The Dunciad is a scathing work of satire and critique written by Alexander Pope in the mock-heroic style. It was published three separate times, the first edition containing three books, and the final two editions containing an added fourth book, published in 1728, 1742, and 1743 respectively. In 1725, Pope had released an edition of the works of Shakespeare to which Lewis Theobald, a respected authority on Shakespeare’s original folios, took great exception. Theobald was merciless in his assault on the text. Shortly after, Jonathan Swift, another famous contemporary satirist, came to stay with Pope. It is believed that the combination of these two factors resulted in the creation of The Dunciad, which is centered around a satire of Theobald.
The first three books of The Dunciad were published anonymously by Pope in 1728 as mock-epic parody which assaulted not just Theobald, but a host of other literary and political figures of the time who Pope believed represented the disillusionment of aristocratic ideals. The Dunciad is not merely a spiteful attack against his critics, but an expansive satire which includes under its umbrella of scathing parody everyone involved in its central conceit: that literature and the arts had been handed over to a confederacy of dunces in which commerce and commodification had eclipsed artistry as the final goal of artistic creation. Front and center of this downgrading of British culture was the political corruption of Prime Minister Robert Walpole and the new Hanoverian breed of “foreign” monarchs, embodied by King George II.
In 1742, Pope revised the existing three books and added a fourth under the title The New Dunciad. As a sign of the times, the King of Dulness was no longer Tibbald but Cibber, based on then-poet laureate of England Colley Cibber. In this expanded version, dullness spreads to the arts and sciences and educational disciplines, expanding its control over the intellectual life of Britain. In 1743, he published the final version of the text, which would ultimately be the last text Alexander Pope ever published before his death in 1744.
