A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'

Author(s): K. E. Robinson
Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 6 (1976), pp. 53-62
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3506388
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 A Reading of Absalom and Achitophel
One of the most forthright comments on Absalom and Achitophel is Yvor Winters's
remark that the whole poem is designed 'to praise a monarch who was a corrupt
fool'.1 It may not represent Winters at his best, but it does state honestly not only
the question of sincerity which so often confronts the critic of Dryden but the answer
offered by the critical orthodoxy - except that the orthodox view praises where
Winters condemns. It has become commonplace to regard the opening lines of
Absalom and Achitophel as a witty transvaluation of Charles's adulteries into a
polygamy in the tradition of the patriarchs and to disregard that this implies that
Dryden evaded - not to say wilfully overlooked - the immorality involved.2 In
order to show that Dryden was morally sincere in his praise of Charles it is necessary
to demonstrate that he faced up to the failings of his monarch but discerned
qualities in the man or his role (or both) which more than compensated for them.
There are indeed strong reasons to suggest that the opening lines have precisely
this balanced perspective and that upon it hinges the structure of the whole poem.
Even a passing examination of the poem's historical context emphasizes the
tenuousness of the normal reading of its beginning. No one would deny that
Absalom and Achitophel is a public poem on a very serious subject, and yet the witty
reading is at variance with such a view. Not that wit and seriousness are mutually
exclusive, but the reading does depict Dryden as resorting to a device more in
keeping with the conceited valedictory poems of the earlier century (so often
underpinned by precisely those 'nice speculations' which he had rejected) than the
perspicuous style which, increasingly an individuating factor of his age, he himself
conceived of as a better tool for reasoning man into truth.3 It is true that Burnet
composed a defence of polygamy with Charles very much in mind, and similar
defences were written as themes by Oxford undergraduates, but Burnet was well
aware that he was being tendentious and the themes were little more than pyro-
technic displays.4 For Dryden to begin on such a note would have been to risk the
status of the whole piece, especially since more than one commentator had
counselled against the misuse of David's example.5 Although the conventional

1 Forms of Discovery (Chicago, 1967), p. I26. Compare Herbert Grierson, Cross-Currents in English
Literature of the Seventeenth Century (i929; reprinted Harmondsworth, 1966), pp. 297-300.
2 See, for example, Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (Oxford, I952), p. 75 and Earl Miner, Dryden's Poetry
(Bloomington, Indiana, I967), pp. 115-22. Compare Bernard Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative
Myth (New Haven, Connecticut, 1961), pp. I48 and 28I.
3 Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, edited by George Watson, 2 vols (London, 1962), II, 76;
Preface to Religio Laici, in The Poems of ohn Dryden, edited by James Kinsley, 4 vols (Oxford, 1958), I,
311. All quotations from Dryden's verse are from the Kinsley edition.
4 'Two Cases of Conscience', in Memoirs of the Secret Service of John Masky, edited by S. Masky
(London, 1733), Appendix ii, pp. xxiv-xxxiii (cf. Miner, pp. 119-20); C. E. Mallet, The History of
the University of Oxford, 3 vols (Oxford, 1924-7), II, 424; Bishop Buret's History of His Own Time,
2 vols (London, 1850), I, 177.
6 See, for example, Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, 10 vols (Leyden, I703-6; reprinted
London, I962), v, 583(D)-584(A) and Thomas Brooks, Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices
(1652; reprinted London, 1968), p. 45.

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54 A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'
attitude towards Absalom and Achitophel is far from denying that the final passages of
the poem deal with Charles's virtues as monarch 'restoring order to his realm',' the
quality of these virtues, and the quality of Dryden's response to them, is called into
doubt if they are shown as belonging to a man whose earlier moral aberrations can
only be wittily praised. The credibility of the poem's ending rests upon the poet's
holding stable criteria of judgement. The opening lines must extenuate Charles's
faults against a stature which is beyond or transcends them; a sense of moral growth
is essential if Charles's final position is to achieve the strength that Dryden obviously
intended.
It should now be clear that, on my reading, the balanced perspective of the
opening lines consists of an admission of Charles's sexual incontinence in such a
context that it is extenuated without being excused. The biblical analogue provided
Dryden with an objective source for his extenuation. Its power as a historical
precedent stems from Dryden's regard for history as 'a prospective-glass carrying
your soul to a vast distance, and taking in the farthest objects of antiquity':
It informs the understanding by the memory. It helps us to judge of what will happen, by
shewing us the like revolutions of former times. For mankind being the same in all ages,
agitated by the same passions, and moved to action by the same interests, nothing can come
to pass but some precedent of the like nature has already been produced, so that having the
causes before our eyes, we cannot easily be deceived in the effects, if we have judgment
enough but to draw the parallel.2

