ANTI-ACHITOPHEL (1682) ***
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[Transcriber's Note: Typographical errors are listed separately at the end of the Editor's Introduction and each poem.]
_Anti-Achitophel_
(1682)
THREE VERSE REPLIES TO
_Absalom and Achitophel_ by JOHN DRYDEN
_Absalom Senior_ by Elkanah Settle _Poetical Reflections_ by Anonymous _Azaria and Hushai_ by Samuel Pordage
Facsimile Reproductions
Edited with an Introduction by HAROLD WHITMORE JONES
Gainesville, Florida Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints 1961
SCHOLARS' FACSIMILES & REPRINTS 118 N.W. 26th Street Gainesville, Florida Harry R. Warfel, General Editor
Reproduced from Copies in BRITISH MUSEUM UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARY
L. C. Catalog Card Number: 60-6430
Manufactured in the U.S.A. Letterpress by J. N. Anzel, Inc. Photolithography by Edwards Brothers Binding by Universal-Dixie Bindery
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INTRODUCTION
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]
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