THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

oth to purge Dryden’s verse of its early tendency to picturesqueness and to foster an interest in character and
repartee. Dryden the satirist entertains through a witty intermixture of reasoned argument, refined technique, and
invective. Absalom and Achitophel is a party poem, one designed to please friends by advancing their cause and to
provoke enemies by ridiculing theirs. ‘The true end of Satyre’, he wrote in his preliminary declaration to his reader,
‘is the amendment of Vices by correction’; the satirist himself is a physician prescribing ‘harsh Remedies to an
inveterate Disease’, a disease affecting the body politic in which ‘an Act of Oblivion were as necessary in a Hot,
Distemper’d State, as an Opiate would be in a Raging Fever’. Dryden’s reference here is specific. He wishes to
memorialize and not to forgive the treasonable acts of Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and his
main abettor, the Earl of Shaftesbury, in attempting to exclude legally from the throne the King’s proper successor,
his brother, the Catholic Duke of York. The poem, which takes as its basis the biblical story of the rebellion of
Absalom against his father David, is both a histoire à clef and a witty deflation of those, generally humourless,
Protestants whose first recourse in argument was to refer to biblical precedent or justification. Dryden’s narrative
makes little direct appeal to the sacred but it does allow the radiance of divine pleasure to reflect from David to
Charles and it opens with a witty deflection of any taint of adultery on Charles’s part by insisting that it is set ‘In
pious times ... Before Polygamy was made a sin’. The real joy of the poem lies in its exploration of forced parallels
(Absalom and Monmouth, Achitophel and Shaftesbury, Saul and Cromwell, Pharaoh and Louis XIV of France, the
Sanhedrin and Parliament, and the Jebusites - a name with a hint of ‘Jesuit’ about it - and English Catholics) and in
its deftly scathing portraits, notably those of Shaftesbury, Buckingham (Zimri), and the Whig Sheriff of London,
Bethel (Shimei). The aristocratic villains are introduced solemnly as if in a heroic poem; the less elevated, especially
the shabby plotter Titus Oates (Corah), far more abusively (‘Prodigious Actions may as well be done | By Weavers
issue, as by Princes Son’). Shaftesbury/Achitophel is cast as the Satanic tempter of the honourably gulli-
[p. 259]
ble Monmouth/Absalom; he holds out the prospect of personal glory and public salvation, and he flatters the young
man with perverted biblical images pregnant with a sense of a divine mission:
Auspicous Prince! At whose Nativity
Some Royal Planet rul’d the Southern sky;
Thy longing Countries Darling and Desire;
Their cloudy Pillar, and their guardian Fire:
. . . . . . . . . .
The Peoples Prayer, the glad Diviners Theam
The Young-mens Vision, and the 01d-mens Dream
Thee Saviour, Thee, the Nations Vows confess;
And never satisfi’d with seeing bless ...
The poem, which has relatively little ‘plot’ in the strict sense of the term, is structured around a series of vivid
arguments and apologies. It closes with a reasoned affirmation of intent from the ‘Godlike’ David, part a regretful
denunciation, part a defence of royal prerogative, part a restatement of an ideal of constitutional balance. It is
presented as a second Restoration with the King’s position approved, in late baroque pictorial fashion, by an assenting
God and a thundering firmament.
Shaftesbury’s continued machinations against Charles’s policy of support for his Catholic brother stimulated two
pale satirical reflections of Absalom and Achitophel. The King himself is said to have provided the subject of
Dryden’s The Medall: A Satyre Against Sedition (1682), a frontal attack on Shaftesbury’s character and on the
motives of his party (the Whigs to whom the poem is slyly dedicated). The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel
also of 1682 is largely the work of Nahum Tate, but Dryden’s contribution of some two hundred lines of abuse,
especially the sketches of the ‘Heroically mad’ Elkanah Settle (Doeg) and of Thomas Shadwell (Og), have a vicious
palpability about them. Shadwell (?1642-92) became the object of Dryden’s satire partly as a result of his political
affiliations, but more directly as a result of an increasingly unfriendly rivalry in the theatre (Shadwell’s operatic
adaptation of The Tempest, The Enchanted Isle of 1674, was a particularly galling success). Dryden’s bitter distaste
for the flippancy and shoddiness of Shadwell’s work as a poet reached its peak in the lampoon which he had begun in
the late 1670s but published only in 1682, Mac Flecknoe, or A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S. It is a
poem which advances beyond critical sniping to a rage at the deathliness of human stupidity. Flecknoe, whom Dryden
assumes to be an Irishman, finds his true heir in a loquacious Celtic bard, the irrepressible (and non-Irish) Shadwell.
The poem defines by negatives and discrepancies; it undoes epic pretensions by playing with mock-heroic and it
purports to let dullness express itself while showing off the virtues of wit. The elevated tone of its opening couplet
crashes once Flecknoe emerges as a fatuous Augustus seeking to settle his succession; Shadwell, the inadequate prince