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POLITICS and PROVIDENCE: JOHN DRYDEN's Absalom and Achitophel

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POLITICS and PROVIDENCE: JOHN DRYDEN's Absalom and Achitophel POLITICS AND PROVIDENCE: JOHN DRYDEN'S Absalom and Achitophel By MICHAEL J. CONLON A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THB DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1969 r For Phyllis, Sean, and Margaret ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my particular appreciation for the research materials made available to me through the Graduate Council of the University of Florida, its chairman, Dean Linton E. Grinter, and the Special Collections Department of the Graduate Research Library, and its director. Miss Laura Monti. Tliree of my felloxr/ students, Mr. John D. Canfield, Mr. John Schwindt, and Mr. Larry P. Vonalt, gave criti- cism and encouragement to me; and Mrs. Patricia B. Rarobo patiently prepared the final copy. I feel especially fortunate in the help I have received from the members of my supervisory committee. Professor Harold Wilson shared with me his knowledge of English history, while the discussions I have had with Professor Robert Bowers helped in several ways to form my thinking about John Drydcn's poetry. The chairman of my committee, Professor Aubrey Williams, has extended countless kindnesses to me. He first brought me to face this dissertation, and by his just precept and scholarly example he enabled me to finish it. Finally, for the love of my wife and children, who have endured the dissertation far too long and suffered its author even longer, I am very grateful; and to them I dedicate it. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Notes 8 I - The Kingdom 10 Notes 45 II - The Kingship 54 Notes 80 III - The King's Word 84 Notes 112 Cone lusion 118 Notes 121 Works Cited 122 Biographical Sketch 130 iv INTRODUCTION In 1669 the French ambassador to the court of Charles II dis- patched this appraisal of England's new government to Louis XIV: "If Aristotle, who attempted to define the smallest things pertain- ing to politics, were to come again to this world, he could not find words to explain the manner of this government. It has a monarchical appearance, as there is a king, but at bottom it is very far from being a monarchy. .Whether this is caused by the fundamental laws of the Kingdom, or by the carelessness of the King, herein lies the 1 difficulty." Aggravating such uncertainty about the status of the English kingdom and kingship was the endemic fear of Englishmen in the seventeenth century that Romecould gain sway over the crown, or, worse, that a Catholic could inherit the crown. The English, moreover, "regarded Catholicism as the natural ally of royal absolutism," and therefore normally accompanied by "the subordination" of the subject's welfare to "the financial needs or caprices of the King.-^ After the Restoration, then, issues of royal sovereignty and Popery had the effect of dividing the King from his parliament, and particularly from those growing numbers in parliament who thought they, more than the King, could best serve the needs of the people. Rushing through this political situation and spilling out over larger areas of thought in almost every direction were the tides of empiricism and secularism. "The dike of faith," Professor Don Cameron Allen has -1- -2- written, "was going down as the sea of rationalism burst through. Christians realized that when it had overwhelmed the steeples and drowned the cocks, it would sweep all men into a materialistic skep- . 3 ticism, or, at best, into a rational theism." In the main such were the issues dra\im into the open by a storm of controversy in the late 1670 's when rumors of a Popish Plot forced Charles II to a series of confrontations with members of parliament, led by the First Earl of Shaftesbury, who were determined the king- dom could be secured from ruin only by excluding the Catholic Duke of York from the throne. Such were the issues bandied about in hun- dreds of pamphlets, tracts, lampoons, and panegyrics; and such were the issues woven through a fabric of biblical event by John Dryden in what may be considered one of the few works of lasting value to emerge from the crisis--Absalom and Achitophel (1681). As one seventeenth- century historian, John Pollock, has written, "at a dis- tance of more than two centuries the sum of continuous investigation has little to add to the judgments passed on his times" by the poet laureate. "The flashes of Dryden 's insight," he goes on, "illumine more than the light shed by many records,"^ Though Dryden 's poem is usually praised in such fashion, frequently, too, the praise has been shot through with doubts about its shape and meaning, or attenuated by an even deeper and more serious doubt about the worth of Dryden 's art. Absalom and Achitophel has been used variously, for example, to illustrate Dryden's knack for caricature, his debts to such conspicuously different minds as Milton and Hobbes, his -3- service to a conservative myth, his heroic pretensions and frustra- tions, or, simply and contemptuously, his "drudging"--his failure to make a "petty Draught" into a major work.