In The Beginning of Politics: Power in the Biblical Book of Samuel, Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes patiently and plausibly draw out the political thought implicit in one of the great peaks of the Biblical imagination, the Saul-David narrative:

At the root of the structure of politics unveiled in the narratives of the Book of Samuel lies a double reversal of means and ends that is immanent to sovereign power. Power is an indispensable tool needed for a vital collective good. It must therefore be organized and cultivated. But the sovereign who has gained it and those around him who compete for it do not see supreme political power exclusively from the public’s point of view, as a means for organizing collective defense. The privileges and status of the highest political office can be intoxicating, transforming sovereign authority all too easily into an end-in-itself…It involves the conversion of genuine ends such as the sacred, love, loyalty, and moral obligation into means in the hands of power wielders who, above all, seek to maintain their rule. [i]

The working of power on the mind and person of a sovereign is most evident in the narrative of David, whose psychologically “opaque” representation by the narrator of Samuel testifies to the depths of conflicting motives comparable to what we find in Shakespeare’s kings. But whereas Shakespeare generates his depth through compounded metaphors emerging from intense introspection and self-dramatization, the narrator of Samuel achieves his effect through a mosaic of the surfaces of speech and action. I quote from the New Revised Standard Version (updated) because its language carries, in itself, no suggestion of poetry (unlike that of the King James Version). The following, 2 Samuel 18-19, recounts David’s reaction to the news of his son Absalom’s death:

The king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept, and as he went he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

It was told Joab, “The king is weeping and mourning for Absalom.” So the victory that day was turned into mourning for all the troops, for the troops heard that day, “The king is grieving for his son.” The troops stole into the city that day as soldiers steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle. The king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud voice, “O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, “Today you have covered with shame the faces of all your officers who have saved your life today, and the lives of your sons and your daughters, and the lives of your wives and your concubines, for love of those who hate you and for hatred of those who love you. You have made it clear today that commanders and officers are nothing to you, for I perceive that, if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased.So go out at once and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night, and this will be worse for you than any disaster that has come upon you from your youth until now.” Then the king got up and took his seat in the gate. The troops were all told, “See, the king is sitting in the gate,” and all the troops came before the king (2 Samuel 18-19). 

The grief in David’s speech is neither disguised nor transfigured by metaphor; nor is it opaque. But a narrative of entire opacity, without outward expression of feeling and intent, would fail. What matters is how the opacity is placed: in this case, it arrives at the end of the passage where the king “got up and took his seat in the gate.” Here he fulfills his duty as a king, doing what he must to retain his power, but he is—we are invited to speculate after what has come immediately before—inwardly absent, or torn, or withdrawn from the role, the dynastic succession that his son represented being doubly obliterated, first by patricidal rebellion and then by death without reconciliation. The blank denial of interiority seems to be erected on what Halbertal and Holmes call “the profound clash between the logic of power and the logic of love” (140) that arises with “the entanglement of paternal love and political power” (142). With “and all the troops came before the king,” David’s name is eclipsed by his role and his person eclipsed by the procession troops, and yet behind both we have been—by the structure of the chapters—to discern “the echoes and recesses of human judgment” that roil his spirit.

That phrase, “the echoes and recesses of human judgment,” belongs to William Empson’s first and most famous study, Seven Types of Ambiguity. The full passage reads: “Dryden is not interested in the echoes and recesses of words; he uses them flatly; he is interested in the echoes and recesses of human judgment”.[ii] It is perhaps this interest that led Dryden to draw upon the story of Absalom for his great work of political libel and lampoon, “Absalom and Achitophel.” Perhaps. The trouble with this line of thought is that Dryden leaves untapped the tragic well that the narrative contains. The circumstances of Dryden’s adaptation are distant from our era: he supported the legitimacy of the Stuarts, according to which the line of succession went from Charles II to his brother James. Because James was a professed Catholic, a coalition in Parliament was determined to exclude him from the crown; the coalition was led by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who instead promoted Charles II’s illegitimate son Monmouth (one of many illegitimate children) as next in line to the throne. Dryden wrote his poem against and within the midst of these political maneuverings—one phase in a series that yielded the Glorious Revolution. In his “Absalom and Achitophel,” Charles II is cast as David, Shaftesbury as Achitophel, and Monmouth as Absalom. Though the poem he published stands complete as a work, Dryden only included the first half of the story (the second half was later written by Nahum Tate), stopping before Absalom’s death, before David had occasion to give vent to his grief, ending his poem instead at the point when David was moved to act against his son. 

