Who's Who in Absalom and Achitophel

Who's Who in "Absalom and Achitophel"?Author(s): Alan RoperSource: Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 1/2, John Dryden: A TercentenaryMiscellany (2000), pp. 98-138Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817866 .Accessed: 16/09/2011 05:39

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Who's Who in Absalom and Achitophel?

ALAN ROPER

I n Spectator no. 512 Addison once again displayed his interest in the psychol- ogy of response and the process of reading. That interest is best known from the earlier papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination,"' but in no. 512

Addison applied its terms to the reading of Absalom andAchitophel:

[I]f we look into Human Nature, we shall find that the Mind is never so much pleased, as when she exerts her self in any Action that gives her an Idea of her own Perfections and Abilities. This natural Pride and Ambition of the Soul is very much gratified in the reading of a Fable; for in Writings of this Kind, a Reader comes in for half of the Performance; Every thing appears to him like a

Discovery of his own; he is busied all the while in applying Characters and Circumstances, and is in this respect both a Reader and a Composer. It is no wonder therefore that on such Occasions, when the Mind is thus pleased with it self, and amused with its own Discoveries, that it is highly delighted with the Writing which is the Occasion of it. For this Reason the Absalon and Achitophel was one of the most popular Poems that ever appeared in English. The Poetry is indeed very fine, but had it been much finer it would not have so much pleased, without a Plan which gave the Reader an Opportunity of exerting his own Talents.2

Addison reduced the author's role to the production of "very fine" poetry and slid too easily from a single "Reader" to the poem's popularity, which obviously re-

quires the approval of many readers. He nonetheless laid hold of something im-

portant when he stressed that meaning is at least partly created in the act of

reading.

1. See William H. Youngren, "Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics," Modern Philology 79 (1982): 267-83.

2. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 4:318.

- O99

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i.... --... li~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. .....

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Figure i. The title page of Narcissus Luttrell's copy of Absalom andAchitophel, with his

annotations, now in the Huntington Library.

100 '. ALAN ROPER

When Johnson came to discuss the success of Absalom andAchitophel in the Life of Dryden, he recalled Addison's claim, defined the author's contribution less vaguely, and correctly spoke of readers in the plural:

Addison has attempted to derive [the popularity of Absalom and

Achitophel] from the delight which the mind feels in the investiga- tion of secrets; and thinks that curiosity to decypher the names

procured readers to the poem. There is no need to enquire why those verses were read, which to all the attractions of wit, elegance, and harmony added the co-operation of all the factious passions, and filled every mind with triumph or resentment.3

Although Johnson improved in some ways upon Addison's terms, he also trans- lated the central perception into something crude and simple in order to dismiss it, and Johnson's alternative source of attraction, the engaging of party prejudice, is much less sophisticated than Addison's. But was Addison right? Modern critical studies usually ignore the issue he raised, even those concerned with estab-

lishing a historical context for Absalom andAchitophel. The Restoration identities of most of Dryden's characters are taken for granted, as though fixed in the poem, and the few that are disputed become the property of scholars who contend to one side, away from the mainstream of criticism.

For most modern readers of Dryden's poem it suffices to know the Restoration equivalents of the titular characters and of David and Zimri. Some

might add Shimei and Corah to this list, or even stretch to Barzillai. The re-

maining characters are usually understood to represent, in Browning's phrase, "certain people of importance in their day" who no longer have identities: a knot of disaffected nobles, some factious commoners, one group of ecclesiastical and another of political dignitaries, a pair of murder victims, two wives, and one mis-

tress. If you seek more precision, you will find it in texts prepared for students, which may annotate the characters as they appear or where you may find a list

coupling biblical and Restoration names and concluding with an assurance that "all these references would have been recognized by the contemporary reader without the help of notes."4 Since those encountering such a list are modern- not contemporary readers-they have small reason to know that the assurance is ill founded.

"The contemporary reader," of course, never existed, just as the readers referred to in modern discourse-general, common, lay, ideal, implied, actual,

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), 1:373-74. Louis I. Bredvold, et al., eds., Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Prose (New York, 1956; 1st ed. 1939), 1196.

3- 4-

ALAN ROPER 100 -n

WHO'S WHO IN "ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL"?

informed, he or she-merely serve as avatars or puppets of the critics and scholars who call them into being. But there certainly were contemporary readers of Absalom andAchitophel, and many of them recorded in copies of early editions the Restoration equivalents of the poem's characters and places. Until recently, these annotations were usually ignored by modern scholars and dismissed when mentioned. Scholars have instead supported their conjectures by referring to early printed keys among other sources, although they have also argued that some items in those keys issue from an imperfect understanding of the times. They argue thus, I believe, because modern studies have presented us with a printed poem that ended a process traceable in terms of causes, sources, analogues, and antecedents, a printed poem equipped with fixed meanings always available to a patient scholar however much they may elude a hasty reader. Such studies have value and relevance, and, without questioning their usefulness, I wish to consider the printed poem as also beginning a process traceable in terms of various attempts to understand and thereby to create the poem's contemporary reference. Both Addison and Johnson in their different ways recognized such a process; it began immediately upon the publication ofAbsalom andAchitophel- and will continue beyond this essay in the responses of such readers as it may find.

With his motto from Horace in the title page Dryden challenged readers to interpret his poem: Si Propius stes / Te CapietMagis; "if you stand closer, it will take you more." Absalom andAchitophel, more obviously than most poems, requires an audience to complete its meanings. Absalom does not equal Monmouth, nor Achitophel Shaftesbury, until a reader says so, and saying so enlarges the poem's meanings by an act of interpretation. As John Wallace put it, echoing Addison's perception, we must take "responsibility for having introduced the allegorical equation, or so the author could tell us-even the author of Absalom and Achitophel";5 especially the author ofAbsalom andAchitophel, we may want to say.

We need a history of interpretations, in order to see, among other things, how one reader imposes upon another or upon others. Annotated copies of early editions supply the beginning of that history and challenge us to undertake an archeology of readership, since most annotators neglected to sign their work and since many copies were subsequently cropped, leaving only fragmentary marginalia. We need to ask not which glosses strike us as correct, which as incorrect, but what reasons contemporaries might have had for annotating as they did.

5. "Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading," ELH36 (1969): 265-90, quoting 273.

VI 101

102 '. ALAN ROPER

Answering that question takes us into the busy, gossipy world of Restoration politics, out of which Absalom andAchitophel emerges with such assurance and seem-

ing clarity. Of the 149 copies I have examined, 67 contain manuscript keys or

marginalia or both together. Although I considered only editions published in 1681 and 1682, I found some copies with identifications reflecting titles conferred or inherited several years later. Sometimes two people annotated the same copy. A few annotators marked the opening pages then bored of the game. Others re-

quired the help of notes in order to understand the poem. Those helpful notes sometimes took the form of early printed keys, of which there were four; it seems likely that manuscript keys also circulated. I have no villains to chronicle. However, I can feature an attractive rogue called Ford, Lord Grey of Warke, who at one time or another has served as Restoration equivalent for no fewer than five of Dryden's characters, although he is now in danger of losing all his former honors. My heroes are two young men: Jacob Tonson, who had just turned

twenty-six, and Narcissus Luttrell, who was twenty-four when Tonson published the first edition of Absalom andAchitophel and gave a copy to Luttrell.

Luttrell noted on the title page of his copy, now in the Huntington Library, that he received it "Ex dono Amici Jacobi Tonson" (figure i),6 and some of Luttrell's other notes on the title page may reflect information passed along by Tonson with the copy. The poem sold for one shilling; although published anonymously, it was written "By John Dryden"; according to one interpretation, it was first available for sale on "17 Novemb." 1681, although Luttrell's date may instead

signify the day of acquisition, which would have been close to, perhaps identical with, the day of publication.7 Luttrell's general comment presumably owes

nothing to Tonson: "An excellent poem, agt ye Duke of monmouth, Earl of

Shaftsbury & that party, & in vindica6n of the King and his freinds." Tonson,

though, may have supplied information that Luttrell incorporated into his co-

pious marginalia to the poem (for examples, see figure 2, p. 114).

6. Luttrell's copy (135868) corresponds to izaiii in the classification of Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A

Bibliography ofEarly Editions and ofDrydeniana (Oxford, 1939; reprint, London, 1966); hereafter

Macdonald. Copies ofAbsalom andAchitophel are identified in notes by collection, shelf-mark when available; and Macdonald's number for the edition.

7. Edmond Malone, in The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden, 4 vols. (London, 1800), assumed that Luttrell's dates were those of acquisition (vol. i, pt. 1:156). James M. Osborn, in "Reflections on Narcissus Luttrell (1657-1732)," The Book Collector, 6 (1957): 15-27, argued that "Luttrell was noting the day of publication, which, of course, was often the day of purchase" (p. 22). Phillip Harth, in

Penfor a Party: Drydens Tory Propaganda in Its Contexts (Princeton, N.J., 1993) revived and endorsed Osborn's argument (p. x). Evidence that Luttrell was signifying the day of publication comes only from 1680, the first year in which he consistently recorded the precise date-day, month, year-on his pur- chases. Note that Luttrell dated his copy of A Panegyrick On the Author ofAbsalom andAchitophel (in the

Huntington Library) "20. Dec. 1681.," whereas the Clark Library copy of the same broadside is dated " 19 December 1681."

ALAN ROPER 102 'v


Luttrell's marginalia are best understood in relation to other annotated copies of early editions, some of them evidently influenced by the printed keys, which we may therefore appropriately consider at this point. The earliest formed part of a wretched piece of doggerel entitled A Key (With the Whip) To Open the

Mystery and Iniquity of the Poem Call'dAbsalom 6&Achitophel. Written by a dis-

senting preacher named Christopher Nesse and published anonymously, it became available some eight weeks after Dryden's poem; Luttrell dated his copy, now in the Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, "13. Jan." 1681/82. While quarreling with Dryden's handling of biblical history, Nesse supplied Restoration equivalents for twenty of Dryden's characters, printing the name as a sidenote as well as discussing the individual in the text. Two months later, Luttrell acquired a copy, now in the Huntington Library, of a set of verses called Absolons IX Worthies: Or, A Key to a late BOOK or POEM, EntituledA. B. & A. C. and dated it "10. March. 1682/1." Not properly a key, Absolons IX Worthies allocates a satiric quatrain to each of eight characters from Dryden's poem, asso-

ciating the biblical names-Achitophel, Zimri, and so on-with biographical details of Restoration figures it leaves unidentified, so that it, too, needs to be

glossed, and Luttrell duly annotated his copy. It lists only disloyal characters,

omitting one of Dryden's, Issachar, and filling up its titular number by adding one of its own, Uriah Junior. Modern scholars sometimes treat Absolons IX Worthies as a reliable extension of Absalom and Achitophel by combining details from the two poems to support an argument that a character corresponds to one Restoration personage rather than another. But nothing establishes Absolons IX Worthies as an authoritative commentary upon Absalom and Achitophel rather than a set of conjectures or interpretations by a contemporary.

Scholars discussing the Restoration identity of Dryden's characters have never cited the next printed key as support for a case. It first appeared at the head of a

cheaply printed quarto offering a double-column text ofAbsalom andAchitophel but without the author's address "To the Reader" and without imprint. It has been dated to 1708 or just before, because in 1708 James Read put his name to another cheap quarto (it sold for one penny), also with double-column text, man-

ifestly set from the anonymous quarto, and claiming to be "The Eight Edition" ofAbsalom andAchitophel. Still, in 1708 Henry Hills printed and sold a cheap octavo edition ofAbsalom andAchitophel, "For the Benefit of the Poor," and warned of a rival edition at the end of his text:

To prevent the Publicks being impos'd on, this is to give notice, that the Book lately Publish'd in 4to is very Imperfect and Uncorrect in so much

<" 103

104 x ALAN ROPER

that above Thirty Lines are omitted in several Places, and many gross Errors committed, which pervert the Sence.

Since Hills accurately described both the anonymous quarto and Read's quarto, we cannot tell which he had in mind.8 In any case, undeterred by other evidences of inaccuracy, Hills helped himself to the key that both quartos featured and

placed it at the end of the author's address in his octavo. We may call the key Read's, even though it strictly belongs to the anonymous quarto, for which, of course, Read may also have been responsible. Read's key offered eleven identifications, of which five were idiosyncratic in ways reflecting an imperfect knowl-

edge of events no longer current. Indeed, these partially keyed editions belong to

years during which there were several attempts to fix a literature dealing with a recent but fading past. An edition of Buckingham's Rehearsal in 1709 offered an exhaustive key to the play, and in the same year Garth's Dispensary also received a key. In 1715 there were keys to Butler's Hudibras and to Tom Brown's Works, as well as Pope's satire on the practice in A Key to The Lock.

