The main title, "Mac Flecknoe," doesn't clue us into a whole lot about what to expect in the poem. Unless you have your PhD in Mediocre Mid-seventeenth Century English-Irish Poetry, the name "Flecknoe" probably doesn't ring a bell. It's a reference to Richard Flecknoe, an utterly average and totally obscure poet—the relevance of whom is still unclear in relation to our author John Dryden, or Thomas Shadwell, the poem's actual subject. "Mac" was an informal term used to informally address a man of an unknown name, which hints subtly at the satirical and lowbrow tone of the poem. But that's about all we have to work with there.
The subtitle, however ("A Satire upon the True-blue Protestant Poet T.S."), gives us a pretty solid idea of the poem's content and purpose. Dryden tells us flat-out that that the poem is a satire, (or rather a "satyr" as it's spelled in the original), upon somebody named… T.S. Who is this mysterious T.S. we might wonder? T.S. Eliot? Taylor Swift? Tupac Shakur? Tom Selleck? These are all excellent guesses, if we do say so ourselves. We know now, though, that the T.S. in question is none other than English poet Thomas Shadwell, archrival of Dryden.
This connection is hardly obvious to us now. Shadwell is no Shakespeare, as Dryden makes abundantly clear. But folks reading the poem back in the 1680s would probably have been able to connect the dots. Seeing as this isn't the 1680s, however, and nobody knows who the wide world of sports Thomas Shadwell even is anymore (apparently for good reason), we're here to help. Check out our "In a Nutshell" and "Detailed Summary" for more.