By exercising the memory and looking back to events in the historical (or biblical)
past, it was possible, if the parallel were chosen with sufficient care, to understand
the pattern and significance of contemporary situations. The Davidic analogue
that Dryden inherited offered him a means of focusing the nature of events in the
Exclusion Crisis, including Charles's misdemeanours.3
'Dryden employs a dull narrative', claims Winters (p. I26), 'which elaborately
and clumsily parallels the biblical narrative' because it lacks 'any really unifying
principle'; but Dryden did not restrict himself to a literal application of the
analogue, preferring to concern himself with the pattern of key incidents. This
pattern pivots upon Absalom's rebellion, biblically a function of David's adultery
with Bath-sheba and his murder of Uriah. If the relationship between Absalom's
revolt and Nathan's prophecy in ii Samuel 12. 10-14 is at all obscure, the exegesis
shows no doubt about the connexion. In Thomas Lodge's translation ofJosephus,
for example, Nathan pronounces that David 'should be punished by God, and his
wives should be violated by one of his own sonnes, who should likewise lay a snare
for him: so that he should suffer a manifest plague for the sinne he had committed
in secret'. And closer to the date of Absalom and Achitophel both Milton (in De
Doctrina Christiana) and Matthew Poole's commentary give essentially the same
account.4 David's triumph over Absalom and Absalom's death restate David's

1 Schilling, p. 28I.
2 'The Life of Plutarch' (I683) in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, I, 4. See Miner,
pp. 107-8 and I39-40, and Anne T. Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays
(New Haven, Connecticut, I970), pp. 50-51.
3 See R. F. Jones, 'The Originality of Absalom and Achitophel', MLN, 46 (I93I), 2I I-I8.
4 Thomas Lodge, The Famous and Memorable Works ofjosephus (London, I640), p. 171; The Works of
John Milton, edited by F. A. Patterson et al., I8 vols (New York, 193I-8), xv, 78-9; Matthew Poole,
A Commentary on the Holy Bible, 3 vols (London, I962), I, 608.

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 K. E. ROBINSON
55

quasi-divinity and record the end of his purgation to produce a basically simple
analogical pattern. It consists of a sinful lapse from the stance required by the
sacred office of kingship, its punishment through Absalom, and the monarch's
regeneration. Dryden invokes this pattern proleptically to soften Charles's offences,
harnessing all the authority of a historical precedent to subordinate his immorality
to the satisfaction of the role of king which marks the pattern's fulfilment.
It is, of course, one thing to state, another to show that this analogical pattern
applies to Absalom and Achitophel. The greatest difficulty about the opening lines is
to understand the experience of reading them. The preface assumes that the reader
will bring the received correspondence between David and Charles to bear on the
poem, but that does not mean that David is Charles in any simple way. It is clear
that Dryden will assert the correspondence rather than address himself to it as
inapposite, and yet the opening lines so present the Davidic period by contrast with
the Restoration era that by the time 'Israel's Monarch' is introduced in the seventh
line there is a firm sense of the differences in social institutions which make certain
aspects of the Davidic analogue inapplicable. It is precisely because the opening
lines seem to assert the inapplicable as applicable that they become so complex.
To discard this sense of the inapplicable at the seventh line, to retreat into some
statement about the wit of the opening, would be to falsify the experience of reading.
What follows is an attempt to realize the full impact and importance of this
complexity.
When Mandeville observed 'Of Paradys ne can I not speken propurly I was not
there; it is fer beyonde and that for thinketh me',1 he summed up the problem of
the writer dealing with the paradisial or quasi-paradisial estate. He could have
written of it - others have - but it would only have been possible to do so
meaningfully through negative definition. For Milton such negativity involved a
fallen perspective which, far from being obstructive, lent itself to his concern with
thefelix culpa. On a different scale Dryden too is able to contain such a perspective
in the first few lines of Absalom and Achitophel. He adapts the relativity of temporal
periods implicit in the perspective to distinguish the mores fundamental to the
Davidic period and the Restoration.2 'Priest-craft' (whatever its signification) has
begun; polygamy is a sin. David's polygamy may have been legitimate, but
Charles's analogous behaviour is not. There is nothing to suggest that either the
law prohibiting polygamy or the moral censure of adultery does not apply to
Charles, nor would it be permissible to bring into play the regenerative expectations
of the analogical pattern on the evidence of the Davidic correspondence alone as it
appears in the opening lines. But what might have been a heavy judgement on
Charles's sexual exploits is lightened by a carefully controlled point of view, an
urbane perspective which the analogical pattern finally justifies.3 Although there is
no escape from the law (civil and moral) as it stood in the Restoration period, the
opening lines look back nostalgically, as Miner (p. 18) rightly observes, to the
ahistorical 'pious times' which appeal to the 'daydreams of masculine desires',
when to act naturally was to pursue a purely appetitive course unfettered by
restrictions. This poised nostalgia (so characteristic of the earlier Cavalier wits) is