The following year, 1716, Jacob Tonson printed "A KEY to both Parts of Absalom andAchitophel" in a new edition of Miscellany Poems.9 Tonson supplied identifications for twenty-six of the characters in Dryden's poem, omitting only Amnon (line 39) from among those with names, as well as a few that enter merely as relatives of other characters: David's brother (line 353), Absalom's mother

(line 368), and Barzillai's son (line 831). Tonson's key remained unquestioned for

nearly two hundred years and probably represents the closest we will ever come to what Dryden would have said if asked the Restoration identity of his characters. Tonson need not have relied upon his memory when compiling his key but

may instead have transcribed and alphabetized marginalia in old file copies, up- dating the titles of a few historical counterparts. Such seems a likely explanation of the key's containing an "Isbosheth" (as "Rich. Cromwell"), even though the character is so spelled only in Tonson's first two folios and in the two Dublin

quartos derived from them. In all ofTonson's subsequent editions, including that for Miscellany Poems in 1716, the character is spelled "Ishbosheth." To be sure, the

key also glosses an "Abethdin" as "Lord Chancellor," and the lines praising Achitophel's conduct of that office, absent from the first two folios, were added in Tonson's first quarto, which he called "The Second Edition." But Achitophel's

8. For these editions, see D. E Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1975), 1:198. The lines

missing from both quartos correspond in a complete text to lines 333-34, 337-44, 349-66, lo0o-l5. Most of the "gross Errors" are common to both quartos, although Read's has some peculiar to itself, notably the

omission of line 87, a half line, which is found in the anonymous quarto, thus making clear that it sup-

plied copy for Read's quarto rather than the other way around.

9. Italic and roman reversed; the key is at 2:36-37 of Macdonald 49.

104 V ALAN ROPER


office is there spelled "Abbethdin" (line 188);10 the (incorrect) spelling with a single b occurs in The Second Part ofAbsalom and Achitophel (line 1014), from his copy of which Tonson presumably took his gloss.

We may set Tonson's key beside Nesse's, not to argue cases of identity, but to find a way of discriminating among annotated copies of early editions. Tonson and Nesse disagree on only two identifications, those for Agag (line 676) and Caleb (line 574). Nesse identified Agag, for whose murder Corah is said to call, as the king's brother, James, duke of York, but that gloss occurs elsewhere only once in the annotated copies I have seen." Tonson listed Agag as "Sir E[dmund] B[erry] Godfrey," an identification that received some, seemingly independent, support from contemporary annotators,'2 although others favored the earl of Danby,'3 or Lord Stafford,'4 and perhaps Edward Coleman.'5 More helpful than Agag is Caleb, listed by Dryden among opposition lords and described as "cold." Nesse identified Caleb as the earl of Essex and then brooded, as well he might, over the significance of "cold." "Is it, because for Children he's too old?" "Cold Caleb" shares a line with "well hung Balaam," and we are told no more about them. Tonson identified Caleb as my rogue, "Lord Grey" ofWarke, a by no means obvious candidate, as modern scholars have more than once argued.

We should expect that Nesse's identifications would be adopted by at least some readers anxious to annotate their copies, especially if they owned one or other of the editions published in the early months of 1682 after Nesse's Key appeared. As it happens, the clearest example I have found is a Clark Library copy of the first folio that was presumably purchased some weeks before Nesse's Key became available.'6 Like Nesse, the owner of this copy identified just twenty of the characters, although passing by Agag and instead annotating Issachar, unglossed by Nesse. They not only have nineteen characters in common, but the annotator also transcribed several of Nesse's peculiarities: "Mowgrave" for Adriel instead of "Mulgrave"; "Ld Seymour" (Nesse has "L. Seimor") for Amiel instead

o1. Quotations from Absalom andAchitophel follow the text in The Works of John Dryden (hereafter Works), 20 vols. projected (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956-), vol. 2, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing (1972): 5-36.

1. National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum) Forster 7018 item 12 (12d). 12. Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds) l2ai; Harvard *fEC65. D8474A. 1681 (12ai); Yale Ij D848

+68ia copy 1 (l2ai); Folger D2212.3 (l2aiii); Clark *fPR 3419 A21 i681fcopy 2 (izd); British Library 11630. e. 19 (i2ei); Clark *PR 3419 A21 168ih (l2eii); National Art Library Dyce 3254 copy 1 (2f); Claremont PR 3415 Ab 88 1682 (12f); Brotherton copy of 12g.

13. Huntington 106367 (12c); Clark *PR 3419 A21 i68ie (12c); Clark *PR 3419 A21 1682a copy 1 (12f).

14. Folger D2216 (12ei). 1. Harvard *EC65. D8474A. 1682 (12f); the gloss is cropped to "man." Coleman was the first to be executed,

partly on Oates's testimony, for complicity in the Popish Plot. 16. *fPR 3419 A21 i681 (l2ai).

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io6 ALAN ROPER

of "Mr Seymour" as, properly, in other annotated copies; and "Sr Wm Jonas," from Nesse's sidenote, where the name of Dryden's character is substituted for

Jones, the Restoration equivalent. As important, they agree upon Caleb as Essex, even though Caleb's Restoration identity prompted no consensus among early annotators. I have seen "Essex" for Caleb in two other copies, which seem not in- debted to Nesse in other respects.17

Marginalia in the Clark copy of the first folio evidently derive from Nesse's

Key. Subsequently, that copy was bound with a copy of The Second Part of Absalom andAchitophel, and a later owner transcribed Tonson's key to both parts into the front of the volume. Tonson's key also served as principal source for mar-

ginalia in a copy of the London edition called "The Fourth."'8 Although the annotator included details not in Tonson's key-for example, identifying Absalom's mother (line 368) as "MrS Walters, alias Barlow"-he accepted Godfrey for

Agag and Grey for Caleb. Like Tonson, he identified Hushai as "Hyde Earl of Rochester" and Jotham as "Mar: of Hallifax." Lawrence, Viscount Hyde became earl of Rochester on 29 November 1682, just over a year after publication of Absalom and Achitophel, and the earl of Halifax was not created Marquis until 22 August 1682. Annotators, including Nesse and Luttrell, who early responded to the poem show these men as "Ld Hide" and "E. ofallifax" or d Hallifax."

These early annotators displayed a usually exclusive concern to put an answer the question "Who's who in this poem?" Nesse, it is true, sought to open the

poems "Iniquity" as well as its "Mystery," but I have found only one early annotator who similarly diversified identification with (hostile) comment on the

poem's political and religious sentiments.19 The rest attended to people rather

than principles, although they also took note of parties and places along the way. So it was with Luttrell's response. His marginalia consist of two main kinds. He

supplied Restoration equivalents for all but six of the thirty characters, together with similar identifications of places like Gath or Egypt and groups like Jews or

Jebusites. He also entered expansive glosses that serve to paraphrase, describe, or explain the text. Sometimes an explanatory gloss accompanies an identifying

gloss in order to show why this Restoration personage must be signified by that biblical character. The expansive glosses will concern us further, but we should

17. Clark *PR 3419 Az1 i681e (2zc); Chicago PR 3418 A2 1682 (2zg).

18. Clark *PR 3413 A1 1682 item 2 (2g). l9. Folger Dz212 (1iai).

106 o-- ALAN ROPER


first consider the identifying glosses in themselves because they supply the point of contact with other annotated copies and later annotated editions.

Luttrell's glosses are identical to those printed by Jacob Tonson thirty-five years later, except that unlike Tonson, Luttrell offered no gloss for Agag (line 676), nor for Saul and Is[h]bosheth (lines 57-58), who, every glossator has agreed, represent Oliver and Richard Cromwell. The consonance between Luttrell and Tonson may seem insignificant. After all, most glossators agreed upon the Restoration equivalents of most of the characters, the principal exception being the compiler of Read's key, and even he managed Monmouth for Absalom, Shaftesbury for Achitophel, Charles II for David, and Bethel for Shimei. Setting aside Read's key, we find that other annotators usually agreed upon Mulgrave for Adriel,20 Seymour for Amiel, Huntingdon for Balaam,21 Ormond for Barzillai, Oates for Corah, Jones for Jonas,22 Halifax for Jotham, Howard of Escrick for Nadab,23 and Buckingham for Zimri. Together with some minor and obvious characters such as Michal, who is David's and therefore Charles II's queen, and Annabel, who is Absalom's and therefore Monmouth's bride, all these identifications have survived to the present. Modern scholars have questioned only one, Huntingdon for Balaam, but they have also accepted other identifications with an assurance not always matched by Dryden's contemporaries.

Issachar (line 738), for example, enters briefly as Absalom's "wealthy western friend" and host during Absalom's triumphant progress through the land. All modern editions, whether meant for scholarly or classroom use, accept, without

mentioning an alternative, Thomas Thynne of Longleat in Wiltshire-"Tom of Ten Thousand"-as the Restoration equivalent of Issachar, because Thynne lav-

ishly entertained Monmouth during his progress in 1680 through the southwest of England. Luttrell, Tonson, and most contemporary annotators who entered a

gloss at this point also agreed upon Thynne. But a few thought otherwise. One

opted for someone called "Mr Teke,"24 probably meaning George Speke, an

20. Chicago PR 3418 Az 1681 (12ai) glosses Adriel as "Dorset," and my copy of izaiii has "Ld: Buckhurst," another of Dorset's titles. Clark *PR 3419 A21 i681h (l2eii) has "Gen Monk, Duke of Albermarle," for Adriel, an unusual association (Monk died in 1670), which is deleted in favor of Mulgrave. The Brotherton copy of izg offers an undeleted "Duke of Albermarle," perhaps signifying the second duke, son of the general. Forster 7018 item 12 (izd) glosses Adriel as "Lauderdale."

21. Rylands 7248 item 8 (i2g) glosses Balaam as "Ld Bellasis" and Caleb as "Ld Peeters," meaning Belasyse and Petre, two of the Popish lords imprisoned in the Tower. Newberry Case fY 185. D85594 (2ih) has "D of Buckinga" for Balaam, even though Zimri is also glossed as Buckingham a few lines earlier.

22. Bodleian Vet. A3 c. 76 (i2ai) has "Justice Jeffries" for Jonas. Jeffreys was a court servant greatly disliked by the Whigs; Jonas comes first in Dryden's "Rascall Rabble" of disloyal commoners (line 579).

23. Chicago PR 3418 A2 i682 (2zg) puts "Sr Wm Jones" beside Nadab, perhaps misplacing the usual gloss for Jonas six lines later.

24. Clark *PR 3419 A21 1682a copy 1 (z2f).

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io8 ALAN ROPER

irascible Whig member of Parliament from Somerset, who also lavishly entertained Monmouth during his western progress in 1680.25 Another entered "Sr W": Coven,"26 perhaps the Sir William Coventry later associated with Halifax's Character ofa Trimmer. Coventry, an uncle ofThynne's, retired from Parliament in 1679 and lived near Witney in Oxfordshire. He had no connection with Monmouth, and the annotator may have confused him with Sir William

Courtenay, who "magnificently entertain'd" Monmouth at Exeter during the western progress.27 These possibilities find some support from a manuscript key in the front of one copy that offers equal alternatives for Issachar: "either Sr Willm Courtney or Speak in Dorsetshire," relocating Speke one county over.28 One in- decisive annotator entered "Esqr Thinne or ... will Courtney,"29 and another bettered him with "Mr Thinn. or Mr Speak. Sr W" Courtney."30 "Courtney" alone adorns the margins of two copies,3' and the margin of another yields a

cropped "tny."32 Two more annotators preferred our friend "Ld Grey,"33 perhaps because Monmouth began the progress of 1680 at Grey's seat, Uppark, near Chichester in Sussex.34 Indeed, if we accept that Issachar stands for a Whig mag- nate who entertained Monmouth during his western progress and who is otherwise distinguished only by being "wealthy," then we have at least eight candidates

among whom to choose. Just as we have limited and therefore insufficiently limiting information

about Issachar, so, too, we know of Bathsheba only that David has grown old in her embraces (line 710), and she evidently stands for one of Charles's mistresses. Luttrell, Tonson, and most early annotators opted for the duchess of Portsmouth, for ten years Charles's principal mistress; she appears without rival in notes to modern editions. The compiler of Read's key, groping for the past, cautiously concluded that Bathsheba signifies "D. Portsmouth, or any other Concubine," because he knew, as we do also, that Portsmouth, although principal, was not

25. For a contemporary description of Speke's entertainment, see A True Narrative of the Duke ofMonmouths Late Journey into the West ... from an Eye-witness thereof(London, 1680), 2 (quoted in Works, 2:270).

