As readers begin Book II of The Dunciad, they are greeted with a much different version of Bayes than before. Rather than the desperate and insecure figure of Book I, the newly crowned and renamed King Cibber is described by Pope as an arrogant and jealous figure looking down upon his many servants, the Dunces. As all manner of Dunces gather to celebrate, the Queen of Dulness declares that there will be a series of heroic games played in order to honor the new successor. All poets and authors who serve Dulness are present, but in addition, all of the Stationers, or printers and sellers of books and print material, who serve Dulness are there as well.
It is these booksellers and bookmakers who Dulness summons forward to compete first. She creates "a poet's form" (ln. 35) and packs it full of symbols meant to denote the qualities of a dull poet: a brain full of feathers, a heart full of lead, and a plump figure connoting commercial success. She places this form in front of the booksellers and tells them that the quickest and nimblest poet capable of reaching this effigy first shall have him as a client whose work they might print. We are told of two stationers in particular vying for the prize: Lintot and Curll. They challenge one another and as the race begins, it appears that Curll will be the winner. As he races to the phantom poet, however, he slips in a puddle of his wife's waste outside of his neighbor's shop. Fearing he will no longer win the race, he cries out to Jove, the most powerful of the Roman gods, and begs him for help winning the race. While Jove on Olympus listens with amusement to the prayers of humans below and does nothing, the goddess Cloacina serves Jove and takes pity on Curll. He had often honored her with his work and so she had him "oil'd with magic juices for the course" (ln. 104) and he makes it to the poet figure first.
Unfortunately, Dulness is playing a trick on him, and while Curll tries to grab the figure, Dulness makes him impossible to catch as he disappears and reappears in a foggy cloud. She creates illusions of other dull poets whom Curll also tries to grab, all to no avail. She finally takes pity on Curll and tells him that his gift shall be that all decent writers will soon have their work made dull like the works of the poets under the Goddess, and she gives him a fine tapestry depicting the actions of her confessors, including Curll, to honor his victory.
Next, a poetess named Eliza is brought forward. The Goddess starts a literal pissing contest, in which the victorious dunce shall win the fair poetess. Curll, Osborne, and Eridanus compete, with Osborne coming out the winner. Then, an extravagant and wealthy looking man with an impressive entourage appears. The Goddess decrees that the next competition, which is aimed at authors this time, will result in the winner of the contest obtaining this wealthy man as their patron. The winner will be determined by "who can tickle best" (ln. 196). While it looks like Welsted may win, a young competitor unheard of prior to the competition prays to Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, who teaches him to find the patron's weakness, just as she taught Paris to find Achilles' heel. As a result, the youth wins.
The Goddess wishes to turn to a different game and rouses the crowd to shout, chant, and make the most chaotic noise possible to determine who is the loudest. After they join her in this command, she gifts them each a "Cat-call," telling them they are all equal in their loud and disruptive sound, but so that the contest may end, brings in her "Brayers" to make the loudest noises possible. Blackmore and his vast voice are proclaimed the winners.
The crowd then makes their way to Fleet Ditch for a diving contest amongst party-writers, or gossip writers. The winner is the diver who can both stay down the longest and also show his love for reveling in the dirt more than any other. He shall win the weekly journals and a pig of lead. Many dunces attempt this challenge, including a "desp'rate pack" (ln. 305) of gazetteers, or pamphlet publishers. Arnall wins and returns from the depths to say that he has encountered mud-nymphs and a branch of the river Styx blending into the Thames, which is the river necessary to cross into the Underworld.
To cap off the games, Dulness issues a contest for critics. They must listen to the dullest and most laborious writing possible without falling asleep. All of the critics, the audience, and even the readers of these works, despite their best efforts, ultimately fall prey to the sleep-inducing literature. Included in this is Cibber, who falls asleep on the Goddess' lap and begins to dream.
Analysis
In Book I, we began to see how dunces like the new King Cibber were trapped in a much narrower perspective than the speaker. Dulness reigned within a "sacr'd Dome (Book I, ln. 122), symbolically representing a human head. Dulness is trapped within the confines of an individual mind. In Book II, Pope builds upon this with his parade of dunces to show how Dulness is also permeating the inner circles of London and English literary society. This internal death of the mind radiates outward in Book II, both in the book's vivid imagery and its characterization of many of the victors of the Goddess of Dulness' games.