1 Quoted in David Jones's preface to In Parenthesis (London, 1937), p. xiii.

2 See Alan Roper, Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (London, 1965), p. 13.
3 See Ruth Nevo, The Dial of Virtue (Princeton, New Jersey, 1963), pp. 250-5I.

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56 A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'
finely captured in 'cursedly'. It is not concerned with literal truth; instead the
punctuation of the I68I folios ('E'er one to one was, cursedly, confin'd') makes it
clear that it operates as a parenthetical aside closer to the urbanely mock-serious
than an imprecation. It is this attitude that informs the nebulous reference to
'Priest-craft', which as an extension of the wishful desire for a naturalistic juris-
prudence implicitly attacks argument from authority at the diametrical opposite
of the naturalistic. It is hinted that polygamy is a sin, has become adulterous, only
because those who exercise 'Priest-craft' designate it so. But Dryden does not
crudely 'enlist anti-clerical feeling'.1 The effect of 'Priest-craft' is emotional rather
than logical: like 'cursedly' it expresses a positive but judicious attachment to the
vital natural qualities underlying Charles's quasi-polygamy (and so utterly foreign
to Shaftesbury's 'huddled' procreative activities) whilst maintaining a strict
adherence to the moral law. It is characteristic of Dryden's regard for the tradi-
tional social fabric that he should contain the natural within the limits of the
received moral code in contrast to the deists' emerging examination of the customs
and systems of national law in terms of natural law (which Geoffrey Bullough
dates from the I67os onwards).2
Charles, then, shares meritorious attributes with David in a context which
shows them to be misplaced. Dryden preserves this balance in the earlier parts of
the poem by hinting that beneath the elevation of the heroic couplet and biblical
allusion all is not as it ought to be. It is especially difficult here to describe or
indeed understand the complex experience of reading the poem. David's polygamy
involves the 'promiscuous [or mixed] use of concubine and bride', but although
Charles's 'polygamy' stems from the same natural outgoing warmth, it is promis-
cuous in a different sense. In his case the warmth is allowed a less than discriminate
rein. But this separation of temporal perspective is not so pronounced in the lines
that follow. David and Charles are fused so that David's as well as Charles's faults
are exposed within the same extenuating framework. What makes David 'after
Heaven's own heart' in the biblical version is not sexual vigour but a quality of
soul which equips him to be 'captain over his people' (i Samuel 13. 14). Since
vigorous procreative activities are specifically presented as an example of being
'after Heaven's own heart', David no less than Charles is guilty of misvalues.
Siiilarly, although Miner (p. I2I) is in part correct to assert that the phrase
'Scatter'd his Maker's Image through the Land' indicates 'how much the king can
be regarded as a type of God the Father, creating like Him, after his own image,
and indeed after His image', it is morally ambivalent. 'Scatter'd' both strengthens
the sense of indiscrimination and takes on ribald sexual overtones as a part of the
imagery of sowing and reaping which provided the century with a rich source of
bawdy. The effect is to maintain a suggestion of careless sexuality without
destroying that magniloquence, both in couplet and allusion, which represents
David's and Charles's true stature, thus keeping alive the delicate balance between

1 Jack, p. 75. Dr Johnson felt that 'Dryden indeed discovered, in many of his writings, an affected
and absurd malignity to priests and priesthood' (Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck
Hill, 3 vols (Oxford, I905), I, 403).
a 'Polygamy amongst the Reformers', in Renaissance and Modem Essays Presented to Vivian de Sola
Pinto, edited by G. R. Hibbard (London, I966), pp. 5-23 (p. 23). See also A. O. Aldridge, 'Polygamy
and Deism', JEGP, 48 (1949), 343-6o.