The poem is curtailed. It is also curiously foreshortened in its engagement with the text, for Dryden, seeking to defend Charles II, distorts the ambiguous judgments of David, and so denies to Charles his tragic potential. Achitophel is reduced to malevolent scheming, Absalom to a well-coiffed gullibility. They are reduced because Dryden’s aim is to diminish his enemies, but the cost of the reduction is the “echoes and recesses of human judgment.” Even though Dryden, in the opening of his poem, admits to Charles’ imperfections, he does so with a jocular and hearty humor, and he suggests that historical relativism might excuse his flaws. He presents Charles as a forgivably flawed but decent fellow rather than engage with the materials offered in Samuel, and in declining what is there, he turns away from psychological conflict and ambivalent motivation—as he perhaps must do if he is to charge his poem with satirical force.

It would seem, then, that in this poem at least Dryden abandons his interest in “the echoes and recesses of human judgment” that might have attracted him to Samuel in the first place. But in fact, he locates them elsewhere, sounding them out not in the personages of the Biblical story and his era, but instead in the “people” who surround, sustain, and constrain their actions. Dryden’s poem is animated by his own perplexity concerning the true sources of sovereignty, the proper limits of the popular voice, and the dynamics of public opinion. These do not, on their own, make for natural subjects of poetry, and where they find clearest expression, we can understand why, however misguidedly, the 19th-century critic Matthew Arnold called Dryden “a classic of our prose”:[iii]

O foolish Israel! never warned by ill,

Still the same bait and circumvent still!

Did ever men forsake their present ease,

In midst of health imagine a Disease,

Take pains contingent mischiefs to foresee,

Make heirs for monarchs, and for Good decree?

What shall we think! Can people give away,

Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?

Then they are left defenceless to the sword

Of each unbounded, arbitrary lord,

And laws are vain by which we right enjoy

If kings unquestioned can those laws destroy.

Yet if the crowd be judge of fit and just,

And kings are only officers and trust,

Then this resuming cov’nant was declared

When kings were made, or is forever barred;

If those who gave the sceptre could not tie

By their own deed their own posterity,

How then could Adam bind his future race

How could his forfeit on mankind take place?

Or how could heavenly justice damn us all,

Who ne’er consented to our father’s fall?

Then kings are slaves to those whom they command

And tenants to their people’s pleasure stand.

Add that the pow’r for property allowed

Is mischievously seated in the crowd,

For who can be secure of private right

If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?

Nor is the people’s judgment always true:

The most may err as grossly as the few.

And faultless kings run down, by common cry,

For vice, oppression, and for tyranny.

What standard is there in a fickle rout,

Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out?

Nor only crowds, but Sanhedrins may be

Infected with this public lunacy

And share the madness of rebellious times

To murder monarchs for imagined crimes.

If they may give and take when’er they please,

Not kings alone (the Godhead’s images),

But governments itself at length must fall

To nature’s state, where all have right to all.  (ll. 754-794 )

Arnold’s complaint has to do with what is lacking here: not the feeling that we associate with poetry, but the imaginative evocation of a particular object or circumstance of action. These lines carry out, instead, an argument about the validity of resistance to a monarch in a general sense. They present a possible sort of action—resisting a monarch—and the possible motives for that sort of thing, exfoliated of the contingencies and individual deliberation that would be essential for its dramatic representation. These lines are essential to what Dryden is writing about, to both the occasion of the poem and his choice of the David story as its vehicle for expression. For the question of public power laces the David story, glanced at as Absalom gathers the people to his side, as David’s remaining forces muster to his, and, even in the passage above, where David must appear before the soldiers to regain their confidence in his rule. They are a commentary on what Dryden—to the surprise of readers who are most drawn to the psychological opacity and ambivalent motivations of the story—finds most compelling: how David, Achitophel, and Absalom act against and upon a field of social power broader than themselves. 

