3 - Satire and Beyond

Summary

The received view of Dryden, as we have seen, foregrounded political and personal satire as Dryden's true poetic forte, the medium in which his talents found their best and most characteristic expression. As a consequence, Dryden has become for many modern non-specialist readers effectively a ‘one-poem poet’, with his longest satire Absalom and Achitophel regularly singled out by teachers and anthologists as the one poem by him that the ordinary educated reader needs to know about, with Mac Flecknoe as the obvious second choice – or a first option for those wanting something of less intimidating length.

Dryden's satirical interests and gifts are, of course, undeniable. ‘They say’, he wrote, ‘my Talent is Satyre’ (Works, iii. 234), and Absalom and Achitophel has always ranked among his bestknown works. Dryden was, moreover, a keen student of the history and theory of satire as a genre. He prefaced his translations from Juvenal and Persius (1692) with an extensive ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, which debates the origins and derivation of the term, traces the history of satire as a literary form, compares the work of its various practitioners, and offers speculations on its potential for writers of the present.

The complex and intricate embeddedness of Dryden's satires in their historical moment is also self-evident. Absalom and Achitophel alludes in great detail not only to the events and personalities but to the speech making and pamphleteering of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. Its very allegorical framework echoes propagandist uses of the biblical story of David and Absalom at earlier points in the crisis, and was, in its turn, used, with its significances inverted, in the Whig responses to Dryden's poem. Though modern scholarship has questioned older assertions that the poem was specifically designed to influence the outcome of the Earl of Shaftesbury's trial, and that it was directly commissioned by the King, the poem's role as a piece of direct partisan intervention in contemporary political activity and debate is unquestionable. Early marginalia in which readers proposed their own identifications of the poem's characters and offered their own comments on its political import give us glimpses of the topical interest that Absalom prompted on its first appearance. The poem clearly has many features in common with the other controversial and polemical verse that formed such a prominent part of late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literary culture.