The Political Writer 1678–85

Abstract

‘Hired to Lye and Libel’:¹ Shadwell’s description of Dryden’s role as a political writer may be extreme, but essentially the same judgment is found in several contemporary pamphlets and not a few modern accounts of Dryden’s political writing. Readers often cling to the notion that great writers should be unsullied by any commitment to partisan politics, particularly to conservative positions. But ‘politics’ in the reign of Charles II had little in common with modern politics (except that of Northern Ireland), for it entailed a bitter and bloody debate over the very survival of the nation as a particular religious entity. When, in the preface to Absalom and Achitophel Dryden observed that ‘he who draws his Pen for one Party, must expect to make Enemies of the other. For, Wit and Fool, are Consequents of Whig and Tory: And every man is a Knave or an Ass to the contrary side’ (11. 3–5), he was responding to the very recent transformation of politics into a factional dispute. In the first two decades of Charles’ reign there had been a politics of acquiescence if not of consensus, with religious dissent marginalised and fragmented, and the economic self-interest of various individuals and groups in Parliament finding expression in shifting alliances.