The idea that the parade of dunces speaks to the interiority hinted at in Book I is expounded upon by David Sheehan, who writes that the "movement is from outside the limits of the City strictly defined, further and further inward, a movement of contraction and narrowing" (34) and that this speaks to Pope's desire to get to the heart of what is causing Dulness, and not simply elaborating on what it is or can do (35). Sheehan traces the geographic markers of London laid out in Book II from "where the tall Maypole once o'erlooked the Strand" (ln. 24), to "Bridewell" (ln. 257), "to Fleet-ditch" (ln. 260), and so on. But there are other kinds of interiority in geography and in characters that readers are asked to consider. Images like that of the "poet's form" (ln. 35) created by Dulness show readers how key this hollowing out and interiorization is for Dulness in this passage:
She form'd this image of well-bodied air;
With pert flat eyes she window'd well its head,
A brain of Feathers, and a heart of Lead;
And empty words she gave, and sounding strain,
But senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain!" (ln. 42-46)
Pope describes a symbolic transformation of a poet's insides to show that this internal domain is important to Dulness—how it seeks to get at the heart of minds, hearts, and societies. The form mimics this point as well. Pope rarely places enjambed lines in this poem, saving his definitive breaks within lines for particularly important moments. In this passage, the exclamation point which is found in the center of the line acts to draw attention to the center and "heart" of a line, as well. Simply recognizing the expected end-rhymes which frame the ends of these lines and make them appear whole is not enough for Pope. This transitional space is vital.
That this interior space is so important to Pope is clear in the contests he writes about as devised by the Goddess. In the author's challenge for obtaining a patron, they must find a secret or disguised weak spot by poking and prodding at the wealthy target (ln. 215-220). In the diving contest, the competitors must stay as deep as they can for as long as they can, as if delving into the center of the world. Readers see this when they hear the winner encountered mud-nymphs who "suck'd him in" and went so deep as to approach a part of the Underworld (ln. 332, 338). As they parade further onward, the dunces "all descend" (ln. 269), as if sinking into the city. But what is perhaps made clearer from the contests is what has already been relinquished within the minds of the victors. Many of these victors, whether it be Curll or the unknown youth, prayed to gods to assist them in order to win. While this certainly shows a rather reliant nature, it also shows a dullness the Goddess strives for, one that looks to others, be they gods or writers, for their successes and triumphs. The interiority of these figures has been corrupted, and therefore only some exterior force—be it Cloacina (ln. 93) or Venus (ln. 215) or Dulness herself (ln. 243)—can aid them.
Why this interior conquest is so important to Dulness is something that we are shown through the final contest issued by the Goddess in particular. As the boring works read aloud invite sleep, those who "sat the nearest, by the words o'ercome, / Slept first ... One circle first and then a second makes, ... Like motion from one circle to the rest: / So from the midmost the mutation spreads" (ln. 401-402, 406, 408-409). Once Dulness has control of the interior space, be it of a person's mind or a city's intellectual heart, the spread of Dulness is quick and cascading. For Pope, to sacrifice that "midmost" point to Dulness is to sacrifice all points to Dulness. Readers, too, are lulled into sleep with alliterative lines full of open-mouthed tones like "soft creeping words on words the sense compose, [...] As to soft gales top-heavy pines bow low" (ln. 389, 341). Even Pope's audience is not safe once the parade has taken them to the heart of London and opened the gates for Dulness.
While Book II maintains the skill in both form, imagery, and allusion that Book I established, it builds upon these earlier themes and realizes them on a larger scale—that of Dulness' army within London, the heart of Britain's literary, cultural, and intellectual life. Book II reinforces recognizable exterior geography, pushes symbolic understandings of interiority to hyperbolic extremes, and in doing so requires the reader to experience the text, inviting them into the interior of the work. Should these textual clues not make this keystone of Pope's work abundantly clear, just as readers discover how important this interiority is in the final contest, they are plunged into perhaps the most interior of places as they enter Book III: the dreams of King Cibber.
