If Langbaine was such a momus, he certainly dipped his feather into ink, "the common Remedy" against attack (the Advertisement), giving the lie to his enemies the Poets.
The third point of attack, that concerning the title of esquire, was perhaps intended as an insult to the humble origins of Langbaine's distinguished father and is certainly appropriate satire on a man so concerned with borrowing and on one who had left the university profligately to become "idle" and "a great jockey."[29] Langbaine was entitled to style himself a gentleman[30] as he does in A New Catalogue (but not in the Account); ironically, Langbaine came to the address of esquire by his elections in 1690 and 1691 as inferior and then superior beadle of arts of Oxford University "in consideration of his ingenuity and loss of part of his estate."[31]
Langbaine's reactions to the trick served to intensify his source studies (though this was already promised in the Preface) and to increase his attention and antagonism to Dryden. Moreover, in the Account he added titles very carefully, including that of esquire to Dryden himself. This particular response to his satirists reaches its most amusing dimension with the preciseness of the unknown author listing of "R. A. Gent." (Account, p. 516).
It is probably impossible ever to know if Dryden was involved in the trick played on Langbaine, and it is hard to imagine that Langbaine's criticisms would have engaged even so ardent a controversialist as Dryden, but whether the emotion is in any way mutual or not, Dryden is at the center of Langbaine's thoughts:
Thus our Laureat himself runs down the French Wit in his Marriage a la Mode, and steals from Molliere in his Mock Astrologer; and which makes it more observable, at the same time he does so, pretends in his Epistle to justifie himself from the imputation of Theft ... [and] I cannot but blame him for taxing others with stealing Characters from him, (as he does Settle in his Notes on Morocco) when he himself does the same, almost in all the Plays he writes; and for arraigning his Predecessours for stealing from the Ancients, as he does Johnson; which tis evident that he himself is guilty of the same (Preface, a2r-[a2v], italics reversed).
What is finally remarkable about Langbaine's work, especially in the Preface to Momus and throughout the Account, is his abiding determination to insert himself into virtually every one of Dryden's quarrels, no matter how passe. The quality which binds together Langbaine's heros is not their talent, their common beliefs or their rectitude in admitting sources, but their mutual fortunes in being Dryden's adversaries. The list of support he marshals is a long one and includes Sir Robert Howard and the debate over the rhymed heroic drama; the group led by Clifford and known as the Rota;[32] The Empress of Morocco controversy with Settle;[33] Shadwell, Flecknoe and Mac Flecknoe; the Ancients versus the Moderns; Rymer; and Dryden's attitudes toward the classics, the French, and the English dramatists of the earlier part of the century. The reiterations of these attacks come from Langbaine at a time when Dryden was vulnerable to political and religious charges, and Langbaine does not fail to include those.[34] Langbaine's wholesale attacks seem, however, to have two centers. The principal one concerns the charge of plagiarism, which, as Osborn has shown, was an old one with Dryden, although Langbaine's strictures against borrowing do not represent the most characteristic attitude of his time.[35] More precisely, Langbaine focuses on Dryden's (seeming) arrogance toward the use of source material, and he would "desire our Laureat ... to shun this, Confidence and Self-love, as the worst of Plagues" ([a2v]).[36] The second focus, again one which is seemingly characterized by arrogance, is Dryden's criticism of the three major pre-interregnum dramatists, "these three Great Men" (Account, p. 136), Shakespeare,[37] Fletcher and Jonson. Of these the attacks on Jonson and the "thefts" from him are seen as the most disturbing. Well over a tenth of the Preface and of the Account are devoted to Dryden, but the next mentioned playwright, at least in the Account, is Jonson. His "Excellencies ... are very Great, Noble, and Various" (Account, p. 281). Everywhere his modesty and his exemplary uses of the classics and of the English language are vaunted as a rebuke to Dryden. His opinions on other dramatists are quoted extensively and approvingly. Behind this admiration lie Langbaine's love of ancient learning and the continuing affinity of University men for Jonson. But there is a personal side, too (as there may be with Dryden). Langbaine's father was a friend of Jonson, who presented him with an inscribed copy of Vossius,[38] and Langbaine concludes his article on Jonson with an encomium by his father's friend Anthony Wood.
If Langbaine delights in exposing the antagonisms and contradictions of Dryden's thirty years at the controversial center of London life, he also inadvertently reveals to us a man on a hobby-horse riding at full tilt with a motley pack. His obsession with Dryden, like most obsessions, was, no doubt, a fault. It seems, however, to have generated much of the energy required to accomplish so assiduously such large tasks. Langbaine's attacks angered some contemporary readers;[39] they seem, ineffectually, to have made no adverse impression on at least one of Dryden's patrons: in the same year that Langbaine dedicated the Account to James, Earl of Abington, the Earl commissioned Dryden to write a commemorative ode to his wife Eleanora. For the modern reader, Langbaine's point of view happily supplies the interest which raises his catalogues from any dullness inherent in their genre. Langbaine is a writer one now appreciates not simply for the extensive accuracy of his theatrical recording, but as a man whose attitudes (and many of his inaccuracies) arise passionately out of his interests and prejudices. To paraphrase Mirabell, quite out of context, we admire him "with all his faults, nay like him for his faults."
University of California,
Los Angeles