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 K. E. ROBINSON 57

the reprehensible and meritorious. The 'tiller' possesses a sexuality which provokes
him to illicit extra-marital relationships but at the same time he shows a sensitive
regard for his wife. Although this recommends itself as an incisive portrait of
Charles's paradoxical character,l it cannot but refer too to David whose adulterous
lapse provides the first stage of the analogical pattern. By dealing with David's
adultery at several removes from the surface of the poem Dryden places its
importance relative to his life as a whole. He puts his emphasis firmly upon the
positive qualities common to David and Charles, and, the correspondence between
them as adulterers established, these positive qualities activate the expectations of
regeneration contained in the analogical pattern. Charles's immorality, like David's,
becomes inseparable from the total pattern.
It is self-evident that the remainder of the pattern is to be found in the poem.
Although Charles is guilty of nothing so depraved as David's murder of Uriah, his
licence has involved him in a threat to the British system of monarchy and the law
founded upon it, not only because of his susceptibility to feminine wiles - he is
'the poor Priapus King', not so much the ruler as ruled in his indiscretions2- but
because his indulgent attitude towards Monmouth has exacerbated the succession
problem. Monmouth is well suited to be the unwitting agent of judgement on
Charles for, born out of wedlock and viewed so indulgently by his father, he is both
the outcome and the occasion of Charles's sinfulness. On to this skeleton Dryden
builds his narrative; but although the credibility of his statement about the Exclu-
sion Crisis rests upon as full as possible an application of the analogue, he is far
from justifying Winters's strictures. The emphasis on pattern allows him con-
siderable freedom to work within those facts which yield themselves readily to his
drawing of the parallel, without any essential distortion.
The analogical pattern permits Dryden to maintain the civilized and apparently
objective balance of the opening lines throughout the poem. He can juxtapose the
essentially praiseworthy qualities of Charles's character and the pernicious results
when they are misplaced in the knowledge that they have been reasserted in their
proper context. The worst result is, of course, Absalom's defection at Shaftesbury's
instigation, the abortive outcome of natural generosity and mildness in his begetting
and upbringing. Since Monmouth mirrors Charles's own appearance and character
as a youth, in Charles too, it may be assumed, ' 'twas Natural to please'.3 Yet if the
'native mercy' and mildness to which this gives rise have a stabilizing effect and if
'the moderate sort of Men ... Inclin'd the Ballance to the better side', Dryden
hints that Charles is not in control of his mildness, that its effect is unintentional:
David's mildness manag'd it so well,
The Bad found no occasion to Rebell.
(1. 77)

1 See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Henry B. Wheatley, 8 vols (London, I904-5), vII, 37 and
compare J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts (London, 1958), p. II5.
2 'An Historical Poem' in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 166o-7r4, edited by
George de F. Lord (New Haven, Connecticut, I963-), II (1965), I58. See also Dryden, Poems, iv
1879.
3 The extent of the actual likeness between Monmouth and Charles can be judged by comparing
William Dobson's portrait of Charles at fourteen with Samuel Cooper's miniature of Monmouth at
seven, bearing in mind that Cooper may have emphasized the similarity. The portraits are con-
veniently reproduced side by side in Lord George Scott, Lucy Walter: Wife or Mistress (London, I947),
facing p. I28.

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 58 A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'
Such laisser-faire government invites the participation of a Shaftesbury, and only a
practical reaffirmation of kingship in Charles's second 'restoration' can stop the
balance inclining to the worst side once the political situation is such
That no Concessions from the Throne woud please,
But Lenitives fomented the Disease.
(1. 295)

But at no stage do Charles's natural virtues lose their essential merit.