26. Huntington 106367 (12c); a cropped copy. 27. True Narrative of. .. Monmouths Late Journey, 3. 28. Clark *PR 3419 A21 i68ih (l2eii). 29. My copy of i2aiii.

30. All Souls CW. 2. 10 item 28 (12ei). 31. Brotherton copy of 12ai; Bodleian Malone G1. 19 ( 2ei). 32. Harvard *EC65. D8474A. 1682 (12f).

33. Chicago PR 3418 A2 1681 (12ai); Rylands SC 1ol59C item 6 (12ai) has "Grey L. Tan[the rest of the word is

illegible]"; Grey became earl of Tankerville in 1695. 34. J. N. P. Watson, Captain-General and Rebel Chief The Life of ames, Duke of Monmouth (London, 1979):

128-29.

108 8 ALAN ROPER


sole mistress. Three annotators, two with copies of the second Dublin edition, preferred the duchess of Cleveland,35 head mistress for the decade preceding Portsmouth's ascendancy, and living in Paris when Absalom andAchitophel was published. But she still figured in satires on royal mistresses in 1681 and 1682,36 and her seniority might seem reflected in the king's growing old in her embraces. She became his mistress shortly before his restoration on his thirtieth birthday. He was past forty when Portsmouth ascended, past fifty when Absalom and Achitophel appeared. Those favoring Cleveland might also have recalled that she became Charles's mistress when wife of another, just as Bathsheba became David's, whereas Portsmouth was unwed.

I make the case for the duchess of Cleveland, not to challenge the majority preference for Portsmouth, but to understand why three early readers opted for Cleveland. I am also concerned to establish the reasonableness of their choice at the same time as I accept the reasonableness of choosing Portsmouth. Dryden's line, while asking readers to think of a Restoration equivalent for Bathsheba, supplies insufficient detail to restrict the possibilities and enable us to say in unison "she must be Portsmouth and cannot be Cleveland or, for that matter, the duchess of Mazarin or Nell Gwyn." Those who specify only Portsmouth (or Cleveland) help the poem to mean, at least for themselves. Some may object that Bathsheba occupies only a line, Issachar a couplet, and that other problematic characters are dispatched with similar brevity. Can we not assign them to a special category and argue that Dryden normally supplies sufficient detail to restrict Restoration equivalents to just one per character? If so, then, except for the special cases, Dryden has wholly created the meaning without our collusion. Briefly sketched characters number no fewer than seventeen, just over half the total, and, so far from being special or aberrant, in fact provide a sharper version of the poem's nor- mal functioning by reason of the extra demands they make on readers.

Some briefly sketched characters proved troublesome to readers, whereas others did not, and we cannot always tell what made a character difficult or easy to identify. Thus, each of the three ecclesiastical dignitaries occupies a couplet (lines 864-69). Zadock and the Sagan of Jerusalem were frequently annotated and nearly always as the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, although one key left the Sagan unglossed and listed Zadock as the Bishop of London.37 But their colleague, "Him of the Western dome," evidently puzzled

35. Clark *PR 3419 A21 168ie (12c); Huntington 106367 (12c); Chicago PR 3418 A2 168ia (pirated from Tonson's first quarto; see Works, 2:413).

36. See "An Essay of Scandal" (summer 1681), lines 32-36, in John Harold Wilson, ed., Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), 64; and A Dialogue between the D. ofC. and the D. ofP. at their meeting in Paris: Luttrell dated his copy (in the Huntington Library) "28. March. 1682."

37. British Library 643. line 24 item 2 (12aii).

%e 109

ALAN ROPER

annotators, most of whom, including Luttrell, passed him by. I have found nine who anticipated Tonson by identifying the character in one way or another as John Dolben, bishop of Rochester, although only two responded to Dryden's "Western" by noting that the bishop was also dean of Westminster.3 Seven others also responded to "Western" but thought the character signified the "Bp. of Sarum,"39 or "Bp of Salisbury,"40 these being from 1667 to 1689 the alternative titles of Seth Ward, a vigorous opponent of nonconformists. One annotator

looked even farther west and opted for the "Dean of Exeter," signifying thereby either George Cary, who died in February 1681, or his successor, the Honourable Richard Annesley.41 Still another favored the "Bp of [Bath and] Wells,"42 mean-

ing either Peter Mews, a loyal and well-rewarded supporter of Charles I and Charles II, or another favorite of Charles II's, Thomas Ken, who succeeded Mews in November 1684. Richard Hickes of the Middle Temple put his name on a

copy of the first folio and also favored "Bath & W,"43 although a later owner deleted Hickes's gloss and substituted "Dean of West." Another reviser deleted "Rochester" from "Bish of Rochester" and inserted "Oxford" above and "Dr Fell" below the deletion.44 Moreover, annotators did not limit their disagreement to

briefly sketched characters, for a few challenged the majority opinion about the

identity of a character described by Dryden with some fullness. Hushai appears among those loyal to David and is allocated five couplets

celebrating his prudent management of the Exchequer. Most annotators agreed that Hushai corresponds to Lawrence, Viscount Hyde, and Luttrell explained that Hushai must be Hyde because Hyde was "very frugall in ye managemt of ye

Exchequer when was first lord cohnissione." Tonson endorsed the identification, which has remained unchallenged to the present. But some early annotators

thought otherwise. Two read Hushai as Danby, sometime lord high treasurer, al-

though out of office and in the Tower for more than two and a half years.45 One

manuscript key lists Hushai as either Hyde or "Sr Stephen Fox," who served with

Hyde as a lord commissioner,46 and Fox occupies without dispute the margin of

38. Brotherton copy of i2ai; Congregational (Dr. Williams's) 82. 4. 4. item io (izd). Folger D 2216 (12ei), a

cropped copy, has "Bp Roche ... & dean."

39. Jesus, Oxford, R9. 8. Gall. item 2 (izai); my copy of 12aiii; Bodleian AA 73 item 12 Art (12d); Texas Aj D848 +68iae (12h).

40. Folger D 2212.3 (lzaiii); Bodleian Malone Gi. 19 (i2ei); All Souls CW 2. . item 28 (i2ei).

41. Yale Ij D848 +681a copy 2 (2lai).

42. Princeton Taylor i2ai.

43. Guildhall Bay H. ]. 3 No 19 item 1 (lzaiii).

44. Princeton Ex 3722. 3103. Ilq (12aiii).

45. Yale Ij D848 +68ia copy 2 (l2ai); Folger D2213 (i2b). 46. Clark *PR 3419 A21 168ih (izeii).

110 -


another copy.47 The annotater of a copy pirated from Tonson's first quarto finally opted for "Lord Hide" but first entered then deleted "Sr Lionel [that is, Leoline] Jenkins," secretary of state since April 168o,48 and still another favored the earl of Burlington, lord treasurer of Ireland from 1660 to 1695.49 Two more, with copies of the second Dublin quarto in which they had already embraced Cleveland rather than Portsmouth for Bathsheba, associated Hushai with "Earl Radno[r]"50 and with "Old Trurow."5' These are the same person: John, Lord Robartes ofTruro, created earl of Radnor in July 1679, lord president of the Privy Council in succession to Shaftesbury from October 1679 until August 1684, sev-

enty-five years old in 1681, and a loyal and able servant of his king. True enough, these annotators of a Dublin edition seem uncertain about ministerial responsi- bilities, mistaking the duties of a lord commissioner for those of a lord president, but an owner of the first folio also favored "[R]adnor."52 Moreover, as Dryden be-

gins the character of Hushai a reader might easily suppose that here is a veteran, perhaps the king's contemporary like Danby, or his senior like Burlington and Radnor, rather than a mere thirty-year-old like Hyde, one of the ministerial Chits:

Hushai the friend of David in distress, In publick storms of manly stedfastness; By foreign treaties he inform'd his Youth; And join'd experience to his native truth.

(Lines 888-91)

Hyde prevailed over Radnor and the others both in his own time and for posterity. He prevailed not because Dryden inscribed him unmistakably into Hushai, but because in his own time informed readers, perhaps informed by other readers, for sufficient reasons declared him the counterpart of Hushai, and because

posterity, rummaging among the records of the dead, has found no other candidate it has wished to advance.

Informed contemporaries, we have seen, agreeing upon many Restoration identities, usually disagreed about some, so that it is unusual to find two extensively annotated copies that agree in all important details. Even the two owners who

47. Brotherton copy of 12g.

48. Chicago PR 3418 A2 1681a (see note 35, above). 49. Newberry Case fY 185. D85594 (12h). 5o. Huntington 106367 (12c).

51. Clark *PR 3419 A21 1681e (12c). 52. My copy of 12aiii.

^ 111

112 ' AL A N ROPER

annotated copies of the same Dublin edition and agreed upon Bathsheba as Cleveland and Hushai as Radnor nonetheless cast different votes for Issachar, one favoring "Sr wm: Coven[try],"5 the other joining the majority and backing Coventry's nephew, "Esqr Thynn."s4 The second also detected Essex in Caleb, whereas the first passed by Caleb without comment. These incidental but per- sistent disagreements among annotators signal that to some extent they worked

independently, unless they were simply copying from a printed key. On the other side, we can easily find a contemporary consensus over the Restoration identities of all characters except Agag, Caleb, and "Him of the Western dome." There were many more Hydes than Radnors or Danbys, more Portsmouths than Clevelands; I have seen thirty-eight Thynnes but, depending on how and what you count, only seven Courtenays, three Spekes, and two Greys. The consensus

may testify to the skill or the obviousness of Dryden's satire: many things follow easily if as a contemporary reader you deduce from the prefatory address that far away and long ago signify, as so often, here and now.

The consensus may also reflect some, perhaps widespread, sharing of information both written and oral. There must have been more letters mentioning and identifying Dryden's characters than the few calendered by the Historical Manuscripts Commission.55 People must have talked about the poem in London, Dublin, and elsewhere, especially during the first six months of its life, when it ran through edition after edition, was twice turned into Latin by Oxford scholars, and was celebrated, attacked, answered, and imitated. Manuscript as well as printed keys may have been available. A copy of the first edition at Yale has a contemporary key laid in; it lists items by page and line as well as by character or place, giving, for example, "Solymaan Rout-ye Cittie Rabble," for page 16, line 25.56 The glosses from this key are also found in the margins of a copy of the third edition at Claremont,57 where the "Solymaan Rout" (line 513) is identified as "The City Rabble." I have seen fifteen other copies that gloss the phrase, but none as in the Yale and Claremont copies. The two copies contain the same

glosses, except that Claremont identifies Adriel, omitted from the Yale key, as

Mulgrave. Some details-Achitophel's son (line 170), the Pillars of the Laws (line 874)-are glossed only in these two copies and with the same or very similar phrasing. The Yale key may represent a coffee-house purchase, the Claremont

53. Huntington 106367. 54. Clark *PR 3419 A21 168ie.

55. Tenth Report, Appendix, Part IV: 174-75; Ormonde, n.s., 6:233, 236. See also Correspondence of the Family of Hatton, in Camden Society, n.s., 23 (1878): 1o.

56. Ij D848 +68ia copy 1 (l2ai).

57. PR 3415 Ab 88 1682 (12f).

ALAN ROPER 112 2 ~


marginalia a transcription of the same key or another copy of it. A British Library copy of the first edition has a list of characters facing Dryden's epistle.58 The list looks as though it has been copied from another source or taken down in dicta- tion: there are blots, a deletion, a reforming of the letters in Escricks name. The

compiler followed the consensus for nearly all the listed characters but thought or was told that Zadock signified the bishop of London instead of the archbishop of Canterbury. He also glossed Caleb as Lord Radnor, thus associating the king's servant with malcontent lords given to petitioning for Parliaments.

