English verse allegory, humorous or serious, political or moral, has
deep roots; a reprint such as the present is clearly no place for a
discussion of the subject at large:[1] it need only be recalled here
that to the age that produced _The Pilgrim's Progress_ the art form was
not new. Throughout his life Dryden had his enemies, Prior and Montague
in their satire of _The Hind and the Panther_, for example. The general
circumstances under which Dryden wrote _Absalom and Achitophel_,
familiar enough and easily accessible, are therefore recalled only
briefly below. Information is likewise readily available on his use of
Biblical allegory.[2]
[Footnote 1: Cf. E. D. Leyburn, _Satiric Allegory, Mirror of Man_
(New Haven, 1956).]
[Footnote 2: e.g., _Absalom's Conspiracy_, a tract tracing how the
Bible story came to be used for allegorical purposes. See _The
Harleian Miscellany_ (1811), VIII, 478-479; and R. F. Jones, "The
Originality of 'Absalom and Achitophel,'" _Modern Language Notes_,
XLVI (April, 1931) 211-218.]
We are here concerned with three representative replies to _Absalom
and Achitophel_: their form, their authors, and details of their
publication. Settle's poem was reprinted with one slight alteration
a year after its first appearance; the _Reflections_ has since been
reprinted in part, Pordage's poem not at all. _Absalom Senior_ has been
chosen because, of the many verse pieces directed against Dryden's poem,
it is of the greatest intrinsic merit and shows the reverse side of the
medal, as it were, to that piece; the second is given, not for any
literary merit it may possess--indeed, from its first appearance it has
been dismissed as of small worth--but rather as a poem representative of
much of the versifying that followed hard on the Popish Plot and as one
that has inspired great speculation as to its author; the third, in
addition to throwing light on the others, is a typical specimen of the
lesser work produced in the Absalom dispute.
The author and precise publication date of the _Reflections_ remain
unidentified. Ascription of the poem to Buckingham rests ultimately on
the authority of Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses_ and on Wood alone, and we
do not know on what evidence he thought it to be Buckingham's; we do
know, however, that Wood was often mistaken over such matters. Sir
Walter Scott in his collected edition of Dryden (1808; IX, 272-5) also
accepted Buckingham as the author, but cited no authority; he printed
extracts, yet the shortcomings of his edition, whatever its convenience,
are well known. The poem has not appeared in any subsequent edition of
Dryden's poems, the latest being the four volume set (Oxford, 1958);
the volume of the California Dryden[A] relevant to _Absalom_ is still
awaited. Internal evidence is even more scanty. Only one passage of the
_Reflections_ (sig. D2) may bear on the matter. Perhaps the "Three-fold
Might" (p. 7, line 11) refers, not to the poet's "tripartite design"
(p. 7, line 10) or to the Triple Alliance of England, Holland, and
Sweden against France (1677/8, as in _Absalom and Achitophel_, line
175) but either to a treatise which had occasioned some stir in the
scientific world some twenty years previously: "the Delphic problem"
proposed by Hobbes to the Royal Society on the duplication of the cube,
which might have come to the ears of Buckingham as well as to those of
the court,[3] or perhaps to the triple confederacy of Essex, Halifax,
and Sunderland.[4] But to the Restoration reader the phrase "Three-fold
Might" would rather have suggested the Triple Alliance, to which Dryden
reverts in _The Medal_ (lines 65-68) when he claims that Shaftesbury,
"thus fram'd for ill, ... loos'd our Triple Hold" on Europe.[5]
[Transcriber's Footnote (A):
This Introduction was written in 1959. Volume II of the California
Edition (_The Works of John Dryden_) was published in 1972.]
[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _English Works_ (1845), ed. by Molesworth, VII,
59-68.]
[Footnote 4: H. C. Foxcroft, _A Character of the Trimmer_
(Cambridge, England, 1946), p. 70. This book is an abridged
version of the same author's _Life and Works of Halifax_ (1897).]
[Footnote 5: Cf. the phrase "Twofold might" in _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I, 175.]
Evidence against Buckingham's authorship, on the other hand, is
comparatively strong. The piece does not appear in his collected _Works_
(1704-5). It surely would have been included even though he had at first
wished to claim any credit from its publication and later have wished to
disown it. Little connection, furthermore, will be found between the
_Reflections_ and the rest of his published verse or with the plays,
including _The Rehearsal_, if the latter be his alone, which is
doubtful.
_Poetical Reflections_ has been ascribed to Edward Howard. W. Thomas
Lowndes in his _Bibliographer's Manual_ (1864; II, 126) assigned to this
minor writer, on the authority of an auction note, the little collection
_Poems and Essays, with a Paraphrase on Cicero's Laelius, or, Of
Friendship ... By a Gentleman_ (1674), and G. Thorn-Drury, on the
equally debatable evidence of an anonymous manuscript ascription on
the title page of his own copy, ascribed the _Poetical Reflections_ to
Howard.[6] An examination of the _Poems and Essays_, however, reveals no
point of resemblance with our poem. How, then, does Howard fit into the
picture? He was in the rival camp to Dryden and was a friend of Martin
Clifford[7] and of Thomas Sprat, then Buckingham's chaplain: these three
have been thought to be jointly responsible for _The Rehearsal_. Sprat
had published a poem of congratulation to Howard on Howard's _The
British Princes_ (1669), the latter a long pseudo-epic of the Blackmore
style in dreary couplets which, again, provides no parallel with the
_Reflections_. And what of Howard's plays? Many of these were written
in the 1660's during his poetic apprenticeship; none seems akin to our
poem. Whereas, as shown in the Table of Allusions below, two independent
readers often agreed over the identities of many characters in Settle's
poem, Restoration readers at large were reticent over the authorship
of the _Reflections_. Hugh Macdonald, in his useful _John Dryden: a
Bibliography_ (1939), was wise to follow their example, and it seems
rash, therefore, to propose any new candidate in the face of such
negative evidence. The poem exists in two states, apparently differing
only in the title page.
[Footnote 6: _Review of English Studies_, I (1925) 82-83.]
[Footnote 7: In his _Notes upon Mr. Dryden's Poems in Four Letters_
(1687) Clifford, in 16 pages, accuses Dryden of plagiarism,
especially in _Almanzor_.]
Evidence of Settle's authorship of _Absalom Senior_, on the other hand,
is neither wanting nor disputed. We have had to wait until our own
century for the pioneer work on this writer, since he cannot have been
considered a sufficiently major poet by Samuel Johnson's sponsors, and
Langbaine's account is sketchy. In a periodical paper[8] Macdonald
summarized supplementary evidence on the dates of composition of
Settle's poem; he was working on it in January 1681/2, and it was
published on the following April 6. Lockyer, Dean of Peterborough,
asserted to Joseph Spence, who includes the rumor in _Anecdotes_, that
Settle was assisted by Clifford and Sprat and by "several best hands of
those times";[9] but Spence is notoriously unreliable. In the lack of
other evidence, then, it seems best to take the poem as wholly Settle's.
It needs only to add a few words on its textual states. The First
Edition, here reproduced, seems to exist in a single impression, and
likewise the Second Edition of the Settle (1682, in quarto) seems to
have been struck off in a single textual state. Of its individual
variants from the First Edition only the following seem of any
significance and, since there is no reason to suppose that it was
printed from any copy other than the First, they may be merely the
result of carelessness.