The critics' concentration upon Dryden's skill in satiric portraiture has tended to
obscure the remarkable honesty which the extenuating framework of the analogical
pattern permits him to bring to his presentation of governmental chaos as the
upshot of Charles's faults. As moral, religious, and political head of his country
Charles dictates in his own outlook and behaviour the outlook and behaviour of
his subjects. In the analogue itself Absalom's revolt is visited upon David for hi
sins, but Dryden deepens this relationship to show that the masses' attitude towards
Absalom (and hence towards the traditional fabric of their country) reflects
David's attitude. The indiscriminate exercise of natural instinct in his sexual
enterprises and his self-absorbed and indulgent bearing towards 'His yout
Image in his Son renew'd', bordering on narcissistic idolatry, provoke par
tendencies in the body politic. His subjects see him in terms of a graven im
whose existence is dependent upon their wishes:
Those very Jewes, who, at their very best,
Their Humour more than Loyalty exprest,
Now, wondred why, so long, they had obey'd
An Idoll Monarch which their hands had made:
Thought they might ruine him they could create;
Or melt him to that Golden Calf, a State.
(1. 6I)

Charles's 'natural' behaviour precipitates such governmental idleness and his

worship of Monmouth is so idolatrous that his authority is threatened and he sinks
towards becoming a redundant symbol. In David the Lord had 'sought him a man
after his own heart, and commanded him to be captain over his people', but Charles
has become (to use a term Dryden borrowed from an earlier Royalist writer) a
'weathercock of state'.' His epicurean abdication from captaincy threatens at least
a decline to limited monarchy where
Kings are slaves to those whom they Command,
And Tenants to their Peoples pleasure stand.
(1. 775)

or at worst a retrogression to a lawless 'state of nature', for

If they may Give and Take when e'er they please,
Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)
But Government it self at length must fall
To Nature's state; where all have Right to all.
(1. 791)

1 The Conquest of Granada, nII..Io (Mermaid edition, edited by George Saintsbury, 2 vols (London,
1904), I, 62). The phrase derives from the dedicatory epistle to John Collop's Poesis Rediviva; or,
Poesie Reviv'd (London, I656), sig. A4r.

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 K. E. ROBINSON 59

Naturalistic kingship breeds naturalistic politics.

Dryden's interpretation rests upon a well-defined political th
had pointed out that 'to confound the state of monarch with t
cratical estate', as Charles offers to do in acting simultaneously
ruled, 'is a thing impossible, and in effect incompatible, and s
imagined':
for sovereignty being of itself indivisible, how can it at one and the sa
betwixt one prince, the nobility and the people in common? The first
majesty is to be of power to give laws, and to command over them in
who should those subjects be that should yield their obedience to the
have also power to make the laws? Who should he be that could give
himself constrained to receive it of them, unto whom he himself gave it
Charles's indiscretions neglect the 'indivisible' quality of his r
base of the sexual and political, private and public forms of m
Charles shares with his people is implied in the echo of the lin
many, multiply'd his kind' in Charles's summary of the dissidents
one was made for many, they contend'. This contention seems
inversion of Bellarmine's belief, as quoted by Sir Robert Filmer (p.
when he made all mankind of one man, did seem openly to signify
approved the government of one man than of many'. Charles'
inversion and his affirmation of the true 'monarch's end' are themselves a dismissal
of his earlier aberrations.
The idea of the king as pater patriae, propounded by Bodin and Filmer, is central
to Dryden's presentation of his analogue. Filmer's Patriarcha was, according to
Peter Laslett (pp. 33-5), widely influential in the Exclusion Crisis, and it must have
appeared particularly attractive to Dryden. Its familial theory of monarchy fitted
well not only with his own outlook but with the basically familial analogue of
Absalom and Achitophel. Filmer's argument is summed up by the quotation from
Bellarmine: just as Adam and the patriarchs had 'right of fatherhood, royal
authority over their children', so by 'the ancient and prime right of lineal succession
to paternal government' kings have succession to 'the right of that fatherhood which
their ancestors did naturally enjoy' (pp. 57, 60, 6i). Given this stature for Charles
it is easy to see the seriousness of his misapplication of fatherhood in his relationship
with Monmouth. Although 'Kingly power is by the law of God, so it hath no
inferior law to limit it', the King, as a father, 'is bound by the law of nature to do his
best for the preservation of his family':
all Kings, even tyrants and conquerors, [are] bound to preserve the lands, goods, liberties
and lives of all their subjects, not by any municipal law of the land, but by the natural law of
a Father, which binds them to ratify the acts of their forefathers and predecessors in things
necessary for the public good of their subjects. (p. 103)

Charles's indulgence of Monmouth is also the neglect of more important patri-

archal or familial duties. His slowness to react to Monmouth's progresses, for
example, seems to endanger the 'Hereditary Paternal Monarchy' of England.2
Dryden's honesty about the extent of Charles's responsibility for the faction of
the times prepares the way for his rehabilitation of Charles as the regenerated

1 'The Necessity of the Absolute Power of All Kings and in Particular of the Kings of England', in
Patriarcha and Other Works of Sir Robert Filmer, edited by Peter Laslett (Oxford, 1949), p. 322.
2 Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia or the Present State of England, Part I (London, I674), p. 72.