Sir Charles Lyttelton dubbed them "malcontent lords" in March 168o,59 a few months after sixteen of them petitioned the king on 7 December 1679 for a meet-

ing of Parliament.60 Anticipating the event, a newsletter of 2 December 1679 declared the "most considerable" to be "Lords Shaftesbury, Grey, Howard, North, Huntingdon, Chandos and Kent."6' Essex came over a year later. Dryden represented this group of malcontent lords by means of an elegant rhetorical preteri- tion, naming in passing those whom he professed to find unworthy of mention:

Titles and Names 'twere tedious to Reherse Of Lords, below the Dignity of Verse. Wits, warriors, Common-wealthsmen, were the best: Kind Husbands and meer Nobles all the rest. And, therefore in the name of Dulness, be The well hung Balaam and cold Caleb free. And Canting Nadab let Oblivion damn, Who made new porridge for the Paschal Lamb. Let Friendships holy band some Names assure: Some their own Worth, and some let Scorn secure.

(Lines 569-78)

Here we have only three biblical characters to share among five or six times that number of Whig nobles, and we might expect contemporaries to apportion them

variously or to leave them unglossed. Some indeed passed them by, but those who annotated the copies I have seen nearly always agreed upon Balaam and Nadab while disagreeing about Caleb. Luttrell helps explain the agreement over two and signals the problem with the third.

Proprietor of a whole couplet, not a mere hemistich, Nadab looks easier than the other two. Unexercised by "Canting," Luttrell focused on the second half of

58. 643. line 24 item 2 (12aii). 59. Correspondence of the Family of Hatton in Camden Society, n.s., 22 (1878): 223. 60. K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968), 560-61. 61. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1679-8o, 296.

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Nadab's couplet: "Ld Howard of Escrick who took ye sacramt in lambs wool," in mulled ale, that is, flavored with the pulp of roasted apples. I mentioned that Luttrell frequently entered such expansive glosses, but one contemporary, anno-

tating a copy of the first folio, favored the curt style,62 offering a "D. Mon:," a "D. Y." (for York), an "Oats," and a "B. Cant." He so styled all his glosses except that for Nadab: "Howard ofEsgrig & because t'is sd he took the sacramt once in Lambs wooll." It looks as though Nadab initially puzzled an otherwise confident annotator, who subsequently received and perhaps sought a solution to his dif-

ficulty. If so, he must have missed a flimsy pamphlet that appeared just a few months before Dryden's poem, told the story in full, and even glossed Dryden's "Canting" in advance by allusion to Howard's early career as dissenting preacher.63 Of course, even so recent a story might have eluded some of Dryden's readers because in an age addicted to a politics of gossip many other stories com-

peted for attention.

Among those stories some concerned the earl of Huntingdon (or Hunting- ton, as his name was nearly always spelt), and many contemporary annotators had no difficulty in seeing him in "well hung Balaam," although only Luttrell ex-

plained the epithet as well: "Ld Huntington who hath a swinging P-. as is said." Who said so and where? Well, "The Quarrel between Frank and Nan" circulated in manuscript in 1681 and included among sketches of Whig lords one of

Huntingdon with his long tool, Not as his mark of man but fool, Whose tail and follies make his life

Only useful to his wife.64

As we shall see, modern scholars have enlarged the meaning of "well hung," if I

may so express the matter. We may therefore note in passing that contemporaries who glossed the epithet never understood it in anything but Luttrell's sense. One annotator, seeing Buckingham in Balaam, added that the epithet served "to describe a good p."65 Both Nesse and the author ofAbsolons IXWorthies transmuted "well hung" into Priapus, and Francis Atterbury, later bishop of Rochester but

62. Dyce 3252 (12aiii).

63. A Letter to a Friend, Occasioned by my Lord Howard ofEscricks Letter To His Friend, With his Protestation at the Receiving the Blessed Sacrament in the Tower, July 3. 1681 (London, 1681).

64. Lines 61-64: see Poems on Affairs ofState: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714 (hereafter POAS), 7 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1963-75), vol. 2, ed. Elias F. Mengel Jr. (1965), 238. For other references to

Huntingdon's endowment, see The Poems ofJohn Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond, 4 vols. projected (London and New York 1995-), 1:497 (hereafter Hammond).

65. Newberry Case fY 185. D85594 (12h).

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ii6 ALAN ROPER

then an Oxford wit of twenty, turned "well hung" into "membrosior" (than Caleb) for his Latin version of Dryden's poem.66

The near unanimity of contemporaries about Balaams Restoration counter-

part makes him less interesting than his close companion "cold Caleb," or, as

Atterbury turned him, "Frigidus in Venerem Caleb." Caleb and his Restoration identities answer more fully to Addison's explanation of how Absalom and

Achitophel functions than anything else in the poem, which insists that Caleb has a Restoration identity but then defines it only by placing Caleb among disaffected lords and calling him "cold." It looks as though early readers found it difficult to specify a lord so qualified, and some therefore discarded either coldness or disaffection in order to make a satisfying association with a contemporary. Discarding coldness could easily license an earl of Kent as Caleb, because his name was often coupled with Huntingdon's among malcontent lords. In The Cabal, which Luttrell dated "18. Feb." 1679/80, they stand together as "bawling Huntington, and Kent the mute."67 Readers might have supposed that in Absalom and Achitophel the same two nobleman were once more paired antithetically, if on different grounds, and I can report seven or eight who annotated their copies with Huntingdon for Balaam and Kent for Caleb.68 Discarding disaffection as a criterion may account for the person who listed Radnor as Caleb. Although loyal, Radnor was of advanced years and much older than Essex, whom Nesse thought Caleb and called "cold" perhaps "because for Children he's too old."

To be sure, Nesse was trying to think of a lord who both belonged to the opposition and could qualify as "cold." Such a thought perhaps prompted the gloss of"Ld Wharton" for Caleb in four copies,69 and "Ld Wharton or Ld Grey" in two others.70 Wharton was nearly seventy, of Puritan stock, and certainly of the opposition, although he held back from signing the petitions of Whig lords. Indeed, his son was a more active exclusionist than he. Another annotator identified Caleb as "E. of Stamford,"7' perhaps to reflect coldness of a different kind. One

66. Absalon etAchitophel: Poema Latino Carmine Donatum (Oxford, 1682), 22. Atterbury was assisted by Francis Hickman. The other Latin version, William Coward's Absalon et Achitophel: Carmine Latino Heroico (Oxford 1682), 20, follows the contemporary consensus on the spirit of Dryden's phrase by way of

complicated allusion to a bawdy line of Juvenal's. 67. British Library Lutt. II. 23; included in POAS, 2:327-38; see line 180. 68. Texas Aj D848 +681a (12ai); Folger D2212 (12ai); Dyce 3252 (i2aiii); Clark *fPR 3419 A21 i681f copy 2

(i2d); Folger D2216 (i2ei); Trinity Coll., Cambridge, H. o1. 146 item I (i2ei); Clark *PR 3419 A21 1682a

copy (12f); Clark *PR 3419 A21 i68ih (i2eii) has "Earl of Huntington" for Balaam and "Ld Grey, or Earl

of Kent" for Caleb. 69. Jesus, Oxford, R9. 8. Gall. item 2 (12ai); Bodleian AA 73 item 12 Art (i2d); Balliol 915. h. 1 item 18 (12f);

Texas Aj D848 +681ae (12h).

70. Yale Ij D848 +68ia copy 1 (i2ai); Claremont PR 3415 Ab 88 1682 (i2f).

71. All Souls CW 2. 10 item 28 (12ei).

116 1 ALAN ROPER


of the petitioning peers, Stamford was only twenty-eight in 1681 but was a reputed cuckold with a wanton wife.72 Luttrell was evidently thinking along the same lines as Nesse when he glossed "cold Caleb" as "Ld Grey cold because no children." It happened that Grey had a child, but only a girl, who was only six in 1681 and perhaps sequestered at Uppark.73 Moreover, recurrent rumors of an affair between Monmouth and Lady Grey finally reached print early in 1681,74 and beginning with Scott, scholars favoring Grey as Caleb have sometimes cited the rumor and argued that "cold" signifies Grey's indifference to his wife's actions and especially her reputed infidelity. Grey and Huntingdon thus share a line as complaisant cuckold and lusty womanizer, and I have found ten annotators who agreed with Luttrell in making them the counterparts of Caleb and Balaam.75 One scholar points out that reading "cold" in this way "corroborates" Dryden's reference to "Kind Husbands" just two lines before Caleb's entry76 But an admittedly sparse contemporary record dissociates "cold Caleb" from "Kind Husbands."

I said earlier that Absolons IX Worthies, proposing itself as a key to Absalom

andAchitophel, names a character unmentioned by Dryden, and we can now account for that additional character. Absolons IX Worthies lists its characters by their order of appearance in Dryden's poem, first Achitophel, "Next Zimri," "Then kind Uriah Junior," "Next Priapus-Balaam," and so on to "last Corah." We must therefore seek Uriah Junior in Dryden's lines 569-72, between the end of Zimri and the beginning of Balaam, and, as signaled by his epithet, he represents Dryden's "Kind Husbands," being "kind Uriah Junior whose distress'd / Lady the beauteous Absalon caress'd." We cannot claim that Uriah Junior signifies Grey, but his author certainly distinguished him from "Chast Caleb ... whose chill embraces charm / Women to Ice." One annotator ofAbsalom andAchitophel also favored such a distinction, glossing "Kind Husbands" as "Grey" and Caleb as "Kent,"77 and two annotators of Absolons IX Worthies glossed Uriah Junior as

72. See Wilson, Court Satires: 52, 55, 56, 112-13, 122, 127, 288.

73. See Cecil Price, Cold Caleb: The Scandalous Life ofFord Grey, First Earl of Tankerville 1655-1701 (London, 1956), 26.

74. See A True Relation of a Strange Apparition which appear'd to the Lady Gray, commanding her to deliver a Message to his Grace the Duke ofMonmouth (London, 1681). For its publication in January 1681, see Narcissus Luttrell, A BriefHistorical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1857; reprint, Westmead, England, 1969), 1:64.

75. Princeton Taylor 12ai; my copy of 12aiii; Bodleian Ashmole G. 16 item 2 (l2aiii); Worcester, Oxford, LR. 8. 18 (12aiv); Yale Ij D848 +68ia copy 4 (i2a/d); Cambridge Hib. 7. 692. 1 item 16 (12b); Forster 7018 item 12 (i2d); Brotherton copy of i2ei; Dyce 3254 copy 1 (i2f); Clark *PR 3413 Ai 1682 item 2 (12g).

76. Mengel in POAS, 2:476. 77. Folger D2216 (12ei).

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Grey but then found they had a problem with Caleb. One left Caleb unglossed along with Balaam and Shimei,78 the other entered "Escrick" then smudged it out when he found he needed Howard of Escrick for Nadab.79 Confronted with an uncanonical character, Luttrell underlined Uriah Junior in his copy of Absolons IX Worthies but entered no gloss, as was elsewhere his practice when he discovered a reference he could not place. Caleb he knew or thought he knew from Absalom andAchitophel and duly wrote "Ld Grey" in the margin.

Luttrell's gloss of Grey for Caleb anticipated Tonsons printed gloss by thirty- five years, and I would like to think, although I cannot prove, that at this point and perhaps others in the poem Tonson helped his friend to interpret a difficult allusion, having already assembled the materials for his eventual key. Whether or not he did, it seems likely that Luttrell in his turn was willing to share his mar-

ginalia with others. A copy in the Dyce Collection of the London quarto called "The Third Edition" contains annotations that answer to Luttrell's in puzzling ways.80 Two people annotated that copy. The first, call him Dyce A, entered sim-

ple identifications of characters that have interest because Dyce A is one of only three annotators I have found beside Luttrell who identified most of the characters and agree with Tonson in all cases, including Grey for Caleb.8' Dyce A also identified Amnon, the poems other murder victim, the only named character omitted by Tonson and, with Agag, the least likely to be glossed in copies of early editions. The second annotator, call him Dyce B, subsequently transcribed Luttrell's comments into the copy. On the title page he added "by M" John Dryden" together with Luttrell's general comment verbatim but omitted price and date as well as "Ex dono Amici Jacobi Tonson," presumably because such data were not true of the copy he was annotating. Identifications of characters re-

quired no adjustment because Luttrell and Dyce A agreed upon all cases they had in common, although Dyce B repaired one of Dyce As omissions by copying Luttrell's gloss of York for David's brother. But Dyce B found much to copy from Luttrell's descriptive, paraphrastic, and explanatory glosses. He had no room in the quarto's margins for Luttrell's explanations of why Balaam is "well hung" and Caleb is "cold" but copied Luttrell's reference to sacramental lamb's wool be- neath Dyce A's identification of Nadab as Howard of Escrick.