^ The number and variety of responses, perhaps, affirm the poem's richness and complexity, but for the purposes of my own study they pinpoint the several prob- lems which have become the foci for disputes over its meaning. It has been difficult, first of all, to accurately describe and assess the actual values implicit in the debates over exclu- sion and, therefore, difficult to measure the values Dryden uses as a rallying point in his satire. The indiscriminate use of such tags as Tory versus Whig or conservative versus liberal has only enlarged the problem by blurring distinctions and relationships significant to the clash of values dramatized in the poem. Absalom and Achitophel , one recent study has asserted, is an expression of Dryden's "partly Hobbesian and completely Tory belief [s] " about the nature of man.^ Setting aside the questions raised by the phrase "Tory belief [s] ," the description of Dryden as servitor in his poem to the views of Thomas Hobbes seems especially suspect, For we are asked to accept this assertion in the face of little evidence from the poem's con- text and even less from the poem itself. Nor does the author ever make clear the extent and nature of Hobbes' influence on the debates over exclusion. Accordingly, in my first chapter, entitled "The Kingdom," I have examined the ways Hobbes' characteristic equation between the law of self-preservation and political obligation may have influenced the arguments of Shaftesbury and his party to justify ' -4- an Exclusion Bill. This undercurrent of Hobbism in the crisis pro- vides an explanation for the gestures to Hobbes that I believe Dryden has made in ' his poem to disvalue the opposition party. Far from holding to a Hobbesian view of man, Dryden, it seems to me, understood this latest attempt to tamper with royal prerogatives as another symptom of the assault by Hobbists, Deists and other free- thinkers on the traditional be Uef_in_th^rovidence of God and its / ^operation in the affairs of nations. The task of apologists for the kingship, as symbolizing essen- tially sacramental obligations, was made all the more delicate, of course, by the antics of Charles II, who seemed dedicated to the easy and less than exemplary life of a Restoration gentleman. In this task Dryden's attitude toward the King as a man subject to all the weaknesses and indulgences of ordinary human beings has been hard to place. The prevailing view has been that Dryden made large conces- sions to Charles II in the poem by submerging the iSemn"^ a tmos - — _ph_ere^of_his_courrin the pious and polygamous past of the Old Testa- ment. In the second chapter, "The Kingship," I have emphasized the ways Dryden establishes a connection between the sexual disorders of David's (i. e., Charles') house and the civil disorders of his kingdom. While^Ijwould agree that Dryden's attitude toward the King concessive, I am convinced, too, that he has patterned the events Allowing upon David's adultery and culminating in Absalom's rebellion as an emblem of the ways God in His providence arranges retribution. Rendering the King in this way, Dryden could draw from a long-standing ^ -5- tradition, recently discussed by Professor Inga-Stina Ewbank, that managed to fuse both a "cautionary and a typological" attitude toward the figure of David. The third and in some ways a most crucial part of Absalom and Achitophel critics have questioned and debated bears upon Dryden's decision to conclude his poem with a speech from the throne by the King. Samuel Johnson — apparently the first to censure Dryden's use of the speech--found an "unpleasing disproportion between the begin- ning and end" of Absalom and Achitophel and appraised the speech an inadequate and far too attenuated resolution to the confrontation of forces dramatized within the poem.^ In my final chapter, "The King's Word," I have tried to suggest some ways David's speech properly completes a series of gestures in Absalom and Achitophel to the divinity that was thought to hedge about the kingship, and I have tried to suggest, too, the ways the speech closes off Dryden's argu- ment for the patience and mercy of both the King and the Godhead. Dryden's depiction of the King as a reluctant oracle of justice, provoked to a posture of punishment by an ungrateful kingdom, moves to a proper denouement in this gestus oratorius of the poem's last lines, harmonizing royal justice and divine providential justice, the King's word and God's logos.
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