But the commentary is hardly decisive in favor of monarchy. The broad argument seems to be that the people (the demos, however circumscribed by class or education; some mass of individuals) cannot be trusted to judge well, though it concedes that they might do so at times. They are prone to dissatisfaction and when they are infected by the madness of crowds they will be inspired to make their own kings and their own gods. But to do so without realizing that to make a king is necessarily to make a person into an institution (monarchy) that, axiomatically, binds future generations. Having made a king for themselves, the crowd has defied the very logic of monarchy, has created a self-contradictory monster which will be in turn overthrown in the release of anarchic social disorder.

But I think I have made Dryden’s argument more clearly than he does in these lines. For at the same time as he would argue against their legitimacy, he allows himself to become ensnared in the rights of the people: his rhetorical figures and argument can never simply concede that sovereignty does not reside in the populace in some way or another. 

When Dryden suggests that monarchical inheritance is valid because sin descends to all men from Adam, he does so in a form of a question that points to the injustice of God’s plans rather than to the justice of man’s social arrangements. The relation of “each unbounded, arbitrary lord” to “kings unquestioned” is not fixed, so that the best couplet of the passage, “And laws are vain by which we right enjoy | If kings unquestioned can those laws destroy” seems to suggest that kings are only kings if questioned, that the public pressure upon kinghood is necessary, that the public acceptance of kings is just what makes them other than arbitrary, and what distinguishes a true king from an “arbitrary lord.”  With the phrase “nor is the people’s judgment always true,” Dryden makes an extraordinary (in light of his argument) concession that the people’s judgment is often true—and that it has binding force. Throughout these lines, the key question is where sovereign power resides, and Dryden is unwilling to decide. The word “sovereign” itself refuses to be subdued: “For who can be secure of private right | If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might.” If “sovereign sway” resides in the people, then it is the Stuart cause (the defense of Charles II and the royal right of his brother James) that will “dissolve” it “by might.” “Sovereign” is not, even in the context of the poem (let alone our current political thinking), located with any surety in the person of the king, and we may feel that it adheres also in “private right,” a sovereignty of individual natural rights that the King may not violate. 

The most telling confusion comes in the imagery of disease and bodily distemper. At the start of the passage, Dryden looks aghast at a people that, in the midst of health, would “imagine a disease” and “make heirs for monarchs,” where “make” means both decide and beget (so that the crowd is doing the procreating on their behalf),but the notion that this crowd is “in the midst of health” is belied when at the end of the passage, Dryden writes “infected with the public lunacy,” where the word “infected” diagnoses bodily ailment. The metaphors fall in on themselves: the crowd that can become infected by the lunacy of imagined ailments is not healthy but is already in a weakened state. 

Such an analysis might imply that this passage is a failure—muddled where it ought to be clearest. But the muddle is not solely Dryden’s: it comes about because he refuses the simplistic opposition of lampoon to admit the fissures in the ground of thought that the tumult of the 1670s and 1680s open, and over which Locke would construct his political philosophy, establishing sovereignty in the people rather than the person of the king. Dryden does not build as sturdily over the fissures, but he admits they are there. 

Or, to draw on the language of the poem itself, the form of Dryden’s verse betrays the infection that he imputes to the crowd, revealing it to be common to the language of the time. His verse is disfigured because of the ways of arguing and imagining political life that it must absorb and adapt to write against the times; it cannot—and it should not—set itself above the language of his contemporaries. Lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111 beautifully apprehends Dryden’s constrained situation[iv]:

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

Pity me then and wish I were renew'd;

Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink

Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection.

Dryden cannot be said to have overcome the infection, but by admitting the infection into itself, the poem pays a price to obtain something in return. Dryden’s poem rises to its greatest heights where he writes of those advisors who opposed Charles and supported Monmouth and in so doing by giving themselves over to the disease. The language of disease is not incidental to the continuity that Dryden establishes, because his imagination in this poem, and elsewhere, is essentially bodily. Whereas Dryden’s great satirical successor Swift looked in disgusted fascination at bodily functions, Dryden is drawn to imagine the world as body and the body as a world; it is the central metaphorical complex of his understanding. “Body politic” and the “body of the people” and their infection are not merely ways of speaking for him—it is this language, rather than the conceptual confusion over sovereignty, that Dryden endows with novel force and significance. In one direction, the medium of his poem itself is capable of being infected by the disease of the political body; in another direction, it is the corruption and madness of the body politic that is directly continuous with the disfigured form of Shaftesbury, in the person of Achitophel:

For, as when raging fevers boil the blood,

The standing lake soon floats into a flood;

And ev'ry hostile humour, which before

Slept quiet in its channels, bubbles o'er:

So, several factions from this first ferment,

Work up to foam, and threat the government.