When and why Dyce B made his transcription must remain uncertain. The

handwriting could date to 1682 or to forty years later, and we ought to allow for an interval before the copy passed from Dyce A to Dyce B. For whatever reason,

78. Harvard *EB65. Aioo. 681a7. 79. Bodleian Ashmole G. 16 item i. 80. Dyce 3254 copy 1 (12f). 81. See also Bodleian Ashmole G. 16 item 2 (izaiii); Worcester, Oxford, LR. 8. 18 (izaiv).

118 -m


Luttrell's annotations had value and perhaps authority for Dyce B, and we have other evidence that Luttrell was willing to share his knowledge and marginalia. Luttrell's annotations to Settle's Absalom Senior were transcribed almost certainly during the Restoration into another copy of the poem.82 The copyist entered all of Luttrell's glosses except for three that he probably omitted by oversight. He added none of his own and always respected the substance of Luttrell's phrasing, while changing spelling and accidentals in a clearly contemporary style. Dyce B similarly introduced his own spelling and accidentals when copying Luttrell's marginalia to Absalom andAchitophel, although Dyce B also changed the phrasing from time to time but never the sense of a gloss.

Luttrell's annotated copy and Tonsons printed key mark off the first stage of Absalom and Achitophets posterity, the period during which Addison's description of the poem's appeal corresponds most closely to what we can gather from the manuscript record. But when Addison published Spectator no. 512, on 17 October 1712, a generation had passed since Absalom andAchitophel first appeared, and many who wished to experience it on Addison's terms must have needed the kind of assistance that Tonson's key soon supplied. Even Addison, a boy of nine in 1681, could never have known, other than vicariously, the excite- ment of reading Dryden's poem as he describes it and to which contemporary marginalia abundantly testify. By the time of Spectator no. 512, most of the historical counterparts to Dryden's characters had died. Henry Compton, bishop of London (Sagan of Jerusalem), held on until 1713, and Louis XIV (Pharaoh) until 1715; the earl of Mulgrave (Adriel) died in 1721 as duke of Buckingham, the title having become extinct in 1687 at the death of George Villiers (Zimri) and therefore available for a new creation in 1703. Two of the women lasted longest. The duchess of Monmouth (Annabel) remarried after her husband's execution in 1685 and survived until 1732. The duchess of Portsmouth (Bathsheba) died unwed in 1734, a few months before the fiftieth anniversary of Charles II's death.

We can sense how much early-eighteenth-century readers needed a reliable key to Dryden's poem by returning to Read's key, copied by Hills in 1708 and printed "For the Benefit of the Poor." I mentioned that five of Read's eleven identifications are idiosyncratic. The three malcontent lords in Dryden's summary dismissal, Balaam, Caleb, and Nadab, become three commoners in Read's key, Algernon Sidney, Sir Thomas Armstrong, and Robert Ferguson ("the Plotter"), all of whom achieved maximum notoriety with the discovery of the Rye House Plot eighteen months after Absalom and Achitophel was published. Corah becomes Stephen College, "the Protestant Joiner," tried and executed in the summer of 1681, even though Corah is a priest and College was not. Zimri, on whose

82. Huntington 135883 (Luttrell's copy); Texas Aj Se 78 +682a copy 3.

, 119

120 ALAN ROPER

Figure 3. Read's key, recorded in an unknown hand in a copy of Tonson's "Third Edition," now in the Huntington Library.

character Dryden later congratulated himself in a way that indicates the association with Buckingham,83 proves in Read's key one more avatar of our friend, "L. Gray." Who could trust such a key? Well, an otherwise unmarked copy of the first folio reproduces Read's key on the verso of the tide page, with "Ld Grey" first entered for Zimri then deleted in favor of "Villiers Duke of Buckingham."84 A

copy of the second folio displays Read's identifications and no others in its mar-

gins and also lists them in tabular form at the end of the text.85 A later hand struck out the five idiosyncratic glosses in the margins and terminal list and entered equivalents that agree with Tonson's in 1716, except that Caleb, eliminated as "S Tho: Armstrong," acquires no alternative identity. One eighteenth-century owner, with an unmarked copy ofTonson's "Third Edition,"86 copied Read's key to face the beginning of the poem (figure 3); the separate glosses were also entered

83. In the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress ofSatire (Works, vol. 4, ed. A. B. Chambers, William Frost, and Vinton A. Dearing [1974]: 71).

84. St. John's, Cambridge, Hh. 2. 20 item 5 (12aiii). 8s. Yale Ij D848 +681aa copy 1 (12d). 86. Huntington 438606 (12f).

ALAN ROPER 120 's


in the margins in a different hand, but no one came behind with corrective pen. Two other owners of "The Third Edition" also copied Read's key into the pre- liminary matter and one of them added "the Papists" in the margin beside "Jebusites" (line 86), perhaps as a mark of independent thought.87 One already annotated copy of the first folio received additional glosses in the eighteenth century, some of them supplying Read's identifications as alternatives to the first annotator's. We find "Huntingt." for Balaam in one hand, "or Sidney" in another; so too with "Oates or Stepn Colledge" for Corah and "How ... Escrick or Ferguson" for Nadab.88 Read's key teaches us that, had Tonson not issued his authoritative key in 1716, the later history of Absalom andAchitophe's interpretation would have looked very different from what we have.

The first stage of that later history, and the second of the poem's posterity, lasted for 225 years, during which almost no one questioned the accuracy of Tonson's identifications, although there was an early rival. Four Dublin editions of the first part alone, appearing between 1727 and 1735, "added an explanatory Key never Printed before," which is partly but not entirely derived from Tonson's and which omits seven of Dryden's characters. Its dependence on Tonson's key shows in the gloss for Hushai: "E. Ro. & Hyde," mistaking the family name for part of the title because Tonson put "Earl ofRochester, Hyde," in order to distinguish this Rochester from the famous John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, whose title became extinct with his son's death in 1681 and available for Hyde's creation a year later. Although the two keys agree on almost all characters they have in common, the Dublin compiler also included details certainly not derived from Tonson. He glossed Shimei as "L: M. of Lon.," and even Read knew that Shimei represented "Sheriff [Slingsby] Bethel." Some glosses may have come from an annotated copy of one of the early editions, as "En[glish] Virtuosi" for "These Ad[am] wits" (line 51) or "The round heads Cant" for "The good old Cause" (line 82) resembles someone's marginal note more obviously than an entry in a key. But this partial rival to Tonson's key seems to have enjoyed only a brief, Irish currency, and thereafter Tonson's "KEY to both Parts" reappeared in edition after edition from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Some editions, beginning with Thomas Broughton's in 1743,89 included from The Second Part

87. Cambridge Aaa. 35 item 1 ("the Papists"); Clark *PR 3419 A21 1682a copy 2 (if). 88. Worcester, Oxford, LR. 8. 18 (12aiv). 89. Original Poems (London, 1743). The publishers were Jacob III and Richard Tonson, who continued the

family business after the death in 1735 of their father, Jacob II, nephew to Jacob I (Dryden's and Luttrell's Tonson), who retired in 1718 and died in 1736.

V 121

122 ' ALAN ROPER

only the two hundred lines that Tonson had attributed to Dryden in Miscellany Poems of 1716 (2:3-4). They accordingly discarded the characters and glosses be- longing to Tate's share. Samuel Derrick reprinted Tonson's complete key in his edition of 176o,90 expanding some glosses, adding an entry for Gath as well as historical details, and making "J. H.," Tonson's gloss for "rotten Uzza" in Dryden's contribution to The Second Part (line 407), into "Jack Hall," an identification that remained canonical until questioned by George R. Noyes in 1950.91 By 1798, in "Cooke's Edition" of the Poetical Works, the accretion of further historical or explanatory detail makes the key resemble a list of dramatis personae.

Ten years after "Cooke's Edition" Scott discarded the tabular key and distributed Tonson's glosses among notes to the poems. Those notes contain a wealth of supplementary material, as befits the first full scholarly edition of Dryden's works, and Scott repaired Tonson's omission by identifying Amnon. Scott also referred to Luttrell's annotations, as have subsequent editors down to the present, although nineteenth-century citation of Luttrell's marginalia was chiefly sec- ondhand. Both Malone and Scott had access to Luttrell's copy when preparing their editions, Malone of the Prose Works in 1800, Scott of the complete Works in 1808, but Scott merely alluded to without quoting Luttrell's explanation of why Balaam is "well hung" and cited none of Luttrell's other marginalia to the poem.92 Malone transcribed several of Luttrell's notes into a copy of Tonson's first quarto now in the Bodleian Library93 and made them available for the Wartons' edition of the Poetical Works in 181 1, where each ends with "MS. Note by Mr. Luttrell. Malone" or "MS. Luttrell. Malone." These notes were appro- priated (with "Malone" reduced to "M") for the Aldine editions of Dryden's Poetical Works, first published by Pickering in 1832-33 and frequently reprinted. From Pickering's edition the notes passed into Dryden's Works in Verse and Prose

published at New York by Dearborn in 1836 and reprinted there by Harper. Some of Malone's transcriptions in his copy of the quarto and for the Wartons' edition paraphrase rather than reproduce the original, and one wrongly attributes a statement to Luttrell, presumably because Malone confused his own notation with Luttrell's. Luttrell merely glossed "Bull-fac'dJonas" (line 581) as "Sr William jones." Malone annotated his copy with "Sir Wm Jones[.] He drew the Habeas Corpus Act," and the gloss so appears in the Wartons' edition followed by "MS. Luttrell. Malone." From there the gloss passed to the Aldine editions

90. Miscellaneous Works (London, 1760), also published by J. and R. Tonson. 91. The Poetical Works ofDryden, 2d ed., rev. (Boston, 1950; ist ed. 1909), 1042, io6i.

92. The Works ofJohn Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury, 18 vols. (Edinburgh, 1882-93), 9:264.

93. Mason H 185 item 4 (12ei).

ALAN ROPER 122 -'


and beyond, surviving in print until around 1960 and crediting Luttrell with misinformation.94

The Wartons' edition of 1811 also reinstituted the tabular key, but aug- mented it with expansive footnotes, many of them featuring splenetic comments on the poem and poet by Joseph Warton, Dryden's most unsympathetic editor. Thereafter, most editions included some version of Tonson's key, treating his

glosses as canonical, or distributed those glosses among notes in the manner of Scott, or offered a combination of key and notes in the manner of the Wartons. Even the unannotated text of Dryden's Poems prepared for the "Oxford Standard Authors" by John Sargeaunt in 1910 included a lightly edited version ofTonson's "KEY to both Parts," and Sargeaunt's edition remained in print for fifty years. It thus survived into the third stage of the poem's posterity along with sundry texts

prepared for the school and college markets in Britain and North America late in the second stage and kept in print, unrevised, for several decades.

E. S. de Beer inaugurated the third and current stage of the poem's posterity in

July 1941, when he announced:

Commentators on Absalom have always relied for identifications on the "Key" published in 1716 in the Miscellany Poems; they have never seriously questioned its authority. In its favour is the fact that the book was published by Dryden's publisher, Tonson, within a

comparatively short period of Dryden's death. On the other hand the identification of Agag as Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey does not make sense, and no attempt is made to identify Amnon. While most of the identifications in the Key are correct, some are wrong and some are open to discussion.95

As preacher of a new dispensation, de Beer appropriately had a precursor. Thirty years earlier A. W. Verrall had referred to Tonsons key as "a mere compilation without Dryden's authority, reprinted by modern commentators," when lectur-

ing on Dryden at Cambridge.96 At this point in his lecture Verrall was exercised

94. Habeas Corpus was enacted in May 1679, when Jones was still attorney-general. He did not become a

supporter of Shaftesbury, who managed Habeas Corpus through Parliament, until November 1679. He did not become a member of Parliament until November 168o, when he committed himself to urging the Exclusion Bill, the most likely referent of the "Statutes" that Jonas could "draw / To mean Rebellion, and make Treason Law."

95. "Absalom and Achitophel: Literary and Historical Notes," Review ofEnglish Studies 17 (1941): 298-309, quoting 306.

