The Crafting of “Absalom and Achitophel”: Dryden’s “Pen for a Party” by W. K. Thomas

Abstract

paper, each has stimulated, annoyed, challenged, excited or puzzled me into further thought. It is to be hoped that they did likewise at the University of Waterloo and, now, will be so with further readers. That is, finally, all one can ask from the proceedings of a conference — adding that one hopes that one’s own halting efforts do likewise. Engaged, serious dialogue about our literature, its place in the history of our culture and in the present are above all else what our discipline requires at the present. It is to achieve this plea­ surable and valuable aim that, presumably, we hold conferences, and the proceedings of this one like its predecessors, must be judged a success on those grounds. NOTES 1 Michael Goldman, “Acting Values and Shakespearean Meanings: Some Suggestions,” Mosaic, x, 3 (Spring 1977), 55. 2 E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies (London, 1976), pp. 2, 3. 3 I have considered these matters in more detail in “Speaking What We Feel: Shake­ speare Criticism in the Late Seventies,” Dalhousie Review, 58 (1978), 550-62. * Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, 1972), p. 4. 5 Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Drama and the Viewer’s Eye (Chapel Hill, 1977), p. 3. 6 Alvin Kernan, “The Plays and the Playwrights,” in the Revels History of Drama in English, hi, ed. J. Leeds Barroll et al. (London, 1975), 241, 251. 7 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), ch. 9. 8 John Webster, The White Devil, i.i. 9 Ibid., v.vi. 10 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, v.v. Gary f . w a lle r / Wilfrid Laurier University W. K. Thomas, The Crafting of “Absalom and Achitophel” : Dryden’s “Pen for a Party” (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1978). 239- $ 7-5° Although the most informed criticism of a great poem can never be an ade­ quate substitute for the poem itself, nor can it ever say all that is to be said upon its subject, there is a place for an explication that attempts to define the character of the poem, to provide (as in the case of Absalom and Achito­ phel) information concerning the “occasion” of the work, and to elucidate poetic “meanings,” however tentative and incomplete such elucidation may be. W. K. Thomas has demonstrated an admirable degree of scholarly, inter­ pretative, and critical expertise in his study of his subject, which will be of considerable value to the reader. If a fellow-student of Dryden’s work finds omissions here and questionable emphases there, if he discovers the occasional 369 inconsistency in the arguments advanced and a failure at times to focus upon the poem as poem, such limitations are inherent not so much in the critical method employed as in the very nature of the exercise itself. In his first three chapters Thomas provides for the reader necessary his­ torical details relating to the Popish Plot and the crisis brought about by Shaftesbury’s introduction of the Exclusion Bill, and the King’s position vis- à-vis these events, and the various constituencies of the English people: “The sober part of Israel” (69), “The moderate sort of Men” (75), who “knew the value of a peacefull raign” (70) and “ Inclin’d the Ballance to the better side” (75) ; the Jews (Whig religious Dissenters), “Adam-wits” (51) whom “No King could govern, nor no God could please” (48) ; the Jebusites (Eng­ lish Roman Catholics), whose deprivation by law of both political and religious rights “set the Heathen Priesthood in a flame” (98). Dryden’s strong anti-clerical sentiments are made clear in these lines (e.g., “Priests of all Religions are the same” [99] ), as a little later is his contempt for what in his “Epistle Dedicatory” to All for Love he had called “that Specious Name of a Republick,” by which the authority of the Crown might be “Drawn to the dregs of a Democracy” (227) — a line he so favoured that he repeated it in The Hind and the Panther (1. 211 ). Thomas quite rightly points out that Dryden’s main purpose in this section of the poem, which deals with the factions hostile to the King (excluding, of...