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Judas-Friars Of The Popish Plot: The Catholic Perspective On Dryden's The Spanish Fryar*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
Extract
Friar Dominic, the title character of The Spanish Fryar (1681), is usually regarded as a ‘crude caricature of Catholicism,’ an advertisement for Dryden's Protestantism during the Popish Plot crisis of 1680. But there is another way of looking at him. One may ask, why does Dryden make this wicked priest a Dominican at a time when Jesuits are being singled out for vituperation? Why does he call him Friar Dominic, have him refer to Saint Dominic as a ‘sure Card’ who never fails ‘his Votaries,’ and plainly term him ‘this Jacobin’ (II.iii.2), another name for a Dominican? Evidently, he wants the reader to notice that his satire is aimed at one particular Order, not all Catholic Orders. As William Prynne noted long before, ‘no Protestants’ ever wrote ‘so bitterly against these Popish orders as themselves do one against the other.’ Dryden's choice seems odd, since Dominicans were a handful compared to the 120 Jesuits, 80 Benedictines and 55 Franciscans in the English mission. They were not even worth the historian's numbering. Besides this, Cardinal Philip Howard, Dryden's uncle by marriage, was an eminent Dominican under whose aegis Dryden would place two of his sons after the 1688 Revolution, when they went to Rome to serve the Pope.
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References
Notes
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