Representing Religious Toleration in Dryden's The Hind and the Panther (1687)

Abstract

This article situates John Dryden's longest original poem, The Hind and the Panther (1687), within the context of the Stuart court's campaign to cultivate support for repealing legislation penalizing religious nonconformity. Reading the poem's representation of a precariously diversified confessional landscape alongside contemporary discussions of religious toleration, I suggest that the work's polemical and formal incongruity be read in the context of the poem's attempts to enable a space for religious expression within the court's tolerationist agenda. The poem's much observed dissonances register the difficulty of generating culturally legitimate forms of communal identity based on religious diversity, as it experiments with various poetic idioms to negotiate the negative affections bred by the practice of toleration. The inconsistent fluctuation between a zealous defense of the Catholic church on the one hand, and extravagant praise for royal toleration on the other, discloses the poem's efforts to script new modes of sociability that can enable and regulate the expression of competing confessional commitments within a collective defined by an entrenched and irremediable pluralism.