96. Lectures on Dryden, ed. Margaret de G. Verrall (Cambridge, 1914), 76. Verrall delivered the lectures in 1911.

123

124 A

by Tonson's glossing of Hebron as Scotland, and although evidently contemp- tuous of "the bookseller's 'Key'... in the posthumous edition of 1716," Verrall challenged none of its glosses for characters except to insist that Agag has no Restoration equivalent and therefore cannot signify Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey (pp. 71-72). De Beer had other game in view. Accepting "most of [Tonson's] identifications," de Beer had alternative Restoration identities to propose for four of Dryden's characters, Agag and Amnon, Balaam and Caleb, and he also sought to assign a Restoration identity to Stephen the Protomartyr, mentioned in line 643 and never before glossed by editors.

In effect, de Beer changed the rules of readership, although he gave no sign of realizing that he had. For more than two hundred years the key accompanied the poem. You did not, indeed you could not, read the poem without it, because the key unlocked meanings fixed in the poem by its author. Editors could em- bellish the key by, for example, expanding initials into full names or by supplying the name, lacking from Tonson's original, of the bishop of London in 1681. They might even enlarge the key on occasion by adding an entry, as Derrick in 1760 repaired Tonson's omission by glossing Gath (line 264) as "the Land of Exile, more particularly Brussels, where King Charles II long resided" (1:248). Scott turned Derricks gloss into a footnote (9:245), and other editors incorporated it into their versions of the key so that by 1909 this piece of tradition had become part of the original testament: "Gath. Explained in Tonson's Key, published in The Second Part ofMiscellany Poems, 1716, as, 'The Land of Exile, more particularly Brussels, where King Charles II long resided.'"97 Verrall might grumble, but the key remained in place, with two centuries of tradition ornamenting its original simplicity.

Thus embellished, the key enjoyed a long tyranny over editors and therefore over readers, as we can see by returning to Hebron, the place that so exercised Verrall. Tonson glossed Hebron as Scotland presumably because he was supplying a "KEY to both Parts of Absalom andAchitophel' and because in The Second Part the word Hebron and its derivatives occur nine times, six in Dryden's, three in Tate's share, and always signify Scotland, Scotsman, or Scottish.98 Unfortunately, Dryden once referred to Hebron in the first part as well, during his character of the Jews, "Who banisht David did from Hebron bring, / And, with a Generall Shout, proclaim'd him King" (lines 59-60). One early annotator trans- lated the first line as "Charles from Breda,"99 and Scott glossed Hebron as "Here, Flanders or Holland; afterwards Scotland" (9:232), presumably meaning "in The

97. George R. Noyes, ed., The Poetical Works of Dryden (Boston, 1909; 2d ed., rev., 195o), 960. 98. Hebron: 328, 352, 793, 803; Hebron's: o165; Hebronite: 320, 330, 348; Hebronitish: 333. 99. Clark *fPR 3419 A21 1681f cop. 2 (lzd).

ALAN ROPER


Second Part" by "afterwards." In the middle of the nineteenth century Robert Bell

incorporated relevant components of the key into separate introductions to each of the two parts. Among "Places" in the first part he included "Hebron and Tyre, indifferently used to designate Holland," and he ended his key to The Second Part by noting that "for some unexplained reason, Tate alters the allegorical ge- ography, and Hebron, which formerly represented Holland, here stands for Scotland."'00 But Tonson's key said simply and unelaborately that Hebron means Scotland, and versions of that key continued to appear in other editions, notably the Aldine editions issued by various publishers during the nineteenth century.

W. D. Christie rehearsed and tried to resolve the problem of two Hebrons or one in his Globe edition of the Poetical Works, published by Macmillan in 1870:

Hebron, in the Second Part of "Absalom and Achitophel," in which the names of the original poem were continued with the same ap- plications, means Scotland; and it is so used in Dryden's portion of the continuation as well as by Tate. Here [in the first part] one would expect Hebron to mean the Netherlands, or, still more suit- ably, Brussels. But Gath stands for Brussels in line [264]. A reference is perhaps made to Monk's march from Scotland to effect the Restoration, or to Charles's having been already crowned King of Scotland. (P. 93)

The following year Christie produced for the Clarendon Press a volume of selections from his Globe edition and abbreviated his original note on Hebron by omitting the reference to Charles's Scottish coronation.'10 Christie died in 1874, and nearly twenty years later C. H. Firth revised Christie's notes for a fifth edition of the Clarendon selections, which eventually yielded a separate, annotated text ofAbsalom andAchitophel manifestly meant for the schoolroom.102 When re- vising Christie's note on Hebron, Firth discarded the puzzling over geographical inconsistency and the tentative proposal of a reference to Monks march. In their place Firth resurrected Christie's second proposal from the Globe edition and rewrote it as dogma:

0oo. Poetical Works ofJohn Dryden, 3 vols. (London, 1854), 1:230, 266. 1ol. The volume contained six poems and appeared in the "Clarendon Press Series" of "English Classics." It is

sometimes referred to as Selected Poems, the title on the spine, but its proper title is Dryden: Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell, followed by the titles of some or all of the other five poems.

102. Clarendon published the fifth edition in 1893 and continued to reissue it as "the fifth edition." By 1911 Clarendon had detached Absalom andAchitophel from its fellow selected poems and put it into a strange little volume by itself together with the introduction, notes, and pagination of the fifth edition of the

parent work. An impression of 1958 was presumably the last and still announced itself as Absalom and Achitophel, edited by W. D. Christie, fifth edition, revised by C. H. Firth.

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ALAN ROPER

Hebron means Scotland. Charles II was crowned king in Scotland, Jan. 1, 1651; in England not till April, 1661. So David reigned first seven years and six months in Hebron, and then thirty-three years in Jerusalem.

Verrall, while complaining about Dryden's inconsistency and Tonson's unau- thoritative key, insisted that in line 59 of Absalom and Achitophel Hebron "ap- parently stands for the Continent, perhaps in particular the Low Countries or Brussels, from which Charles was brought to England.... It is clear that Hebron in Part I does not mean Scotland" (p. 76). But by 1911 it was already too late. Firths note appeared in a Clarendon edition that remained in print until around 1960, by which time James Kinsley had issued his Clarendon edition of Dryden's Poems. Kinsley incorporated Firth's note and repeated it in the Oxford edition of Absalom andAchitophel that he and his wife published in 1961 to replace the old Firth/Christie edition. Two years before Verrall lectured, Noyes adopted Firth's note for an American edition of Dryden's Poetical Works that remained in print for seventy-five years and influenced many texts prepared for the American col-

lege market. With prestige on both sides of the Atlantic, a note that abandons the obvious in favor of the intricate has appeared with only minor rephrasing in almost all annotated texts of the twentieth century. Most editors follow Firth's original and suppress all mention of the Netherlands. The very few who mention the obvious sense reject it for the intricate.103 We have been too long in Hebron, but one last version of Firths gloss will illustrate how editorial ingenuity may be presented as authorial intention: "Charles II was crowned King in Scotland in 1651 but not in England until 1661; therefore, although he entered England in 1660 from the Continent, Dryden can say that his people brought him from Scotland."'04 Dryden, of course, said no such thing, even though a century of

scholarship has sought to persuade readers that he did. Dryden said merely that the Jews brought "banisht David ... from Hebron."

Hebron as Scotland shows how Tonson's key has dominated those who mis- read it and also how meanings can be attached to a text that does not demand them. It also demonstrates the tyranny of editors, who are, in one way of seeing, readers who seek to impose their interpretations on other readers and who have a better chance of success than mere critics, proprietors of essays like this one, because they can offer the extra inducement of a text to read. Editors would not put the matter so darkly, of course, but the enterprise of modern scholarship unde-

103. Hammond (1:460) glosses Hebron as "Either Scotland ... or ... Brussels ... though [Charles's] place of

exile is called 'Gath' at line 264." 104. Dryden: Poems and Prose, ed. Douglas Grant (Penguin Books, 1955; reprint 1985), 20. Grant took the note

from his earlier edition of Dryden's Poetry, Prose, and Plays (London, 1952), 90.

126 N-


niably benefited from de Beer's challenge to Tonson's authority in 1941. Tonson's key directed readers how to understand important features of Absalom and Achitophel. Diminishing his authority freed scholars and editors to issue new di- rections. Their liberty might have proved license, but they restricted themselves to debating the identities of the four characters proposed by de Beer for reassignment, Agag and Amnon, Balaam and Caleb. De Beer's attempt to give a Restoration identity to Stephen the Protomartyr (a coincidence of names led him to nominate Stephen College, "the Protestant Joiner") met with silence.10

Indeed, de Beer's whole essay met with more than a decade of silence, chiefly because a war had to be fought and James Kinsley had to finish his education, begin his career, and start gathering material for his Clarendon edition of Dryden's poems, published in 1958. By 1955 Kinsley was ready to reject all but one of de Beer's proposed amendments to Tonson's key; de Beer's response the following year came with a reply by Kinsley appended.106 The new rules of debate, which Kinsley and de Beer established for succeeding decades, stripped Tonson's key of its privilege, elevated Nesse and Absolons IX Worthies into trustworthy witnesses, and licensed scholars to advance such new candidates as they discovered in historical records. Much of this debate remained locked in scholarly journals, but some escaped into new editions able to impose interpretations upon readers not party to the debate. We may consider in turn the later fortunes of each of the four characters de Beer nominated for reassignment.

Amnon has long enjoyed a special status because Tonson left him off the key and because he was unidentified by Luttrell, the only contemporary annotator cited by later scholars. Indeed, among sixty-seven annotated copies, I have found only seventeen glosses for Amnon, one of them a puzzling "Prodger."'07 Edward Proger or Progers, who seems meant, served the king as groom of the bedchamber and procurer. According to hearsay and Monmouth's biographers, he witnessed a mar- riage between Charles and Monmouth's mother.'°8 According to rumor, he himself fathered Monmouth.'°9 But Proger survived into the next century, whereas Dryden's Amnon has already died at the hand or command of Absalom:

10o. De Beer's gloss for Stephen is anticipated by Yale Ij D848 +681a copy 1 and copy 2 (both 12ai), Claremont PR 3415 Ab 88 i682 (12f), Rylands 7248 item 8 (12g), and Harvard *fEC6S. D8474A. 1682c (12h). The Brotherton copy of 12ei glosses Stephen as Lord "Staffor[d]."

1o6. "Historical Allusions in Absalom andAchitophel," RES, n.s., 6 (1955): 291-97; 7 (1956): 410-15. 107. Princeton Ex 3722. 3103. 13 (12g).

o18. See, for example, Watson, Captain-General, 275. 109. POAS, 2:222.

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128 ' ALAN ROPER

Some warm excesses, which the Law forbore, Were constru'd Youth that purg'd by boyling o'r: And Amnon's Murther, by a specious Name, Was call'd a Just Revenge for injur'd Fame.

(Lines 37-40)

Dyce A identified Amnon as "A Bell-Man in Whetstones Park" and another annotator as "A Watchman killd in Whetstones Park,""'1 thus associating him with a beadle called Peter Vernell, who was killed by Monmouth and other "per- sons ... of great quality" late in February 1670/71."1 Two poems describing the affair circulated in manuscript and one was later printed in Poems on Affairs of State (1697).112

Whetstone Park was and is a narrow street in the parish of St. Giles-in-the- Fields running east-west between Lincoln's Inn Fields to the south and Holborn to the north. One contemporary, annotating a subsequently cropped copy of the third folio, glossed Amnon as "kild in Holborne,""3 and another as the "Watchman of St: Giles.""4 A manuscript key lists Amnon as "A Constable mur- derd by ye Duke of Monmouth,"'"5 and similar phrasing occurs in marginalia to six other copies."6 One gloss identifies the victim as "The Porter killed by ye D. of Monmouth,""7 and the Yale key reproduced in Claremont marginalia ex-

plains that "ye Duke of Monnmouth killed a watchman in a nights ramble.""8 Two other copies identify Amnon as "kild by D Monmouth" and "One slain by the Duke of Monmouth,""9 seemingly unhelpful glosses but in fact something to bear in mind when we encounter later scholars who understand "Murther" in a Pickwickian sense. The first of these was Scott, who noted the beadle's murder and described it as "probably one of the youthful excesses alluded to" just prior to "Amnon's Murther" (9:230). That murder Scott associated with an incident

two months earlier than the killing of the beadle. Shortly before Christmas 1670 Monmouth ordered his troopers to assault Sir John Coventry in revenge for

1lo. Dyce 3254, copy 1 (12f); All Souls CW. 2. o1 item 28 (12ei). 111. The quotation is from Marvell's letter reporting the incident: Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth,

3d ed. rev. Pierre Legouis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), 2:133. 112. Both poems are reprinted in POAS, vol. 1, ed. George de Forest Lord (1963), 172-76. 113. Yale Ij D848 +681ae (12h). 114. Folger D2212.3 (izaiii).