Some by their friends, more by themselves thought wise,

Oppos'd the pow'r, to which they could not rise.

Some had in courts been great, and thrown from thence,

Like fiends, were harden'd in impenitence.

Some by their monarch's fatal mercy grown,

From pardon'd rebels, kinsmen to the throne;

Were rais'd in pow'r and public office high;

Strong bands, if bands ungrateful men could tie.

Of these the false Achitophel was first:

A name to all succeeding ages curst.

For close designs, and crooked counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfixt in principles and place;

In pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace.

A fiery soul, which working out its way,

Fretted the pigmy-body to decay:

And o'er inform'd the tenement of clay.

A daring pilot in extremity;

Pleas'd with the danger, when the waves went high

He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,

Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.

Great wits are sure to madness near alli'd;

And thin partitions do their bounds divide:

Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest,

Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?

Punish a body which he could not please;

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

And all to leave, what with his toil he won

To that unfeather'd, two-legg'd thing, a son:

Got, while his soul did huddled notions try;

And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy.

In friendship false, implacable in hate:

Resolv'd to ruin or to rule the state.

To compass this, the triple bond he broke;

The pillars of the public safety shook:

And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke.

Then, seiz'd with fear, yet still affecting fame,

Usurp'd a patriot's all-atoning name.

So easy still it proves in factious times,

With public zeal to cancel private crimes:

How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,

Where none can sin against the people's will:

Where crowds can wink; and no offence be known,

Since in another's guilt they find their own.

Yet, fame deserv'd, no enemy can grudge;

The statesman we abhor, but praise the judge (ll. 136-187).

The maligning and mal-aligned body of Achitophel emerges from and returns to the body of the populace. The portrait properly begins with “Of these Achitophel was the first” but the full arc begins before the individual is announced, with the lines that describe the “foam” of faction that rise up in the veins of the body politic—we are to see the continuity between this body and Achitophel’s, the simile of “as when raging fevers boil the blood” and “ev’ry hostile humor” becoming the “fretted the pygmy-body to decay” of Achitophel, who in turn leaves what he “has won”  to a son, “born like a shapeless lump, like anarchy” so that the disorder of the masses is made to emanate from Achitophel in turn. His malformity is the public’s, and the public’s is a consequence of his, since he acts in their name and does it wrong and harm at once. Though the lines convey Achitophel’s manipulation of the people in the name of the elusive “public zeal” and “public safety,” Achitophel is constituted by the same matter as they are, so that, as a body, the populace is, in his person, made to act upon and undo itself: 

                  Punish a body which he could not please;

Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?

This refers to his own body, but it encompasses in its potential significance the body of the populace. The opacity of David’s mind harboring unfathomable motives and desires has been replaced by the opacity of the flesh, making the fickle passions of the populace outwardly visible in Achitophel’s form. In factious times, the people’s will is divided, making it possible for anyone to appeal to it as a justification for acts that otherwise would be considered treasonous. Put another way, when the body of the populace is distempered, out of harmony in its humors, and disproportionate in its parts, “none can sin against the public will,” because it has lost its internal measures of rightness. It has become incoherent. Recasting the story of David, Dryden substitutes the distemper of the body for the disorder of the mind, the opacity of the flesh for the opacity of the spirit, and the grievous farce of social faction for the tragic pathos of dynastic fissure. Rather than a clash between “the logic of power and the logic of love,” Dryden implicates the disorders of the body in the confusion of sovereignty, both corrupting and corruptible, infecting and infectible, fecund and monstrous, sources of appetite and desire, pains and pleasure. Perhaps Dryden knew that there could be no satisfactory resolution and drew the poem to its unsatisfactory close with an abrupt speech by David (Charles II) that subdues the rebellion. Samuel Johnson wrote of the end of the poem: “Who can forbear to think of an enchanted castle, with a wide moat and lofty battlements, walls of marble and gates of brass, which vanishes at once into air when the destined knight blows his horn before it?”[v] It sometimes feels that closure in history could come about in no other way.

--By Owen Boynton