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 60 A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'
David at the end of the poem. Culpability is necessary if the analogical pattern is to
carry its full weight. Since this culpability is a matter of virtues misdirected, it is
quite consistent that having seen (or in terms of the analogue been punished by)
the results of his earlier misdeeds, Charles 'With all these loads of Injuries opprest'
should be restored to grace as an embodiment of the same virtues rightly placed.
And the relationship between Charles's and his subjects' attitudes presupposes the
country's felicitous reaction to his regained stature. Broadly speaking, then, the
difference between Charles at the beginning and at the end of the poem is that he
has contained his natural impulses. As a paternal monarch he ought to have
embodied a godlike perfection, but he comes close to forfeiting this stature by
trusting the promptings of nature. The line 'When Nature prompted, and no law
deny'd' sums up his position. Characteristically poised, it maintains an attachment
to natural warmth whilst insisting that adultery is not acceptable; but it also
refers to the well-known passage on innate goodness from St Paul which lies behind
the following lines from Religio Laici:
Not onely Charity bids hope the best,
But more the great Apostle has exprest:
That, if the Gentiles, (whom no Law inspir'd,)
By Nature did what was by Law requir'd;
They, who the written Rule had never known,
Were to themselves both Rule and Law alone:
To Natures plain indictment they shall plead;
And, by their Conscience, be condemn'd or freed.
(1. 198)

Instead of doing 'By nature ... what [is] by law requir'd' Charles acts against a
background of external restraints. Because he needs external law to indicate his
transgressions, he cannot properly ensure the safety of the Ark, which is best done
by keeping 'the covenant of the ark ... the law which the ark preserves'.l In failing
he allows both anarchy and the Satanic, in the guise of Achitophel, to exert their
influences.2 His explicit recognition of Monmouth's status and his adoption of true
paternal stature in relation to his country prevent, however, those who would
'touch our Ark'. At the end of the poem he is, in the fullest sense of the word,
'lawful'. He is no longer subjected to but is the law; and because he has himself
asserted his lawful function, he is regarded as lawful by his subjects. In an important
sense, however, he is now beyond the law. It is implicit that as a man Charles has
passed through the stages of development from sinfulness to being dead to sin (and
hence the law) through grace. As a king he can, therefore, become an embodiment
of Grace, self-control transmuting his desire to please into a truly godlike mercy and
mildness. Despite the fact that, his clemency despised, justice has to take the throne,
he remains a most humane embodiment of the law. It was precisely 'the healing
Balm' of Charles's mercy that Dryden was to declare superior to David's deathbed
cruelty in Threnodia Augustalis:
That King who liv'd to Gods own heart,
Yet less serenely dies than he:

1 Edmund Calamy, 'Trembling for the Ark of God', in Sermons of the Great Ejection, edited by Iain
Murray (London, I962), p. 34. For a discussion of the ark image, see Roper, pp. 17-18.
2 See particularly B. K. Lewalski, 'The Scope and Function of Biblical Allusion in Absalom and
Achitophel', English Language Notes, 3 (1965-6), 29-35 and A. B. Chambers, 'Absalom and Achitophel:
Christ and Satan', MLN, 84 (1959), 592-6.

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 K. E. ROBINSON

Charles left behind no harsh decree

For Schoolmen with laborious art
To salve from cruelty:
Those, for whom love cou'd no excuses frame,
He graciously forgot to name.
(1. 239)