S15. Clark *PR 3419 A21 1681h (i2eii). 116. Jesus, Oxford, R9. 8. Gall. item 2 (l2ai); Texas Aj D848 +68ia (12ai); Bodleian AA 73 item 12 Art (izd);

Balliol 915. h. 1 item 18 (12f); Brotherton copy of i2g; Texas Aj D848 +681ae (2lh).

117. Brotherton copy of izai.

18. Yale Ij D848 +681a copy 1 (12ai); Claremont PR 3415 Ab 88 1682 (12f).

119. Folger D2213 (12b); Clark *PR 3419 A21 i68ie (i2c).

128 ;- ALAN ROPER


Coventry's slighting remarks in the Commons about the king's taste in actresses. The troopers mutilated Coventry's nose but did not kill him. If the Restoration equivalent of Amnon's murder indeed occurred more than ten years before publication of Dryden's poem, then the paucity of contemporary glosses becomes explicable. Much had happened in those ten years to fade the memory of how Monmouth and the others killed the beadle as he begged for mercy on his knees. Luttrell and Tonson were boys at the time.

When de Beer addressed the matter, most editors had accepted Scott's evidence. Some specified Coventry alone; a few mentioned the beadle as a less

appealing alternative. But others rejected both candidates. As Verrall put it, "'Amnon's murder' (39)-an allusion which 'has never been satisfactorily explained,' writes Prof. J. Churton Collins in his note on the passage-need not have any precise analogy in the known actions of Monmouth."'20 De Beer briefly complicated the matter by trying to find a Restoration match for Absalom's mur- dering his half-brother in revenge for Amnon's ravishing his sister. He put the case for William Fanshawe, who married Monmouth's half-sister in 1676 and seemingly incurred Monmouth's disapproval to an extent that cost him a government post in 1681. Kinsley remarked in rebuttal that a withdrawal of patronage "stretches the meaning of'Murther' too far" and accordingly reintroduced Coventry's nose, perhaps because, though also stretching the meaning of "Murther," mutilation does not stretch it too far. De Beer conceded Coventry in his response to Kinsley, who inserted Coventry alone into the notes both to the Clarendon edition of Dryden's Poems and to the Oxford text ofAbsalom andAchitophel in 1961. Kinsley thus suppressed the beadle, who nevertheless acquired supporters in succeeding decades, although only one was an editor and he with a specialized edition meant principally for scholars.'2' Another editor writing for scholars has found it "impossible to choose between" Coventry and the beadle,'22 but editors seeking a wider audience in the school and college market either declare that Amnon's Restoration identity remains uncertain or opt for Coventry, sometimes qualify- ing their choice with a "probably." It all depends on which text you read.

120. Verrall: 71, alluding to The Satires ofDryden, ed. John Churton Collins (London, 1893), 93-94, an edition that remained in print until 1965 as a school text in the series called "Macmillan's English Classics." Collins rejected Coventry because he was not murdered and the beadle both because he lacked the stature called for by Amnon and because his death did not constitute "Revenge for injur'd Fame."

121. Mengel in POAS, 2:459, where Coventry is mentioned but deemed less likely than the beadle. See also Edward S. Le Comte, "Amnon's Murther," Notes &e Queries 208 (1963): 418; W. K. Thomas, The Crafting ofAbsalom andAchitophel: Drydens "Penfor a Party" (Waterloo, Canada, 1978), 16o-6i; and Colin Visser, "New Testimony on 'Amnon's Murther,"' Restoration 6 (1982): 90-93. Visser argues that the duke of Albermarle killed the beadle with Monmouth as accessory.

122. Hammond, 1:458.

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130 ALAN ROPER

Such is also the case, but afortiori, with Agag, the poem's other murder victim. Those few contemporaries who glossed Agag favored Godfrey over Danby as his Restoration equivalent, although Nesse opted for York. Tonson endorsed

Godfrey, perhaps because a murder is in question and Godfrey's was undeniably the most sensational of the period. Verrall complained that Agag has no Restoration equivalent, but Godfrey remained in possession. However, Dryden says that Corah might call for Agag's murder, and everyone, except for the com-

piler of Read's key, agreed that Corah stands for Titus Oates, who could not

properly be held responsible for Godfrey's murder. Perhaps Agag signified someone not already murdered but simply opposed by Oates, who perhaps wanted him dead. So Nesse may have thought in designating York, although rejecting the

charge against Oates; so those who favored Danby may have thought, because

Danby was among the many against whom Oates testified and because Danby was still famously in the Tower. As part of his case for the unreliability ofTonson's

key, de Beer proposed to replace Godfrey with Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, whose conduct of a Popish Plot trial angered Oates. Oates, though, could scarcely be described as calling for Scroggs's murder, so Kinsley dismissed both Godfrey and

Scroggs and nominated Lord Stafford, one of the Popish lords, at whose trial Oates testified with sufficient plausibility to secure Stafford's execution. I have found only one contemporary who anticipated Kinsley, and his copy of the first London quarto was subsequenty cropped, so that the name appears as "afford";'23 so, too, the king in his mercy remitted the sentence on a sick, old man from

hanging, drawing, and quartering to beheading. On the whole, and at this writing, Kinsley has triumphed. Editors of schol-

arly texts, other than Kinsley, judiciously balance all three candidates, Godfrey, Scroggs, and Stafford (Danby found support only among his contemporaries), leaving the decision to their scholarly readers.'24 One scholar reviewed those three candidates before reintroducing Nesse's nominee, the duke of York, and has re-

cently received a cautious second.'25 Another challenged York and the other three in order to clear the hustings for Charles I but has attracted no voters.26 But

college texts prepared since Kinsley published his findings accept Stafford, al-

though sometimes prefacing his name with "perhaps" or "probably." Two texts

prepared between de Beer's essay and Kinsley's offered Scroggs to students.'27

123. Folger D2216 (2zei). 124. Works, 2:269; POAS, 2:481. 125. Thomas, Crafting ofAbsalom, 135-37; seconded by Hammond (1:509). 126. J. R. Crider, "'Agag's Murther' as Parallel History in Absalom and Achitophel," English Language Notes 21

(1983-84): 34-42. 127. John Dryden: Selected Works, ed. William Frost (San Francisco, 1953; 2d ed. 1971); Seventeenth-Century Verse

and Prose, ed. Helen C. White, et al., 2 vols. (New York, 1952).

ALAN ROPER 130 ~^


Another two, also prepared between de Beer and Kinsley, ignored de Beer and advanced Godfrey. But one was more often used for its selection of earlier than of later seventeenth-century works.'28 The other was a Penguin text of Dryden to be accompanied, if you choose, by a Penguin guide to Absalom and Achitophel that lists Agag as "(?) Lord Stafford."'29

Agag and Amnon enter the poem to illustrate the activities of other characters. Agag shows Corah's insolence to his king; Amnon exemplifies Absalom's youthful excesses. No doubt, part of their elusiveness stems from their being offered as victims of others rather than just as themselves. But at least they were in- volved in actions, if passively. Balaam and Caleb, by contrast, do nothing and have nothing done to them. Even Nadab engaged in an idiosyncratic act of ir- reverence permitting an informed identification. But Balaam and Caleb are distinguished only by their epithets and their being grouped with an indeterminate number of disaffected lords. Cold Caleb's epithet, moreover, is so commonplace that were it not antithetical to Balaam's "well hung," it could never signify anything or anyone in particular. Because Balaam and Caleb share a line and are further linked by antithesis, their later history has often been a joint history. But to understand that later history we must first return to the nineteenth century and take up a problem with Balaam alone.

The problem, of course, concerns his epithet, especially as explained by Lutt- rell, glossed by Nesse and Absolons IX Worthies, and turned into Latin by Atterbury. How to explain the meaning of "well hung" without bringing a blush to the cheek or snigger to the lips? As John Churton Collins put it in 1893, "the explanation of the epithet in the text had better be left where it is to be found in Luttrel's MSS" (p. 102). This unhelpful gloss probably derives from Scott, who noted that "a coarse reason is given by Luttrell, in his MS notes, for the epithet ... in the text" (9:264). But Scott also quoted Absolons IX Worthies: "Priapus- Balaam, of whom 'tis said, / His Brains did lye more in his Tail than's Head." Other nineteenth-century editors left the phrase unannotated, and one frequently reprinted edition offered a text that substituted a line of asterisks for the couplet containing Balaam.'30 Christie indignantly described Balaam's epithet as "a coarse insult" in his Globe edition of 1870. But such a remark drew attention to the vulgarism even if it withheld definition, and Christie omitted it from his Clarendon edition the following year. The final Victorian solution came with

128. Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank J. Warnke, eds., Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry, zd ed. (San Diego, 1982; ist ed. 1946).

129. Dryden: Poems and Prose, ed. Douglas Grant (1955); Raman Selden, John Dryden: Absalom andAchitophel, Penguin Masterstudies (1986), 102.

130. The Works ofJohn Dryden in Verse and Prose, 2 vols. (New York, 1836). This edition, published by George Dearborn, was reprinted in New York by Harper at least six times between 1837 and 1867.

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132 ' ALAN ROPER

Firths revision of Christie's Clarendon text in 1893, published eight years before the Oxjord English Dictionary produced the volume containing "hung" and thirty- five before the volume containing "well-hung." Firth glossed "well hung" as "voluble, fluent" and cited Oldham's imitation of Juvenal's third satire, written in

May 1682: "Flippant of Talk, and voluble of Tongue, / With words at will, no

Lawyer better hung" (lines 111-12). Oldham is playing upon the phrase "a well-

hung tongue," a Gallicism corresponding to avoir la langue bien pendue. When

"well-hung" means "loquacious," it is accompanied by "tongue," as in Oldham's

couplet, or an equivalent. The OED citations make clear that other senses of

"well-hung" are also determined by the noun it governs. When the noun signifies a man or men, the usual and still current sense of "well-hung" is "having large genitals," to quote the OED, which instances Dryden's phrase among others.1'3

Firth's gloss thus had the disadvantage among others of suppressing the

meaning that Dryden's contemporaries gave the epithet. Later scholarship eliminated the disagreement by combining meanings into what it chose to call a double entendre, so that Balaam could emerge as priapic orator. De Beer believed that someone so variously endowed could not signify Huntingdon and found "a possible alternative" in Ford, Lord Grey of Warke, who in earlier years, we saw, had served as equivalent for Zimri, "Kind Husbands," and Issachar, as well as Caleb.

Putting Grey in Huntingdon's place left Caleb unassigned, and de Beer adopted Nesse's nominee, the earl of Essex. Kinsley rejected Grey for Balaam and reaf- firmed Huntingdon. But Kinsley also accepted the Nesse/de Beer nomination of Essex for Caleb, thus offering to eliminate altogether the man who had served so

variously and valiantly as historical counterpart to the poem's characters. Kinsley omitted Grey from his notes to the Clarendon Poems and the Oxford Absalom

andAchitophel, and Grey now clings precariously to the poem, entering as possible but unlikely alternative to Essex in conscientious glosses or lingering in unrevised editions first prepared before it became clear that doubt might attach to the Restoration identities of Balaam and Caleb. Two scholars writing after Kinsley have affirmed their faith in Grey as Caleb,'32 but at present Essex seems the

person most likely to be chosen for a gloss on Caleb in texts prepared for the col-

lege market. While this was going forward, Balaam and his endowments came in for ad-

ditional scrutiny. Both de Beer and Kinsley accepted "well hung" as a double entendre, but a year after Kinsley issued his Clarendon edition, Wallace Maurer,

131. See also the entry for "well hung" in Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in

Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London and Adantic Highlands, N. J., 1994). 132. Mengel in POAS, 2:476; and Thomas, Crafting ofAbsalom: 118-19. Hammond (1:498) finds it "impossible

to adjudicate between the claims of Essex and Grey."

