Keys

Abstract

The sense of ‘key’ as ‘something which enables the interpretation of an allegorical, cryptic, or otherwise obscure work’ enters English, according to the OED, with Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in 1605; this sense also encompasses ‘a means of translating a foreign text’. The rudimentary keys to Rabelais that had circulated on the continent, which comprised little more than an index identifying the historical or real counterparts of fictional protagonists, were transformed by Peter Motteux’s commentary on his English translation into a complex allegorical superstructure that offered a politicized model for reading a modern literary ‘classic’ like Gargantua and Pantagruel. It is a model that writers like Swift and Pope were provoked not simply to mock, but also to incorporate into the very fabric of their comic fictions: the late Restoration genre of the ‘key’ was part of the complex of literary materials that went into the development of the eighteenth-century novel in English.