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Dryden's Absalom andAchitophelRoger Plumsky aa Johnsonburg, PennsylvaniaPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Roger Plumsky (2001) Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, TheExplicator, 60:1, 12-15, DOI: 10.1080/00144940109597154

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NOTES

1. In the 1984 Royal Shakespeare Company version of the play, based on the translation by Hampton, the actor’s voice “cracks” or ascends to an unnaturally high pitch; as a result his words sound foolish.

2. The original French line reads, “Et s’il vous faut tomber dans une extdrnitk, / Ptchez plut8t encor de cet autre c 8 t P (100).

WORKS CITED Frame, Donald M., trans. Tartuffe and Orher flays by Moli2re. New York: New American

Hampton, Christopher, trans. Moli2re’s Tartuffe. London: Samuel French, 1984. Jaynes, William. “Critical Opinions of Cltante in Tartuffe.” Oeuvres and Critiques 6.1 (1981):

91-97. Molitre, Jean Baptiste Poquelin. k Tarruffe and k Mddecin malgrd hi. Introd. and notes by

Jacques Guicharnaud. Laurel Language Library. New York: Dell, 1962. Tartufle. Perf. Antony Sher, Nigel Hawthorne, and Alison Steadman. A Royal Shakespeare Com-

pany Production by BBC TV in association with RKO Pictures. RKO Home Videos, 1984.

Library, 1967.

Dryden’s ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL

In lines 421-22 of Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, Achitophel urges Absalom to cite a concern for the public good as justification for opposing his father, David:

The publick Good, that Universal Call, To which even Heav’n submitted, answers all.

The “Universal Call” is presumably the traditional “spiritual calling,” a divine injunction to all men to serve their fellows. The modifier “To which even Heav’n submitted” functions a bit stiffly, in that God (“Heav’n”), who makes the call, also complies with it; the word “even” perhaps softens this paradox somewhat. The lines could be paraphrased as follows:

Your claim of concern for the public good, that universal imperative to serve mankind, heeded even by God, who established the imperative, will justify everything you do.

This reading is not wholly satisfactory because it ignores the important sug- gestion of the passage that the universal call is a mandate that commands “even Heav’n” to submit to it. Examination of the language reveals a second interpretation of the couplet, in which the modifier “To which even Heav’n submitted” functions easily. Two additional interpretations emerge, as well.

In the several decades before the publication of Absalom and Achitophel, goldsmith banking had become extraordinarily important in commerce, in

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public finance, and, as Dryden intimates here, in the vision that many of his contemporaries held of the summum bonum.’ The jargon of goldsmith bank- ing included the words “call” and “answer,” as well as the phrase “universal call.” When one wished to recover funds deposited with a goldsmith banker, one was said to call on the banker, or to submit a call for the money.2 When the banker returned the called-for funds, he was said to answer the calL3

Since a call is a demand for funds by a single depositor, then, by extension, a universal call must be a demand for funds by many, indeed, by all deposi- tors-what we today call a bank run, a familiar phenomenon in Restoration London, as the solvency of individual goldsmiths became the subject of spec- lat ti on.^

The commercial language allows a second interpretation of the passage:

The public good is a bank run (in the sense that the public wishes to become rich) which pays everyone, including God, who at one time, at least, sub- mitted a demand for payment from bankers.

The modem reader may wonder in what sense God may be said to have had traffic with bankers. Dryden’s Bible-reading contemporaries, however, would have recognized here an allusion to Christ’s Parable of the Talents, recorded in both Matthew 25 and Luke 17, in which a master upbraids an economical- ly uninspired servant for having failed to invest the single talent entrusted to him. The parable was central in the usury debate that occupied Christendom for centuries, opponents of usury arguing that the parable should be interpret- ed metaphorically, proponents of usury insisting on a literal interpretation, of which the following is typical:

For it seems that there were Bankers or Exchangers in Christ’s Time, which he himself alludes to, when he Answers the Slothful Servant for not putting his Talent to such, so that Christ might have his own againe with Usury.5

Achitophel, of course, embraces a literalist, materialist conception of deity, a god as rabid for gain as are, by insinuation, all of Achitophel’s (Shaftsbury’s) Whig cohorts.

Two additional meanings of the couplet arise if the traditional and com- mercial meanings of terms are permuted. “Universal call” may mean a call to service, while “answers all” means “pays everyone.” Then the couplet implies that in issuing the call to service, Achitophel’s God recognizes that the pre- tense of altruism can improve one’s bottom line. But “Universal call” may mean a demand for money, while “answers all” means “justifies everything,” implying that even God recognizes the desire for riches as the only justifiable motivation, human or divine. The multiple predications, which Dryden effects elsewhere in the poem, fully characterize Achitophel as a brilliant villain deft- ly dropping the mantle of Christ on the antichrist.6

With Achitophel’s deliciously evil and comically contorted punning, Dry-

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den both conceals and reveals the new Whig ethos, wherein God, like every- one else, is driven by self-interest disguised as brotherly love. The protean language, the syntactic cunning, and the cosmic good humor make the couplet one of Dryden’s finest.

-ROGER PLUMSKY, Johnsonburg, Pennsylvania

NOTES

1. A good introduction to goldsmith banking is found in Gilbart 1: 24-29. For an excellent analysis of the goldsmiths’ operations, see Quinn. See also the contemporary pamphlet The Mys- tery of the New Fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers (1678). Investment became a vogue during the Restoration, affecting cultural values, as Thomas Roy Bentley notes: “The new comedies pro- duced on the London public stage between 1660 and 1700 depict a society in which money is the measure of all values, in which money is the catalytic force in all actions, in which money is both god and king. They articulate the conflicts created by the intrusion of capitalistic attitudes and beliefs into a traditional hierarchical society” (1).