ALAN ROPER 132 2


conceding "the coarse meaning," featured the decorous in order to propose another Restoration worthy as original of Balaam."33 This person was Sir Francis Winnington, an articulate Whig lawyer and Parliamentarian, who was listed among equivalents to Dryden's characters in a contemporary letter. Since the letter-writer does not specify which characters represent the contemporaries he lists, we cannot be sure that he thought Balaam signified Winnington. But if he did, he was probably alone in his conjecture. The only annotators I have found who offered an alternative to Huntingdon were those seduced by Read's key into glossing Balaam with Algernon Sidney, one who put Buckingham for Balaam, and one who thought that Balaam and Caleb stood for Belasyse and Petre, two of the Popish lords in the Tower. Moreover, if the writer thought that Balaam signified Winnington, he was reading inattentively. Winnington was a mere knight, a com- moner, and Dryden claims to be dealing in these lines with "Lords" and "Nobles."

Despite these objections, and there are others, Kinsley was sufficiently im- pressed by Maurer's argument to list Winnington and Huntingdon as equal claimants to Balaam in the Oxford text of Absalom and Achitophel. But Winnington experienced a brief glory. Only the Kinsleys adopted him for a popular or teaching text, and that went out of print by 1980; later scholarship barely mentioned him. Nonetheless, his candidacy and the kind of argument needed to support him served to advance the inappropriate sense of "well hung" over the appropriate one. Most college texts now list "fluent" before "licentious," and a year after the Oxford Absalom and Achitophel A. M. Baumgartner announced that "the sum of the evidence presented by Maurer and Kinsley is that, of the possible meanings of the word 'well-hung,' it was the fluency or volubility of Balaam that was uppermost in Dryden's mind, rather than the sexual meaning."'34 Of course, we no longer say such things. We know what is uppermost for modern scholars and was for some of Dryden's contemporaries but not for Dryden. His contemporaries, we should note, managed to enjoy the line, whereas most modern scholars seem not to have done.'35 Even Nesse saw the joke, although he did not relish it.

Dryden's contemporaries had the advantage of reading a poem that dealt with recent events, current issues, and living people, even, at times, with coffee-house

133. "Dryden's Balaam Well Hung?" Review ofEnglish Studies, n.s., 10 (1959): 398-401. 134. "Dryden's Caleb and Agag," Review ofEnglish Studies, n.s., 13 (1962): 394-97, quoting 394. 135. Pierre Legouis translates line 574 as "Balaam membru comme Priape et le frigide Caleb" and rejects Firth's

interpretation (Dryden: Poemes Choisis [Paris, 1946], 253, 430). Hammond glosses "well hung" as "with

large genitals" and adds that "the meaning 'fluent of tongue,' preferred by some editors, is irrelevant here" (1:497).

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134 ALAN ROPER

gossip. Modern scholars try to recapture some of that once-living knowledge in order to construct a version of past experience, and they may err just because they think of past experience as single instead of multiple, fixed instead of fluid, error-free instead of error-prone. Nonetheless, scholars who address the identity of Dryden's characters are responding to something special about Absalom and Achitophel, which is, after all, the most successful poeme a clef in English. No other poem has received so many editions over the centuries that provide a key, or identifying glosses, or both together. A completely plain text, offering no editorial assistance, has been uncommon since 1716 or even 1708. James Kinsley supplied such a text in Dryden's Poems and Fables (1962) to replace Sargeaunt's earlier edition for the "Oxford Standard Authors," which had included, as I mentioned, a version of Tonson's key. When I took down the circulating copies of Poems and Fables in UCLA libraries, I found the margins of Absalom and Achitophel adorned in two of the three with "Charles II" and "Monmouth," "Shaftesbury," "Buckingham," and others, as though they were copies of the first folio or the second Dublin quarto. In one copy some of the marginalia had been

cropped prior to rebinding, a phenomenon with which I became very familiar when gathering annotations from copies of early editions. The other copy ac-

cepts the opinion of most modern editors and glosses Hebron as Scotland and

Agag as Stafford. As much as Dryden's contemporaries, modern readers must always take re-

sponsibility for introducing allegorical equations into Absalom and Achitophel, even though most will merely introduce equations dictated to them by editors. In doing so, they differ not at all from those eighteenth-century readers who, unable to rely upon their own knowledge, transcribed Tonsons key or Read's into copies of early editions; nor do they differ greatly from those Restoration readers who perhaps purchased a manuscript key in a coffee-house or supple- mented their knowledge of current affairs by consulting Nesse's key or an informed acquaintance, such as Luttrell, or perhaps Tonson. No matter how or where readers gain their knowledge, they must take responsibility for using it to

enlarge their experience of the poem. They can only avoid responsibility by em-

bracing ignorance or denying the value of historical knowledge and thus forego- ing part of the pleasure offered by the poem.

Johnson, we saw, substituted for the Addisonian pleasure of application an

appeal to party prejudice, which he believed filled the mind of every reader of Absalom and Achitophel "with triumph or resentment." The Addisonian and Johnsonian principles can obviously coexist, even, perhaps, within the same reader, as is the case with one early response in a letter:

ALAN ROPER 134 i


In Dryden's poem, called Absolon and Achitophel, are represented the lively characters of the Duke of Monmouth and Shaftsbury, also Howard, Sir William Jones, Bethel, Winnington, and most of that party, under Jewish names, together with the Doctor of Salamanca, as Corah. After which are nobly described the Duke of Ormond, Halifax, Hide, Seymour, and most of the loyal party.136

There can be no doubt about this writer's allegiance and no doubt that he is also

pleased by his ability to identify the Restoration equivalents of those "lively characters." These are distinct principles, although Johnson, sure of his own princi- ple, dismissed Addison's.

Johnson's reductive argument has recently been revived by Steven Zwicker in an essay on manuscript marginalia in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books.'37 Much like Johnson, Zwicker distorts the argument for what he calls "disinterested reading" in order to dismiss it (p. 323). In its place he assembles examples of discursive marginalia that are obviously polemical and concludes that all marginalia were necessarily and always polemical, even when, as is over- whelmingly the case with annotated copies ofAbsalom andAchitophel, such marginalia consist of simple identifications. Zwicker takes note of the fact by putting and answering a question:

Were Dryden's contemporaries writing Charles II for David, Queen Catherine for Michal, Monmouth for Absalom, and Shaftesbury for Achitophel lest they forget who these characters were? The keys surely were no reader's glossary like those provided for English- language editions ofTolstoy's novels. Manuscript notations and keys suggest neither an unsteady grasp of design nor an equivocal reader; they suggest nothing so much as that powerful drama of partisanship that constituted the world of popery and Exclusion. (P. 108)

In a few cases discursive annotations of Absalom andAchitophel are clearly contentious. Zwicker quotes marginalia from a copy of Tonson's "Seventh Edition" (1692), which was included in a composite collection of Dryden's Works. The marginalia display a reader moved to irritated application of the poem to the circumstances of 1696. In addition, and as I mentioned, a copy of the first folio has scornful annotations, beginning with the very first line, which elicited "The Poet

136. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Tenth Report, Appendix, Part IV, 174-75. The letter is calendared as "London, Dec. 21," 1681, but begins, "On the i7th the Pope was burnt in Smithfield," an unlikely opening for a letter written late in December but most appropriate for one dated 21 November.

137. "Reading the Margins: Politics and the Habits of Appropriation," in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Refiguring Revolutions (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1998), 101-15, 321-24.

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136 A

an Atheist exceeding Lucretius."'38 For the most part, however, manuscript keys plainly supply readers' glossaries and function much like character lists at the front of printed plays. A "drama of partisanship" is, after all, a drama, and you still need to keep the characters straight as you read. Whether or not the author of the following key thought that he was supplying the equivalent of a cast-list, he certainly gives no sign of participating in a drama of partisanship:

The King The Queen The Duke Monmouth The Dutchess Monmouth Oliver A citoekpl Earl Shaftsbury King Freh [?] King Lewis Z. Duke Buckingham Nad: Howard Escrick Sr Will Jones Shimei Bethell Corah Oats Bathsheba Portsmouth Barzillai Ormond Zadok Sancroft Adriel Mulgrave Jotha. Hallifax Hushai Hide Aiel Seamor.'39

Most early keys assign Restoration identities to specified characters, but the author of this key begins with just the names of contemporaries represented in the

poem, much like the letter-writer quoted above, before settling to a conventional

pairing of characters with contemporaries. Both the unassigned and assigned names in this key would seem to record

the pleasure of recognition-"I know which people are in this poem or who this character is supposed to be"-rather than a fit of party prejudice. Similarly, the earl of Arran wrote to the duke of Ormonde on 22 November 1681, just a few

days after Absalom andAchitophel appeared, "Mr. Dryden's late poem will divert

you [by] characters he gives of the worthies here" in London.140 Just as Arran recommended the poem as a source of pleasure, so those who copied the keys of others more obviously expressed a need to know than a need to contest. Those who offered alternative glosses, or substituted a second identification for their

first, or disputed the gloss of an earlier annotator were engaged in act of under-

standing, not partisanship. It is true that biblical names for groups of people rather than individuals often prompted contentious glosses. Jebusites (line 95) were nearly always "Papists," as they are in Tonson's key, and the "Solymaan Rout"

(line 513) drew a range of opprobrious terms from Tonson's "London Rebels" to

138. Folger D2212 (12ai).

139. Newberry Case Y 185. D 8559, Part 1 (Macdonald iza/d: with the corrections of z1d and the ornament of

iza on Bi); the "Key" is on the title page. 140. HMC, Ormonde, n.s., 6:236.

ALAN ROPER


"Fanatics," "Presbyterians," "Commonwealthmen," and "City Rabble," although it also elicited "Londoners" and "Citizens of London." The Jews (line 45), the

"English" for Tonson, modern readers, and many contemporaries, were "Fanatics,"

"Whigs," "Presbyterians," "Protestants," and "Dissenters" for other contemporaries. Some of these glosses may respond to what is perceived as the poem's partisanship, and many reflect in some way the contentious nature of the available terms for groups and positions. When isolated from the glosses for individuals and places, the glosses for groups might support a Johnsonian reductionism. But when returned to their proper context among other annotations, these glosses seem far less polemical than their phrasing might suggest.

However we resolve the matter, we should agree that neither Addisonian

pleasure nor Johnsonian passion adequately accounts for the poem's popularity, which must have depended far more on the "very fine" poetry, as Addison called it, or "the attractions of wit, elegance, and harmony" cited byJohnson. The dozen or so poems written in imitation of Dryden's lack such attractions and accord-

ingly bid for a favorable reception by offering readers little more than a set of al-

legorical conundrums to solve; as one of their authors put it, "A Veil drawn over the Design in Poetry creates a Curiosity, if not a Reverence."'4' Had they succeeded, they would have received more than just one or two editions in their own day and would be read in ours by more than an occasional scholar. But we err on the other side if we believe that Absalom andAchitophel has survived in spite of its topicality. Among Dryden's strengths as poet, along with the diction, prosody, and talent for argument, we must include his ability to populate his poems with figures from his own day, from history, and from myth. His poems are full of particular people doing things; they have names, and their activity corresponds to the energy of the verse. In attending to those people and their activities we attend to one of Dryden's strengths. Another of his imitators found, like him, an epigraph in Horace: Mutato Nomine, de Te I Fabula narratur'42-"with the name

changed, the tale is told of you"-and the phrase could well serve as an alternative epigraph to Absalom and Achitophel. Just like Dryden's contemporaries, we need to change the names as we read, in order to prevent the characters from

slipping into mere types without particular relevance or satiric point. Accordingly, Absalom andAchitophelhas survived not in spite of but together with its topicality and because that topicality contributes to the pleasure offered by the poem.

141. Preface to Uzziah andJotham (London, 1690). For a list and discussion of poems written in imitation of Dryden's, see Alan Roper, "Absalom's Issue: Parallel Poems in the Restoration," forthcoming in Studies in Philology.

142. Thomas Hoy, Agathocles the Sicilian Usurper (London, 1683); see Horace, Satires, 1.1:69-70.

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138 - ALAN ROPER

Readers must always decide for themselves the size of that contribution, and they will find it negligible or considerable according to their interest in the dead. We should not try to legislate the pleasures of others but may properly record our own, and after taking this turn around Robin Hood's barn, I have found my pleasure enhanced by thinking of the historical counterparts to Dryden's characters as comprising all the candidates proposed by others, while preferring Tonson's in every case, together with the beadle for Amnon. I have also found that if you change the names as you read and stand closer to Absalom andAchitophel, it will take you more.

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