth hatches out maggots (pp. [6], [29]):
How many, who have Reams of Paper spoil’d,
Have often sleepless Nights obscurely toil’d,
And buried in their Eggs, like Silkworms, lay
’Till his warm Satire shew’d them Life and Day?
Here then, my Sons, is all your living Hope,
To be immortal Scriblers, rail at POPE.
The image, the attitude and the phrasing alike are borrowed from Pope, for The Scribleriad is highly derivative throughout. Only two or three times does “Scriblerus” improve at all upon the many hints he steals from Pope. I have already mentioned the Goddess Puffs, but other happy touches are to be found in a spirited travesty (pp. [16-17]) of the opening lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XIII:[13]