2. The OED lists 1709 as the date when “Sb 11. Comm. A demand for the payment of money” became current; however the word was used in a commercial sense much earlier. In 1664 Pepys remarked that “the convenience of having ones money at an houres call is very great,” and in 1667 he describes a run on the banks, saying that the bankers are “so called upon that they will all be broke.” See Pepys 4: 241 and 6: 362. The accounts of leading goldsmith Edward Backwell con- tained the headings “Money at Call”; see Quinn 68.

3. Dryden’s enemy Thomas Shadwell mocked Dryden’s reticence in public: “As for ready Wit, he carries very little or none about him, but, if you draw a Bill upon him, like a Banker, he can answer you at home, and, as Bankers do, with the cash that is other mens.” See the preface of The Medal of John Eayes: A Satyr against Folly and Knavery (1682).

4. For a discussion of bank contagion during the period, see Quinn 21-22. I have found no commercial use of the phrase “universal call” as early as 1681, the year when the poem was writ- ten. A decade later, however, Charles Davenant used the phrase while referring to the bank runs that preceded the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694: “But we have reason to believe that infinitely the greater part of Goldsmiths are upon a good and sure ffoundation: and tho’ they may not have ready cash to answer the sudden and Universal1 call which is upon them, yet they have estates. [. . .]” See Usher 76. Several decades later Jonathan Swift used the phrase in his “The Run Upon the Bankers” (1720): “For in that Universal1 Call I Few Bankers will to Heav’n be Mounters: / They’ll cry, Ye shops, upon us fall, I Conceal, and cover us, Ye Counters.” See Swift 241.

5 . A Discourse Upon Usury: 01: Lending Money for Increase (1682). 33. For other commen- taries on the parable, see Filmer 115; Fenton 137; Wilson 85; and Dormer 73.

6. J. Douglas Canfield suggests that Dryden compresses eight assertions into a single line (line 705).

WORKS CITED

Bentley, Thomas Roy. “Money: God and King: Economic Aspects of Restoration Comedy.” Diss. Memorial U of Newfoundland, 1971.

Canfield. J. Douglas. “Anarchy and Style: What Dryden ‘Grants’ in Absalom and Achitophel.” P U 14 (1978): 83-87.

Dormer, John. “Usury Explain’d, or Conscience Quieted in the Case of Putting out Mony at Inter- est (1695-96):’ Religious Attitudes toward Usury: Two Early Polemics. New York: Arno, 1972.

Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1681-1684. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg. Vol. 2. Berkeley: U of California P, 1972.

Fenton, Roger. “A Treatise of Usurie (1612):’ The Usury Debate in the Seventeenth Century: Three Avuments. New York Arno, 1972.

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Filmer, Robert. “Quaestio Quodlibetica (1653):’ The Usury Debate in the Seventeenth Cenrury: Three Arguments. New York: Arno, 1972.

Gilbart. J . W. The Histury, Principles and Practice of Banking. Ed. Ernest Sykes. 2 vols. London: G . Bell, 1907.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Ed. Henry B. Wheatley. 10 vols. London: G. Bell, 1893-99.

Quinn, Stephen S. “Banking before the Bank: London’s Unregulated Goldsmith Bankers 1660-1694.” Diss. U of Illinois, 1994.

Swift, Jonathan. The Poems of Jonathan Swif. Ed. Harold Williams. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon, 1937.

Usher, Abbott Payson, ed. Two Manuscripts: 1.-A Memorial Concerning the Coyn of England, November; 1695. 11-A Memoriall Concerning Creditt. July 15, 1696. Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins UP, 1942.

Wilson, Thomas. “A Discourse upon Usury (1572):’ Ed. R. H. Tawney. London: G. Bell, 1925.

Austen’s SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

No character in Jane Austen’s much-studied repertoire of characters is as desperately in need of explication as Sense and Sensibility’s Colonel Brandon, despite his revealing his true nature in a detailed-filled but cursorily read monologue in chapter 9 (204-10). The traditional view of Brandon is swayed by his appearing “silent and grave” and talking of “rheumatism” and “flannel waistcoats” (34, 37, 38). His manying Marianne Dashwood, a woman eigh- teen years his junior with highly romantic sensibilities, is even seen as “puni- tive” of her.’ Indeed, the narrator herself colludes in conveying Brandon this way. After all, Marianne, Willoughby, Elinor, and the narrator remark repeat- edly on his silence, gravity, earnestness, thoughtfulness, sang-froid, and reserve (34, 50, 51, 169, 172, 282).

But this is an instance where D. H. Lawrence’s dictum “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” is apposite. For although the narrator concludes Mari- anne’s story by presenting her “by general consent’’-that is, Elinor’s, Edward’s, and Mrs. Dashwood’s-as a consolatory “reward to Brandon for “his sorrows, and their own obligations [to him],” a thorough explication of the Colonel Brandon that Jane Austen actually presents and that he reveals in the tale he tells Elinor about himself shows us a very different character from the one that critics, influenced by the novel’s other characters and the narrator, tend to interpret disparagingly (378). In fact, Brandon exhibits behavior throughout his life that not only shows him as having a highly developed sensibility in eighteenth-century terms, but also, according to Lawrence Kohlberg, writing in the 1980s about moral development in psy- chological terms, proves him to be operating at the highest level of princi- pled, moral conduct.2 We secure a fuller view of the whole Brandon by

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