It is interesting that whereas at the beginning of the poem Charles had to be

viewed through a carefully balanced perspective, at the end the poise belongs to
Charles himself, recognizing and realizing his natural propensities within the
exigencies of the situation that he faces. The shift is significant of the monarch's
new self-control.
Any attempt to describe the ending of Absalom and Achitophel must take account of
Johnson's remarks on the poem, which have exercised a profound effect on critical
thinking to the present day. Only in more recent studies has it become common to
defend Dryden's structural powers against the judgement that because the 'original
structure of the poem was defective ... there is an unpleasing disproportion
between the beginning and the end'.1 Schilling proposes the solution that the effect
of the apparent imbalance in favour of evil is to emphasize the force of Charles's
virtuous power. 'The sudden breaking off of the poem shows', he claims, 'the
king's total command; the greatest possible structure of opposition has risen against
him; yet the moment he chooses to speak, this becomes meaningless.'2 But correct
as his solution might be, it is only, since it relies upon a purely theoretical strength
attaching to kingship, moderately convincing in terms of the poem's effect. The
pattern and movement that have been outlined mean, however, that Absalom and
Achitophel enacts Schilling's reading. The ending benefits from the additional
strength that comes from the completion of the pattern and its analogical expecta-
tions. Moreover, the attitude of Charles's people towards him has been shown to be a
direct function of the degree to which he fulfils or fails to fulfil his paternal role.
When he neglects them to indulge Monmouth, they themselves feel a slackening
of obligation towards him; and his positive statement in lines 939-I025 contains
their reaction: 'And willing Nations knew their Lawfull Lord'. His assumption of
the full obligations and power of paternal monarchy is accompanied by exactly that
effect his contemporaries felt it ought to be accompanied by, 'a kind of Universal
Influence, over all his Dominions', so that 'every Soul within his Territories, may be
said to feel at all times his Power and his Goodness'.3 His actions have become
consistent with his divinely ordained role, and he is truly 'after Heaven's own
heart':
Thus from his Royal Throne by Heav'n inspir'd,
The God-like David spoke: with awfull fear
His Train their Maker in their Master hear.
(1. 936)

Dryden's assertion that 'a Series of new time' is consequent upon his sovereign's
changed stature is much more than a Virgilian platitude: Charles's moral growth
makes retrogression improbable within the terms of the poem.

I Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, I, 437.

2 Dryden and the Conservative Myth, p. 306. For other discussions of structure, see Lewalski, and also
Morris Freedman, 'Dryden's Miniature Epic', JEGP, 57 (1958), 2II-19.
8 Chamberlayne, Anglia Notitia, p. 0o7.

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62 A Reading of 'Absalom and Achitophel'
And yet the ending of the poem is not without its difficulties. It is true that
Dryden's concern with the relationship between the law and natural impulse
suggests moral growth in Charles at the poem's end, but it is equally true that his
explicit treatment of this growth is limited to Charles's relationship with Monmouth.
Dryden does not deal explicitly with the regenerated Charles's sexual appetite,
although the analogical pattern requires the fullest rehabilitation. He could have
settled pragmatically for a stature in which Charles was at one with the civil but
not necessarily the moral law, realizing that complete restoration was improbable,
if not humanly impossible. On this account immorality would be allowable, albeit
not desirable, so long as the law was not threatened. Dryden obviously preferred
even a partially regenerated monarch to contractual monarchy, but within the
poem the emphasis on the connexion between materialistic actions in the moral
sphere and materialistic politics and the stress on Charles's position as ethico-
religious as well as political head of his country demand complete regeneration.
Dryden was clearly aware of the disparity, but he chose neither to make a virtue
of pragmatism nor to claim a stature Charles did not merit. His concern was not so
much to defend Charles as to describe the optimum social order, in the full know-
ledge that Charles did not quite match up to his part despite the re-establishment
of his proper relationship with his country.
F. R. Leavis has implicitly (and rightly) insisted on the opposition between
politics defined as the art of the possible and imaginative literature creative of
possibilities.1 Absalom and Achitophel is generally regarded as a political poem
addressed to the political debate which was eventually to issue in contractual
monarchy, but it stands above the mass of political verse of the period as concerned
with much more than the art of the possible. Dryden uses the analogue, as other
writers use the myth, to structure perceptions about the ethical, religious, and
political welfare of his nation, perceptions sensitive to human potentiality and
incisively evaluated against the political theorists of his day. If the ending is ideal,2
it is self-consciously so. It represents a projection of Dryden's profound concern for
an order which would preserve the dynamism of the traditional social structure,
asking (in Lawrence's terms) 'why' and not 'how', about the organic needs of his
society rather than about how the social structure might be changed to accommo-
date the period's increasingly reductive view of human capabilities. On this reading
Absalom and Achitophel presents a much more sensitive and honest Dryden than the
party apologist of the orthodox criticism. K. E. ROBINSON
NE WCK.ASTLE-U. ON-TYNE
NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE

1 Nor Shall My Sword (London, I972), p. I70.

2 See Schilling, p. 281.

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