Mac Flecknoe

Mac Flecknoe, an extended verse satire by John Dryden, written in the mid-1670s and published anonymously and apparently without Dryden’s authority in 1682. It consists of a devastating attack on the Whig playwright Thomas Shadwell that has never been satisfactorily explained; Shadwell’s reputation has suffered ever since.

The basis of the satire, which represents Shadwell as a literary dunce, is the disagreement between him and Dryden over the quality of Ben Jonson’s wit. This comic lampoon was both the first English mock-heroic poem and the immediate ancestor of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.