Poor Thomas Shadwell.
I get the impression (though I have zero factual evidence for this) that Shadwell was a man who took everything way too seriously: politics, literature, himself. Shadwell would become, or make himself, the butt of jokes by wits far superior to himself, especially
John Dryden.
Shadwell saw himself as the successor to playwright
Ben Jonson and wrote his 18 plays in the manner of Jonson. Like most people alive, I’ve never read one of them, but they’ve been described as having merit, though nowhere close to the level of Jonson’s work, of course.
It was Shadwell’s love of Jonson that contributed to his feud with Dryden, possibly more than politics did. Dryden and Shadwell were actually friends once, but Dryden was dismissive of Jonson’s work, and they conducted a public argument on the subject, which eventually became quite tedious.
To be sure, the politics were important. Dryden was a
Tory Catholic and a supporter of
James II, so he was ousted from the post of
poet laureate by
William and Mary and replaced with Shadwell, a rabid
Protestant Whig who was unable to get his plays performed during much of the reigns of the Catholic kings
Charles II and James II. Shadwell penned political attacks on Dryden and his satires
Absalom and Achitophel (where Shadwell is lampooned as "Og") and
The Medal.
In Dryden’s
mock epic Mac Flecknoe, Dryden depicts Shadwell not as the heir of Ben Jonson, but
Richard Flecknoe, a recently deceased prolific writer widely seen as a
hack in many literary circles. Typically, a writer writing about a person whom he didn’t want to name directly (even if most people knew who he was writing about) would refer to him solely by the first letter of his last name (e.g. S-----). But Dryden called him Sh----- throughout the poem, with obvious
scatological implications. Shadwell never had a chance.
When he died of an overdose of
opium, another
satirist,
Thomas Brown, penned a vicious "
eulogy" of Shadwell. (Brown, an
equal opportunity offender, had also attacked Dryden.)
Tom writ, his readers still slept o’er his book;
For Tom took opium, and they opiates took.
Oh, well. Shadwell happens.